Translator: Tanya Cushman Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
So it all started with a very, seemingly innocent little phrase:
an apple a day keeps the doctor away.
This little phrase, it marked the beginning
of one of the greatest takedowns in marketing history.
With this one phrase,
we nullified the greatness of Adam and Eve in the apple orchard
and Newton's theory of gravitational law.
You could say the moment you bite into an amazing apple,
"It's an explosion of texture and flavor.
Sweet yet indulgent.
Tart yet refreshing.
Something crunchy
that turns into a mouthful of sweet, refreshing juice."
You could say that an apple
would rival the greatest of any type or category of junk food there is today.
And yet, somehow, we overlook this experience
because we perceive it as health food.
But we're not here to talk about apples.
For me, this embodies the notion and the understanding
of our internal battle between health food and junk food.
What if we reframed the question?
What if it's actually not health food versus junk food?
What if it's actually food versus everything else?
Food has become
one of the most socially acceptable extremist religions in our society today,
being practiced in neighborhoods, wealthy neighborhoods,
across the country.
We have jihad being declared
in every unassuming playground and play date in America.
Somehow, along the way, we've become confused
as to experts in specific fields
versus "I consume, so therefore, I must be an expert."
Imagine if we took the same approach in the medicine industry.
Imagine if we had dentists performing open-heart surgeries
simply because they have a beating heart in their chest.
According to this theory, they're an expert, right?
There was a time I took my son to the park,
probably about a year ago,
and I witnessed food religion at its worst.
There was a poor mother,
came into that playground with her children.
She pulled out some snacks for her children.
What happened next completely blew my mind.
She pulled out Cheetos and a bottle of soda,
and all the other mothers in the playground
started whispering and pointing,
like she'd just pulled out heroin and a bottle of whiskey.
(Laughter)
Now, although I would never feed this or dream to feed this to my own children,
I also understand the battle is won through education not shame,
[which] will, basically, drive this underground,
encourage solitary consumption and eating disorders.
Now, this feels like somebody else's problem - right? -
extremist religion.
Let's actually see how many people
are following their own extremist religion.
Let's see a show of hands.
How many people are or were vegetarian?
Paleo?
Gluten-free?
Raw?
Vegaquarian?
Whatever that means.
And my own personal favorite as a chef:
vegans.
Do we have any vegans?
As I suspected.
So you can see,
this extremist religion is not so far from our own backyard.
As human beings, it's normal.
We're social creatures.
We want to enlist and encourage as many people as possible
to our version of our religion.
What if our definition of healthy is just completely screwed up?
What would you say if I told you
that not only is all health food truly healthy,
but it could actually be slowly killing you in the process,
and not only do you feel good about it,
you feel completely empowered by your choices?
How many times
have you been to the supermarket and watched people ponder,
Which bag of potato chips am I going to purchase today?
only to land on those organic potato chips?
Well, being a little strange myself,
I typically ask the question why:
Why did you purchase that?
And the answer will typically go along the lines of,
"Look, it says it's organic.
It means it's healthy, right?"
Or "Look, the potatoes, they come from a small town outside of Kansas,
and the sea salt is harvested by hands, by virgins in the Greek islands,
(Laughter)
and the olive oil is squeezed one olive at a time.
All of this means it's healthy, right?
I'm here to tell you, it's not some magical form of junk.
Junk is junk. Food is food.
Makes it even more simple, right?
Imagine a world
where you make your choices based off, Which flavor do I want?
versus going to the supermarket store shelves
and having to scour the shelves to try to find the flavor of something
because it's hidden behind all of the seals and the non-GMOs
and the Fair Trades and the organics and this and that
before you can actually understand what you're actually buying.
Now, we're in this Utopian world.
I imagine and I predict -
it's not rocket science, but I predict in 50 years from now,
we're going to have children coming to us, saying,
"Hey, I can't believe you used to eat that crap."
Right?
Exactly the same way we feel about the war of tobacco.
Imagine trying to explain to them
the down and dirty battle between lobbyists and politicians
about trying to declassify pizza as a vegetable
simply because it has tomato sauce.
It's absurd.
So, many people feel protected by policy, right?
Everyone feels like if it's on a store shelf,
there must be some kind of legislation,
somebody must have put their rules on that thing in order for it to be there,
so therefore it's safe.
The way that policy typically goes:
Someone writes a study.
The consumers go out
and they try to find a product that matches that study.
The consumer asks,
the manufacturer answers
by scrambling to get something that answers that particular need,
and then policymakers, they try to catch up
to assert their worth in that particular field.
We can all remember the New York City soda ban,
or the failed soda ban, right?
When a politician tries to say,
"You don't need a soda that takes two hands to carry."
Everyone said, "Don't touch my soda."
Feared in any state, he said, "But it's okay.
Take two giant ones and put them in each hand. It's okay."
Right?
But yet we still feel protected by that same policy
that we've been fighting against.
A little notion -
sugar is sugar is sugar.
Right?
That sugar you just paid 10 times more for?
It's not magical.
It's still sugar.
A couple of entrepreneurs came to me and said,
"Adam, we've struck gold.
We've done it:
a healthy cupcake."
I said, "Wow.
First of all, that sounds like an oxymoron,
but give me one - I need to try it."
I tasted it and I said, "Wow, this thing is so sweet.
Show me the nutritional label."
I looked at it, and I said,
"35 grams of sugar? How is this healthy?"
They said, "No, no, no. It's not sugar.
It's agave."
(Laughter)
So, at the end of the day, we need to get beyond the marketing messages,
we need to get beyond the hype,
and we need to understand
that in your body, yes, there may be a difference from one to the other,
ever so slight,
but at the end of the day,
it's all about monitoring your consumption of sugar:
eat less -
the quality of it is obviously secondary; it's still important -
but eat less sugar.
Now, we seem to have become very comfortable
living our life in sound bites - the Twitter generation.
We seem comfortable
if we can read it in 140 characters or less,
we know, or proclaim to know, all there is to know.
We seem to have become very, very comfortable
touching the surface of many different things
and proclaiming to the world,
"I know something about that."
Food is a very complicated topic,
made even more complicated by the lobbyists
who profit from their ability for you to believe their study
versus the other study
that tells you that that product is actually going to kill you.
Let's revert to some ancient wisdom.
Let's do something revolutionary.
We eat something; we feel something.
It's kept us alive for millions of years.
So,
let's connect ourselves with food.
Let's understand the difference
between feeling great because we're being nourished
and feeling great because we're feeding an addiction.
That's, obviously - that's what drugs are for.
Let's understand the role that food plays in our lives.
It's supposed to nourish and inspire,
not excite us and distract us while slowly killing us.
Thank you.
(Applause)