The Seduction of Simplicity
In an age of food tribes, intellectual humility is our most essential nutrient.
We are addicted to simple stories about food.
Industrial bad, local good. Processed evil, whole foods virtuous. Vegan enlightened, carnivore sinful. These binaries feel satisfying—they give us teams to join, enemies to fight, and the comforting illusion that we have figured it all out.
But our hunger for oversimplification blinds us to the reality of our food system. When we reduce food's messy, interconnected nature to stark opposites, we lose the opportunity to understand the forces truly shaping what and how we eat.
This temptation toward tidy narratives makes sense. Food is overwhelming—a tangle of agriculture, culture, economics, nutrition, and identity that defies neat categorization. Unlike major infrequent purchases like a house or a car that allow time for careful research, food demands decisions multiple times a day. We cannot possibly evaluate the totality of every bite without sacrificing our entire day, so these constant micro-decisions force us to create intellectual shortcuts just to stay sane.
Faced with this chaos, we retreat to stories simple enough to fit in a fortune cookie. Natural food advocates warn to "only eat ingredients you can pronounce," while industrial food defenders counter that we shouldn't "fear chemicals—all food is made of them." Both sides mean well, but these catchphrases crumble under scrutiny and encourage sloppy thinking.
I can pronounce "arsenic" just fine, yet I know I shouldn't eat it. And while water and arsenic are both chemicals, only one belongs on my plate. We seem to have lost the vast and vital dialogue that exists in the middle ground between these two poles.
Echo Chambers and Ideological Monopolies
Digital media has turbocharged our tendency to form food tribes. Any combination of dietary values can now find its community online. Want to adopt a carnivore diet and eat ribeyes every day? There's a subreddit for that. Curious about breatharianism? YouTube has it.
Social media has transformed how quickly ideas solidify into movements, allowing us to broadcast and reinforce any food philosophy faster than ever before. And while I find neither carnivore diets nor breatharianism desirable nor credible, I still have to share space with them in this world because their fans vote with their food dollars too (well, maybe not the breatharians).
This fragmentation offers undeniable comfort. Inside our chosen groups, we find validation and relief from complexity. The keto devotee never has to defend their bacon consumption; the vegan activist finds solidarity without endless explanation. Inevitably, brands of all kinds emerge to supply each tribe with its comfort items.
And while society might not change much when the keto crowd feasts on meat and vegans tend their vegetables, what happens when one food ideology achieves dominance? What if it becomes the prevailing worldview, backed by conglomerates with massive market power or empowered by government agencies that create regulations binding on everyone?
We are already living in such a scenario. The centralized, industrial agricultural model has defined Western food systems for generations. This commodity-driven approach has won the battle of ideas so far, shaping our landscapes, policies, and plates.
But after a while, ideological monopolies tend to breed resistance. Today's most vibrant food movements—regenerative agriculture, veganism, slow food, locavorism—have all risen as alternative visions in direct response to industrial food culture.
Beyond the Echo Chamber
This proliferation of food philosophies is valuable. Ideological diversity is good for society in the same way biodiversity is good for nature. We need more experiments and more ways of thinking about what we eat. But we cannot advance if we only shout past one another from our phones. The future of food shouldn't be about one ideology dominating all others. Instead, good ideas should be forged in the friction from rubbing up against other good ideas, emerging stronger for the encounter.
Over the past decade, I have noticed that conversations at food conferences tend toward homogeneous agreement. While rallying your base around shared values is important, we desperately need more opposing viewpoints on those stages. We need more GMO supporters debating non-GMO activists at natural food shows. We need more advocates for the underserved speaking at elite restaurant conferences. We need more regenerative agriculture champions at events sponsored by agrochemical companies.
Critically, when we invite opposing voices, we must feature their best representatives—people who can articulate their position clearly, logically, and respectfully. Otherwise, we are not attempting a serious debate; we are just bringing in a sacrificial lamb to dunk on, or platforming a charlatan.
The most productive discussions happen when we resist "straw manning"—the disingenuous tactic of refuting the weakest version of an opposing argument to create the illusion of victory. It's easy to claim all vegans want to force everyone to eat tofu, or that anyone who eats meat doesn't care about the planet. These caricatures are intellectually lazy.
When we "steelman" instead—engaging with the strongest, most persuasive version of an opposing argument—something profound shifts. Combat can give way to curiosity. We can begin to see the legitimate concerns animating different food tribes, even when we disagree with their conclusions. Paradoxically, our own arguments become stronger when we understand the best arguments against them.
The Certainty Trap
Engaging with challenging ideas does not mean adopting them. We can work to understand opposing viewpoints without surrendering our own. But intellectual honesty demands that we stop cherry-picking evidence that supports our position while ignoring our own logical flaws. It requires us to acknowledge when the "other side" makes a valid point, even if their overall conclusion differs from ours. This has become increasingly difficult, as everyone now seems to operate with their own definition of truth. A nutrition scientist points to peer-reviewed data, while a neighbor swears by a diet based purely on personal feeling. In food's complex ecosystem, is it possible for both to hold a piece of the truth?
For over 1,500 years, it was accepted as fact that the sun revolved around the Earth. This was not a fringe theory; it was the worldview, embedded in religion, science, and common sense. Based on the available evidence—watching the sunrise, tracking the stars—it made perfect sense. No one alive during that era can be blamed for believing it. It took centuries before Copernicus, Galileo, and others successfully challenged this bedrock assumption. Such is the nature of blind spots: you don't know you're in one until someone points it out, and even then, it can take generations to see clearly.
What if we are currently in the middle of our own 1,500-year blind spot regarding food, health, and sustainability? It has happened in smaller cycles. Decades ago, fat and cholesterol were public enemies, and food companies slapped "low-fat" on every conceivable product. Today, many are tossing out seed oils and bringing back butter and beef tallow. These swings don't mean one side was purely right or wrong; they reveal a deeper pattern where each era's food dogma is a reaction to the last.
If we are being truly honest, we must admit that no matter how confident we feel, we, too, are products of our time. Like those pre-Copernican thinkers staring at the sky, we may be utterly convinced of something that future generations will find laughably wrong.
The Future of Food Is Complicated
What worries me most is the half-hearted embrace of open-mindedness. The kind that's performative and incomplete. "Do your own research" has become a rallying cry that cuts both ways. While we should investigate our beliefs, there's a crucial difference between consulting reputable sources—a challenge when the very definition of what a "reputable source" looks like can vary widely—and tumbling down rabbit holes of conspiracy theories peddled by supplement hawkers.
We must try to have the humility to recognize our own biases and the biases of those speaking to us. Consider how a regenerative rancher and an animal rights activist might find common ground. Both see the failures of industrial animal agriculture. Both value dignity for animals. Their solutions diverge radically—one envisions animals integrated into sustainable farming, the other imagines a world without farmed animals entirely. But if they moved past slogans to engage with each other's deepest values, they might discover unexpected alignments.
My hope for food's future centers on improving our conversations. Whatever innovations emerge—lab-grown meat, regenerative systems, or something yet unimaginable—our ability to evaluate them will depend on the quality of our collective conversation. Without a foundation of good-faith dialogue, even the most promising solutions will get lost in tribal warfare.
During the first season of my podcast, The Tomorrow Today Show, I purposefully chose a long-form format with 2 to 4 hour-long episodes to create space for exploration that can't happen in soundbites. What emerged repeatedly was how poorly served we are by binary thinking. The most resonant answers often live in the middle, and acknowledging that "it depends" is crucial because context—personal, cultural, and ecological—is everything.
I don't pretend this is easy. Asking people to be rational about something as fundamentally irrational as food feels nearly impossible. We are talking about what we put in our bodies, how we nourish our children, and what connects us to culture and memory.
For many, food is primarily an emotional pursuit, not a logical one, and this emotional lens makes it difficult to confront the fact that every choice involves tradeoffs. That organic apple traveled thousands of miles. That local steak came from a slaughtered animal. That vegan burger required industrial processing. Your juice cleanse came in plastic. Nothing is perfect; everything has a cost and a benefit.
The path forward isn't about finding the one true way or arguing our way to consensus. It is about recognizing that in a domain as complex as the food system, absolute certainty itself may be the enemy. The future of food is complicated, contradictory, and irrevocably plural. That is not a bug—it is a feature.
Our task is not to eliminate this complexity but to develop the intellectual, emotional, and organizational muscles to navigate it with grace. If we can't, we will keep falling for whoever offers us the simplest story, regardless of whether it is true.
This essay was inspired by the season one finale of my podcast, The Tomorrow Today Show, where I hosted a sprawling conversation with the season's guest co-hosts—Melanie Bartleme (Mintel), Michael Wolf (The Spoon), Katie Stebbins (Tufts University), Ben Walmer (Highlands Dinner Club), Charles Temkey (Clam Man, Opera Singer, Coffee Wizard), Ethan Soloviev (HowGood), Ali Bouzari (Pilot R&D), and Nicki Briggs (Here/There Consulting).
