Page 248 - How to Be a Conscious Eater - Making Food Choices That Are Good for You

to tech entrepreneurs and consumer behavior experts, many
will tell you that this is what the future of food is all about.
A one-size-fits-all approach to food and food-service experi-
ences doesn’t work anymore. Which, intuitively, makes sense.
Instead, we are shifting to “personalized nutrition,” enabling
each of us to discover our own optimal diet and avoid foods
that could harm us.
It used to be that most people could eat anything, and a
few people could eat anything except a few things. Now it
seems almost everyone can’t or won’t eat some things. Though
the two categories of people—those who can’t and those who
won’t—are related, they often get conflated. In reality, they’re
critically different. See the next essay for an understanding of
the food allergy epidemic and how to be an empathetic eater
toward those who suffer from it.
Many who choose not to eat certain foods, though, have
taken their elimination diets pretty far. That’s my own obser-
vation, but you can tell, too, because business is booming: The
overall “free-from” category has risen to $32 billion, which
is nearly the size of the entire organic industry, according to
Euromonitor. (The entire packaged foods market, for context,
is about $2 trillion.) Gluten-free specifically has gone from a
$1.7 billion retail market in 2011 to a projected $4.7 billion in
2020, also according to Euromonitor. Not to mention, restau-
rant menus have come to look like Egyptian ciphers: GF for
“gluten-free,” V for “vegan,” DF for “dairy-free,” and so on.
What’s driving the rise of food tribes? As I support in this
book, some folks become part of food tribes such as vegan or
vegetarian not with the goal of personalizing their nutrition
but rather to express various social or environmental values
through their eating identities. The many stripes of elimination
dieters are to me a different lot, though, and for them, several
factors appear to be at play. One is our food culture having

Stuff that’s made in restaurant kitchens 237

Conscious Eater_04 PT_4th patches.indd 237 10/23/19 1:38 PM