Altruistic Hedonism in Food
In January 2019, I wrote a piece called Empathy for the Food System, where I propose that decades of user centered design in the consumer packaged goods and agriculture industry have prioritized the whims of people at the expense of the environment. From plastic water bottles to high fructose corn syrup, these initially well-meaning inventions put our collective wants ahead of environmental issues like plastic waste and industrial corn monocultures.
It’s been 4 years since that piece and a lot has happened in the world since then. I’ve been busy with my team at Alpha Food Labs and The Future Market working with food clients to address the very issue I raise in Sympathy for the Food System: how do we make food that’s good for people, planet, and profit?
We’ve helped big food companies like Danone and Mars, next-gen food companies like Simple Mills, non-profit organizations like the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, and national food industries like New Zealand Beef+Lamb figure out how to plan for and define the future of food.
Through that client work, I’ve talked to hundreds of eaters and food industry professionals who all reinforce an intuitive fact that we all know to be true: food must taste good if anyone is going to eat it. It’s a mind-numbingly obvious fact that feels silly to type, but the sustainable food movement doesn’t address this basic fact seriously enough. Yes, sustainable food can be delicious, but the reason why it’s delicious is seldom because of how sustainable it is. To advance the food sustainability movement into the future, the food industry needs to focus more on how it can create a causal relationship between sustainable growing practices that result in more delicious food.
Food Choices are Mostly Emotional
Have you ever eaten your favorite meal and leaned back in your chair afterward in a state of bliss and said to yourself, “wow, that meal was SO sustainable!” I’m guessing not, because this is not how we are typically wired to react to food.
Trying to find a balance between a healthy planet and meeting the whims of eaters means we need to meet the planet in the middle. Placing all eater’s needs ahead of planetary health will lead to disaster, but ignoring eater’s needs and expecting them to consistently make sustainable food choices from a place of altruism is overly idealistic and unrealistic.
We should recycle. We should reduce fossil fuel emissions. We should eat a more biodiverse diet. We should do a lot of things to keep the planet healthy. There’s plenty of logic on why we should do those things, but food choices are frequently made emotionally, not logically. How do we make it easier for eaters to make planet-positive food choices by appealing to their emotions?
In a global study on Regenerative Agriculture we conducted for Beef+Lamb New Zealand, we asked consumers what factors most influenced their food decisions. Unsurprisingly, taste was the #1 factor, followed by price, nutrition, and convenience. Sustainability hovered around 3rd or 4th place, even among people who considered themselves as living sustainably. All things being equal with taste, price, nutrition, and convenience, people tend to choose the more sustainable food option, but all things are rarely equal when it comes to those characteristics. The same trend appeared again and again in subsequent consumer studies we did for other clients.
The reason why eaters rank taste — and maybe nutrition — higher than sustainability is because those are visceral, self-centered pursuits that can be felt in the body. You know immediately if something is delicious but can you taste if something is sustainable? Not really. People eat food for flavor and sustenance. They don’t eat climate change statistics.
Sustainability is an logical, altruistic pursuit while deliciousness is an emotional, hedonistic pursuit. In a world where taste dominates our food choices, and the connection between sustainably or regeneratively grown food and deliciousness is fuzzy, eaters don’t have an immediate, visceral incentive to choose the more sustainable food.
The instinct to seek out delicious food is deeply ingrained into our DNA. Salt, sugar, and fat are not accidentally delicious to humans. They are things that our species has been attracted to since the dawn of time and when people try to resist them, they are battling millions of years of evolutionary instinct. These kinds of cravings are part of human nature, but what’s not ingrained in us yet is a visceral craving for sustainable foods.
What if we could definitively demonstrate how regeneratively raised beef is 100% more delicious than CAFO beef? How would that affect consumer buying choices? Might we see CAFO beef fade away on the basis of being less delicious, not less sustainable? Is it even possible to let eaters experience how sustainably grown foods are more delicious than their less sustainable versions?
If sustainable farming methods could create Wagyu-levels of desire, for beef and every other kind of food, it would bring the sustainable food conversation to an entirely different plane. Eaters would be motivated to support sustainability for hedonistic reasons, not just altruistic ones. This all eaters, regardless of how much they already do to help the environment, to participate in saving the planet through their food choices. And to make a dent in the massive challenge of warding off climate change, we need the entire world to participate, not just the Patagonia-wearing climate warriors who are already doing all they can for Earth.
The Future of Sustainable Food: Altruistic Hedonism
Altruistic Hedonism, where eaters can satisfy their selfish needs of taste and nutrition while serving the altruistic goal of saving the planet is the win-win scenario we need to get everyone on the food sustainability train.
What attracted so many investors and consumers (at least initially) to faux meat companies like Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat? They delivered a powerful promise that their plant-based burgers tasted like the real meat, were healthier for you, and would save the planet. Set aside for the moment that the reality of those claims are more complicated than their pitch, and you have a very compelling trifecta of benefits. Why wouldn’t you choose the thing that was better for yourself and planet? It seems like a huge win-win. And even as sales of plant-based meats have stalled from their initial honeymoon phase, these companies rightly tapped into a very powerful aspiration that we would like all our food to live up to. But this is remarkably difficult to do at scale.
While eating deliciously and sustainably can seem mutually exclusive in food today, companies like Row-7 Seeds and the Bionutrient Food Association are helping to make this a reality.
Row-7 Seeds is co-founded by Dan Barber, the Michelin starred chef of Blue Hill at Stone Barns, vegetable breeder Michael Mazourek and seedsperson Matthew Goldfarb. Their seeds have been bred for flavor first, and having the privilege of tasting many of them, I can attest to the fact that they do taste a full standard deviation or two better than their conventional counterparts. Growers who use Row-7 Seeds today are also growing these crops using regenerative agriculture methods, which sets them up to show eaters how better agriculture does lead to better tasting food.
The Bionutrient Food Association is a non-profit that has been working on a handheld spectrometer where the average consumer can carry it around and scan a piece of produce in the supermarket to find out its actual nutrient content. Their spectrometer has the potential to unleash radical transparency in the market on who’s produce is more nutrient dense and who’s is not. The idea is to empower the consumer to choose the most nutrient dense food that frequently comes from healthier soil and is raised with more care, which forces growers of all stripes to adopt these practices to compete.
We in the food industry need to find ways to move toward a world where the most environmentally beneficial foods are also the most delicious. Consumers need to be able to see a direct connection between sustainable growing methods and flavor. Or for starters, help consumers understand that there’s any connection at all between growing methods and flavor, like the wine industry has done for a small subset of people.
How might we make this connection stronger? Where do we need to invest in order to better understand the relationship between regenerative agriculture, flavor, and nutrition density? What cultural shifts need to happen to get eaters to realize that farming methods can affect the quality of the food? These are big, hard questions but they’re the kinds of things that I’m dedicated to working on for the rest of my career.
Today, sustainable food is sold with a pitch that follows this framework: “Our food is delicious, and it’s also sustainable, so you should buy it.” The future of food and the planet needs to get to a place where the industry can instead say, “Our food is delicious because it’s sustainable, so you should buy it.” Introducing hedonism into the sustainable food conversation is not only good for people, but the planet too, and is a necessary condition for the sustainable food movement to be truly mainstream.
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Comments, questions, or collaborations?
Contact: mike@thefuturemarket.com
