The Evolved Eater
Page 20
As Dan Barber writes, “With few ingrained food habits, Americans are among the least tradition-bound of food cultures.”11 We mix and match cuisines as we please, picking the best (or worst) from around the world to form atrocities like Denny’s Mac ’n Cheese Big Daddy Patty Melt or Rochester’s infamous Garbage Plate. This mashup culture has been a blessing in many ways because we are more free to experiment, invent, and test new approaches to everything (jazz, national parks, denim jeans) than anywhere else in the world.
The flip side of this blessing is that our history lacks an ingrained and robust model for good eating. The world’s most recognizable cuisines (French, Italian, Chinese, Indian, Turkish) were formed around organizing principles of what was available preindustrialization. In most of these countries, the limited ingredients available to farmers meant that grains or vegetables took center plate, with meat playing the supporting role. Classic dishes like bouillabaisse in French cuisine and paella in Spanish were developed to optimize what the land and sea produced. We never benefited from such a natural system of forced sustainability, and as a consequence, sustainable values don’t penetrate our cooking culture. As Dan Barber writes, “Today’s chefs create and follow rules that are so flexible they’re really more like traffic signals—there to be observed but just as easily ignored.”12
This flexibility and willingness to innovate and improvise should mean that we have the opportunity to transform American cooking the same way jazz evolved into blues and then rock and then hip-hop over time. The future of American cuisine will represent a paradigm shift, a new way of thinking about cooking and eating that defies the way we eat today.
In looking at the future of American cuisine, we need to go beyond cheekily named chickens and an obsession with kale grown on Brooklyn rooftops. Since the best global cuisines evolved over thousands of years, through a dance with tradition and heartache and burned fingertips and scorched tongues, how do we go about architecting our own American cuisine? How do we go from where we are today to where we need to be in the future if our children are to enjoy the same luxuries we take for granted every night at dinnertime?
The Joy of Cooking?
For much of my adult life, I was definitely in the “majority of calories consumed away from home” camp—for that matter, I still am. I’m off to work early, I eat breakfast and lunch at my desk, and I try to make it home for dinner. I’m clearly not the only one.
People know and say that they want to spend more time cooking and eating at home, but there is a profound disconnect between how people say they want to eat and how they actually do it. We dug into more research on eating out versus eating in and found that people did want to cook more—they just didn’t always have the time, knowledge, confidence, or resources to do so. And that was often true across socioeconomic lines.
Take the recent academic article “The Joy of Cooking?” Sociologists Sarah Bowen, Sinikka Elliott, and Joslyn Brenton spent eighteen months following nearly two hundred low- and middle-income moms, logging hundreds of hours interviewing and observing how these moms fed their families. What they found was surprising: Many of the moms did enjoy cooking—and in fact cooked for their families several days a week. But time and budget constraints made it hard for these moms to make home-cooked meals the way they wanted.13
“For the poorer families, they cooked because they didn’t have the money to eat out,” Sarah Bowen said in an interview with Vox. “Middle-class families felt it was important to cook and eat at home. So people in our study were cooking, but a lot felt like they didn’t have enough time or money to do it the ‘right’ way.”14
There were essentially three obstacles that got in the way of cooking the ideal meal, and they affected families in different ways. Those three obstacles were time pressures, trade-offs to save money, and the fact that it was often impossible to please all the different family members. Kids are notoriously picky (I know because I have a couple of munchkins at home).
For the low-income families, time pressure was a big deal. They often had unpredictable schedules and jobs that kept them out late, including service industry positions where they might miss the dinner hour altogether. And while the middle-income moms had more predictable work schedules, they still talked about not having enough time to make a home-cooked meal with everyone in the family flying in from different directions and converging in the kitchen around six o’clock.
Bowen talks about “one mom who was going to community college and commuting back and forth by bus.” This woman and her kids would get home around 8:00 P.M. every day—way too late to then start planning and preparing a meal. The woman, who struggled financially, felt that if she could just get home a couple of hours earlier, maybe she could cook like she wanted to. She liked cooking. She had grown up with a grandmother who loved to cook, and she felt it was an important way to show her kids she cared. But it just wasn’t possible with her schedule.
Many of us can relate to the “time pressure” challenges of cooking. On the nights I work late, the last thing I want to do after getting home at 9:00, 10:00, or 11:00 P.M. is make a meal. Prior to starting Plated, I hadn’t been very kind to my body, and while I wasn’t struggling with obesity or diabetes, in some ways, that was just luck of the draw; plenty of people in my family were suffering from both.
As a nation, we are spending less time in the kitchen than ever. In 1965, the average middle-class American cooked for ninety-eight minutes a day. By 2007, that number had declined to fifty-five minutes.15 About 20 percent of our calories come from restaurants and fast-food establishments, compared with just 6 percent in 1977.16 Since 1970, the number of fast-food joints in the United States has more than doubled.17 In 1960, 13 percent of Americans were obese, compared with 35 percent today.18 The kitchen has been replaced with a recipe for disaster.
And who could blame us for trading the hot stove for the drive-through window? Critics of the home-cooking movement charge that it’s antifeminist (because women still cook the majority of the time) and elitist (you try searing tuna with avocado and ponzu while holding down two jobs and shopping with food stamps). Home cooking, concluded Amanda Marcotte in a 2014 Slate article, is “expensive and time-consuming, and often done for a bunch of ingrates who would rather just be eating fast food anyway.”19
But the more research we did, the more the what and how of what we were eating as a society didn’t match up with the ways we claimed to want to eat. There was a huge gap that demanded to be filled, and until we filled it, millions of people were dying every year from diseases that could be prevented if we changed our eating habits.
But changing habits is hard. Again, most folks viscerally and intellectually understand that they should be eating better. However, it is going from understanding to implementation where everything falls apart. “Sure, I’d like a piece of wild-caught salmon over seared lacinato kale, but that’s not going to happen when I’m rushing home to get my kid from day care after working ten hours.”
So first, we had to solve the cooking conundrum.
Cook More, Live Better
There are three main benefits to cooking: wellness, happiness, and connection or mindfulness. I’ll briefly go through all three now.
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Wellness. As Michael Pollan said, “The most important thing you can do for your kids’ long-term health is to teach them to cook. The best diet is: Eat anything you want as long as you cook it yourself.”20 Research suggests that Pollan is onto something.
A 2014 Johns Hopkins study found people who frequently cook meals at home eat healthier and consume fewer calories than those who cook less. Participants who cooked dinner six or seven times a week consumed 6 percent fewer calories and 12 percent fewer grams of sugar than those who cooked no more than once a week. The study also suggests that those who frequently cooked at home also consumed fewer calories on the occasions when they ate out. “When people cook most of their meals at home, they consume fewer carbohydrates, less sugar, and less fa
t than those who cook less or not at all—even if they are not trying to lose weight,” says Julia A. Wolfson, a fellow at the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future and lead author of the study.21
Researchers surveyed Canadian fifth graders about how much they liked certain foods. The study found that “those who reported helping with meal preparation at home showed a 10 percent stronger preference for vegetables than their peers who didn’t help cook.”22
“Obesity is an escalating public health problem that contributes to other serious health issues, including diabetes, high blood pressure, and heart disease,” says Wolfson. “The evidence shows people who cook at home eat a more healthy diet. Moving forward, it’s important to educate the public about the benefits of cooking at home, and to identify strategies that encourage and enable more cooking at home.”
* * *
Happiness. “Not cooking is a big mistake,” Mark Bittman warned in a 2014 piece in Time. “And it’s one that’s costing us money, good times, control, serenity, and, yes, vastly better health.”23 Involving ourselves in cooking a meal connects us with the complex supply chain that raises and delivers our food, which in turn makes us more active, engaged, and generally better consumers.
Additionally, cooking is a natural and easy excuse to spend time in proximity with the person or people we love most. Research shows that happiness is directly correlated to time spent with friends and family engaging in constructive projects together, like cooking. A recent study in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition demonstrates how cooking at home actually makes us happier than eating fancy meals out at a restaurant.24
The study looked at how food choices influence mood. One hundred and sixty women reported what they ate for ten days. They were contacted every two hours to report what they had recently eaten and how they were feeling after. The researchers looked at two aspects of each meal: whether it was eaten at home or out (restaurants, fast food, cafés, etc.) and whether the meal was healthier than the woman’s “baseline” or typical meal, or more indulgent / less healthy.
Most people (except for those who live in Manhattan and use their oven as a shoe rack) think that eating out is special. But this study found that women were significantly happier and less stressed after eating at home and after eating healthier meals. As the authors conclude, “The home is a privileged environment that nurtures healthy eating and in which healthier food choices trigger more positive emotions.”25
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Connection or Mindfulness. We have become disconnected from the visceral experience of making stuff. Most Americans now spend their days in office buildings behind computer screens, pounding out e-mails, not pounding out the production of physical goods that made America a global force in the mid-twentieth century. Many of us may not produce anything tangible and directly applicable to our lives ever.
After I started cooking, two things happened:
First, I started paying attention to where my ingredients were coming from. The more I cooked, the more labels I looked at in an attempt to understand where my food was coming from, what was in it, and how it would impact me when I ate it. Experiencing ingredients firsthand went a long way toward helping me understand the importance of standards. Understanding where food comes from helped me become a more active and engaged eater. As I learned to cook, it inspired a sense of mindfulness that went beyond the kitchen, extending to being present and aware of how I interacted with others and the earth. I also started meditating and doing yoga. But in case you fear that I was veering toward the edge of some new age hippie revelation, I still shot machine guns on the weekend with the Marines to balance it all out.
Second, my confidence in the kitchen skyrocketed. I found myself capable of putting together foods in a way that had previously seemed like magic. This was empowering, and I got a major self-esteem boost out of it, both inside and outside the kitchen.
We conducted a poll of Plated employees and customers to see whether this experience expanded beyond just me. We asked, “After learning to cook, do you feel more confident?” For folks who claimed that they “rarely or never cooked” before starting to cook with Plated, over 80 percent of people responded that they agreed or strongly agreed.
So if cooking is a key enabler of our wellness, happiness, connectedness, and confidence, then why is there not more concerted effort to make cooking a bigger part of the modern American lifestyle?
Back to the Future
For me, cooking has been transformative. In the vast majority of the world, including the United States, women do the majority of household activities—including cooking. On an average day in the United States, women spend more than twice as much time as men preparing food.26 As I learned how to cook through Plated, I became the primary “food preparer” in our house—I wouldn’t go so far as to call myself a chef. While I may not contribute as much as my wife would like to laundry, cleaning, and interior decorating, I get away with it because I am the one who makes sure our kids are fed.
Multiple people’s lives directly depend on me showing up and literally putting food on the table. In the Marine Corps, as officers, we were taught that we ate last—if there was only enough food to feed the guys, then we would go hungry. Similarly, at Plated, there were times in the early years when Josh and I went without salaries for months on end so that we could afford to make payroll and feed our people. At home, while I have had the good fortune of never going hungry, I have embraced what it means to serve.
When we outsource all our food needs to someone else, even if that someone else knows more about baking or sautéing or nutrition or bicycle delivery than we do, we lose something more important than time. We lose our connection to our food and the earth that grows it. The future of healthy, affordable, and delicious food is in the hands of the humans who live in the dirt (or hydroponics) and abide by its rules, conjuring the alchemy that transforms seeds into feasts. Physically preparing a meal connects us with the agricultural systems that produce our food, making us more active and engaged consumers.
Some may claim that ignorance is bliss, but I’d argue that sticking your head in the sand like a free-range ostrich is no way to eat or live. We owe it to ourselves and to our children to become more educated and concerned about what food means, how it works, and who is involved.
When we outsource all our food needs to someone else, we also lose our connection to the people around us who make us happy. In a 2013 appearance by Louis C.K., the comedian explains why he doesn’t want to get a cell phone for his kids: because constant attachment to a screen deadens your experience of the world. “You never feel completely sad or completely happy, you just feel … kinda satisfied with your products. And then you die.”
Nights when I am home on time, I read a book (or five) to my daughters before bed. One of my older daughter’s favorites is The Velveteen Rabbit. At one point, the rabbit asks the Skin Horse if it hurts to be “real.”
“‘Sometimes,’ said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. ‘When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.’”
This children’s narrative took me to the same place that Louis C.K. was going—that being “real” means being uncomfortable at times. It means you ask tough questions, and one consequence is that you might find answers that make you feel upset.
One of the most important questions of our time is how much truth we are willing to trade for comfort. This is the age-old CRAP Trap circling back once again.
Technology exists to make our lives safer, healthier, easier, and more comfortable. We are building a new economy based on technology-driven convenience, and it makes sense that this convenience at all costs has bled over into other areas of our lives. Dating based on a swipe comes with a lot less friction than marriages that require a lifetime of work.
But what if removing friction and increasing comfort isn’t the right goal? As our expectations continue to climb—photoshopped social profiles, on-demand everything—what are the implications for our food, our re
ality, and our happiness? What if, like a stormy ocean that makes stones smooth and beautiful by knocking them together, the point of being human is to bump up against each other, burn our fingers a bit, and confront the truth in order to become better and more beautiful?27 This may be less convenient and more painful and uncomfortable in the short term, but over the long run, it will make us happier, and at the end of the day, that is what we all want above everything else.
Conclusion
New Food Ideas Require New Food Companies
Building a Better Way to Eat
In a recent interview, one consumer packaged goods (CPG) executive admitted, “We’re kind of fucked.” One-third of American consumers surveyed by Deloitte, a consultancy, said they would pay at least 10 percent more for the “craft” version of a good, a greater percentage than would pay extra for convenience or innovation. Interest in organic products has been a particular challenge for big manufacturers whose riskily altered products include such mouth-moistening ingredients as sodium benzoate and Yellow 6. EY, another consultancy, recently surveyed CPG executives. Eighty percent didn’t believe their company could adapt to customer demand. Kristina Rogers, global head of consumer products and retail at EY, posits that Big Food “may need to rethink their business from scratch, not just trim costs and sign deals to acquire promising young brands.”1
Big Food is not going to feed ten billion people the way they need to be fed—in a healthy, affordable, real, fresh, delicious, and convenient way. Nearly twice as much money is spent on processed foods and sweets today as compared to a few decades ago. As food industry veteran Hank Cardello told me, “The traditional food industry is very efficient if you want something convenient that tastes half-decent. However, it is horribly efficient for nutritious foods that are fresh. And it’s nearly impossible for them to change.”2