The Evolved Eater

by Nick Taranto

  After building his first company in the enterprise software space, Irving is a big believer in the power and potential of the innovation economy and in entrepreneurs’ ability to solve difficult problems. Like Josh and I, Irving wanted to spend his time focusing on a problem that both mattered to him personally and that also mattered to society more broadly. Even a decade ago, the technology that companies like Plated and Bowery Farming have access to today either did not exist or it was not cost effective. To be able to apply cutting-edge technology to a very big problem is incredibly exciting. When we visit Irving at his prototype farm, it feels more like we’re going to visit a computer manufacturing facility than an agriculture hub. We don hairnets and clean suits and special booties to keep bacteria out of the system.

  “It’s the combination of machine automation and a dramatic reduction in the cost of both data and LED lighting systems that makes it possible for Bowery to do what we do today, what wouldn’t have been possible ten or even five years ago,” explains Irving. “What makes Bowery particularly special is that because there is a heavy reliance on technology, we have thousands of sensors across our farms, measuring millions of points of data, around the environment, and nutritional data, and anything you could think of that affects plant growth, quality, and yield. We can use that information, combined with machine learning and computer vision, to understand what’s working and not with how our plants are growing. We can change the variables on a rapid basis that is not possible when you are growing two or three crop cycles per year. Even in our early days, we have already built a much more efficient, effective, and low-cost system overall.”

  Another serial entrepreneur buddy of mine, Wiley Cerilli, is starting a next-generation food business with the mission of making good food more accessible. Wiley sold his online listing company and became a venture capitalist. He is now building Good Uncle, a delivery-only restaurant that licenses, re-creates, and brings the best dishes from famous restaurants around the world to American college campuses.

  As Wiley says, “We’re focusing on markets where others are not. Food is becoming a larger and larger part of people’s identity and culture, yet most secondary and tertiary markets can be categorically called food deserts, inundated by uninspired and mediocre chains. Good Uncle is the perfect vehicle to bring crave-worthy food with compelling brand stories to markets where nothing of the sort exists. As Howard Morgan, one of the partners at First Round Capital, said, ‘This could be a billion-dollar business without ever going to any major city.’”

  Another buddy of mine, Matt Corrin, started the Canadian healthy fast casual restaurant chain Freshii. They now have over two hundred stores operating in over twenty countries, and their growth is only accelerating. As Matt says, “My career quickly transitioned from high-end fashion working for the iconic designer Oscar de la Renta to the affordable, fresh-food business working for myself at age twenty-three. I went from dressing runway models to dressing salads. I took a risk and chose to dedicate my career to building a fresh-food empire and changing the way the world eats.”

  Matt is definitely a big and original thinker. He fervently believes that Freshii will redefine what a restaurant is and will alter people’s eating habits. He says, “I believe Freshii will be one of the reasons that life expectancy goes up. Healthy, convenient food will help citizens of the world live longer. In 2015, I wrote an open letter to Steve Easterbrook, the CEO of McDonald’s, challenging him to cobrand one of his fourteen thousand Golden Arches locations with one of our Freshii outlets. It shares my vision on what I hope for the future of food:

  Imagine a world where every standalone McDonald’s, every highway rest stop and campus location offers fresh salad bowls, quinoa, whole grain wraps, and pressed juices—even kids’ meals—alongside burgers and Cokes. One outlet can feed the whole family again. Fans of the Big Mac can still indulge while gaining knowledge about fresher, healthier options that taste great and cost no more. I believe this calculated risk would produce a slimmer world and a healthier food industry. To heal hearts and waistlines, we must take action now. Imagine a healthier world. Imagine greater choices for wellness-conscious citizens. Imagine a fast-food industry that is respected and growing again, rather than shunned and shrinking.1

  Real Food for Real People

  We have come a long way in five years, and we are far from finished. There is a lot of money to be made and good to be done in dinner, the Plated way, and our focus now is on getting that model right. We are still decades away from accomplishing our mission to create a world where healthy, affordable, and delicious food is made easy for everyone. I get asked all the time, “How can Plated be for everyone? How are you going to make Plated more affordable?”

  I like to respond to this question with an analogy.

  When Tesla launched the world’s first electric sports car in 2006, their product, the Tesla Roadster, was intentionally designed for the 0.0001 percent—I can practically count on my fingers and toes the number of people who can afford to drop over $100,000 on a sports car with a limited driving radius. But Elon Musk, Tesla cofounder and CEO, was unapologetic: “We’re figuring out how to take you to Mars and build a self-sustaining city—to become a truly multiplanetary species.”

  Wait a second. How do you get from playthings of the über-rich to colonizing Mars?

  Answer: The same way you get from twelve-dollar meal kits to feeding ten billion people in a healthy, affordable, delicious, and easy way.

  In order to colonize Mars, you need low-cost space travel, you need the ability to harness the sun’s energy, and you need a way to store that energy. Following Musk’s early success with PayPal, he in quick succession launched or invested in SpaceX (low-cost space travel), SolarCity (the ability to harness the sun’s energy), and Tesla (which markets itself as both an automaker and an energy storage company). While the pieces are starting to come together, Musk admits that Mars colonization is probably still twenty to thirty years away. But it’s happening.

  The one sure way to kill your vision, your mission, and your business is by trying to do too much too soon. For Plated, we need to prove that we can build a big, strong, profitable business that delivers millions of fresh meals across the country. We need profits to do that, and the best way to generate profits as quickly as possible is by starting with dinner (the highest value, most emotional meal of the day), targeting the premium end of the market. That’s why Tesla launched with the Roadster, and that’s why we launched with twelve-dollar meals. Eventually, we will launch lower-price-point meals that will appeal to everyone, and eventually, that will allow us to feed everyone the way they should be fed. I believe fervently in this. The same way I believe that, eventually, Elon Musk will colonize Mars.

  We encourage this type of outlandish, big thinking. We believe in inspiring you and giving you better versions of everything so that you can be a better version of yourself. We want to bring people along for this journey because the definition of a life well lived is intensely personal, and as long as you are continuously raising the bar along the way, we’re here to support you. Hell, we’ll be here to support you if and when you fall down and fall short, but we just like it more when you’re winning!

  You don’t need to be a ten out of ten. If you’re taking steps in the right direction, you’re making progress in your personal evolution. I’m much healthier and happier now than I was prior to starting Plated. Do I occasionally want pepperoni pizza and a gallon of India pale ale? Yes! I’m not perfect; I’m far from it. But I take great pride in working on myself every day, and food is a huge part of my own path to becoming an Evolved Eater.

  Dinner Is the First Lily Pad

  As we scaled the business, we began to think more critically about what it means to be healthy, and we kept returning to the reality that health is more than just managing weight, optimizing body fat, mitigating disease, and maximizing longevity—which is how at least I had conceptualized health for most of my adult life. But as we dug dee
per, we arrived at an unexpected place—believing that happiness can help create good health and that cooking makes us happy. And that is reflected in our belief that food is a joy to be celebrated.

  Josh says that one of the biggest misconceptions about Plated is that we are only for people who don’t want to go to the grocery store or don’t know how to cook. As Josh says, “That couldn’t be further from the truth! Once customers realize we are saving them from throwing food away at the end of the week, that we’re introducing them to a whole new world of flavors and ingredients, and that they’re learning new techniques, they usually realize it doesn’t matter if they were a professional chef before starting Plated or a total novice!”

  As I thought hard about food in my own life and in the process drove myself a bit crazy, I realized something very important: There’s no giant authority here; you need to develop your own approach to your own journey to becoming an Evolved Eater.

  We built Plated to help. Cooking dinner is the foundation for the first phase of the Plated business model.

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  Cook Your Way to Happiness

  One-liner: Cooking is not the panacea for the Flawed American Diet, but it’s a good place to start, and it’s the foundation for the first phase of the Plated business model.

  More Than Anything Else, We Seek Happiness

  The future of food and nutrition is coming—but it’s not here yet. So what should we do in the interim to maximize our happiness and health? As humans, we believe every other goal—health, beauty, money, or power—is valuable only because we expect that it will make us happy. Happiness is the only major life goal that we seek for its own sake.1

  Martin Seligman, a one-time president of the American Psychological Association, founded the positive psychology movement and built off earlier fields like humanistic psychology, which emphasized the importance of reaching one’s innate potential. Since the 1960s, the study of human happiness has spawned thousands of scholarly articles and hundreds of books—with titles like The Art of Happiness, The Happiness Project, The Happiness Animal, The Happiness Advantage, and Stumbling on Happiness—many of which focus on increasing well-being and helping people lead more satisfying lives.

  So then, as Frank McAndrews writes, “Why aren’t we happier? Why have self-reported measures of happiness stayed stagnant for over forty years?”2

  Part of the problem is that happiness isn’t just one thing, and we may actually be biologically hardwired to be dissatisfied most of the time. We all experience different kinds of happiness, but some types of happiness conflict with each other. For example, a happy marriage is something that unfolds and evolves over decades. But successful marriages require a lot of work, and they certainly require sacrificing other forms of happiness—that is, if you find happiness in hanging with friends, going on spontaneous surf trips, and generally being a lazy hedonist. As happiness in one area of life increases, it will often decline in another.3

  As work has become an increasingly significant portion of our waking hours, spending our leisure time with other hard-charging professionals supports the idea that hard work is part of the good life and that the sacrifices it entails are those that a decent person makes. This is what a group of humans with a strong sense of identity does; we reposition our painful obsessions as potential opportunities—and this is why so many incredibly smart people are some of the least happy people around.4

  This problem is deepened because humans have evolved to experience happiness in a very short-term and fleeting way. We have all said something like, “I can’t wait until (I get that job, I find my life partner, I get that raise, etc.).” We are all also equally guilty of saying something like, “Remember when…”

  Think about how rarely you hear someone say, “Isn’t this awesome right now!”

  Human society has developed to cope with our brains, which continue to believe that the past and future were and will be better than the present. And there is good reason for why we think this way and believe these things. On the one hand, most humans enjoy a psychological trait called the optimism bias, which leads us to reason that our future will be better than today. On the other hand, most of us also adhere to what psychologists call the Pollyanna principle, which leads us to repress unpleasant information and to remember more vividly pleasurable memories. Depressed people invert these two principles, and they dread the future and regret the past, which makes for a pretty painful present. For most humans, though, the reason that the good old days seem so good is that we focus on the pleasant and forget the pain.5

  This Pollyanna-optimism deception shines some light on just how short-lived happiness often is. Psychologists who research emotions refer to our addiction to happiness as the hedonic treadmill—human happiness remains stationary, despite our efforts or interventions to advance it.6 We set our sights on a goal, we work incredibly hard to make it happen, visualizing how achieving the goal will make us happy. But the reality is that after a quick “happiness fix,” we quickly revert to our baseline, and we start running after the next thing that we believe will make us happy—the job, the chocolate chip cookie, the girlfriend.

  A study of lottery winners and paraplegic accident victims showed that getting what we dream about (winning millions of dollars) rarely makes us happier in the long run. The same psychological mechanism also means that something tragic (like being fully paralyzed in an accident) doesn’t make us any unhappier than our baseline, again in the long run. Short term, there is an adaptation period (either up or down), but human psychology is incredibly adaptable.7

  Entrepreneurs who dream of selling businesses and retiring young often find themselves wondering why they were in such a hurry to sell. After finally raising our first round of venture capital, it was depressing for me to realize how quickly my attitude went from “I’m a real entrepreneur! We raised millions of dollars!” to “I’m an entrepreneur who’s only raised single-digit millions.”

  Before you let this depress you and you throw away all your hopes and dreams, it’s important to realize that this is how we were biologically programmed to be from an evolutionary perspective. Focusing on the future is what keeps us motivated to keep advancing humanity, solving the world’s biggest problems. Biologically speaking, our ancestors who just sat around in a cloud of ecstasy all day were the ones who got eaten by tigers.

  Acknowledging that happiness is a real thing, but that it is fleeting and temporary, should help us enjoy it more fully when it comes into our lives. We should also recognize that it is not possible to be happy across all facets of our lives simultaneously. The Hollywood fiction of “happily ever after” has created a society-wide overdose on outsized expectations.

  What is the antidote for unrealistic expectations that lead to being unhappy? People who regularly practice gratitude—by taking time to notice and reflect upon the things they’re thankful for—experience more positive emotions and happiness.8

  And gratitude doesn’t need to be reserved only for momentous occasions. Yes, you might express gratitude after receiving a promotion at work, but you can also be thankful for something as simple as cooking a delicious dinner with your family. Research by UC–Davis psychologist Robert Emmons, author of Thanks!: How the New Science of Gratitude Can Make You Happier, shows that simply keeping a gratitude journal—regularly writing brief reflections on moments for which we’re thankful—can significantly increase well-being and life satisfaction.9

  But what does any of this have to do with food and cooking? Is cooking actually that important to our health, happiness, and survival? Can cooking possibly help us find a better approach to food and life?

  Turns out, it can.

  Cook Your Way to Happiness

  Josh and I decided to start with cooking because we believe that it is the simplest step we can all take to make ourselves healthier and happier starting today. Cooking is the best way to both connect to where your food is coming from and to ensure that you and your family are eating well. Cooki
ng can both help us fix the Flawed American Diet and make us happier, healthier, and more connected. We are not going to stop with cooking dinner, but it is where we are starting, and it’s really important to us and our customers.

  What I have found is this: When you fail at food, you fail at life.

  Remember Maslow’s hierarchy of needs from chapter 1? Ahead of even safety and security, food forms the base of the pyramid. Food is the most fundamental need we have as humans. If you don’t figure out food, nothing else matters—not family, friends, sex, self-esteem, confidence, creativity, self-actualization. That’s because without a strong food foundation, it is impossible to experience the emotions, ambitions, and relationships that make life worth living.

  Foodies, activists, chefs, farmers, and TV personalities have succeeded in making food a part of the mainstream conversation. And this conversation is driving the growth of “new” foods and food sources (farmers’ markets, organic food, farm-to-table restaurants) and more information about how to cook (TV and app-based cooking shows, an infinite number of online recipes). But our food culture is slower to change.

  From its start, American cooking was characterized by the adjective Americans love most: big. American cooks worked with big pieces of meat and big piles of starch that grossly outweighed the small portions of fruits and vegetables. American cooking was not about cuisine, it was about getting the job done. Across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, we were moving too fast and trying to accomplish too much—there was just no time to invest in food or cooking culture.

  In 1877, Juliet Corson, the head of the New York Cooking School, lamented the wastefulness of American cooks. “In no other land,” she wrote, “is there such a profusion of food, and certainly in none is so much wasted from sheer ignorance, and spoiled by bad cooking.” A real food culture—that way of eating—never evolved into something recognizable, and where it did, it was not preserved. Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, who said, “Tell me what you eat: I will tell you who you are,” would have found that difficult to do in early America.10