How to Be a Conscious Eater

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

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