What Is Food For?

May 06, 2026

Mission-driven food companies have a problem. The ones that scale tend to lose their mission. Annie’s, Stonyfield, Honest Tea, Ben & Jerry’s: each started with a real commitment to better food, and each was acquired, watered down, or sued into compromise once the public markets got hold of them. The pattern has held for forty years.

Mike Lee’s recent piece, “A New Blueprint for Big Food,” names the pattern and offers a different wager. Stop fighting the profit motive, he writes. Redirect it. If the financial logic that runs Big Food can be re-aimed at soil health, nutrient density, flavor, and worker welfare, then the activist investor and the sustainability advocate end up pushing for the same outcome. It is a sharp piece, and the move is the right one. Lee takes financial logic seriously as the system to be redirected, refuses the moral lecture that has not worked for forty years, and stays honest about the gaps in his own case.

I want to build on his piece. There is a question sitting underneath it that he does not quite ask, and naming it changes how the wager reads. The question is what food is actually for.

Lee inherits an answer from the system he is trying to redirect: food is a consumer good, grown for sale and accounted for on balance sheets, and the argument is which costs that system should price. Any serious proposal for fixing the food system has to take that reality seriously, and Lee’s does. The question is not whether food operates inside markets. It does. The question is which of food’s functions the market sees and rewards, and which it leaves to whatever happens around the edges.

Food does many things at once. It sustains bodies, but never just bodies. It carries pleasure, but pleasure shaped by what you grew up tasting and where. It connects people: the eaters and the cooks and the growers and the carriers. It marks place: soil and climate, kitchen and table. It carries culture, the recipes and rituals and meanings that travel forward. It expresses sovereignty, the ability of a community to feed itself on terms it chooses. It participates in living systems, drawing from soil and water and weather and labor and feeding back into them. Each function is upstream and downstream of the others. The parts do not run in parallel, they run in relationship. That is what it means to call food mutually causal.

What food is for also varies by what food we are talking about. Wine is for pleasure, ritual, conviviality, the expression of place. Nobody buys wine for nutrient density. Vegetables sit at the other end: nutrient density and accessibility are the dominant functions, with pleasure and culture alongside. Lee’s flavor-revenue path borrows its strongest evidence from wine, where flavor and place have been linked for centuries, and stretches it across categories where the dominant functions are different. The flavor-soil-nutrition chain may hold for one category and break for another. What food is for is not a single answer. It is many answers, depending on what is on the plate, who is doing the eating, where, and under what circumstances.

Any blueprint reaches some of these functions and misses others. Lee’s reaches pleasure and partially reaches nutrition through the flavor-revenue path. It does not, by design, reach connection, place, culture, sovereignty, or living-system participation, except where those happen to be downstream effects of changes in soil and worker welfare. That is not a failure of his blueprint. It is its shape, fitted to the goal he is working from.

His goal, which he does not quite name, is to make Big Food less harmful without replacing it: to keep the consolidated industry and the market system that runs it roughly intact while the financial logic starts rewarding different things. That goal is real and defensible. It is not the only one. Other goals would produce different blueprints: dismantling Big Food, moving food out of market logic, centering food sovereignty, building regional systems on commons or cooperative principles.

Two paths, two theory levels

Lee proposes two paths. The first is what I will call the flavor-revenue path: better soil produces more flavorful and more nutrient-dense food, and eaters reliably pay for flavor, so regenerative agriculture finds its way to revenue through people’s mouths and wallets. The second is the externality-pricing path: get the true cost of conventional food (soil loss, polluted water, healthcare costs, exploited labor) into accounting standards and supplier contracts, and the cheap commodity ingredient stops being cheap.

He bundles them as complementary tools. Pulling them apart and asking whether the parts hold together takes a couple of distinctions worth borrowing from evaluation work.

A theory of change is an explanation of how change happens in a given context. It traces the causal mechanisms that connect where we are to where we want to be, and surfaces the assumptions that have to hold for the connection to work. The term comes out of evaluation theory, particularly Carol Weiss’s writing on theory-driven evaluation. A theory of change is mostly descriptive: this is how the world rearranges itself when the right conditions are in place.

A theory of action is a plan for what specific actors will do to make change happen. It identifies the activities, the actors, and the resources needed to produce an outcome the system would not produce on its own. A theory of action is mostly prescriptive: this is what we will do.

The evaluative question is whether the two align. Does the proposed action actually trigger the change the theory of change describes? Where the action is too narrow for the mechanism the change theory implies, there is an alignment problem worth surfacing.

This gets sharper with a second distinction, from Chris Argyris and Donald Schön. They observed that people and organizations carry two theories of action at once. The espoused theory is the one we offer when asked: the world view and values we believe our behavior is based on. The theory-in-use is the one our actions reveal: the world view and assumptions implied by what we actually do. The two are often misaligned. The most important fact about the gap is that people are usually unaware of it. Argyris’s claim is that effectiveness comes from developing congruence between the two, which means surfacing the gap is constructive work, not gotcha work.

Their example is concrete. A management consultant said he would handle a disagreement with a client by first stating his understanding of the disagreement and then negotiating what data they could agree would resolve it. That was his espoused theory: joint control of the problem. A tape recording of the same consultant in such a situation showed him advocating his own view and dismissing the client’s. That was his theory-in-use: unilateral control. The consultant did not know the gap was there.

A public proposal carries both layers too. There is an espoused theory of change and an espoused theory of action, the version Lee writes for public reading. There is also a theory-in-use embedded in the design, made of the assumptions the blueprint quietly depends on. Whether they align is the evaluation question.

For Lee, the espoused theories sit cleanly with each other on the surface. The espoused theory of change says markets respond to better measurement, regenerative becomes profitable, and Big Food reorganizes around soil, flavor, and worker welfare. The espoused theory of action follows: fund the science, build the measurement tools, change the accounting standards, and wait for the reorganization to follow. Read on the surface, the action plan addresses the conditions the change theory says are needed.

The theory-in-use is harder to see and more interesting. The blueprint as designed depends on a number of assumptions the espoused theory does not name. Markets reliably translate measured signals into desired outcomes, which they often do not, because indicators get captured by the producers being measured. Big Food’s consolidated industry structure is compatible with regenerative supply chains, which it often is not, because consolidation tends to compress regenerative farmers when they get pulled into industrial supply. Measurement infrastructure is a neutral tool rather than a lever controlled by particular actors. Consumer behavior reliably tracks measurable signals at scale, despite the well-documented class stratification of palate. Accounting standards respond to a clear intellectual case, despite the Rockefeller Foundation’s true-cost report sitting in circulation for years without translating into FASB or IFRS movement. The financial logic is the dominant or sufficient lever for change.

None of those assumptions is named in Lee’s piece. All of them are doing structural work in the design. This is not a charge of bad faith. It is the standard pattern Argyris and Schön describe: the blueprint’s author probably could not see the in-use theory if asked, because that is what theories-in-use do.

The forty-year pattern Lee opens his piece with is a useful test case for the misalignment. Annie’s, Stonyfield, Honest Tea: each tried to operate inside an in-use theory that scale and mission would coexist. Scale rewarded itself, and mission got compressed. The pattern is not a fluke. It is what happens when an espoused theory and a theory-in-use are out of alignment, and the actors involved are unaware of the gap.

The misalignment in Lee’s blueprint is between what the proposal says about how change will happen and what the proposal actually depends on. The espoused theory pulls toward an ambitious reorganization of the food system. The theory-in-use defaults to the conditions of the existing food system, with measurement infrastructure as the only adjustable variable. When the in-use assumptions fail, and indicator capture is one well-documented way they fail, the espoused outcome does not arrive. What arrives instead is what the theory-in-use is actually fitted to: a less destructive Big Food that has absorbed regenerative aesthetics without changing structure.

That is the alignment finding. The hidden goal I named earlier is the goal embedded in the theory-in-use. The work the evaluation does is to surface the gap, so that the choice between the espoused theory and the in-use theory becomes a choice we make rather than a default we inherit.

The empirical assumption underneath

The flavor-revenue path also rests on a science question that deserves to be named, even if I cannot settle it here.

Lee’s path depends on a chain of empirical claims, each of which needs its own evidence base. Healthier soil produces more nutrient-dense food. Nutrient density correlates with flavor. Eaters reliably perceive the difference at the bite. Eaters will pay for that perception at scale.

Here is what I think we know, gesturally. The wine and terroir literature is reasonably solid on the relationship between soil, climate, plant stress, and flavor compounds. Plant physiology supports the secondary metabolite story: plants under mild stress do produce more of the polyphenols and aromatics that make food taste like something. The dilution effect in produce, where yields have gone up while nutrient density per unit weight has gone down, is real but contested in its interpretation. The connection between soil health specifically and human nutrition is an emerging field with real research and a long way to go before it can carry procurement or policy weight.

The point is not to settle the science here. Lee himself calls for the kind of research that would test these assumptions at the statistical confidence we apply to drugs, and he is right to. Before measurement infrastructure gets built on top of a partial chain, the chain itself has to be tested. The pieces that are well established need to be defended. The pieces that are partial need controlled studies. The pieces that are gestural need to be flagged as such, not built into the architecture as if they were settled. We are agreeing with Lee on what needs to happen next, and we are agreeing that the work has to happen before the wager scales.

When you optimize for the wrong thing

This is where the practitioner reflex kicks in.

The minute regenerative becomes “a measurable input that can be priced,” the indicator captures the work. I have watched this happen across enough fields, including ones I work in, that it now reads as a near-certainty. Carrots get bred for the spectrometer. Breeding programs, fertilization timing, harvest conditions, and post-harvest handling all get tuned to optimize the signal that drives the price premium. The reading goes up. Whether the carrots are actually more nourishing becomes a separate question that nobody is checking, because the reading has become the proxy.

This is the standard fate of an indicator that gets too important too fast: the number drifts from the thing the number was supposed to track, the spreadsheet still says we are on track, and the underlying thing is somewhere else.

What gets captured by the indicator is whatever goal the indicator was designed to serve, named or unnamed. If the goal is unnamed, the capture is invisible. We optimize for it without knowing we are optimizing for anything in particular. That is the through-line of every measurement system that has been built on top of an unstated objective. It is also why the question I named at the top is not optional. If the goal has not been named, the indicator will name it for us, and the name will be the one with the best signal-to-noise ratio, not the one we would have chosen.

A pre-mortem, in one scenario

A pre-mortem is a planning method from the psychologist Gary Klein. You imagine that the project has failed, then work backward and ask why. The point is to surface the assumptions a plan is hiding by treating failure as the starting condition rather than the worst case. It is one of the few tools I know for finding the hidden goal of a hidden theory of change.

Here is one pre-mortem for Lee’s blueprint, deliberately limited to a single scenario.

It is 2041. The wager worked. Healthier soil reliably produces more flavorful and more nutrient-dense food. The handheld spectrometer is in every grocery store, and true cost accounting moved into financial disclosures a decade ago. The CFO’s spreadsheet rewards regenerative supply chains, and the activist investor pushes for more rotation acres. By every metric in Lee’s piece, this is a win.

Here is what failed. Carrots are bred for the spectrometer. The reading went up year over year, but whether the carrots are actually more nourishing has become a separate question that nobody is checking, because the reading is the proxy. Breeding programs, fertilization timing, harvest conditions, and post-harvest handling all got tuned to optimize the signal. The signal is high. The underlying biology drifted somewhere else.

That is one scenario. Others are easy to imagine. There is the small regenerative farmer who cannot operationalize the new standards as fast as Big Food and gets bought out by the buyer who can. There is the premium-priced flavor that sorts by income and deepens the class divide in what people eat. There is the relationship between an eater and a farmer mediated by a device, where trust now lives in a number rather than in a name. There is the question of governance, where the new accounting standards get written by the same class of people who wrote the old ones, leaving the question of who actually decides about food exactly where it was. Each is its own pre-mortem worth running.

Each is also a different answer to the question of what food is for. The small farmer scenario asks about food as livelihood. The class divide scenario asks about food as access and dignity. The device-mediated relationship asks about food as trust between people. The governance scenario asks about food as something we decide together. None of these questions is forbidden by Lee’s blueprint. None of them is asked by it either.

What the question opens

Holding the objective question open is uncomfortable. It does not deliver a slogan or produce a campaign. What it does is change our relationship with proposals like Lee’s. You can take the wager seriously without absorbing the goal it is fitted to. You can fund the science the flavor path depends on without committing to flavor as the thing food is most for. You can push externality-pricing into accounting standards without conceding that accounting standards are the right place for the question of what we owe to soil and to each other.

The work of evaluation is to make hidden things visible: the goals, assumptions, and trade-offs that shape decisions before anyone realizes a decision is being made. When those are surfaced, the choices that come next are choices people can be held accountable for, instead of choices that get made for us by an objective nobody named.

Lee’s piece is worth taking seriously, and so is the question underneath it. The wager he describes is one good answer to one of the questions food asks of us. The other questions are still here, on the table, waiting for someone to ask them out loud.