#2. Foodies will save our food system
Think about your last lunch. Exciting or mundane? Cooked or bought? Whatever the answer, it was the end product of hundreds of farmers likely growing corn, soy, or chicken. While amazing, this system we’ve created to feed our planet has left the farmers who grow our food poor. And foodies are here to save us from ourselves.
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Today, we revel in our efficiency. We, like our food system, are turning into machines. Where there were once stories, cultures, and communities, we now live with optimized Huel shakes and Soylent subscriptions. Squirted from a pouch, and they taste like it. But shut up and eat your nutrient slop. Less time eating, more time doing, you cog. I used to pick up the same sandwich from Pret everyday. Eat in front of my computer, and barely taste it. I was never the type of person to spend $100+ on something as silly as balsamic vinegar.
While we slurp our slop, we love to hate foodies. They’re such bourgeois, entitled snobs. They dine out on sous vide duck breast with juniper berry glaze and smirk over their exquisite palates. Meanwhile, the American farmer tills the backbone of our economy, is up to his eyeballs in debt, and struggles to turn a profit. However snobbish some foodies are, they hold the singular key to saving our food system from itself.
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Two years ago, I went on a food tour outside Bologna. Amidst a mozzarella factory and a cathedral to prosciutto, we visited a balsamic vinegar maker. The owner makes balsamic vinegar the same way generations of his family have. He begins with 50 liters of “mosto” (freshly ground grape juice) in 50 year old wooden barrels. As the mosto sits in the barrel, through sub-zero winters and hot Italian summers, water evaporates, the vinegar absorbs wood from the barrel (yum yum), and the flavors condense. Each year, the craftsmen decant the condensed vinegar into a 40 liter barrel, then a 30 liter, and so on. After decades of concentration, we have three syrupy, tongue-exploding liters of balsamic vinegar.
With an ear-to-ear grin of fatherly pride, the owner showed us a small barrel for his daughter. He began it the year she was born. She will be about 10 now, and that vinegar still won’t be ready for 15 more years. 200 years ago, this process would end with 3-4 bottles’ worth of magnificent 18-year-old vinegar as a common part of the Modenese dowry. Our friendly father is more modern. There is no dowry and he doesn’t expect his daughter to get married at 18. 25 though? One perfect bottle. 25 years for a single bottle of balsamic vinegar.
Credit: Elise Bauer
It was in his smiling eyes that I transported into the foodie motherbrain. I realized that the foodies’ super power isn’t in what they can afford or how small their bites are. Their power is in their ability to appreciate. To find wonder in a mundane ingredient’s story and showing others how to share in that.
After that trip, I will indeed spend $100+ on a bottle of good balsamic vinegar. I know the care the craftsmen put into the bottle. I see that proud smile and feel the warmth of a family who has dedicated generations to the craft. What’s more, I will not buy $10 balsamic vinegar. Not because I’m better than $10 balsamic. Because I know that my money doesn’t go to support the people who care for the product. That $10 goes to the manufacturers who cut grape concentrate with wine vinegar. It neglects the crafters who dedicate a quarter century to a batch of quality vinegar.
Men and women like our father of balsamic vinegar have built our food system from the ground up. Our agricultural system today is a marvel of scale and efficiency. It inspires awe with every chicken nugget. We create enough nutrients to sustain 8 billion people. But our food system has slid from commoditizing the basics to commoditizing everything.
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Modern agriculture was born in the industrial revolution era. Henry Ford’s intense focus on efficient output inspired the agriculture industry to begin mono-cropping their fields with optimized fertilizer and seed. From that agricultural revolution, we’ve been able to feed an exponentially growing global population for over 100 years.
Yet despite the benefits of food mechanization, broad commoditization has left farmers poorer. Take coffee for example. Some coffees have more complexity than a 100-point bottle of wine. But your daily Starbucks tastes the same whether you buy it in Seattle or Shanghai. When you buy a Starbucks coffee, you know what you’re getting. And it’s not 100-point complexity. That’s because there’s no single coffee farm in the world that can feed Starbucks’ needs. So Starbucks buys beans from hundreds of farms. They price each crop’s unique taste and idiosyncrasies at commodity prices. Starbucks mixes them all together, burns all the nuance out of them so you can’t tell the difference, and voila! Consistently mediocre coffee. To achieve complete consistency, a brand must render all inputs to their lowest common denominator.
And this doesn’t apply to only coffee. It applies to anything a brand needs to be consistent year-round across geographies. Bananas, carrots, beef, pork. This idea seems to make sense until you snap back to our reality in which food doesn’t work that way. All food is seasonal. It has grown and developed with its local geography.
Identical outputs require commoditized inputs. And when we render these inputs commodities, they’re priced as such. Lower prices mean lower income for farmers. Lower income means less money to reinvest into land and our food. Lower income forces farmers to grow inferior products that lack richness in flavor, texture, and nutrition. Such products are only capable of ever being commodity products. Suddenly, those who provide food for the world can't afford to buy quality produce themselves. This is a Wicked Problem - a positive reinforcement cycle self-perpetuating to an undesired end. Today, the average farms (including the largest mega farms) earn only 1-3% profit margin.
Commoditization doesn’t only render away flavor, but also nutrition. Our bodies wouldn’t notice much of a difference if we replaced your grocery store’s iceberg lettuce with a wet paper towel. But technology that we’ve developed over the last one hundred years can and should play a significant role in the redesign of our food system.
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How can foodie wonder trigger this redesign? Demand for nuance. With a foodie-like appreciation for nuance comes a demand for nuance.
Let’s go back to coffee. I recently subscribed to Cometeer, whose mission is to decommoditize the global coffee market. Others shill coffee whose nuance has been burned out and watered down. Cometeer works with individual roasteries and farmers to highlight each coffee’s uniqueness. The company scales by being a horizontal platform, not a vertically-integrated coffee monolith. By automating only the front-end of the process - brewing, packaging, and delivery - they leave farmers and roasters to perform their best work. They buy the nuance and flavor, sell to people who appreciate nuance and flavor, and share the premiums with the farmers. Farmers in turn invest that back into the land to grow even better coffee. Let the positive feedback cycle ensue.
But coffee isn’t the only place we can do this. We can do this with EVERYTHING. Carrots. Zucchini. Apples. Beef. Salmon. Lentils. EV.VER.Y.THING.
Modern technology should change how we think about our food system. The internet didn’t exist when we built our agricultural system. Neither did robotics. Or machine learning. Or drones. Or Amphiphilic Liquid Coating. You get it? We have made so many recent advancements that allow us to rethink our perspective toward food and create a new, post-modern food system.
Nearly all companies transforming food today automate the end of the supply chain, not the beginning. New “grocery stores” like Farmdrop source food from top quality local farms. If it’s not in season it’s not available. If it’s available, you better believe it’s damn good. All of a sudden, you’re not shopping for strawberries. You’re shopping for Newland Farm strawberries from Kent or Froberg Farm strawberries from Texas. Meanwhile, Goldbelly unlocks America’s menu to anybody. We can discover the best local meals in the country, buy them nationally, and appreciate them at home. It’s so amazing the things we can create. While my wife scrolls Instagram, I scroll Goldbelly.
I’m not arguing for an end to commoditization. Commoditized goods may always have a place in the world. They provide a safety net to those who can’t afford specialized products. However, I am arguing for a significant scale back of commoditization with a move toward specialization. Specialization across territories has been studied in-depth. It’s the macroeconomic principle that underpins all trade. What happens when two nations trade goods they each specialize in? Both win. It is always, always good for both parties. Between them, they create higher quality goods for lower prices. The same can be true of any two groups, not just countries. It can be regions, states, or even communities. But only demand for these nuanced ingredients can initiate this transformation.
As in any market, demand for specialized products has to come from high income individuals first. It will, for a time, be something only those with the highest willingness to pay can do. Goldbelly is expensive. Cometeer is expensive. Farmdrop is expensive. This doesn’t mean they will only ever be for the rich. This is the first domino to fall in a global reshuffle of our food system. Look at how much cheaper computing has gotten. In 1980, four years after Jobs founded Apple, one dollar fetched you 10 billion computations per second. Today? 100 million billion. If you don’t believe me, look it up on the supercomputer in your pocket. What if we can do the same thing for our food system?
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I hate talking to snobs. They think they’re better than me. They look down on me. But I love talking to people who are full of wonder. Asking them about their favorite ingredient and dish. Learning the story. The moment their eyes pause and I know they’ve transported themselves back to the kitchen. Imagine living like that everyday. Every sizzle is an elation. Every sniff takes you across the globe. And every bite is a well-earned thank you to farmers and craftspeople.
The role of the food lover in agriculture is simple. Inspire wonder. Infuse seemingly monotonous products with meaning and variety. And let the people who grow them lead us to the post-modern food system. That’s the world I want to live in.
Credit: Elise Bauer
