We turned 4. Come hang out with us? :)

Welcome to Truth Be Told, the food and health journalism publication published by The Whole Truth Foods.

Dear readers,

This is Samarth, your editor, and I am writing today to invite you to TBT’s birthday party—we turned four a couple of weeks ago—and we want to celebrate with you, our readers. It’s at The Whole Truth office on Saturday, 12 September, from 11 am to 1 pm. You can register here. I would love to meet you! :)

I am genuinely proud of what we have built and what editing this publication has taught me. (Well, as part of my job, I have read every single word of every article we have published from day one, and every article we didn’t publish.)

As we keep growing and moving towards new things, looking back helps. So, in birthday mode—I also turned 33 four days ago—let me reflect on a question I have been thinking about.

When we launched TBT in 2022, widely accessible AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude didn’t exist. You couldn’t ask a bot about strategies to get enough protein as a vegetarian, why there are these unknown ingredients in your bread, or whether A2 milk is worth paying a premium for. And I didn’t see it coming either.

At the time, the core problem we were trying to solve was to create a trusted source of information around food, health and fitness, and build a publication rooted in an editorial culture of truth-seeking that sets the right incentives for writers.

So, in the age of chatbots—which, to be honest, do a fairly good job of answering many questions—what’s the purpose of publications like ours?

I will share two top-of-mind things.

One, as the editorial team, our job is curation (and not just production of new articles).

Which means: what topics do we bring to your attention, and what questions do we ask?

Power often works by setting frames for you: billions of advertising dollars are thrown into directing attention towards a limited set of things. Journalism says: hang on… Is this the frame that is actually helpful for consumers, or simply for the person trying to sell?

This becomes especially important at a time when access to information is madly abundant. Curation has always been the job of magazines and publications that don’t aim to cover everything, but it becomes even more important when parts of what we used to do have become redundant. (You can ask an AI for a simple explainer and keep asking it to explain until you get it. Or you can ask it for the latest position of authoritative bodies on, say, artificial sweeteners.)

Two, letting humans be at the center of the writing.

At the launch of TBT itself, we had said that “truth” for us comes both from deeply individual experience and decades of scientific research. Both matter. And we have followed that as a principle, bringing a mix of explainers, guides, deep dives and personal essays.

And now, I encourage my writers even more to put themselves in the piece, even when it’s a deep dive on a food industry topic. Because it helps me experience the journey of the writer: how they discovered the facts, how learning those facts changed something in their lives, or what this information means to them.

This is the part that is always unique to the writer, and no bot can spill it out because the bot—by its very nature—doesn’t experience it.

AI doesn’t know that reading ten articles and two books on sleep doesn’t really help during the week when, for no good reason, you keep waking up at 4 am. Facts alone cannot tell you about the shame, guilt or helplessness you experience in those hours.

It also doesn’t know how, even after learning a new trick of the food industry, you may choose not to change and continue doing what you were doing, and yet feel empowered because you are now choosing with agency, rather than unknowingly falling for food industry manipulation or trusting someone who was pretending to help but had an agenda that didn’t keep you at the center.

Because there is a life to be lived based on facts that we learn, and writers can show us what living those facts feels like in a world that can feel overwhelming. That’s why writers who care and choose to pay attention to their experiences matter so much, and why we will continue giving them a platform and celebrating them at TBT.

I am genuinely grateful for every writer who has chosen to write for us, and for all you readers whose active engagement keeps reminding us that this work matters. It gives me so much joy when I randomly meet people who tell me they are readers of TBT, because it puts a face behind the emails these letters go out to.

So… if you are in Mumbai and have time, please join us to celebrate this Saturday. It will be fun!

Best,

Samarth