In the food industry, there is an emerging trend to apply subtraction directly to our definition of deliciousness. This is a completely new paradigm compared to conventional diet methods which focused only on reducing quantity without really paying attention to the status of how we found deliciousness in food. But new approaches try to work directly with our taste buds before working with our stomach. This way subtraction can be appropriately connected with satisfaction and happiness.

Plum Organics

In the food industry, there is an emerging trend to apply subtraction directly to our definition of deliciousness. This is a completely new paradigm compared to conventional diet methods which focused only on reducing quantity without really paying attention to the status of how we found deliciousness in food. But new approaches try to work directly with our taste buds before working with our stomach. This way subtraction can be appropriately connected with satisfaction and happiness.

Take a look at Plum Organics, which was founded in Emeryville, California in 2007 to provide safe, healthy and delicious baby food. The co-founder, Neil Grimmer, who was a designer at a renowned design firm IDEO (interesting marriage of subtraction and aesthetics here), decided to start Plum Organics when he realized that he couldn’t find any products at grocery stores he wanted to give to his newborn baby.

What’s really revolutionary about Plum Organics is the fact that they introduced “culinary-inspired recipes” in a baby food market, not just safe, high quality and organic ingredients. Despite our obscure perception that babies are unaware subtle flavors, our taste buds critically (often irreversibly) develop in the first 1000 days of life – 10 months as a fetus, and two years as a baby. Believe or not, the taste development of babies begins in utero as they taste the food their mother eats. Once born, they start recognizing what they are eating after about four months. Then, when it’s time for solid food, they’ve already developed some (often strong) likes/dislikes towards foods.

If you fail to develop your taste buds early in life during that period when critically they establish their own definition of “deliciousness,” they will easily become prone to those intense, strong flavors you need to avoid if you want to stay healthy. It will become very hard to change your diet after your taste buds have stubbornly made their mind and want to stick to intense food.

Plum Organics are keenly aware of the importance of developing babies’ taste buds and advocates delivering well-prepared, fine foods from the very first bite the baby takes – which is crucial. Their product lines contain spinach, pea, kale, broccoli, carrot, zucchini or parsnip among other vegetables that are nutritious but avoided by many people because they taste “bad.” But Plum Organics combines and cooks those otherwise “unwelcome” ingredients with fruits, grains and dairy products to maximize their deliciousness. Yes, babies can definitely learn to appreciate kale. It is encouraging.

Gluten-free foods and Paleo diet

Other niches in food market that leverage subtraction include gluten-free or Paleo diets. The gluten-free category was created to take care of the people who are allergic to gluten but has been evolving ever since as a driver to re-discover deliciousness outside wheat and other gluten-rich grains.

Subtracting wheat and other grains is a big deal because they are literally everywhere. They are even found in ketchup or salad dressings, not just bread or pasta.

But if you remember the history of our diet, wheat is with us only for 0.05% of our entire history – it is still new. The fact that so many people are allergic to it demonstrates that our body hasn’t quite finished the feasibility study to fully embrace wheat. It is still a foreign food that causes stress in digestive systems of many of us. But nonetheless, we love it and kept growing the amount of production and consumption dramatically ever since we domesticated it. Why? Because it’s a very concentrated form of carbohydrate, for which our taste buds are designed to find deliciousness. Because it’s so intense, it’s almost addictive.

As we increased our reliance on wheat, we forgot other food we used to eat previously. So we need to remember them by re-tuning our taste buds. It will take effort because wheat dominates our definition of “deliciousness” in many ways, but increasing number of people are re-discovering the joy of eating forgotten foods.

If you start subtracting more “new” food such as refined sugar, dairy products or processed foods from your diet, you will become a Paleo diet eater. (Beans, including lentil is gluten-free, but Paleo diet excludes them from “to-eat” list.) As the name suggest, Paleo diet tries to mimic what our Stone Age ancestors ate. But its purpose is not anthropological. The idea is to make sure you are eating the food that is completely compatible with your body and digestive system.

The emerging trend of subtraction in the food industry is aimed at reducing any sources of stress to our digestive system (which turn out to be a lot), and leverage its original abilities. It begins with our taste buds re-discovering natural deliciousness, then works for our digestive system to provide the environment in which it can perform best.