Why I Quit My Dream Job at the NY Times/Mark Bittman

[NJCher]

We speculated a bit here at the C&B Forum, but we didn't nail it. It's a "Blue Apron" for vegans.

Story at Time Magazine

Could there be a better week to form a company specializing in vegan meals? As everyone knows, the World Health Organization last week labeled processed meat a carcinogen and said red meat was probably dangerous as well. Not news, exactly, but a further confirmation that plant-based diets are where it’s at.

It was the determination to get healthier food onto the dinner plates of more Americans that led me to leave the New York Times, where I had what most people would think was a dream job: as weekly Opinion columnist and the lead food writer for the Sunday Magazine. But really: Not only was I ready for something new, it felt like it was time to put my boots on the ground.

So when David Mayer contacted me, I was primed. Mayer is the lead investor in The Purple Carrot, a plant-based meal kit company founded in Boston by Andy Levitt last year. Dave, who never uses 100 words when he can use 1,000, wrote me a long e-mail that said, among other salient things, that he wanted to build a company so people would “cook meals with real food, talk about it, show their kids what cooking is and connect on that and what it means. Imagine the implications … if we could help …. hundreds of millions of Americans to eat vegan at least two nights a week. Make it easy, really good and affordable.”

I was pretty much sold at that point. Dave and Andy came to D.C., where I was that week and, with my friend Maddy Beckwith—a knowledgeable food person and a savvy investor—we went out for lunch. (I tried to impress them all by booking the table, but not only did the restaurant not recognize my name they couldn’t find the reservation.) Maddy and I fired questions: Why vegan, rather than almost vegan, which has been my philosophy for the last 10 years or so? What kept them from appealing only to vegans? What about the ridiculous amounts of packaging meal kits use? Where was the food coming from? And so on.

More at link.

The Purple Carrot. The food photography is stunning.


Cher

[Warpy]

1. Anything that gets Trendies into the kitchen is probably a good thing

and the hope I'm sure Bittman has is that after they've cooked the kit food for a while, they'll discover knives and start cooking the stuff from scratch.

Still, only the Trendies will be able to afford it. What needs to happen are opening charity kitchens in bad neighborhoods where busy poor folks can stop in for a quick meal in the front end or a lesson in preparing it in the back. Instead of missionary zeal over plant based diets, the emphasis could be on how to stretch a piece of meat to feed a whole table of people without any of them feeling deprived. Using meat as a flavoring works a lot better than trying to convince carnivores to give it up completely.