"The biggest risk right now is that—in this protein craze—people think 'meat' when they hear 'protein,'" Eve Turow-Paul, the executive director of Food for Climate League, told Newsweek. Food for Climate League is a Chicago-based nonprofit working to make climate-smart food choices the norm.
Read MoreTo those who can afford it, food has long meant more than just sustenance. But millennials became the first young generation to spend discretionary income on food, even at the risk of not affording rent, according to Eve Turow-Paul.
She explored this in her 2012 book, A Taste of Generation Yum: How the Millennial Generation’s Love for Organic Fare, Celebrity Chefs and Microbrews Will Make or Break the Future of Food. Much of it stems from a desire to seize control in a world increasingly prone to chaos, she says.
“The reality is life is not easy right now, emotionally,” says Turow-Paul, who also wrote the 2020 book Hungry: Avocado Toast, Instagram Influencers, and Our Search for Connection and Meaning.
“For previous generations, terrible things were happening, but there wasn’t 24-hour news, Instagram, X, and all these platforms,” she says. “The mess of the human experience is more visible to people, and that’s really hard to cope with. With a world that feels increasingly chaotic and unpredictable and out of control, what do you do? You regain a sense of control by understanding your food.”
Read MoreEve Turow-Paul, an author and expert in global food trends, described luxury fruits as being among the “couture food experiences” through which people attempted to make value statements. “Over the last 10 years especially, global food culture has become homogenized,” she said. “How do you continue to one-up other people in this kind of food environment?”
Read MoreAbout a third of U.S. adults say they’re interested in reducing the amount of meat they eat, even if they’re not planning to become vegetarian or vegan.
Turow-Paul: “Which is a really exciting finding because it’s showing that food culture is beginning to bend in a more sustainable direction.”
Eve Turow-Paul is founder and executive director of the Food for Climate League. The nonprofit partnered on a recent report about people’s eating habits and attitudes about “plant-forward” diets.
Turow-Paul: “Plants are really at the forefront of the meal. And meat or other animal products such as dairy, butter are going to be playing a supporting role to the plants. And by plants … we’re not just talking about leafy greens, we’re talking about whole grains, nuts, seeds, legumes. It runs the whole gamut.”
Read More“What is it that we are so hungry for?” asks author Eve Turow-Paul in her newly released book Hungry: Avocado Toast, Instagram Influencers, and Our Search for Connection and Meaning. Similar to The Hartman Group’s long-standing quest to understand food culture and “the why behind the buy,” Turow-Paul “decided to look into the ‘why’ behind my own behavior and that of the people around me.”
Her search soon morphed into an in-depth, global examination of what the Digital Generation (now food-obsessed — but why?) is really looking for. Intrigued by her inquisitive, investigative, and ethnographic eye for detail (and far-reaching quest to plumb the depths of what drives food culture today), we reached out to the author to find out more about where food culture is and where it’s headed.
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