Before the soup cans, Andy Warhol drew shoes for money, and few did it better. Through the 1950s he was one of the best-paid commercial illustrators in New York, the sole artist on the I. Miller account. Women’s Wear Daily called him the Leonardo of the shoe trade. A decade making products look desirable left him most of the way to painting a can of soup.

That income bought him room to experiment. In 1962 he lined up thirty-two Campbell’s Soup Cans at a Los Angeles gallery, and the Marilyns and Elvises followed. The same year, 200 One Dollar Bills was his first silkscreen, the currency drawn by hand rather than transferred from a photograph, divisive and nearly worthless on debut, the sort of bet only a man with money already coming in could make. It sat unexhibited for twenty-three years before surfacing at Sotheby’s in November 2009, in the wreckage of the financial crisis, and blew past its $12 million estimate to sell for $43.8 million.

The pop work made him the most famous artist in America and soon the most expensive living one. That fame was the asset he would spend for the rest of his life. He put it toward a side business the art world found a little embarrassing. Through the 1970s and 1980s he painted hundreds of commissioned society portraits, around $25,000 a canvas and $40,000 a pair, roughly $150,000 and $240,000 today. Critics called it flattery for hire. Warhol called it business art, and there was a real idea in it.

The money made him independent. Nobody could tell him what to make next. The clearest case is his Oxidation Paintings: he primed the canvases in copper paint, then he and his friends urinated on them, and the acid corroded the metal into streaks of green and gold. No portrait client would have commissioned that, and only a sliver of the avant-garde would have bought it, even though years later they would fetch millions at auction. The portraits had already bought him the freedom to make what he wanted.

Parallel Thinking sits at the root of everything I do in food. I studied business, then went to art school, and I’ve spent the years since running both halves of my head at once, the half that wants an idea to be beautiful arguing with the half that wants it to pay for itself. So when I look at Warhol’s business art, I see the engine that made everything else possible. I once ran a small version of it myself, and it changed the course of my career and the shape of my life. It turns up everywhere, most plainly in an industry that refined it into a science: tech.

No Room for Strikeouts

No one in Silicon Valley set out to copy Andy Warhol. Tech arrived at the same trick on its own, and it works there better than anywhere else for one reason: margins. Sell software and the cost of serving the next customer is almost nothing, so each dollar comes back many times over, funding the next round of research and the round after that.

In one quarter of 2025 Apple booked around $95 billion in revenue and turned roughly $24 billion of it into operating cash. It plows the surplus into research and keeps refining a $3,500 face computer almost no one asked for. Amazon runs the same loop through AWS, which clears more than $11 billion a quarter and bankrolls long shots like the Zoox robotaxi. The deeper the pockets, the more swings you get, and the grand slams pay for the strikeouts.

I am not holding tech up as the model food should copy. People have bolted a move-fast-and-break-things mindset onto food before and mostly broke things that didn’t need breaking. My point is narrower. Shareholders don’t reward a food company for cleaner water or healthier eaters unless those things also turn a profit, so the only companies that can push toward better outcomes for people and the planet are the ones with enough surplus cash to fund what won’t pay back for years. Tech is just where that flywheel runs hottest. Food can’t spin it the same way. The reason is structural.

Food runs on margins that would horrify a software executive, often a few cents on the dollar, and it’s brutally capital intensive: nothing reaches a shelf without factories, trucks, and slotting fees negotiated over decades. The whole apparatus rewards predictability, not surprise. The grocery buyer wants the cereal exactly as it was last quarter, and the shopper, unlike the gadget owner expecting a better phone every fall, mostly wants it to taste the way it did when she was ten

Clayton Christensen named the trap in The Innovator’s Dilemma: the better a company is run for the business it already has, the harder it gets to justify the bet that loses money now and pays off later. A system built to run smoothly is a poor place to gamble. And yet food is exactly where the boldest bets ought to be made, even though a publicly held company, judged by the market every quarter, is the worst placed to make them.

I’m not as interested in the moonshots that leave farming behind, like lab-grown meat or indoor farming. I mean something a food company should, in theory, be able to do: move a real share of its supply chain to regenerative agriculture and build a new product line on top of it. To pull that off, a company that got rich for decades on extractive farming and junk food would have to stand up in front of its shareholders. It would tell them it now wants to rebuild its sourcing around soil health and sell people something better.

To that room, the proposal lands the way urine on canvas once did in the art world. It looks radical, the kind of idea a sensible executive is not supposed to say out loud. No patron would have funded Warhol’s version, and no shareholder base will give a food company permission for this one. Warhol had already bought his way out of needing permission. Most food companies never have, so they almost never make the bet that could remake a category.

I won’t relitigate the Danone story; you’ve heard me tell it. Emmanuel Faber tried to run a version of this play, and his own board pushed him out for it. Picture Faber with a cash cow in one hand and his programs for biodiversity, clean water, and regenerative sourcing in the other, funded and shielded from the people who wanted him gone. Might he have kept his job, and might those programs have bent the food system toward something better at real scale? We don’t get to know, because he never had the cover a cash cow buys.

So the industry does the sensible thing and buys its breakthroughs instead of building them. General Mills bought Epic Provisions, the grass-fed brand built on regenerative ranching; Hormel, the maker of Spam, paid around $775 million for Applegate and its organic, antibiotic-free meat. It’s hard to fault, and it isn’t the same as building something brave from the inside.

A Factory of My Own

I know what that freedom is worth, because for a while I had a small version of it. Starting in 2008, two close friends and I ran a supperclub in New York called Studiofeast, and kept it going for about eleven years. It was never a business in any real sense. I worked in corporate innovation the whole time, first in fintech at American Express, then at a boutique strategy agency, so Studiofeast never had to cover my bills. That one fact was the whole point of it.

Supperclubs were having a moment then, and a wave of us used them to try forms of dining you couldn’t get away with in a real restaurant. Because Studiofeast didn’t have to make money, it could be as strange as we wanted, and it became the most valuable creative outlet I’ve had. One year we built a seven-course dinner around umami, well before the flavor had become a household name. Another night, every dish was something a guest had named as their death-row last meal. We did a Sichuan crawfish boil for a TV Show, an evening tracing the past, present, and future of protein, and a six-course lunch on a moving New York City subway car.

A recruiter found me through Studiofeast, not through American Express or the agency, and the job she brought me was at Chobani. This was back when I had to Google what “Chobani” was as I was on the phone with her. I doubt she’d have heard of me if I’d played the supperclub safe. The day job kept me afloat, so Studiofeast was free to be risky, and the risk is what got noticed. That opening turned my career toward food.

It would be easy to file Studiofeast away as a tidy lesson about funding your own freedom, and the lesson is real enough. But that was never what it was to me. Nearly every person who matters most in my life today, I met through Studiofeast, and some of the best nights I’ve ever had happened around those tables and in the kitchen, next to people I loved cooking with. The day job mattered only because it freed all of that, and all of that is most of what my life now rests on.

That’s the pattern underneath all of it, and it was never only about Big Food. Warhol had his portraits, tech has its flywheel, I had a day job. The farmer who plants one speculative acre behind a dependable one is running the same play, and so is the chef whose catering covers the tasting menu nobody ordered. Breakthrough tends to come from whoever built something steady enough to let them fail.

And the lesson I keep relearning is that the practical and the impractical belong in the same pair of hands. The boring engine is what pays for the dream to exist, and the dream is the reason you bother keeping the engine running. Lose either half and the other stops mattering.

I want that for the whole of food, the giants as much as the upstarts, and the rest of us too. Stay solvent enough to keep going, and keep dreaming anyway. The food worth eating has always come from the people who could do both at once.

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Mike Lee is a food futurist and innovation strategist, author of Mise: On the Future of Food, host of The Tomorrow Today Show podcast, creator of Mise Futures, and is on Instagram at The Book of Mise.

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Mise 2: The Restaurant Issue is now open for pre-orders! Ships 8/11/26. Over 200 pages of future scenarios exploring the future of restaurants.

A Patagonia fleece, a tube of Burt’s Bees lip balm, and a box of cereal all start in the same place: the soil. The cotton in your t-shirt grew in the same kind of field that grows your dinner. Now and then it’s the very same field, though nowhere near as often as it could be.

We in the food industry have spent a decade learning to ask hard questions about the farms behind our food, whether they build the soil or strip it. We’ve mostly had that conversation among ourselves. We barely talk to fashion and beauty, who pull from the same ground, and there’s a lot we could do together if we did.

Same Soil, Separate Lanes

Those of us in food tend to focus on the food side of regenerative agriculture. That’s a view worth widening. For about a decade the talk has run through restaurant menus, oat milk cartons, and beef that did right by the grass. That’s real progress. It’s also mostly happening in one lane.

That isn’t because fashion and beauty have ignored the soil. They haven’t. Rebecca Burgess built the textile network Fibershed on a plain fact: the fiber and dye in our clothes come straight out of the ground. She’s spent years doing for the closet what the Good Food Movement did for the plate. Patagonia and Dr. Bronner’s have pushed on regenerative sourcing too. The thinking is alive in all three industries. What barely exists is the conversation between them.

So food companies plan around food crops, apparel around fiber, beauty around botanicals, each of us standing over the same farm and seeing only the part we buy. A field doesn’t sort itself into those categories. We do.

And the categories were never natural. We made them up. Before the Green Revolution paid farmers to specialize, one farm might grow food, fiber, medicine, and dye side by side. The sheep gave wool and manure. Flax became linen and linseed oil. The blue in a coat came from indigo growing a few rows over.

Then monocultures took over, the highest-yielding crop crowding everything else off the land, and the food-and-fiber split hardened into “best practice.” We’ve been paying for that narrowing ever since. A global food system leaning on twelve plants and five animals is fragile, and the Cavendish banana in every supermarket is one disease away from disappearing. Getting diversity back into the ground is the whole game, and it’s bigger than any one industry can do alone.

The Economics Of A Chaos Garden

Monoculture consumption leads to monoculture farms. A grower plants what someone will reliably buy, and nothing else. So picture a field that’s genuinely diverse. Gabe Brown, the renowned North Dakota farmer, plants cover-crop mixes so mixed he calls them chaos gardens. A field like that grows far more than food: fiber, oilseeds, dye plants, fragrance crops, feed. Only some of it is headed for a plate. The rest has to go somewhere, and somebody has to pay for it, or a sensible farmer won’t bother growing it.

The trouble is that food can only buy the food, apparel only the fiber, beauty only the botanicals. When each of us takes our slice and walks away from the rest, the math on diversity falls apart, and the field slides back to the one crop with the surest buyer. Keeping a field diverse comes down to who’ll pay for all of it, and those buyers sit in industries that rarely share a table. The most diverse fields stay the hardest to make money on, so diversity keeps losing.

Beauty runs on agriculture as surely as the produce aisle does, leaning on shea, argan, lavender, and rose. The tint in a lipstick and the plant extract in a serum are crops somebody has to grow. The fiber in a shirt is no different. None of us is buying from a factory. We’re all buying from a field, and mostly we’re each buying from it alone.

“Nose-To-Tail” Agriculture

The fix is something chefs already live by. Fergus Henderson built his London restaurant, St. John (one of my top 5 favorite restaurants on the planet), on a single rule: if you take an animal’s life, you owe it the respect of using all of it, the tenderloin and the trotter alike. Anything less is just waste with good manners.

A regenerative field asks for the same discipline. It only pays for itself when somebody uses the whole harvest, not just the prestige cuts. Food takes the grain, apparel the fiber, beauty the botanicals, and the cover crops that rebuilt the soil get planted by the farmer and bought by no one. The numbers work only when the whole field has a home.

Take a cotton grower going regenerative. They rotate cotton with peanuts and cover crops to feed the soil. The apparel buyer takes the cotton, the food buyer the peanuts, and nobody pays for the cover crops. That one farm already feeds three industries at once, and the three of us keep acting like we shop in separate economies.

I won’t pretend the coordination is easy. Getting a food team and an apparel team to plan around the same farm, on the same timeline, with budgets that don’t talk, is hard. But the prize is worth the awkward meetings. If the three of us bought across the whole harvest, the farmer could plant for diversity instead of for the one crop with the surest check.

Let Soil Create the Product Line

I’m putting this forward as a vision to work toward, and I won’t pretend it’s a sure thing. What I keep reaching for is a food, fashion, and beauty industry that can sell what it makes and rebuild soil and biodiversity in the same act, so the economy and the planet pull together instead of trading off. I don’t know if it’s buildable. But it could be, and that’s the reason I keep sketching ideas like this one.

A diverse farm grows crops for several industries at once: grain for food, cotton for clothing, oilseed for beauty, and cover crops that rebuild the soil. Today each buyer acts alone, takes its one crop, and leaves the rest. Instead, they could plan the farm together. Before anything goes in the ground, every company that wants something from it agrees who buys what, right down to someone paying for the cover crops the soil depends on. The farmer holds those promises as forward contracts, the sale locked in before the crop exists, and plants the whole diverse mix knowing all of it is sold.

That alone would change what gets grown. But there’s a stranger, better version beyond that.

A company usually starts with a consumer insight. People want more protein, say, or a cleaner label, and the product team designs backward from it, then leans on the supply chain to grow what the product needs. The soil takes orders. This is how companies make products.

What if we flipped it? Start with the soil. Look at what a region’s farms need to grow together to stay healthy: the rotations that rebuild nitrogen, the cover crops and roots that hold water and carbon. That combination becomes the product development brief. The product line gets built out of what the land wanted to grow anyway.

It’s like the cooking show Chopped, run at the scale of a CPG portfolio. The chefs open a basket they didn’t pick, and the skill is turning whatever’s inside into something people want to eat. Except in my version, the basket isn’t random. It’s the crops that, grown together, leave a region’s soil healthier. The brand brings the creativity, finding products that make those crops worth growing. Or, plainly: it’s farm-to-table cooking, scaled from one chef’s kitchen to a whole industry’s shelves.

Cotton and peanuts already belong in the same rotation. The peanuts fix nitrogen and break the pests and diseases that hammer cotton, so both come out of the ground healthier. A company could sell a cotton product and a peanut product, both sourced from the same rotation farms. Instead of demanding cotton from one set of farms and peanuts from another, it pays a whole region for the pair, and that pair becomes a soil-led product line. For a farmer, that’s a reason to add one simple two-crop rotation, the smallest real step toward a more diverse field. Almost no company today sells both a cotton shirt and a bag of peanuts. But maybe a company like Patagonia could. It already makes clothing and, through Patagonia Provisions, food. Or a clothing brand could partner with a peanut brand, splitting the rotation.

We’re a long way off. Most companies still can’t get their own departments to plan around one farm, let alone coordinate with a competitor down the street. But the direction is the point. Right now the soil works for the product. The bet is that one day the product works for the soil, and we eat and wear and wash with whatever a healthy field hands us.

Connecting the Silos

We don’t have to invent the cross-industry playbook from scratch. The most credible standard we have was built that way on purpose. When the Rodale Institute defined a stricter farming standard, it co-founded the Regenerative Organic Alliance with Patagonia from apparel and Dr. Bronner’s from personal care, a three-industry project from day one. Its Regenerative Organic Certified seal now turns up on a bag of beans, a cotton t-shirt, and a bottle of soap, one set of soil-and-labor rules held across all three.

The One Planet Business for Biodiversity coalition does something similar, pulling food, textile, and personal care companies into the same room to scale regenerative farming. The wiring is there. What’s missing is the rest of us treating this as one project instead of three.

One sourcing decision inside a big flavor and fragrance house can move food, beauty, and apparel at once, and a lot of acres with it. When we look ahead in food, fashion and beauty belong in the room, because we’re all forecasting the same farms.

Altruistic Hedonism works in every aisle. People won’t buy regenerative fiber to save a watershed any more than they’ll eat regenerative grain to save one. They’ll buy it because it feels better and performs better. A handful of brewers turned Kernza from an obscure grain into a beer people order by name. We can build that same taste for quality around a fabric or a dye, and every time we do, a farmer gets one more reason to keep the field diverse.

The food industry treats regenerative agriculture like it belongs to us. It doesn’t. Farms feed looms and labs as easily as they feed us. The soil has never cared whether it was growing a dinner or a dress. Keeping it to ourselves is costing us the biodiversity we keep saying we want. The field is already whole. We’re the ones still talking about it in separate rooms.

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Mike Lee is a food futurist and innovation strategist, author of Mise: On the Future of Food, host of The Tomorrow Today Show podcast, creator of Mise Futures, and is on Instagram at The Book of Mise.

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Mise 2: The Restaurant Issue is now open for pre-orders! Ships 8/11/26. Over 200 pages of future scenarios exploring the future of restaurants.

Supply-side wins still matter, and the good food movement should keep pushing for more of them: better ingredients, better animal welfare, better farming practices, better corporate behavior behind the labels. But supply is half the system. The other half is the conditions under which an actual person, in an actual life, decides what to eat. Time, money, kitchen skill, and access are all barriers to eating well. Households face different combinations of them, and when several are in play at once, fixing one alone doesn’t unlock much.

Big Food didn’t engineer those conditions, but its business model depends on them staying the way they are. A household running short on cooking skill, bandwidth, and food IQ is the most reliable repeat customer there is for cheap engineered food, regardless of income. Nothing in the current incentive structure rewards changing that. The next thirty years gets won by working both sides at once: keeping pressure on the supply side, and starting the much harder work of decoding what would actually shift eater behavior at scale.

On the supply side, control is concentrated. A few hundred people make the decisions that move the system at scale: the C-suites at Cargill, Tyson, PepsiCo, Nestlé, and ADM; the buyers at Walmart, Costco, and Whole Foods; and a few dozen other food and agribusiness giants. Corporate power in the food industry is so deeply concentrated that a single large dinner table could seat the CEOs who control the majority of global consumer brands—and it would only take a few extra chairs to include the agribusiness leaders who run their supply chain.

The demand side is the opposite. Power is diffused across billions of eaters worldwide, each making one of the most personal decisions there is to make, many times a day. No procurement contract changes the default at someone’s kitchen table. No proxy fight decides what a tired adult reaches for at 7 PM. The same person can be a careful shopper on Sunday and reach for a bag of Doritos on Thursday at 11 PM. Multiply that by 8.3 billion eaters living 8.3 billion different lives, and you don’t have one demand side. You have 8.3 billion of them.

The Reasons Are Stacked

None of the big friction points—time, money, access, skill—to eating better are new on their own. What’s gotten worse is how many American households face several at once, and how thoroughly the cheap engineered food economy has built itself around that fact.

Start with time. The Bureau of Labor Statistics shows the average American adult now spends roughly 37 minutes a day on food preparation and cleanup combined, down sharply since the mid-1960s. The economist Daniel Hamermesh, in Spending Time, found that the households most likely to need cheap fast food are the same ones with the fewest minutes to cook anything else. The home kitchen became less of an everyday place, and the household with the least slack lost it first.

Money is its own constraint. A box of Kraft mac and cheese feeds four for under three dollars. Real food costs three or four times that, and a lot of households don’t have the gap to close.

Access is its own thing too. The USDA defines a food desert as low-income tracts more than a mile from a supermarket in urban areas and ten miles in rural ones, but the distance is only the start. A mile in a car-centric suburb is a five-minute errand. A mile in an urban neighborhood with no good transit, carrying four grocery bags with two kids in tow, is a different sentence entirely.

Skill is the fourth piece. Family and consumer sciences classes (a.k.a. home economics) have been steadily cut from American public schools over the last forty years, mostly for understandable reasons: budget pressure, gendered baggage around domestic labor, the squeeze toward reading and math, schools deciding food competence wasn’t the most urgent thing on their plate.

Exceptions exist. Some districts and charter networks still teach culinary basics, and a handful of programs are bringing it back. For most American kids, though, K-12 finishes without a single hour spent on how to cook a meal, plan a week, read a label, or stretch a pound of beans.

The internet has filled part of the gap, but the wrong part. Gimmicky sheet pan dinners, TikTok hacks, three-week meal plans, influencer cookbooks: there’s a recipe for everything. For the household that already has the time, the ingredients, and basic knife skills, recipes can genuinely be useful.

But what recipe centric food education doesn’t teach is what’s actually missing: the food intelligence and insticts to combine ingredients on the fly, using what’s in the fridge without a phone open, or how to effortlessly stretch a $7 chicken into four meals. A nation of rote recipe followers is still a nation that can’t cook without instructions. And does anyone after a hard day at work really want to come home to follow more instructions? No. So DoorDash it is.

The world needs more home cooks who can improvise their way to a solid, home-cooked meal any night of the week, not because they have tons of time, but because they have cooking intelligence. To them, 10 minutes is more than enough time to cobble together a simple dinner using whatever is laying around. Forget Michelin stars. This is the kind of cooking that puts whole foods on plates that would otherwise not.

These kinds of instinctual home cooks play jazz, not classical in the kitchen. And because they don’t need sheet music, they can riff and be nimble getting dinner made. How might we shift the atomic unit of mass media food education/edutainment away from the recipe and toward ratios and patterns? And how can we empower more home cooks to cook this way?

Whole industries have built themselves around this skill gap. Big Food has spent decades studying what a tired adult with $30 and twelve minutes will buy at 7 PM. The frozen lasagna at the freezer aisle endcap and the rotisserie chicken under the heat lamp at Costco are engineered to fit a household running short on time and skill, with subsidized commodity inputs to make the price work.

Fast food fills the same gap from a different angle: a McDonald’s drive-thru on the way home from the second job, the Taco Bell value menu priced to beat cooking it yourself. Delivery apps are the newest version. DoorDash and Uber Eats put a Pad Thai or a burrito bowl at the door inside 35 minutes, and for a lot of younger eaters, many restaurants only exist as an icon on a phone.

None of this is bad in isolation and on occasion. A frozen pizza on a Wednesday is fine. A drive-thru after a long shift won’t hurt anyone, and a Costco rotisserie that becomes four dinners across the week is great. The trouble is the gap between using these as shortcuts and depending on them as the entire food infrastructure of a household.

Two families can order the same Pad Thai on a Tuesday: one because they chose not to cook, one because no one in the kitchen could have. One has options. The other has a dependency.

Calling that a willpower problem is a misread. The conditions are what put the problem in front of so many households at once. And the industries that profit off those households have little incentive to change the conditions.

Why Silver Bullets Win

Those same conditions explain why silver bullets sell when it comes to health and wellness. By silver bullet I mean the single product or protocol that promises to substitute for the slow project of building a food life: the 7-day cleanse, the detox tea, the apple cider vinegar gummy, the fat-burning supplement nobody can pronounce, the TikTok promise of ten pounds gone in two weeks. The pitch is always the same: skip the longer, harder work but still get the result.

People reach for them because the alternative is genuinely hard. Building food habits for reasons you can’t taste at the table is difficult to sustain across a life, especially against everything pulling in the opposite direction. Sometimes the trick helps a little. Mostly it doesn’t. Either way, the demand stays strong, because humans are wired to want the trick.

And the trick has never been better packaged. The food system is genuinely confusing. The science contradicts itself depending on what study you read, and most people don’t have time to figure out which half of the processed shelf is actually fine. A friendly face on a phone screen offering a clean five-step plan is hard not to click on. Some guy on TikTok telling you that kale is bullshit makes for an easy new food rule to follow. Take (or avoid) this or that, and you can skip the critical thinking. The influencer ecosystem has industrialized that pitch, and the algorithm rewards the loudest version of it.

I don’t blame anyone for reaching. People in the fad-diet aisle know what they’re doing; they’d just rather be told there’s a trick than told there isn’t. Fad diets and wellness influencers are the food version of Las Vegas, where we all know it’s fake but want to believe anyway. Deep down, we’re in on the joke. And like Vegas, the next trip is always going to be the one.The good food movement’s response has mostly been to mock the fads (I am guilty of this), which might have been a missed learning opportunity. Fads are filling a real demand for a simpler story, and that story will keep winning until the better one becomes easier to find and easier to live with.

Stop telling eaters to just try harder

You can’t fix the food system by telling people to cook more at home. It’s one of the most repeated lines in the entire food conversation, and it does almost nothing, because it skips the question that actually matters: cook more at home with what skills, in whose kitchen, at the end of which workday, for whom?

Telling someone to cook more is a moral demand dressed up as advice. The person you’re talking to almost always already knows they “should” cook more. They are not failing for lack of being told. They’re failing because nobody ever taught them how to make a pot of beans taste like something they’d want to eat again, and because the cheap engineered version on the next shelf was designed to taste better than the version they’d cook from scratch.

That last part is on Big Food. The product was engineered to hit a flavor target most whole foods can’t reach, the price was dropped below the cost of cooking it yourself, the marketing taught a generation that this is what dinner tastes like, and the kid grew up wanting more of the same. Philip Morris ran the same playbook for sixty years. None of that absolves the industry.

But shaming the industry doesn’t put a better dinner on the table tonight. Neither does shaming the eater. What does is closing the gap between the household that has the tools to cook a real meal and the household that doesn’t.

Build the food IQ infrastructure

The work of raising a country’s food and cooking IQ has been underfunded and treated as charity. It should be infrastructure, as essential to public health as clean water.

Some pieces of it are already running. Edible Schoolyard turns school grounds into food-literacy classrooms. Stephen Ritz’s Green Bronx Machine puts working farms inside Bronx classrooms, where kids grow what they cook. The Chef Ann Foundation rebuilds school cafeterias around scratch cooking. Samin Nosrat’s Salt Fat Acid Heat and Kenji López-Alt’s The Food Lab teach the underlying principles that a recipe never does: fat, heat, salt, acid, technique. Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg’s The Flavor Bible and Michael Ruhlman’s Ratio teach how to combine flavors and balance ratios on the fly, no recipe required.

What’s missing is scale and integration. Despite the great progress these organizations have made, most of the people who’d benefit most from these have never heard of them. The ones who have encounter them once, in a community-center workshop or a single school year, and never again.

The right model is closer to a personal trainer than a single class. People don’t get fit from one gym visit. They get fit from a coach, a community, a routine, and enough early wins to keep showing up. Food IQ works the same way. The eater who masters one weeknight meal and gets a real compliment for it cooks the next one. The eater who never makes it past an inedible first attempt buys the frozen lasagna for life.

Meeting people where they are

The supply-side fight has to keep going. So does pressure on procurement, school food, freezer-aisle policy, and the labor conditions that decide how much time a household actually has. But there’s a lane the food movement has barely begun to seriously fund: making it easier for ordinary people to build the skills, confidence, and means to feed themselves better.

That’s a federal cooking-and-food-literacy curriculum that actually gets taught, subsidized community kitchens, a real budget for after-school food programs, grocery store dietitians who do more than hand out coupons, media that teaches as it entertains, and workplace programs that turn lunch into something other than a vending machine.

Not one of them alone makes a headline that can compete with clickbait and sensationalism, sadly. But all of it changes more dinners than the next labeling requirement or federal dietary guidelines.

The journey toward a better food system is real. And most of the country doesn’t even know there is a journey. The job is to make the better choice easier to learn, easier to afford, easier to taste, and easier to repeat. That is the next thirty years and beyond.

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Mike Lee is a food futurist and innovation strategist, author of Mise: On the Future of Food, host of The Tomorrow Today Show podcast, creator of Mise Futures, and is on Instagram at The Book of Mise.

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Mise 2: The Restaurant Issue is now open for pre-orders! Ships 8/11/26. Over 200 pages of future scenarios exploring the future of restaurants.

I’ve been writing my way toward a wider picture of what the food system could become, in two essays so far: first a diagnosis, then a vision. The Enshittification of Big Food laid out how the food on our shelves keeps quietly getting worse, and why that isn’t an accident: it’s what happens when shareholder return is the only goal a food company answers to. A New Blueprint for Big Food sketched the alternative, a different future where taking care of people and the planet is the only way a food company earns a profit. Not a finished plan. A direction worth walking toward.

Over 141 substantive comments came in across Substack and LinkedIn. They clustered into five big themes, and I’ll work through all of them in the essays ahead. This week takes the foundational one: the economic rules the blueprint depends on. Profit, who pays whom, what counts as a cost. Most people treat them as laws of nature, which is why the blueprint reads as wishful thinking. They’re agreements people made, and what people agreed to, people can renegotiate. That’s my argument.

Should we be fixing capitalism at all?

Three readers pushed on this, from three different angles. The furthest-reaching version came from Gunnar Rundgren, who writes the Garden Earth newsletter on agriculture and ecology. “Profit has nothing to do with sustainability,” he argued. What we need instead is to “establish alternative markets and networks where consumers and producers are motivated by socially beneficial purposes,” networks that “gradually replace the profit-laced capitalist turf with new playing fields.” Putting nature on the balance sheet, he added, “means privatisation and commodification of nature, which is the last thing we need.”

Yuwei Shi, who teaches and writes on impact and sustainability transitions, extended that thought into a phrase I keep returning to: “scale and speed capitalism is not going away by epic battles but can be rendered irrelevant gradually by millions of cuts. Profit-maximizing capitalism will become irrelevant when a million oases appear on Earth.” He also asked the sharpest question in the threads: whether anything that scales eventually falls back into the same monopolistic control, and whether that’s exactly what the hedge funds are betting on.

And Miyoko Schinner, one of the trailblazers of the plant-based movement, pushed the moral version hardest. “Milton Friedman was not God,” she wrote. “We need to get over that.” Her case: “I do think a moral argument, not just a financial incentive, needs to be core in food, because healthy and affordable food is a basic human right.” That puts a moral floor under the whole industry, said plainly, in language B-corp branding and impact-investing decks tend to soften before it gets that direct.

I take all three seriously. None of them is wrong about what’s broken or about what a better food system would have to honor. But I land on a slightly different question. They ask what to do about the system. I keep asking how to bend the system we already have toward the outcomes they’re all reaching for, and how fast.

Someone Is Already Paying for Nature

The worry about commodifying nature is fair, and it has a long, ugly history behind it. The enclosure of the commons turned shared English land into private property and a generation of villagers into landless laborers. Water rights have been stripped from communities that held them for generations. Mineral extraction ran as colonial policy across half the world. The through-line in each case was an ownership claim: a powerful actor declared that something used in common was now property, and the people who’d depended on it without owning it lost. That concern is warranted. I’m not waving it away.

But the blueprint isn’t asking anyone to claim ownership of nature. It’s asking that the damage corporations are already inflicting on it show up on their ledger instead of someone else’s. The trouble is who’s paying the price. Running the soil down, drawing an aquifer below the next pump’s reach, mailing a future diabetes ward its bill: every one of those is a real cost, and someone pays it. The farmer pays in yield twenty years out. The town pays in deeper wells, and a kid eventually pays in a clinic waiting room two decades after that.

The one party who never sees the cost is the buyer choosing between a cheap commodity ingredient and a better one. On the ledger that actually decides what a food company sources, those costs are entered at zero. That’s what priced at zero means: the price exists, it’s just set at zero, on the only ledger the decision runs on.

So the choice on the table isn’t whether to put a price on the damage. The price already exists. The choice is who sets it, what they set it at, and whether the people who pay for it have a seat at the table. Stephen Leider named the financial version of this plainly: the market still treats purpose as “narrative, not as an asset class with measurable economics.” Once soil health, labor resilience and flavor translate into margin durability and pricing power, regenerative stops being defended by “mission language” and starts being defended by “cash flow quality, lower risk, and better multiples.” Make the cost measurable, in other words, and it has to be argued for on the same spreadsheet that’s currently erasing it.

None of this is an argument against parallel systems. Regional, community-owned food economies should keep growing alongside the existing one. But two-thirds of American grocery dollars run through ten companies so we are forced to try and rewrite the legacy food system too. Parallel systems reach the person who already cares about better food.

Repricing externalities reaches the person who didn’t know there was a debate. Both matter, and the climate isn’t giving us time to pick one over the other. I’d rather redefine the worst of capitalism than wait for it to collapse, because collapse hurts real people. My interest is in how that rewiring could work. But I have no ego about which path wins. What I’m rooting for is human and planetary health and wellbeing for everyone, and the best ideas making real progress, by whatever combination of paths gets us there.

Altruistic Desire

The moral case is the right foundation: healthy and affordable food is a basic human right, and the system we have fails to deliver it. Nobody pushing to reprice externalities cares about the accounting for its own sake; we care because the current price produces a food system any honest moral reading would reject. But waiting for every executive whose bonus depends on not having a moral awakening to have one is a long bet. So the spreadsheet move, making the better choice for people and planet the one the math picks anyway, does half the work. The other half is older than any spreadsheet, and it’s the half we keep underrating: desire.

Take Kernza. It’s a perennial grain, roots ten feet down, holding soil and water in place year-round where annual wheat leaves bare dirt every harvest. That’s the ecological case, and ecological cases told that way don’t move many cases of product. But Patagonia Provisions and Topa Topa Brewing Company already turned Kernza into a beer, Kernza Lager, and the beer is just good. You take a grain grown in a way that improves the ecosystem around it and the lives of the people who farm it, and you make it into the most delicious version of itself, a beer that beats the conventional pilsner on flavor before anyone says a word about watersheds.

The deliciousness pulls demand. Demand creates margin. With margin comes supply, and supply means more acres growing Kernza instead of annual wheat. And more acres of Kernza means soil holding more water, aquifers recharging instead of dropping, biodiversity surviving where annual monoculture would have flattened it. The planetary outcome arrives as a byproduct of the consuming.

Now run that forward. The future I want: every serious brewmaster in the world chasing a better Kernza beer than the last. Connoisseurship forming around Kernza beers the way it has around barrel aged stouts and hazy IPAs. The whole thing turning into a meme. A Costco shopper reaching for a case of some new Kernza beer because he had it last weekend at his neighbor’s backyard barbecue, and learning only later, somewhere on the back of the can, that the grain it’s brewed from is rebuilding a watershed in Minnesota. Nobody having to be lectured into any of it. And all the while, the soil healing under more acres of Kernza, paid for one case of beer at a time.

Then run the same play across bread, distillers, chefs, fast food, snacks, beverages, every category big enough to move acres at scale. Heritage wheats, perennial rices, dry-farmed tomatoes, rotationally grazed beef: each one has a version of the Kernza story waiting to be made. This is how I envision a food system where desire and altruism move in lockstep.

Profit Is a Construct

Everything in economics rests on agreement. A dollar buys something because enough people agree it does, and on that one shared belief the whole structure sits: prices, contracts, property rights, the definition of profit itself. None of it descended from anywhere. The equation is just arithmetic: revenue minus costs. The choice is what we count on each side. The version we run today enters soil, water, human health, and harvest labor at zero on the cost side. That’s a choice we keep making every quarter.

People treat capitalism the way they treat gravity, as a fact of the universe that isn’t up for discussion. But gravity pulls on you whether you believe in it or not. An economic system only works as long as enough people keep believing in it. Which means it can be edited.

Take the Friedman Doctrine. I’m with Miyoko on this one: he is not a God. Milton Friedman didn’t discover a law of nature the way Isaac Newton discovered gravity. He was a University of Chicago economist who wrote an essay for The New York Times Magazine in 1970 arguing that a company’s only obligation was to its shareholders. The argument took off. A generation of business schools taught it as though it had been handed down.

It’s still just an idea. We aren’t required to accept it the way we’re required to accept the laws of nature. Positions get revised. Some get replaced. B-Corps are one revision in progress: somebody invented the certification in 2007 because they thought extractive capitalism could use some new rules, and enough companies signed on for it to count as a serious counter-position. It’s not the final answer. None of these are. The rules get written by somebody, and that somebody is us. The real question is whether the next version of the operating system gets written from inside the system or outside it, and the honest answer is probably both.

What stays with me, reading through all of this, is that the destination doesn’t actually change from one person to the next. Nobody in this conversation thinks the current system is fine. The argument is about route and speed, and that’s a sharper, more honest argument than the one we were having ten years ago.

The hardest sentence in food right now is “nice idea, won’t happen.” It costs nothing to say, and it forecloses everything. Insisting the future can’t be different is the surest way to make sure it isn’t. The next version of the operating system is already being written, in pieces, by the people closest to the work, including the three readers whose arguments this essay has been wrestling with. Slower than I’d like. Faster than “won’t happen” leaves room for.

And to be honest, I don’t yet know how this vision could fully happen. Maybe it won’t. But it feels compelling and important enough to me to keep trying and bringing you all along for the journey. This shit is hard. But it’s supposed to be. And for the sake of the future of our food system and planet, I’m not going to shy away from wrestling with these kinds of ideas just because I can’t immediately see the solution.

Four more themes are still on the table from those comment threads: whether anything that scales eventually re-monopolizes, what private equity does to a regenerative brand once it buys one, how the demand side finds the time to choose better food, and what the next ingredient swap is going to be. Each one gets its own essay. This was the one underneath the rest, so it had to come first.

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Mike Lee is a food futurist and innovation strategist, author of Mise: On the Future of Food, host of The Tomorrow Today Show podcast, creator of Mise Futures, and is on Instagram at The Book of Mise.

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Mise 2: The Restaurant Issue is now open for pre-orders! Ships 8/11/26. Over 200 pages of future scenarios exploring the future of restaurants.

In March 2021, two activist hedge funds, Bluebell Capital and Artisan Partners, forced out Danone CEO Emmanuel Faber. He had spent nearly a decade trying to turn the $30 billion food company into an entreprise à mission, with carbon-adjusted earnings and a binding social charter. Within weeks, the board sided with the activists. The line that came out of that fight, from someone close to him, was that you “couldn’t sell yogurts and save the planet at the same time.”

The activists were right about Danone’s share price. Faber was right about almost everything else. Both being true is the trap.

Faber wasn’t an outlier. Annie’s, Stonyfield, Honest Tea, Ben & Jerry’s: each a purpose-driven brand acquired, watered down, or sued into compromise once the public markets got hold of them. The pattern has held for forty years because the financial system doesn’t yet reward what these companies were trying to do. As long as that’s true, the most determined CEO in the world can’t outrun the spreadsheet.

The change I’m interested in is what happens when the incentives shift. When the most profitable thing a food company can do also happens to build soil, treat its workers fairly, and improve the people eating its food. In that world, no one has to be lectured and no CEO has to be brave. Regenerative agriculture stops being a moral case and becomes a financial one, and the activist investor ends up pushing for the same outcome the sustainability advocate has been pushing for all along.

What follows is a sketch of that vision. How to actually build it is a conversation I want to have next.

What Gets Counted

It’s hard to argue people out of pursuing profit. Profit is the proxy modern humans use for what food and shelter once were: security, comfort, the freedom to spend a Saturday morning however you choose. Try to talk someone out of pursuing it and you’re working against survival logic itself. It’s the most reliable engine for getting humans to do hard, coordinated work over long time horizons.

The food system we have today is what happens when that engine is pointed at calorie maximization, shelf stability, and quarterly earnings. The food system we want is what would happen if it were pointed at different inputs.

In 1970, Milton Friedman wrote in the New York Times that the only social responsibility of a business is to increase its profits. The line shaped a generation of MBA programs and the food companies they staffed. Friedman’s mistake wasn’t the profit motive itself but the assumption that the inputs to the calculation were complete. They weren’t. Soil health, water, public health, and the welfare of farm workers were rounded to zero on every spreadsheet because nobody had figured out how to put a price on them. The companies that grew fastest were the ones best at exploiting that rounding error.

Policy can correct some of this. Disclosure rules will eventually put nature on the balance sheet, crop insurance reform may price soil health into farm economics, and federal procurement could favor better suppliers. These fights matter. But policy is slow, contested, and reversible at the next election. The faster, more durable change happens when the financial logic itself shifts. When a CFO at a Big Food company runs the numbers and concludes that buying from regenerative farms is the more profitable choice. That isn’t a moral discovery; it’s an accounting one.

The regenerative agriculture movement, the sustainable food advocates, the chefs and farmers rebuilding soil one season at a time, are doing important work, and the system has moved in the right direction because of them. I want that work to keep going.

But I also want to train my eye on a question their work doesn’t fully answer: how do we reach the much larger group of people who have never heard of regenerative agriculture, who don’t track sustainability or public health debates the way we do in the industry, who just want dinner to be cheap and good? That group is most of the market, and they won’t be moved by another values pitch. The lever that reaches them is price and pleasure: food that tastes better and costs about the same.

The Science We Need

Changing what gets rewarded means changing what gets measured. Soil health, nutrient density, flavor, worker welfare, water quality, the true downstream cost of cheap food: these things can’t drive financial decisions until they’re measurable, defensible, and pricable. Until they are, regenerative agriculture stays a story for people who already care.

This isn’t research that’s going to come from inside Big Food. Most corporate food R&D is reformulation work: less sugar, fewer additives, cleaner labels. The kind of fundamental work I’m describing is too slow, too speculative, and too disconnected from quarterly earnings to fit inside a CPG company. It happens at universities, in nonprofits, in philanthropic labs, in chefs’ research kitchens, and in academic-industry partnerships, and it needs the kind of patience those settings can offer.

The most important place to put that energy is on the connection between how food is grown and how it tastes. Eaters don’t consistently pay a premium for sustainability, sadly. They will sometimes pay a small premium for health. They consistently pay a premium for flavor.

Flavor is the thing eaters actively chase: the heirloom tomato, the small-batch ice cream, the better cup of coffee. Flavor moves money. If regenerative farming reliably produces more flavorful food, then sustainability has a path to revenue that runs straight through people’s mouths to their wallets.

The hypothesis, well-supported in wine and slowly being tested in produce, is that healthier soils produce more flavorful, more nutrient-dense food. Plants under mild stress in living soil make more secondary metabolites, the compounds responsible for color, aroma, and many of the antioxidants our bodies use.

Plants flooded with synthetic nitrogen in depleted soil get bigger, blander, and less nutritious. We need studies that establish this with the statistical confidence we apply to drugs, and we need tools that bring the measurements out of the lab and into the produce aisle. The endgame is a handheld spectrometer at the grocery store that lets a shopper scan a carrot and read its nutrient density on the spot. Whether that device exists yet is beside the point. What matters is the underlying science, which turns regenerative agriculture from a story into a measurable input that can be priced.

The other large area is pricing what currently has no price. Conventional food is artificially cheap because the costs of producing it, the soil degradation, the polluted water, the healthcare costs from diet-related disease, the exploited farm labor, show up on someone’s balance sheet, just not the food company’s.

There’s serious academic and policy work, sometimes called true cost accounting, that’s been trying to put dollar values on these externalities. The Rockefeller Foundation’s True Cost of American Food report estimated that the real price of conventional food is roughly three times the supermarket price once those externalities are tallied. Get those numbers into financial accounting standards, into climate disclosures, into supply contracts and supplier scorecards, and the cheap commodity ingredient stops being cheap. The CFO sourcing from regenerative farms today is paying a premium against an unfairly low conventional price. Make conventional food show its real cost, and the regenerative premium narrows or vanishes.

There’s also breeding for flavor, smaller in scale than the other two but worth mentioning. For seventy years, fruits and vegetables have been bred for yield, shelf life, and shipping tolerance, and flavor wasn’t a selection pressure. The Honeycrisp apple is the proof that breeding for taste at scale is possible. Run that playbook across more crops and the flavor gap closes between fresh produce and engineered snack food. A bag of Doritos isn’t naturally more delicious than a carrot. We just spent more on the chip.

This is the connection the food system has been missing: sustainability and health on one side, pleasure and hedonism on the other, with no scientifically established bridge between them. Build the bridge and the rest follows.

What This Looks Like When It Works

Pull these threads together and the food system reorganizes around itself.

The most profitable carrot is the most flavorful one, grown in living soil. Procurement officers buy it because the data says it sells, and the farmer who builds soil makes more money than the farmer who depletes it. Nobody had to be lectured; the economics reorganized.

Picture a normal-looking cracker, sold at Target and Costco, made from a four-crop rotation: winter wheat, a nitrogen-fixing legume, a deep-rooted oilseed, and a cover crop. The bill of materials is the rotation plan. Scale that to a $10 billion brand, and the more crackers sold, the more rotation acres demanded. Growth becomes good for the soil because growth is the rotation. Patagonia Provisions has shown a glimpse of this with Kernza, the perennial grain whose ten-foot roots build soil while it grows. Long Root Ale is small. The principle is enormous at scale.

In that world, the activist investor pushing a food company for 20% growth is, by accident, pushing for more rotation acres, more nitrogen-fixing legumes, more nutritious produce on shelves, more fairly paid farm workers. They’re pushing for everything the regenerative movement has been pushing for through volunteer effort. Regenerative agriculture, formerly a moral cause, becomes a P&L line item that goes up and to the right.

This is the structural difference, and it’s what makes this approach more durable than ESG. Today, when a Big Food company has a sustainability program, that program lives next to the profit-generating part of the business as a kind of supplement: nice when times are good, expendable when they’re not.

The first programs cut in a tough quarter are always the ones that aren’t producing revenue. In the world I’m describing, sustainability isn’t a cost center living next to the engine. It is the engine. Cutting it doesn’t trim costs; it kills the business. Companies are built to seek and defend profit, and they can be relied on to fight for whatever activity is producing it. Make profit run through soil health, worker welfare, and nutrient density, and those things become things companies will fight to protect.

When a hedge fund analyst looks at a company built this way, they don’t see soft margins to cut. They see compounding moats: soil that produces better food at lower long-term input cost, consumer trust earned through measurable nutrient density, pricing power that holds up against private label. Cutting the regenerative supply chain destroys the moat. The defense isn’t a charter document. It’s the economics.

The Wager

The food companies I want to exist aren’t the ones that make a moral case for better food. The case for moral food has been made for a hundred years. Some of it has won. Most of it has been bought, watered down, or replaced with cornstarch.

The food companies I want to exist make better food because the economics are on their side. Their soil produces more, their flavor is measurably better, and their unit economics improve as they scale. Their CEOs don’t have to give speeches at Davos about purpose; they show up at earnings calls and post strong numbers.

This is what the profit motive looks like pointed at people, planet, and palate: not a moral revolution but a redirection of energy that already exists, applied to inputs that have always been there but were rounded to zero on the spreadsheet.

It’s a radical vision, and I won’t pretend otherwise. It depends on research that hasn’t been done, on accounting standards that don’t exist yet, on a kind of food company that isn’t currently being built. But every other approach the food movement has tried for the past forty years has hit a similar wall. The mission-driven CEO runs into the activist investor. The certification label runs into commodity-priced competition. The boycott runs into a generation of consumers who don’t remember what they were boycotting. That friction isn’t accidental. It comes from trying to insert mission into a system whose underlying incentives are pulling the other way.

The vision in this essay is an attempt to remove the friction by routing mission and profit through the same activity, so the system stops fighting itself. Whether it can actually be built at scale, I don’t know. But the alternatives have been slow, contested, and reversible, and the climate, the soil, and the diseases of the modern diet aren’t waiting for slow approaches to slowly succeed.

Radical change requires radical ideas. This is one. The work now is to pressure-test it, fund the science it depends on, and start building.

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Mise 2: The Restaurant Issue is now open for pre-orders! Ships 8/11/26. Over 200 pages of future scenarios exploring the future of restaurants.

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Mike Lee is a food futurist and innovation strategist, author of Mise: On the Future of Food, host of The Tomorrow Today Show podcast, creator of Mise Futures, and is on Instagram at The Book of Mise.

In 1990, McDonald’s gave in to public pressure and replaced beef tallow with vegetable oil in its fryers. The vegetable oil contained partially hydrogenated fat. Trans fats turned out to be more dangerous than the saturated fat they replaced, and by the late 1990s they were estimated to cause around 50,000 premature deaths a year in the United States. A McDonald’s meal in 1982 contained 2.4 grams of trans fat. By 1992, the same meal contained 19.2 grams.

The biochemist Fred Kummerow had warned about this in 1957, in a paper in Science showing trans fats in every diseased artery he examined. The American Heart Association printed 150,000 copies of a warning in 1968, then destroyed every copy under pressure from margarine industry lobbyists. The FDA didn’t get trans fats out of the food supply until 2015. Kummerow sued the agency at age 98 to force the issue, and died at 102.

The replacement was worse than the original, and everyone who needed to know, knew. The people running the food companies were not doing anything irrational. They were operators inside an incentive system that rewarded cheaper, more shelf-stable substitutes and punished anyone who paid more for raw materials than the competition. The system, not the operators, is the story.

A Useful Word From The Internet

In 2022, the writer Cory Doctorow gave a name to a pattern he had been watching unfold across the internet. He called it enshittification. The word is ugly on purpose. He was describing how digital platforms get worse over time, in a way that isn’t random and isn’t a mistake.

The pattern goes like this. A new platform shows up and is genuinely good. Facebook shows you posts from your friends. Amazon has the lowest prices and ships fast. Google gives you the best search result at the top. The platform is good because it needs you. It is buying your loyalty.

Then, once you are locked in, the platform stops being good to you and starts being good to the businesses that pay it. Your Facebook feed fills up with posts from pages you never followed. Amazon search results are mostly ads. Google’s first page is sponsored. The platform is still useful enough that you stay, but the experience is worse. The value is being pulled out of the user side and pushed toward the advertiser side.

In the third stage, the platform stops being good to the businesses too. It squeezes them on fees and rankings, because by then both sides are stuck. Anyone who has tried to leave Amazon as a seller, or get reach on Facebook as a brand, knows this part. The platform is now bad for almost everyone using it, and still extremely profitable, because everyone is too tangled up to leave.

Doctorow’s point is that this is the strategy working as designed. A public company that doesn’t grind more margin out of a captive audience loses to one that does. The better the product was at the start, the more loyalty there is to monetize on the way down.

I think packaged food has been running this same play for a hundred years, just slower.

A Century of Cheaper Substitutes

The 1876 Heinz ketchup recipe was tomatoes, vinegar, sugar, salt, onion, and a spice blend. Coca-Cola in 1886 was cane sugar and an extract sold from a soda fountain in Atlanta. Hellmann’s mayonnaise in 1905 was eggs, oil, vinegar, and seasoning, mixed by hand at a New York deli. The Oreo in 1912 was flour, sugar, lard, cocoa, and vanilla. The Big Mac in 1967 was beef, bun, cheese, lettuce, onion, pickles, and a mayonnaise-based sauce.

Those short ingredient lists existed because the technology to make cheaper functional substitutes mostly didn’t exist yet. High fructose corn syrup wasn’t industrially viable until the 1970s. Modified food starches and protein isolates were either decades away or available only at scales too small to matter. Most of these companies were also privately held or founder-run, so quarterly earnings pressure wasn’t yet the only thing the business answered to.

In 1974, sugar prices spiked. Coca-Cola began replacing cane sugar with high fructose corn syrup. By November 1984, Coke and Pepsi had jointly completed the transition. They were responding to a price differential the federal government had spent the previous decade engineering: New Deal-era set-aside payments to farmers had been killed off, the 1973 Farm Bill had institutionalized direct payments that drove chronic corn overproduction, and sugar import quotas kept domestic sugar prices around 25 cents a pound while world prices sat near 7. Today, bulk corn syrup runs about 35 cents a pound. Refined sugar runs $1.01.

The same logic operates at smaller scales across every aisle. Butter gets replaced by margarine, then margarine gets replaced by cheaper processed vegetable oils. Real vanilla gets replaced by vanillin. Whole milk solids get replaced by milk protein concentrate. Each substitution is individually defensible inside a procurement spreadsheet. Cumulatively, they produce food with the shape of the original and almost none of its content.

The food version of this story diverges from the digital one in one specific place: the customer’s tongue. Coke didn’t lose drinkers when it switched to corn syrup. A whole generation grew up on the new version, and the new version is what their brains learned cola was supposed to taste like. The cheaper formulation didn’t just survive the swap. It became the reference point. By the time anyone tried to sell a cane-sugar Coke back to Americans, it tasted off to most of them. The substitute had become the original.

From Cereal to Cornstarch

Before there was a substitution economy in soda, there was breakfast cereal. Corn flakes, puffed wheat, the whole enriched, extruded, sugar-glazed catalog the postwar grocery aisle was built around. Cereal is the original sin of this whole arc, because cereal was where Big Food learned that you could industrialize a grain into a shelf-stable shape, fortify it back to barely meeting a nutrition label, print “whole grain” on the box, and sell it as a wholesome family breakfast for a hundred years. There is nothing whole about a Frosted Flake. The grain has been milled, cooked, extruded, dried, sprayed with sugar, and stamped into a flake. What survives is the silhouette of food and the marketing language of food, with most of the actual food removed.

That template, perfected on cereal, then got applied to almost every other category. Yogurt got the cereal treatment. Bread got it. Snacks got it. Eventually entire meals got it. We are still inside the consequences of the cereal precedent, and the reason we are now stuck having a public debate about ultra-processed food at all is that the cereal-style product, the one with the shape and marketing of a real food and almost none of its substance, finally metastasized into the majority of the calories most Americans eat. The UPF debate is not new. It is the original con catching up with us.

The sharpest recent example of how the trick keeps refining itself is what happened to Annie’s. In 2014, General Mills bought Annie’s Homegrown for $820 million. Annie’s had built its whole brand on being the un-Kraft: organic pasta, real cheddar, butter, milk, a back-of-box ingredient list that read like a recipe. Parents paid a premium for it. For about a decade after the acquisition, that mostly held.

In September 2025, General Mills announced what its press release called a “delightful upgrade” to Annie’s Classic Shells & White Cheddar, with “even more ooey gooey real cheese.” What the press release did not mention, and what Retail Brew caught by comparing labels, was that butter and nonfat milk had been removed and replaced with cornstarch. The new version has 22 percent less protein and 18 percent less calcium. Asked why, General Mills declined to answer, saying only that the new recipe had been “well received overall.”

The cornstarch swap works because mac and cheese is, at heart, a textural product. The cling and thickness of the sauce on the pasta is most of the eating experience. Butter and milk used to do that work and bring some actual nutrition along with them. Cornstarch can do the texture alone, more cheaply, by thickening the sauce as it cooks. The customer keeps eating. General Mills keeps the difference.

This is the third stage of the Doctorow arc, applied to a box of pasta. The brand built loyalty on a promise. Once the loyalty was reliable, the promise got cheaper to keep.

What This Actually Costs

The trans fat story already told us the price of leaving this system to run on its own incentives. Fifty thousand premature deaths a year, for decades, while the warning sat in a drawer. The cereal aisle taught a country that an extruded grain product sprayed with sugar was a wholesome way to start the day. The cornstarch Annie’s is the same machinery, smaller scale, friendlier branding. Different generations, same play.

And the rewriting isn’t only happening on the tongue. It’s happening in how people think about food at all. We are now in a world where a brick of silly putty in a gold foil wrapper gets sold as a smarter source of protein than a piece of well-raised meat. Where an ultra-processed patty engineered to bleed is positioned as a more virtuous dinner than a bowl of rice and beans. Where a small scoop of real ice cream is treated as the dietary failure, and a whole pint of “zero sugar” novelty loaded with synthetic sweeteners and gums is treated as the win. None of that is nutrition. It is marketing dressed up as nutrition, and a generation has been trained to mistake one for the other.

That is the part that gets to me. Not that Big Food cuts corners. Of course it does. The system pays it to. What gets me is that the corner-cutting compounds inside our children’s mouths and inside their heads, and by the time anyone notices, the better version of the food tastes wrong and the simpler version of the meal sounds naive. Regulation can pull a poison off the shelf. It cannot give a generation back the tongue they would have had, or the common sense.

I do not think this is hopeless, and I do not think cornstarch has won. I know the people making real food. I have spent years around the farmers, ranchers, dairy operators, fermenters, bakers, regional brands, and chefs who are putting better products on shelves and tables every year. Some of them are growing. A few are scaling. The clean-label movement of the 2010s did not deliver on every promise it made, but it permanently raised the floor on what a serious eater expects from a label, and it created customers who can taste the difference. That is real, and it is more than the system was built to allow.

What I will not do is pretend the score is even. The incumbents still own most of the calories, most of the shelf space, most of the marketing budgets, and, more than anything, most of the palates. The people building the alternative are doing it against a tongue and a culture that the substitution economy spent a century training. Winning that fight is going to take better food, better stories, and a generation of eaters willing to be re-trained on what real tastes like. It is doable. It is not done. Anyone who tells you we are ahead is selling you something, probably in a gold foil wrapper.

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Mike Lee is a food futurist and innovation strategist, author of Mise: On the Future of Food, host of The Tomorrow Today Show podcast, creator of Mise Futures, and is on Instagram at The Book of Mise.

Last week I described how our current food system is organized around chokepoints: a 21-mile strait carrying a fifth of the world’s oil and a third of its seaborne fertilizer, four companies processing most of America’s beef, a single banana cultivar feeding half the planet. That essay was a diagnosis, this one is about the redesign.

The food world already has a word for the new system it wants: resilient. It runs through policy reports, USDA white papers, industry sustainability decks. The picture is recovery: the system takes a hit, like a hurricane or strait closure, and bounces back.

Resilience gets built through redundancy: backup suppliers, buffer stocks of grain and fertilizer, plans for the recovery curve. It’s a defensible goal. But bouncing back means bouncing back to the same design that produced the vulnerability in the first place, and a system that returns to baseline after every shock has learned nothing from it. The next one finds the same weak point.

Nassim Taleb, the risk theorist who wrote The Black Swan, already had the better word for it. In his 2012 book Antifragile, he laid out a three-part distinction. Fragile things break under stress. Antifragile things get stronger from it. Resilience sits in the middle: you survive without gaining. Muscle is antifragile. The immune system is antifragile. And our food system should be antifragile too.

In practice, that means small regional plants that pick up customers every time a giant one goes down, farms with living soil that out-produce depleted ones in a drought, and prices and insurance that get smarter after each bad year instead of just more expensive. Most of today’s industrial food system is fragile, dressed up as resilient. It looked steady through a sixty-year run where the big inputs cooperated and nothing serious tested it. Resilience isn’t wrong, just inadequate.

The Food System Is Built On Three Big Assumptions

The industrial food system runs on three assumptions so embedded they’re invisible. Together they make it fragile.

Efficiency is the highest good. This is why four meatpackers process 85% of American beef: fewer plants, lower cost per pound. The same logic explains why 90% of the global grain trade runs through four companies and why roughly 75% of global food comes from just 12 plants and 5 animal species. Each consolidation made the system cheaper. Each also made it more fragile. We treated the fragility as an acceptable side effect, until it wasn’t.

Nature comes free. Soil gets treated as a substrate for chemical inputs, but it’s a living system that took thousands of years to build and decades to deplete. Water is priced for delivery, but the watershed producing it doesn’t appear on anyone’s books. Pollinators, genetic diversity, the nitrogen cycle, grassland carbon all produce enormous economic value, none of which shows up on any income statement. When something is priced at zero, people use it like it’s infinite. Policy has made the math official. In January 2026, the Trump EPA stripped the health-benefit valuation from a soot and ozone rule that projected $46 billion in annual benefits. Combined with broader rollbacks of clean air and water rules, federal accounting now matches industry practice: clean air and intact ecosystems are worth zero unless somebody proves otherwise.

Damage is someone else’s problem. Nitrogen runoff from Midwestern corn fields creates a Gulf of Mexico dead zone the size of New Jersey, and the cost never lands on any grain company’s P&L. The FAO’s 2024 true cost accounting report put the hidden costs of global agrifood systems at $12 trillion a year, roughly 10% of global GDP. Over 70% comes from diet-related disease, the downstream consequence of a system engineered around cheap calories. Another 20% covers soil depletion, nitrogen pollution, biodiversity loss, and the carbon baked into every step from fertilizer to shelf. These costs land on public health systems, ecosystems, and future generations, not the companies that create them. Economists call this externalizing. The blunter version: we designed the system so the people who profit from the damage seldom see the bill.

These three assumptions aren’t failures of the food system, they are the food system. The goal was cheap, abundant food, and the design delivered. The concentration, the fragility, the ecological cost, the diet-related disease were consequences of optimizing for cheap food. What the system wasn’t built to do is improve under stress, so it keeps breaking in the same places. Reform work stalls for the same reason: it tries to fix outputs without touching the logic that produces them. You can fund a thousand regenerative pilots, but if the prevailing inventives of the economy and food system still reward depletion, then depletion is what you’re going to get.

What Antifragile Looks Like In Food

Muscles tear under load and rebuild stronger. The immune system meets a virus, learns it, and fights off the next exposure before you notice. Both turn stress into improvement. The same mechanism already operates inside the food system, but only in pockets, and not as the default.

Start at the field. Wine grapes grown under a little drought stress make more concentrated, more flavorful fruit than well-watered ones. Same for dry-farmed tomatoes and olive trees, which push their roots deeper and concentrate their oils when forced to fight for water. Biologists call it hormesis: a little stress triggers the plant to make the very compounds that taste good and command higher prices. The stressed crop out-earns the pampered one. Taste and toughness, it turns out, are usually the same project.

Now zoom out to the network. When the JBS ransomware attack shut down the company’s U.S. beef plants in May 2021, and again when the big packers went dark during the early months of COVID, prices spiked and shelves emptied. The chokepoints cracked exactly where last week’s essay said they would. Beef is still that consolidated, and the next ransomware attack will hit just as hard. But each disruption did something else too. Smaller regional processors that stayed open picked up customers and orders they couldn’t have won in a calm market, and federal money for small and regional meat processing climbed in the years that followed. Each centralized failure was free marketing for the distributed alternative. The decentralized layer gains share whenever the central layer stumbles, and gains capital to expand for the next round.

Now the soil. Drought hits everyone, but soils with high organic matter hold more water, so the regenerative field outyields the depleted one when it matters most. Each bad year widens that yield gap and makes the case for switching practices harder to argue against. The shock doesn’t damage the regenerative farm in the same way, it promotes it. Same logic for diverse rotations during a pest outbreak: when one crop fails, the others carry the season, and the farmer learns which mixes to lean on next year. The failure trains the system. Regenerative agriculture is what antifragility looks like on a farm.

None of this is theoretical. It’s already happening at the margins, against a default that still rewards the fragile option. The job is to restructure the incentives so the parts already working this way can grow into the dominant ones.

Making The Invisible Visible

Most corporate behavior follows the numbers. Right now the numbers lie. Nature doesn’t appear on a balance sheet; soil health doesn’t factor into insurance; the damage from a dead zone is paid by fishermen rather than by the fertilizer company. Change those three things, and the cheapest option stops being the most damaging one.

I’m skeptical of the pastoral vision where everyone shops at farmers markets and eats seasonal heirloom vegetables at every meal. While idyllic, that vision doesn’t readily scale past affluent zip codes, and it leaves the system’s incentives untouched for everyone else. The redesign I have in mind is more boring than that: a food system where the financial signals tell the truth about what things actually cost. Shift the signals, and the system tends to find solutions no single planner would have designed.

Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics model gives the shift a useful frame. She draws two boundaries. A social floor, below which people lack the essentials of a decent life. An ecological ceiling, beyond which human activity destabilizes the planetary systems we depend on. The food system is one of the few enterprises that breaches both at once. It overshoots the ceiling and leaves hundreds of millions below the floor. Any redesign has to operate between those two lines.

Three mechanisms are trying to fix the accounting: one for public companies, one that creates a new kind of company whose assets are ecosystems, and one that reaches the farmer through the insurance contract they actually sign.

The first is the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures, or TNFD. It does for nature what climate disclosure does for carbon: forces public companies to disclose what their business actually depends on. A grain trader would have to put soil, water, and pollinators on the same page as quarterly earnings. In April 2025 the IFRS Foundation, which sets the world’s accounting standards, adopted the framework. Agriculture will be one of the first sectors to get its own rulebook.

Natural Asset Companies (NACs) are a stranger idea. Today, an investor can buy shares in a logging firm that profits from cutting a forest down. NACs would let an investor buy shares in a company that profits from leaving the forest standing, by putting a price on what intact forests do for free: filter water, absorb carbon, hold soil in place. The NYSE proposed listing them in 2023; political opposition killed the proposal in 2024. NACs may not be the mechanism that cracks this open, but some mechanism has to. A system that prices ecosystem destruction at zero just keeps producing more of it.

Crop insurance is where the accounting meets the dirt. The federal crop insurance program is a $17 billion-a-year operation that currently treats a farmer who builds soil and a farmer who depletes it the same. A research project launched in late 2025 is testing whether soil health could be priced as a risk factor, the way a credit score is.

In a 2024 paper in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics, Aglasan and colleagues found that Midwest counties with higher cover-crop adoption logged lower crop insurance losses from drought, heat, and excess moisture across 2005 to 2018. If that holds at scale, the farmers doing the work get lower premiums, paid for by lower payouts to the ones that aren’t. The reason to switch shows up in the budget instead of in a sustainability report no one reads. Each bad year also feeds the model: the system learns what survived and prices the next round accordingly. That’s antifragility built into the financial layer.

The Circular Consequence

Once prices start telling the truth, a lot of things that look like sacrifices start looking like good business.

Right now the food system is linear: extract, produce, consume, discard. Nitrogen gets mined or synthesized, applied to soil, absorbed by crops, eaten by people, flushed into waterways. A Cornell study published this month in Nature Sustainability found that if the U.S. just recovered the nutrients in its animal and human waste, it could cover all of its agricultural nitrogen needs and half its phosphorus needs. We are importing nitrogen from the Persian Gulf while flushing a surplus into our own rivers. The only thing keeping the loop open is that the open loop is cheaper, because nobody pays for the rivers and oceans we’re polluting downstream.

Close that loop and the rest of the logic clicks into place. Food waste becomes compost. Compost rebuilds soil. Healthier soil needs less synthetic input, which means less dependence on a volatile global supply chain. Cover cropping, agroforestry, and silvopasture all predate industrial agriculture and cycle nutrients instead of consuming them. But they lost to cheaper farming methods because historically for our food system, “cheaper” was the only thing that mattered.

The same logic reshapes infrastructure. Past a certain point, scale itself is fragility. When one giant plant breaks, whole regions go without dinner; a dozen smaller plants can lose any one node and keep running. Decentralized nitrogen production, regional meat processing, local food hubs, distributed cold storage all cost more per unit than their centralized equivalents, and all of them keep working when a single node fails.

They also gain customers and capital every time the central nodes go down. A 2024 Nature Food study found small-scale ammonia production could meet up to 96% of global demand once transportation and disruption risk are priced in. Nitricity, a company in Delhi, California, turns almond shells into nitrogen fertilizer and has sold its output through 2028. Whether Nitricity specifically wins matters less than whether the distributed architecture takes hold.

The Demand Problem

Supply-side changes, no matter how well priced, run into a wall called consumer choice. People pick food by taste, then price, then convenience, with sustainability a distant fourth, if at all. In every consumer study I’ve read or done, the pattern holds. Given two identical products, people pick the sustainable one. Given two where the sustainable option tastes worse or costs more, they don’t.

This is why I keep coming back to altruistic hedonism. Sustainability at scale has to ride on the back of pleasure. Row 7 Seed Company, co-founded by Dan Barber and plant breeder Michael Mazourek, exists because Mazourek told Barber that in his entire career, nobody had ever asked him to breed for taste. Modern vegetable breeding has optimized for yield, shelf life, shipping, and appearance, with flavor as an afterthought. Their conversation produced the honeynut squash and many other markedly more delicious vegetables, which now sell through Whole Foods. Patagonia Provisions sells beer and pasta made from Kernza, a perennial grain whose ten-foot roots rebuild soil every season.

Both companies are primarily targeting affluent consumers right now, as they have not become mainstream and accessible to all yet. But what they’re demonstrating at a small scale is the radical idea that hedonism and sustainability don’t have to be mutually exclusive. That idea needs more room to develop, and even if it stays at the high end for now, it can’t end there.

Consumer tech has always worked this way: a new iPhone or laptop launches at a premium for early adopters, and a few years later it’s saturated the mainstream. Expensive at launch, ordinary by the end. What Row 7 and Patagonia Provisions make needs to travel the same path, or their impact stays capped by the discretionary spending of affluent food shoppers. Pricey fashion vegetables for people who already care cannot be where this lands. The food industry has to reach the people who never think about sustainability, and make regenerative food the default, whether they know it or not.

If regenerative, biodiverse, regionally adapted food tastes measurably better, the market does work that policy alone probably can’t. Everyone chases after flavor, but unfortunately for the planet, not everyone is hard wired to chase sustainability. But in a world where the best tasting food derives its taste from being grown responsibly with healthy, rich soil, then sustainability and regeneration become byproducts of selfishness, which may be the only version that scales to 8 billion people. The instinct to seek pleasure in food is millions of years old. The instinct to seek sustainability is maybe twenty. I know which one I’m designing around.

A New Design

The pieces I’ve been describing don’t look novel on their own: truthful prices, closed loops, regional nodes, pleasure-led demand, antifragile soil. What’s new is treating them as one redesign instead of five siloed sustainability plays. Give the current system another hundred years without that redesign, and the picture isn’t hard to sketch.

Consolidation continues because it still pays. More fertilizer and grain moves through fewer chokepoints. Another disease hits another monocrop and we rebuild around whatever survives. Aquifers that have been draining since the 1950s finish draining. Shocks that used to hit once a decade hit annually, then seasonally. Crop insurance gets expensive, then unaffordable, then withdrawn. Diet-related disease eats a bigger share of every rich country’s healthcare budget until something gives. None of this requires a catastrophe. Each move is the rational continuation of the last one. That’s what “exactly as designed” looks like by the year 2126.

The other path is harder to describe because it hasn’t been built. Prices tell the truth about ecological cost, so soil-builders out-earn soil-miners. Regional nodes pick up share every time a central one falters. Nitrogen cycles between farm and table and back, and the Persian Gulf import bill shrinks every year. Plant breeding optimizes for flavor and soil at the same time, so what’s best for the land tastes best on the plate. More pleasure, not less. A food system that gets stronger from each shock and feeds more people, not fewer. Neither future is guaranteed. The first is the slope we’re already on; the second takes real work, most of which hasn’t started at scale.

I don’t know which pieces will matter. TNFD could become just a routine checkbox. NACs could die in regulatory purgatory. Crop insurance reform has to survive actuarial committees where caution disguises itself as rigor. Row 7 might stay a niche honeynut story. You have to accept most of that before you start placing the bets.

But the current design is failing on its own terms. Hormuz. COVID. Avian flu. The Panama Canal. The crises mostly hit the same pressure point: wherever concentration meets disruption. And they’re getting more frequent.

Taleb has another metaphor for this: the turkey parable. Feed a turkey for a thousand days and by day 999 he’s never been more sure the butcher loves him, until he gets slaughtered on day 1000. Our food system has been living that life for a while. Every year of stable abundance was more evidence the model worked, until it doesn’t.

The next food system gets built by people who think in generations. They see the gap between how food works now and how it should work, and decide that closing it is worth a career. What they’re building is larger than any single company or movement. It’s a food system that feeds more people without stripping the soil, and gets stronger from each crisis. The current design won’t get us there. I’m with the people who are building the next one.

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Mike Lee is a food futurist and innovation strategist, author of Mise: On the Future of Food, host of The Tomorrow Today Show podcast, creator of Mise Futures, and is on Instagram at The Book of Mise.

You’ve probably been hearing about the Strait of Hormuz for weeks now. It’s 21 miles wide. A fifth of the world’s oil passes through it, a fifth of its liquefied natural gas, and roughly a third of its seaborne fertilizer.

Since the U.S. and Israel launched strikes on Iran on February 28, it has been functionally closed. Peace talks in Islamabad collapsed over the weekend. On Sunday, President Trump announced that the U.S. Navy will blockade any ship trying to enter or leave the strait. As of yesterday morning, that blockade is in effect. The country that started the war is now blockading the waterway it went to war over, while Iran keeps shutting it from the inside.

Americans are watching the oil price, because that’s the number they can see from the highway. Fertilizer is the crisis they’re missing. The crops that feed the animals that become the protein on your dinner plate are grown with synthetic nitrogen, and roughly half of the world’s supply is made inside Gulf chemical plants using Gulf natural gas, then shipped through Hormuz. Losing that volume is the difference between farmers planting on schedule and farmers rationing what they managed to buy ahead.

In Iowa and Illinois, the planting window is the hard constraint. Nitrogen has to be in the soil before the seed goes in, and corn planted late or without enough nitrogen produces 20 to 40 percent less grain, a loss that cannot be made up later in the season. About 80 percent of American farmers locked in their fertilizer purchases last fall, before the war. The other 20 percent are buying nitrogen fertilizer at nearly double what it cost in January.

Farmers who spent the winter planning for corn are switching to soybeans, because soybeans fix their own nitrogen and don’t need the fertilizer nobody can get. It’s a forced bet that soybean demand holds through a season when the whole Midwest is making the same bet. In Punjab and the Rift Valley, the options are fewer. The International Rescue Committee warns of a sharp rise in hunger by June across South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. Nearly 320 million people worldwide are already acutely food insecure, and many of them eat calories grown by farmers who will not see a full bag of nitrogen this season.

We have been building our most critical systems around single points of failure since the 1980s. Hormuz happens to be the one in the headlines this month, but there are other Straits of Hormuz, metaphorically speaking. The same pattern of concentration runs through the food system, the semiconductor industry, the global pharmaceutical supply chain, and much of modern life. We are only starting to feel what it costs.

The Flaw is Concentration

Raj Patel, a food systems researcher at the University of Texas, said in a recent interview: “At some point, the pattern should tell us something about the system itself, not just the latest geopolitical trigger.” COVID broke fertilizer supply chains in 2021. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine choked fertilizer exports the following year. Iran has closed Hormuz this winter. Three shocks in five years, each with a different trigger, and no structural fix after any of them, because each time the conversation stayed on the trigger and left the flaw alone.

The flaw is concentration. And in the case of fertilizer, the cost chain from farm to grocery store is short. When nitrogen gets expensive, corn gets expensive. Most American corn is animal feed, so feed gets expensive. Feed costs flow into meat, dairy, and eggs, and from there into almost everything in the middle of a supermarket. The same Congress that watched this shock coming cut SNAP funding earlier this year, so the families least equipped to absorb it are absorbing it with the thinnest safety net in a generation.

The concentration runs far beyond fertilizer. Four companies (Tyson, JBS, Cargill, and National Beef) process over 80% of American beef. A few COVID-era plant closures in 2020 threw the national meat supply into chaos. The Biden administration later spent a billion dollars trying to stand up independent processing capacity. The industry today is as consolidated as it was then.

ADM, Bunge, Cargill, and Louis Dreyfus control 90% of the American grain trade. The grain that feeds most of the country’s livestock and a good share of its export market passes through those four companies’ infrastructure. When one of them has a plant closure or a logistics failure, the bottleneck isn’t theoretical.

The same logic of scale has moved from commodities onto the grocery shelf. Ten parent corporations produce most of what fills a typical American grocery cart, from bottled water to frozen dinners. A shopper choosing between brands is usually choosing between subsidiaries. The food system looks diverse at the point of purchase. It isn’t.

The fragility goes deeper than corporate structure. Over the past century, roughly 75 percent of the world’s plant genetic diversity has been lost as farming consolidated around high-yielding, genetically uniform cultivars. The Cavendish banana, a single cultivar, accounts for nearly half of global banana production, and a fungal disease called Tropical Race 4 is moving through plantations with no commercial-scale replacement in sight. Four varieties of wheat produce 75 percent of the crop on the Canadian prairies. Seventy-two percent of American potato production depends on four varieties. Almost every coffee tree in Brazil descends from six plants brought from a single location in Asia.

Morocco holds roughly 70 percent of the world’s phosphate reserves, one of three nutrients every crop requires, controlled by a single state-owned company. Last year’s drought dropped Panama Canal water levels low enough to restrict grain shipments from the entire American Midwest. A disease, a drought, a political decision in the wrong place, and a system built without redundancy breaks the same way every time.

Modern life runs on advanced semiconductors: the processors in your phone, your car’s braking system, the card reader at the grocery checkout, the imaging machines in hospitals. Over 90% of them come from one company, TSMC, on one island, Taiwan. TSMC itself depends on ASML, a single Dutch firm that is the only manufacturer on earth of the machines that make those processors.

If a blockade of Taiwan or a fire at ASML’s facility in the Netherlands shut down production for a year, you would not be able to buy a new car, replace a broken phone, or get certain medical imaging done, and the wait times for appliances and electronics would stretch into months. The cause would be different from a fertilizer shortage. The structure would be identical: one chokepoint, no backup, global consequences.

Patel, writing about food, put it this way: “These companies are optimized for global logistics and profit margins, not for national resilience.” He was talking about grain traders. He could have been talking about any of them. The logic is the same in every case: find the cheapest source of something critical, build the system around it, strip out the redundancy because redundancy costs money, and then, when it breaks, act as if no one could have seen it coming. We could see it coming. We have been watching it come for years.

New Fuel, Same Trap

Oil keeps putting us in wars. In this one, thousands of Iranian civilians are dead, and the president of the United States has threatened on national television to wipe out an entire civilization if its government doesn’t surrender. That is what oil dependency costs. Not in theory, not eventually. Right now, this month, in the Persian Gulf.

This has been obvious since the first Gulf War. Clean energy got framed first as an aspiration, then a burden, then a culture war, and the Trump administration is now actively rolling back the tax credits and permitting reforms that were supposed to accelerate the transition. We are choosing to stay dependent. And every extra year on oil is another year where a president has to stand at a podium and bullshit the world on why a shipping lane is worth killing people over.

Even if the clean energy transition succeeds, it moves the chokepoint. It does not remove it. The transition is still worth doing. It would do enormous good for the climate, and we should pursue it as fast as we can. But we should pursue it with our eyes open.

Solar panels, batteries, and electric vehicles require cobalt, nickel, lithium, and rare earth elements. The Democratic Republic of the Congo produces about 70% of the world’s cobalt, processed almost entirely in China. Indonesia controls half the world’s nickel. Chile, Argentina, and Bolivia sit on more than half of the planet’s known lithium. China refines nearly all of the world’s rare earth elements and manufactures most of its solar panels and batteries.

These minerals would be our new oil, and they are just as concentrated in just as few places. The fuel changes. The geography does not. If we build the clean energy economy the same way we built the oil economy, with the same concentration, the same lack of redundancy, the same dependence on a handful of foreign sources, we will end up fighting the same wars in different places.

In a world that runs on clean energy, a future US president might not be worried about the Persian Gulf at all. They might be staring at a cobalt crisis out of the Congo or a lithium dispute that freezes battery manufacturing. And someone in that White House will start talking about securing access, protecting supply lines, and the risk of depending on a single foreign source for something the country cannot live without. We have heard that speech before. We are hearing it this week. In twenty years, we may be “delivering democracy” to the Congo for the same reasons we have been “delivering” it to the Middle East for the last forty.

You don’t feel fragility until something breaks. Before that, everything just looks cheap. Cheap groceries, cheap gas, cheap electronics. Nobody notices the strategic reserve that never got funded, the processing plant that got consolidated away, the soil no one bothered to rebuild. Those are just line items that someone cut because cutting them made that quarter’s earnings palatable to shareholders.

We built this. Cheap over resilient, every time, for decades. And when the cheap breaks, we go to war to get it back. War is where life becomes cheap. The farmer who can’t get nitrogen. The family downrange of a missile meant to secure a shipping lane. The hundreds of millions of people who will go hungry. We optimized for abundance and treated resilience as waste. The price was always going to come due. It is due now.

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Mike Lee is a food futurist and innovation strategist, author of Mise: On the Future of Food, host of The Tomorrow Today Show podcast, creator of Mise Futures, and is on Instagram at The Book of Mise.

Vibecoding has mostly been a tech story so far. Engineers and founders are using AI coding tools to move faster, prototype in hours instead of weeks, skip early hires they would have needed two years ago. That matters. But those people already knew how to build software, or at least how to manage the process of building it. AI made them more productive.

The more consequential shift is what happens when people who never built software before suddenly can. For decades, the only people who could turn an idea into a working application were engineers or people who could afford to hire them.

Everyone else had to wait for a software company to notice their problem, decide the market was big enough, and build something close enough to be useful. Vibecoding changes who gets to build, and that changes what gets built. The person with the problem becomes the person who builds the solution. And because she understands the problem better than any outside developer ever could, what she makes fits in ways off-the-shelf software never did.

Software Has Eaten the World

Software is the medium through which almost all economic value now moves. Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta. Uber didn’t own cars. Airbnb didn’t own hotels. Instagram was thirteen employees when Facebook bought it for a billion dollars. The leverage software provides is hard to overstate, and until recently, access to that leverage required either engineering skills or the money to hire them.

You can’t run a business today without touching software dozens of times a day, whether you think of yourself as a “tech person” or not. Payments, scheduling, inventory, customer communication, accounting, compliance. All of it flows through software somebody else built, configured for somebody else’s needs. And for most people, that was just how it worked. You picked the best option available, learned to live with its limitations, and moved on. No reasonable person was going to learn to code just because their inventory tracker annoyed them. So the friction stayed invisible. You adapted to the tool instead of the tool adapting to you, and you never thought to question it because there was no other option.

Vibecoding breaks that open. The on-ramp is simple: open an AI tool and type something like “Build me an app that tracks my inventory by supplier and flags when I’m within two weeks of running out.” Or just start with: “I have this problem. Here’s how I currently deal with it. Build me something better.” The AI will ask clarifying questions, walk you through decisions, and produce something functional. You’ll go back and forth for a bit, tweaking things that aren’t quite right, the same way you would with a contractor. But within hours you have working software shaped to your actual needs. It builds the tool and teaches you how to use it.

Once you start, the speed is striking. I’ve built entire interactive websites in ten minutes from my phone. Not wireframes. Working sites. I built myself a personal finance app because I didn’t like any of the options on the market. I’ve made interactive games for my friends and me to play on the weekend. I built custom research software that handles the way I actually think about organizing sources, something no off-the-shelf tool got right. When building software takes months and costs tens of thousands of dollars, you only build things you’re sure about. When it takes minutes and costs nearly nothing, you start building things you’re curious about.

Most people’s relationship with AI has been conversational: chatting, brainstorming, help with writing or proofreading. That’s useful, but vibecoding turned a corner for me because the output is a thing you can use. Something functional exists at the end that didn’t exist before. That shift changed how I think about what’s possible on a Tuesday afternoon with no budget and no engineering team.

Once that clicks, you start seeing problems differently. The workaround you’ve accepted for years at work. The spreadsheet you maintain by hand every Friday. These are everywhere, and they’re almost never problems a software company would bother solving. The market is too small. The audience is you, maybe your team, maybe a few dozen people who do exactly what you do. But now you can describe what you want and have it built in an afternoon. Custom software for a customer of one.

Think of it like bread. If you can’t bake, you eat whatever the store sells and you make do. And that’s fine for many people. But if you learn to bake, you control the flour, the hydration, the ferment time. You make bread the way you want it, not the way some manufacturer decided you should want it. Vibecoding does the same thing with software, except baking well takes years of practice and a feel for dough. Vibecoding takes a description in plain English and ten minutes of spare time.

Why Food People Should Care

In software-centric industries, the people who understand a problem and the people who can build software to solve it sit near each other. In tech and finance, they’re often in the same building. In food, they almost never are.

So food people hack it. I know chefs and recipe developers who track their formulations in Excel. Think about that for a second. Software designed for financial modeling, repurposed as a recipe database, because nothing better exists that fits how they actually work at a price they can afford.

A food truck operator tracking sales, commissary schedules, and event permits across three different apps and a notebook. A farmer tracking cover crop rotations across 800 acres has her spreadsheet dialed. A CPG founder managing retail distribution through four channels has a Google Sheet doing exactly what she needs. They could each describe the right tool in four sentences. Until now, that description had nowhere to go.

Nobody knows a farm like the farmer who runs it. Not the agronomist who visits twice a year. Not the software company in Austin that built a “farm management platform” after interviewing twelve growers at a trade show. She knows which field drains poorly in April, which supplier holds up when first-choice seed stock runs out, how the morning actually runs versus how the manual says it should.

Vibecoding closes that gap. She describes the tool she actually wants and has it built in hours. Real software, with a database, user accounts, search. Customized to how she and her team work. She doesn’t stop being a farmer. She becomes a farmer whose operational knowledge is no longer stuck behind an engineering barrier.

What Bedroom Musicians Taught Us

In the late 2000s, the cost of music production collapsed. Ableton Live, a USB microphone, and a laptop was enough for anyone to produce a track. SoundCloud was enough to distribute it. Before that, making music required studio time, audio engineering knowledge, and usually a label’s money. The technical barrier filtered for access. Talent had nothing to do with it. Podcasting followed the same arc. A USB mic and a Riverside account replaced what used to require a radio license and a broadcast studio. Most podcasts have twelve listeners. But Joe Rogan, Serial, and Call Her Daddy all started as low-budget experiments by people the traditional media system would never have platformed.

Cheap tools flooded the internet with terrible music. Millions of tracks that went nowhere. The same thing is happening now with AI: low-effort slop clogging every platform, and critics pointing to it as evidence that democratizing the tools cheapens the craft. I don’t dispute that AI is producing a lot of junk. But focusing only on the junk misses what’s actually shifting. Democratized tools don’t promise everyone will make something great. They promise that people who would have made something great, but couldn’t get access, now can. The old system had no way of finding those people. Cheap tools find them by letting everyone try.

And if you don’t trust the major AI companies, you don’t have to use them. Open-source models exist. You can vibecode your own AI setup using open-source tools, no technical expertise required, just plain language describing what you want your stack to look like. You get to choose which companies you support and which ones you don’t.

Most of what gets made will be forgettable, and that’s fine. Every so often, one of those bedroom producers turns out to be Billie Eilish, a teenager recording “Ocean Eyes” in her Highland Park bedroom with her brother. Or Chance the Rapper, a kid from Chicago’s South Side who released Coloring Book without a label and won three Grammys. Or Lil Nas X, who made “Old Town Road” on a laptop with a $30 beat bought online, then spent 19 weeks at number one. All bedroom musicians. None came through the traditional system. They came through because the tools got simple enough to get out of the way.

That’s what’s starting to happen in food. A farmer with a direct-sales idea, a nutritionist who wants to track outcomes differently, a co-op manager who needs inventory software that actually fits how co-ops work. These people have always known what they needed. They just couldn’t build it. Now they can.

The Flood Is Coming

If we look past the failure rate and see vibecoding for what it actually is, digital leverage for nontechnical people, something interesting starts to happen. Maybe a farmer stops depending on her software vendor and builds the tool herself. A restaurant rebels against every industry-standard POS system and vibecodes one that actually fits how their floor runs. A CPG founder vibecodes a growth management tool that handles e-commerce, retail analytics, and online marketing in one place, instead of duct-taping four platforms together. People are building things like this right now.

A lot of slop has been created with AI already. That’s true, and it’s obvious to anyone paying attention. But if your take stops there, if you look at the flood of low-effort output and conclude the tools themselves are the problem, I’d ask what you’re planning to build instead. The tools are free. The barrier is gone. If you care about quality, if you have taste and domain knowledge and strong opinions about how things should work, you are exactly the person who should be building with these tools. Ceding the entire space to people who don’t care what they make is a choice. The answer to bad AI output is better AI output, made by people who actually give a damn. You now have the ability to prove that the tools aren’t the problem.

The value was never in the average output. It was in the distribution of attempts. When only a few thousand people can try, you get products shaped by whoever happened to have engineering resources. When millions can try, you get products shaped by the people who actually understand the problems. A few will be so precisely fitted to a real need that they take off on their own, because someone finally built the thing everyone in the industry had been waiting for.

Vibecoding doesn’t build you the Uber corporation overnight. That took billions in capital and years of regulatory battles. But vibecoding could have let someone with no technical background build the first Uber prototype. The version that works for a thousand users in one city, proves demand, attracts investment, and brings in engineers who can rebuild it to scale. The next billion-dollar company might start as a vibecoded prototype that a nontechnical founder shares with a few hundred people who immediately can’t live without it. That’s the spark. Everything else comes after. But without the spark, none of it starts.

Somewhere right now, someone who can’t write a line of code is describing a product idea in misspelled, rambling, half-coherent plain English. The tool is turning that description into a working app. That person is going to share it with a few friends. Most of the time, nothing will happen.

One of these times, something will.

—

Mike Lee is a food futurist and innovation strategist, author of Mise: On the Future of Food, host of The Tomorrow Today Show podcast, creator of Mise Futures, and is on Instagram at The Book of Mise.

On a Monday morning in late March, a soybean farmer in central Illinois hooks a 600-gallon sprayer to his tractor and rolls out to burn down winter weeds before planting. The tank is full of Roundup. He has sprayed Roundup on this field every spring for twenty-two years. His father sprayed it before him. The weeds die, the soil stays intact, and he plants into clean ground without turning a plow.

He has read the lawsuits. He knows Bayer is paying billions. He also knows that switching to organic would mean three years of lower yields at conventional prices, equipment he doesn’t own, and a crop insurance structure that penalizes the transition. So he fills the tank and drives.

This farmer is not one person. He is tens of thousands of people making the same calculation on the same morning across the Corn Belt, each one weighing what they’ve heard against what they can afford to do about it. The lawsuits say one thing. The economics say another. And the economics win every spring.

In February 2026, Bayer proposed a $7.25 billion settlement to resolve tens of thousands of cancer lawsuits over Roundup. The company acquired Monsanto in 2018 for $63 billion and has been bleeding ever since: $10.9 billion reserved in 2020, stock down over 70 percent, roughly 61,000 lawsuits still open.

The same week, President Trump signed an executive order invoking the Defense Production Act to guarantee continuous domestic production of glyphosate. Over 80 percent of American corn, soy, and cotton acreage runs on it, and the order classified a weedkiller as essential to national food security. That tells you something about how deep the dependency runs.

What a Ban Would Actually Mean

In 2018, a groundskeeper named Dewayne Johnson, who had sprayed Roundup on school grounds while developing lesions across 80 percent of his body, became the first plaintiff to take Bayer to trial. A jury awarded him $289 million. Since then, tens of thousands of similar claims have followed, and calls to pull glyphosate from the market have grown louder with each verdict.

Those calls deserve to be taken seriously. But a ban imposed tomorrow, without transition infrastructure, would not mean less spraying. It would mean different spraying. American agriculture does not have a chemical-free mode at commodity scale, and the chemicals that would fill the void carry more cumulative hazard than glyphosate does.

Paraquat, the closest functional substitute for pre-plant burndown, is banned in over 70 countries. Its acute toxicity is well documented, but the relevant concern for farmworkers is chronic: years of occupational exposure, inhaling spray mist and absorbing it through the skin, have been repeatedly linked to Parkinson’s. Dicamba, the herbicide industry’s current answer to resistant weeds, vaporizes and drifts for miles, destroying crops on neighboring farms that never sprayed it. Atrazine persists in groundwater and has been detected in thousands of drinking water systems. Take glyphosate off the table without building the off-ramp, and farmers reach for these instead, applied more often, in combinations nobody has studied for long-term effects.

Farmers already use these chemicals alongside glyphosate, in smaller quantities, to handle weeds that glyphosate misses. A 2017 analysis in Nature Communications by weed scientist Andrew Kniss found that glyphosate, despite making up nearly half of all soybean herbicide applications, contributes less than one percent of the long-term health risk to mammals from the herbicides used in those fields. Glyphosate does the heavy lifting at low toxicity, keeping the doses of everything else small. Remove it, and farmers don’t stop spraying. They spray more of the chemicals already doing the most damage.

What the Science Says

On cancer, major institutions have lined up on opposite sides, and both camps have serious evidence behind them. The WHO classified glyphosate as a “probable human carcinogen” in 2015. A 2025 Ramazzini Institute study found elevated tumor rates across multiple organs in rats exposed to doses regulators classify as safe. On the other side, the EPA, EFSA, and Health Canada have all concluded glyphosate is unlikely to cause cancer at realistic exposure levels, and the Agricultural Health Study, tracking 50,000 pesticide applicators over two decades, found no significant link to non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Independent replication of the Ramazzini findings would go a long way toward resolving this. None has been initiated.

A complicating factor: most regulatory safety reviews tested glyphosate in isolation. Farmers spray Roundup, which contains glyphosate plus surfactants called polyethoxylated tallow amines (POEA), compounds derived from animal fat that help the herbicide penetrate plant leaves. Research from Mount Sinai has found these commercial formulations significantly more toxic to human cells than glyphosate alone, and a 2025 pregnancy cohort detected POEA in 97 percent of participants. The agencies that cleared glyphosate were testing something different from what people are actually exposed to.

Cancer is not the only concern. Glyphosate works by inhibiting an enzyme found in plants, but that same enzyme exists in soil microorganisms. Multiple studies have found that repeated Roundup applications reduce colonization by mycorrhizal fungi, the organisms that help plant roots absorb water and nutrients. Field research has detected glyphosate residues in crop plants a full growing season after treatment. Twenty-two years of annual spraying on the same field does something to the biology underfoot, even if the weeds keep dying on schedule.

All of this plays out against a backdrop of compromised regulatory credibility. The Monsanto Papers revealed the company ghostwrote safety studies that regulators relied on. The Williams et al. 2000 study was retracted in 2025 after evidence of corporate authorship. Whatever conclusion you draw about glyphosate’s safety profile, the regulatory process that certified it was compromised at the source.

Beyond Chemistry

That substitution problem only applies if a ban means an overnight swap to other chemicals. It does not have to. Alternatives that avoid both herbicides and tillage are further along than most of this debate acknowledges, and their progress makes the policy inaction harder to justify.

Rodale’s Farming Systems Trial, now in its fifth decade, shows organic corn and soybean systems matching conventional yields after a transition period and outperforming in drought years. Roller-crimped cover crops suppress weeds without chemicals or tillage: plant cereal rye in fall, flatten it in spring, and the mat holds long enough for the cash crop to shade out competitors.

Carbon Robotics is deploying laser weeding machines that identify and kill individual weeds without touching the crop or the soil. The the GROW research network is testing integrated systems that combine these approaches; farms in the trials are cutting herbicide use by half to three-quarters while holding yield.

The distinction between these methods and conventional organic farming matters, especially for soil. Older organic systems rely on tillage to control weeds, and tillage destroys the same mycorrhizal networks that glyphosate suppresses, while also increasing erosion and releasing carbon from the soil.

The newer approaches, cover-crop-based systems, precision weeding, integrated management, control weeds without turning the soil and without spraying it. They protect the biology above and below ground at the same time. No single method replaces glyphosate on its own, but farms stacking several of them are getting close.

The bottleneck is the transition itself. USDA organic certification requires 36 months without synthetic inputs. During those three years, a farmer pays organic-level costs and sells at conventional prices. Crop insurance coverage drops 35 percent. The USDA has put $300 million into transition support, which sounds like a lot until you set it against 200 million acres of chemical-dependent cropland.

Organic acreage is growing faster than any other agricultural segment, proof that the economics work once a farm clears the transition years. But the Farm Bill, the crop insurance rules, and the research funding all still assume the farmer is spraying. Nothing in the system rewards changing course at the speed the situation demands.

The Trap

Wherever you come down on glyphosate’s safety, the dependency itself is not in question. American agriculture is organized around this one chemical so thoroughly that removing it without preparation would cause more immediate damage than continuing to use it: higher pesticide loads, more tillage, degraded soil, lower yields during the transition years. The off-ramp exists. The tools work. But the investment required to make the transition survivable has never come close to matching the scale of the problem.

Meanwhile, the problem compounds. Resistant weeds are spreading, which forces farmers to spray higher doses or layer additional herbicides on top, which accelerates resistance further, which pushes up costs, which makes the transition harder to afford.

Twenty-two continuous years of Roundup on the same field is already affecting the soil biology that the next generation of farming methods will depend on. And the regulatory credibility that was supposed to settle the safety question has been damaged by Monsanto’s own conduct: the ghostwritten studies and the documented interference with the regulatory process.

That farmer in Illinois, and the tens of thousands like him, will fill the tank again tomorrow morning. Their sons and daughters will probably fill it after them. Each spring the system grinds forward without serious transition investment, the soil gets a little more depleted, the weeds get a little more resistant, and the cost of eventually changing course gets larger.

The longer we wait, the more expensive the reckoning becomes. And right now, every institution with the power to act is betting that the reckoning is someone else’s problem.

—

Mike Lee is a food futurist and innovation strategist, author of Mise: On the Future of Food, host of The Tomorrow Today Show podcast, creator of Mise Futures, and is on Instagram at The Book of Mise.

Forty-two guests paid $1,500 each. Tickets sold out in sixty seconds. Outside the Paramour Estate in Silver Lake, on the opening night of Noma’s residency in Los Angeles, Jason Ignacio White stood with former employees and a demand letter signed by former Noma employees and One Fair Wage. He had spent five years running Noma’s fermentation lab. He had collected more than 56 testimonies. The letter called for settlement of legal claims, immediate reparation for prior harms, and changes to the company’s management and employee policies. It cited physical and emotional abuse, failure to pay wages, and described the restaurant industry’s wage structure as a direct legacy of slavery.

The New York Times had 35 interviews describing years of physical assault, body shaming, public humiliation, and threats to blacklist anyone who spoke up. American Express pulled its sponsorship. The pop-up continued, fully booked, through June.

That evening Redzepi posted a video on Instagram. Disheveled, perspiring. Staff crying behind him. Comments disabled. Multiple camera angles. A camera person working the room, hustling for coverage, finding the shot. The edit was clean. The whole thing was cinematic — cinema verité, but produced, the chaos carefully framed. At one point Redzepi spoke about his aspirations for what came next, and it tipped briefly into pitch territory.

Maybe for an organization where obsessive attention to detail had been drilled into everyone, this was genuinely their version of a hastily made emergency statement. But what landed was a production that felt more self-aware than empathetic, more interested in its own narrative than in the 35 people whose accounts had forced the moment. This had PR fingerprints all over it.

Then it ended. Redzepi led the team in their signature send-off — “have a good service” — followed by their collective clap in unison, cut to black. I’ll be honest: I got goosebumps. It was that crisp, that dramatic. The videos that followed on their Instagram account showed the remaining team running the pop-up, Redzepi nowhere in sight — a kind of welfare check proving that dad had actually moved out of the house. The brand pivoted forward, carried by the people he left behind, and if your only concern was protecting the Noma name, it was masterfully executed. It just never addressed the victims. To me, it didn’t feel like closure. It felt like a successful getaway.

Awards Are Power

Noma was the most celebrated restaurant on the planet for a while, ranked number one five times by the World’s 50 Best Restaurants. What I took from Redzepi’s work: he drew a hard line around Copenhagen and refused to cross it. Fermented berries, sea buckthorn, insects — made transcendent through technique, not imported prestige. You didn’t need French or Italian convention to be taken seriously at that level. I believed that then, and I still do. But I took that lesson a long time ago, and Redzepi kept accumulating power long after anyone needed to give him more.

The mythology that magazine editors, documentary producers, award voters, and culinary schools built around him concentrated authority in one person, and nobody thought to check it. Nobody in that machine ever asked what was happening inside the kitchen. What they built wasn’t just a reputation — it was a brand more exclusive than any luxury label. You can walk into a Mercedes dealership today. You can order Gucci from your phone. Noma you had to be chosen for, be lucky enough to reach. That allure was so bright that what was happening inside was easy to not see, or easier still, to not look for.

A Financial Times investigation found 30 unpaid interns alongside 34 paid chefs, working up to 70 hours a week. Contracts threatened to blacklist anyone who left early. That’s worth holding onto the next time someone asks why they didn’t just walk out.

Only the most insufferable chef nerds would compare a kitchen stage to being on the 1998 Yankees — but for a certain kind of young cook, it meant about that much. Walking away meant walking away from that. And the contract made sure you knew it would cost you your reputation in the only industry you’d trained for. The exit wasn’t free.

The restaurant extracted millions in owner dividends over several years while calling its model unsustainable. When it began paying interns in late 2022, Redzepi announced the closure within weeks. The business was only sustainable because nearly half the kitchen worked for free.

In 2015, Redzepi had written that he had been “a bully for a large part” of his career. The following year, the Danish government awarded him the Order of the Dannebrog for his contributions to Danish cuisine. The 35 accounts in the Times investigation describe conduct that continued after that essay. A public confession of harm, absorbed by the culture as evidence of growth, that changed almost nothing for the people inside the kitchen.

The apology became a credential. The story it told was entirely about him — his demons, his reckoning, his arc. The people he harmed were backdrop. Once you’ve cast yourself as the protagonist of your own redemption, anyone still being harmed becomes a problem with the timeline, not with the man.

Young cooks stayed anyway. Noma on a resume lasted forever — walk into any kitchen in the world afterward and the conversation changed. For many of them, nothing bad happened. Good for them. But for the ones being abused, the math was probably pretty clear and pretty brutal: three months of this, then your whole professional life shifts. How many of them ran that calculation over and over, trying to decide if they could last? How many decided they could, and did, and paid for it? The abuse was the price some people paid to get there.

Noma made the news because a famous person was attached to it. Farms, meatpacking plants, and restaurant kitchens without famous people do and have done worse, but you never hear about it.

What the Receipt Doesn’t Show

According to the National Restaurant Association, the United States has roughly 1 million restaurants. The vast majority operate without celebrity chefs, documentary crews, or former employees with media platforms. The federal tipped minimum wage is $2.13 an hour, unchanged since 1991. McDonald’s settled a Michigan harassment case for $1.5 million. Chipotle paid $7.75 million for child labor violations in New Jersey. None of it generated a fraction of the coverage that one chef’s Instagram video produced in a single news cycle. The public pressure that briefly worked in Silver Lake almost never reaches the other 999,999 eateries in America.

Go further back in the supply chain and the protections thin out fast. The Fair Labor Standards Act exempts farmwork from the overtime rules that cover every other American industry. Children as young as 12 can legally work the fields with parental consent. On small farms, there’s no minimum age at all. Farmworkers die of heat illness at rates far above the general workforce. The EPA estimates tens of thousands of pesticide poisonings among agricultural workers every year. Under the H-2A guest worker visa, laborers are legally tied to a single employer — the same person who controls their working conditions controls their ability to remain in the country. These aren’t oversights. They’re policy choices.

An hour east of Naples, Florida, tomato pickers in Immokalee worked for decades under what federal prosecutors called “ground zero for modern slavery.” Nine prosecutions. Over 1,200 workers freed from forced labor between 1997 and 2022. Locked in trucks. Some chained.

In meatpacking, the scale is industrial. At JBS’s plant in Greeley, Colorado, workers process hundreds of cattle an hour until their hands lock into permanent claw positions. In 2023, Packers Sanitation Services paid $1.5 million after the Department of Labor found 102 children cleaning equipment overnight with caustic chemicals at 13 plants across eight states. A 2016 Oxfam America report documented poultry workers wearing diapers on the line because bathroom breaks were denied. Line speeds: 140 birds per minute. A 2019 Human Rights Watch report on meatpacking carried a title that does the work: “When We’re Dead and Buried, Our Bones Will Keep Hurting.”

In 2015, an Associated Press investigation traced slave labor on Thai fishing vessels to shrimp sold at Walmart, Kroger, and Red Lobster. Workers held at sea for years. Some beaten. Some disappeared. The AP won a Pulitzer for Public Service. The supply chains were not dismantled.

A $1,500 dinner produced by unpaid labor and a $4.99 rotisserie chicken produced by workers whose hands no longer work are the same contradiction at different price points. The abuses differ, but structure doesn’t: limited recourse for the workers, no way of knowing for the people buying the food.

What We Measure and What We Don’t

I’ve spent years watching the food and agriculture industry try to reckon with externalities, the costs that don’t show up on the receipt. Carbon emissions. Fertilizer runoff. Soil depletion. Deforestation. We have, in fits and starts, begun building infrastructure to account for some of these. Organic certification exists. The USDA’s regenerative label is taking shape. Michelin launched a Green Star in 2020 for environmental sustainability, proving that evaluation infrastructure could be built and deployed quickly when the Guide decided something mattered enough to measure.

For everything else, the environmental accounting is patchy, young, and easily gamed. “Carbon-neutral” on a package of beef can mean almost anything. “Regenerative” still has no single legal definition. Organic, the most established certification we have, accounts for roughly 6% of U.S. food sales after decades of growth.

And yet, even that limited, imperfect progress on environmental metrics vastly outpaces anything we’ve done for human worker treatment.

We have labels that tell you whether the chicken was cage-free or whether the cows were grass fed. We care, or we perform caring, about the life the animal lived and the condition the farm is in. We do not have a mainstream, consumer-facing label that tells you whether the person who picked the tomato was paid a living wage. We do not certify that the line worker at the meatpacking plant gets bathroom breaks. We have no widely recognized standard for whether cooks are allowed to work in a restaurant for 70-hours a week for free.

Consumer-facing environmental metrics, limited as they are, have gotten more institutional support in two decades than worker treatment has gotten in a long time. That gap reflects where the investment, market incentives, and consumer attention have pointed, and it suggests that the labor conversation won’t advance on its own.

The Work That Already Exists

There are people doing this work who deserve to be named.

Fair Trade certification guarantees minimum prices and labor standards for producers in developing countries, covering coffee, cocoa, bananas, sugar, and tea, but it applies primarily to imported commodities and doesn’t reach the restaurant kitchen in Chicago or the meatpacking plant in Greeley.

The Coalition of Immokalee Workers went directly to the buyers. The Fair Food Program requires participating retailers to pay a small premium, roughly a penny per pound of tomatoes, that flows down through the supply chain and shows up as a separate line item on workers’ paychecks. Farmers who refuse to comply with the worker-written code of conduct lose access to those buyers entirely.

Since 2011, that model has distributed more than $50 million in direct wage premiums to workers on participating farms. Take-home pay rose 50 to 70 percent. No documented cases of forced labor have occurred on a participating farm since the program launched. It now covers more than 20,000 workers in ten states across nine crops. McDonald’s, Walmart, Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, and Subway are in. Kroger and Publix are not, and workers on their suppliers’ farms remain outside its protections.

The Equitable Food Initiative certifies farms on labor practices, food safety, and pest management simultaneously, with workers participating in the auditing process. Regenerative Organic Certified, developed by Rodale Institute, Patagonia, and Dr. Bronner’s, builds worker welfare directly into its soil-health framework. B Corp evaluates companies across governance, workers, community, and environment. These are different mechanisms with the same basic argument: purchasing power, aimed at labor conditions, changes them.

What all of these efforts share is proof that the model works when people decide to back it. Organic certification didn’t start big. Carbon labeling is still finding its footing. Someone decided those things were worth building, and institutions followed. The awards bodies, major retailers, and restaurant groups haven’t made the same call on worker treatment. They haven’t made it a condition of doing business the way they have with environmental standards. But they could.

Redzepi’s pop-up runs through June, fully booked. Former Noma employees and their supporters stood outside while every seat inside was already taken. The guests watched, said nothing, and kept eating.

We know what the chicken ate. We have no idea whether the person who processed it can walk off the floor at the end of a shift. That gap isn’t an accident. It’s a choice we keep making every time we hand over a menu, scan a label, or give out an award without asking who made the food and what it cost them to do it.

—

Mike Lee is a food futurist and innovation strategist, author of Mise: On the Future of Food, host of The Tomorrow Today Show podcast, creator of Mise Futures, and is on Instagram at The Book of Mise.

The food system doesn’t exist apart from the world, and the world is in a genuinely difficult place. Regulatory infrastructure that took decades to build is being dismantled faster than anyone can track. The workers who pick, process, and pack most of what Americans eat are living under conditions of active fear. Food prices haven’t recovered. The political coalitions that once made food reform possible have fractured into tribes that now use food itself as a cultural weapon.

In moments like this, I find it useful to try to destroy the thing I care about — on paper, as a thought experiment, with as much honesty as I can manage. Not because I want to see it fail, but because finding the vulnerabilities yourself is better than letting your actual enemies find them first. If you wanted to kill the good food movement, what would you attack? Where are the walls thin? Which threats are already inside the building?

The good food movement, as I use the term, is food whose full chain of production and consumption leaves people and the planet in better shape than it found them: the soil, the labor, the bodies of the people eating it. Not organic as an aesthetic. Not farm-to-table as a restaurant category.

In February 2017, I wrote “The Four Horsemen of the Good Food Movement” on Medium and reprinted it here on Substack in 2023 without changing a word, because the thesis held. I named four threats: Apathy, Consolidation, False Truths, and Elitism. Bayer had absorbed Monsanto for $68 billion. False Truths had a ChatGPT upgrade. The horsemen were still riding.

It’s 2026. I ran the exercise again, and four threats kept surfacing: Pharmacology, Poverty, Capture, and Tribalism. Each one attacks the movement from a different direction, and together they’re bearing down simultaneously. The first one is also the newest — something that didn’t exist as a serious force in 2017 or even 2023, and that the movement hasn’t fully reckoned with yet.

Pharmacology

The optimistic version of the GLP-1 story goes like this: people on Ozempic eat less, their appetite shifts away from ultra-processed snacks toward actual food, and the market follows. Tens of millions of Americans eating differently is a different food culture. That’s not nothing.

Conagra put a “GLP-1 friendly” badge on 26 existing Healthy Choice frozen meals in January 2025. They didn’t change the recipe. They changed the label. Nestlé launched a companion product line. Danone reformulated an Oikos yogurt drink. The food industry looked at a moment when millions of people are trying to eat less and better, and saw a badge opportunity.

The drugs are genuinely helping people lose weight and manage blood sugar. But “people feel better” and “the food system got better” are two different things, and the food industry is working hard to make sure nobody notices the gap.

Here’s the deeper problem. When you feel good, it’s very easy to conclude that your relationship with food is healthy. Your weight is down. Your doctor is pleased. Your energy is up. Food feels like a solved problem — something you’ve handled. And in a culture that has always understood food primarily through the lens of personal health, feeling fine is basically the whole test. If your body is okay, what else is there to worry about?

Quite a lot, as it turns out. The way we produce food in this country is doing damage that has nothing to do with how any individual body feels. The soil that grows our food is depleting. The carbon load from agriculture, processing, and transport keeps accumulating. Water systems are being strained. The labor conditions for the people who actually grow and harvest food remain, in many cases, genuinely grim.

None of that shows up in your bloodwork. None of it gets better because your A1C improved. Getting people to care about those things has always required asking them to feel something on behalf of a system, rather than themselves — and that has always been a much harder ask than “this food is making you sick.”

GLP-1 drugs can address the personal health track. They do nothing for the systemic one. The risk is that as more people feel better, the urgency to fix either track softens, and the movement loses the one argument that has ever reliably moved people: that what they eat is hurting them. The movement still needs to make the systemic case, more concretely and more urgently than it has, and it needs to make that case to people who increasingly feel fine.

Poverty

Poverty has always been the good food movement’s original sin. The foods the movement champions cost more than the foods it’s trying to replace, and they’re sold in places that large portions of America can’t easily reach. That’s not new. What’s new is how many things are getting worse at the same time.

Food prices haven’t come back down to where they were before the pandemic. The SNAP cuts passed this year are the deepest in the program’s history, close to 20 percent over the next decade, which means families who rely on food assistance have less money for groceries at precisely the moment groceries are still expensive. The Kroger-Albertsons merger failed in federal court in late 2024, but the grocery consolidation that merger represented didn’t go away. In many lower-income communities, there are still basically two stores, and those stores know it.

Higher prices, fewer benefits, less retail competition — all three running simultaneously means the households most affected by a broken food system have less capacity to do anything about it than they did five years ago.

The good food movement has always told itself that scale would eventually solve this. Get enough people buying regenerative chicken and organic produce, the argument goes, and prices come down, distribution broadens, and better food stops being a luxury. That story has been circulating for twenty years. It hasn’t really happened.

The premium end of the food market has grown significantly, but the structural distance between what the movement produces and what most Americans can actually afford and access hasn’t closed in any meaningful way. If anything, the economic conditions of 2026 are pulling in the opposite direction — compressing the budgets of the people the movement most needs to reach, at exactly the moment when the political environment is making the systemic fixes harder to pursue.

The good food movement is largely a movement for people who already have enough. That’s been true for a long time. What’s different now is that the conditions making it true are getting harder to reverse, and the movement doesn’t have a serious answer for that yet. A movement that can’t reach the people who most need it isn’t a movement. It’s a product category.

Capture

This horseman doesn’t attack the movement from outside. It joins it.

The mechanism is straightforward enough that it’s easy to miss. A large food company acquires a brand that genuinely represents what the movement cares about. The brand keeps its name, its packaging, its founder story, its farmers market origin myth. What changes is the procurement process, the margin targets, and the pressure to scale. The practices that made the brand worth acquiring in the first place get quietly renegotiated until they’re something else. The label stays the same. The label is the whole point.

“Regenerative” is the current front line of this. It’s doing the work that “natural” did in 2017: a term that started with real meaning, got absorbed into marketing departments, and ended up written into voluntary certification programs with enough exceptions to drain it of operational content. Major retailers now put “regenerative” on private-label packaging while sourcing from farms whose practices wouldn’t survive any serious scrutiny. Danone, General Mills, and PepsiCo all carry regenerative agriculture commitments. Some of that represents genuine investment. Much of it is what happens when a procurement team is handed a sustainability mandate and told to hit it without touching the cost structure.

The harder problem is what this does to the people who actually care. When General Mills says it’s committed to regenerative agriculture, and Walmart puts regenerative labels on its house brand beef, and PepsiCo announces a seven-million-acre regenerative farming initiative, the average engaged consumer reasonably concludes that the movement won. The big guys came around. What else is there to fight for? But “regenerative” in a General Mills press release and “regenerative” as a genuine long-term commitment to soil health, carbon sequestration, and farmer livelihood are not the same thing — they just use the same word.

The advocates who understand that difference and try to say so out loud face an exhausting task: explaining why a win isn’t a win, why the label on the bag doesn’t reflect what happened in the field, why you should still be skeptical of a company that has now said all the right things. It’s a hard argument to make without sounding like someone who simply refuses to be satisfied. And that perception — that the critics are just moving the goalposts — is exactly what makes Capture so effective. The movement’s own vocabulary becomes the instrument of its neutralization.

That’s the real damage. Not the consumers misled by a label, though that matters too. It’s the gradual erosion of the movement’s ability to say what it actually stands for, because the words it stands for have been borrowed by people with different intentions and different incentive structures. The movement hasn’t figured out how to defend its vocabulary the way it defends its practices, and Capture is counting on that continuing.

Tribalism

The good food movement has always depended on the idea that food is common ground. People across the political spectrum eat. People across the political spectrum get sick from bad food, pay too much for groceries, and live in places where the options are limited. The argument was never that food reform required political consensus on everything — just that food itself was universal enough to build a working coalition around. That assumption is in worse shape than it’s ever been.

Food tribes are not inherently a problem. The regenerative agriculture movement is a food tribe. The slow food movement is a food tribe. Tribes form around genuine shared values and do real work. What’s different now is what happens when tribalism metastasizes — when the identity of the tribe becomes more important than its actual positions, and when the boundary between tribe and outsider becomes more important than the pursuit of any shared goal. At that point, tribes stop being productive subcultures and start being epistemological silos. People inside them stop evaluating evidence and start evaluating loyalty.

That’s the condition the food world is increasingly in. Seed oils are a right-wing wellness cause. Veganism is coded culturally left. Raw milk has become a freedom issue for a certain kind of libertarian voter. The carnivore diet functions as much as a political identity as a nutritional philosophy.

What’s striking is how often these factions are identifying real problems — genuine issues with industrial food, with dietary guidelines that have shifted over decades, with the outsized influence of large food companies on public health recommendations — and then retreating so far into their own frameworks that the conclusions become untethered from evidence. Fluoride in water is poison. Tylenol causes autism. The FDA is a captured institution that has been deliberately making Americans sick. These aren’t fringe positions anymore; they’re traveling alongside legitimate food policy arguments in ways that make the whole conversation harder to have.

The sharpest version of this is MAHA — Make America Healthy Again, the health platform associated with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his tenure at HHS. The policy targets are not exotic: federal scrutiny of ultra-processed food, a harder look at artificial additives, a rethinking of dietary guidelines that haven’t meaningfully evolved in decades. These are arguments the good food movement has been making since before 2017, in many cases much longer. The fact that they’re now being advanced alongside positions that strain credulity — and by people the movement strongly disagrees with on other issues — has created a kind of policy paralysis. Engaging with the substance feels like endorsing the whole package. So the movement largely doesn’t engage.

Some of that caution is warranted. But there’s something else going on worth naming. The good food movement has developed a cultural identity that operates somewhat independently of its actual policy goals. A policy win that arrives from outside the movement’s own codes doesn’t feel like a win. It can feel threatening to the identity itself, which is a very different thing from a substantive objection to the policy.

The result is a movement that has become better at protecting its culture than advancing its agenda. We’ve spent thirty years being told the movement was too elite, too coastal, too precious to translate beyond a certain kind of consumer. Now there’s a political moment making some of our arguments, to audiences we’ve never been able to reach. And we’re largely sitting it out. That’s worth examining more honestly than the movement has so far.

The Harder Work

The good food movement is not losing. It’s also not winning in the ways that matter most. More brands are using the right language. Fewer people are eating the right food. More companies have regenerative commitments. Less of the soil is actually being regenerated. The gap between what the movement says and what the food system does has arguably gotten wider at the same time that the movement has gotten louder.

None of these four horsemen require the movement to be incompetent or corrupt or asleep. Pharmacology is a genuine medical advance that happens to relieve pressure on the food system. Poverty is a structural condition that predates this movement and will outlast any administration. Capture is what success looks like when the wrong people show up to claim it. Tribalism is what happens when people who care deeply about something start caring more about who else cares than about the thing itself. These are hard problems precisely because they don’t have villains. They have incentives, and conditions, and the accumulated weight of a lot of individually reasonable decisions pulling in the wrong direction.

The movement has always been good at making the moral case. The food system is broken, the evidence is overwhelming, and the people with the most power to fix it have the least incentive to do so. That case is still true. What’s becoming clear in 2026 is that moral clarity, by itself, is not enough. The horsemen don’t respond to arguments. They respond to power, access, money, and organized political will — the things the movement has been slowest to build, and the things it most urgently needs now.

—

Mike Lee is a food futurist and innovation strategist, author of Mise: On the Future of Food, host of The Tomorrow Today Show podcast, creator of Mise Futures, and is on Instagram at The Book of Mise.

Unless you’ve been living under a digital rock, on February 3rd, McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski posted a video to Instagram introducing the chain’s new Big Arch burger. He was trim and scrubbed in a beige sweater, oxford collar visible, the kind of man whose aura, as one commenter observed, “screams kale salad.” He held the burger toward the camera like Exhibit A.

He called it a “product.” He took a bite so small the burger looked essentially untouched, then declared it “so good” with the conviction of someone confirming the parachute had, in fact, opened.

“That’s a big bite for a Big Arch,” he said. It was not.

Then came the pile-on. Burger King’s president posted himself biting a Whopper with genuine commitment, mayonnaise running down his chin (ew). Wendy’s president ate a Baconator on camera and dipped fries in a Frosty. Jack in the Box wagged a finger: “Small bites? We don’t do that here.” A&W Canada posted their CEO tearing into a “teen burger” with two hands.

McDonald’s leaned in. They posted a photo of the Big Arch captioned “Take a bite of our new product,” with the note “can’t believe this got approved.” One marketing firm estimated that the meme added $18.4 million of brand value to McDonald’s, whatever that means.

Why We Laughed

The video was funny because it confirmed what most of us already suspected: the man who runs McDonald’s does not seem like he actually eats McDonald’s. He earns $20 million a year selling a combo meal that costs $11, and in 81 seconds of unguarded footage, the distance between those two numbers became visible.

As Mark Ritson observed in Adweek: “You know your product intimately as a concept, its market share, its brand equity, its net promoter score, but you stop knowing it as a thing you shove in your mouth on Tuesday when you’re shitfaced.”

Fast food occupies a strange position in American life: we eat it constantly and trust it almost not at all. We know the photo on the menu board was styled by someone whose job is to make a $6 sandwich look like it has self-respect. We know the “freshness” means it arrived frozen on a truck. We know the person at the window was trained to say “my pleasure” whether they feel any or not. We eat it anyway, because on a Tuesday at 6pm or Saturday at 2am when the day (or night) has already won, fast and cheap counts for a lot.

The whole thing runs on a quiet agreement to not look too closely. Kempczinski’s tentative nibble and clinical vocabulary tore that up. He made the synthetic visible, let the machinery show. We recognized it instantly, because we’d always known it was there.

The best observational comedy works exactly like this. The comedian doesn’t tell you anything you didn’t already know. They just say it out loud, and the laugh comes from the relief of finally hearing it confirmed.

One Word

“Product.” Kempczinski called the Big Arch a product, and the internet treated it like a confession.

It wasn’t a confession. It was vocabulary. When you run a $220 billion company with 40,000 locations, the burger on your desk is, in fact, a product first and food second. It has a positioning statement, a margin target, a launch date, and a customer segmentation strategy. Kempczinski gets paid $20 million a year to make the Big Arch a successful product. Nobody’s cutting him a check to make it a wholesome food. He used the word because it’s the word everyone in his office uses every day.

But when you call your own burger a “product” on camera while holding the thing fourteen inches from your face, the internet notices. When a CEO holds up a burger and calls it a product, he’s telling you, without meaning to, how the people who create your food refer to your food most of the day.

The word “product” and the word “food” don’t describe the same object differently. They put you in completely different headspaces. One is about customer acquisition and margins. The other is about taste, hunger, the body. The soul. Food feeds people. Products feed corporations.

The best food companies learn to hold both at once. What made the Kempczinski video so arresting was catching a CEO who runs a food company talking about food like he’d never once thought of it as food. It felt like we saw something we weren’t supposed to see. Like running into your eccentric high school English teacher at a restaurant in your hometown on a Saturday, drunk on margaritas. Some things you just assume without proof. Then the proof arrives and you're somehow still caught off guard.

Food crosses a line that most other products don’t. You take it into your body. Every culture on earth has rituals around eating, not because nutrition requires ceremony, but because ingestion is an act of trust. When you’re placing that trust in a system rather than a person, the bet is that regulation and corporate incentives align, at least roughly, with your interest in not being harmed.

That bet has gotten harder to feel good about. The 21-ingredient bun. The patty engineered to hit a specific fat-to-lean ratio not for flavor but for cook-time consistency across 40,000 griddles worldwide. The “natural flavors” that are natural only in the sense that a chemist probably derived them from something that once grew in soil. Each choice is rational from a business standpoint and widens the distance between the words food and product.

And when everything is a product, everything gets optimized. The ingredients, the cooking time, the portion size, the packaging. And once you’ve standardized all of that, the last remaining variable is the person handing it to you. Burger King is currently rolling out an AI system named Patty across 500 U.S. restaurants, listening through headsets and generating friendliness scores for workers based on keyword detection. This is literally a Black Mirror episode come alive for BK employees.

The goal is consistency: sand down the variables that humans naturally introduce, the bad days and distracted moments and accents that don’t quite parse, until the transaction runs as smoothly as the supply chain that produced the food. The worker becomes another input to standardize. The hospitality isn’t there to make you feel like a person. It’s there to confirm the product arrived correctly.

At some point you have to ask: if you automate all the humanity out of the experience, is it still a restaurant? Or is it just a vending machine with seats?

McDonald’s killed its own AI ordering pilot in 2024 after the system kept adding items nobody ordered. Taco Bell paused its version after a memorable glitch: the system asked a customer what they’d like to drink with their drink. Each failure reveals the same gap the Kempczinski video did: the machinery behind the curtain becomes visible at the exact moment it’s supposed to be invisible.

The Escape

I watched the original video more times than I’m comfortable putting in writing. I even renamed a group chat I’m a part of to “Products,” since that was all we talked about for over a week. I still see new parodies spawning every day, more than a month after the original video was posted. Yeah, I’m in deep, and writing this essay will either get it out of my system or send me further down the hole.

The world since January 1st has been a lot. Our phones have made it possible to witness every atrocity happening everywhere on earth, in real time, all day. What’s happening to people out there right now is genuinely horrible. And our brains were not built for this. The caveman brains we all have evolved to process the immediate dangers of a small tribe, not a live feed of a planet in crisis. And yet here we are, doom-scrolling through wars and political dysfunction and injustice before we’ve finished our morning coffee.

Then a CEO in a beige sweater takes a comically small bite of a burger, and for a few days, the entire internet agrees on something that costs nothing to care about. No body count. No villain. No position required. Looking away from the hard stuff for a minute doesn’t make you a bad person or an indifferent one. Sometimes it makes you a functioning one. The hard stuff will still be there when you look back. It needs us paying attention.

But you can’t pay attention to everything, all the time, without occasionally looking away. The Chris K video was that. An innocent gaffe that gave millions of people a low-stakes place to gather and laugh at the same thing before diving back in to face reality.

We’ve always known the product frame, the fiction on the menu board, the manufactured smile at the window, the CEO who doesn’t eat his own burger. Most days we’d rather not think about it. And that’s exactly how McDonald’s likes it.

The break is the product. The distraction is the point. Keep us coming back for the comfort, not the nutrition, because if we actually stopped long enough to think about the nutrition, we might not come back at all. Kempczinski accidentally told us how they talk about the food. What he didn’t say, and didn’t need to, is that they’ve always been selling something else entirely.

Maybe that’s the real product McDonald’s has always sold. Not the burger. The escape.

—

Mike Lee is a food futurist and innovation strategist, author of Mise: On the Future of Food, host of The Tomorrow Today Show podcast, creator of Mise Futures, and is on Instagram at The Book of Mise.

This is the latest in a thread I’ve been pulling on for years on a topic that has had a remarkable effect on the state of food and nutrition: food tribalism.

I’ve written about how America’s fractured political landscape produced an equally fractured food culture. About how the attention economy swallowed Big Food whole and turned small brands into attention-mining operations.

About how algorithms manufacture consensus around trends nobody asked for, and how your feed shapes what you eat before you’ve consciously decided you’re hungry.

About how AI will deepen every one of these dynamics by giving each food tribe its own personalized echo chamber.

I still believe in those past writings but this space continues to evolve, so I want to pull the thread forward. The shift away from mass-brand food keeps accelerating, and the industry is starting to look as divided as the country itself.

The Creator Industrial Complex

In February, Unilever CEO Fernando Fernandez told investors at CAGNY that “the times of big corporate big brand messages are gone.” Mass marketing isn’t dead yet, but you can see where this is heading. The $60-billion company was shifting half its media budget to creators and influencers, up from 30 percent. By late 2025, Unilever was already working with close to 300,000 of them. Fernandez’s ambition was granular: one influencer in each of India’s 19,000 zip codes, one in each of Brazil’s 5,764 municipalities.

He’s not alone. PepsiCo builds “creator ecosystems” around Doritos, Lay’s, and Mountain Dew. Earnings calls from General Mills, Gap, and Bath & Body Works all echo the same pivot. The influencer marketing industry hit an estimated $32.5 billion in 2025.

This matters for food culture because of what creators actually do at a structural level: they speak to specific communities in those communities’ own language. They penetrate niches that mass advertising can’t reach. In a food landscape where identity and ideology are increasingly inseparable from what people eat, Unilever’s announcement amounts to the industrialization of tribal marketing.

Big Food has always been in the attention aggregation business. What’s changed is the method. Over the past two decades, established food companies have been buying up new, modern food brands for their ability to convert cultural relevance into revenue. The creator pivot takes that logic further. You don’t even need to buy the brand anymore. You rent the creator, who already lives inside the tribe.

The carnivore community, the seed-oil skeptics, the raw vegans, the biohackers: each has its own creators, its own vernacular, its own information ecosystem. And now the world’s largest food companies are building infrastructure to reach every single one of them, separately, simultaneously, with tailored messages that feel native to each tribe.

The fragmentation we’ve been witnessing isn’t just happening organically anymore. It’s being fueled with marketing dollars.

The Life Cycle of a Food Movement

Many modern food movements follow a similar arc: A small group coalesces around a genuine insight. The movement grows, attracts money, and builds a cottage industry. Wanting to reach a wider audience, some players in that movement end up adapting and diluting the original idea for mass appeal. The purists revolt. The movement splinters into factions that resent each other.

Paleo is useful as a case study because its entire lifecycle is visible. It began in 1985, when S. Boyd Eaton published a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine arguing that human genetics were mismatched with modern agricultural diets. The movement coalesced around evolutionary emulation: eat what a caveman ate.

By the early 2010s, Paleo had bureaucratized. Certified products, conferences, influencer networks. Then science complicated the founding narrative. Researchers found starch residue on stone tools showing humans ate grains and tubers for at least 100,000 years. The rigid meat-centric caveman story was, at minimum, incomplete. Simultaneously, “Paleo-friendly” packaged brownies flooded grocery shelves, technically compliant but spiritually bankrupt.

The splintering is confirmed by people inside the movement. Robb Wolf, one of Paleo’s most prominent voices, has described the commercialization candidly: somebody would create “a brandable flavor of paleo” with “arbitrary lane lines,” which is “largely what Whole30 ended up being.” Some adherents went full carnivore, rejecting all plant matter. Others pivoted to biohacking. The moderate middle got absorbed into mainstream “clean eating.”

Veganism is running a version of this playbook a decade behind. What began as radical animal rights activism became a multi-billion-dollar retail market. Biotech companies began engineering plant-based alternatives at industrial scale. Food geographers now call the result “Big Veganism,” and the tension is visible from within. Miyoko Schinner, who built one of the movement’s flagship brands, took venture capital to scale nationally, lost control of her own company, and watched the new owners cheapen the products until the brand entered liquidation.

She now describes herself as fighting “the system that has been hurling headlong toward consolidated control for decades,” trying to “return control of the food system to ordinary people, farmers, small producers, more entrepreneurs.” The vanguard retreated into raw veganism and community-supported agriculture. The mainstream settled into flexitarianism. The movement didn’t die, it just fractured.

Then, enter Unilever or someone like them. When Fernandez deploys 300,000 creators, he’s building infrastructure that can reach each food tribe fragment individually. A creator who already lives inside a carnivore forum or a raw vegan subreddit can penetrate communities that mass advertising never could. Big Food isn’t trying to reverse the fragmentation. It’s monetizing the shards.

When Diet Becomes Religion

The deeper concern with dietary tribalism isn’t commercial. It’s psychological.

Traditional dietary laws (Kosher, Halal) served specific sociological functions: they defined group boundaries, demonstrated shared values, maintained communal identity. In a secularized America where religious affiliation and civic participation have dropped sharply, food morality appears to have filled some of that vacancy.

The pursuit of healthy eating has taken on a religious quality where certain foods are sinful and eating a certain rigid way is godly. The clinical extreme is orthorexia nervosa: an obsessive fixation on food purity that leads to severe restriction and social isolation. The body becomes a site of relentless moral surveillance. And there’s a striking finding in the research: higher levels of traditional religiosity correlate with lower rates of orthorexic behavior. When people have a stable source of moral identity and community, they seem less compelled to construct it through extreme dietary restriction. The food tribe fills a void that other institutions used to occupy.

Once diet functions as religion, any challenge to your dietary choices stops being data. It becomes blasphemy. And that’s where the wellness-to-extremism pipeline begins. During COVID, researchers tracked what they called “Pastel QAnon”: conspiracy content repackaged by wellness influencers with soft aesthetics, yoga poses, and organic food photography. Same ideology as the dark-web original, delivered like a lifestyle brand.

The bridge between wellness communities and conspiracy movements is a shared distrust of centralized authority. If you’ve already decided that the USDA dietary guidelines are shaped by industry lobbyists (they are), that sugar companies funded research to blame fat for heart disease (they did), and that regulators approved additives banned in other countries (true), then the person telling you that vaccines are a pharmaceutical cash grab is speaking a language you already understand. The facts change. The grammar of suspicion stays the same.

Where This Goes

Imagine the current trajectory continuing for twenty years. Unilever’s 300,000 creators become 3 million. Every major food company deploys AI-matched creator networks. The algorithmic sorting tightens. The tribal identities harden.

The American grocery store starts to look less like a shared public space and more like a collection of embassies for competing dietary nations. The carnivore section sells identity as much as meat, curated by creators speaking the language of ancestral health and anti-establishment defiance.

Two aisles over, the regenerative-organic section speaks a different dialect entirely, one of soil health and planetary stewardship and carbon sequestration. The products sit on the same shelves, but the consumers buying them inhabit different information universes, watching different creators, reading different studies, operating from different first principles about what food is for.

The optimistic version of this future is real personalization. People with celiac disease, metabolic disorders, and genuine food allergies have more options than ever. The explosion of cuisines available to ordinary Americans is a real gain. I don’t want to return to the monoculture of meat, potatoes, and Wonder Bread.

The pessimistic version is permanent fracture. A food system where nobody shares a common understanding of basic nutrition because every tribe has its own version of reality. We’re already closer to this than most people realize. Seed oils are either a metabolic poison or a perfectly healthy cooking fat, depending on who you follow. Raw milk is either a living food full of beneficial enzymes or a vector for listeria. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sits atop federal health policy while promoting the claim that vaccines cause autism. A not-insignificant number of parents now believe Tylenol is more dangerous than measles. Two people can look at the same peer-reviewed meta-analysis and reach opposite conclusions, each citing the studies that confirm their priors, each accusing the other of cherry-picking.

Algorithms don’t reward the person saying “it’s complicated.” They reward the person saying “they’re lying to you.”

The concept of a “healthy diet” is as contested as the concept of a “fair election.” And once that happens, we lose the shared basis for collective decisions about school lunches, dietary guidelines, food labeling, public health campaigns. Every nutritional recommendation becomes a political statement. Every food label becomes a tribal flag.

Fragmentation can be profitable. Every new tribal identity generates new products, new creators, new certifications. Nobody in the supply chain has a financial incentive to tell a carnivore devotee and a raw vegan that they actually agree on most nutritional principles: eat whole foods, avoid ultra-processed junk, cook at home more often. Agreement doesn’t generate content. Agreement doesn’t sell supplements.

My read: the only force strong enough to counteract this is either a shared crisis severe enough to make the tribal distinctions feel petty, or a new generation of food leaders willing to build businesses around nutritional common ground rather than tribal identity. I’ve seen glimmers of the latter in companies that focus on soil health and flavor across all foods, rather than a more narrowly focused dietary ideology. But they’re outnumbered and outspent.

Expo West, a.k.a. the Superbowl of the “supposedly better-for-you food products sold in plastic packages industry,” kicks off in Anaheim this week, with thousands of exhibitors packed into the convention center. It has become something like a large hadron collider for modern food brands and those who love them: every food tribe, every dietary ideology, every brand built on a nutritional conviction smashing into each other at high speed, ejecting new deals, ideas, partnerships, and products in every direction. If you want to see what all the food tribes actually look like, walk that floor.

The food industry has always been good at giving people what they want. And it doesn’t need you to agree on what’s right. It just needs you to keep buying whatever you’ve decided “right” means.

—

Mike Lee is a food futurist and innovation strategist, author of Mise: On the Future of Food, host of The Tomorrow Today Show podcast, creator of Mise Futures, and is on Instagram at The Book of Mise.

Last week, I argued that MAHA’s dietary goals aren’t worth the political wreckage of the administration they’re attached to. Even so, I kept coming back to the same problem. Strip away the politics entirely. Get dietary guidelines written by independent scientists with zero industry interference. You’d still land on the same hollow instruction that well-meaning food people have been repeating for two decades: eat real food.

I believe that advice. The problem is that “eat real food” is almost never followed by the harder question: how, exactly, when most people don’t cook?

Cooking is the most obvious answer to the question of how to eat better. It’s so obvious that it barely gets said, and when it does, it lands with all the persuasive power of “just go to the gym.” Everyone already knows they should go to the gym.

That’s not the hard part. The hard part is getting people to actually go, consistently, in a life that is full of other demands. The gym membership sits unused not because of ignorance but because the act of going is mentally and physically expensive in a way that sitting on the couch is not.

Cooking works the same way. The friction is real: the planning, the shopping, the prep, the cleanup, the whole production of it, all weighed against the ease of hitting a button on DoorDash and having food appear at your door in thirty minutes. On a Tuesday night after a long day of work, that comparison rarely goes in cooking’s favor.

Why People Don’t Cook

In a 2025 Instacart survey of over a thousand Americans, lack of time and after-work fatigue were the top two reasons people said they don’t cook more, well above any lack of knowledge or inspiration. One in five adults skips cooking after work because they’re too exhausted to start. A quarter say they avoid cooking certain dishes because they’re not confident using a knife.

A 2025 HelloFresh report found that 38 percent of Americans simply don’t have groceries on hand when they need them. And then there’s the identity barrier, the quiet but persistent belief that cooking is something other people do: foodies, retirees, people with more time, people with different lives.

That belief is worth confronting directly, because it’s not true and it’s defeatist. You do not have to be a foodie to cook. You do not have to aspire to cook beautifully or impressively or creatively. The bar for “cooking” that changes your relationship to food is genuinely low. It is knowing how to make chicken, rice, and broccoli on a weeknight. It is understanding that you can scramble eggs and that doing so is faster than driving to a fast-food window. It is making spaghetti with jarred tomato sauce, which, if you weren’t making it before, is a revelation in what you’re capable of.

Decades of food media have accidentally raised the bar for what counts as cooking at home. The Food Network era gave us beautiful people making complicated things in beautiful kitchens, and influencers followed with intricate recipes and aspirational aesthetics. That content produced genuinely passionate home cooks. But it also made cooking feel like a performance, something you do when you’re ready, with the right pan and the right amount of time. For everyone else, the implicit message became: this isn’t really for you.

How One Habit in the Kitchen Becomes Ten

A great framework for thinking about how to get more people to start cooking isn’t from nutrition science or even culinary education. It’s broken windows theory.

The argument, developed by James Wilson and George Kelling in a 1982 Atlantic essay, holds that visible signs of disorder invite more disorder. Fix the broken windows in a neighborhood and you change the social signal. One small act of maintenance can shift the entire environment. Cooking works the same way. One meal you make yourself doesn’t just feed you. It changes the signal you send yourself about what kind of cook you are.

Someone who has never cooked makes spaghetti with jarred tomato sauce for the first time. That’s it. That’s the whole move. But now they know the process: how to salt pasta water, how long to wait, how to drain it. They’ve navigated a stove without catastrophe. The next time they make it, they might add garlic to the jar sauce. A few weeks later, they buy canned tomatoes instead. Months later, fresh ones from a farmers market in August.

They’re not following a rigid recipe plan. They’re following a habit that keeps growing because they didn’t fail at the beginning. Research from the University of Minnesota confirmed this compounding effect: people who perceived themselves as competent cooks in their early twenties were 3.5 times more likely to be cooking with vegetables regularly a decade later, and significantly less likely to be eating fast food.

The single most important thing you can do is not learn to cook well. It’s to start cooking at all, with whatever you have, with no particular aspiration beyond making something. The recipe for failure here is perfectionism.

Cooking as Self-Defense

Michael Pollan has a rule that sounds like permission: eat all the junk food you want, as long as you cook it yourself. Most people read this as a friction argument. But the rule still holds even for confident, efficient home cooks for whom the labor stopped being a barrier long ago. What cooking actually does is make things real.

If you make a birthday cake from scratch, you personally add the butter, the sugar, the oil. You watch the batter come together and have a pretty clear sense of what you just built. Compare that to a Hostess cake from a gas station. The ingredients are abstract. You didn’t witness them. Abstraction is permissive. Cooking removes it.

That same engagement, built up over time in a kitchen, also gives you a useful immunity to the noise. Someone who cooks regularly knows that fat carries flavor in ways water never can, that acid rescues a dish that tastes flat, why salt matters beyond just making things salty.

That working knowledge makes it harder to get played by a “low fat” label on something that compensates with sugar, or to fall for the advice that you shouldn’t eat any ingredient you can’t pronounce. Someone who has actually cooked with xanthan gum knows it’s an innocuous thickener (used in miniscule amounts), not a toxin. You don’t need to be a nutritionist. You just need enough firsthand experience with real ingredients to recognize when someone is trying to sell you a story.

Cooking won’t make you perfect about what you eat. It’s not supposed to. But it makes you a more honest and more informed participant in the choices you’re making. That’s worth more than any dietary framework currently competing for your attention.

Instincts, Not Recipes

The culture of recipes has produced a generation of cooks who are helpless without instructions. That’s backwards. I wrote about this almost a decade ago, and I keep coming back to it: recipes are written like classical music. Follow the score and you get something close to what was intended, but deviation is a mistake. Jazz works differently. You learn the scales, internalize the chord structures, develop a feel for tension and resolution, then you improvise. A jazz musician can walk into any room with players they’ve never met and make something work, because the knowledge lives in their hands, not in someone else’s composition. That’s the difference between a recipe-follower and someone who actually knows how to cook.

But if you still need the comfort of a recipe, start with that recipe, then start bending it. If you’re comfortable with beef and broccoli, swap in chicken, swap in cauliflower, change the sauce. These moves feel trivial, but they’re what builds agency. Once you realize a recipe is a template and not a script, you can adapt on the fly with what you have, cooking around a picky eater, making it work on a Wednesday with half a fridge.

AI can help too, more than people expect. Tell it what’s in your fridge, how much time you have, how many people you’re feeding. The result may not win awards, but a workable dinner from scratch beats DoorDash for anyone trying to build a habit. And if you want to skip the composition problem entirely, forget dishes altogether. Cook single ingredients well. Ninety percent of my home meals are a protein in a pan, a vegetable alongside, a grain underneath. Learn to pan-roast a chicken breast and you mostly know how to pan-roast a pork chop. Learn to blanch green beans and you can blanch almost anything. The techniques transfer. The repertoire builds itself.

The fundamentals are not mysterious. Salt, fat, acid, heat. Seasoning at the start of cooking tastes different than at the end. Browning has a look, a smell, and a sound. These aren’t techniques so much as instincts, and instincts are what you’re really after.

And the part that actually matters for most people on most nights: these instincts don’t require ideal conditions. They work in chaos. They work when you’re tired and the fridge is half-empty and nobody planned anything. You look at what you have, you know that the wilting vegetables will crisp up in a hot pan, that the leftover grain needs acid and salt to come back to life, that the eggs in the back of the fridge can turn almost anything into a meal.

That’s not a TikTok moment. Nobody’s filming it. But it’s the thing that makes you decide to cook instead of reaching for your phone to order delivery. Knowing a few principles well enough to improvise lowers the threshold for when cooking feels possible, which is the only threshold that actually matters.

What Cooking Changes

Here is the thought experiment I can’t stop thinking about: imagine every American knows how to cook at least a little. A minimum-viable version, a handful of dishes, a few techniques, some basic instincts about flavor. What does the country look like in thirty years?

Fast food doesn’t disappear, but it shrinks, because home is a real option for more people rather than an aspiration for a few. Farmers selling whole vegetables become more competitive with processors selling engineered convenience. The entire debate about ultra-processed food becomes irrelevant to you, not because it’s been resolved but because you’re not really a part of it anymore.

There’s a more personal version of this too. Wars, markets, political decisions made by people you didn’t vote for about things you actually care about — a lot of it feels out of reach right now. Cooking doesn’t fix any of that. But it’s one of the few places left where you’re fully in charge. You decided what went in. You made it. You put it on the table. In a moment when the news cycle makes agency feel like a fantasy, that’s a concrete thing to hold onto.

None of this requires waiting for legislation that may never arrive or a pricey public health PR campaign. It requires enough people in enough households deciding they can cook, starting badly, and continuing anyway. The industrial food system’s biggest advantage is the widespread belief that making food is something other people do. That belief is wrong. And the moment enough people find that out, everything changes.

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Mike Lee is a food futurist and innovation strategist, author of Mise: On the Future of Food, host of The Tomorrow Today Show podcast, creator of Mise Futures, and is on Instagram at The Book of Mise.

On January 7, 2026, two things happened in America. The federal government released the most significant overhaul of dietary guidelines in a generation. And in Minneapolis, ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot and killed Renee Good, a 37-year-old American citizen with no criminal record, in her car.

The same administration produced both events on the same day, and the food industry has spent the past month talking almost exclusively about one of them.

I’ve been watching the expert takes on the new dietary guidelines closely. The anti-ultra-processed-food stance is welcome, the protein targets are aggressive, the saturated fat math doesn’t add up, the conflicts of interest are troubling, and the alcohol guidance is suspiciously vague. That conversation has been thorough and largely correct, and I don’t need to run it back.

My work is about getting people to think more holistically about food systems—to see the externalities that come with the things we celebrate. We talk about the hidden costs of cheap beef. We talk about what monoculture does to soil. We should apply the same thinking here. These dietary guidelines, whatever their merits, did not arrive on their own. They came with MAGA. And just as we should account for the environmental cost of a dollar menu cheeseburger, we need to account for what came bundled with MAHA.

What too few people seem willing to say is simpler and harder: are the new dietary guidelines—however improved—worth the immigration raids, the environmental rollbacks, the gutted agencies, and everything else this administration has done?

What the Guidelines Actually Do

Before weighing that question, it helps to be honest about what the guidelines actually change. They matter enormously in a few specific domains and barely at all everywhere else.

Where they carry real force: federal feeding programs. The National School Lunch Program serves 30 million kids a day. SNAP and WIC shape the purchasing options for tens of millions of low-income families. Military meal planning, VA hospitals, federal prisons—anywhere the government buys and serves food, these guidelines become the operating manual.

Where they carry less influence: your kitchen. Mine either. Most Americans won’t read these guidelines and won’t change what they cook for dinner on a Tuesday. Economics, convenience, culture, and flavor have always been more powerful forces than a government PDF. That said, the guidelines may give validation to people already eating meat-heavy, paleo, or keto diets. For the subset of Americans who do follow federal nutrition advice, this is a meaningful shift. But for everyday folks who don’t track this stuff, life goes on.

People don’t make food decisions by consulting a pyramid. They make them tired, at 6 p.m., with kids screaming, choosing between what’s fast and what’s familiar. A serious dietary framework would start with the humans—their schedules, their kitchens, their skills, their budgets, their cultures—and work backward to the science. These guidelines start with the science and assume compliance will follow. It rarely does.

RFK’s contribution, if he made one, was cultural rather than regulatory. His rhetoric—Beef is BACK, Butter is BACK—gave social permission to people who already wanted to eat more of those things. Kennedy didn’t invent the anti-seed-oil movement or the ancestral health community. He gave them a government seal.

The honest assessment: the guidelines will meaningfully affect school lunches and federal food programs. They will modestly influence clinical nutrition conversations. They will barely register in how most Americans eat day to day.

And if anyone thinks the big food companies are going to absorb the push against ultra-processed foods quietly, PepsiCo offers a useful counterpoint. Frito-Lay launched a dye-free NKD line of Doritos and Cheetos — a token gesture toward the new dye-free mood, but one that sits alongside the conventional versions, not in place of them. The real strategy was on PepsiCo’s most recent earnings call, where CEO Ramon Laguarta announced double-digit shelf space gains for Frito-Lay in upcoming store resets. NKD is just a PR strategy. Expanding the ultra-processed footprint is the business plan.

The Bargain

Many people in the food industry understand that food is political. The best ones have always known it—that immigration policy is food policy, that farm bills shape what we eat more than any dietary advice, that the labor conditions in a processing plant are as much a food issue as what comes out of it.

But understanding food as political and being willing to confront the politics head-on are different things. And when MAHA arrived speaking the industry’s language—reduce ultra-processed foods, eliminate artificial dyes, challenge captured science—it made confrontation feel unnecessary. The food goals and the political vehicle could be separated, or so the thinking went. They can’t.

On the MAHA side: stronger language against ultra-processed foods. A push to remove artificial dyes, with the FDA hinting at mandatory action by 2027. Higher protein targets. Full-fat dairy guidance that aligns with where the evidence has been trending. Fermented foods in the guidelines for the first time.

On the MAGA side: the elimination of SNAP-Ed, which provided nutrition education to the communities most affected by diet-related disease. An immigration enforcement campaign that has turned restaurants into surveillance sites and left Latino student attendance in Minneapolis-area schools cut in half—kids too scared to make the drive to the building where they’re supposed to eat the improved school lunch.

The administration released the Epstein files, then redacted the names of suspected co-conspirators while leaving victims’ identities exposed. The EPA repealed the scientific finding that greenhouse gases endanger human health, eliminating federal authority to regulate climate pollution. The same EPA re-approved dicamba, a herbicide federal courts had twice struck down, with a former soybean-industry lobbyist running the pesticide office. Even prominent MAHA activists—Kennedy’s own allies—called it a favor to the chemical industry.

Relationships with historical allies in Europe have frayed under tariff threats and diplomatic hostility. The affordability of life’s basic necessities—groceries, housing, childcare—has not improved. The administration promised to make life cheaper; for most Americans, it hasn’t.

Was getting dye-free food labels and higher protein targets worth all of this? Worth gutting the EPA’s authority to fight climate pollution? Worth re-approving pesticides that federal courts rejected? Worth terrorizing immigrant communities out of the food programs these guidelines claim to improve? Worth the shootings, the raids, the children too frightened to go to school? Each person will answer that differently. But if you care about health—as MAHA claims to—you have to account for the full ledger, not just the line items you like.

Did We Need MAHA to Get Better Food Policy?

No.

The anti-UPF movement was building momentum long before RFK entered government. Carlos Monteiro coined the term in 2009. By 2024, the scientific literature linking UPF consumption to chronic disease had reached critical mass. California banned Red No. 3 from public schools in 2023 without any help from MAHA. The science on full-fat dairy had been shifting for years. Higher protein targets for aging populations were already being discussed in sports nutrition and geriatric medicine.

None of this required a political movement or Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Many people who support MAHA care genuinely about these issues, and they’re right to. But MAHA didn’t create that trajectory. It accelerated certain elements of it, contaminated the process with the industry capture it claimed to be fighting, and packaged the results inside a political movement causing tangible harm to millions of people.

The contradictions run deeper than food labels. MAHA tells Americans to eat real food, limit processed ingredients, and take personal responsibility for their health. Meanwhile, the same administration has gutted the EPA’s ability to regulate the air those Americans breathe and the water they drink. It has ordered the agency to stop calculating the human cost of pollution. It has re-approved a potent herbicide that drifts onto neighboring farms and that federal courts have blocked twice.

If your health movement can’t keep pesticides out of the fields or particulate matter out of the lungs, it’s not a health movement. It’s a nutrition pamphlet stapled to an environmental rollback. The marginal benefit of new dietary guidelines—guidelines that most Americans will never read—does not outweigh losing the federal government’s authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, hold polluters accountable, and keep potent chemicals off our food supply.

What It Would Actually Take

The underlying impulse behind MAHA—that the American food supply is contributing to a chronic disease crisis and that federal policy has been complicit—is correct. It was correct before RFK said it and it will be correct after he’s gone. So what would a serious version of this look like, untethered from an administration that also deports the people who work in our food supply chain?

It would start by treating dietary guidelines as the beginning of a conversation, not the end of one. The document tells Americans to eat more protein, more whole grains, more fruits and vegetables. It says almost nothing about how a family on SNAP benefits affords the grass-fed beef the guidelines implicitly endorse, or how a school cafeteria serving 800 lunches a day transitions from reheating frozen entrees to cooking from whole ingredients without additional staff, equipment, or training.

You can’t wish ultra-processed food out of people’s diets. If someone doesn’t know how to make dinner from whole ingredients—and doesn’t have the time, money, or energy to learn—they’re going to keep reaching for what’s fast and familiar. A serious food health movement would invest in the knowledge and capability that make healthier eating possible: cooking education within cultural food traditions, practical meal planning for people with real constraints, community-level programs that meet families where they are rather than lecturing them from a government PDF.

That also means investing in the infrastructure side. Increase SNAP benefit levels alongside any restrictions on what can be purchased, so families aren’t choosing between fewer calories and worse calories. Give school nutrition programs the staffing and equipment budgets required to actually cook real food at scale. Build supply chains that get nutrient-dense food into the communities where diet-related disease hits hardest, at prices that compete with ultra-processed alternatives.

It means decoupling dietary science from agricultural economics. The USDA simultaneously writes the dietary guidelines and promotes commodity agriculture—a structural conflict of interest that predates this administration by decades. The grain lobby warped the guidelines in the ’90s, the dairy lobby in the 2000s, the beef lobby now. A future administration should separate these functions entirely: let an independent public health body write the dietary guidelines and let the USDA do agriculture policy.

It means building a food culture where the healthy choice wins on its own terms. Not through mandates or guilt, but through flavor, price, and convenience. Fund plant breeding that optimizes for taste and nutrition rather than just yield and shelf stability. That last part is impossible without restructuring the Farm Bill—ultra-processed food is cheap because the commodity crops behind it are subsidized and shelf-stable, not because anyone chose it over fresh produce on a level playing field.

Support the chefs and food scientists working to prove that minimally processed food can be more craveable than the engineered stuff. This is what I’ve called hedonistic sustainability: the principle that healthy food has to win on selfish terms, on pleasure and desire, or it won’t achieve the scale we need. Altruism gets you early adopters. Pleasure gets you the mainstream.

All of this is achievable under a competent, humane administration of either party.

Where This Leaves Us

The spirit of MAHA—the parts that are right about processed food, about chronic disease, about the failure of previous dietary guidance—will outlive this administration. These ideas have been building for two decades and they don’t belong to any political party.

What we need to do is rescue them from the movement that has contaminated them and build them into something that serves everyone. Not just the people who shop at Erewhon. Not just the people who can afford grass-fed beef. Not just the people who are safe enough to leave their homes in the morning.

The food industry bears particular responsibility here. Too many companies and leaders embraced MAHA because it spoke their language on ultra-processed food and clean labels—while ignoring or minimizing everything else the administration was doing. That silence was a choice. Going forward, the industry needs to advocate for better food policy without providing cover for a political movement that terrorizes the workers who make the food system run. You don’t get to celebrate cleaner ingredient lists while staying quiet about the raids in restaurant kitchens.

The path forward is not complicated, even if it’s difficult. Fight for dietary guidelines grounded in independent science. Fight for the funding and infrastructure to make those guidelines real in schools and communities. Fight for a food system that nourishes rather than sickens. And refuse to accept a bargain where any of that requires looking away from the human wreckage piling up alongside it.

MAHA is not worth MAGA. But the underlying project—building a food system that nourishes rather than sickens—is too important to abandon just because an administration that has caused this much damage claimed it first.

We need to take it back. We need to do it right. And we need to do it without anyone getting hurt, hunted, or erased in the process.

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Mike Lee is a food futurist and innovation strategist, author of Mise: On the Future of Food, host of The Tomorrow Today Show podcast, creator of Mise Futures, and is on Instagram at The Book of Mise.

Two prediction market companies announced free grocery stunts in New York City this month. Kalshi set up outside a Manhattan grocery store offering shoppers up to $50 in free food. Their tweet: “F it. Free groceries for everyone.” Polymarket, its larger rival, went bigger—opening what it calls “New York’s first free grocery store” for five days, along with a $1 million donation to the Food Bank for New York City.

“F it” is what you say before buying last-minute concert tickets or booking a spontaneous flight to Paris. It’s the language of carefree impulse, of throwing caution to the wind on something fun. Applying it to feeding people who can’t afford groceries tells you everything about how this was framed—not as a response to a crisis, but as a vibe.

My first reaction should have been simple—free food is free food. But I kept wondering who was actually in that line, and whether a grocery giveaway that functions as a photo op gives off a different vibe than one that functions as a lifeline. There’s something about turning hunger into a brand activation—someone else’s need becoming your marketing moment—that makes generosity feel like it’s performing for the wrong audience.

I know this isn’t entirely rational. When a food bank receives a major donation, they hold a press conference. They put out a press release. Someone poses with an oversized check. That’s also turning food assistance into PR, and it doesn’t bother me. Maybe the difference is that a food bank’s entire reason for existing is feeding people, so the PR is in service of the mission. When a gambling company sets up a pop-up grocery store, the mission is in service of the PR.

It’s a bit like when the mob builds a playground in a neighborhood they’ve been shaking down for protection money. The playground is real. The kids will use it. But everyone knows who paid for it and why, and that knowledge changes the gesture.

Where the Money Comes From

And the gambling part matters. Since the Supreme Court opened the door to legal sports betting in 2018, Americans have wagered over $142 billion in a single year. Problem gambling hits hardest in low-income communities—the World Health Organization explicitly identifies the diversion of household spending on gambling as a driver of food insecurity.

The people most likely to lose money they can’t afford to lose on these platforms are the same people most likely to need help buying groceries. A gambling company handing out free food to families that gambling may have helped put in financial distress is a loop that should make everyone uncomfortable, even if the food itself is welcome.

Prediction markets are gambling platforms dressed up in the language of information markets and probability. Both Kalshi and Polymarket face existential regulatory threats in New York—the ORACLE Act would classify them as unlicensed gambling with fines up to $1 million per day, and Attorney General Letitia James issued a consumer alert the day before Kalshi’s giveaway. The free groceries arrived alongside all of this, which makes the generosity read less like philanthropy and more like lobbying with better optics.

But once I started pulling on that thread—hunger, charity, who gets to play hero—I kept running into the same dynamics I’d been aware of for years, just wearing different costumes.

47.9 Million Americans

The most recent USDA data found that 47.9 million Americans are food insecure—roughly one in seven of us, in the wealthiest country in the history of the world. More than fourteen million of those are children.

The United States produces far more food than it needs. We throw away 40 percent of our food supply every year. Hunger in America is not a scarcity problem. It’s a distribution problem, a wage problem, a policy problem—the accumulated result of decisions about who gets help and who doesn’t. As the Food Research & Action Center puts it: “Hunger and food insecurity in the United States are symptoms of policy choices and an economic system that prioritizes the needs of corporations and the wealthy over those of the general population.”

SNAP benefits—the federal government’s primary tool for fighting hunger—are pegged to the USDA’s “Thrifty Food Plan,” which works out to roughly $3.31 per meal. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins made that vivid in January when she announced what $3 can buy. After running “over 1,000 simulations,” the USDA’s conclusion: a piece of chicken, a piece of broccoli, a corn tortilla, and “one other thing.” One piece of broccoli. One unspecified item. This is what the federal government considers a meal for Americans who can’t afford to feed themselves.

Set that against the current landscape of wealth. The world’s twelve richest billionaires now hold more wealth than the poorest half of humanity—more than four billion people. Billionaire wealth surged by $2.5 trillion in 2025 alone—not through labor or invention, but through stock appreciation and compound returns.

The twelve richest men on Earth could fund the entire SNAP program out of last year’s gains and still have $2 trillion left over. Average weekly food spending runs about 18 percent higher than what the Thrifty Plan allows. The benchmark isn’t a safety net. It’s a policy choice about how little help is acceptable.

What Feeding People Actually Takes

Many years ago, I served on the board of the West Side Campaign Against Hunger (WSCAH) in New York City. Founded in 1979 in the basement of a Methodist church, WSCAH became one of the most innovative food pantries in the country by rethinking what emergency food assistance could be.

In 1993, they pioneered the first customer-choice supermarket-style pantry in the country — letting guests select their own produce, proteins, and grains instead of handing them a pre-packed bag. When COVID made that indoor model impossible, they didn’t close. They asked a harder question: should people have to come to the food, or should the food come to people? They rebuilt — community distribution sites across Northern Manhattan and the South Bronx, a digital ordering system, a 13,000-square-foot warehouse. SNAP enrollment, job training, financial counseling. WSCAH now serves more than 100,000 customers a year, distributing over five million pounds of food, operating on donations and grants, never quite having enough.

Polymarket’s million-dollar donation will feed people. But a single donation isn’t a commitment. Have they shown any interest in the policy work or root-cause infrastructure that organizations like WSCAH have spent decades building? Will they give again next year? I challenge them to.

Or did feeding the hungry just happen to be great optics at the exact moment they needed New York to see them as good neighbors? This is what happens when generosity is discretionary — when feeding people isn’t a commitment but a gesture, available when the incentives align and gone when they don’t. Gambling companies do it at the neighborhood scale. Billionaires do it on a global stage.

The Billionaire Question

In October 2021, Elon Musk had just been named the world’s richest person. David Beasley, head of the UN World Food Programme, challenged him to help save 42 million people from starvation for $6.6 billion. Musk responded publicly: “If WFP can describe on this Twitter thread exactly how $6 billion will solve world hunger, I will sell Tesla stock right now and do it.”

The WFP called his bluff. They published a detailed spending plan and tweeted it directly to Musk. He never responded. SEC filings later revealed he donated $5.7 billion to his own foundation around that time. The World Food Programme never saw a dime. A year later, he bought Twitter for $44 billion. A global institution responsible for feeding millions of starving people, forced to make its case in a Twitter thread because the richest man on the planet turned famine relief into a social media dare. World hunger is not something you solve by tweet.

The $6.6 billion request represented roughly 2.2 percent of Musk’s fortune. For a fifty-year-old American with the median household net worth of $200,000, that’s about $4,400—what you’d pay for a used Honda Civic with 120,000 miles on it. Musk was being asked to do the proportional equivalent of buying a beat up used car to help prevent the starvation of 42 million people. He said no, then spent twenty times that amount on a social media platform.

I’m not arguing that people shouldn’t be allowed to get rich. But no one’s quality of life changes between $250 billion and $300 billion. You don’t sleep better. Your kids aren’t safer. You don’t eat differently. Every human need was met a million times over long before you got there. If we can tolerate that kind of wealth concentration at the top—and I think we can—then we can also afford to guarantee that the floor isn’t starvation. That 47.9 million Americans don’t know where their next meal is coming from isn’t a scarcity problem. It’s a distribution problem.

But this isn’t a story about Musk specifically. It’s about what billionaire philanthropy actually is: discretionary, whimsical, shaped by the preferences of people who have never experienced hunger. The money to eliminate food insecurity exists. The will doesn’t.

Generosity as Performance

You could argue I’m just being a big downer. And you might be right. Money is money. Food Bank for New York City will use that million dollars to feed people, and that matters. Should we really reject help based on where it comes from?

Maybe not. But we should reject the idea that giving absolves the giver. A donation doesn’t neutralize the business model that made it necessary. The tobacco companies made this case for decades—funding arts programs and universities while buying silence about harm. The WHO eventually recommended banning tobacco industry philanthropy altogether through its Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, because the gesture of giving was inseparable from the strategy of influence.

Gambling companies aren’t tobacco companies. But when hunger relief depends on industries that profit from human weakness and even causes people to need emergency food assistance in the first place, the philanthropy isn’t offsetting the harm. It’s laundering it.

And this is the deeper problem with charity as spectacle: it lets everyone off the hook. The company gets its headline. The public gets to feel good about sharing the post. The politicians get to point to private generosity as proof that the system works. And the structural question—why are 47.9 million Americans food insecure in a country that throws away 40 percent of its food supply—never gets asked in this news cycle, because someone showed up with free groceries and a camera crew.

We know what actually reduces food insecurity. SNAP works. Universal free school meals work. When the expanded Child Tax Credit was active, food insufficiency among families with children dropped by 25 percent—then the credit expired and millions of families slid back. These are policy choices, not PR charity—and they don’t depend on the whims of billionaires or the reputation needs of gambling companies. No one should have to be grateful to the right benefactor at the right moment to eat dinner.

Polymarket’s pop-up opens tomorrow and closes Sunday. The million-dollar donation will feed people for a while. But then the pop-up closes. And the need continues—1.3 million food-insecure New Yorkers, still hungry, still waiting for a system that actually works.

The groceries matter. The discomfort matters too. And the distance between a five-day stunt and a forty-year-old food pantry—between a Twitter dare and a detailed spending plan—between a piece of broccoli and a functioning safety net—is the distance between performing generosity and practicing it.

The next time someone can’t feed their kids in New York City, Polymarket will not be there. Neither will Kalshi. The pop-up will be gone. The tweets will be forgotten. And the hunger will still be exactly where they left it.

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Mike Lee is a food futurist and innovation strategist, author of Mise: On the Future of Food, host of The Tomorrow Today Show podcast, creator of Mise Futures, and is on Instagram at The Book of Mise.

While America was watching other fires, the EPA released a routine rule about power plant turbines. Buried on page 215 was a single policy change: the agency will no longer calculate the monetary value of human health benefits when setting rules for fine particulate matter and ozone.

The news was first reported by The New York Times. Going forward, cost-benefit analyses will tally only the cost to industry. Lives saved, hospital visits avoided, children who don’t develop asthma—these won’t appear on the ledger.

I’ve spent just over a decade arguing that our economy operates with a fundamental accounting feature. Pollution, climate change, public health crises—these costs get categorized as “externalities,” pushed off the books and out of sight. This is a feature for polluters and a bug for everyone else.

But there’s a difference between a system that fails to account for these costs and a system that forbids accounting for them. The first is negligence. The second is policy.

The Language of Abandonment

The EPA’s reasoning: health benefit estimates were “too uncertain,” so they stopped counting them.

The spokesperson’s statement deserves to be read twice: “Not monetizing DOES NOT equal not considering or not valuing the human health impact.”

The capital letters are theirs.

How does a regulatory agency “consider” something it refuses to quantify? In a cost-benefit analysis, consideration without numbers is sentiment without substance. It’s the bureaucratic equivalent of thoughts and prayers.

Industry compliance costs will have dollar figures, decimal points, Congressional testimony. Health benefits will have... consideration. One side gets math. The other gets a vague gesture toward good intentions.

Every boss I ever had repeated the same mantra: “You can’t manage what you can’t measure.” Millions of business leaders live by this. So if we can’t measure human health, why would any corporation manage for it?

“False precision” is apparently a problem only when it benefits the public. You want to talk about false precision? U.S. nutrition labels relied on 1968 data for decades because the Dietary Supplement Act of 1992 legally blocked the FDA from updating them. Industry claims nutrient values are “stable,” but that ignores how soil geography and processing alter the food on your plate. We accepted precise, outdated numbers for nearly fifty years not because they were accurate, but because they were profitable.

We accept fuzzy estimates for GDP growth, weapons systems, and market projections every day. Nobody demands certainty before approving a defense contract. The question isn’t whether we can estimate things—it’s whether we want to.

What the Science Says

PM2.5—fine particulate matter, small enough to cross from your lungs into your bloodstream—is one of the most studied environmental health risks we have. The Harvard Six Cities Study established the basics decades ago: dirtier air, shorter lives.

By the EPA’s own estimates, Clean Air Act rules prevent over 230,000 premature deaths annually—benefits exceeding costs 30 to 1. Biden’s PM2.5 rule alone was projected to save 4,500 lives by 2032, returning $77 for every dollar spent.

The research hasn’t changed. The administration just decided to ignore it.

Turned Inside Out

This isn’t regulatory rollback. It’s mission inversion. The Environmental Protection Agency—shell intact, letterhead unchanged—now exists to protect industrial pollution from public health considerations.

It’s a timeless pattern: cash in on abundance now, at the cost of abundance later. And let’s be honest—this will be profitable. That’s the point.

Consider what this means in practice. Bayer has paid over $11 billion to settle Roundup lawsuits, with juries awarding individual plaintiffs billions in damages for cancers linked to glyphosate. Those verdicts are possible because we quantify human harm.

Under this new logic, the suffering would be equally real—but it wouldn’t “count.” How much more profitable would companies be if they never had to pay for the damage they cause? And for those harmed, can they pay for their chemotherapy with the EPA’s “consideration?”

Zero Dollars

We calculate betting odds on everything now. Super Bowl spreads. Election forecasts. Which celebrity couple will divorce next. Your phone offers a hundred ways to gamble on outcomes we can barely predict.

We price derivatives on the weather, the market value of an athlete’s knee, the expected returns on assets that don’t exist yet. We sliced and packaged subprime mortgages into instruments so complex they crashed the global economy—but we still put a number on them. Insurance companies assess the worth of a limb, an eye, a year of life. Wrongful death lawsuits assign dollar figures to human existence every day.

But the lungs of a child developing asthma from particulate exposure? Too uncertain to price for the EPA.

W. Kip Viscusi, the economist who developed the federal calculations for valuing human life, called the move ‘irresponsible’: ‘Even before 1980, they didn’t say lives were worth nothing. There’s always been a non-zero value attached to lives. Until now.

The Quiet Threat

Some threats announce themselves—an attack, a crisis, agents in the streets. But other threats slip past the headlines: a rule change on page 215, a methodology quietly sunsetted, a cost suddenly deemed too complicated to calculate.

These don’t generate marches or trending hashtags. They accumulate. And then, years later, people start getting sick, and nobody can point to a single moment when it began.

If the federal government decides it’s impossible to estimate the benefits of reducing air pollution, what hope is there for valuing soil health, pollinator services, aquifer degradation? The message will be heard by every executive who has spent years resisting sustainability accounting: if it can’t be seen on a quarterly earnings report, it doesn’t exist.

Is this the enshittification of the food system? Of air? Of the basic systems that keep people alive? Not a dramatic collapse. Just a slow accumulation of cuts, each one too small to fight on its own.

The EPA was created to protect you from polluters; now it protects polluters from you.

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Mike Lee is a food futurist and innovation strategist, author of Mise: On the Future of Food, host of The Tomorrow Today Show podcast, creator of Mise Futures, and is on Instagram at The Book of Mise.

General Mills is headquartered in Minneapolis. So is Cargill, the largest privately held company in America. Hormel is in Austin, Minnesota. Land O’Lakes in Arden Hills. The state that produces more turkeys than anywhere else in the country, that processes billions of pounds of meat annually, that feeds America—watched federal agents shoot people in its streets for three weeks before these companies said a word.

Meanwhile, the food world continues its regularly scheduled programming. What’s the next big flavor trend? Is the tinned fish moment over? Which city has the most exciting restaurant scene? I have spent my career in this industry, and I no longer have patience for any of it. Not while ICE agents are eating lunch at family restaurants and then arresting the workers who served them. Not while American citizens are being shot dead for the crime of witnessing an arrest. Not while children are too afraid to go to school because their parents might be detained on the drive.

The federal government is waging war on the people who feed this country. And almost everyone in the food industry—the companies, the associations, the media, the influencers—is pretending not to notice.

The Shootings

On January 7, 2026, Renee Good was shot and killed by ICE agent Jonathan Ross in Minneapolis. She was 37, an artist, with no criminal record. An independent autopsy found three gunshot wounds, including one to the head. The Department of Homeland Security claims she tried to run over agents with her car. Video analysis by multiple news outlets raises serious questions about that account.

On January 14, a Venezuelan man was shot and injured by federal agents in North Minneapolis. He survived.

On January 24, Alex Pretti—a 37-year-old ICU nurse at a Veterans Administration hospital—was killed by Border Patrol agents. Analysis found that several agents wrestled him onto the sidewalk, one struck him with an object, and then ten shots were fired within five seconds. He had no criminal record. He was an American citizen. His crime was witnessing federal agents attempting to enter a restaurant.

Three shootings in seventeen days. Two American citizens dead. This is not enforcement. This is occupation.

Dine and Detain

On January 14, four ICE agents sat down for lunch at El Tapatio, a family-owned Mexican restaurant in Willmar, Minnesota. Staff served them while frightened. After the restaurant closed at 8:30 p.m., agents followed the departing workers and detained three of them—including the owners—near a Lutheran church and middle school. The phrase that emerged to describe this tactic was “dine and detain.”

Think about what that means. Federal agents using restaurants as surveillance points. Eating meals prepared by workers they plan to arrest. Waiting for them to finish their shifts before taking them away. The owners’ 20-year-old son announced he would try to reopen the restaurant himself.

This is not an isolated incident. In December, agents posed as customers at a Brooklyn Park coffee shop for an hour before luring a cook outside with a fake story about hitting his car in the parking lot. He was handcuffed and taken away. In St. Paul, the owner of El Burrito Mercado—a 47-year-old Mexican market that’s been called a local institution—told CNN that masked officers were “swirling around the block waiting for people.” She called her own business “a hunting ground.”

And then there’s Kristi Noem, the Secretary of Homeland Security overseeing all of this, who celebrated her birthday at a Mexican restaurant wearing a pink sombrero while staff sang “Feliz Cumpleaños.” She posted the video herself. The culture is delightful. The enchiladas are worth celebrating. The people who make them are targets for arrest and deportation. This is the moral bankruptcy at the heart of American food culture: we want the labor, we want the cuisine, we want the restaurants—we just don’t want the human beings.

The Terror Is Working

Asian Duck Cafe in Minneapolis now keeps its doors locked during business hours. Customers call ahead to be let in. El Rodeo in Maple Grove closed entirely—workers were too afraid to show up. A liquor store worker in Willmar told CBS News his employer lost 75% of its business since Operation Metro Surge began.

On January 23, more than 700 businesses across Minnesota closed for a general strike. Restaurants, coffee shops, grocery stores, yoga studios—dark for a day. The Restaurant Opportunities Center of Minnesota started offering know-your-rights training for food service workers.

And then there are the children. In North St. Paul-Maplewood-Oakdale, Latino student attendance dropped 51% during the first week of intensified enforcement. A fourth-grade teacher in Minneapolis told HuffPost nearly half her class was missing. Parents are keeping kids home not because of threats to the schools but because they can’t risk being caught on the drive. These children have parents. Those parents work in food processing plants, restaurant kitchens, dairy farms, cleaning services, delivery routes. When families stop leaving their homes, the supply chain that feeds America begins to seize.

The Food and Agriculture Industry’s Complicity

My grandparents immigrated to the United States from Hong Kong. So did my parents. They ran Chinese American restaurants. I was born here, but under this administration’s logic, my family would be targets.

The day after Alex Pretti was killed, more than 60 CEOs signed an open letter through the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce. Read it carefully. The letter does not mention ICE. It does not mention Border Patrol. It does not mention the Department of Homeland Security. It does not name Renee Good. It does not name Alex Pretti. It does not acknowledge that federal agents shot and killed two American citizens. It does not demand that those agents leave. It calls for “deescalation of tensions”—as if tension were the problem, not the bullets. It calls for “real solutions” without naming a single one. It speaks of “tragic loss of life” in the passive voice, as if people died of natural causes rather than being gunned down by government employees.

Among the food and agrilculture related signatories: Cargill. General Mills. Land O’Lakes. Hormel. CHS. CJ Schwan’s. Ecolab. The Toro Company. Target.

Some make the food. Others supply the equipment, the sanitation systems, the distribution networks, the retail shelves. All of them depend on the same labor force—their supply chains, processing plants, distribution centers, and retail floors staffed by the very people now being hunted. These are companies with government affairs offices and lobbyists and the phone numbers of senators. And this is what they produced: a letter that could have been drafted by an attorney—carefully constructed to express concern while committing to nothing.

This is the corporate equivalent of “thoughts and prayers.” It is carefully engineered to say nothing while appearing to say something. These executives tell us they’ve been working “behind the scenes”—communicating with the Governor, the White House, the Vice President. And what did all that access produce? No demands. No accountability. No names. Just a call for “peace” addressed to no one in particular, as if a nurse and a poet were casualties of weather.

On January 16, Reuters contacted Target, General Mills, Hormel, Land O’Lakes, Cargill, and 3M. None would speak on the record about what guidance they’ve given employees. Their websites said nothing about federal agents occupying their state. This was, according to Bill George—a former Minneapolis executive and Harvard Business School fellow—a mistake. “A lot of them are very silent,” he told Reuters, “and I think it’s not a good time to be silent.”

The contrast with 2020 is instructive. After the police killing of George Floyd, companies like UnitedHealth and General Mills issued public statements. They spoke his name. This time, federal agents killed two American citizens in Minneapolis—and the same corporations refused to say a word until they could sign a collective letter that mentioned neither the killers nor the killed.

Meanwhile, a video circulated showing ICE agents arresting a contractor in the parking lot of General Mills’ Chanhassen manufacturing facility. The company’s response? “Our team requested ICE agent identification, followed all our safety protocols and partnered with local law enforcement.” That’s it. Federal agents are grabbing workers outside your building and your public statement is that you checked their badges.

Minneapolis City Council Member Aurin Chowdhury responded to the CEO letter: “If they wanted this to end they could leverage their capital to do so.” She’s right. These companies have the ability to make federal contracts contingent on policy changes. They could threaten relocation. They could fund opposition candidates. They could make the political cost of this operation unbearable. Instead they wrote a letter that refuses to name the killers or the killed.

So I take the silence of this industry personally. The National Restaurant Association has 500,000 members and spent $17.5 million on lobbying in 2024. The restaurant industry employs roughly 1.5 million undocumented workers—everyone knows this, even if no one says it. The dairy farms of Wisconsin and Minnesota depend on more immigrant labor. The meat processing plants, including Jennie-O in Willmar, have always depended on immigrant labor. Cargill operates some of the largest beef and poultry processing facilities in the country. Land O’Lakes and CHS are farmer-owned cooperatives whose members cannot get their crops harvested without immigrant workers. This is not a secret. It is the foundation of how America eats.

A vague call for “deescalation” is not opposition. It is reputation management. It is a press release designed to provide cover without consequence. The food media moves on to the next trend piece. The professional class of food people—the consultants, the analysts, the conference speakers—continues as if the occupation of Minnesota is not their concern.

It is your concern. If you work in food, it is your concern. If you eat food, it is your concern. Every meal in America passes through immigrant hands—the fields, the slaughterhouses, the processing plants, the restaurant kitchens, the delivery trucks. The system was built on this labor, deliberately, because it was cheap and because the people doing it had no power to demand better. The industry looked the other way for decades. Now that workforce is under violent assault, and the industry is still looking away.

Minneapolis is Ground Zero

Consider who ICE has actually targeted in Minnesota. A 56-year-old Hmong American grandfather—a U.S. citizen named ChongLy Thao—dragged from his home in freezing weather wearing only underwear and Crocs. A Somali-American woman, also a citizen, detained for two days while agents made racist remarks. A refugee with a valid work permit, arrested at the hotel where federal agents were staying. A five-year-old boy used as bait to lure his relatives outside. A two-year-old detained with her father despite an active asylum case. Off-duty police officers stopped and questioned. A Latino citizen whose car was rammed by agents before they demanded his papers. In the first nine months of this administration, over 75,000 people arrested by ICE had no criminal record whatsoever—more than a third of all arrests.

These are not violent criminals. These are not even undocumented immigrants, in many cases. These are citizens, legal residents, refugees, and asylum seekers. People detained because they had the wrong accent, the wrong skin color, or happened to be in the wrong place when agents decided to make an example.

And then there are Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Both white. Both American citizens. Good was a poet from Colorado who had just dropped her six-year-old at school. Pretti was an ICU nurse who spent his career caring for veterans, giving final salutes to the service members who died under his watch. Neither had a criminal record. Neither was an immigrant. They were killed for the crime of being present—Good for stopping to support her neighbors during an arrest, Pretti for stepping between agents and a woman they had pushed to the ground.

Their deaths reveal what this has always been about. It was never just immigration enforcement. Latino and Black communities have faced harassment from federal agents for decades, long before ICE even existed. What’s happening in Minneapolis is an escalation—from targeted enforcement to mass intimidation, from deporting undocumented immigrants to terrorizing anyone who looks like they might be, and now to killing anyone who objects. The Asian community could be next. Restaurants like my family owned. The Hmong grocers in St. Paul. The Vietnamese pho shops, the Korean BBQ joints, the Chinese takeout places that have fed working-class America for generations.

This is how it works. First they come for the people without papers. Then for the people with papers but the wrong accent. Then for the citizens with the wrong ancestry. Then for anyone who stands in solidarity. The administration has already labeled peaceful protesters “rioters” and “domestic terrorists.” It has already shot two white Americans dead for the crime of being present. The line is not holding. It is not even a line anymore.

The administration has made Minnesota “ground zero” for its enforcement surge, using the state to demonstrate a new model of aggressive federal intervention. This blueprint is already moving elsewhere; while the Twin Cities remain under siege, the Department of Homeland Security recently launched a similar campaign in Maine. With twelve thousand new agents and “dine and detain” tactics becoming standard practice, restaurants are being turned into hunting grounds from coast to coast.

The federal government is testing how much violence the American public will tolerate against the people who grow, process, cook, and serve its food. While the American Right remains steadfast in its support, most Americans now oppose ICE and its tactics. For the administration’s base, it seems that no amount of violence is too much.

To the food industry: how dare you rely on immigrants to build your businesses but don’t step up to defend them when they’re being attacked by our own government. Without them your companies would not exist in their current form.

Every day the food industry stays silent, the line moves. Every day without pushback, the next step becomes possible. Armed agents in every restaurant kitchen. Checkpoints at processing plants. Papers demanded at farm gates. Workers too terrified to harvest crops rotting in the fields. This is not paranoia. This is the trajectory. This is what happens when an industry builds its entire labor model on a workforce it refuses to defend.

The people who feed America are being hunted. The people who profit from that labor are saying nothing. And if you think this stops with immigrants, you have not been paying attention. They have already killed the poet. They have already killed the nurse. They will not stop until someone stops them.

Wake up.

—

I had a Dry January piece queued up for today. After this week, it feels trite. Here it is if you want to read it. Instead, I need to write about what’s actually on my mind.

Venezuela. U.S. special forces bombing Caracas, capturing Maduro, the president announcing America would “run” the country. Over a hundred died in the preceding operations. Oil stocks surged.

Iran. Millions in the streets across all 31 provinces. Security forces responded with live ammunition. The government blacked out the internet. Hospitals ran out of blood. One eyewitness told The Guardian he saw “hundreds of bodies” in Tehran.

Minneapolis.

On Wednesday, Renee Nicole Good and her wife stopped to support their neighbors during an ICE operation. Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, was shot in the face by an agent while sitting in her SUV. Within hours, the Homeland Security Secretary called it “domestic terrorism.” The president posted that Good had “violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer.” The vice president called her death “a tragedy of her own making,” called her “brainwashed,” and said the agent who killed her “deserves a debt of gratitude.”

And yesterday, the EPA announced it will no longer estimate the lives saved by reducing air pollution when writing clean-air regulations. Human life, removed from the equation. The variable was simply deleted.

A mother is killed and the government calls her a terrorist. Thousands die in Iran and the regime blacks out the internet. An agency charged with protecting health decides lives don’t count. The pattern is hard to miss: human life as something that shouldn’t constrain what power does.

Something shifted in my body reading all this. Not just sadness or outrage—something more primitive. The part of my brain thinking about work went quiet. A different system came online. My screen looked the same but the words on it had become a foreign language. A debate about sodium recommendations. A hot take on ultra-processed food definitions. The sentences were in English but they weren’t reaching me.

One day you’re a citizen with opinions, writing essays about food and drinking culture. Then something shoves you back toward the base and suddenly you’re a mammal assessing whether the environment is safe. Your brain stops running the software for “career” and starts running the firmware for “survival.”

And yet the food industry kept humming along as if none of it happened. That disconnect is what I can’t stop thinking about—what it means when an industry dedicated to feeding people operates as though people don’t exist beyond their purchasing power.

Business As Usual

My LinkedIn feed crystallized it. The new Dietary Guidelines dropped last week, and people did what people do—parsing the language, debating sodium recommendations, identifying the gaps. Smart people doing their jobs. But reading these posts the same week a mother was killed by a federal agent, the same week protesters were being gunned down in Tehran, felt like watching someone polish silverware while the house burned.

I don’t blame them. The machine keeps running. The content calendar doesn’t pause for political violence. The deadlines remain, regardless of the body count. The professional world assumes the background conditions are stable enough for professional concerns to matter. When that assumption breaks, you either keep pretending or you stop functioning.

Most people keep pretending. It’s not cowardice—it’s that the alternative doesn’t help anyone either. So you compartmentalize. You write your post about beef tallow. You move on. You tell yourself this is resilience.

Maybe it is. Or maybe it’s how the unacceptable becomes normal, one ignored atrocity at a time.

Food Touches Everything

The dissociation runs deeper than one bad week. It’s baked into how the industry thinks about itself—as if food exists in its own domain, separate from politics, power, and violence.

It doesn’t. The people who grow our food, process it, cook it, serve it—many of them are immigrants. Many of them are the people ICE targets. Renee Nicole Good was not an immigrant. She was an American citizen. And ICE shot her anyway. When a mother gets killed after stopping to help her neighbors and the government labels her a terrorist, the fear ripples outward. It ripples through the food system, because the food system runs on the labor of people who now have more reason to be afraid. This is not a metaphor.

When the EPA decides human life doesn’t factor into pollution rules, it affects who can grow food safely, who can work the fields without getting sick, and which communities bear the burden of our industrial food system. Immigration policy is food policy. Labor policy is food policy. Environmental policy is food policy.

And yet the food conversation operates as if none of these connections exist. As if supply chains don’t have people in them. As if “consumer insights” float in some pristine realm untouched by the world.

The Problem with “Consumers”

Food is a human necessity that we’ve turned into a commercial enterprise. Everyone has to eat. Unlike almost any other industry, there’s no opting out. And that creates a tension we rarely acknowledge—between food people need and food people want, between nourishment and commerce, between feeding humans and extracting value from consumers.

The language tells the story. We don’t talk about people. We talk about consumers, shoppers, end users. We segment them into occasions and dayparts, track their path to purchase, and compete for share of stomach. We talk about “activating” shoppers as if they’re dormant devices. We congratulate ourselves for being “consumer-centric” as if reducing humans to data points is the same as understanding them.

When you call someone a consumer, you’ve already decided what matters about them: their utility to your business. Their fears, their struggles, their context—none of it fits in a spreadsheet, so none of it gets counted.

The industry is loudest when selling to the comfortable. The $14 adaptogenic lattes. The high-protein bars in matte, minimalist wrappers. Food as lifestyle, as aesthetic, as armor. That segment operates for people who feel safe—safe enough to have mental bandwidth for whether their snacks align with their values.

You cannot “delight” someone who is terrified. Wellness is a peace-time pursuit. We saw it during the pandemic—when everyone was scared, sales of legacy junk foods surged while premium better-for-you brands flatlined. People didn’t reach for adaptogenic lattes. They reached for Oreos.

Millions never had that safety to begin with. Immigrants who’ve feared ICE for years. Black and brown communities who have feared lethal consequences from authorities long before ICE existed. Families where food insecurity isn’t a white paper topic but a weekly reality. How can someone think about soil health when they don’t have personal safety?

Culture Without a Price Tag

I want to be precise here. I’m not saying food should be reduced to mere sustenance—calories in, survival out.

Food culture matters. The recipes passed down through generations. The rituals that make a family a family. The way communities express identity through what they eat and how they share it. This is part of the human story.

But the industry treats food culture as a premium segment—the artisanal, the craft, the curated experience you pay extra for. As if culture only exists at a certain price point.

Culture exists wherever people eat. Rice and beans made the same way for generations is culture. A family’s Sunday dinner is culture. The traditions of people who will never set foot in a Whole Foods are culture.

The problem isn’t commerce itself. It’s that commerce can only see culture when it’s monetizable. So we valorize the $14 latte while ignoring the food traditions of people who can’t afford it. We’ve conflated culture with premium.

This isn’t an argument against creativity or craft or even trends. It’s an argument against an industry that can’t see past the cash register.

Most of What We Talk About Doesn’t Matter

This is the gut check. Not about the core work—feeding people matters, understanding how people eat matters, building systems that nourish communities matters.

But all the other stuff? The obsessive macro counting. The endless debates about package design. The trend spotting and hot takes. The breathless protein fixation, as if one more high-protein bar will solve anything.

The same week Renee Nicole Good was killed, news broke that Good Culture—the premium cottage cheese brand—was acquired for over $500 million. A mother shot in the face by a federal agent. A half-billion-dollar bet on cultured dairy. I don’t have a tidy way to connect those two facts. I just know they happened in the same week, and one of them is supposed to be my industry, and I couldn’t make myself care about the cottage cheese.

What will our legacy be? Did we push a few more units of some newfangled nutrition bar? Did we chase whatever macro was trending that quarter? Or did we leave the world more nourishing, more equitable, more just?

The people we serve are not consumers or demographics or occasions. They’re humans trying to survive and protect their families. People who get scared and tired and hungry. People who deserve dignity regardless of purchasing power.

What I’m Committing To

I’ll get back to the work. The work continues because it has to. But I’m not going to pretend this week didn’t happen.

I know it can be hard to talk about this stuff at work. Politics, justice, humanity—these aren’t comfortable topics. Some companies discourage it. Some people just want to keep their heads down. I get it.

And I understand that some people might not want to work with me because I’m saying these things out loud. That’s fine. I don’t want to work with those people either.

For years, interviewers have asked me: “What’s the next big thing?” I’m done answering that. It’s the wrong question. It assumes the food industry is a fashion show, that our job is to call trends and position ourselves to profit. The next big thing is the same as the last big thing: feeding people well, with dignity, in a way that doesn’t destroy the planet or exploit the vulnerable. That’s it. That’s the work. Everything else is decoration.

I’m going to go deeper on the issues that actually affect whether people get fed and whether the world gets better. I’m going to push for systems thinking over trend-chasing, for lateral creativity over line extensions, for solving real problems instead of capturing shelf space for the next fad. I want to help broaden how this industry thinks—to see the connections, to ask better questions, to be more effective at work that actually matters. To break people out of their echo chambers. And I’m going to keep saying the uncomfortable things out loud, because the comfortable things aren’t working.

This industry is not a fashion show. It’s not a content calendar. It’s not a series of acquisitions and exits. It is a system that determines whether people eat, what they eat, and whether the people who feed them are treated with dignity or terror. That’s the firmware. That’s what’s running underneath all the software we’ve built on top. And when the world breaks open like it did this week, the software crashes and the firmware is all that’s left.

We are not here to optimize. We are here to feed people. We are humans first. If we forget that, nothing else we do matters.

—

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