A Short History of Food, Societal Evolution, and the Human Condition
‘Just eat real food.’ But what does ‘real’ even mean in a world of cheap abundance? How did we get here in the first place? This is a story about food, societal evolution, and the human condition.
👋🏼 Hi, I’m Shantanu — I run Xandro Lab, a science-first longevity brand in Singapore. We started with a single product and a mission to make longevity research more accessible. Today, we’ve grown into one of Singapore’s fastest-growing longevity brands — with a strong repeat base, a lean team, and a product line that keeps evolving with science.
I write this newsletter to document the behind-the-scenes of what it really takes to build and scale a consumer brand from Singapore — the high-conviction decisions that move us forward, and the quieter, uncomfortable realities that demand more from us every few months.
If you sit with anyone long enough — friends, family, random strangers online — you’ll hear some version of this:
“There’s too much pesticide in our vegetables.”
“Heavy metals are in our rice and fish — I’ve read it’s in baby food too.”
“Microplastics are in our water, salt, maybe even our fruit.”
“Everything’s processed — bread, meat, sauces, the snacks we feed our kids.”
“Food is so engineered now — they make it addictive on purpose.”
“GMO crops are ruining real farming — who knows what we’re really eating.”
“We’re eating fruit that’s not in season”
”Onions sit for months and look perfect but taste bland.”
“There’s too much hidden sugar. Even the ‘healthy’ stuff is full of it.”
We say all this — then we look back at the good old days when food felt simpler, cleaner, local. We say that in ‘good old days’ people just ate what grew nearby, in season, cooked it at home, shared it at the table. No chemicals, no engineering, no billion-dollar marketing campaigns. Just ‘real’ food.
These complaints aren’t nonsense — they’re real. They come from a sense that something is off. That we solved one problem — hunger — but replaced it with a new mess of trade-offs: cheap calories, hidden chemicals, modern diseases.
This week’s piece is about that tension - How we got here? Why food changed so much and so fast? Forgotten problems we used to have — and the ones we have now. And what it means to live — and eat — in a time when our biggest problem isn’t whether there will be food, but whether the food we have really feeds us well.
Reader’s Note + Personal Context
Before we get into the first section, I should say this: This is going to be a long read. Take a moment — sit down, grab a coffee or tea, read it with calmness. This is not rage-bait or click-bait. It’s not a viral tweet thread telling you what to eat or what to fear. It’s a story, and a reflection, on how I’ve seen food systems change — up close, and from the inside.
Long before I ever sold a single longevity supplement, I was trying to build something very different — a global food marketplace. The vision was big, maybe too big. I wanted to connect farmers in the remotest villages with big importers in cities across Asia. The mission was simple in theory but brutal in practice: source clean produce, build trust in supply chains, handle logistics across borders.
I spent months on the ground — visiting farms, talking to processors, sitting in pasar malams and wholesale markets in India, Indonesia, and Southeast Asia. I learned how bananas can travel 45 days across oceans from the Philippines or South America to your local supermarket. How flowers and onions often first pass through the Netherlands before they reach the rest of the world. The scale, the complexity — and the ingenuity — of the global food system blew my mind.
That venture failed. But that short, intense stint gave me an understanding I still carry today: food doesn’t magically appear. It’s grown, traded, stored, shipped, repackaged, and marketed by millions of people, across routes that criss-cross the world. It’s more advanced and more fragile than we realise.
That’s why this piece is so personal to me. It’s not about defending the food industry. It’s about respecting how food systems evolved to feed billions of people — and what we forget when we talk about going back to some perfect past.
If you’re still here, settle in — let’s start with the story we all love to hear: the myth of the good old food.
Today’s reading -
The Myth of the Good Old Food : Nostalgia vs. the real struggles our grandparents faced — from spoilage to nutrient deficiencies.
A Short History — From Scarcity to Abundance : How industrial food systems solved hunger — and created new trade-offs.
The Aspiration — The Return to Whole Food : Why we crave ‘real food’ now, and why it’s harder than we admit.
Societal Evolution — How Life Changed, How We Didn’t : From harvesting to food delivery apps — what our bodies still expect.
What Modern Food Still Gets Wrong — Gut Health, Toxins, and Trade-Offs : The invisible damage convenience can do to our guts, and why safety is so uneven.
Marketing — The Mirror We Love to Hate : How branding and ads shaped what we crave — and why it works.
The Modern Contradiction — Trusting Junk, Fearing Simple Fixes : Why we fear a tested pill but trust fast food — the irony of modern scepticism.
Closing — The Human Condition & What We Can Do : Where we go from here: honest trade-offs, clearer choices, and a little less guilt.
1. The Myth of the Good Old Food
When people talk about food these days, there’s always a sense that we’ve lost something. It comes up in casual conversations, wellness trends, even dinner-table debates: “Food isn’t what it used to be.” You hear it when someone praises their grandmother’s home-cooked meals, or when they blame chronic illness on ‘modern diets’ and chemicals. Influencers tell you to quit processed foods and eat like your ancestors did - think carnivore diet, whole foods, organic, freshly grown food.
There’s comfort in that story — the idea that there was a time when everything we ate was whole, local, pure, and perfect for our bodies. When I was a kid in India, I’d watch my father wash vegetables in a big tub, scrubbing off soil and dust. Even today, my mother still cuts open an eggplant to check for insects. Here in Singapore, I never worry about that. The same vegetables look clean, sealed, pristine.
The reality behind that nostalgia is complicated. We forget that for large parts of human history, people struggled to get enough protein, iron, or vitamins. Diseases like rickets, scurvy, pellagra, beriberi — all linked to simple nutrient deficiencies — were common. Generations lived with stunted growth, fragile bones, or weakened immune systems, not because they ate ‘artificial food,’ but because they simply didn’t have enough.
During the ‘good old days’, poor preservation meant spoilage was common; mold and toxins were often eaten without people knowing. Food hygiene was unreliable: animal products spoiled fast, contamination was common, and food-borne illness killed thousands.
The ‘good old food’ story also leaves out how hard people worked for every calorie. Hunting, gathering, farming by hand — there was nothing romantic about it when droughts hit or pests wiped out crops. There was no backup plan. No global shipping container full of rice or onions or potatoes from the other side of the world.
Today, we complain about processed food and chemical preservatives — and yes, not all of it is good for us. But the reality is, many of these systems evolved to solve a basic, brutal problem: hunger. Processing gave food a longer shelf life so it could survive the journey from farm to market to your plate. Refrigeration, fortification, canning — these weren’t invented to ruin us. They were invented so we wouldn’t starve when the local harvest failed.
There’s wisdom in how people cooked, how they used the whole animal or plant, how they wasted less. But that past was far from perfect. And when we pretend it was, we forget how far we’ve come — and what it took to get here.
This story is a real look at how food, society, and our human condition have evolved together.
2. A Short History - From Scarcity to Abundance
It’s easy to forget how quickly things changed.
The industrial food system — the one people now blame for so many of our modern problems — emerged to solve the problem of scarcity. Machines, fertilisers, and irrigation scaled up harvests. Trains, trucks, and container ships made it possible to move bananas from the Philippines or Ecuador to cities thousands of kilometres away. Cold storage and processing plants kept meat from spoiling, so it didn’t need to be eaten the same day. Basic fortification — adding iodine to salt, iron to flour, vitamins to cereal — helped erase diseases that had plagued people for centuries.
Of course, none of this was perfect. Mass production introduced trade-offs. Nutrient density dropped in some places as yields went up. Ultra-processed foods made it easy to fill a belly with empty calories instead of real nourishment. Marketing — that powerful force that tells us what to crave — learned how to push cheap, hyper-palatable foods into every corner of life.
But big picture? The shift from scarcity to abundance is one of the greatest reasons why our average lifespan rose, why infant mortality dropped, why millions of families could move out of the constant fear of famine. The irony is that we rarely see that as progress. We complain about the system — and parts of it deserve criticism — but we forget that without it, the conversation would not be about organic kale or pasture-raised beef. It would be about how to get anything to eat at all.
That food marketplace platform I once tried to build showed me this first-hand. Watching shipments of produce travel days, weeks, oceans — seeing fresh vegetables in a port city that couldn’t grow them locally — I understood how complicated it all is. Every banana, onion, or carton of milk carries the fingerprints of hundreds of people, machines, and quiet fixes that keep food moving.
This system feeds billions, mostly well enough that we no longer worry about basic survival. But it also leaves us with new problems to solve — waste, overconsumption, loss of connection to how food gets to our plates. That’s the tension that sits at the heart of where we are today: the world of cheap abundance.
This story is not just how food evolved, but how abundance changed us and what we do with it.
3. The Aspiration — The Return to Whole Food
With abundance came something else: the longing to return to what feels more real.
It shows up in farmer’s markets, in farm-to-table restaurants, in the growing number of people searching for ‘organic’ labels and local produce. It’s there when people post photos of homemade sourdough (pls tell me some local examples), or proudly talk about their backyard farms (not in Singapore, of course).
Mangoes are my favorite food, I could devour 3-4 mangoes in one sitting. At my home, mango season was two short months - I had to wait all year. In Bangalore, I would get a longer stretch because mangoes came from all over India. Now, living in Singapore, I see Thai mangoes almost year-round and some Australian ones. The same fruit that once felt rare is now just another choice.
When food is everywhere — in plastic wrappers, on shelves that never run empty — the idea of something freshly picked, unprocessed, and close to the source feels grounding. It’s a reminder that eating isn’t just fuel. It’s culture, ritual, connection.
The aspiration makes sense. There’s no denying that fresh vegetables, fresh cuts of meat (butcher shops are bloody not clean), grains close to how they were grown — these can be better for us than ultra-processed food. Cooking at home gives us more control over what we eat. Eating together can make us feel more connected, too.
But underneath that longing is a tension. The dream of a whole-food diet every day is often out of reach for many people. It takes money to choose organic. It takes time to plan, to cook, to shop in more than one place. It takes knowledge to know what your body really needs. And life doesn’t always allow for that — when you’re working hard, aspiring to get promoted, or living in places where fresh produce isn’t as easy to come by.
I’ve met farmers who sell beautiful harvests locally, only to see that they can’t sell enough to survive because their prices can’t compete with bulk imports. I’ve met city families who say they’d love to eat ‘farm fresh’ — but they pick up frozen nuggets and instant noodles because they’re cheap, fast, and the kids love them.
Wanting to go back to whole food is not wrong. It’s worth striving for where we can. But pretending that everyone can do it all the time — that’s the story that leaves too many people feeling guilty or judged. It ignores the real gap between our ideals and how modern life actually works.
This story is a reminder that our aspirations are real, but so are the trade-offs.
4. Societal Evolution — How Life Changed, How We Didn’t
When you step back, it’s remarkable how quickly our way of living has shifted.
Just a few generations ago, daily life was structured around food in ways we barely think about now. Hunting, gathering, planting, harvesting — food wasn’t something you grabbed on the way to work. It was work. It was survival.
Industrialisation changed that. Urbanisation brought people from farms to factories and offices. Public transport, cars, and city blocks replaced fields and kitchen gardens. For the first time, large numbers of people were removed from the direct work of producing food. The job became to earn enough money to buy it from someone else.
In my hometown, farmers would harvest at dawn and take the train into town to sell outside the wet market. In Bangalore, you’d see trucks unloading onions and greens every morning from the countryside. And in Dubai, I watched how the entire world’s produce lands daily — you find every fruit imaginable, but you never talk about local harvests.
As our cities grew, our plates grew more complicated too. We created global supply chains to keep supermarket shelves full all year. Calories became cheap and convenient so people could work longer hours and feed their families more easily.
And it worked. Hunger declined. Life expectancy rose. Many societies built new levels of prosperity on top of this basic promise: You will not starve.
But our bodies never quite got the memo. Biologically, we’re still wired for a world of uncertainty and effort. We store fat easily because for thousands of years, the next meal wasn’t guaranteed. We crave salt, sugar, and fat because those things were once precious and rare. We feel good when we share a meal because our social bonds evolved around fires and feasts, not factory-made snacks eaten alone at a desk.
This mismatch is everywhere now. We live in cities, we work on screens, we eat when the clock says lunchtime — not when we’ve walked ten kilometres to find food. We have more food, but also more stress. We have endless options, but also more confusion about what’s good for us and what isn’t.
Sometimes people blame themselves. Sometimes they blame companies or marketing. The truth is, we’ve changed our environment faster than our biology could keep up. The systems that feed us were built to remove scarcity — but they didn’t rewrite what our bodies want or need.
That’s the human condition I keep coming back to. We’re ancient creatures living in modern cities, asking our bodies and minds to adapt overnight to abundance, convenience, and choice.
This story is a reminder that evolution didn’t end when food got easier to find.
5. What Modern Food Still Gets Wrong — Gut Health, Toxins, and Trade-Offs
Every system that solves one problem usually creates another. Our modern food supply made hunger less common, but it also changed what our bodies — especially our guts — have to deal with every single day.
For most of human history, our gut microbiome evolved alongside the food we could hunt or grow. It was seasonal, local, often high in fibre, and relatively low in processed sugar or chemicals. Fermented foods happened naturally — they helped preserve nutrients, and they fed the diverse bacteria that lived in our intestines.
Today, the same gut has to process an avalanche of new inputs: additives, artificial sweeteners, preservatives, and highly processed grains stripped of their original fibre.
We now know that an unbalanced gut microbiome can affect everything from digestion to mental health to immunity. Many people have gut issues that are shaped by years of convenience foods, hidden sugars, and diets that don’t feed the right bacteria.
Then there’s the wider ecosystem of what goes into the food before it even hits our plates. Industrial farming relies on pesticides and herbicides to scale up yields and protect crops from pests. But residues can linger, especially when supply chains cut corners. Heavy metals like lead or mercury can end up in water and soil, accumulating in certain crops or fish.
Hormones and antibiotics are used in animal farming to speed up growth or prevent disease — but misuse can affect the final meat and dairy products we consume.
In some parts of the world, regulation and oversight catch these risks early. In others, they slip through, because cost-cutting and corruption are part of the chain.
It’s not about fear-mongering — it’s about recognising that modern food’s biggest win, its sheer scale, is also what makes it vulnerable. A single bad batch can travel across continents. A single poor farming practice can show up on thousands of plates. And a lack of transparency can leave us guessing what we’re really eating.
So when people feel uncomfortable with how food has evolved, they’re not entirely wrong.
Living in Singapore now, I see how limited fresh variety can feel. Local greens mostly mean the same few types of spinach and lettuces — anything more diverse is either expensive or just not there. Premium stores import fruit from everywhere, but price and supply keep it out of reach for many.
Gut health reminds us that our bodies don’t forget. They carry the consequences of what we eat — or what was added to our food long before it got to us. More people now live with chronic inflammation, digestive disorders, skin problems, even mental health conditions that are linked to poor gut diversity. Even obesity and metabolic diseases are tied to a microbiome that can’t do its job well anymore.
This story is a reminder that while our food systems solved old problems, they left us with new ones to face.
6. Marketing — The Mirror We Love to Hate
Whenever people talk about what went wrong with food, it doesn’t take long for someone to blame marketing.
They’re not entirely wrong. Advertising has an incredible power to shape habits, nudge cravings, and sell things we don’t really need. It turns a sugar-laden cereal into a ‘healthy start’ for kids. It makes a cheap fizzy drink feel aspirational. It tells us that eating is not just survival, but a lifestyle, an identity, something we deserve more of.
But marketing didn’t create our hunger. It just learned how to speak to it.
Every era has its own version of this. When families moved from farms to cities and had less time to cook, convenience became the pitch. When more people had disposable income, indulgence and variety became the pitch. When the science caught up and people got scared of too much sugar or fat, the pitch changed again — ‘low-fat’, ‘guilt-free’, ‘zero-calorie’. Same underlying drive: sell what people think they want, or might fear they need.
It’s easy to blame the ad alone — but the ad didn’t make the food. The food didn’t make itself. These things exist because people keep buying them.
We want shelf life. We want speed. We want taste that’s engineered to make us crave more. Even simple foods get a story: in Singapore, supermarket shelves are full of eggs labelled kampung, first-born, omega-3 enriched, omega-6 enriched, carrot, golden corn — all carefully branded so we trust the same humble egg more. The promise feels comforting or exciting — whichever mood works best that year.
I’ve worked in branding for long enough to know how powerful this is. Even in my own world, running a science-first supplement brand, I see how one piece of marketing can make someone trust you or write you off as a scam. Good marketing can build real trust if it’s grounded in honesty and testing. Bad marketing sells false hope. Both exist because demand exists — fear, aspiration, insecurity, curiosity.
When people say, “Big food brands broke the world,” it’s only half the story. The other half is how quickly we made them rich. We wanted the promise: more food, more convenience, more comfort, always on demand. And we still do.
If marketing is a villain, it’s a villain we created — and still feed, every time we choose the fastest, cheapest, or easiest thing on the shelf.
This story is a reminder that marketing didn’t invent our needs; it reflects them, amplifies them, and sometimes exposes the contradictions we’d rather ignore.
7. The Modern Contradiction — Trusting Junk, Fearing Simple Fixes
When you look at how far we’ve come — from unpredictable harvests to global supermarket aisles — it’s strange how selective our fears have become.
People will happily grab a burger they know is processed, drink a cocktail they know isn’t doing their liver any favours, light up a cigarette despite everything we’ve learned about cancer. But suggest they take a simple mineral or vitamin — tested, regulated, often more transparent than half the things in that burger — and a wall of scepticism goes up.
People don’t hesitate to pile up their plates at a fast-food chain, but they’ll warn each other that a supplement pill could ‘damage your kidneys’. They’ll question whether a vitamin is ‘natural’ while eating foods that have been frozen, dyed, sweetened, or stored for weeks in cold ships and warehouses. None of this makes them stupid or careless — it just shows how complicated our relationship with food has become.
Part of the fear is justified. The supplement industry, like any industry, has bad actors. There are companies that promise magic — the overnight weight loss, the cure-all detox, the miracle pill. And people remember those false promises. But it’s still ironic that we don’t hold the same suspicion for things that do far more obvious harm. The third drink on a Friday night, the sugary snack we reach for when we’re stressed, the pack of cigarettes that sits in the pocket of someone who won’t take a daily vitamin because it feels ‘unnatural’.
The contradiction is bigger than just supplements. It’s the tension between what our instincts tell us is safe — food that feels familiar, comforting, normal — and what the science shows about how our bodies handle what we put in them.
Our livers, kidneys, and gut microbiome don’t read labels — they respond to what’s actually in our food, in the doses we take in, and in the form it’s delivered. Some so-called ‘natural’ foods can cause more long-term stress than we realise — too much sugar, hidden fats, or additives disguised by clever marketing. And sometimes, when there really is a gap, the right supplement — one that’s well-made and properly absorbed — can help fill it in ways food alone may not always do.
The point isn’t that everyone should consume supplement — it’s that the fear shouldn’t blind us to the bigger picture. We don’t live like our ancestors. We don’t hunt, gather, or farm the same way. Our systems feed us well in some ways, poorly in others. It’s up to us to see the contradictions clearly — and choose what makes sense for the lives we actually live now.
This story is not about defending pills, but about seeing how complicated trust becomes when food, health, and human nature collide.
8. Closing — The Human Condition & What We Can Do
When I look back at everything I’ve shared here — how we moved from hunger to abundance, from small farms to global aisles, from fearing famine to fearing additives — I keep coming back to the same idea: we didn’t break food. We shaped it to match what we needed, what we could afford, and what we didn’t always understand.
I can’t speak for every country. I grew up in small-town India where fresh vegetables were daily life but trust was never guaranteed — you worried about water, soil, pesticides. I’ve seen how cities like Bangalore and Dubai crave big brands and shiny packaging because they promise consistency. I live in Singapore now, where you can find a box of organic blueberries next to the cheapest instant noodles — and watch people choose both in the same basket. The trade-offs look different, but the pattern is the same everywhere: the more choice we get, the harder it is to know what really feeds us well.
So what else can we do?
We’re not going back to hunting and foraging in forests. We’re not going to quit our jobs and grow all our own food. But we can see the system for what it is — imperfect, advanced, fragile, and still the best chance billions have to eat enough. We can make better choices when we can: ask more questions about what’s in our food, cook at home when time allows, buy fresher or closer to the source when it’s possible — and not carry guilt when it isn’t.
We can take our biology seriously. Understand what our bodies actually need. Fill gaps when they’re real. Keep learning. And stay honest about what one meal, one trend, or one pill can and can’t do. No miracle. No magic. Just better questions, better trade-offs.
Maybe that’s the human condition in the end. We’re wired to look back for something pure, look forward for something better, and wrestle with the imperfect systems we built in between.
Thanks for reading.
There couldn’t have be a better coincidence - While I editing this piece, I landed at this new video by Nasdaily - the company, Bluetree, claims to remove double sugar from fruit juice and beer. Will you call this good or bad?
I would have preferred to go out and take pictures for this blog post. But it’s late already. So, I may update it over the week. Please visit the website for updates. Emails are static!
Until next Sunday — take care, eat well, and stay curious about what really feeds you - Shan