Getting the Big Trend Right

A wink to Brad Jacobs, and a bet on where the world is actually going.

By: Ethan Babil

7/24/26

Step into my shoes for a second

For the past year I have lived inside a world most people never see. I have driven a garbage truck through Denver before the sun was up, watching it wake while I got to know a city by what it throws out. I have stood on the floor of transfer stations and landfills next to the people who work there, the ones who see it every single day, who have gone nose blind to it all, pun intended. I have sat across the table from waste management owners and executives in corporate offices, learning how they think, learning where their incentives actually point. And I have shown up to the leading conferences and events in this industry, watching the biggest players in the room turn a government mandate into a market. I did all of this on purpose. I came out of finance, private equity and banking advisory, and I walked away from it to learn this business from the ground up. The truck. The transfer station. The compost pile. The people. And it did not start with the truck. I worked a full overnight shift in a corner of New Orleans most people never see, where the food carried no nutrition and no one had been taught to expect any, where bad food and hard living fed each other in a loop with no exit. Then I walked the glitz of New York and Miami, all glamour and abundance. Opposite ends of everything. And at the center of both, the same hollow food doing the same quiet damage. So before we go any further, I want you to step into my shoes. Not as a metaphor. As an actual request. Stand where I have been standing this past year and look at what I have been looking at. Because from here, the trend everyone is chasing and the trend that actually matters are not the same thing. And I want you to understand one thing about me first, because everything I am about to say circles back to it. I wake up every single day for one thing: affordable, localized, whole foods for urbanized communities. That is it. That is the whole mission. Hold onto those three words, because they carry the entire essay.

Two perspectives

Here is what a year in waste infrastructure taught me. There are two perspectives on what is happening right now, and they are in tension. The first is the perspective of the capitalist. The waste managementist. The entrepreneur. To this person, a government mandate is not a burden, it is a map to a market that has not been built yet. When Denver passed Waste No More, the big waste companies did not see a regulation. They saw an organics market opening up. Overnight, food waste became a commodity and composting became infrastructure. And zoom out far enough and this looks beautiful. It is sustainability. It is regenerative. It is circular. I believe in all of that. I am building inside of it. But there is a second perspective, and it is the one that keeps me up at night. It belongs to whoever is actually providing the waste. Yes, some of that is large multifamily and big food service. But there is a small demographic that gets overlooked every single time: the mom and pop shop. The Mongolian beef restaurant. The Italian catering company that has been feeding one neighborhood for two generations. The place where someone's deep rooted culture shows up in the shared form of food. That is a powerful thing, and it is being stripped away. Not by people who hate the planet. Not by villains. By the sheer weight of compliance. These restaurants and food servicers cannot afford more fines coming their way. So when they push back against a mandate, it is easy to cast them as the enemy of the future. But look closer. They are not fighting sustainability. They are trying to make a living. They care about a legacy, about living on in the form of food, and a city like Denver, however well intentioned, is positioned to strip that away from them. This is the hard part. It is very difficult to see both perspectives at once. It is even harder to build a company that leverages the mandate and cares for the legacy at the same time. But that tension is the whole job. That is where the real work lives. So I will ask the question that sits underneath all of this: is the American dream dying? Because what one person once built out of their culture and their hands, feeding a community the food of their ancestors, is exactly what the current shape of this trend is quietly grinding down.

Why these three words

 me go deeper on affordable, localized, whole foods, because I did not land on those words by accident. They are core beliefs. Start with the enemy of all three: industrial farming. Think of a company so engulfed in the bottom line that its entire existence is keeping up with volume and scale. That model is not ancient. It has a deep rooted background in the war eras, World War Two and the industrial boom around it. And that history matters, because it is the same history that emptied the farms. Here is the urbanization piece, and it is the beating heart of why I am out here. Around the wars, inland farmers left. They left their families and their land and went to fight. And after the war, there was a massive industrial boom, an ocean of opportunity in the big metropolitans. New York. Boston. Denver. Factory work paid more than the farm ever could, so people came, and they kept coming. They moved into high rises and into city life and stepped away from grassroots. That was not just a migration. It was a severing. Call it a loss of grounding. We lost touch with the rhythms of growing food, of working soil, of knowing where our sustenance comes from. And that severing did not stop with one generation. It cascaded. Look at where it lands today. I am a recent college graduate, so I have watched this up close. So many students get funneled straight into what this industrialization built. Student becomes young professional becomes career becomes, hopefully, retirement, and a huge number of them are lost the entire way through, because they have been walked so far from grassroots that they never touch what they were actually meant to be. I call them wandering souls. People who stepped outside of what they could have been and spend a life quietly looking for meaning they were structurally denied. That is the real cost of industrialization. Not just the soil. The souls.

Control the waste, control the market

So how do I fight that? Through the waste stream. Control the waste, control the market. I will say it again, because it is the thesis. Control the waste, control the market. And in this case, the market is agriculture. Here is how waste and farming pair. The word is feedstock. Feedstock is a glorious way of saying food waste. And feedstock lives everywhere, from the mom and pop shop all the way up to the largest industrial food manufacturer. When you can take in what everyone else calls their output, their trash, and treat it as your input, three very important things come out the other side. Compost. Renewable natural gas. Animal feed. Each one comes from its own complicated process, but here is why they matter so much: outside of labor, those three are among the most expensive line items on a farm. Bring them in house instead of subbing them out or buying them from a distribution facility, and you have unlocked the first of my three words. Affordable. Then localization. I believe no food should travel more than ten miles to reach the person who eats it. Ten miles. Pull the pesticides out, pull the industrial inputs out, shorten that distance, and a community gets measurably healthier. I am not asking anyone to burn down the middle aisle. Soda and fermentation have been around for millennia, crackers and cheese are not the enemy. But when a community grows and eats close to home, the health gain that follows is not small. And then whole foods, which walks hand in hand with localization. This is soil first farming. It is ground up, grassroots in the most literal sense. Feed the soil with high quality compost and you get the best produce. That produce cycles back around, becomes food waste again, gets converted into the highest quality animal feed, which becomes the best protein a person can eat. That loop is the circular economy. My input is your output. Other people's outputs are my inputs, and that is exactly what lets creativity, innovation, and exploration shine in a way they never have. Now look at what we eat instead, and follow the money that put it there. It starts with subsidies. A subsidy is simple: the federal government pays farmers to grow certain crops, and it has done this since the 1930s. The catch is which crops. The money does not chase what makes us healthy. It chases a short list of commodities, corn, soy, wheat, cotton, and rice, while fruits and vegetables get almost nothing. And those most heavily subsidized crops, corn and soy and wheat, happen to be the exact building blocks of ultra processed food. The corn syrup, the starches, the seed oils, the fillers. We are subsidizing the raw material of the very diet that is making us sick. Then look at what gets sprayed on those crops. For decades the dominant weedkiller was Roundup, whose active ingredient is glyphosate, and whose maker was a company called Monsanto. In 2015 the World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer classified glyphosate as probably carcinogenic to humans, most strongly linked to non-Hodgkin lymphoma. A later meta-analysis found that high exposure was associated with a roughly forty one percent increased risk of that same cancer. Regulators still argue about the strength of the link, and the industry disputes it. But more than a hundred thousand people did not wait for the argument to end. They sued, and Bayer, which bought Monsanto in 2018, has paid out over ten billion dollars. Here is the part that should stop you. The same corporate world that sells the chemical is deeply braided into the world that treats the sickness. Bayer is a pesticide company and a pharmaceutical company under one roof. I am not going to hand you a conspiracy, because I do not need one. The structure alone is damning enough. When one set of incentives profits from what goes on the crop and a related set profits from the illness downstream, no one has to plan anything evil. The machine simply runs in the direction of more volume, more spray, more sickness, more treatment. Follow the money and it never once passes through your health. And this is what ends up on the shelf. Research out of Northeastern University that scanned the products at Walmart, Target, and Whole Foods found that around seventy percent of the American food supply is ultra processed. Seventy percent. Then notice the protein wave everyone is riding right now, and ask the same question: who profits? Supplement companies that want to sell more powder. The largest cattle operations and packers, Cargill, Tyson, JBS, that want to move more meat. Additives exist in that chain to make the product look better while doing nothing good for the person eating it. This is not a diet. It is a business model wearing the costume of food. That is the system. And the trend I am betting on is the exact inverse of it. Local, affordable, whole foods for urbanized communities, funded by the fact that the money lives in those urban communities while the growing lives in the rural ones. Move that money toward regenerative farming, which is not some new invention but one of the oldest forms of farming we have, and you do not just change a city. Because food and water are what markets actually move on, not events, not headlines, you change the world.

The other big trend

Everyone will tell you the big trend is AI. Every venture fund is jumping in. If you are not in AI, the story goes, you are missing the dot com moment, you are missing the industrial moment, you are missing the next leap in human prosperity. And I am not going to argue against the technology. I think it is real, and I think it is enormous. But I want to turn it around. AI is an extension of us. We are already technology. Over time we will not just carry our phones, we will be one with our own personal systems, and the line between the tool and the self will keep thinning. That extension is powerful. It is also, if we are honest, tied to the same lineage as everything else I have described. It runs on the industrial revolution's energy, and that energy has always been tangled up with war. I am not saying that makes it bad. I am saying we should be clear eyed that this is where it comes from, and that we may need to reach for a new kind of energy entirely, and build something bigger than a society or a culture. A world worth running back to. So here is the real question, and it deserves its own space. AI will give us more freedom. More freedom of our time. So what will we do with it? I want to say the answer is obvious, but it is not, and I will not pretend otherwise. Because for a long time now we have been told what we want. We work the corporate desk because we were told that is the life to want. We are fed exactly the content that keeps us fed. We have been falsely fed for far too long, not just our bodies, our minds. And out past the screen, the wild is emptying out. The World Wildlife Fund's Living Planet Report found that monitored wildlife populations shrank by an average of seventy three percent between 1970 and 2020, and its own scientists name our global food system as the leading cause. The planet is being pushed harder and faster than ever, and a lot of that is a kind of self toxicity we refuse to see, all of it in service of short term gain, monetary incentive, and control. So no, I cannot promise that more freedom leads somewhere good. That is a harder, deeper question than the venture funds want it to be. But here is what I believe. If the corporate lifestyle, the cubicle, the bags under the eyes, the whole apparatus that was installed in us, if a huge share of that becomes nonexistent because technology absorbs it, then the question of what we do with the leftover time becomes the most important question of the century. And I believe the honest answer, the human answer, is regenerative. I think it is a regenerative time to live. A time to put our toes in the grass again. A time when localized food and local commodities become more valuable, not less. When whole becomes worth something again. We might not learn to want less. But more might simply be given to us, more purpose, more jobs, more fulfillment, more ground under our feet, once we let ourselves become this way. That is the trend I am betting on. Not instead of AI. Underneath it. Because I can see how deeply waste infrastructure ties into agriculture, and I know that if we control the feedstock, we control the market, and we can do it in the most fulfilling way possible.

The question I will leave you with

So step back out of my shoes now, and take this with you. What if there were a world where every single person had something to wake up for? Not a corporate desk you are forced into to keep up with whatever life is throwing at you, but a life charged by the thing you actually work on. A reason, every morning, that is yours. That is where I believe this big trend is heading. And it is why I believe I can make an impact as large as a billion dollar corporation, with the empathy to see the effect on every life that follows my decisions. So I will ask you what I ask myself every day: what will you do with the freedom that is coming?

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Sources

• Subsidies and commodity crops: American Action Forum, "Agriculture Subsidies and Their Influence on the Composition of U.S. Food Supply and Consumption"; USAFacts, "Federal Farm Subsidies: What the Data Says"; Cato Institute, "Cutting Federal Farm Subsidies."

• Glyphosate and non-Hodgkin lymphoma: International Agency for Research on Cancer (WHO), Monograph Volume 112 (2015); Zhang et al. meta-analysis (2019), ~41% increased NHL risk with high exposure; Bayer/Monsanto litigation and settlement reporting. Note: the U.S. EPA has stated glyphosate is "not likely to be carcinogenic to humans," so the classification is contested.

• Ultra-processed food supply: Northeastern University GroceryDB study (~70% of the U.S. food supply ultra-processed, per NOVA classification of products at Walmart, Target, and Whole Foods).

• Wildlife decline: WWF and Zoological Society of London, Living Planet Report 2024 (73% average decline in monitored vertebrate populations, 1970–2020). This is an average decline in population sizes, not a count of individual animals or species lost.