Nicole Astra: Welcome to Talking Plant Protein. I'm Nicole Astra and we're turning the tables a little bit today because my next guest, journalist and influencer Larissa Zimberoff is usually the one asking the questions, and today she's in the hot seat. So Larissa, welcome to the show.

Larissa Zimberoff: Thank you for having me. It's just wonderful to be here.

Nicole Astra: So you say you cover the space between food tech and business. Tell me how you got into the plant-based world.

Larissa Zimberoff: Yeah, it's a great question because I usually just think about why I want to eat better versus plant-based or versus technology. So I have the technology world because I used to work in Silicon Valley. I worked in high tech. I worked for retail commerce sites and it was exciting, but eventually I changed my career and went to New York and I went and I got my MFA in creative writing. In my program, I started writing about food and I realized that it was something I really loved and wanted to focus on. Now, in tandem to that is that I have type one diabetes. So I really look at food differently from most people. So I talk about this in the introduction of my book and I look at food from the inside out. I say I see through food. I look at fiber, hydrates, protein, fat, and these are crucial to me.

Larissa Zimberoff: I don't look at food like as the pure joy, like the donut in my hand. I look at what is behind it. And I learned over time, over decades of tinkering with my diet, that the simpler I ate, the more plants I ate, the healthier and easier my life was because I'm the computer to my body. So I want to make it simpler. And that is the basics of why I mostly eat plant-based and why I drive to cover food, food that I'm interested in. I'm freelance, so I only write about what I care about. So I get to ditch a lot of ideas.

Nicole Astra: You've just wrapped an event, Future Food Dinner. Is that what we're calling it?

Larissa Zimberoff: It needs a better name.

Nicole Astra: No!

Larissa Zimberoff: It needs a better name.

Nicole Astra: Because you and I ask a similar question of our guests. I want to know what our dinner plates are going to look like in 10 years. And that's really exactly why you designed this event, right?

Larissa Zimberoff: Yeah.

Nicole Astra: Tell me why why it's important to you and what were some takeaways?

Larissa Zimberoff: Yeah. In my book, I posed the question to about 20 plus media, writers, journalists, and entrepreneurs and investors. And I say, what's on our plate in 20 years? And I said 20 years because it seems a little more realistic to get to some places with plant-based or cultured. And it's that I want us to think about how long is it going to take us to shift? Now that we've got Biden in office, everyone's really talking about climate and that is what's going to propel us to this shift. It's climate. What might get us there faster might be environmental disasters or perhaps another pandemic. But until then, I think things will kind of go at this accelerated rate, which is what we're seeing. Because we're in the world, we think it's already happening, but it's not. Plant-based has less than 1% of sales compared to animal meat. But it's growing, right?

Nicole Astra: Despite its exponential footprint, right? Yes.

Larissa Zimberoff: It's growing and people in the pandemic were trying new foods and everyone was so excited. But it still has just a tiny fraction. So this dinner, I wanted to show people what might happen. I wanted to actually show them what I knew and what they might not know yet. So like algae, where I had a blue spirulina syrup, which came with a chicken and waffles and the chicken was made from chickpea protein and soy flour, and the chicken had a little bone and you picked it up with your hands and you ate it and it was really satisfying, and it had this crispy shattery skin. The waffle was made from upcycled okara flour, okara comes from tofu making. It's soy based and it's full of protein and fiber and fiber means prebiotics. And then the blue syrup was swirled on the plate and it was beautiful.

Larissa Zimberoff: And so I wanted to show examples where I felt that they were potentially healthy, good for us and also good for the planet. So I did have a lens to wanting to offer foods that I thought were also good for us and not just good for the planet or just saving animals.

Nicole Astra: Right. So you're really speaking our language now here because the consumer's just not ready for this, and we need innovators and we need voices like yours and collaborators to show them what it could look like and the potential that plant-based eating can be. So big question, when will one of these dinners come to Chicago?

Larissa Zimberoff: I would love to have it in Chicago. So what made San Francisco so good for me; one, I live here, but I had access to a good friend who's a chef and he works in innovation. So he was so excited to take this on. He just jumped in with me into the swimming pool of what companies did we want to include? Where could we get donations? And then we worked with a nonprofit space that had staff and had sort of the infrastructure to do this. And so I can't just do it because it's like, who's the chef? Where's it going to be? And how can I get support in executing this dinner? But I did think of ... there's a kitchen incubator in Chicago and I was like, "Oh, they might be great to have it at."

Larissa Zimberoff: Because then you've got companies and entrepreneurs that are already working there and startups, and it's got a lot of excitement, but then there's also some interesting Chicago brands, like the Aquafish company, that's like fermenting fish. So I think ... and not fish, not-

Nicole Astra: Right.

Larissa Zimberoff: Not seafood fish, but yeah. So that's super exciting. So not only do I want to have the dinner in different places, but I want to have it localized with the products. So New York will be a great location. Europe will be a great location. Tel Aviv will be wonderful. Just really accessing new brands and getting to talk to new people, I think it has a lot of excitement.

Nicole Astra: And before you go, you've mentioned the book, but tell our audience where to get it.

Larissa Zimberoff: Yeah. Yeah. So my book is called Technically Food: Inside Silicon Valley's Mission to Change What We Eat. I have it right here.

Nicole Astra: Great.

Larissa Zimberoff: You can get it at all the big places. You can get it at your local bookstore. If they don't have it, they'll order it for you. I like to send people to bookshop.org, which is a nice online place to get it. But you of course can get it from bigger people than that, that you probably know the name of. I narrate the audio. So if you want the audio, you can get that on audible. And there's a Kindle version. It kind of comes in everything. I have a weekly newsletter that goes out every Friday that has sort of what I'm thinking about and what's the pulse of food and what I'm interested in, kind of very casual. So yeah, there's a lot of ways to interact with me and you can also find where to buy it on my website, which is just my name.

Nicole Astra: All right. Well, again, we thank you for your time on Talking Plant Protein. We appreciate your voice in the industry and we'll be listening.

Larissa Zimberoff: Awesome. Thank you so much for having me.