Mind Your Decisions

Food Fridays Takes a Break: A Lesson in Branding

It’s tough to do, but I’m putting Food Fridays on hold indefinitely. I am going to share my reasoning with you as the experience is a lesson in branding. I’m eager to hear your comments on the change.

I thought about this change for a while, but it was difficult to follow through. There were three main reasons holding me back:

1. The series has gotten good traffic (especially the vegetarian and Cape Cod chips articles)
2. The topics are fun to learn and write about.
3. I have over 20 drafts, some that are nearly completed posts. Many of these ideas were reader suggestions.

The last point really hurts as I’m throwing away perfectly good content. It’s hard to pull the plug on a series when you’ve already written several articles.

Ultimately, I think this is a necessary move and worth the cost.

I’ve been thinking about unifying and simplifying the website’s message. I wanted it to reflect that I write about personal finance and game theory, and how the two topics relate.

I brainstormed many taglines over the past few weeks. One of the ideas became a clear winner: “A strategic guide to personal finance.”

This idea really captures much of the content–clearly Game Theory Tuesdays, The Calculating Guru, and my budding Financial Tools page fit in with the tagline.

I have been trimming anything on the site that doesn’t shout “A strategic guide to personal finance.” Very observant readers can see I’ve cut about 5 topics from the blog categories–they just didn’t fit in with the main idea. The hardest part has been dealing with the topic that’s obviously inappropriate, Food Fridays.

It’s not that the Food Fridays articles didn’t involve strategy and personal finance. Just take a look at the Food Fridays discussion of goals for a critique of financial advisers. It’s just that the series title “Food Fridays” doesn’t scream strategy and personal finance like the other series do. Perception is the key.

I still love to talk about food, so don’t be surprised if many of my other articles incorporate food examples. I might also salvage some of the drafts by using the topic for another article, but I am definitely going to end up throwing away some ideas.

Anyway, that’s the strategy of the plan. Please do let me know if you have any comments. I’ve been humbled by smart comments recently, so I wouldn’t be surprised if one of you points out an important point I’m missing.

Oh yeah, and you can access my old Food Fridays articles in the newly created category, “Tangents.”

A final note

I was planning on writing a carnivore’s follow-up to my popular article “Vegetarians are Healthy, Smarter, and Often Richer.”

In drafting the article, a logical puzzle came to my mind: if vegetarianism is great for us, why did we humans start eating meat? Why do most Americans crave meat? Is it natural to be vegetarian?

I came across two very informative articles in my preliminary research. They are both excellent reads, and here are snippets that might be interesting for you:

National Geographic News: “Evolving to Eat Mush:” How Meat Changed Our Bodies

Meat-eating has impacted the evolution of the human body, scientists reported today at the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual meeting in Washington, D.C. Our fondness for a juicy steak triggered a number of adaptations over countless generations. For instance, our jaws have gotten smaller, and we have an improved ability to process cholesterol and fat.

Slate: It’s time to stop killing meat and start growing it

Is meat-eating necessary? It was, back when our ancestors had no idea where their next meal might come from. Meat kept us alive and made us stronger. Many scientists think it played a crucial role in the development of the human brain. Now it’s time to return the favor. Thousands of years ago, the human brain invented agriculture, and hunting lost its urgency. In the past two centuries, we’ve identified the nutrients in various kinds of meat, and we’ve learned how to get them instead from soy, nuts, and other vegetable sources. Meat has made us smart enough to figure out how we can live without it.

So, why do we keep eating it? Because it’s so darned tasty. Don’t give me that hippie shtick about how McDonald’s or Western society foisted beef on us. McDonald’s didn’t invent the appendix. McDonald’s didn’t invent all the genes we’ve acquired—at least eight, according to a 2004 article in the Quarterly Review of Biology—that help us, but not chimps, manage a meat diet. Look at the fossil evidence recently published in Nature. About 5,000 years ago, when people in Britain figured out how to domesticate cattle, sheep, and pigs, they promptly switched from fish-eating to meat-eating. A similar revolution swept North America about 700 years ago. My daughter has been demanding meat ever since she tasted it in baby food. I’ve seen vegetarian friends lust at the thought of a burger. We’re carnivores. We evolved that way.

This makes me even more confused about what exactly I should be eating for optimal health. I stick to mostly vegetables, but I’m still researching the topic. I’m clearly not the only one confused, which is why the diet industry is so profitable in America.

Now if only someone wrote a strategic guide to health choices…