Ted Audio Collective Hi everyone, you're listening to HBS After Hours.
I'm Youngmi and I'm here tonight with Felix and me here.
So this is going to be fun because we decided that we're going to spend the whole episode talking about one of our favorite topics, which is food.
I know both of you guys have food related topics that you want to talk about.
So Felix, do you want to get us started?
Yes. I think it's one of the most significant trends out there in food and it's called Eat Clean.
You type Eat Clean into Instagram.
You get 51 million posts.
Are you aware of this?
Do you follow this?
Do you have a sense of what it is?
Well, the clean eating vernacular has become quite common, right?
So you meet people and you say, Oh, you know, you look great.
And I say, Oh, I've been eating clean or, you know, I've been clean eating.
So I've always assumed it just meant that you're eliminating anything that tastes good.
Is that what it is?
You, first of all, anything that is white, and then anything sweet?
Right. Is it also all raw?
So, I mean, the truth is there's no standard way of defining what it is.
But I think it's clean.
And some intuitions I think are very straightforward.
So we know on average, we consume too much sugar and so people try to reduce how much sugar they eat.
So there's a lot in the clean eating movement that is very natural, very healthy response to what science will tell us about what's good for our bodies and what's not so good.
I think what's more concerning is that the way it has become interpreted over time really has much more to do with cutting out entire food groups.
For instance, people who will not eat anything that is not raw, people who will not eat anything that contains sugar, people who will not touch carbs.
And so then you get these really crazy combinations where people will have five different food groups that they don't touch.
And then they, right.
So then many people can ultimately not live up to the constraints that they set for themselves.
And so food and eating becomes a constant struggle and it will very often dictate in quite dramatic ways where people will go, where people will not go, who they will meet, when they will go out, when they will not go out.
So for instance, I am gluten free and I have another 18 restrictions.
If I go to Istanbul, I probably cannot find the food that I need.
So what started as a sort of concern around people's health, I think now has become an obsession and there is a term that people use now orthorexia to describe this obsession with constraints around what you can eat.
The core of the idea is food as poison.
So much of what we eat is poisonous for us.
I mean, you hear the word detox with respect to food.
That's right. Yeah.
I mean, I have two reactions to this.
You know, one is there is this legitimate reaction against the excesses of processed foods, which we went way over on.
On the other hand, to me, this feels like representative of the extremism of today.
I remember my father was always like eat everything, just eat a little bit.
And that is a very simple piece of advice, but we just seem to go against that.
It's got to be extreme solutions.
Everybody's interested in extreme solutions.
And the second thing is the food debate today.
I love food. I love going to good food places, but there is a narcissism to all of this.
You know, like my body is a temple and anything inside is I'm polluting it.
That to me feels so wrong and problematic for the reasons you're saying.
I mean, I would just underscore what you just said.
First of all, we forget if you look at the distribution of our country, the middle of that distribution is still occupied by really unhealthy eating and a lot of obesity.
And so moving away from the middle of that distribution feels like absolutely the right thing for us to be doing.
The second thing I will say about this is that I do believe one of the biggest catalysts for changing how we think about food.
And it's pretty extraordinary.
How dramatically different our relationship with food has become has been social media and our ability to take something that for the most part was consumed privately, invisibly in our homes, and to be able to just blast it out to the world and taking these ephemeral experiences, which is a meal that might last
20 minutes and create this diary of your consumption.
So then food becomes identity and it becomes fashion and it becomes all of these other things.
Yeah. And I think that's what you're saying.
And then you see it of course in the supply response is now immediate, right?
So then restaurants start to create food.
I had two experiences in the last couple of weeks where I went to restaurants and you know, it's like all these dishes.
And so I asked for advice.
What would you pick?
And twice the person said, this is the item that is most Instagram.
Oh my God. Isn't that amazing?
It is amazing. And it was, and one of them was a dessert that I ate and was actually delicious, but it was also, beautiful.
First and foremost, super Instagrammable.
And so you see the production now of food that is as much about the aesthetics and what it looks like.
But again, this is not all bad.
Like I love photographing my food and I think it it changes the experience of food.
It creates more texture around the experience of eating.
I would cut. I mean, I feel like this is a prime example of how of the evils of social media.
Which is, if I had to pick one place to look for for the social evils of social media, I would look at this, which is what is meant to be a communal experience.
And we enjoy our company has become a individuated narcissistic exercise, which is superficial and completely divorced from its original meaning.
But how is it different from Instagramming out you standing in front of some place from your exotic vacation?
No, I agree. That's also evil and pernicious, which goes against my general sense of what is problematic on Instagram.
But I don't know for some food, it feels so important and it feels so special.
And it's kind of devolved in this way.
When I see people taking photos, I'd take photos of your food.
Oh my God. I've never taken photos of my food.
Really? Okay. That's interesting.
I don't understand that at all.
The sharing aspect.
So say you say, that's what I mean.
It's not sharing with the person with you.
You're sharing with the world in some anonymous way as opposed to sharing like, well, let's eat this together and let's talk about it.
I'm sharing with 125 ,000 special people who follow my Instagram.
That's exactly it though.
It's not sharing. But it's identity as well, right?
And it's a way for you to communicate to the world what you're about.
And I think that's fine.
I think what you said, young me before, I think is really interesting to me.
Sort of this idea of discipline as social status.
I'm able to do things.
And I know that, you know, sugar is like super addictive, but I am the guy who can just say no to desert.
And then of course it's consciousness of bodies and body forms and how people spend incredible amounts of time sculpting their bodies.
And I think a lot of it has to do with this idea that you're just in complete control, like control as a social status.
And immortality. But I do think we are forgetting that if you exclude the extreme ends of the continuum, people who eat healthy, they are healthier.
I mean, they are healthier.
And so yes, there's control.
Yes. They're a little obsessive about it, but as a result, their Instagrams look fantastic.
Their skin goes. But this is in fact, I think one of the concerns, I think of many people that the advice that is given, you know, what you should not eat and what makes your hair and your skin glow.
Lots of that advice is just complete bogus.
And in fact, lots of that advice is counterproductive.
This is what your father's advice got exactly right.
Eating everything in moderation.
That's a recipe for health.
And I think so much of clean eating is about conning out particular food groups and almost always that doesn't have great consequences.
And it's not terribly sustainable.
I mean, just think about the thing like almond milk, right?
What is that in the first place?
It's basically water without nutritional value, except because...
I like almond milk.
I'm so sorry to hear.
No, but I agree with you.
Even with the less extreme examples, there's a preciousness with respect to the food.
So for example, avocado toast.
Don't, don't, I love avocado toast.
So go there. 12 different kinds of grilled cheese.
Yeah, that's ridiculous.
That's what you draw the line.
But you know what I will say is for every trend, there's a counter trend.
So if you look at fast food restaurants, they're trying to move in one of two directions.
Some of them are trying to get more healthy and respond to this.
And some of them are like doubling down, doubling down on the most disgusting food.
So Taco Bell is a great example of a company that is doing very well.
And essentially all of their product innovation is taking two gross things and combining them to make a new gross thing.
So nacho fries. It's just like a mashup of two disgusting things to make a new disgusting thing.
Did you make that up or is that true?
I think that is the best performing launch in the history of Taco Bell.
These nacho fries. They have a fried chicken chalupa, where the fried chicken is like a shell.
It's awesome. They have a taco shell breakfast burrito now.
I mean, these are creative concoctions that they are selling like gangbusters, which are also instagramable in a different way, right?
I mean, this this is a different version of identity politics, basically.
Right. You have these identity groups around food.
The expression on your face.
You are so disgusted.
No, I'm not disgusted.
No, what I was thinking about is I mean, food.
What's fascinating to me about food is what's occurring to me right now is it like embodies everything that's going on in society.
It's everything in society is getting reified into the domain of food.
And it's totally fascinating for that reason.
It is. It's about identity.
It's also about income levels.
It's about everything that matters, gets manifested in this one domain.
There is a part of you that's got to feel bad for the big food companies, right?
The big food giants are just being buffeted by the different trends.
Yeah, Campbell's Soup is a great example.
One thing you see is I'm trying to take all of these products and try to make them more healthy.
And of course, it fails miserably.
You know, food is more than just food.
The brand Campbell Soup means something in it existed in a moment in time.
Yeah. And it had a set of associations with us.
And no matter what you do, it's still Campbell Soup, even if you completely change what goes into that product.
And so you have these legacy brands that are trying to figure out what to do with themselves.
And just to be clear, are you saying that there is no future because it was existed at a moment in time?
Or are you saying? I think it's really hard.
I mean, like if you look at Coca -Cola right now.
So one of the things Diet Coke is doing is they're trying to put all these different flavors, which for sure will goose sales in the short term.
Yes. Is it a long term strategy?
No, of course not. I mean, because it's still Coca -Cola.
It's not La Croix water, which exists in a completely different space in our lives.
Right. So you have to feel bad for these brands trying to figure out how to...
Well, before we feel completely bad, I think one way to think about the clean eating movement and its origins, it's a response to the industrial production of food.
Right. That turned out to be basically a catastrophe from a health perspective.
So one of the ways that I sometimes think about it is when companies are not completely honest about the effects of their products, I think at some point in time, there's just a response.
Something as irresponsible as just feeding the nation sugary products for two decades.
It's going to come back to haunt you.
And I think we're now at this moment where you see the real consequences.
And so I don't I don't actually feel that bad.
But here's my defense of big food.
All right. So there was a point in time with the industrialization of food.
I would argue actually had a societal effect that was it changed the lives of women across this country.
The notion that you could put a meal on the table in 20 minutes, and you could argue that women would not be where they are today if it weren't for that.
Prices came way down as a result of this.
And so it moved a whole bunch of people into the middle class.
So that was one phase.
And then there was a second phase where everything became sort of marketing science and that's when it really got gross.
I remember reading it might have been 12 years ago about the scientists behind chips, you know, the chips you put in your mouth and how they had perfected the ratio of carbohydrates surrounded by like this flavor of salt on the outside and made the size such that almost like a metronome.
If you were watching television with a perfect rhythm, you could pick up a chip, eat it, put your arm down, pick it up and back and forth.
And they were so proud of this innovation, this breakthrough, which is just a long winded way of saying it.
I think at different points in a company's lifecycle, you're sort of optimizing against different things.
And at that moment that was, wow, this is amazing.
You know, you're applying science now.
But you totally forgot about the health.
Yes. So I mean, that's a sense in which food is different.
Food is something that well.
As I was saying this, I realized I was going to lose his argument.
And then you have the obesity epidemic.
Who do you think or can you think of a food company?
Big food. That you think is dealing with this transition well.
Oh yeah. Well, PepsiCo, I think PepsiCo is interesting, right?
They're doing really interesting things.
Sorry, somebody has a dog on this bike.
Okay, wait, hold on.
Let's take a break.
And then when we come back, I want to ask you about your favorite and Lee's favorite food trends.
All right, I want to do favorite and Lee's favorite food trends right now.
And so Felix. So I start with my favorite.
And it's been going on for a little while, so it's not super recent.
But what I love is that basically menus.
Now, when you look at it, they're getting rid of main dishes.
Everything is an appetizer.
Small plates. Small plates.
You know how you go to a restaurant, all the appetizers look so interesting.
So out there, so creative.
And then you get to the main dishes and you're like, what do you mean?
Steak and beans. Like why was it?
Why somehow it was much more difficult to be creative with main dishes?
Sometimes I just order a few appetizers.
And that's right. Yeah, and then we started ordering appetizers and now that's essentially what the menu is.
So I'm in love with small dishes.
Oh, that's a good one.
What's one of your favorites?
So I have a next, I was going to start with a negative one.
Okay, all right. And I feel bad because I went to Hawaii for like the first time.
And now I see these restaurant chains everywhere for poke.
Oh my God. So poke, which is raw tuna.
They are everywhere.
And this feels to me like this is just a huge poke bubble, I think.
And I see, I see the blood on the streets of all the poke entrepreneurs.
I don't actually get on so many levels.
I don't get it in terms of the taste.
I don't get it in terms of the presentation.
I don't get it in terms of the economics of these businesses, meaning the price points at which they're serving these things.
The whole thing just feels raw.
You know, my intuition is always raw fish served in a really spicy format.
It's got to be about, it's old fish, it's got to be about the spicy tuna anyone.
No, thank you. I love my...
That has actually never occurred to me.
Really? That's my first...
I have no idea whether that's right or not.
But that's my first...
I have to say one of the heavenly experiences in life is just a clean piece of sashimi.
Exactly. But poke is the opposite of that.
I just don't get it.
And I think it's a terrible trend.
All right. I'll do a good one.
One of my favorites is I love the elevation of food trucks and street food.
Oh, yes. As a legitimate form of cuisine and I love it more generally.
I love this phenomenon of looking for amazing cheap food.
And I love the ethnic mashups that you get.
Yeah. You know, kimchi tacos, just all of that stuff.
I love that. Okay, your turn again.
Felix. So here's one that I don't like.
I think it tends to happen more in higher end restaurants.
But when the server comes and they explain the dishes as if you were in the restaurant to cook it yourself.
Okay. We start with and then we do this and then we do that and we chop it really finely.
I'm not here to cook.
This is not cooking school.
This is like I want to sit down and eat my meat.
It's driving me nuts.
And then, of course, it's like the seven specials of the day.
And 20 minutes later, you have no recollection of what that first thing was.
No. The funny thing is when they go through all the specials and then you don't order any of them.
So you listen politely and then you'll say, I'll have.
So I want to know your strategy.
Do you steer away or steer towards?
On the margin, there's a dish, it's called a special and it's not called not as close, but does that make you want to order it more or less?
Because are you thinking like they're trying to move the goods or are you trying to think?
So I tend to think the special in particular, if it's sort of credible, that it's a special of the day, I tend to think it's probably fresher.
But then I'm super skeptical about chef's choice.
So when they serve the entire meal and it's not that is like to me, no, you're selling me what's been in the fridge for available.
If you get the omakase or at high end, Julia and Cambridge, they have a chef's table.
It's amazing. You just put yourself in their hands.
I think it's spectacular.
But don't you think it's like, no, not at all.
You got a good place at a place.
That's the best. All right.
Your turn. I have just this, it's not a trend.
It's a strategy that my wife and I have employed in the past, which is it's called the high, high, low, low strategy.
Okay. So like budget wise, there's a whole middle end of the distribution, which is kind of expensive and not that good.
So our high, high, low, low strategy is you go high, high, like super high, super good or low, low.
And that's the food truck or the super low, low.
It's a great strategy.
The only problem is it can devolve into a high, high strategy, but I think if you stay rigorous about high, high, low, low, low, it's great.
But I find that the middle or even upper middle.
Why do you think that is?
It's like mediocrity, right?
It's just, I don't know.
That's a good question.
Why is the price point in the middle?
But I think that's a function of the city.
So if you're in San Francisco, I think you can find a lot of really great in the middle, like neighborhood, neighborhood restaurants in the middle.
New York, I think is the same thing, a little less so, but getting better, but it's that neighborhood restaurant.
It's not the chain.
So that's my recommendation, which is the high, high, low, low.
Okay. So I have to tell you a trend I hate, which is the politics of potlucks, particularly in any school environment.
My sister was talking to me about this.
Oh my God. If you're in any school environment, like a school event, and all the parents have to bring a dish, it becomes, it's the worst of America.
It used to be that potlucks were an opportunity to commune and to connect with each other over food and your child's sporting event, their play or whatever.
But now it's, oh, I can't believe this person brought in muffins with refined sugar, the politics around who brought what.
Is it about envy or competition?
So there are multiple layers.
So you put aside the allergies, which everybody understands and everybody is sympathetic to.
But there are all of these sort of preferences are, oh, we only eat this and we only eat that.
And then there's beyond that another layer of just judgment, judgment around the type of sugar or is that store bought or is that, I mean, there's just, it's.
I feel like the pollock was meant for an era when lots of people were cooking at home.
Yes. So on the margin, having everybody cook was smart because an effort was being distributed.
Now lots of people don't cook at home.
Now you're making everybody cook at home.
It's really, it just feels like the worst.
It really is the worst.
Let's do one more round, a good one or a bad one.
So this is just about a dish that really surprised me in a restaurant.
They had mushroom ice cream.
And I think, oh my God, what is this?
And it was fabulous.
Really? Delicious. So, so my wife and I, we had a conversation about, we can't remember too many times when food really surprised because you get so used to these unusual combinations and sometimes they work and sometimes they don't work.
And this, this just like totally surprised because you know, mushroom ice cream and I'm telling you, it was delicious.
Okay. In part, because I have a former student who started this, which is I'm interested in insects and as a source of protein.
Like crickets and things like that?
Yeah, like chirps. And I think they're interesting.
The brand I was thinking about is chirps.
I think they've figured out taste in addition to the protein and there's, you know, at some very high level, if you think about the ability to kind of continue to get protein out of animals and the environmental impact of that, it's complicated and problematic.
And so I think these alternative sources of protein, including by the way, avocado toast.
But insects in particular.
But you said this is chirp, do they taste?
They taste great. Oh, you, you wouldn't, what did they taste like?
No, no, they actually taste different, but they taste good.
Okay. It's not like they're trying to mimic another food.
They just happen to taste really good.
And I think that whole field of insects is just interesting and worth keeping your eye on.
So I like this company called Imperfect Produce and what they do is they work with farms in 20 % of the fruit and vegetables produced by farms.
They have to throw out because it's, it looks ugly essentially or it's scarred or it's misshapen.
So they package this up and you can subscribe and have a box of produce delivered to your home at about 50 % discount to what you pay in the store.
And it's ugly fruit and ugly vegetables.
And it's fantastic.
It's what a great idea.
Yeah, it's really nice.
Okay. We'll come back with pics.
To close it out are after hours pics.
I'm going to go first because mine is about food.
Oh, perfect. Perfect segue.
So mine is a YouTube channel and it's called Peaceful Cuisine.
Have you seen it? What is it?
It's, you know, how you can go on YouTube and you can watch food being prepared or you can watch people.
Cook, but there's always chatter or there's always some kind of pizzazz around it.
This is the opposite.
So they'll prepare a bowl of noodles, but it's so beautiful and it'll have a little bit of music in the background or you can have it without the music.
And the, and the food is, is made already.
No, no, no, no, no.
They prepare the food and it's like tasty or just meditative.
When you're feeling stressed, you go to Peaceful Cuisine.
So for example, if I'm traveling and I'm in an airport and I'm just, there's noise, I'll just put my headphones on and I'll sit in a corner and I'll just watch some Peaceful Cuisine.
That's my recommendation.
Yeah. What about you?
I have a recommendation.
It might be useful in the summer.
For instance, if you're wondering what's the water gun that I should buy for the summer.
I can ask you myself that.
I have rediscovered, I should say, Wirecutter.
And I think it's the company, it's the recommendation company at the New York Times.
They bought it. For, I think 20, 30 million dollars.
And I think they're doing recommendations in a perfect fashion.
Here's like two things that I love about.
You know, you go on Amazon and you read like the first 25 comments are not that instructive and then you sort of give up and you buy whatever.
What I love about Wirecutter recommendations, they get right to the point and the segments are really interesting.
So for instance, they say, we tested smartwatches and then here's the best smartwatch if you have an iPhone, here's the best smartwatch if you have an N because no one's going to change their phone to go with it.
And so the segmentation that they have is really great.
And then what I love is you can drill down and they will tell you about the research that they did and how long they sat on this office chair and how they picked the office, like all of that.
Or you can just say, I want the best office chair out there.
Two seconds later you have what you want.
And so if you want a quick recommendation, Wirecutter is the place.
That's good. What did you buy recently?
I was thinking about that water gun.
Oh my gosh, stay away from me.
Your office is right next to mine so stay away from me this summer.
Um, so I have my usual recommendation and then I have a late breaking food one, which might be helpful.
So Tom Wolfe recently passed away and he was one of my favorite writers and I discovered an essay he wrote about 10 years ago, which I'd never read before, but it's so good.
It's, um, it's called Pell Mel.
And as you know, he was like this incredible wordsmith.
And he invented so many important phrases.
Um, but this essay is called Pell Mel and it's about what makes America a great country.
And he does it by talking about one of the first state dinners that Thomas Jefferson ever had and basically they didn't have a signed seating and everyone was shocked.
Like all these European diplomats were completely shocked.
And he uses that as a metaphor to talk about America and it's just incredible.
My very late breaking food recommendation as I was thinking about this during the show is the best book about food I know is the United States of Arugula by David Camp.
He tells the history of how America, 50 years ago, it was like all iceberg lettuce.
And in a very short period of time, there's now like 50 kinds of lettuce, 50 kinds of lettuce.
And he tells the story through tastemakers.
So Alice Waters and Craig Claiborne and Dean DeLuca.
And it's just about how, if you think about it, when my family came to this country, the food scene was pretty bad and pretty basic and in our lifetimes we have seen a complete revolution in food variety and ethnicity types.
And he kind of explains why that happened.
So it's a great book.
Awesome. That was fun, you guys.
All right. Thanks everyone for listening.
This is HBS After Alice.
