Eve Turow-Paul is the world’s leading expert on Millennial and Gen Z global food culture, and founder and Executive Director of Food for Climate League. Her latest book is Hungry: Avocado Toast, Instagram Influencers and Our Search for Connection and Meaning (BenBella). By blending qualitative and quantitative methods, Turow-Paul explores the ‘why’ behind today’s biggest food and lifestyle trends. Through her writing, consultancy (ETP Insights) and nonprofit leadership, she helps companies and organizations connects the dots between climate, food trends, equity, and mental health, to develop strategic products and campaigns that meet people’s core human needs. Turow-Paul views climate-smart food culture as a key lever for improving mental, physical, and environmental health around the world.
Turow-Paul is a Forbes contributor and her writing on food trends and human behavior has appeared in a number of publications including The Chicago Tribune, Plate, The Village Voice, on The Atlantic, Washington Post, FoodTank, Refinery29, Huffington Post and more. She was prominently featured in the documentary film WASTED! The Story of Food Waste, which premiered at Tribeca Film Festival. In 2019, with seed funding from Food@Google, Turow-Paulfounded Food for Climate League, an all-female non-profit research collaborative working to re-frame the food and climate narrative in order to democratize sustainable eating and empower all eaters to tackle the climate crisis bite-by-bite.
Hungry won the 2021 Next Generation Indie Book Award for general nonfiction.
Hungry: Avocado Toast, Instagram Influencers and Our Search for Connection and Meaning
by Eve Turow-Paul
BenBella, 2020
We wait in lines around the block for scoops of cookie dough. We photograph every meal. We visit selfie performance spaces and leave lucrative jobs to become farmers and craft brewers.
Why? What are we really hungry for?
In Hungry, Eve Turow-Paul provides a guided tour through the stranger corners of today's global food and lifestyle culture. How are 21st-century innovations and pressures are redefining people's needs and desires? How does "foodie" culture, along with other lifestyle trends, provide an answer to our rising rates of stress, loneliness, anxiety, and depression?
Weaving together evolutionary psychology and sociology with captivating investigative reporting from around the world, Turow-Paul reveals the modern hungers—physical, spiritual, and emotional—that are driving today's top trends:
The connection between the "death" of the cereal industry and access to work email on our smartphones
How posting images of our dinners on social media both fulfills and feeds our hunger for human connection in an increasingly isolated world
The ways "diet tribes" and boutique fitness gyms substitute for organized religion
How access to round-the-clock news relates to the blowback against GMO foods
Wellness retreats, astrology, plant parenthood, and other methods of easing modern anxiety
Why "eating local" might be the key to solving not just climate change, but our current global sense of disconnection
From gluten-free and Paleo diets to meal kit subscriptions, and from mukbang broadcast jockeys to craft beer, Hungry deepens our understanding of why we do what we do, and helps us find greater purpose and joy in today's technology-altered world.
"With substance, style, and a keen eye for data, Eve Turow-Paul uses food to illuminate the psychology of an entire generation. Hungry is a deeply insightful book that also happens to be more delicious than dessert." — Daniel Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness and professor of psychology at Harvard
"Turow-Paul combines great story-telling with a hard look at many trends and beliefs that are not based on facts. She artfully explains why they pull us in anyway, the psychological needs they fill, and how we can bring order and sanity to one of the most fraught topics today: food." — Dr. Daniel J. Levitin, neuroscientist and New York Times bestselling author of The Organized Mind