Growing up, I ran everywhere. Really everywhere: in sports, to school, to the store, between all the rooms in my house, all the time. Slow just never made sense to me, and running made everything better. It came to define how I worked. Efficiency meant everything to me because it meant reaching my top speed. In fact, running became the only way I could work. By my 20s I realized that exercise kept me sane. It let out extra steam and left behind a semblance of focus. That was how I lived and made my living. I took on projects and (I’ve gotta say it) I literally ran with them.
Taste Guru Co-founder David Fishman's story
By age 29, I was still running: a rail-thin, ravenous entrepreneur who ate everything in sight, and who still couldn’t wait for soccer practice after work. Mealtime was just like childhood, every day: giant sandwiches, chocolate cake, big plates of pasta, and never bed without a snack. I mean it. I was 29 and I had to have my bedtime snack. Life was a roadrunner-coyote blur, but my routine was simple: eat, run, family, work, eat, in any order you like, all day. Rinse and repeat.
Then life shot a cannon ball at my routine. I got sick, practically everywhere: crippling sinus infections, dizziness, nausea, joint pain, intestine trouble, etc. Rinse and repeat. I was on steroids, antibiotics, anti-diarettics, painkillers, you name it. I wasn’t running anymore, unless it was to the bathroom. Oh, and I had a mysterious tongue virus. It was like different parts of my body were betting who could make things worse. So this was what slow felt like.
Finally I got the right kind of test from the right kind of doctor and he called me up to report that I’ve got Celiac Disease. No gluten allowed. I can’t eat bread anymore. It’s funny that I thought about it that way—as “no more bread”—because the truth was I already couldn’t eat bread. My body took a club to itself every time I ate a sandwich.
So what now? I tried every kind of gluten-free food I could find. It turns out expensive bad gluten-free food isn’t much better than cheap bad gluten-free food, and usually it’s pretty expensive anyway. It helped that my wife — a brilliant, uncomplaining goddess with whom I hope to score points by writing this line — changed how she cooked and what we ate. But I didn’t want her to spend all her time vetting recipes, and I didn’t want to hijack my own life, either — with all the trial-and-error dishes (not to mention our son's life – we have two sons now), the fad brands that miss the mark, the long shopping trips I spent yawning through lists of ingredients like an IRS agent running an audit. I wanted childhood mealtime back: good food that kept me going. I wanted to run in, devour it, and run out again. First gluten slowed me down; there was no way I was going to let gluten free slow me down too. That’s why I started Taste Guru. We buy the food, and we taste it ahead time. We taste it with a lot of people like you, and we figure out what’s best. We spend our time so you can keep yours.
After nearly a year off gluten, I was ready to run again. Now I love running more than ever. I believe you have to get sick, really sick, to truly love being well. What you don’t have to do is buy the wrong food to enjoy the right food. Leave that to Taste Guru. You avoid the gluten, we’ll send the goods.
