Changemakers: Author Michael Easter Talks Food, Health, and Behavior Change

“You don’t have to go all in,” he says of the transition to a plant-based diet. “But what are some things that you can do to push the ball forward? And once you’ve done that, can you push it forward a little more? I think that’s what’s made the difference in my life.”

What is the “scarcity mindset” or “scarcity brain” discussed in your forthcoming book? Can you explain how it’s connected to food and the way we eat today?

The way the book looks at food is that humans have evolved within a context where food was scarce and hard to find. So we evolved to eat more food when we had the opportunity. That made sense for two and a half million years! If you had the opportunity to eat, you should eat, because you might not have access to food for a while. But today, we find ourselves with stocked pantries and ample access—not just to food, but food that has been processed to the extent where it's very appealing. And it pulls these evolutionary levers that lead us to eat more of it.

Now, this is a good problem to have. I think we all agree that we don't want people starving. But as we developed this food system that allows eight billion people to live on Earth, it's also come with downsides. There are a lot of problems that come from eating too much food. As it pertains to what we're talking about, if we’re going to be eating animals on a massive scale, that system has basically been designed for straight-up efficiency. It lacks the recognition that we’re dealing with living creatures who have feelings. That's not good.

There’s this dichotomy between the way our ancestors lived and how we live today. Now, we have the luxury or comfort of just ordering meat products on Instacart. We’re very disconnected from what’s happening behind closed doors on factory farms. In what ways does the animal agriculture industry feed into our “scarcity brain”?

In The Comfort Crisis, I talk about how—if you’re, say, a small-scale rancher, or in the past if you raised animals or hunted—there's this heavy emotional buy-in. You have to go through the process of what it means for one creature to die so you can live. And that’s uncomfortable. And I think it changes your behavior when you realize that.

Today, we’ve engineered it out of our lives because it’s uncomfortable. There's a reason that grocery stores use euphemisms for cuts of meat. We use these terms so we don't remember what it is. And it's presented in such a way that there’s no reminder that it came from a living creature. Because once you start to think about that, it’s hard. I think the food industry is cognizant of that fact. And so they’ve done what they can, more or less, to remove those uncomfortable realizations from the process of purchasing animal products.

The other thing is, when you look at the diet industry, there are all these ideas that in the past humans just walked around eating meat all day. And that's not true at all. Basically, after the agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago, very few people ate meat. Because the animals needed to eat, and it was much more efficient for humans to directly consume the grain that the animal would be eating. Meat in most societies was a once-a-year thing. Maybe twice a year.

Even before that, as hunter-gatherers, it was much more efficient to gather calories than to hunt them. Yes, we ate meat because there were some upsides to it for survival, and it did seem to fuel the development of our brains. But diets of hunter-gatherers were mostly plant-based. And even in the periods where meat was most abundant, when you look at different data on hunter-gatherer diets, maybe 30% of the diet was meat.

Today, the average American consumer eats about 12 ounces of meat a day. That also means that on the higher end of the spectrum, people are actually eating pounds of it. People have never really been able to do that.

How can people push beyond their comfort zones when it comes to what they’re eating, and probably more importantly, how much they’re eating?

Only 20% of eating is actually driven by physiological hunger. And the other 80% of it is because “it's noon, and I eat lunch at noon.” For a lot of people, I think food becomes a widget—I'm bored, I’m stressed out. And so most people don’t really even realize how much food they actually eat. They have no clue. And I think the biggest driver of our collective health problems in our modern environment is our food system, number one. Because we just eat a ton of calories, comparatively, and our activity levels are so low.

Becoming more aware of how much you're eating is very important, and that applies to any food that you’re eating. You could be vegan, and if you're eating too many Doritos and Oreos, you're going to have health problems, too. Just because you go vegan doesn't mean your health problems are going to evaporate. That's going to be the number one thing that determines your health status.

And that actually brings up another point about how I view making changes. To me, it's just about finding vegan foods that are a solid option. There are plenty of great vegan things out there, but they’re a little harder to find. So when you land on a good food option, it’s often better than the animal-based version. Then you’re just slowly folding those options into your diet, and you find over time that you've eliminated a lot of animal products.

Behavior change doesn’t happen all at once. Ultimately, you need to change behaviors, and that’s very hard. When you change a million behaviors at once, you change no behaviors. When you try to change one behavior, you have a much higher likelihood of changing one behavior.

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“When you change a million behaviors at once, you change no behaviors. When you try to change one behavior, you have a much higher likelihood of changing one behavior.”

What are some other tips that people can glean from your book that would help them step outside their comfort zones and eat better?

In The Comfort Crisis, the chapter on food focuses on hunger and how hunger is not an emergency. For a lot of people, I think what happens is that your mind gets ahead of you. So people will say, “It's noon. I haven't eaten. I'm going to feel hungry. And that hunger’s going to build and build and build until I die.” And it's not really like that! If people couldn’t function when they were hungry, we wouldn't be here right now. We would have all died off two and half million years ago.

In my forthcoming book, The Scarcity Brain, I talk about how our food is engineered for quick repeat consumption. For example, when you give people an unprocessed diet versus a heavily process ed diet, and you lock them in a lab and say, “Eat whatever you want!”, the people who eat the unprocessed diet end up eating 500 fewer calories a day. And that’s because with hyper-processed food, the speed with which we eat it is a lot faster. You have to chew it less; there are fewer hunger signals that get ramped down afterward. So you end up eating more food without even realizing it.

So it’s about shifting to more foods that have one ingredient. That’s a basic rule of thumb: your food should have one ingredient. That can become harder to do when you're vegan, because some foods might be more processed if you're trying to mimic animal foods. So becoming more aware of that—when it comes to the foundation of your diet, you're probably going to be better off if your foods have one ingredient.

What initially drew you to support The Humane League?

What I love so much about the work you’re doing is that, like I talked about, it's really hard to make different choices. You're making choices for people by changing the decisions that corporations make, so the individual doesn’t have to make the decision. The decision is made for them, and that’s way easier to scale.

The big picture is, I like The Humane League because you’re making decisions for people. It feels more suggestive of the question, “How do I make incremental improvements, rather than go all-in?” And obviously it’s effective! You’re making massive changes, which is amazing, and I love to see that.

Keep up with Michael Easter on his website, and keep an eye out for his forthcoming book on September 26! And for more tips on plant-based eating, download our free Path to Plant-Based Starter Guide.