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Courtesy Eat for the Planet

A Podcast Covering the Vanguards of the Sustainable Food Movement

Jack Meyer

August 3, 2022
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Food has become increasingly difficult to understand in isolation from the political forces, economic logic, and environmental footprint that accompany its journey into our fridges, pantries, and stomachs. While the nature and the consequences of our diets are irrevocably bound up in the practices of the major players that supply our grocery stores, there’s a growing hunger to learn alternatives to the ecologically damaging practices of the food industrial complex.

Nil Zacharias has spent his time as an author, podcaster, and entrepreneur addressing exactly this. Previously a lawyer and digital marketer in Bombay, after adopting a plant-based diet in his thirties, he went on to found a number of food industry startups—most notably Plantega (where he’s currently CEO), a startup working to increase accessibility to plant-based foods, supplying products to a number of delis across New York. Beyond these entrepreneurial ambitions, Zacharias has also tried to contribute to the world of food and sustainability through his podcast, Eat for the Planet.

Zacharias has hosted the podcast since its inception in 2017, carrying out its self-proclaimed mission of covering the people, ideas, and technologies challenging the status quo of the food industry. The structure of each episode is to-the-point. With a few exceptions, each consists of one interview from start to finish, ranging between 30 minutes to an hour. How conversational the episode is depends on the guest, but Zacharias tends toward a more reserved style of interview, leaving his guests plenty of space to expound on their perspective on and hopes for food’s future.

The guests on the show run a wide gamut. One episode may have an activist for sustainable agriculture sharing what they’ve learned along their path, while another might see an economist discussing how food and farming can prepare us for the future by looking to the past. Another may simply give someone a chance to talk about how they created the best plant-based cheese they could imagine. The episodes do tend to have an entrepreneurial tone to them, given that the brunt of interviewees are innovators of plant-based meats or other vegetarian or vegan products. This aspect may be off-putting to those looking purely for discussion on sustainability in the food industry, and not so much the nitty-gritty of scaling up operations and securing investors. The practical, however, is a necessary hurdle to arriving at any ideal, and the conversations that begin with business-minded concerns tend to find their way to bigger-picture questions before the interview concludes. Altogether, the podcast offers a helpful repository of perspectives on where the food industry could be heading, and where it, perhaps, should.

# Podcasts# Food# The Future

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Alex Tatarsky on Art as a Means to Live Out the Absurd

It’s late August, and I’m walking on Grand Street in Lower Manhattan. It’s one of those summer evenings that’s cooler than expected, a pleasant foreshadowing of fall. I’m on my way to discuss compost with the artist Alex Tatarsky, and as I head east from the subway, I pass through the dense, networked scents of the edge of Chinatown: the briny tang of fish markets, the sweet snatch of a fresh egg waffle from a rolled ice cream shop, the yeasty cloud that floats around the famous bialy shop. Approaching Abrons Art Center, where Tatarsky is doing pick-up rehearsals for an out-of-town run of their show Dirt Trip, this close-packed olfactory landscape opens up into something with more space: a faint vegetal whiff from a small vacant lot, the not unpleasant chemical tang from a passing truck, and beyond these, the smell of a certain rot rolling in from the East River.

Courtesy Blue Note Records

culture

An Album of Cover Songs Honors the Legacy of Leonard Cohen

Though nearly six years have gone by since Leonard Cohen’s passing, the long shadow cast by his legacy as one of the 20th century’s most esteemed and idiosyncratic singer-songwriters shows no signs of lifting from the public’s imagination anytime soon. From the enveloping warmth of “Suzanne,” to the high drama of “Hallelujah,” to the chilling minimalist and gospel juxtaposition of his swansong “You Want it Darker,” Cohen managed to constantly reinvent himself, leaving behind the rare achievement of a musical body of work whose most impressive moments exist across eras.