Can we change what a society eats? (with Sarah Lake)

What if changing what we eat wasn’t about persuasion, but about reshaping everyday food choices? With Sarah Lake, CEO of Tilt Collective, we explore how meat and ultra-processed foods came to dominate U.S. diets – and how Tilt Collective is building a future where healthy and sustainable foods compete on convenience, price, and accessibility.

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episode89

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Guest

• Sarah Lake, CEO of Tilt Collective

Episode hosted, edited and produced by Matthew Kessler. Music by Blue dot sessions.

Transcript

Matthew 0:00
Let’s say, you’ve got this big idea to change the food system. Where do you even start? Do you lobby the government? Throw a bunch of money at a promising new technology? Try to shift what’s considered culturally “normal”? Or just keep publishing more facts and hope they get through? Spoiler: None of these have worked out as hoped!

At TABLE, we’ve been obsessed with the question: how does change actually happen?

My colleague Jack Thompson has been talking with different organizations about their theories of change for our newsletter, Fodder. 

Today, instead of the whole global food system, we’re zooming in on the United States. And asking a more specific question: how do you change what a society eats?

Welcome to Feed a food systems podcast, presented by TABLE I’m Matthew Kessler.

Are you ready to nerd out about nudging and choice context?

Sarah 1:02
Yeah, it’s my favorite thing to do.

Matthew 1:04
That’s Sarah Lake.

Sarah 1:06
I’m Sarah Lake. I’m the CEO of Tilt Collective. I've been working in the climate movement my entire career, looking for opportunities to have more sustainable and healthy food in our food system, from how we produce it, but most importantly, what we produce.

Matthew 1:22
Sarah has a deep background in climate and food systems — from helping set deforestation targets at WRI, the World Resources Institute to co-directing TRASE, which makes agricultural commodity trade data open and accessible for all.

So you've got your science bona fides, and you've also done a lot of work on corporate engagement. And I think there's a really interesting space here between evidence based research and real world action, where a lot happens. There's a lot of advocacy work, there's a lot of politics that come into play here.

And I wonder, did you have a moment, or a series of moments when you realized that food systems are deeply political?

Sarah 1:59

I think I had a point where I stopped eating meat for a bit when I was in probably early high school, and I was teased relentlessly by my brother for it. And realized, you know, people have strong opinions about what they eat and what others eat around them. And, you know, getting lots of questions. Well, why wouldn't you eat turkey on Thanksgiving? That's, you know, just what we do. 

And then in my career, when we were working a lot at WRI, I'm looking at, you know, how do you make production more sustainable? You quickly realize that people are easily willing to talk about how we produce food. So, you know, is it sustainable? What techniques are we using? But once you start talking about what food we're producing, people feel very strongly about it. And with good reason, it's something we have a lot of emotional attachment to. It can be cultural, it can be religious, it can be family oriented. 

And so I think I realized many points throughout my career that people have strong reactions to this, and partially because we've ignored talking about it for so long, right? You have the normal trope of, you know, don't talk about sex and religion. And actually, I think food choices is up there, where people feel like they don't want to sort of ruffle feathers by putting out what is seen to be a values orientation associated with the food they eat.

Matthew 3:27

So… how do you actually change what people eat? People have been trying for decades, and there’s always pushback.

The usual playbook: Start with a vision for a better food future. Next, name what’s broken today. Finally—and hardest of all—figure out how to get from here to there.

This will involve both tactics and strategy. Do you tweak market signals, change how we produce food, or tackle diets directly? Do you align with powerful actors, or fight against them?  Do you go quiet and work behind the scenes or do you go loud with high-profile campaigns?

Almost everyone agrees on the goal: a healthier, fairer, more sustainable food system. But the ways they try to get there? They can look wildly different. Everyone’s cooking the same dish, but using different recipes, different ingredients and different kitchen equipment. It can get messy.

With Tilt Collective’s CEO Sarah Lake, we’ll follow one group’s theory of change: we’ll understand how they define the problem, elaborate on their vision, and explore the solutions they’re pushing forward.

But first—we need to rewind. Today’s food system didn’t just appear. It’s the product of big shifts in what—and how—we eat over the past few generations.

Part 1 - The Problem

Sarah 5:04

50 years ago, what was in a grocery store was radically different than today. If you look at our modern food system, there's really three things that define it in terms of what food we're eating or how it's produced. The first is ultra processed foods. You didn't really see, you know, the Twinkies and Doritos. You might have some crackers, but mostly what you saw was some fruit, vegetables, grains, pulses. 

The other thing that's new to our food system is the heavy reliance on animal products. So you of course, had some animal products, but it wasn't nearly as pervasive. If you walked in a grocery store 50 years ago, there wasn't really a deli counter in every grocery store. You went to the butcher and it was specialized, and it was sort of a separate place. Not every grocery store was offering fresh cut meat, or nearly as much of it in the way that you see it in the freezer aisle, in the fresh aisle, in cans and tins throughout the whole grocery store.

And what you see now is a lot more sort of the industrially produced foods. Sort of mass volumes of food, whereas before, a lot of the food that was in grocery stores was locally sourced and grown. So you had apples that were different shapes and sizes and colors and more varieties of products, whereas now we rely so much on this monocropping and industrialization that we see every banana is the same type of banana in the exact same way, and that it's available year round, even when it's not actually in season.

Matthew 6:33

Let’s break this down into two big shifts: animal-sourced foods, and ultra-processed foods—both central to American diets today.

First: meat and other animal products. We covered the arguments for and against meat and livestock in depth in our Meat: The Four Futures series. One takeaway, while all animals are raised in different systems, most of the meat we eat is really resource-intensive, and much less efficient than plants. When you grow feed for animals, you’re essentially growing food twice: once for the animal, then for the people who eat it. Feeding billions of people a meat heavy diet requires an enormous amount of land—about 20% of Earth’s total land area. And of course, land is not the only important resource.

Sarah 7:25

So where I live in Colorado, the vast majority of water from the Colorado River is going to grow alfalfa for animal feed. It's really an efficiency question of like, we only have so much land and we only have so much water, and right now, we've been allocating it mostly to animal products.

Matthew 7:42

Next, ultra-processed foods. This is a big category ranging from sliced bread to flavored yogurt to packaged snacks and ready-to-eat meals. These are designed for convenience and for hyperpalatability. They’re engineered with the right mix of salt, fat, and sugar to keep us reaching for more. So much so that nearly 70% of the calories Americans consume come from them. 

And here’s where it gets complicated. Families today spend less of their income on food than 50 years ago. On the surface, it looks like a win—cheap, convenient, abundant. But that abundance comes with hidden costs: higher rates of diet-related disease, ecosystems under strain, and stark inequities in who actually has access to healthier, more sustainable options.

Sarah  8:32

At the heart of the issue of how Americans should be getting their food is that every American should have access to the same choices. Regardless of their geography, their race, or their class, and right now, we are very far from that. Where low income consumers, and especially consumers of color who live in areas like food deserts really don't have options around what they eat, right like the even, you know, a couple miles from my house in North Denver, there's no grocery store, there's convenience stores and there's bodegas, and what you're getting is, you know, chips. You're getting the processed foods. There's no fresh vegetables.

Matthew 9:09

So we now have Tilt Collective’s problem definition. Animal source foods have become ubiquitous and there’s unequal access to sustainable and healthy food.  So what’s their vision?

Sarah 9:21

So really, what we want is the availability of more plants, and those plants to be affordable to everyone everywhere. And that can take different forms. We're not talking about, you know, raw kale, we're talking about a plant based burger, and we're talking about, you know, easily prepared lentils that can be offered in different forms.

So one of the pieces around this being affordable, the other piece is having it be convenient, so making sure that, you know, McDonald's will still exist. We're not trying to do away with McDonald's, but how can we have McDonald's where half the menu may be is plant based, and offering more options that are healthier and at the price point that McDonald's tends to meet, so that the the average person going to McDonald's has a choice of choosing maybe a healthier or less processed plant based option than what's currently on the McDonald's menu. 

Matthew 10:14

This, to me, is fascinating—and it really shows the ways Tilt Collective thinks about how wide-scale change happens.  Not by sending everyone to their local farmers’ market, but by flooding the places we already eat with affordable plant-based options.

And to figure out how to do that, Sarah looks to history—specifically the meat industry. In just a few generations, they managed to influence a massive shift in what Americans eat.

Step 1: Make meat feel like  an essential part of every meal.

Sarah 10:52

So we’re at this point where most people’s idea of a meal constitutes some form of meat. Whether that's, you know, a breakfast meat, a deli meat at lunch, or, you know, a steak at dinner. This has become quite normalized and seen to be necessary for health, even when research suggests otherwise.

Matthew 11:11

Step 2: Engineer convenience with breakthrough technologies.

Sarah 11:17

One of the first things that helped is some of the technological innovations. If you look back towards World War Two, the invention of processed meat was really important because it made it more shelf stable. So you had the invention of products like spam that allowed people to eat really cheap meat because it was processed and it was sort of the leftover parts of animals that weren't selling, and it was shelf stable, so you had less money lost throughout like waste of food.

So we saw sort of the increase in consumption, and at certain points the majority of Americans were eating spam, which is wild. It's hard to say any product has had that prevalence. 

Matthew 11:54

Step 3: Normalize through policy.

Sarah 11:57

But you also had a concerted effort by the meat industry to embed meat into US policy. So when school food programs were created, the meat industry worked with the government to say meat should be a part of this, and dairy should be a part of it. And this legacy still exists today. 

So the USDA has a list of approved proteins that can go into school meals, and almost all of them are meat products, even though there's lots of proteins that are not. That we could be offering or categorizing as proteins. So this has now become institutionalized. This is what is seen to be okay in terms of school foods. 

Matthew 12:36

Step 4: Shape incentives. 

Sarah 12:39

Similarly, this was done through lots of lobbying and influence on our subsidies. So right now, we allocate most of our subsidy money towards paying for ranchers and farmers to produce animal products, or the feed that goes into animal products rather than fresh vegetables.

So this isn't just in the US, but generally we are subsidizing the cost of meat to be quite cheap when the actual production cost would make it really expensive.

Matthew 13:11
Sarah is learning from this history. How can working with industry and governments, shifting what people expect from their meals, and making convenience part of the solution—can help Tilt Collective make healthy, sustainable food feel normal, easy to get, and affordable.

And that brings us back to the big question: how do you actually change what a society eats? One answer—change the menu of options.

Part 2 - The theory of change

Matthew 13:49

I'm curious now to hear about your theory of change – Tilt Collective's theory of change. So can we maybe start with what's the 60 second version. So not just what's the goal, but how do we get there? How does change actually happen?

Sarah 14:02

Yeah, the 60 second version is that we need all of the approaches. We need all of them, and it's a question of how we stage them, but we need policy change that makes it easier and affordable to access healthy and sustainable food and incentivizes them. We need companies that are championing this and offering them, whether it's supermarkets or fast food, and we need the financing that makes this possible too, so both public and private finance. 

Matthew 14:30

I mean, of course. The answer is always, all of the above. In a complex system everyone carries some responsibility. But Tilt’s theory of change isn’t just about everyone—it’s about knowing where to push. So where do they focus their attention?

Sarah  14:46

So companies are really important, in particular, retailers. When we talk about retailers, supermarkets, fast food companies, restaurants. These companies are the intersection between consumers and what food is produced. So much of what we want as a consumer is shaped by what's offered to us. You go to a restaurant and you have a whole array of options and how it's described, how much it costs, what ingredients are in it, even, you know, we try new things because they appear on the menu, we haven't seen them before, and so these companies have an opportunity to shape what people eat without people actually choosing differently. So a key part of our theory of change is these companies can help nudge consumers towards these other options. And we see this actually works, right? There's lots of examples where this truly does work where companies start subtly suggesting to consumers, through the language they use or the pricing that they should be choosing one option over another. So private sector and companies have a major role to play. 

Matthew 15:52

Another group they see as a key part of this change ecosystem - governments. 

Sarah 15:58

We need the governments to help level the playing field. Right now, it is much easier to choose meat because it's so cheap and it's available everywhere. It's made available in schools because of governments. It is promoted in part because of governments. And so through policy, we have the opportunity to balance that out and make plant rich options just as cheap, just as available and just as desirable. And that can be things like advertising campaigns that are publicly funded, or embedding plant rich options in school so that kids start learning about plant rich options early on. You know, they're trying kale or more bean based meals early in their life, and then they bring those desires, the preferences for those foods, home to the parents and say, “Hey, I tried this at school. I'd like to eat more of it.” So there's lots of ways in which policy can help influence what people are eating, as well as the price and cost of those.

Matthew  16:55 

My colleagues at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences have done a systematic review on all these different interventions to nudge towards more plant forward diets and and it's a really long list, and a lot of it is not terribly effective. Which I find interesting. Most things work better in combination. And one of the things that does seem to have some more efficacy is this nudging, or choice architecture or choice context. And I find that to be a really interesting solution, because it's happening sort of behind the scenes rather than in plain view. And I wonder if you think there's any validity to the criticism that that's not, you know, that's not food democracy at work. What would you say to that?

Sarah  17:41

I say people already aren't choosing what they eat. That people are choosing based off of a very limited set of options, and often a set of options they don't even want, but it's what's available. So a great example in the US is around the Americans that are living in food deserts, and their options are convenience stores or discount supermarkets that don't really offer fresh produce, even for those who are going to regular grocery stores, they are faced with whatever is set on the shelf. So you can imagine that it's, you know, interesting, what fruit is available, and a lot of this fruit is out of season, or, you know, not locally grown, and we're choosing to offer it because people want it historically, but not because it's the universe of options, right? So there's lots of ways in which our current food system is actually quite limiting and that consumers don't have access to lots of different options even when they want it. 

Matthew 18:37

Sarah’s point here really struck me. Grocery stores feel like they offer everything, but in some ways, that’s an illusion. You’re choosing from a curated menu, and you’re nudged constantly by product placement, pricing, advertising. This is one of the front lines in Tilt Collective’s fight to change how a society eats — not to restrict choice, but to widen it.

One example where Sarah sees this change happening is in supermarkets across Europe, where they know that their customers care  a lot about their health.

Sarah 19:10

Globally, there is more attention on health. We have so much research coming out about longevity and what's impacting our health, and so consumers are aware of this. And so as part of their health programming, supermarkets have made commitments to increase the sales of plant based proteins. This helps with their climate commitments as well, of course, but they're actually saying we as a company have a commitment to meet the health standards of our customers, and therefore we're going to offer more plant based products. And we're seeing really ambitious commitments to saying 60% of all of our protein will be plant based. And to get to this that the companies are investing in better advertising, better pricing, better placement in the stores, and it's working, we see the sale in these companies of the plant based products increasingly go up as customers are more familiar with the products and more incentivized to buy them when they're affordable and easy to find in the stores. So a lot of options in the private sector where we're seeing this progress.

Matthew 20:12

When we talk about changing what people eat, we usually imagine big, flashy actions. But Sarah says the real levers are quiet, almost invisible. Swap a plate for a bowl and portions shrink. One way to reduce food waste. Move meat to the end of the buffet line, put an appealing plant protein first, and choices shift. We can even take a look at what  jar your beans come in.

Sarah  20:37

One of the ones I always think is funny, is we have a connotation of canned food as sort of being cheap and gross and, yeah, just not desirable. And there's lots of studies that show if you put beans in glass jars, people want them more. And it's something as simple as that. And we've done it with other products, like if you get artichoke hearts, a lot of them now come in glass jars and are marked up in price accordingly, but the packaging connotes something to us as a customer, as a consumer, and so we assume that we don't want this just because of how it's packaged. And so there's dozens of these. And to your point, you said it right. There's so many different types of nudges, and they work really well when they're layered together. So if you can figure out what is the right packaging, where is it placed in the store, what's the right pricing level. How do we advertise it? How do we tell consumers about it? It really can work together to radically shift what people are purchasing.

Matthew 21:38

How do you tell consumers about it? That brings us to:

Part 3 - Communication

Sarah 21:48

The other piece that we push in our theory of change is the communications.  Right we need the winning narrative around why healthy and sustainable foods are necessary. And often this is not going to be about climate change at all, but we can identify how we sort of shift the discourse that many people have around food, or in particular, policy makers have around food.

Matthew  22:08

And do you have any examples where efforts have fallen flat or even backfired?

Sarah  22:13 

Yeah, we've learned a lot, and I think we have to continually learn from our mistakes. Things that don't work, number one is often labeling something as healthier or more sustainable. There's a lot of research that when you label a product as sustainable, people think it's not as good a product for some reason. This applies from food to blue jeans. So some of the lessons we've learned from marketing is, you know, look at particular language you use, labeling something as vegan and vegetarian often is really discouraging versus trying to actually describe the product. You know, a savory black bean Cuban stew is more appetizing than a vegetarian black bean stew. So the language is key. 

I think the other part, at a really high level is, the more we talk about this issue broadly, the more we can talk about the benefits that resonate with people. Like, what do people actually care about and how do we understand that? So you know us in the climate world, we're really quick to say, like, this is good for climate change. When you ask most people don't care about climate change, whether we like to admit it or not.

Matthew  23:18 

A sad reality, but very true. 

Sarah  23:19 

Yeah, even if they do care, they don't understand that meat production is linked to climate change. So trying to pitch: “eat climate friendly meat” or “reduce your meat consumption because of climate change,” it just doesn't work. One of the most interesting studies I've seen is when you ask the average American what they care about, the top answer you hear is either their own health or the health of their family. And so actually framing this around the health of your family can be really important. How are you providing for your family healthy meal? Or how are you taking care of your body to be around as a family member for your kids can be really motivating? Who are we trying to get to eat differently, and what is the right message that will land with that group and accordingly, what are the right choice contexts that shape them? 

Matthew 24:12

So to take a real world example.  A study came out in 2023 that showed that 12% of Americans eat half of the beef sold in the US. The strongest predictor of this group was men, followed by age - with peak consumption between 50 and 65, and then education - a high school degree with no college.

Sarah 24:35

This is a very particular demographic. It is probably a lot of my extended family. So I know these people well. And when you look at it, the thing they care about, number one is, is the health of their family, but they're not actually doing the grocery shopping. So when you look at it, it's actually their wives who tend to go grocery shopping. So you can actually target and say, we are going to figure out, how do we shape the choice context of the wives of these men who are over 40 and not college educated and have massive impact on beef consumption. Just through this one particular demographic. So I think to your overall question, you know, I think it's exciting to see where we are having successes, and how we can be very smart about learning from our mistakes to continue to improve, how we talk about this and and what strategies we're leveraging?

I always think about, you know, these white men over 40, they care about their kids, and what would it look like to have a billboard campaign that says, “Hey, Dad, eat less meat so you can still be alive for my wedding.” Because most of these men are facing heart disease and, you know, short lifespans because of their over consumption of meat. They don't really want to eat differently. They're not really compelled. But when it's about, you know, how they show up for their daughters and American ideals of masculinity and providing for the family. Like, I think that's, you know, there's opportunity there. So, yeah, I really get excited to see, like, if we focus on this one small slice of the wedge, we could probably have some big change.

Matthew 26:08

Let’s consider what we’ve heard so far from Sarah Lake. 

First: The problem isn’t just too much meat and too few plants. It’s that our preferences have been shaped—nudged in ways that make these habits feel natural, even inevitable.

Second: Tilt Collective’s response is to meet people where they are—on the terms of markets and convenience. That means a big increase in the quality and availability of plant-based options in restaurants, grocery stores, and institutions.

Third: Making that happen takes work on all fronts: building new narratives, backing research to see what actually shifts diets, helping companies meet demand for plant-forward options, and making sure those efforts are coordinated across sectors.

Yes, it’s all of the above—but if we had to pick one focus for Tilt Collective, it would be leading with a shift in societal norms.

And to wrap up, she points to a historical example that she thinks food systems practitioners can draw lessons from.

Sarah  27:13

I would point to the example of tobacco. We work in the climate world, so many people say, let's look at energy, or let's look at transportation for how you change practices. And food is much more similar to tobacco than it is to energy, and part of it is because people don't really care when they turn on their light switch where their energy comes from. People have some feelings about cars, but you only really buy a car once every 10 years, versus people buy food multiple times a day, sometimes. So food is much more like tobacco. It is deeply meaning. It's an ongoing habit or behavior. And I think the lesson from the tobacco industry is: it is about having the perfect storm of different levers that work together to help shape people's behavior. 

And in particular, what we learned from tobacco is there was a shift in regulation. So one of the main drivers in tobacco is you could no longer smoke in hotels. You had smoking free hotels that were implemented. You had smoking free restaurants. You had laws around smoking around children, so it actually became quite difficult to smoke. So the same way we talk about it being overly convenient to eat meat, how are there ways in which we can actually make it harder to access cheap, unhealthy, ultra processed meat, not all meat, but right, like the worst of the worst. So there's some, some analogy there with smoking. 

The other part of smoking is the cultural shift. There were dedicated campaigns to help undermine the social license of smoking, and this was by design. These are groups like the ones that Tilt is funding, you know, back in the day on smoking, that were getting together and envisioning, how do we shift the cultural narrative on smoking? And there was a deliberate decision to target teen smoking and young adults who were just starting to smoke. And it was seemed to be cool, so starting these campaigns that were directly trying to stop smoking before it started, and were actually quite effective in terms of shifting the culture.

The parallel in food, I think we haven't gotten to yet.  We don't know exactly what that looks like to shift the culture, but we know that there's lots of ways in which we can do that. We can we can leverage influencers. We can create new products that are seen to be sexy and cool and desirable. And we do see some of this, right? And one of one of the examples I point to in food is, first of all, our food system has changed radically, like we have a totally different food system than 50 years ago, like we started talking about. But even in the recent future, we have products we never ate before. So the example I love is quinoa. Quinoa was never in our diets before 10 years ago, and it was something that became popularized as a superfood, partially because Oprah included it in her like diet trend. So there's lots of ways in which we see different products become wildly normal when they didn't exist before.

And we are working to figure out what is that recipe around different plant rich products, picking some of the ones that are, you know, the healthiest and minimally processed and those that are most desirable to consumers, to figure out how we use that to normalize some of the cultural momentum of eating more plants.

Matthew 30:11

Sarah Lake, CEO of tilt collective, thank you so much for speaking with us.

Sarah  30:36

Thank you so much for having me. It was a pleasure.

Matthew 30:43

The quinoa example shows that diets can change in unexpected ways. But it also reminds us that every change comes with social, economic, and ecological costs -just as the status quo does. And people will keep arguing. Not just about the destination, but about how we get there.

A big thanks to you for listening. Want to read more about the work of Tilt Collective, or the other organizations we interviewed for our Theory of change series. You can find links in the show notes. 

Want to share your thoughts on the episode, or have a suggestion for another guest? Send us an email to podcast@tabledebates.org

As always, you can rate the episode on your listening apps, leave us a review, and recommend the Feed podcast to a friend. Your friend might enjoy the episode where Chilean Mycologist Giuliana Furci explains how “without fungi we wouldn’t have food”, or a conversation on Animal Welfare and Ethics with TABLE researcher Tamsin Blaxter.

This episode was edited and produced by Matthew Kessler, reviewed by Tara Garnett, Jack Thompson and Amanda Wood. Music by Blue dot sessions. Thanks for listening and speak soon.