by Nick Taranto
We can’t look to Big Food to solve our food problems. When I spoke with Marion Nestle (no relation to the food company Nestlé), the Paulette Goddard Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health at New York University and the author of What to Eat, I asked her, “How do you feel about the current state of Big Food?” Her response was priceless. “Poor things. They’re doing so badly.”3
As I spoke with hundreds of people who had spent their lives devoted to studying, producing, and fixing food, I was happy to learn that the general mood about the future of food was positive. The combination of changing consumer attitudes and behavior, convenience-enabling technology, media interest, consumer education, and market forces has folks feeling generally optimistic, except for one thing: making the solution happen fast enough.
When I spoke with Pulitzer Prize–winning food reporter Michael Moss, he told me, “The food giants think their ace in the hole for winning and maintaining their dominance of the food system is population growth and the ten billion people that we’ll have by 2050. This has the companies convinced that we will come running to them for calories, no matter how low quality those calories are, because they are the ones who will feed the world, not just the small portion of the world who can afford to eat better.”4
Big Food doesn’t have the answers, and it is not capable of developing the answers on its own. This is where Plated and the new breed of food companies come in. If we are going to feed the world, and do it affordably, conveniently, and in a sustainable, healthy, and delicious way, then the answer must come from technology and data-driven companies like Plated. We can prove that great food can be grown in a good way, affordably, where workers are treated well and where the earth, our waistlines, our wallets, and our relationships don’t pay the price.
We can’t think about changing only parts of the way we eat; that is too shortsighted and narrow-minded. Over time, we will need to build an entirely new and better way to eat.5
From Idea to Action
The Big Food insiders, journalists, and academics I spoke with have written widely and thoughtfully about the food problems we face in America today. They come at these problems from different angles, but I couldn’t help but notice they were united in one common theme: They all expressed a certain level of frustration. They could see the problems, but they couldn’t necessarily do anything about them. They were like Cassandra from the Greek myth, foretelling the future in vain.
Many of these experts are not executors and operators. They are living in journalistic, scientific, and academic realms. They do not live in the realm of smashing your head repeatedly against a wall, also known as building a business. Don’t get me wrong—they deeply feel and understand the problems surrounding food in the modern world—as do millions of other people, but they are fairly limited in what they can actually do about it. So they publish excellent books and clear-eyed blog posts, articles, and thought pieces that slowly change the conversation toward what they all hope to be a better solution.
When I asked Marion Nestle how we should help people eat better, she said, “You just make healthy food and talk about how good it tastes. You don’t do anything else. I think it’s that simple. You don’t hit people over the head with how healthy certain foods are. You just talk about how good and convenient they are.
“I don’t think people need products. People need food. The real problem is with people not knowing how to cook or feeling inadequate about their cooking skills, or feeling like it takes an enormous amount of time and effort after a long day at work when they just don’t want to bother. I imagine that’s the problem you’re trying to solve.”
Yes! That is exactly the problem we are solving. Of course, making all the seemingly simple pieces work together in harmony to deliver that solution is surprisingly hard. Trust me—we’ve spent the last five years working to get the seemingly simple pieces to work together to deliver tens of millions of healthy, affordable, and delicious meals across America. It’s really hard and takes a very talented and committed team of people to make it work.
We are not the only folks using data and technology to reimagine how food is produced, distributed, and delivered. Our category is on fire. Some of the biggest and most respected institutions on Wall Street have put out research predicting that our category could grow by more than thirty-five times over the next ten years!6
This is because our business model is not just incrementally but dramatically better than that of Big Food. We are better for customers, better for the environment, better for employees, and better for investors. But you don’t have to take my word for it; Forbes recently reported that spending at grocery stores decreases by over 7 percent for folks who use a “meal kit.”7
Plated is a great service that can help you get close to your food, close to your family, and closer to the way you want to live, but it’s not all or nothing—we’re not talking about going back to the farm to churn your own butter.
We have found that when folks cook with us two nights per week, they experience the benefits of connection, happiness, and wellness. Just getting started with Plated is taking a big step in the right direction.
As Josh says, “People should expect Plated to get better and better at two things. First, we’re going to continue to expand the types of meals we offer (think breakfasts, lunches, appetizers, and others) as part of our mission to make it easy to eat well. Essentially, making it easier to get good food that you want. The second thing to look out for, over time, is that we’ll get better at understanding what you need, specifically from a health and nutrition perspective, and building that automatically into the delicious recommendations we make to you as a customer. Nutrition science is a young, dynamic, and exciting field, and we’re excited to help advance the science as much as we can.”
New food ideas, new food solutions, and a new food reality require new food companies like Plated, but we are not going to accomplish our mission on our own. There is a monumental amount of work to be done if we are going to feed ten billion people in a healthy, affordable, and delicious way.
And we need your help.
* * *
Here are four ways you can help:
1. Join us at Plated!
2. Tell politicians what you think.
3. Teach the kids in your life how to cook.
4. Recognize that you have massive power.
1. Join us at Plated!
We are always hiring, looking for the hungry, smart, and mission-driven folks who want to commit their skills and energy to solving big, tough problems. Visit us at Plated.com/careers and drop us a line!
We are also building a coalition of like-minded companies and institutions. If you lead a business or team and believe that we can work together to accomplish our mission of helping people eat more real, fresh, delicious food, we would love to hear from you!
2. Tell politicians what you think.
As I sit writing this conclusion, the state of politics in this country is more contentious and gridlocked than at any time in recent memory. That doesn’t mean we should turn our backs on politics and the making of policy. To the contrary, now more than ever, we need to speak up and make our voices heard where laws and policies are made.
There are two main areas where you can help by telling politicians what you think:
a. Limit government subsidies for bad behaviors.
b. Fight dietary inequality and increase access to fresh, real foods.
Limit government subsidies for bad behaviors
Many of the government regulations that were designed to protect us from the dangers inherent in the industrial food system are not relevant in a more transparent, regional food system. These rules discriminate against smaller businesses because the costs of complying with the paperwork requirements cannot be spread out over a large volume of food sales. Small vendors are at a disadvantage because they must pass those costs on to consumers, making their food more expensive than the mass-produced variety. These burd
ensome regulations also discourage entrepreneurs from starting up in the first place.
Getting people to fall in love and get hooked on real food is the answer to moving away from inexpensive, unhealthy food. That starts with getting people excited about real food and where it comes from. And that in turn starts with farmers growing veggies instead of soy and corn. Massive monocrop farms are increasingly becoming the norm as consolidation of smaller family-owned farms (like my family’s) continues. But diversified multicrop and multianimal farms do not receive government subsidies.
The government’s calorie-maximizing policies, a holdover from the Great Depression, no longer make sense in a country more troubled by obesity than by hunger. In its push for large monocultures, the USDA prohibited farms that receive grain subsidies from growing fruits and vegetables. This puts the government in the insane position of subsidizing the cost of fast food while actively prohibiting more farms from growing fruits and vegetables.8
Subsidies and government cleanup measures are not included in the price you pay for riskily altered products, but if they were, good food would not seem so expensive in comparison. The production, processing, and marketing of riskily altered provisions creates collateral damage (like obesity, diabetes, and environmental “dead zones”) that taxpayers are on the hook to fix. Consider the Twentynine Palms–sized area in the Gulf of Mexico now known as a “dead zone” because nothing can survive in the oxygen-starved water, a result of manure and pesticide runoff. Who pays for the cleanup? We do. Who pays to address antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria caused by the overuse of antibiotics on factory farms? We do. Who pays to treat people with type 2 diabetes, which they get from consuming the riskily altered products that are sold cheaply because the companies making them get subsidies? We do.
Tell your politicians that these policies are insane and that you’re fed up.
Visit us at Plated.com/PlatedPolicy to figure out how to help.
Fight dietary inequality and increase access to fresh, real foods
The societal problem with riskily altered food products costing less than fresh fruits and veggies is that the poor cannot afford to deal with the health problems that come from eating hyperprocessed foods in massive quantities. Why does fresh, nutritious, responsibly grown food only need to be for the rich? High-quality, fresh, real food should be the right of every American. If we are going to fix the food problem in this country, increasing access to nutritious affordable food has to be a part of the solution.
While according to the Mayo Clinic, only 2.7 percent of Americans have a “healthy lifestyle,” for wealthy folks, diets are improving. A recent study tracking changes in eating habits between 1999 and 2012 suggests that Americans are eating more whole fruits, nuts, and seeds and drinking fewer sodas. But the study also revealed that the gap between the diets of the wealthy and the poor is widening.9
This news shouldn’t come as a revelation. Low-income places are less likely to have full-service grocery stores or farmers’ markets, let alone bountiful shelves of organic produce. Lower-income folks often have no car, so they have to shop at the sort of bodegas and convenience stores that offer Cheetos, Lunchables, and Mountain Dew rather than fresh produce. In Newark, New Jersey, just a few miles as the crow flies from where I live, Renée Fuller, an elderly woman who walks with a cane, has to go to the next town, West Orange, to shop for food. “You want a banana, you have to travel. There’s not many supermarkets. There’s nothing convenient … You have bodegas and corner stores that sell cold cuts and sandwiches, but not many vegetables … I get my food stamps once a month. I can’t stock up on fruits for the whole month.”10
Poor urban areas that are at least a mile from the nearest supermarket, and rural areas that are at least ten miles from any grocery store, are considered food deserts. According to the USDA, nearly half of the 23.5 million people living in areas deemed food deserts also qualify as low income. They also suffer from higher-than-average rates of diet-related illness, and they spend a higher percentage of their limited time and resources than the rest of Americans traveling to buy food.11
So what can you do about this?
Here’s one idea: We need to make it possible to use food stamps online. We need to reinvent food stamps for this new digital era.
Of people who live in poverty, only 30 percent have access to a car, while 74 percent have access to the Internet. But currently food stamps can’t be used on the Internet—which is insane.
Tell your politicians that SNAP should be usable online.
Visit us at Plated.com/SNAP to figure out how to help.
3. Teach the kids in your life how to cook.
When I was in middle school, several times per week, I had a class on home economics where we learned woodworking, budgeting, sewing, and other basic household skills—like cooking.
You don’t hear much about home ec these days, and in fact, the idea of teaching these skills is frowned on by many as a throwback to an earlier time when women’s primary occupation was to “keep the house.” But the demise of home economics is responsible for a large part of our disconnection from our kitchens, cooking, and our food more broadly. Teenage girls and boys used to learn how to be mindful and capable of cooking.
Unfortunately, these one to two hours per week were co-opted by society for other priorities: teaching teenagers how to avoid pregnancy, say no to drugs, and get a job, instead of how to prepare a meal. Kids lost touch with food, where it comes from, and how to prepare it affordably and efficiently. And this set up tens of millions of us to be reliant on riskily altered products in place of fresh, nutritious, homemade food.
So how can you fight back?
Well, let’s assume that home economics isn’t going to magically reappear on middle and high school schedules.
That means it’s on you to teach the kids in your life how to cook and appreciate food. Which leads us to the fourth way that you can help …
4. Recognize that you have massive power.
It’s important to recognize that as consumers, we have an enormous amount of power. To prove this point, you need look no further than the mighty McDonald’s decision to transition to cage-free eggs by 2025. “We’re trying to respond to what our consumers’ expectations are today of us and their food supply,” says Marion Gross, senior vice president and chief supply chain officer of McDonald’s North America. “Consumers are changing. It’s about how we evolve to meet those changing customer expectations. We can’t remain static and remain relevant to customers.”12
As consumers, we have the power to change how the food system works, but this means making conscious decisions and prioritizing standards and quality over the cheapest, most convenient product available. And that’s why it is okay to be not just unashamed but proud about paying more for good food.
We have talked in depth already about why good, nutritious food is almost always more expensive than the riskily altered products generated by the industrial food system. People who care deeply about food and are willing to pay more for it are often branded snobs or elitists—which leads to hand-wringing and moral angst.13
Where does this guilt come from?
We feel guilty about paying more for good food when others are starving, when millions of people around the world and in this country literally beg, borrow, and steal just to eat something. But instead of cringing and crying about this at fancy cocktail parties while the issue persists and we cede ground to those who claim that feeding ten billion requires the perpetuation of industrialized hyperprocessed food, let’s directly confront why paying more for good food makes sense for almost everyone.
First, let’s start with an axiom: Higher quality stuff is worth more money. Better food tastes better, looks better, and is safer. I call CRAP Consumable Riskily Altered Provisions for a reason—if you eat nutrient-stripped, chemically altered, antibiotic-infused food, you are engaging in risky behavior. As someone’s grandma once said, you can either pay your grocer or your doctor
. When you short your grocer (and yourself), you end up paying your doctor tenfold over the long run. But what if you don’t have the cash on hand to pay for more expensive food in the short term?
That brings us to point two: Eating fresh, unprocessed foods is the best way to reduce your food budget. A pile of kale or a pint of chickpeas costs the same as a single bag of Cheetos. Cooking can move us away from riskily altered provisions, which are more expensive, less healthy, and less emotionally rewarding. Cooking is not hard, but like any skill, it needs to be learned, cultivated, and practiced—and that takes time.
Third, there is more than enough money. We as a society have just decided not to spend it on high-quality food. Think about the amount of money spent on dietary supplements, designer clothes, video games, casinos, and luxury cars. The United States spends more on their cats and dogs than the entire continent of Africa spends on medical care for humans.
Modern humanity has become conditioned to “learned helplessness.” This is an actual psychiatric condition where people have been beaten into believing that they have no control over the outcomes in their lives, so they look to others to solve their problems. We need to quit being victims and bring about change ourselves, whether that be in the kitchen, at work, or in our relationships. If you took the average American shopping cart in the checkout line and tossed out all the riskily altered provisions and substituted fresh food, our country would be richer, healthier, and happier.
If advocating for such behavior change makes me an elitist, then that is a pretty depressing referendum on what we value as a society. Let’s not disparage positive decision making and attempts to change behavior for the better. I saw what was happening in Iraq and Afghanistan, and I wanted to be a part of the solution, so I joined the Marine Corps. I was thirty pounds overweight after two kids and long hours starting our business, so I signed up for an Ironman triathlon. I saw the food system was broken, and I started a business to fix it.