Food is More Than Fuel

Learning from meal time experiments and activism

Timeless Leadership is a weekly newsletter exploring how leaders overcome the constraints of time when leading themselves, their organizations, and their community. Season 1 (Nov 28-Feb 27th) examines my personal discovery of Timeless Leadership. Thank you for reading!

Dining alone doesn’t bother me.

I enjoy tasting my food, observing my surroundings, and processing my thoughts. I often take breakfast or lunch over email, a newspaper, a podcast, or a book.

No big deal.

As much as I love sharing a meal with others, I’ve hardly ever felt lonely during a lunch break, even if there is no one else in sight.

But that wasn’t the case one Monday in the spring of 2012.

That was the day I decided to try Soylent.

Image generated with DALL-E

The perfectly “engineered” meal replacement drink, Soylent promises busy people the fuel they need without the fuss of prepping, chewing, or cleaning up. They even claim the shakes are more balanced and complete than regular food.

Each serving also only costs a few dollars.

As a bootstrapping social entrepreneur, I felt the scarcity of time, money, and nutritious fuel to achieve my goals. I had more holes in my socks than in my calendar.

With no obvious slack in my day, Soylent promised me a shortcut.

I could shave ten, maybe fifteen minutes off of my lunch break.

That might mean I could write another email to a customer or my team.

So I placed the order, and when it arrived, I had my first chalky, milky-oatmeal “lunch”, downed in under two-minutes while standing in my poorly-lit kitchen.

Yum.

Ending the experiment early

The flavor was ok actually. So was my energy after. My digestive system rebelled a little, but the shake still sat better than a Chipotle burrito.

The physical experience wasn’t the problem.

It was all psychological.

Ideally, meals are a chance to connect with others, exchange ideas, and build trust. But even when they are not, the solo meal offers an opportunity to change pace, location, and the focus of attention.

In other words, it’s worth spending some time to eat.

By treating food as merely fuel, I was missing critical time for human connection - if not with others, at least with myself. A meal replacement offered none of that.

Over the course of the first week of Soylent lunches, I found myself asking questions:

• Culturally, do I really want to signal that lunch is no more than a pitstop? Do I expect a race-pace from myself or others for eight or more straight hours?

• Strategically, do I really think that a few minutes shaved off of lunch will make the difference between my venture’s ultimate success or failure?

Before the second week was over, I stopped the gulping the glop. My body didn’t love it. My taste-buds disliked it. And it gave no nourishment at all for the mind or soul.

Twenty plus years chewing on food…

My experiments and explorations into food go back to my first job, at age 16, working at a café at a fitness club and optimizing my own protein intake to build muscle. During down time I experimented in the kitchen; during the rush, I assembled all kinds of orders for gym rats and soccer moms, tennis prodigies and spinning instructors.

In college I worked another food service job and mastered the Philly Cheesesteak. Since then I’ve taken cooking classes and watched food shows, sought out food trucks and top restaurants, and although I’m no Anthony Bourdain, I had only a few reservations when dining in Spain, India, China, Peru, or Kenya.

In my curiosity I’ve also tried cricket powder and MCT oil, cheat days and meal kits, vegan and keto, and even my very own “ABCD” diet (an acronym for “anything but beer, bread, beef, corn, cheese, or dessert” which also didn’t last too long).

In between experiments, I’ve chowed down most of my life with nothing more that attempted mindfulness, seeking some balance between my health, my wallet, my conscience, and a deep enjoyment of food’s flavors and cultures.

Besides this personal journey, I’ve noticed what other people do too, and the broader reality of feeding and nourishing the planet.

The meaning of food for leadership

We’ve grown up oscillating between questioning the food system and celebrating it.

We’ve had Supersize Me and The Omnivore’s Dilemma.

We’ve also had Man vs Food and Jihad vs McWorld.

Whether for health or happiness, climate or culture, economics or ethics, our individual and collective food choices have personal and external consequences.

The food that’s available, how it’s prepared, and how it’s consumed are decisions made by individuals and groups, and we’re all watching each other, adjusting our behavior consciously or sub-consciously, striving to stand out or fit in, to engage about food or painstakingly avoid it.

We take time to eat, and we take more time when we eat intentionally.

Therefore leadership can happen with every grocery store trip and every fork-bite - and leadership is needed.

Whether it’s the staggering volume of food and food packaging waste, the explosion of public health challenges related to diet, or the logical and moral dilemmas of sustainably feeding the world, it’s going to take leadership to fix our fuel.

Picking from the leadership menu

As a parent, what I buy and serve my kids reminds me daily of my power to impact the health, culture, economics, and ethics of food - right at home.

We can do it at work also. When I was at Box, I co-founded the company’s “Green Team.” This gave me a chance to influence purchasing, supply, and cultural decisions, especially about food packaging. I’m proud that globally we cut back on of thousands of disposable cups and plastic bottles in 2019.

It’s clear to me that opportunities to lead about our culture of food are all around us. It typically starts with a decision to take the time.

Time to make healthier food choices.

Time to properly dispose of food waste - or avoid it in the first place.

Time to learn and educate.

Time to drive change.

We don’t all need to make revolutionary changes - in fact, incremental change at scale is probably much more valuable than revolutionary change in scattered pockets. I’m amazed at how most of us, as often as three or four times a day, we can choose to lead.

Which brings us to this final question.

In what ways are you leading with food?

How are you being led?

I’d love to hear your story, or even a quick tip.

(Even Soylent stories welcome!)

P.S. A few statistics

In researching for this post, I wanted to get a sense for the scale of our current system-level challenges related to food.

Pause and sit with the significance of these numbers…

Astonishingly, each year in the United States alone:

• 147 billion meals are wasted

• 42 million metric tons of packaging, mostly for food, is discarded annually

• 10 billion farm animals and 47 billion aquatic animals are slaughtered

And at the same time:

• 44 million Americans face hunger and

• 41.9% of Americans are obese

That’s something, huh?

What are your take-aways? Add a comments below or shoot me an email.

Otherwise, see you next week when I’ll talk about travel.