Amherst Reads Transcript

Participants:

• Eve Turow-Paul '09
• Catherine Sanderson, Poler Family Professor in Psychology

Catherine Sanderson: I am Catherine Sanderson, I am Poler Family Professor of Psychology, and currently Chair of Psychology, and I could not be more delighted to have this conversation today with my former student, whom I knew as Eve Turow, but is now Eve Turow-Paul, who graduated in 2009. So Eve is a perfect example of one of the joys of teaching at Amherst College which was a super smart, you know, motivated student, and it’s always so exciting for me to stay in touch with students I have taught even a little bit through the years, at an alumni event, I think in Brooklyn, a few years ago and...

ETP: Yeah, that’s right.

CS: And it would be fun, and then, her latest book, which is her second book, is actually published by one of my publishers from my last book, and that was also a fun little quirk of fate and a fabulous publisher. So, I’m going to be talking today about Eve’s fabulous new book, which is called Hungry: Avocado Toast, Instagram Influencers, and Our Search for Connection and Meaning, but I also want to point out that in addition to writing this second book, Eve also found it and is the executive director of Food for Climate League, a non-profit organization which she founded last year. So, I’m super excited about that and I think we’d also love to hear about that during this interview. So, welcome, Eve, and thank you so much for asking me to do this interview with you!

ETP: Thanks for agreeing to do it! I’m super excited!

CS: So, when Eve said “Hey, would you have any interest in interviewing me?”, I think I took about what, 10 seconds, how long … 

ETP: Yeah!

CS: Because I was like “Are you kidding me?” Because I have had this book on my nightstand table for a few months now, but I really couldn’t justify spending time, you know, exactly pouring myself into it in the middle of, you know, teaching in a global pandemic and so now it became homework that was required, and I was like “fabulous, I have this wonderful excuse.” So, anyway, so enjoyed reading this book, and really honestly everyone is going to relate to so many different aspects of it. Um, but I wanted really start by talking about what was fascinating to me is that this book, although it is called Hungry, and the cover art is adorable avocado on a phone on a piece of toast, fabulous cover. What was fascinating to me, is the book is such a compelling integration of so many divergent topics. So it is about food, and it is called Hungry, but it actually examines what we eat, what we don't eat, how we feel anxiety, depression, loneliness... 

ETP: Yeah...

CS:  ...The world of social media and technology, so all of these really disparate topics, and I’d love for you to start by just talking about how this book came to be, what was the spark, what was the process of working on it.

ETP: Yeah, very good question. So Hungry, we picked the title initially to cue obviously the association with food but also emotional hungers, so a lot of what I’m asking is what are we hungry for on an emotional level, like evolutionarily, and then day to day in our modern world. The seeds of this book came out of my time living in New York city in 2010, when I was getting my MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing, and it was then that I kind of observed my own food behaviorism, the food behaviorism of those around me and realized ok, it’s peak recession, I’m broke, the people who I’m in graduate school with are also broke, yet we’re spending what little discretionary income and time we have on food. And I started to do my research into the “why” behind the kind of millennial foodie culture and very quickly began to realize that we use food as a coping mechanism, as an antidote for all of these other emotional ailments that plague particularly my generation, although at this point it is not just a millennial issue. But we have a record of high rates of anxiety, and depression, and stress, and loneliness, and for a long time I just didn’t understand why with the rise of tech and screens, we were all suddenly interested in sour dough and these other analog food activities or even just shared plate, shared tables. And it seems like a topic that’s kind of all over the place and the challenge in writing Hungry was investigating all of those disparate trends and then trying to weave it together. I have to be honest, I wrote the book proposal, I’ve got the book deal, and then I had a panic attack because I was outlining it and it’s like “Oh my God, this is five books, and how am I going to do this?” And I’ve gotten a lot of feedback from people saying like “this is just jam packed,” and I’m like “I know!” because I didn’t know what to cut. My editor didn’t know what to cut, but so, I’m hoping to have gone into each of those threads and nodes so that people see the connections and how they’re relevant and impacting one another. 

CS: Well, I will say, I mean, I was obviously fascinated by it as a psychology professor, but I was also fascinated by it as a mom. And I think that so many of the points that you make, although they are truly universal, you also really talk about this link between food and mental health, and well-being, and how it plays out especially for teenagers, you know, for young adults, for college students, and I found those sections particularly compelling and really gripping, and in some cases really tragic. And I’m wondering if you could share a little bit of what you found, you know, about that link in your research. 

ETP: Yeah, for sure, so a lot of what I’ve been focusing on over the last few years is, well, ok what is it that so unique about the way millennials have been raised that’s causing these high rates of anxiety, depression, and loneliness. Ok, long story short, the vast majority of it boils down to time with screens, the digital age. And now, of course, those impacts are proliferating with Generation Z and with people of other generations who are equally plugged in, who are attached to their email, getting 24/7 news notifications, are on Twitter etc. All of these different things are causing a multitude of anxieties, and it became really striking for me as I travelled around the world to see just how common these issues are of people feeling overwhelmed with the world, feeling envious and jealous of time on social media, really changing the way we evaluate our own self worth, the way we spend our time with others, and it’s becoming particularly relevant for Gen Z, those who are still at home with their parents, or now in college are Gen Z-ers, but those, those are individuals who are raised in the worlds where Facebook, Kickstarter, Instagram, they’ve never known a world without it, right, texting. I feel old when I say like “I remember when texting started,” and my class year was actually the first year to meet my college peers on Facebook before I met them in person. So it’s like Millennials were the guinea pigs – one foot in and one foot out of the tech boom – whereas Gen Z-ers, they’re really like the true digital natives. And for the research in my book, it was kind of a time to be like “OK, I’ve been talking about Millennials for a long time, I’m not a Gen Z-er, I need to go do more research. So I went back to my former high school, New Trier, and went back to Illinois and spent a week with students, observing really what was different about the high school experience, and with a keen focus on the impact of social media tech in students' relationships to food. And I want to say, I was deeply disturbed by what I was hearing! And what I was hearing,’ and I think kind of the biggest, I mean, most important takeaway I can just share, a really small anecdote, was the students’ attachment to their devices in the way that was reshaping the way that they were viewing themselves, their peers, their own self worth. One of the biggest, one of the most important questions I think that I asked, I was with a few different students shadowing. I asked two different groups of kids: “How many people do you talk to everyday, including, you know, people that you are texting, video chatting and seeing in person?” And then I asked “How many people do you think really know you?” So two different groups, I got kind of similar answers in terms of the number of people they talk to every day. It was somewhere between 15 and 30, these students have chat groups, and all this stuff. And then I asked “how many people really know you? And I should say “really know you and love you” and I gave, I said, for example “how many people if you went to them and said “I killed somebody” would just look at you and say “where do we put the body?” and... and the first question from both groups of students was “Can I include my parents?” Like “Does family count?” And then the average answer was two. And I thought that that was really striking that these students were spending all day scrolling through these different platforms, editing their photos, obsessing over what they were going to caption, and then at the end of the day, they really didn’t feel that close to anybody.        

CS: Yeah, that’s a heartbreaking story, and I actually, small world, I had a niece, currently a junior in New Trier... 

ETP: Oh wow!

CS: ...I assumed that she was not in your sample but, you know, as a mom I have a daughter who’s a junior in high school. That story, you know, really speaks to me. And that actually leads, I think, naturally, to my next question. So, I have taught Intro to Psych at Amherst since 1998, my first year arriving, and the part of the class in which I talk about psychological disorders, you know, bipolar and schizophrenia, and, you know, depression, and phobias, whatever, is always like a favorite, you know, the students love that part. But I will say as a person with a PhD in Psychology, and the one that taught Intro to Psych for a long time, I learned from your book about a new type of phobia, nomophobia. Am I saying it right? Nomophobia?

ETP: Yes, nomophobia.

CS: Tell us what it is, um, how we get it, how we can avoid it, how we can treat it, you know, and so on.

ETP: Yeah! It’s, it’s, it’s a legit phobia. And they are trying to get it entered into DSM, I don’t think it has officially been accepted as a diagnosed full anxiety, but it’s the fear of not having or not being able to use your smartphone. And we’re all familiar with like the feeling of that anxiety, right, it’s like the panic that you feel when the battery power turns red. Or when you realize that oh my god, your phone is not in your pocket where you thought it was. But this is becoming enough of a physical reaction and of emotional reaction that a lot of people in healthcare have found that they need to label it as a specific anxiety and begin treatment for it, and the nomophobia scale, the diagnostic scale, was developed by someone who worked specifically in a center for internet addiction. But for this book, I was able to run an original study, with this market research from data censial. Just like for additional context, I’ve been doing my research for 10 years, using journalistic tactics – doing interviews and shadowing people, and, you know, going through academic papers – but it was a lot of fun to team up with a market research firm and be like “ok, let’s run our own study, our own survey, and put some of these theories to work.” And so I incorporated a bunch of the nomophobia scale questions. It was shocking how many people were considered quote-on-quote nomophobic. We actually had to change, so we created like a subgroup called the “tech tethered cohort” that we talk about in the book. Based on the original criteria that I had given the data censial team, I was like “OK, if people answer X number of questions in this way, they will go into this cohort,” it was like 96% of respondents that we had to change the criteria. So it would be less people because we were just like “we’re not gonna be able to get any learnings from this if it’s, you know, every single respondent is a part of this.” So yeah, that's nomophobia. 

CS: And I, and I love that, and I’m completely going to use that and I’m gonna talk about that, and I’m probably gonna deliver that scale in Intro Psych the next time I teach, so I love that...   

ETS: I can send it to you.

CS: … I would, I would … And if you could tell, sort of sadly, students are gonna resonate with it, right? It’s gonna be something that they very very much identify with it. So I tag that immediately. The other thing which I think relates sort of to this general topic of the roll of technology is the sort of obsession with social media – the Facebook, the Twitter, etc – you have a wonderful graph on page 49, which I’m really hoping we can show. 

ETS: Oh yes!

CS: Yes, in the… I hope it can be part of the interview and just as an image, but that to me was so gripping because it’s basically talking about this negative self fulfilling downward spiral, I mean... 

ETS: Yes.

CS: ...Downward spiral, so maybe talk about that since, of course, I’m not sure people will be seeing this image. So talk about that... 

ETS: Yeah.

CS: ...Spiral, which to me was so compelling.

ETS: Yeah, so what, what Catherine is talking about is this little map that I made that’s really showing how the algorithms of social media work. And it’s not just social media, it’s any, really any place that’s delivering news to us, that’s recording what we click on, and then trying to deliver more content that, as the company say, we have interest in, right, they’re tracking what you click on, they’re gonna give you more similar stories. And just to be clear, before we move forward, like the reason why it’s so important to be talking about these anxieties is because these anxieties show up in the way we spend our discretionary time and income. Which is really like, the kind of connection here is like, you know, through Hungry, I was like, you know, “OK, why are people not interested in GMO’s, why are they interested in restrictive dieting, and a lot of these big trends are fueled by anxiety. So, the algorithms on these websites on social media are a big reason for this. And, this is especially relevant right now, as we are entering this presidential election cycle, as people are dealing with COVID-19, but here is how it works: all of us have a desire for knowledge. This is just gonna be one small example. If we’re seeing something show up on our screens that makes us scared, that makes us feel like we’re out of control, such as say an alert about a tsunami somewhere, or an alert about the rising number of covid cases, or an alert about Russian interference in our elections. One of the ways we as human beings are trying to cope is by collecting more information because evolutionarily, people who knew what was going on were generally more protected, right? You know what’s up, you know where to look for food, you know places to avoid etc. And I didn’t know until I did research for this book that we actually get a dopamine reward for learning new information. I had been completely unaware of that. So we are motivated, like the same way we’re motivated to find food and to find water, and we are motivated to find information. So, if something bad happens, you, we are all prone to click on those articles because we want to educate ourselves to know what’s up. Even though that then makes us even more scared because most of this we can’t do anything about on a day-to-day basis. So then we just, so we click on it, then the algorithms of Facebook, of Apple News, of Google News, of Twitter, whatever, they are going to surface then more stories that are about that frightening or disturbing thing that you clicked on before, and we all end up in this downward spiral of feeling like the world is increasingly dangerous and chaotic. And prior to 2020, in my presentations, I would always say, you know, “the world is safer than it ever has been.” Now, of course, that’s not quite true… now, maybe the anxiety is more called for, is more appropriate, but still, we’re being gripped in this obsessive cycle of searching for information in order to make ourselves feel like we know something that’s gonna put us in a position of power, when in reality it’s just turning anxiety that a lot of us don’t know what to do with or don’t know how to cope with. 

CS: I particularly thought it was interesting reading and thinking about this book, which of course was written, since it’s now published, pre-pandemic, right, I mean this is a... 

ETS: Yes, yeah.

CS: ...Pre-pandemic book, and yet you talk and link in Chapter 3 about lots of things that social psychologists describe as cognitive errors, right?

ETS: Yeah. 

CS: ...To talk about the illusion of control... 

ETS: Yeah, you’re right. 

CS: ...You talk about a variety of common illusions that we have, and I was struck in reading it about how we’re in the midst right now, and how we’ve been, you and I had this conversation in late September, we’re in the middle of what is clearly a lack of control, right?

ETS: Yes.

CS: We don’t know when there will be a vaccine, we don’t know when college will be not via Zoom, we don’t know... 

ETS: Right. 

CS: … If we will be allowed to go to Italy again, you know or…

ETS: Yeah.

CS: ...Or whatever. We don’t know anything.

ETS: Or when the fires will stop burning. 

CS: The fires will stop burning! Right! We have, and I think in a sense, and you alluded to this, we also, you know, as six weeks away from an election, you know there is a lot of sort of concern about how that’s all gonna play out in terms, you know, our democracy and so on.

ETS: Right, and then a racial justice movement on top of that, which is forcing people to think about another topic that generally makes them feel uncomfortable.

CS: Yes! No, so we are, we are in the midst of, you know, basically a whole lot of different kinds of anxiety provoking events, all of which, the vast majority of Americans and, frankly, people around the world lack control. What are your thoughts about how all of this massive uncertainty and in control, what does this have to do with not just anxiety and depression, but does it do things to our diet? Does it do things...

ETS: Yes.

CS: ...To, you know, health and cooking... 

ETS: Yeah. 

CS: ...And wellbeing and so on.

ETS: Yeah, and so this is, like, this is really why I find tracking food trends so interesting, because to me, it’s just like a little window into our mental health. So, I’m anticipating that eating disorders are going to go up, but that also that restrictive diets in general are gonna go up, so, I actually, I heard a report on NPR that calls to eating disorder hotlines have skyrocketed in the last six months. And that’s probably in part because people are home, maybe they’re able to pay more attention to their ways of eating, they’re being more self-reflective as possible, or it’s just that people are really freaking anxious, are searching for way to control, and one of the easiest thing we can control is what we are consuming each and every day. It’s something you can say yes and no to, it's very black-and-white, we choose what we put in and on our bodies. But over the last decade, as you’ve seen the anxiety rates go up, you’ve also seen restrictive diets become more and more popular. Whether that’s paleo or veganism, or the whole thirty, and in the Hungry study that we ran, we found that people who were anxious about anything, it didn’t matter if it was debt, or terrorism, or the climate crisis, people were anxious in general were also more likely to restrict their diets. Again, it didn’t matter what they were restricting. It could’ve been soy, or sugar, or gluten, they were just more likely to put up those barriers of “yes to this,” “no to that'' again, kind of an attempt to create order where there is none, reduce the number of choices that we have to make. And I’m by no means saying that it’s a bad thing, and I think if you’re able to manage your anxiety, and you’re not eating in a way that’s harming you physically, then if going gluten-free is going to make you feel emotionally better, I think that’s a great coping mechanism. I’m not a naysayer, I’m like, but I feel like I need to be very careful to say that because, you know, this is a touchy subject, and there are many people who are using food in a self-destructive way as a way of managing anxiety. The other thing that we’ve seen over the last six months, if we’re talking about ways to find a sense of control, like the first thing people did was to hoard food, right, I mean that that was trying to create a sense of security and control in this moment, but a lot of people are also learning to grow their food, learning to make their own food, they’re also learning to source food locally, and a lot of this has to do with ensuring food security, learning new skills in order to go to the grocery store less. One of the most potent trends of the last six months is that people are wasting less food. And wasting less food is actually the most important thing we can do to combat the climate crisis. I don't think most people are doing it with sustainability in mind. They might be doing it with financial sustainability in mind but also just as a tactic to go to the grocery stores less, but it is, again, it’s a mode of control.

CS: That’s all fascinating and I knew that you’d have really thoughtful things to say about that. As I was reading your book over the last few days, I was just thinking “Oh, I wonder what she thinks about this,”and  I wonder what you know almost like when a paperback version comes out, you’re gonna need like an epilogue, right, like here is the updated...

ETS: Yeah.

CS: ...Post-covid, you know, because some of that stuff you could actually examine, right, and... 

ETS: Yeah. 

CS: ...In the paperback.

ETS: It’s completely relevant to the work that I’ve been doing like sadly, right, I mean, I spent the last few years looking at the effects of anxiety, and loneliness, and stress, and our behaviors, and it’s just all gonna exacerbate. 

CS: Right, perfect timing. I have been teaching via Zoom social Psychology, and as a way of basically trying to make students feel more connected and sort of bond as a class during, you know, this really uncertain time, they’re divided into four different groups, you know, about 15 kids each. But we start every class the same, which is that everybody in the group has to say either a high or a low about their last week. So that, so every, we all go around... 

ETP: That’s very nice!

CS: And I’m telling you, it’s been really nice as a professor, I mean, you know, maybe some of them will listen to this and be like “ah, I dread that high-low,” I know, but we’ve been doing that. And here is what’s fascinating. So many of the highs and lows have been about food. 

ETP: Hm...

CS: So... so I’ll give you, I’m gonna give you some examples cause I was like... 

ETP: Yeah. 

CS: I was noticing it. So people will say “I’ve learned how to grill a chicken outside,” you know... 

ETP: Oh!

CS: ...Outside … “My mom and I made homemade jam.” 

ETP: Yeah. 

CS: Some of them will be “I got Antonio’s from Uber Eats.”

ETP: Yeah, I mean... 

CS: ...So it’s not, it’s no all, you know, cooking food.

ETP: Yeah.      

CS: But others will be “we did a sourdough starter” or, you know, whatever. So many of them have been “I got this food,” “I learned how to make this food,” “I ate this food,” “my mom and I did this, ” you know, “I made this cake,” you know, whatever. And it just really struck me, and thinking about, and then they can talk about anything they want. But in terms of high points for many of the students that’s been really a sort of a sense of almost comfort, yeah, right. 

ETP: Yes! So, I mean, that’s the other thing. So people are like “ok, you’re saying that, you know, interest in control is gonna go up, so we’re going to see a rising interest in supplements.” Well yes, but then we’re also seeing a rising interest in junk food and comfort which is absolutely also about control and creating a sense of security, right, you can go buy like kale for your kale salad and a can of SpaghettiOs, and those two things are not in conflict with one another from an emotional perspective. I was thinking of an example of Panera. They’ve done like a masterful job of remaking their menu around this because they have like their “Guilty Pleasure Mac & Cheese” and then they also have their like bone broth and both sell really well but they understand that’s the same customer who’s gonna buy both of those, it just depends on a day and how they’re expressing that need. I loved the story that you were telling about your students. The other reason, so, the books is categorized into our three core human needs which I identify as a need for control, mainly need for community, which is great that you’re doing the highs and the lows, because it is also facilitating community when everyone’s isolated and then, I mean, a sense of meaning and purpose. And the third section of the book for me was the most rewarding and interesting to do research on because it challenged a lot of my assumptions of how we cultivate a sense of meaning and purpose in life, and the two major themes that I came across were a) like skill building with an emphasis on physically making something and a second was the connection to nature. And so many of those food trends we were talking about, whether it’s, you know, baking sourdough bread, learning how to grill, making jam, pickling… They’re hitting on both of those things: they’re both physical, you’re building a skill set that includes your body– you need to use your nose to smell when something’s done, you need touch to know the texture, you are also then sharing the product with other people which is another way to cultivate a sense of meaning and purpose, you can see how things are changing over time, you can get better, but it’s also a way of reconnecting us with our food sources, and this was kind of to me, really important takeaway was that connecting with nature reminding us that we are just one small part of this ecosystem, actually fills people with a sense of awe and gratitude that can elevate our sense of meaning and purpose in life. 

CS: Yeah, yeah, I love those examples! Maybe just briefly, because I really like this example from your book, talk about you and your husband and the outer patio that you built...

ETP: Oh yes! I just, sure. 

CS: That just reminded me, so just share that, would you? 

ETP: Yeah, so my husband and I decided to transform our backyard in New York, and we very easily could have hired just a landscaper to do it, but instead we decided to do it all by hand. So, we dug out the backyard, we rented a tamper from Home Depot, we brought bags of sand, and holed all the patio pavers through our condo, which, the only way by the way to get through the backyard was to walk through the kitchen, through our bedroom out of the back yard...out the back door, but we wanted to do it ourselves because, I mean, both of us were yearning for that physical laborious experience and also because every time we looked out the back door we could be like “We did that!” and we actually we were lucky to just have purchased the home here, in Chicago, and struggled in that area, and we took down all the kitchen cabinets and we were gonna redo them ourselves. Again, we could pay somebody, but we were like it’s pandemic, how do we start to make this home, you know, filled with memories, start to make it ours, we were like “we’re gonna do this ourselves,” and it’s been fun.

CS: Yeah, I was gonna say how’s that going, I mean you’re still married, so... 

ETP: It's good! It’s actually been really good!

CS: But good, I’m glad to hear that but you can see that going different directions. And speaking of … speaking of family and your husband, and your home, you are also the mom of Will who I think has just turned one.

ETP: Yeah, on Sunday. 

CS: On Sunday? 

ETP: Yeah. 

CS: So congratulations! Very exciting… and I’m, and so you obviously wrote this book pre-parenthood...

ETP: Aha, mostly. 

CS: ...Largely pre-parenthood in terms of the publication process, and so it struck me very much as a mom of three – I have two sons in college and a daughter in high school – there were lots of points that spoke to me as a mom, whether it’s, you know, issues of kids being picky eaters or, you know, having a restrictive palate, or how culture influences what we eat, and you can imagine, you know, kids growing up exposed to different kinds of foods and so on, foods as comfort, foods as familiarity, also issues of body image, there’s lots of talk about self presentation and I wondered how being a mom to live has changed or influenced how you parent, how you think about parenting in the future, whether it’s cooking food or saying this as woman to your daughter and so on.

ETP: Yeah, that’s a really good question. To me, the things that come to mind first we did baby led weaning for Liv so we never fed her, we’ve, meaning hands spoon fed her, we do feed her, but we’ve just given her food that she can pick up. But part of the theory about baby led weaning is about giving your child autonomy. And I do think that the research I did in the book about her desire for control really opened my eyes to the importance of giving her autonomy really early on, and that a lot of the research around picky eating is around that idea of control both from an emotional perspective but also food safety. Just finding so many really interesting articles about like why kids are picky, it’s like evolutionarily beneficial for a toddler to become picky because if they were still picking up everything and putting it in their mouth, chances are that they’re gonna eat something that was a problem. So also when she doesn’t want to eat something, I’m just like “okay,” and I think I have a more laissez-faire attitude towards it than I would have otherwise. The other thing is I’m hyper aware of the toys that she uses, we do not do screen time unless it’s FaceTime during the pandemic. We had to finally say “ok, if we wanna talk to Nana on screen, you can do that,” but I’m really aware of how some of her toys, if we’re not using them, they’ll make a sound to bring her attention back to the toy, and it reminds me a lot of social media. And these companies that are trying to like… the currency that they work in is how much attention their...of yours that they’re getting. You know, so I’m looking at these products and thinking “well, OK, this book is making a sound when she hasn't been using it because they want the child to return to the toys that the parent thinks the child is very interested in the toys, they’re gonna tell their other friends that they should buy their kid this toy, when in reality, it’s just hijacking your child’s attention. It’s distracting them from whatever else they were doing to bring them back. And I think that that’s been kind of disturbing but, you know, the last part really is around sustainability, and I mean I maintain whatever I consider to be a sustainable diet. I’m not vegan, I have a big belief that we just need to be eating a greater variety of foods that are responsibly raised and sourced, and obviously I am feeding her those foods. And I’m hoping that I can teach her how to cook, how to grow her own food, all those things, not just from the survivalist standpoint like before but from an emotional wellbeing standpoint. Now that I know how this feeds and nourishes our wellbeing in such a multifaceted way, I think, I’m gonna continue to emphasize as a parent.

CS: Great, I love this answer, and I think that, and that answer frankly illustrates the breadth of your book, right? I mean that sort of that it’s not a food… it’s not a book about avocado toast, right? I mean, it’s a book... 

ETP: Right, no. 

CS: It touches on so many broad … broad topics.

ETP:  It’s a… it’s the “why” behind these food trends, you know? And I think that a lot of what I’ve been focusing on over the last six months, too, is like how do we use food culture as a way to manage and find wellbeing personally during this moment but also like now, when I spend a lot of my time being at house, how can this also translate into climate action and regaining the sense of agency. And it turns out that doing like these certain food behaviors that are good for us emotionally, they’re also good for the planet. There’s nothing in conflict.

CS: So, talk about that a little bit because that really I think is important and kind of where you are heading professionally in sort of your post book to your life. That you’re really doing a lot of advocacy work, looking at the climate and at, of course, that is such a centrally important topic for all of us these days. So, yeah, so why don’t you talk about that? I feel like that would be fascinating. 

ETP: Yeah, so, I mean, the Food for Climate League was in large part born for research for Hungry cause I was traveling around the world, talking to people, again, about the “why” behind their food behaviors, and there was this narrative that I was hearing over and over again, whether I was in Seoul or in Sonoma County, people say “you know, I don’t know whether my city’s gonna be underwater in 50 years, I don’t know if I wanna have kids because do I really wanna bring them in to this world?” Birth rates are down around the world. I, you know, then on top of that, I don't really know how my phone works, I have all these other anxieties, I don’t know if I ever get out of debt, but people are saying, you know, I may as well spend the discretionary time and income I have on really great food and food experiences. And it was just this really apocalyptic narrative that I was hearing over and over again. And then, you know, apart from doing my writing, I work as a consultant, for organizations and companies in food, and ed, and hospitality. I was hearing from a lot of my clients like “Well, you know, we’ve tried to address food and climate but those products don’t sell” or “those campaigns don’t get picked up.” I was like what OK, what’s the disconnect here because I can see the potential that we have, why aren’t those products flying off the shelves? So I reached out to a few friends in the industry, and we started a non-profit! I thought this was gonna be like a one off project and now I’m running an organization, so it’s not what I thought I was gonna be doing, but I’m having a ton of fun. But it’s become particularly relevant during the COVID-19 pandemic because the shifts overseeing in food behaviors, again, they are speaking to our core human needs for control, community, and purpose, right, we are learning how to bake banana bread, and doing a hashed egg, and telling other people about it, and facilitating community that way to feel connected, we’re getting chicken and learning how to garden to feel connected to nature and to secure our food when buying immune... when looking for nutrient rich foods in order to boost our immunity. Each of those food behaviors also happens to be a good thing for the climate. So we as an organization right now are working on how do we shift this narrative around a climate smart eating away from negative – less meat, less waste, everyone thinks right now it’s like this idea that you have to give something up in order to do something good – and instead we’re trying to create a narrative that is telling people like no, you can just eat really delicious foods without feeling like you’re sacrificing anything, and you’re going to be boosting your physical health, your mental health, and you’re going to be a climate superhero at the same time. 

CS: And that intersection of all of those and a timeliness, and a timeliness is so very important. I want to end, actually, the way that you end the book with the final chapter. 

ETP: OK. 

CS: And the final chapter is entitled “Nature and Wellbeing,” and it struck me as a psychologist that that was such a lovely ending because it’s really describing what we all should be searching for, right? We should all be searching for wellbeing: physical wellbeing, psychological wellbeing, mental wellbeing, and honestly I can't think of anything more timely these days for all of us than doing, you know, sort of strategies for improving wellbeing, that’s of course a topic near and dear to my heart and teaching, you know, and writing, and speaking, and so on. So tell us about this, and you alluded to the nature piece a little bit, but really what is your book shedding light on for all of us in terms of how to find that, how to find wellbeing in amidst of these massive episodes of anxiety, and depression, and technology, and social media, and all of the uncertainty we’ve talked about throughout this interview?

ETP: Yeah, so, there are some basic needs that we all have, and I think part of what’s so difficult these days is that the world is just drastically different than the world we currently in, and, you know, a big part of the exploration of this book is looking at how so many aspects of the digital age actually hinder our ability to find wellbeing. It’s just making it really hard for us to even just feel OK. That’s why we all feel like crap. You know, this was the other thing, it’s like “oh, I’m anxious, I’m depressed, I’m lonely, I’m stressed out.” I’m not alone by any stretch of imagination, and it’s in many ways because this culture that we have cultivated for ourselves on a global scale runs in direct conflict with the behaviors that we need in order to be fulfilled, and happy, and feel like we belong, and build our self-esteem. Food culture and just lifestyle culture in general can be a conduit to finding, regaining those kind of core aspects of wellbeing you can't through food feel like you’re gaining control of your health because you can, you can be cultivating your own food, changing the way that you shop, you can find community through food, whether it’s starting like up cook club, or cooking your meals with people over video, or starting a socially distanced picnic club that you can do. We all know, right, that food is such a great way to connect people, and there are ways to do it virtually. But getting out into nature was one of the major learnings that I had. And I, honestly, I really saw this when I was doing research for that chapter, I went to a farm in Sonoma. I, myself, I’ve not talked about this yet, I myself was dealing with a serious round of depression when I was researching this. And I went to this farm, and it was the best therapy I’ve ever received. I was petting pigs, and dogs, and goats, I was harvesting food, and cooking, and spending time outdoors. I have never had a more restorative experience in my life. It just made me feel less alone to really connect with these animals, to feel like I was nourishing myself, I could see how my food is being grown, I was learning all about the soil, I was really thinking about the fact that the foods that I was consuming held nutrients that were in the ground, and that I … each of us is a part of the earth already, like in our culture we think about of returning to the earth after death, it’s like no, we each of us is earth! We’re walking around pieces of earth. So, I think the idea of going to Mars is so looney – we are… we are created for this planet, and that also makes me feel more grounded. But these, you don’t have to go to a farm in order to cultivate that feeling of wellbeing: you can go on a walk, I encourage you to go on a walk somewhere where there’s trees, and greenery, and maybe somewhere where you can hear water, that would be extra great. But these are super simple things you can do that reconnect us with those elements of life that we are evolutionary prone to be rewarded by, that are going to fill us with those hormones that are gonna have a lasting impact on our sense of meaning and self-worth and the biggest thing, I got to say, is management of technology. You know, it’s not just about getting outside, it’s about getting outside and putting your phone away. Leave your phone at home! It’s ok. It’s also questioning like, if you get an email or text, or call, do you really have to answer it right now? Is someone going to freak out, is the world going to end if you leave your phone at home, or put it in a drawer, or leave it in the other room for 15 minutes, or maybe an hour? You know, there is this idea that we need to be on all the time that I think has been exacerbated during this current moment that’s a concoction of our own minds, it is not something that is faced in reality, and it has such a serious impact on our wellbeing, I encourage you to turn off your notifications, you don’t need to know about all of the bad news happening all the time. You don’t even need to know about every text that’s coming in all the time. And I also encourage people to, when they can spend time with othersin person, no likes, no upvotes are ever gonna be a replacement for that.          

CS: So, Eve, I love that example of the importance of spending time in nature. And I’m actually going to share now with you a photo, and this is a photo of my social psychology class…

ETP: Wow!

CS: The kids live, and so what you can see here, we’re in a tent, we are outside, of course this is not gonna work well in November in Massachusetts, we can all imagine that we will be moving inside, but this is what I’m gonna say: Amherst very thoughtfully gave all faculty a choice of teaching this fall in person or remote, and if you taught in person, which I’m doing for kids who are on campus, you had a choice of being in a tent or inside, and I said “I’m going tent,” and I’m going tent because I felt like it was so important to be in nature, and as you can see in this photo, we’re, we’re outside!

ETP: And they look, and the students look very happy! 

CS: And they are very happy, I will say this was day one, I now make them rearrange the table, so it’s like a circle, but here is what I’m gonna say is also fascinating – two things: one – many of them, when we were doing high - low, talked about being outside in nature. So these kids, a lot of their high - lows is “I went on a walk,” “I got to play tennis,” you know, whatever, many of these kids were talking about “I went on a bike trail,” you know, places they were allowed to go in Amherst. The students have said they love to be outside, like this is their preference, even though we had a little bit like bee infestation on one of the days. That has happened. But other thing which maybe you can tell from the photo is that it’s old school, so what you can’t see is that there’s a white board and a bunch of markers, so I am not doing a PowerPoint. There is no screen, it’s me with a marker and that’s it. Which might have well been how things were for you, Eve, when you graduated, and it is not how Amherst College is teaching now – that we teach via PowerPoint. You know, for most of our classes, and I will say, there is a sense in which teaching in this tent this fall outside has felt very-very pure to me, it’s felt very much like I can’t rely on the bells and whistles, right, I have a pen and a marker and that’s it. And I will say that it’s really an example, of, I think, of some of the plus that came out of this pandemic. So you’ve talked about, you know, and not in the book but in this conversation, which, of course, very much relates to the book, you’ve talked about the things people are doing in this pandemic that in fact could be good for wellbeing, right?

ETP: Right, well, it’s really interesting, too, that you’re bringing this up because I was thinking about, you know, the nature and wellbeing chapter, and just all the data that I found around being in nature and it helping productivity and creativity, it’s not just about like a feeling of happiness, it’s also like you’re more productive, and, you know, all of these like big tech companies, they know this, and so they’ve been investing in biophilic designs to like bring either like a false sense of nature into the office, or they’ve like actually built jungles. Or like big areas outside and this is, you know, Google, and Amazon, and Facebook, this is making so much sense to me as a practical solution that would not be, but there might be aspects of this, I’m curious, like, what your thoughts are, like, would you want to maintain some of this even if you could go back inside? 

CS: Yeah, well, so what’s so interesting is that we’re gonna eventually have to go back inside because it’ll get really cold... 

ETP: Right. 

CS: … And, and we’re trying to stay outside as long as we can, and what I think is so interesting, though is that in a sense this pandemic, of course, is horrific in lots and lots of different respects, and, of course, you know, a lot of kids at Amherst didn’t have the opportunity to be in this tent, right, because Amherst could only have the space, you know, safely to allow certain kids back in terms of a numbers of singles, but I will say, there is something to me that has actually felt, as you talk about in your book, this sense of connection, right? This sense of connection, and so normally, when I teach social psychology, it’s in a lecture hall, you know, when you’ve been a student, it would’ve been a Merril Hall, now in Lipton, you know, something in the new Science Center, but what I’ve done is I’ve divided the class into four different sections. This is my tent section, and then I have three different sections during the week that are 15 kids each, and there’s kids from California, and kids from Singapore, and kids from China, from Norway, you know, kids from all over, and in a sense I feel like we’re building these little communities, that it’s one class – they have the same set of assignments, you know, papers or whatever – but it’s really four different communities, and, and that’s something, in fact, I was saying earlier today, my husband and I were going walking our dogs before doing this interview with you, and I said to him “At the end of this semester, I feel like I’m gonna get to know the kids better because I’m not getting to know them in a group of fifty sitting in the lecture hall, I’m getting to know them in these little clusters of 15, and I would never and I have never done high-low at Amherst!”

ETP: Yeah. 

CS: High-low is not my thing with which I start the class.

ETP: Yeah. 

CS: High-low is my pandemic … I want these kids to feel like a sense of community when they are logging onto Zoom from around the world, whether they are sitting in a class or wearing masks and etc, and what can I learn as a professor, that’s gonna stick with me post-pandemic.

ETP: Yeah, and so my husband teaches fifth grade, and he’s doing it all virtually but he has had some similar feelings that he’s getting to know his students on this level that he’s just never gotten to know it before, and it’s because we are all grieving, and we’re all coping together, and he knows their family situations, and he can see into their homes, and he’s seeing their students, actually this is like a benefit of virtual in many ways, he’s seeing their faces all the time, like they’re not looking down, he can… he can kind of monitor the classroom a bit better, but I think that there are kind of these forced aspects of this current moment that are helping us return to the things that matter behaviors that are more conducive to community building, to productivity, and to wellbeing, so it’s not, you know, I think that most of the headlines out there are very doom and gloom, and… and, you know, there’s ample reason for the doom and gloom but there are also benefits of what’s happening right now, and I think that, you know, that’s really is what I focus  non-profit is, ok, we’re actually moving the world to more sustainable food behaviors, food as in number one most effective way for us to tackle the climate crisis, that’s a benefit and I’m ... now you’ve got me thinking like “Oh man, I wanna do some research,” I missed some impact on education and what the benefits of this current situation have been separately, well, I’ll tell you after the interview stops. 

CS: Um, so let me just say, it was a delight to have this conversation with you, Eve, and I can’t tell you how much I enjoyed the book which is Hungry: Avocado Toast, Instagram Influencers and our Search for Connection and Meaning. And I honestly think everyone will take away something from this book. We all eat, we all… we all want to have connection, we all want to have purpose and meaning, and the book is a lovely combination of scientific research for the nerds, present company included, I think, but very-very readable, very current, and very thought provoking. I will share thoughts from this book and recommend it to friends and colleagues, and I encourage everyone to check it out, so thank you so much…

ETP: Thank you!

CS: ...For this lovely invitation, and thanks to Amherst for letting me spend an hour catching up with my former student, and the way that I can classify it as work, so thank you!

ETP: This is awesome, thank you so much, this is so much fun, and it’s great to see your face again. 

CS: Yeah, same, same.