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Just posted our latest update at Unpopular Ventures. Sharing it here for anyone else who would like to read it too:
Peter Livingston
2,872 posts
Peter Livingston
@unpopularvc
- The food in the US is poisonous. I wish it wasn't. I'm from the US and spent most of my life there. And I'm not sure exactly what it is, but I'll share what I do know.
- A first for me as an investor: Portfolio company only raised seed funding, and after almost 4 years of work finally started earning MASSIVE revenue from their customers. They are so wildly profitable now, and growing so fast, that they skipped Series A, and were going to skip
- Replying to @unpopularvcEvery time we've been anywhere in the US, the food has made us feel terrible. We have stomach pains, we feel bloated, and we gain weight - a surprising amount too, in very little time. When we are outside the US, we feel great and become skinny with zero effort.
- Miami is the only major US city that is rising. We’ve visited a lot of the major US cities over the last few years. Most feel like they are in decline, or at best - staying as they were. We are impressed by so many things in Miami: it’s super clean, safe, and has relativelyReplying to @pitdesiMiami is booming. We lived here for 5 years until 2019, just came back, and the city has grown dramatically. Housing prices are higher than the Bay Area afaict. Skyscrapers going up left and right. Way cleaner, safer, and fewer homeless than SF. I’m bullish on Miami.
- Replying to @unpopularvcWhen it comes out, I think it will be as ground breaking as discovering that smoking is unhealthy, or that Asbestos causes cancer. There is something similarly huge and disastrous that is in American food right now.
- Replying to @unpopularvc1) Something related to grain (esp. wheat) grown in the US. My wife and kids complain about feeling stomach whenever they have bread made in the US - of any kind. Organic, fresh, white or whole wheat, it doesn't matter. The bread makes them feel bad. But no issues outside the US.
- Replying to @unpopularvc2) Which leads to another hypothesis: additives. In Europe in particular, they have banned dozens of ingredients that are regularly used in US foods. It's hard to pinpoint a specific one, but we all know there are tons of ingredients on American labels...
- Replying to @unpopularvcThe obesity epidemic in the US is perhaps the clearest evidence that something is wrong. I don't believe the obesity epidemic, unique to the US, is just because Americans are making bad food choices. There is something inescapable in all American food that is causing this.
- Replying to @unpopularvcI'm not sure exactly what it is. Maybe it's multiple things. But having alternated between the US and elsewhere several times over the last 2.5 years, I can say definitively that there is something wrong with the food in the US. Here are a few hypotheses:
- Replying to @unpopularvc3) Sugar in everything. I don't think this is the culprit though - we enjoy sweets, and it causes us no issues outside the US. But it's still weird that there is sugar added to everything in the US. We simply buy food that doesn't have added sugar, and we still have issues.
- Replying to @unpopularvcSo I don't know what it is. But I am 100% convinced there is something going on - based on what my family and I feel, and what we can all observe more widely. Maybe something that changed in the last decade or two, related to America agriculture, or ingredients.
- Replying to @unpopularvcWe eat extremely carefully in the US too, and it still makes us feel bad. We mainly shop at Whole Foods, buy organic and fresh (lots of vegetables and fruit), and we cook/eat at home as much as possible - because we know how American food makes us feel.
