A love letter to food

We live in an age of commodification and scale. We have reduced the wondrous life-giving properties of an apple, refined by Mother Nature over thousands of years, to its constituent parts and dumped the isolated components into soda and gummies and called it “healthy”.

We think that health is just a matter of getting the right macro profile. Or maybe cleaner ingredients. But health is actually a gift from the soil.

We are healthy to the degree that we honor and participate in the nourishing gifts born from the vast interconnectedness of life.

You can see what happens to living systems when we forget this. We see flora and fauna dying out, imbalance, one natural disaster after another. And in our bodies we feel tired, we struggle to heal, one system fails and the rest fall like dominoes.

It’s all connected. We’ve taken our food, and our bodies, out of nature. We forgot that we don’t take care of nature, nature takes care of us.

And the healthcare system has been trying, and failing, to deal with the fallout of chronic disease. Healthcare and health insurance weren’t meant to manage chronic disease at this scale. Too many of us got too sick. The system broke.

Our current industrial food system was built to feed, not to nourish. It was built to maximize yield and concentrate profit.

But the good news is, if we could build the food system we have now, then we can build a new one.

The snow is melting at the edges.

People are starting to make the connection between what they eat and how they feel.

Even the healthcare system, under the weight of untenable costs, is discovering food and nutrition support as the answer to the chronic disease epidemic.

In college, my first degree was in Nutrition and Dietetics. Food has always been my biggest passion. But I kept thinking that instead of helping people try to navigate a broken food system, why don’t we just make better food? The failure of our food system is partly an economic failure. If we want better food and healthier people, we have to make the economics of real food work.

So I didn’t become a Registered Dietitian after graduation like all my friends. I pivoted to accounting and finance. And I started Bold Enterprise because I knew that to have a fighting chance, real food needs to get the financial piece right.

This is my mission:

1. Define the profitable operating models that can deliver real food
2. Build financially sustainable enterprises on those models
3. Make the case to investors, philanthropists, governments, and health care partners that if they fund those enterprises, they can change the world

To me, food-is-medicine is simply recognizing that nature is our first physician. And that the best prescription for health grows out of the ground.

Food-is-medicine can be a medically-tailored-meals program using local ingredients, or a beautiful farm product packaged and sold at retail. It can be a lot of things. But it can’t be the same industrial ingredients re-engineered for a better macro profile. This is about real food.

Entrepreneurs and leaders like you are already doing this work. You’re showing everyone else the way. I want to give you financial support that makes it feel slightly less impossible.

This movement is at a point where the incredible work of food-is-medicine pioneers is coming to fruition. There is unprecedented interest from consumers, funders, and policy-makers. Let’s work together to build fundable, sustainable enterprises and maybe someday “food-is-medicine” will just simply be “food”.

— Sam