[SPEAKER_00]: The problem is when we see positive results because of dietary change, we very easily can have a mindset shift to say, oh, this is the best diet in the world.
[SPEAKER_00]: This diet is my diet for the rest of my life.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's not true in almost all cases.
[SPEAKER_00]: I can promise you that the diet that field you or started to, I hate to say the word fix you because none of us are broken.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the diet that started to heal you, I can promise you is not the diet you should be on for the rest of your life.
[SPEAKER_05]: You're listening to the Good Dirt Podcast.
[SPEAKER_05]: This is a place where we dig into the nitty-gritty of sustainable living through food, fashion, and lifestyle.
[SPEAKER_02]: And we're your host, Mary and Emma Kingsley, the mother and daughter founder team of Lady Farmer.
[SPEAKER_02]: We're sewing seeds of slow living through our community platform, events, and online marketplace.
[SPEAKER_05]: We started this podcast as a means to share the wealth of information and quality conversations that we're having in our world as we dream up and deliver ways for each of us to live into the new paradigm.
[SPEAKER_05]: One that is regenerative, balanced, and whole.
[SPEAKER_02]: We want to put the microphone in front of the voices that need to be heard the most right now.
[SPEAKER_02]: The farmers, the dreamers, the designers, and the doers.
[SPEAKER_05]: So come call to be a better world with us.
[SPEAKER_05]: We're so glad you're here.
[SPEAKER_05]: Now, let's dig in.
[SPEAKER_02]: Good morning, all.
[SPEAKER_02]: Welcome to The Good Dirt.
[SPEAKER_02]: Today's episode is about food.
[SPEAKER_02]: But before I introduce our guest, I just want to talk a minute about one of our favorite food topics.
[SPEAKER_02]: And that is seasonal eating.
[SPEAKER_02]: And to point out that this is the time of year when seasonal eating is probably the easiest.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I'm going to stick my neck out and go all counter cultural here and say that seasonal eating this time of year might actually be the most convenient way to feed yourself and your family.
[SPEAKER_02]: I realized that's a bit of a mind shift because it's a busy season with swim team and baseball and getting everyone where they need to be.
[SPEAKER_02]: And we're all conditioned to assume that if we don't know what's for dinner, we run and get some fast food or order to take out, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, we love challenges around here.
[SPEAKER_02]: So if you recognize yourself in that scenario, I'm going to offer you an opportunity to make a bit of a micro shift in your way of thinking about this with just a few suggestions on managing summertime meals and reminding you that right now in this season,
[SPEAKER_02]: The Earth is offering us an abundance of wonderful fresh foods to nourish ourselves.
[SPEAKER_02]: So here's the challenge.
[SPEAKER_02]: Take a moment to identify where you can get the freshest summer produce.
[SPEAKER_02]: It might be a weekend farmers market a farm stand or a nearby grocer that carries more local items.
[SPEAKER_02]: Then instead of taking the time to go pick up that takeout, go collect your supply of fresh produce for the whole week.
[SPEAKER_02]: Get your tomatoes, onions, squash, celery greens, eggplant, bell peppers, herbs, all those things.
[SPEAKER_02]: Add to that a few cans of organic beans to have on hand, such as garbanzo, black and red beans, and if you feel super busy, get some high quality canned tuna or chicken for quick protein.
[SPEAKER_02]: Of course, buying a fresh local chicken and cooking it for the week is also an option, but we're talking about the least resistance here.
[SPEAKER_02]: So allow yourself that.
[SPEAKER_02]: Now that you have all that at home, you probably already have pasta or rice on hand.
[SPEAKER_02]: And voila, you have yourself the makings of quick, delicious, nutritious food that you can make ahead and have on hand for days.
[SPEAKER_02]: So consider switching out the time you'd spend calling and waiting on takeout or going to get it.
[SPEAKER_02]: in dealing with all of the bags and plastic and so forth.
[SPEAKER_02]: For chopping up a few veggies and tossing them up with pasta or your favorite salad dressing, you'll spend way less money.
[SPEAKER_02]: You won't have to deal with a bunch of wasteful packaging and you'll be eating way better for your health and for the planet.
[SPEAKER_02]: What do you think?
[SPEAKER_02]: We'd love to hear your ideas.
[SPEAKER_02]: So call us on our phone number at four, four, three, four, five, nine, one, nine, five.
[SPEAKER_02]: Oh, to leave us a voicemail or
[SPEAKER_02]: email us at the gooddirtpodcast at gmail.com.
[SPEAKER_02]: Call and ask a question.
[SPEAKER_02]: Give your feedback or share what the gooddirt means to you.
[SPEAKER_02]: So on today's episode with Dr. Bill Schindler, who is the author of Eat Like A Human, nourishing foods and ancient ways of cooking to revolutionize your health.
[SPEAKER_02]: He is an internationally known archeologist, primitive technologist and chef.
[SPEAKER_02]: He founded and directs the Eastern Shore Food Lab with a mission to preserve and revive ancestral dietary approaches to create a nourishing, ethical, and sustainable food system.
[SPEAKER_02]: He and his wife, Christina, who we've had on the good dirt previously, operate the modern Stone Age kitchen, a restaurant designed to provide nourishing food created using ancestral approaches maximizing safety, nutrient density, and bioavailability to the community.
[SPEAKER_02]: Even this amazing resume doesn't reflect the full scope and depth of Bill and Christina's work.
[SPEAKER_02]: Stay tuned for lots of great stories about their community endeavors and adventures abroad.
[SPEAKER_02]: Talking to them both on this program has been fascinating and entertaining and has certainly changed the way we look at what's on our own plates every day.
[SPEAKER_02]: So here's Bill's chindler, author of Eat Like A Human.
[SPEAKER_00]: But my name is Dr. Bill Schiller, and my wife and I own modern Stone Age.
[SPEAKER_00]: We have two entities here.
[SPEAKER_00]: One modern Stone Age kitchen is our restaurant, and modern Stone Age food lab is our research in teaching non-profit that's associated with the restaurant.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we can dive into all those pieces, but very quickly, my background is I'm a prehistoric and experimental archaeologist.
[SPEAKER_00]: I used to teach at the college university level for over twenty years.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I realized that food was central to everything that I was studying and everything that I was teaching and that although the work I was doing in that space had a lot to offer our understanding of how we should be feeding ourselves as properly nourished humans.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it transformed my diet, it transformed my family's diet and now we're transforming the community's diet by using ancestral approaches to food here at the restaurant at the food level.
[SPEAKER_03]: So cool.
[SPEAKER_03]: And for listeners of the good dirt, we'll know that we had Christina on.
[SPEAKER_03]: Was that about a year ago, Mom?
[SPEAKER_00]: I think it was about a year ago.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: And then she was featured in an encore episode this winter.
[SPEAKER_03]: We played her episode again recently.
[SPEAKER_03]: So yes, listeners of this podcast should be very familiar with Christina and the work that you do and we're so excited to have you on.
[SPEAKER_02]: So thank you for that introduction.
[SPEAKER_02]: You submitted up and you throughout a term that some of our listeners might be going, what does that mean?
[SPEAKER_02]: you said ancestral foods.
[SPEAKER_02]: So let's start there.
[SPEAKER_02]: What do you mean by ancestral foods?
[SPEAKER_00]: So everybody this listening, please understand.
[SPEAKER_00]: I taught high school history for one year.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then I went back to your I just school and got my PhD in archeology and anthropology and then started teaching that.
[SPEAKER_00]: And one of the things I was frustrated with when I was teaching high school history is that
[SPEAKER_00]: The history went back about five hundred years.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like literally we started teaching about, you know, America was colonized.
[SPEAKER_00]: it was missing a huge piece and that's one of the reasons I actually went back to school is because it's the really old stuff I was really interested in and I think there's a lot of value in the past five hundred years but there's also a lot of value in the past there are four million years and so what when I talk about our ancestors or I talk about ancestral diets or I talk about the past over the however much time we have together during this conversation I am not talking in hundreds of years or thousands of years in those cases I'm talking in hundreds of thousands or in some cases millions of years
[SPEAKER_00]: And the reason it's important is because over the past several million years we had a lot of different ancestors and as they were on this planet they were changing and their bodies were growing their brains were growing lots of things were changing and eventually all those changes resulted in us like we're here as a result of all of these millions of years worth of changes and one of the most significant things that changed over the past several million years that resulted in us is our diet.
[SPEAKER_00]: So the way that we transformed our approach to food, the way that we created technologies that allowed us to get more resources to our environment, and then most importantly transform those resources into something that are incredibly inefficient digestive tract can actually safely get nutrition from, made all the difference.
[SPEAKER_00]: And as we see these major technological milestones, we also see major biological milestones happen as well, like body and brain growth.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we are essentially all sitting here, not only with the ability to think and talk and communicate, but also we're in a place where we can create such amazing technologies that you and I, all of us are in different parts of the world right now simultaneously having conversations.
[SPEAKER_00]: All of that is a result of how we change our approaches to food and created these incredibly nurse bodies.
[SPEAKER_00]: We appear on the planet, modern day homosapiens, literally.
[SPEAKER_00]: The same exact beings as we are now, first appeared on this planet, three hundred thousand years ago.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we've essentially biologically been the same that entire time.
[SPEAKER_00]: So the reason and social diets are important is not to say, okay, somebody three million years ago was eating this.
[SPEAKER_00]: Therefore, we have to eat the exact same thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not that simple.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's much more complicated.
[SPEAKER_00]: But if we have an understanding about how those diets changed over time,
[SPEAKER_00]: and what that meant for nourishing our bodies and what that meant for our bodies to change and transform into what we are today.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then that I believe is the perfect foundation that then start to have a conversation about what our diet should be like today.
[SPEAKER_02]: Very interesting.
[SPEAKER_02]: You said homo sapiens have been around for approximately three hundred thousand years and our bodies are pretty much the same at where the same kind of biological beings we were that correct.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's so interesting to look back and see not only how our food has changed so much in a modern society but how much stimulus and how many different things are I call it our ancient bodies and ancient brains are having to deal with as opposed to
[SPEAKER_02]: three hundred thousand years ago.
[SPEAKER_02]: Maybe they had an equal number of stressors in surviving, getting them the food, but ours are just so different.
[SPEAKER_02]: So I wonder if you can speak to that and how the changing diet has affected our modern health in general.
[SPEAKER_02]: And also thrown in there.
[SPEAKER_02]: Do you see the advent of agriculture as
[SPEAKER_02]: the biggest shift in the way we ate and ancient times, as opposed to modern times, that might be two very different questions that I just wanted.
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, they're all related.
[SPEAKER_00]: Those are three really important things.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I'm actually taking a couple notes, so I don't miss anything.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, so first off, I love the point you make about stressors.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think I'll start off answering that part of the question by saying something that I truly firmly believe in.
[SPEAKER_00]: All of their animals on this planet
[SPEAKER_00]: nurse themselves by eating the right kinds of food.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I know it sounds simply, of course.
[SPEAKER_00]: But they actually have a digestive tract that's designed for a particular diet.
[SPEAKER_00]: And if they eat those foods, right, they can safely and efficiently derive nutrition from those resources, whether it's a duck eating grains or a cow eating grass or a design for that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Humans are different in two different ways.
[SPEAKER_00]: One is we, because we started creating technologies literally millions of years ago, simple but transformative technologies like stone tools that allow us to butcher and chop and dice and slice and things and fire that allows us to cook food and fermentation and all these things that allow us to do essentially what
[SPEAKER_00]: other animals are doing inside their digestive tract.
[SPEAKER_00]: We are doing it before it goes into our mouths.
[SPEAKER_00]: We started to out eat our digestive tract millions of years ago.
[SPEAKER_00]: So now we're in a place where we have bodies that are built on this amazing nutrition that comes in through these technologies, but we're not armed with the digestive tract that allows us to deal with out those technologies.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we need them.
[SPEAKER_00]: Number one,
[SPEAKER_00]: Nourishing humans is more complicated than nourishing another animal because we have the nutritional requirements for their bodies and our brains that require much more than just our digestive tract.
[SPEAKER_00]: We have to do the right kinds of things to the food.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's number one.
[SPEAKER_00]: But just as importantly, if not more importantly,
[SPEAKER_00]: The food is wrapped up in everything that we are as humans.
[SPEAKER_00]: It permeates all aspects of our life.
[SPEAKER_00]: To be fully nourished as a human, we not only have to meet our biological requirements or nutritional requirements, but also our emotional needs, our cultural needs, our political needs, our religious needs, and the list goes on and on.
[SPEAKER_00]: Our traditional needs, our family needs.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's very complicated.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you have to meet all those things.
[SPEAKER_00]: So you can't, you're not eating in a vacuum, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not just, I get this protein, this fat, this vitamin day, and I'm going to be all set.
[SPEAKER_00]: I need to get that in the right setting around the right people and eating it the right way.
[SPEAKER_00]: So being keeping certain things out of our lives and making sure other things are broadened.
[SPEAKER_00]: And even the way that we eat impacts our sleep, everything is all in a related.
[SPEAKER_00]: So those stressors play very large role in not only our health,
[SPEAKER_00]: But also how we deal with certain foods and diets as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: What is the setting that we're eating in?
[SPEAKER_00]: Are we sitting in a kitchen with full light at nine o'clock at night eating a late dinner?
[SPEAKER_00]: Is it with the TV on the background and kids running?
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a completely different setting.
[SPEAKER_00]: or a system of nourishment and sitting down at five o'clock in the evening to a family meal, nothing else is going on the light.
[SPEAKER_00]: So there's a lot of different impacts.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, there's a lot of different kinds of stressors today than we had in the past.
[SPEAKER_00]: Certainly, to restressors in the past, and I'm not even going to suggest that I know exactly what all of them are.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I'm confident that they were there, and I'm also confident that they impacted us in a different way.
[SPEAKER_00]: our quarter of all levels are all those levels are melatonin are all impacted in different ways because we live the certain life in the past and we're living a completely different life now.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I would also say,
[SPEAKER_00]: We've seen a difference in things like, say, cell phone use and television use and social media in the past year, past five years, past ten years, dramatically different.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't want anybody just because this long-term kind of thought about the past may be strange and new to some people listening, I don't want you to fall into that trap of this is what it was like for millions of years and all of a sudden now we're doing all these different things.
[SPEAKER_00]: There are a lot of changes of her millions of years as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: Some of them incredibly significant.
[SPEAKER_00]: Things that we take for granted.
[SPEAKER_00]: So a very quick example would be things that transformed our melatonin release in the way that other hormonal sorts of things as well, our circadian rhythm, like the advent of fire.
[SPEAKER_00]: So prior to, I believe fire was controlled at around two million years ago.
[SPEAKER_00]: Think about what changed with the advent of fire.
[SPEAKER_00]: Prior to two million years ago, you were restricted to actually doing things, engaging in any kind of work, anything to when there was daylight.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like you weren't doing anything in the night, there was no light whatsoever.
[SPEAKER_00]: You were restricted in where you lived.
[SPEAKER_00]: because we had no clothing and no way to change our microclimate.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's why we were only in certain parts of Africa until we invented fire.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then as soon as fire is invented, we start spreading north into Europe and Asia.
[SPEAKER_00]: But to directly to your point, there's a great book called Fire the Spark that ignited human evolution that by an anthropologist named Francis Burton.
[SPEAKER_00]: And in this, the author suggests, she says that the change
[SPEAKER_00]: That happened when we started sitting around a fire at night with the certain light waves that are coming off of this fire and impacting our melatonin release all sorts of things cascaded and changed including and she actually makes a very strong case for this.
[SPEAKER_00]: Most animals are fertile.
[SPEAKER_00]: only once a year or at certain times of the year.
[SPEAKER_00]: And human females are fertile every month, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: She actually makes the link between the way that our hormones were changed and disrupted two million years ago by staring at a fire for a very long period of time to impacts such as that.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I don't
[SPEAKER_00]: want us to think in this black and white.
[SPEAKER_00]: The past was this one big block of, things that were homogenous and then all of a sudden, there's something different now.
[SPEAKER_00]: Those kinds of changes have been going on for a long time.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're just incredibly rapid.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now.
[SPEAKER_02]: And you'll have people saying, oh, he's talking about the paleo diet, the way people ate before.
[SPEAKER_02]: But I think what you're explaining to us, it was much more evolutionary.
[SPEAKER_02]: They're just a sudden.
[SPEAKER_02]: change.
[SPEAKER_02]: Is that what you're saying?
[SPEAKER_00]: Absolutely.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's diversity in the past just like there's diversity now.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's diversity.
[SPEAKER_00]: What we are eating as a generally eating right now is different than it was fifty years ago in the past what they're eating five hundred thousand years ago was absolutely different than what they're eating in the million years ago.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the way that they were living and the way technology was impacting their lives.
[SPEAKER_00]: However, and this brings me to one of your questions as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: The agriculture evolution, there were incredibly dramatic changes that happened that really made a huge difference, really made a huge impact on all aspects of life, especially our health.
[SPEAKER_00]: Many of them were positive, and many of them were incredibly negative.
[SPEAKER_00]: So one revolution, so the speak, would be when we started making tools, things like stone tools at out of the butcher.
[SPEAKER_00]: Another revolution was when we really controlled fire.
[SPEAKER_00]: controlled light, controlled our heat and also had the ability to cook food.
[SPEAKER_00]: Another revolution was when we actually started hunting about two million years ago.
[SPEAKER_00]: A lot of things changed.
[SPEAKER_00]: Agriculture Revolution was a transformative and industrial revolution, the green revolution, all these things, but I would say the most dramatic impact of any of them.
[SPEAKER_00]: is the Cold Chain Revolution.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now I know this sounds crazy, but the Cold Chain Revolution is only about a little over a hundred years old that it's over.
[SPEAKER_02]: And you're saying Cold Chain?
[SPEAKER_00]: Cold.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: Our food system now was based on Cold Chain.
[SPEAKER_00]: So think about the advent of refrigeration and then all the things that changed after that.
[SPEAKER_00]: We didn't have refrigerators.
[SPEAKER_00]: a hundred and fifty years ago.
[SPEAKER_00]: Nobody had a refrigerator or a hundred fifty years ago.
[SPEAKER_00]: Very few people had a refrigerator, a hundred years ago, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Or just over a hundred years ago.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now everybody's got a refrigerator.
[SPEAKER_00]: Think about your parents refrigerator in the size that it was.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then now the things we get at Home Depot and lows in the size that it is.
[SPEAKER_00]: But even more dramatically, our entire food system, like literally the entire food system is based on a refrigerator in a frozen food.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it has changed everything.
[SPEAKER_00]: Our entire food system is built on dead food right as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: I can tell you right here, one of our biggest difficulties is dealing with the health department.
[SPEAKER_00]: The health department is here to make sure people don't get sick and die.
[SPEAKER_00]: We have a restaurant that's trying to nourish people and it sounds like it's the same thing that they're completely different goals.
[SPEAKER_00]: with different sets of rules.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're trying to make, we do.
[SPEAKER_00]: We make all of our cheese and house.
[SPEAKER_00]: We ferment vessels.
[SPEAKER_00]: We do all of those things that's based on live microorganisms transforming a raw material into a finished product.
[SPEAKER_00]: And they're excited about canned sauerkraut and dead pickles, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a completely different thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the transformation in our diets because of a food system that's based on refrigerated and frozen dead food.
[SPEAKER_00]: is been incredibly dramatic and it is impacted not only our health, it is impacted the way that businesses operate, it is impacted all the laws around the food system, a great example is this other than two groups in the world that I know of traditional groups, the Sami, I'm sorry, the Sami, the Masai and the Somba warriors in Africa.
[SPEAKER_00]: There is no
[SPEAKER_00]: drinking of milk in the past.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's no traditional drinking of milk and a traditional society.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's all fermented.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's period across the board.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's things like clabber and yogurt and kefir and traditional cheeses and all this.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like our consumption of dairy over the past eight thousand years has all been through the process of fermentation except for the sombero and the msai who drink raw milk and blood every single day.
[SPEAKER_00]: our entire dairy system from how the milk comes out of the cow to how fast it's cooled down to how it's stored and how it's shipped is based on refrigerated milk and they're two completely different worlds with different sets of rules, different sets of health outcomes, all of those things.
[SPEAKER_00]: So all of them are dramatic.
[SPEAKER_00]: I do think the agricultural revolution was
[SPEAKER_00]: really impactful.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think it was a very negative thing overall when you really think about it.
[SPEAKER_00]: But we can dive in really deep.
[SPEAKER_00]: If anybody wants to, there's a fantastic article written by, and it actually isn't what I thought.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'll just put his fast writer called Jared Diamond.
[SPEAKER_00]: Some people might have read guns, germs, and steel.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was the best seller years ago.
[SPEAKER_00]: He wrote another great book called Collapse, but he wrote an article called The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race.
[SPEAKER_00]: And if you Google it, it'll come up.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's free.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's PDFs of it all over the place.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's only about four or five pages.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he makes a really strong argument for why the agriculture revolution was the worst mistake in the history of our species.
[SPEAKER_00]: I do think the Cold Chain Revolution has made a larger impact on us in a more recent sense, but the agriculture revolution was very dramatic as well.
[SPEAKER_03]: Wow, that's so fascinating.
[SPEAKER_03]: And this is just an aside, but the woman who, let's see, I'm really fascinated by this woman.
[SPEAKER_03]: Marjorie Mary weather posts.
[SPEAKER_03]: She was like the, what was she mom?
[SPEAKER_02]: And she was the aeros to the post serial.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_03]: So her father, post guy, grape nuts.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so she inherited that, which it's so funny because like,
[SPEAKER_03]: My mom and I go, her state is here.
[SPEAKER_03]: She was an amazing art collector and she loved flowers and gardening and so her estate is really amazing to visit and she was such a sassy woman and she like rubbed shoulders with all these presidents and world leaders and she was very wealthy, very influential.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think she was at one time the wealthiest woman in the world, I think.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I think she was the first woman to be that wealthy in like, nineteen twenty seven.
[SPEAKER_03]: And it's so interesting how her wealth comes from this food revolution that kind of messed everything up.
[SPEAKER_03]: But specifically, freezer food.
[SPEAKER_03]: So she's the one who convinced General Electric, we need to invest in freezers and like frozen food.
[SPEAKER_03]: Because in, I guess it was that thirties or forties maybe, they thought that was a dumb idea that no one would ever be able to afford freezers.
[SPEAKER_03]: And they said, who wants to eat frozen foods and food?
[SPEAKER_03]: This one woman single-handedly,
[SPEAKER_03]: made that happen.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, she's been a side, but she's, she's, her story is a really incredible, and I don't know.
[SPEAKER_00]: You make a really good point too.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I don't, it's very easy to sit here.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, I could go on and out.
[SPEAKER_00]: We could spend the next hour of our time talking about all the horrible things about the agricultural revolution and why we shouldn't be.
[SPEAKER_00]: But there were good things that happened from it as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: But what I don't want to do and people fall down this trap and you make a free point.
[SPEAKER_00]: Here's an amazing, it sounds like by all accounts an amazing woman.
[SPEAKER_00]: Somebody I would have loved to have met.
[SPEAKER_00]: Actually, she reminds me a lot of my maternal grandmother.
[SPEAKER_00]: We polarized these conversations and good or bad and then everything gets wrapped up in it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And just because I don't think, yeah, I think the agricultural revolution was very detrimental to us as a species.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think the Cold Chain Revolution was very detrimental to us as a species.
[SPEAKER_00]: I say that, as we're having this conversation, we're over top of our restaurant downstairs.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't even know how much money we're paying for our five walk and refrigerators and walk and freezer we have downstairs.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's several reaching coolers and I've kind of weather refrigeration on the back and most of the food that we sell is coming from local farms.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is very contextual.
[SPEAKER_00]: So there are
[SPEAKER_00]: large parts of this conversation that are five thousand foot view kind of things, but then at the same time, okay, within this modern context, what is the best way to farm?
[SPEAKER_00]: What is the best way to deal with refrigerated food?
[SPEAKER_00]: And somebody like the woman you just mentioned could be at the same time an aeros of posterior, and we don't even allow cereal in our house, it's a devil to me, and absolutely amazing woman at the same time.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: And the philanthropy and the preservation of art and history and everything that comes along with that were so grateful for.
[SPEAKER_03]: We just love visiting our house.
[SPEAKER_03]: And we're like, and this is my mom and I who got like good, this is the great nut queen.
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't know.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, nobody like straight nuts though.
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, yeah, what?
[SPEAKER_03]: How that is the funniest part of it is like.
[SPEAKER_03]: How did grape nuts make this woman?
[SPEAKER_03]: I think she inherited like twenty five million dollars in nineteen twenty seven.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's not inflation.
[SPEAKER_03]: That was that much money.
[SPEAKER_03]: Then anyways, but before we get too far down, any of these amazing rabbit holes, we would love to hear more from our guests about their
[SPEAKER_03]: really personal journey getting into like where we are now.
[SPEAKER_03]: We have Christina's wonderful story of your family and that and the restaurant and everything but you have a really amazing personal journey around your own sort of coming into where you are today.
[SPEAKER_03]: An interesting way to frame it is where there are any aha moments if you can go back far enough to what was maybe a first spark and getting you to think more about these things and then
[SPEAKER_03]: Because this is such a evolution in of itself where they're along the way, have there been any other major sort of a house where you've pivoted and ended up in this place where you are now.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, absolutely.
[SPEAKER_00]: So there's there were a few aha moments and I love the way you frame that because that's a great way to keep me on point.
[SPEAKER_00]: The quick version of just a little bit of my background is I had
[SPEAKER_00]: a real problem on how to really ship a food for a very large part of my life.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it has only been the past, and I'm fifty two now, the past really, fifteen years or so, that I've been able to view food as something that nourished me.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like when I actually eat, I feel like I have this relationship with the food and I have a close enough connection to it to realize that it's actually nourishing my body.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the larger part of my life has been from being overweight or being sick or metabolically ill,
[SPEAKER_00]: or as a college athlete wrestling at the division one level and just the relationship between wrestlers and food, especially in the nineties, was really problematic.
[SPEAKER_00]: That now is a completely different thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: Several aha moments.
[SPEAKER_00]: One is I've tried just about as probably so many of your listeners.
[SPEAKER_00]: I've tried just about every major diet in the world trying to find my health.
[SPEAKER_00]: and none of them work.
[SPEAKER_00]: Some of them, I saw short-term solutions, whether it was a short-term weight loss or whatever it happens to be.
[SPEAKER_00]: But none of them were lifetime solutions.
[SPEAKER_00]: One aha moment.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'm sorry, real quick, this comes from somebody who was an athlete in high school and my parents had hired nutritionist for me and I was diving deep into the literature at that time.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was literally counting every single gram of protein and carbohydrate and fat that was going into my body, listening to the nutritional advice at the time.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then I was one of the best division one programs in the country to Ohio State and we had team doctors and we had nutritionists and we had coaches that were trying to tell us what we should be doing as far as foods concerned.
[SPEAKER_00]: as a result of the times and none of it worked.
[SPEAKER_00]: None of it worked.
[SPEAKER_00]: One aha moment was in Christina probably mentioned this.
[SPEAKER_00]: My work is an experimental archaeologist has been used to replicate and I still do ancestral technologies, things like hope.
[SPEAKER_00]: Most of my life, I've been trained to replicate stone tools.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is a two million year old hand axe, things like this.
[SPEAKER_00]: But in order to learn how to do that, it took years and years and years of practice.
[SPEAKER_00]: And a lot of that practice happened in Walkerstein and I were married.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then the early part of us having, when we started having a family.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I would sit outside and garage the door open every single night for at least an hour and I was banging on rocks.
[SPEAKER_00]: And she came out one night and this would have been almost exactly
[SPEAKER_00]: sixteen years ago because our youngest was one and then our son was three and our oldest daughter was five and Christine was managing everything in the house and she finally just had enough and she can match his stop.
[SPEAKER_00]: You need to come, I don't know if she told you just or another podcast.
[SPEAKER_00]: No, stop.
[SPEAKER_00]: You need to come in the house.
[SPEAKER_00]: You need to bring this in the house and I looked at him like bring this in the house.
[SPEAKER_00]: I had dust and pieces of rock everywhere, but you do not want she keeps it very clean.
[SPEAKER_00]: You want this in the house?
[SPEAKER_00]: She's not that bad, not the rocks.
[SPEAKER_00]: You are this passionate about something.
[SPEAKER_00]: You are doing every day for years.
[SPEAKER_00]: You practice this.
[SPEAKER_00]: I need you to bring that passion into the house.
[SPEAKER_00]: We have a family.
[SPEAKER_00]: We have three kids.
[SPEAKER_00]: She's a five of us total.
[SPEAKER_00]: You need to bring this into the findaway.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you love something this much you're this dedicated to it, then you need to find a way to make it.
[SPEAKER_00]: useful to the entire family.
[SPEAKER_00]: And she was, I was a little bit put off when she, because she called me off guard.
[SPEAKER_00]: But then I thought, I said, yes, she's right.
[SPEAKER_00]: I have to bring this into the house somehow.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is my family.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I said, how do I make banging rocks, replicating two million euros still and tools relevant to a family of five?
[SPEAKER_00]: And I thought about it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Do my best thinking in the shower.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then finally one morning, it literally hit me.
[SPEAKER_00]: And wait a minute.
[SPEAKER_00]: Every single almost, every single prehistoric technology ever invented has something to do with food.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like literally for three point three million years, almost every prehistoric technology impacted our ability to get resources on the environment, process them, prepare them, serve them, share them, store them something.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like literally almost every Albert Einstein of our ancestors, for millions of years, were dedicated to creating technologies that impacted the diet.
[SPEAKER_00]: And when that hit me, like wait a second, everything that I've been doing literally my entire life is going to answer the questions I've been asking of other people, nutritionist, doctors, coaches, whatever, I can answer my own questions.
[SPEAKER_00]: Let me just dive into the past better understand how our ancestors were eating and that first of all, immediately led to a bunch of revelations.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then I realized there's a lot of holes in the archeological record that I couldn't fill in by looking at archeological sites or reading set reports
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's why our family started traveling and learning from a living with different indigenous and traditional groups all over the world because there's still a lot of these practices being practiced.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're disappearing unfortunately and we're trying to document them as fast as we can, but just as importantly,
[SPEAKER_00]: What can we learn from these traditional approaches to food that isn't missing in our modern food system that we can reintroduce.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's really one of the things that's driving us.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that was a huge revelation.
[SPEAKER_00]: Another huge revelation was when I really started to see the power and all of that, I started to dive deep.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I always love cooking, but not at the level of doing now.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I knew I had to dive really deep into understanding better how to become a chef.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I started to train at the Italian Conner Institute in Clabria in Italy and
[SPEAKER_00]: I train at the school of artists and food, and then I picked people that I'd either read about or learned about, that were experts in this particular kind of cheese making or something else, and I went and trained with them.
[SPEAKER_00]: And as I was learning all these skills, I said, wait, I have to, as you can probably tell from Christina, we both dive really deep when we dive into something.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, wait a minute, I need to make everything that my family's eating entirely from scratch.
[SPEAKER_00]: That was what I was going to start to think I was going to do.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I did it for a year.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is one of the revelations.
[SPEAKER_00]: One of the revelations was that that was from an nutritional perspective, probably the healthiest our families ever been, but from an emotional perspective, it was one of the most stressful things ever.
[SPEAKER_00]: That year, and I say everything from scratch, like everything that we ate, almost everything we ate was forged and hunted by me.
[SPEAKER_00]: We supplemented that with a little bit of produce and meat from local farmers.
[SPEAKER_00]: But it was all prepared entirely from scratch in house.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, a hundred percent everything.
[SPEAKER_00]: We didn't purchase anything beyond what I just mentioned for the entire year.
[SPEAKER_00]: But eating was a chore.
[SPEAKER_00]: Getting ready to eat was a chore.
[SPEAKER_00]: My stress level was off the charts.
[SPEAKER_00]: And because of that, my family stress level was off the charts.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I said, OK, that's too much.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's when I started to realize that being fully nourishes more than just exactly what you're eating.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then we had a Thanksgiving coming up.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I said, you know what?
[SPEAKER_00]: This is going to be great.
[SPEAKER_00]: I am going
[SPEAKER_00]: to make everything for Thanksgiving, one hundred percent from scratch.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm not going to buy anything.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's all going to come fully from scratch.
[SPEAKER_00]: All the cheese, the cured meat, some stuff in the beginning, everything was hundred percent from scratch.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I did.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was grinding flour for the pies, like the whole thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I put out this meal, this huge spread.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think some of the tasty good, I'm confident some of it didn't, but I, everything, I met my goal.
[SPEAKER_00]: I made the wine like literally, I started really early.
[SPEAKER_00]: and had it all, everybody was very polite, our extended family was a very polite, and it was one of two times in my life that I literally went around the corner afterwards and was so proud that I physically padded myself on the back with my legs.
[SPEAKER_00]: And cleaned up, went to bed, and then I woke up that morning with this weird feeling, and the only thing I can prepare to, I'm not proud of this, but I, most people can relate to this.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you've ever, like, maybe got drunk, and enough that
[SPEAKER_00]: You don't necessarily remember everything that happened.
[SPEAKER_00]: You woke up in your hand, did I do something stupid?
[SPEAKER_00]: That kind of feeling.
[SPEAKER_00]: I woke up with this weird, like, questioning something's missing, like something's wrong.
[SPEAKER_00]: Why?
[SPEAKER_00]: We just pulled off this amazing meal.
[SPEAKER_00]: What's wrong?
[SPEAKER_00]: And a couple hours later that morning, it hit me.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, you know, what did I do?
[SPEAKER_00]: I spent literally months of my life.
[SPEAKER_00]: for this one meal.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, what did that meal do?
[SPEAKER_00]: It was not a selfish act necessarily, but it was a show.
[SPEAKER_00]: That all of that work, all those months of work that prepared this one single meal
[SPEAKER_00]: Did I really nourish anybody because I gave them one good meal?
[SPEAKER_00]: No.
[SPEAKER_00]: We just had one meal.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it was at that moment that I said, you know what?
[SPEAKER_00]: I know from my past experience, I cannot in a place, I have a career.
[SPEAKER_00]: Christine has got a career, we have kids, we have old soccer practice and ballet and all the things going on.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's no way that I can make every single thing, a hundred percent from scratch.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'm not gonna invest, I'm not gonna subject my family to doing that for the rest of the time, we're all together in the same house.
[SPEAKER_00]: And at the same time, I'm not going to spend exorbitant amounts of time to create one meal once a year.
[SPEAKER_00]: Neither of those things made sense.
[SPEAKER_00]: What makes sense, and this was probably the most powerful thing that I realize is, what thing does my family eat every single day or almost every single day?
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's where I need to start.
[SPEAKER_00]: And believe it or not, even though Christine and I both don't eat hardly any bread at all, our kids do.
[SPEAKER_00]: And our kids took a sandwich to lunch every single day of their educational lives.
[SPEAKER_00]: And let me start this.
[SPEAKER_00]: If I start making all of their bread, which is doable for their lunches, how many hundreds or thousands of sandwiches are they going to consume over the next however many years when they're in school?
[SPEAKER_00]: That's going to compound and make a big impact.
[SPEAKER_00]: So at that moment, we said, we're never buying bread again.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's when we started that I would say that's the moment our sourdough bread company started when I realized that was what we're going to do.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then once that became routine in our family, we started introducing other things.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now we're at a place we have a restaurant where we're making everything exactly one hundred percent totally from scratch.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's no two ingredients put together outside of our walls, but we also have a team of twenty nine people helping to make that happen.
[SPEAKER_02]: That makes a difference.
[SPEAKER_02]: I want to hear this story of your sourdough bread company because that's a good story.
[SPEAKER_02]: But first I want to go back to the Thanksgiving dinner for a second and I'm sure this was part of your revelation.
[SPEAKER_02]: But I know in our family, I would enjoy doing something like that and
[SPEAKER_02]: creating an experience for everybody, but in terms of Thanksgiving dinner, people would have gone, where is the ocean spray cranberry sauce?
[SPEAKER_02]: That flavor is important to this occasion.
[SPEAKER_02]: I associate that with being at mom's house and where are the marshmallows on top of the sweet potatoes?
[SPEAKER_02]: That kind of thing where it's like what you were talking about earlier, it's
[SPEAKER_02]: is an emotional piece that goes with it is not just the nutrients that are going into your mouth and how great that is.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's an extractive take on nutrition, which I think you start talking about in the very beginning.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's just so much more than the macro.
[SPEAKER_02]: How many grams of protein do you have today and all that?
[SPEAKER_02]: It's so much more complicated than that.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's three major pieces to that.
[SPEAKER_00]: First is what I tried to do.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is a good attempt.
[SPEAKER_00]: I tried to make sure everybody still got all that, but I made it, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So I made the marshmallows.
[SPEAKER_00]: I made the cranberries.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I tried to do it now.
[SPEAKER_03]: Wow.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that was a good try.
[SPEAKER_00]: We can do them so much better now.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm so embarrassed about I'm so proud of that.
[SPEAKER_00]: I feel embarrassed at the same time.
[SPEAKER_00]: The other thing it taught me though was and the two of the pieces are this.
[SPEAKER_00]: Number one, those things are real.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like those feelings are real.
[SPEAKER_00]: I remember almost every meal I ate either one of my grandparents' houses.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like they were very special to me.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I know Christina as well, she'd go to her grandparents' house and there were things that
[SPEAKER_00]: They would open up a thing of crescent roles the things that pop open and all this and she remembers that and that's a part of her and Eating that is eating that role and these are the questions I wish people really dove into an ass and wishes this is something that people on social media were talking about more Is eating that role that one day of the year?
[SPEAKER_00]: Determental or is it beneficial?
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm eating that role every day is a bad thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: We all kind of agree on that.
[SPEAKER_00]: But is it more detrimental to not have it because of what you're missing and consuming a meal, sharing a meal together isn't incredibly human experience.
[SPEAKER_00]: I tell you, one quick aside, the book I mentioned earlier by Francis Burton, she kicks it off.
[SPEAKER_00]: She starts it off.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's brilliant.
[SPEAKER_00]: We humans love to separate ourselves from other animals.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know why we feel the need to do it, but we feel the need to do it.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we're always asking, what's different about humans?
[SPEAKER_00]: What's different about humans?
[SPEAKER_00]: And she said almost everything that we've come up with falls apart when you really dive deep.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, humans make and use tools other animals make and use tools humans communicate at high levels.
[SPEAKER_00]: We know that now that animals many animals communicate at high levels.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is all these different things, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: The one thing she said that humans do different.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's separatists is how we share food.
[SPEAKER_00]: And she's a picture this.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is her example.
[SPEAKER_00]: I read the book years ago, but I'm going to try to remember exactly how she said it.
[SPEAKER_00]: So picture a big table and you surround the table with a bunch of hungry whatever animal it is.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then you put food in the middle of the table.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like for every, even if another animals will all eat at the same time, they're not sharing food.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're not talking a parent to a child and a worm from a Robin area.
[SPEAKER_00]: Literally, you have a bunch of adult hungry animals around the table, you put food in the middle.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's an all-out melee.
[SPEAKER_00]: Plus on top of that, the eye to eye contact is a form of a sign of aggression, showing your teeth is a sign of aggression in the animal world.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is a completely different thing, but here we are.
[SPEAKER_00]: celebrating that, going out of our way, paying a massive amount of money and spending a lot of time preparing a situation where we do just that.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is a very unique, essential human experience.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, again, it's not just the fat of the carbohydrates and the protein, and this is coming from somebody literally our entire restaurant, our entire food philosophy is built on.
[SPEAKER_00]: What can we do to a wrong gradient to make it as safe and nourishing as possible for our bodies?
[SPEAKER_00]: But we cannot discount those social and cultural pieces.
[SPEAKER_00]: But that brings you to one of the very quick point.
[SPEAKER_00]: One of the issues we're faced with three young kids trying to nourish them as best we can and other parents are faced at the same dilemma.
[SPEAKER_00]: What about school lunches?
[SPEAKER_00]: What do we do?
[SPEAKER_00]: What's the social impact of not letting them get a school lunch compared to the bioschool lunch, which most of them are hoard compared to the nutritional consequences?
[SPEAKER_00]: Or, and this is where we landed, we weren't going to let them buy school lunch, special occasions we did, it's not special, but we were going to make it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Are we going to sit our kids down and have them open up their lunch box?
[SPEAKER_00]: And what comes out of that lunch box is so foreign to everyone around them that they aren't even allowed to sit at the table with their friends.
[SPEAKER_00]: So what we landed on was we work and again, I think this is very early seeds of the restaurant.
[SPEAKER_00]: The restaurant we have downstairs now is we are making familiar food as nourishing as it can possibly be.
[SPEAKER_00]: You're not going to come in here and just eat a plate of crickets and something else, although we do have some crickets, but that's not it.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's literally familiar food.
[SPEAKER_00]: You can come here and get a sandwich, you can get soup, you can get pizza, you can get tacos, but they're all made one hundred percent from scratch using traditional approaches that make them incredibly nursing and safe.
[SPEAKER_00]: what we did with our kids was, we got them with little bento boxes with all little spots in it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we filled them up with essentially from a macroscopic level, the same things that the kids next to them had.
[SPEAKER_00]: We even made like our own lunchables and all these other things, but they were all made from scratch the right way.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it could have had a ham sandwich.
[SPEAKER_00]: but it was homemade sourdough bread.
[SPEAKER_00]: And when we got to the point, at one point, we're still doing now, we're making all the hammer cells, but at least we were buying the apple gate, not whatever.
[SPEAKER_00]: But it looked like the kid next to them, but it was a completely different food they were eating.
[SPEAKER_02]: Oh, this is so interesting.
[SPEAKER_02]: I've told this story before, but there was a European family.
[SPEAKER_02]: They were from Holland in our neighborhood when my kids were growing up.
[SPEAKER_02]: She would put like,
[SPEAKER_02]: just whole vegetables in their lunch like an entire pepper cucumber or whatever in her kids would just gobble it up and at one point she mentioned to me this the kids say that this is they get a reaction like what are you doing why are you eating a whole cucumber so even just that what example and someone from another culture coming in and being immersed in suburban America going to school this was a not thing everybody else had that wrapped the gummies and the cheetos and all that stuff so it's it's really interesting point but
[SPEAKER_02]: Please tell us the story of the beginning of your sourdough company.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's a really good one.
[SPEAKER_00]: So the sourdough bread company started five years ago last week.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we were at the beginning of COVID.
[SPEAKER_00]: I had started
[SPEAKER_00]: Through Washington College where I was teaching a center for teaching and learning, that was focused on connecting students in the community to food.
[SPEAKER_00]: That was the focus of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: The idea was it was going to be, we have three centers of excellence through the college and I was hoping this was going to be the fourth.
[SPEAKER_00]: And because I wanted the students to get off campus and actually immerse themselves in town and I wanted the community in town to have access to what I was trying to build, we built it in town.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was an old restaurant that we transformed.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we opened as this center right before COVID.
[SPEAKER_00]: And because of a number of factors, some of them financials, some just had to do with the issue of COVID.
[SPEAKER_00]: We didn't know if we were going to be viable at all.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then all of a sudden, COVID hit.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then we literally had to send all the students home.
[SPEAKER_00]: And nobody could come in the doors.
[SPEAKER_00]: People weren't leaving their house.
[SPEAKER_00]: So they're like, what are we going to do?
[SPEAKER_00]: I couldn't find a way to be relevant.
[SPEAKER_00]: And what happened was there was a local organization.
[SPEAKER_00]: that was donating bags of food to families in need every week in the county.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we have families in need in this county already, but when COVID hit, nobody is going to the grocery stores, we had even more.
[SPEAKER_00]: So they would gather all sorts of food together and give these bags out and fantastic thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: What I noticed, though, is the bread going in there was wonderbredder for the equivalent.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I looked in here, it was called the food lab at the time, I looked in the food lab, and we had no ingredients here at all.
[SPEAKER_00]: We had no budget, no nothing, but we did have thousands and thousands of pounds of flour.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'm like, we can at least make sourdough bread and donate it to that organization who could then distribute it to the families in place of the wonderbred.
[SPEAKER_00]: So our oldest daughter, Brianna, was a junior in high school at the time.
[SPEAKER_00]: She was on online school board out of her mind.
[SPEAKER_00]: She and I would come in together once a week and we'd think about a hundred loaves of sarano.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then we'd bring it, we'd drop it off to that organization.
[SPEAKER_00]: They distribute to the families and this went on for weeks and weeks until we completely ran out of flour.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then we had no budget, no ingredients, no anything.
[SPEAKER_00]: I say, I don't know if you guys remember this, but it reminded me of the final episode of Cheers when they left and turned out the lights and they left the bar.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we left and turned out the lights and went home.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now prior to opening up this center, this food lab, we had created in our home already decades ago.
[SPEAKER_00]: about a decade and a half ago, a commercial kitchen essentially in our basement.
[SPEAKER_00]: Anytime a restaurant will go out of business, we would buy all that equipment, and that we could afford.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we put in tables, we had mixers, I built a wood fire oven in the backyard so I could make this aerobode for a family and all this.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we had an infrastructure at our house already that when we went back home, our oldest owner brand is, you know what?
[SPEAKER_00]: I kind of like this baking thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: Can we start a aerobode company?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I guess, let's go ahead.
[SPEAKER_00]: She's not going to make a website.
[SPEAKER_00]: So she'll literally overnight, she put together a website.
[SPEAKER_00]: The next day we baked Sarato crackers, Sarato Fakasha and just regular Sarato bread and gave samples out in little bags to the neighbors.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that first week we had maybe eight orders.
[SPEAKER_00]: I forget, maybe at the most eight orders.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then it quickly started to grow and it was the perfect time because think about this you could or nobody want to leave their house so it's still very early in COVID.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like you could order online incredibly fresh sourdough bread it could get delivered to your house and this was a time when if you remember
[SPEAKER_00]: We were still like ordering things from Amazon to keeping me realize for three days before we were bringing in the house, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So he didn't do his no contact whatsoever.
[SPEAKER_00]: We put it down on their porch step.
[SPEAKER_00]: We left when they felt comfortable.
[SPEAKER_00]: They opened the door and grabbed the fresh bread.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it just took off.
[SPEAKER_00]: And Brianna had her driving permit at the time.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was perfect because within a few months, she was doing eight to ten hours of deliveries on a Saturday, just in the car all over.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then a farmer's market, when the farmer's market started to open back up here in Maryland, a farmer's market asked us to go, which we still are at actually on Thursdays.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it just started to grow from there.
[SPEAKER_00]: And remember, this is interesting because we don't eat that much bread.
[SPEAKER_00]: But if we do eat bread, it's always sour.
[SPEAKER_00]: Real true genuine sourdough.
[SPEAKER_00]: So then when we brought it back into this building, when things started to open up, we said, now that we're actually in a true commercial kitchen, we can do more than just bread.
[SPEAKER_00]: We weren't just under the cot, it didn't history laws anymore.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then that's when we started to expand and do everything that we're doing.
[SPEAKER_03]: Can't believe it's been that recent.
[SPEAKER_03]: It feels like you guys have been out of it for
[SPEAKER_00]: We have, so we've, the Saturday bread company started five years ago.
[SPEAKER_00]: We've been in this building for four years and we have now of twenty nine people working.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, you have such a huge operation and your impact is so far reaching.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's really amazing.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, so talk a little bit about where the rest aren't as today.
[SPEAKER_02]: And oh, I'm really interested in knowing how you've seen people's perception of what you're doing, change or have you or do people does anybody ever just walk in there and they just think they're walking into a regular restaurant.
[SPEAKER_02]: They don't know what's going on.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was so excited to have the Sarah Nobred part of this, and then I was so excited to actually start offering all sorts of food.
[SPEAKER_00]: Christina and I met in a restaurant working in a restaurant.
[SPEAKER_00]: We both started the same day.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was in New Barton or she was in New Wachers at the same restaurant in Princeton, New Jersey, called the Alchemist Embarrasser.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we worked obviously in college.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're working the shifts that got us the most money, which is Friday night, all day Saturday, double on Sunday.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we didn't have a typical social life because we were working at the restaurant and we were serving other people social life.
[SPEAKER_00]: So so we would never want to restaurant like we were never on a route.
[SPEAKER_00]: And in fact, the first probably two years of this place being open, we found every other creative word to use other than restaurant.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like bitterly, we just, we, everything.
[SPEAKER_00]: We just, we, we just, and now we're proud of the fact that we have a restaurant, but we, we were so excited.
[SPEAKER_00]: We have this message, we want, we believe what we're doing so hard.
[SPEAKER_00]: We want everybody to come because of that, and people just came in because they wanted a cup of coffee, or they wanted a loaf of bread.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the order of the people coming in, we're coming in because they just like the food.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it was almost
[SPEAKER_00]: or some of me, that was the case because we had this amazing message to send and then all of a sudden I started to realize, wait a minute, actually, this is healthy food and they actually like it.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's something we should be proud of, which I forgot to say this early, it's quick aside, but I think it's important for everybody to home as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's very important for this restaurant, but it's just important for home.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was struggling through learning how to literally make everything our family.
[SPEAKER_00]: Eight.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I was competing
[SPEAKER_00]: The reality is I was competing with this truly multi trillion dollar food industry that have people in lab coats with test tubes that are tweaking flavors and Doritos.
[SPEAKER_00]: And here I am trying to make a tortilla chip at home that they're actually going to eat.
[SPEAKER_00]: And they're teenagers, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: And they're eating these other things at their friend's house.
[SPEAKER_00]: So they have the bar for taste or texture is up here.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'm struggling.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm learning how to make cream cheese and scratch, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So I realized very quickly that making food, nourishing at home,
[SPEAKER_00]: is very important.
[SPEAKER_00]: Making nourishing food at home that actually tastes and looks good is even more important because it doesn't matter what you make if nobody's going to eat it.
[SPEAKER_00]: The first masonry thing I ever did in my life was build this wood fired oven in our backyard.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is awesome.
[SPEAKER_00]: I spent so much time I built it solely so I could make bread for the family and make pizza for the family.
[SPEAKER_00]: And my kids, like every other kid that loves pizza, my son would not eat the pizza for three years.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like literally would not eat our pizza.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now partially, it was because I was still learning how to do this habit across properly.
[SPEAKER_00]: Part of it was I was still struggling through the cheese a little bit on it.
[SPEAKER_00]: The pepperoni I was making at the time tasted a little strange, and I wasn't controlling the fire perfect, so we'll get a little charred on one side or whatever.
[SPEAKER_00]: He wouldn't eat my pizza.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now he devours.
[SPEAKER_00]: In fact, he's one of the people that cooks a pizza here at the restaurant.
[SPEAKER_00]: He likes it better, but I wasn't, I was making healthy pizza, but it wouldn't compete with dominoes or whatever, so they weren't going to eat it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I bring it back to people came in here, because they liked their food.
[SPEAKER_00]: And they like their food, and oh my gosh, they like our food.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's huge, you're coming back because it gave us a way through the food.
[SPEAKER_00]: It gave us a way to send an incredibly powerful message about nutrition and diet and health and all those other pieces.
[SPEAKER_00]: So in the beginning, most people came in because they just liked their food.
[SPEAKER_00]: And they came back because they liked their food.
[SPEAKER_00]: But now we have a lot of people that are traveling, just because of whether we're on podcast or because of social media or because of the conferences we spoke at, we have a lot of people traveling in now to come to see us.
[SPEAKER_00]: And they're coming because that they've heard the message you're understanding, what we're doing.
[SPEAKER_00]: We do have an incredible community here and we have a lot of regulars that we absolutely love.
[SPEAKER_00]: They've been the mainstay of this place.
[SPEAKER_00]: We do live in a small rural area.
[SPEAKER_00]: If five years ago, four years ago, you told me we were going to have a place like this.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're in the world, would you put it?
[SPEAKER_00]: It probably wouldn't be here because I didn't think it would have been able to survive here.
[SPEAKER_00]: But it has because we have an incredible community here, but also because we have enough people coming in to visit us because they've heard about us somewhere that it would
[SPEAKER_00]: It's very able to get us through especially some of the leaner months.
[SPEAKER_00]: Chester town in the middle of February is a pretty slow place to be.
[SPEAKER_00]: But we've been able to do it and we have never had to let people go or get rid of anybody on our team because of slower times.
[SPEAKER_03]: Wow.
[SPEAKER_03]: I just had four thoughts on one time, hang on.
[SPEAKER_03]: So you mentioned a few minutes ago going around the world and engaging with these communities that are still doing food.
[SPEAKER_03]: the old ways and documenting them.
[SPEAKER_03]: Is there an end goal with that?
[SPEAKER_03]: Is it just to get it all down?
[SPEAKER_03]: Are you bringing that stuff back to the restaurant?
[SPEAKER_03]: I know you have this food that, which we haven't even talked about, really, at all.
[SPEAKER_03]: Is it sort of part of the educational component?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_00]: So the food lab as our non-profit, it's an official five or one, C three.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it is focused on research, teaching, and outreach.
[SPEAKER_00]: All the research that we do is through that any of the classes, we do a ton of online classes, a ton of on-demand classes, and almost every weekend that we're here, we hold an in-person class.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it can be everything ranging from fermented vegetables to home butchering to cheese, making whatever.
[SPEAKER_00]: We have a bunch of little one-off things as well, but that's our standard.
[SPEAKER_00]: once one the three times a year depending on the year in our schedule we do intensive where there are five day intensive it is literally yours immersed in every single thing that we do.
[SPEAKER_00]: We also do a lot of internships so people come and if anybody's interested you can go to our website modernstoneh.com and one of the things that you can find out about is our internship programs you can come anywhere from two weeks to several months and
[SPEAKER_00]: be immersed in any part of what we do.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you want to learn Sarato Bread, you can spend the entire time in our Sarato Bakery.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you want to learn a little bit of all of it, you can do a little bit of all of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: If the business side of this is something that's interesting to you, you can spend time there.
[SPEAKER_00]: So there's a lot of different opportunities we have on campus housing here.
[SPEAKER_00]: We also are an approved apprenticeship program for the local high schools.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we have several high school apprentices that are here as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's that
[SPEAKER_00]: the outreach and educational side of it, as far as the research is concerned, there's several goals that we're trying to accomplish with this kind of research.
[SPEAKER_00]: One is
[SPEAKER_00]: most of what we're going to learn with these indigenous and traditional ancestral groups is disappearing.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we want to document it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the way that we document it is solely up to the people we are working with, whatever they're comfortable with.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're certain groups we've been with that absolutely want no video whatsoever.
[SPEAKER_00]: whatever they want is fine.
[SPEAKER_00]: We could take some photographs, some literally just notes, some of its full video and notes of pictures, whatever they're comfortable with, we're trying to document it and then use that information and to preserve these different approaches to food.
[SPEAKER_00]: The other part of it is we want it in context.
[SPEAKER_00]: We want to experience this in context because just like you can't separate food from all the parts of life, you can't separate what they're doing from all the other things going on at the same time.
[SPEAKER_00]: So in some cases, this is one reason it's been very valuable to have these experiences as a family.
[SPEAKER_00]: There are certain
[SPEAKER_00]: food related traditions that only men engage in, certain ones that only women engage in, certain ones that only children engage in, and some those the walls around them are so solid.
[SPEAKER_00]: that I, as a man, couldn't even get in to see what the women are doing inside the area they're preparing food or whatever.
[SPEAKER_00]: So Christine and Brianna are in no way to have been able to go in.
[SPEAKER_00]: That sort of thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: So coming as a family has been very helpful in accessing a lot of this information.
[SPEAKER_00]: But also the stories around it and the colors and the singing and the dancing, whatever it is all incredibly important information.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's more than just
[SPEAKER_00]: writing down a recipe for how to initialize maze or something like that.
[SPEAKER_00]: But gathering those stories also helps provide information and stories for things like podcasts or for classes and that's sort of thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: And our hope is to use that information to help bring the world and make the world a little bit smaller, especially at a time when it's so much division happening, just food is a great way to bring people together.
[SPEAKER_00]: The other goal
[SPEAKER_00]: is to take this incredible information and literally transform it into food.
[SPEAKER_00]: Every single thing we make downstairs in our restaurant has some sort of traditional or ancestral process that is either making the ingredients safer, more bio-available, and more nutrient-dense in some way.
[SPEAKER_00]: And they're all
[SPEAKER_00]: as a result of the research that we've done.
[SPEAKER_00]: For example, as we were in Norway last week, actually, because Christina and I are both invited to speak at a conference in Oslo, and then we set up right after it.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a particular kind of cheese called Bruno's, and actually translates in the brown cheese that I've wanted to learn to make my entire life.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we drove three hours north and worked with Eva and Sven and a cabin in the middle of the mountains in Norway, and learned how to make this traditional brown cheese.
[SPEAKER_00]: And why is this brown cheese important?
[SPEAKER_00]: In this particular case, we make
[SPEAKER_00]: We use about a hundred to a hundred and twenty gallons of milk a week to transform into cheese.
[SPEAKER_00]: So our pizza cheese or provolone or all the cream cheese or the cheeses.
[SPEAKER_00]: We have a massive amount of weight left over.
[SPEAKER_00]: We make a lot of that way into ricotta, but there's only so much ricotta we can use and sell.
[SPEAKER_00]: So a lot of it ends up getting composted or tossed.
[SPEAKER_00]: This Brunoist is a cheese that's made from a leftover way, from making, making other cheeses.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we're, by learning how to do this, not only do we have all sorts of amazing stories about Sven and Eva and all, and this traditional approach to cheese, but we're actually turning it some of our leftover way, and we're helping towards our zero waste approach here to turn that into stuff that we also put on a plate.
[SPEAKER_00]: And by putting on a plate, it's not just that we've done a zero waste, we're able to share a very traditional
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't mean odd that it's weird odd in that you don't normally see it in America.
[SPEAKER_00]: Cheese that helps tell a story about norway traditional foods on a plate on a charcoal report or something like that.
[SPEAKER_03]: I want to try it.
[SPEAKER_03]: Do you have it at the restaurant now?
[SPEAKER_00]: We do.
[SPEAKER_00]: We have some that I've started making and it's great.
[SPEAKER_00]: very quickly for anybody who's a cheese maker out there.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is how it's done.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's actually not officially cheese.
[SPEAKER_00]: Cheese officially is made from the casing protein.
[SPEAKER_00]: So when you take milk and get it fermenting and you separate the curds in the way and take the curds out and make the cheese the way that's left over is what you would make ricotta from or now that way is loaded with lactose still.
[SPEAKER_00]: So if you immediately start it heating it up and kill off all the bacteria.
[SPEAKER_00]: So there's no more no more fermentation happening after this point because the fermentation's happening
[SPEAKER_00]: The bacteria is eating the lactose.
[SPEAKER_00]: We want the lactose in this case.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we bring it to a boil.
[SPEAKER_00]: So the boil is going to keep it out of simmer for like literally eight, ten, twelve hours.
[SPEAKER_00]: And all the moisture is going to evaporate.
[SPEAKER_00]: And when the moisture's gone, the lactose caramelizes just like you caramelize sugar.
[SPEAKER_00]: So lactose caramelizes you at a little bit of cream and you make this fudgy cheese that is absolutely delicious.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's fantastic.
[SPEAKER_03]: Wow.
[SPEAKER_00]: You've never had anything with this texture and flavor in your life.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, you just said Fudgee cheese and I'm like, I made a question work, but I'm sure it's amazing.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's super cool.
[SPEAKER_00]: And for anybody out there, if I don't have any listeners or carnivores, if they are carnivores, this is one of the only other than honey, this is probably the only sweet thing that is actually fully carnivores well.
[SPEAKER_02]: Amazing.
[SPEAKER_02]: So where are you all going next?
[SPEAKER_02]: You said you're going somewhere next.
[SPEAKER_00]: We are hopefully today booking or so excited.
[SPEAKER_00]: Kristina and my twenty-fifth wedding anniversary is this year.
[SPEAKER_00]: I will tell you, God bless her.
[SPEAKER_00]: She has agreed to go to the Amazon for our wedding anniversary through with the whole family.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think I forgot to mention in the last sort of thing we're talking about.
[SPEAKER_00]: Why do we do these things?
[SPEAKER_00]: There is a selfish reason.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a person who says, I want to know about my food.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm trying one of my goals in life is to remove as many links from my food chain as possible and know about all of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we're going to go to the Amazon.
[SPEAKER_00]: to do a bunch of different things.
[SPEAKER_00]: One of them is to learn how to traditionally process the maniac.
[SPEAKER_00]: A maniac is an incredibly toxic plant and there's a way to process this maniac that detoxifies it.
[SPEAKER_00]: It has cyanide producing compounds.
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh my gosh.
[SPEAKER_00]: It like still kills people every year, but when it's processed properly,
[SPEAKER_00]: it ends up in the grocery store shelves and all of you have had it.
[SPEAKER_00]: It turns into tapioca.
[SPEAKER_00]: And in our sourdough gluten-free breads, we do have tapioca flour in it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Tapioca starts as this really poisonous plant called Mania.
[SPEAKER_00]: That is processed.
[SPEAKER_00]: It has to be fermented and then dried and all sorts of things have to happen to it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then eventually it becomes tapioca.
[SPEAKER_00]: And now this is maybe a little bit over the top for some people, but I feel weird serving something here
[SPEAKER_00]: that we don't know every single thing about.
[SPEAKER_00]: Tapioca is one of them.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know how to process the tapioca, especially I'm serving something to somebody that actually was poisonous several months ago.
[SPEAKER_00]: But if killed them, it's going into a gluten-free loaf of bread.
[SPEAKER_00]: So there's that connection we want to make.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the other really cool thing about Maniac is they've actually been able to, years and years ago, been able to genetic selection, selective pressure, create a Maniac whole sweet Maniac.
[SPEAKER_00]: So most of the toxins have been removed and you can actually go to certain really high end grocery stores and buy the sweet menu.
[SPEAKER_00]: the less toxic version.
[SPEAKER_00]: And all you have to do to that is cooking.
[SPEAKER_00]: Once you've cooked it, then it's not toxic any longer.
[SPEAKER_00]: But what's fascinating is this is a staple around the world.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's native to South America, especially Brazil.
[SPEAKER_00]: And in fact, it's such a staple in traditional groups that they've brought to Africa and it's a staple in a lot of places in Africa.
[SPEAKER_00]: And almost every single instance, the traditional groups that are growing and using the Maniac purposefully choose to continue to deal with the very poisonous one.
[SPEAKER_00]: instead of using the non-poisonous one.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the reason is, because those toxins are there for a reason.
[SPEAKER_00]: Those toxins just like in other wild plants are there to protect it, right, from fungus and from insects and from predators, what we do in most modern farming, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: We've gotten rid of most of the toxins, then we put these really defenseless plants out in the field, and then we hit them with all sorts of things to kill all the other stuff, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: We've taken away the defense mechanisms, and we're artificially putting it back when we spray the fields.
[SPEAKER_00]: They know that if they keep the toxins in this plant, they plant a hundred plants, they're going to have a hundred percent harvest.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're going to have a hundred percent harvest, and then they can deal with the toxins after the fact.
[SPEAKER_00]: Even though there's still a few problems with it, they're still choosing to do that.
[SPEAKER_00]: I just think it's a fascinating way to approach plants in our diet.
[SPEAKER_02]: It is fascinating and it all speaks to the fact that nature knows what she's doing.
[SPEAKER_02]: And we humans just have to keep learning that over and over again.
[SPEAKER_02]: I just hope we learned it in time to save ourselves.
[SPEAKER_02]: But anyway, before we start winding up,
[SPEAKER_02]: Just want to ask you, do you have a favorite story for all your travels?
[SPEAKER_02]: And you just must have a million stories.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I do.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's actually one I'm going to tell on our cheese class tonight.
[SPEAKER_00]: First off, I have to just say this in a quick.
[SPEAKER_00]: Us traveling with our kids has been one of the most rewarding things of my entire life.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we just heard a term when we were Norway.
[SPEAKER_00]: Monica and I let the biohacking girls in Norway.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're wonderful.
[SPEAKER_00]: They put on this conference.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we were staying at Monica's home.
[SPEAKER_00]: Monica's husband, Jan, we were talking with him and talking about traveling.
[SPEAKER_00]: and he brought up a term that stuck with me and Christina were having conversation.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was talking about the value of friction when you're traveling.
[SPEAKER_00]: When he was comparing it to, and all inclusive resort where you go there, you're catered to completely and you just lay in the sun and do whatever.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's a trip that some people would very much enjoy.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then there's the kind of trips where you're pushed out of your comfort zone a little bit, not in a dangerous way, not in an incredibly uncomfortable way, but you're just uncomfortable enough
[SPEAKER_00]: that makes it incredibly special.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I will tell you that every single one of these excursions has, there's been some level of friction.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think it's something that we look for on purpose because it makes it so much more meaningful.
[SPEAKER_00]: But this is definitely one of them.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I am not very tall and I'm not built like a runner.
[SPEAKER_00]: But it's my dream to run a marathon.
[SPEAKER_00]: I haven't done it yet, but I still think I might be able to do it.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I used to really admire, and I still do it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Anybody who's been able to even complete a marathon.
[SPEAKER_00]: And every time the marathon results will come out for the New York marathon, a boss marathon, I'd read about this in the eighties.
[SPEAKER_00]: And all of these, they kept
[SPEAKER_00]: mentioning in these articles where they were depicting the person who won the marathon typically it was somebody from Kenya and they would say oh my gosh another Kenyan runner is one of the marathons because of this magical ash yogurt that they make in Kenya.
[SPEAKER_06]: I don't like
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm just gonna have sounded strange.
[SPEAKER_00]: And even problematic to me, even as a teenager, like wait a minute, you're saying they're taking a lot away from the person who trained so hard and when this marathon, by saying the reason they wanted is because they ate this weird yogurt.
[SPEAKER_00]: But it always stuck with me, this yogurt, this ash yogurt.
[SPEAKER_00]: I had met a woman, actually a family, when I was doing some cheese making courses in Iceland, and they have cheese making company in Kenya.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I started talking about this mercy.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we've heard of it too.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, I want to come and learn about the Marsic.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this woman, Delay, she's like, yeah, can you come and we'll go together?
[SPEAKER_00]: So, okay, great.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, the whole family went, I was speaking in South Africa, and again, geographically, South Africa is nowhere near Kenya, but really, it's in the general part of the world.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, we said, okay, we're going to tag it on to this speaking thing in South Africa.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, we went up to Kenya, we flew in, and there's a couple of things that are really interesting about.
[SPEAKER_00]: This was a larger trip, but I'll just focus on this one thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: We landed in Nairobi, and then we took a small flight with Delia to a little village on this little tiny plane.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'll do, I promise, give me a second.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's worth the whole story.
[SPEAKER_00]: Her plane was very little.
[SPEAKER_00]: And on this plane was just me and the family and Delia.
[SPEAKER_00]: And there were a couple of other guys on the plane.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a very small plane.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it turns out they were archeologists and they said, oh, what are you doing?
[SPEAKER_00]: And we told them what we're doing.
[SPEAKER_00]: What are you doing?
[SPEAKER_00]: And the God are going here.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're going to this mountain of Mount Elbow over here.
[SPEAKER_00]: And there's an archeological site.
[SPEAKER_00]: And they found out that I was an archeologist and listen, I don't know what you're doing tomorrow, but you guys can join us and you can see the archeologists.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, we're in because we had to actually an entire day off before we were going to this village.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I
[SPEAKER_00]: This was potentially could have been the most dangerous ship we've ever taken because our family almost died three times.
[SPEAKER_00]: We have were close to it three times.
[SPEAKER_00]: One is that flight that we took a month later, literally the same plane, the same exact flight flew into the side of Mount Kenya and everybody died.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we were on that flight.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's number one.
[SPEAKER_00]: Number two, we go and meet these guys and they take us to this cave.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this cave is a very famous cave for a couple of reasons.
[SPEAKER_00]: One is it was built over several thousand years by elephants.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the entire cave, the rock that the cave is made of.
[SPEAKER_00]: is full of all sorts of essential minerals or something.
[SPEAKER_00]: And over thousands of years, the elephants would come every single day with their tusks and take it and they'd actually consume it for mineral supplementation.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it was really big cave.
[SPEAKER_00]: They kind of see this cave so we go all the way in this cave.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's bats everywhere as a gorgeous cave.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it turns out we found it later on that about a decade earlier there were some Americans that went into that same cave and
[SPEAKER_00]: contracted the marble virus and they all died.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I found that out after we left the cave, but so that's number two.
[SPEAKER_00]: Number three, we finally go to this village and we had hired somebody to take us down to be a translator and he picks us up in this little minivan, the bald tires and the trip to the village.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're in a village and to trip down to that village was about four hours down this mountain.
[SPEAKER_00]: I've never been on a more dangerous road in my life.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was all sand.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was no guard wheel and I thought for sure we were going off the edge.
[SPEAKER_00]: We went down it in the dark and even if we made it down, we had nowhere to go back in.
[SPEAKER_00]: We didn't like going back in the dark.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was a nervous wreck, but we finally get to this village and they greeted us.
[SPEAKER_00]: Everybody was dancing.
[SPEAKER_00]: gorgeous, everybody was wonderful and the embracing and they bring us in and everybody's dancing and it was like a massive geographic episode or something but except for one guy and it was this one guy over to the side and he was a mountain of a man and he was laying on this bigs animal skin on the ground and he had his hand like this on his head as he was laying
[SPEAKER_00]: And all I could see was something shining off the back of his hand.
[SPEAKER_00]: I couldn't tell what it was.
[SPEAKER_00]: And our translator came over to me after about a half an hour and said, listen, that's cadale.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's the chief, the headman of the village.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you need to go tell him why you're here.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I look at this man.
[SPEAKER_00]: He looked mean.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I said, wait.
[SPEAKER_00]: We've been talking to you for months like you said this was all set up.
[SPEAKER_00]: Why do I have to go over there and he's no he knows but you just have to go tell him like it's part of the ritual this entire you have to do this I said who's come with me is now it has to be just you so me and this translator walk over to this scary-looking man
[SPEAKER_00]: And through the translator, I told him why we were there and which you are obviously already knew what we were going to do with the information and why it was important us to learn how to make this mercy, this issue.
[SPEAKER_00]: And as soon as I got done talking, he jumps up with a huge smile, gives me a hug.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's welcomed me, waiting for you and all this.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then finally, I felt comfortable enough when I said, okay, what's that on your finger?
[SPEAKER_00]: Again, it's all through a translator.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a ring that had a knife blade hanging off the back.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was so shiny like I know that he was polishing it on our way down like a father in the driveway clean the shotgun when the boyfriend comes to pick up his daughter.
[SPEAKER_00]: So he had this shinin and so what is that?
[SPEAKER_00]: And they do they are all the time worrying with neighboring villages.
[SPEAKER_00]: He says when we're fighting if we get in the hand combat, he turned it around and he said that I can
[SPEAKER_00]: put my arms right in, I couldn't slice your back wide open.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then I swear to if he looked down like it was all planned, maybe picks up a piece of fruit and he says, or I can use it to peel fruit like this.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we spent the entire day learning to make this issue over to stuff called mercy, and we're doing all these wonderful things.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then towards the end of it, everybody starts dancing again.
[SPEAKER_00]: And our oldest daughter, Brianna, who was sixteen at the time, was in the middle.
[SPEAKER_00]: And there was another kid dancing with her.
[SPEAKER_00]: Everybody was around, everybody's having fun, but it was really weird how everybody was arranged.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then the transit, it comes back over to me, says here, Cadau wants to talk to you again.
[SPEAKER_00]: So he brings me over to Cadau, and I said, yeah, what's up?
[SPEAKER_00]: And he says, listen, he speaks, and then the translator says to me, says, listen, he wants to offer you four cows for your daughter and her son.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'm usually not very witty and I don't think on my feet very well, but at this moment I something hit me and I said, how long the throw in a couple of goats and he's got himself a deal.
[SPEAKER_02]: Oh no.
[SPEAKER_00]: And translator looks at me pissed and he says, you do not choke about this.
[SPEAKER_00]: So okay, okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: So all I know is the arrangement of everybody over there dancing change a little bit.
[SPEAKER_00]: We are still not entirely sure whether or not she got married or not, but moving and we made it out of there.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was
[SPEAKER_00]: all accounts it was absolutely amazing.
[SPEAKER_00]: So when we're actually flying back on that plane back then I wrote me that little tiny plane right before we boarded there were six men mountains of men dressed in these incredible
[SPEAKER_00]: incredibly expensive beautiful suits and they they're obviously local and very important and they get on the plane with us and all I can remember so I had this is the gourd we had made the mercy can and I traded for it while we were there so I had this in my I was cautious I don't want to get hurt I'm really holding this on the plane and I'm looking at every all the men that got on the plane are looking at me and they kept looking at it and finally the head guy comes over and he says
[SPEAKER_00]: Where'd you get that?
[SPEAKER_00]: And I told them the villager at any year to your smile.
[SPEAKER_00]: It goes, that's my village.
[SPEAKER_00]: He ends up in literally the governor of the entire province.
[SPEAKER_00]: Wow.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, this offense has to conversation.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was wonderful.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was so literally at other areas invited us back.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a fabulous experience literally all the way around.
[SPEAKER_02]: Oh my gosh, that's incredible.
[SPEAKER_02]: With plenty of friction to spice it up, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: A plenty of friction.
[SPEAKER_02]: I was gonna say, this is almost like white lotus level vacation.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: Okay, you guys, all of you do so much and you've accomplished so much and I'm just so glad you guys exist and are doing what you're doing.
[SPEAKER_03]: An interesting thing about
[SPEAKER_03]: What you do is that in my opinion embodies this really slow way of being really down to the basics and this intentionality and everything you do and yet you do so much and you do you're doing a million things on this podcast we talk about slow living so I wonder what slow living means to you and how you embrace it every day or how you live it out every day.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's an awesome question.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's very relevant because one of the things that Christina have found, and maybe this is a product that was working harder now than ever, or maybe it's a product of getting older than we've ever been.
[SPEAKER_00]: But we have, for the first time, been very intentional about our health other than just food and exercise.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's only been this past year.
[SPEAKER_00]: In fact, I'm almost embarrassed to show you this, but we are, we're doing it all right now.
[SPEAKER_00]: for your things on.
[SPEAKER_00]: I got, we're testing everything.
[SPEAKER_00]: I have the orange, I got the hoop and I got the garment.
[SPEAKER_00]: We were, let me just put a plug into this for, we were at the conference, we were speaking at Norway.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was a great guy named Torkel there and he's a doctor in the, in the region doctor and he wrote just wrote a book called The Pulse Cure.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's an English, it's available all over the country.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a fantastic book, but it's all about HRV and using the different things to track and it's about being very intentional all of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's a highly recommend book.
[SPEAKER_00]: We actually just finish it.
[SPEAKER_00]: We dive into things very deeply because we're very passionate about them, but one thing that we've noticed is that whole idea about the oxygen mask.
[SPEAKER_00]: We are not going to nourish anybody unless we're nourishing ourselves first.
[SPEAKER_00]: The one thing I love about these trackers is that we used to pride ourselves on not getting much sleep because it meant that we were working really hard.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I remember when we were both in education and we're up and we're sending emails at midnight.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, yeah, they're going to see that it's marked at midnight that we sent it.
[SPEAKER_00]: They know we work really hard.
[SPEAKER_00]: When we started the company, we started the business here.
[SPEAKER_00]: We would get up at three o'clock on certain days of the week every week and get in here to get things done before the rest of the team came in.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was hard work.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's still as hard work, but we have taken a very intentional step to ensure that we're getting the right amount of sleep and we're dealing with our stress in the right way.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we aren't as slow as we would like to be, but we have intentionally slowed down.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the nice thing about whether it's an orang or a wup or a garment is
[SPEAKER_00]: It's one thing to wake up and say, I don't know, I'm super tired because I'm going to get much sleep and take care of it tomorrow.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's another thing to have a constant record of what that is.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it almost helps hold you accountable.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it wasn't until we started using something like this, you'll have to have a free.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're just testing a free.
[SPEAKER_00]: It wasn't until we started tracking it that we were able to then have the intentionality to be able to make decisions that are changing it.
[SPEAKER_03]: I love that you said that I have an ordering to.
[SPEAKER_03]: I, a little embarrassed to admit, like to me, it's a little sad.
[SPEAKER_03]: The way that it's helped me to have my app told me when I'm tired.
[SPEAKER_03]: How bad is it that I'm, like, need my phone to be the slowdown?
[SPEAKER_03]: But I appreciate it.
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay, so we'll wind up here.
[SPEAKER_02]: Of course the name of the podcast is the good dirt and the good dirt coming out a lot of things.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's why we talk about a lot of things on here.
[SPEAKER_02]: But what does the good dirt mean to you?
[SPEAKER_00]: That's a great question.
[SPEAKER_00]: What does a good dirt mean to me?
[SPEAKER_00]: When you say that it's so funny because as an archaeologist, dirt is a dirty word.
[SPEAKER_00]: We weren't allowed to say dirt.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was oil, but dirt was dirt to them as an archaeologist meant the stuff that's on the floor you have to sweep up, not the stuff we're doing.
[SPEAKER_00]: But, and I always disagree with that.
[SPEAKER_00]: because the first, my first reaction to the word dirt is life.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's everything from the microbes, but microbial life that's inside of the dirt or the soil, to everything that can come out of it and then else stuff that returns to it.
[SPEAKER_00]: One of the things I think that we should do
[SPEAKER_00]: to transform our health as a society, as a global population, is start to get dirty again.
[SPEAKER_00]: And to get literally rid of the hand sanitizer.
[SPEAKER_00]: I can't believe we're still using hand sanitizer.
[SPEAKER_00]: So dirt to me is life.
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_02]: And that reminds me, I know I said this was the last question, but I have one more.
[SPEAKER_02]: What would you, your person of incredible knowledge and experience and passion and drive and energy?
[SPEAKER_02]: And you have so much to teach all of us, what would your advice be to like the average person out there that's trying to keep on top of things with their family and their job and their food and their meals and given the purpose of your restaurant and your work to just to I'll let you feel in the gap there.
[SPEAKER_02]: But what would your advice just to average person American family be?
[SPEAKER_00]: The number one thing I think is to give yourself grace.
[SPEAKER_00]: I actually wore this orring for a while and then I actually took it off because it was making me too stressed even look at it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like I was fixated on it a little bit too much.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that's a great sort of poster child for
[SPEAKER_00]: the way that we approach food every time you turn on social media or the news or something, somebody else is telling you something to do.
[SPEAKER_00]: And some of these biohackers, if you listen to everything that they said, you would do nothing but take supplements all day long, go completely broke, and then be eating all day to get the kind of food.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's just impossible.
[SPEAKER_00]: And even if you're doing some of it, you're worried about the parts that you're not doing and that's not healthy either.
[SPEAKER_00]: Literally, I spent so much of my life getting inspired by a book or hearing somebody talk or later on by a podcast and you hear somebody who sounds like they've got it all figured out.
[SPEAKER_00]: Number one, they don't.
[SPEAKER_00]: But at least what they talked about maybe they have all figured out.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then you want to model your life after what they're doing.
[SPEAKER_00]: But you forget that you've been a different trajectory as your entire life, and all of a sudden, now you cannot adopt everything that they're doing overnight, it's doomed for failure.
[SPEAKER_00]: My suggestion is, number one, pick something, pick a low hanging fruit.
[SPEAKER_00]: For me, it was making the bread for our kids.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it wasn't until I literally distilled it down to one thing that was achievable that I was able to actually achieve something to the point that now I've taken a step and that sort of the status quo now, I can then take another step and build.
[SPEAKER_00]: But if I continued to try to do everything, but that level all year round, it was doomed for failure.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you eat another thing and this is on the same line mindset wise.
[SPEAKER_00]: Good friend of ours is Dr. Mindy Pelts.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know if you know who that is.
[SPEAKER_00]: She wrote fast like a girl.
[SPEAKER_00]: She's a big fasting expert.
[SPEAKER_00]: She's wonderful.
[SPEAKER_00]: But we had a conversation once and I'm definitely somebody who's a guilty eater.
[SPEAKER_00]: If I eat something that I
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe as an exact win, my dietary plan, or whatever that happens would be at the time, I am filled with guilt.
[SPEAKER_00]: So the point where I'm usually done for the entire day, so I just eat whatever I want to, and all of a sudden, a hundred calorie mistake turns into a five thousand calorie mistake, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: She said, no, no, you're thinking about it the wrong way.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you eat more,
[SPEAKER_00]: then you are had planned to eat or you eat differently than you had planned to eat, your mindset can control everything that happens after all the cascade of events afterwards.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you think that you've cheated, it's a very negative thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: think about it as feasting.
[SPEAKER_00]: Feasting is very positive.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you go to Thanksgiving dinner and you eat way more than you intended to, and it happens to all of us, if you think of it in a positive way, I feasted.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't do this all the time, but today I feasted.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then you can leave that meal and still be in a very positive mindset.
[SPEAKER_00]: But if you say, oh my God, I cheated.
[SPEAKER_00]: No matter that your belly is completely descended, you go back to your house, you're going to pull out a pie again that night and eat another slice of apple pie, which is that becomes where all the issues are.
[SPEAKER_00]: So a very positive mindset knowing that your body is here to repair itself.
[SPEAKER_00]: You just have to put it in the right state to be able to do it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Understand that you are a human living you're in a literally three hundred thousand year old body, but living in a very modern context, the same exact rules don't apply.
[SPEAKER_00]: you have to make sure you're fully nourished all the time and a lot of that means you have to give yourself grace.
[SPEAKER_00]: You have to not have to be worried about eating a piece of birthday cake and feeling guilty for the entire day because the social capital that you built by eating that piece of birthday cake
[SPEAKER_00]: in front of the person that made it and the person who's birthday you're celebrating is a lot more valuable than putting on a couple of extra calories into your body on a particular day.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we're all trying to navigate this.
[SPEAKER_00]: Nobody has the right answer and I will say one other one other very quick thing and then I promise to stop but this is really important.
[SPEAKER_00]: Our diets are so incredibly poor globally that almost any change
[SPEAKER_00]: results in some positive results, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's great.
[SPEAKER_00]: The problem is when we see positive results as a because of a dietary change, we very easily can have a mindset shift to say, oh, this is the best diet in the world.
[SPEAKER_00]: This diet is my diet for the rest of my life.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's not true in almost all cases.
[SPEAKER_00]: I can promise you that the diet that field you
[SPEAKER_00]: or started to I hate to say the word fix you because none of us are broken but the diet that started to heal you I can promise you is not the diet you should be on for the rest of your life because let's say you are trying to lose weight.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you go on a fully ketogenic diet or carnivore diet, and all of a sudden you lose the weight.
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh my God, this is the best diet.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm going to be on this for the rest of my life.
[SPEAKER_00]: But you've solved that weight issue potentially, or at least are part-way there.
[SPEAKER_00]: But now it's a skin issue, or a digestive issue, or something else that now is the most prominent issue in your life.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you might have to shift gears.
[SPEAKER_00]: In fact, you're probably going to have to shift gears to address that.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the problem that I see a lot of people that come to me for to talk about diets, the trap they fall into is they feel like they're a failure.
[SPEAKER_00]: They don't want to admit failure.
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh my gosh, maybe this was partially the diet, but this is no, that was the right diet for you for this
[SPEAKER_00]: part of your journey and now you're going to have to shift gears because you've lost the weight but you might need to restore your microbiome or something needs to happen change.
[SPEAKER_00]: So feel free to embrace that change and start listening to somebody else on a podcast or on social media that is in that world.
[SPEAKER_00]: Do not force yourself to stay on a diet just because you've been on a diet.
[SPEAKER_03]: It also reminds me of what you said earlier about being literally in relationship with your food
[SPEAKER_03]: Because it's the same thing in a relationship.
[SPEAKER_03]: And there's two different obviously food isn't a person, a sentient person, but the food the way that your body responds the food is going to change as your body changes.
[SPEAKER_03]: So it makes a lot of sense.
[SPEAKER_03]: And yeah, I just really appreciate saying that.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I'm sure that they're focusing on who
[SPEAKER_03]: That will resonate with a lot too, because I don't think that's said enough because it doesn't benefit the person who's trying to sell you the thing.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes, no one says that.
[SPEAKER_02]: And how often do we hear?
[SPEAKER_02]: Oh, this will change your life.
[SPEAKER_02]: This everything changes your life.
[SPEAKER_02]: So this diet changed my life.
[SPEAKER_02]: But guess what?
[SPEAKER_02]: That doesn't have to be the rest of your life.
[SPEAKER_02]: And it's there's so much like polarization and stuff that that stems from that way of thinking, I think, about food.
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you for that.
[SPEAKER_02]: And you mentioned the birthday cake.
[SPEAKER_02]: And don't you have a recipe and eat like a human speaking of a book.
[SPEAKER_02]: We need to talk about your book a minute for the birthday cake that you came up with to celebrate in your family for the very reason you just described birthday cakes are important.
[SPEAKER_02]: And you know, I want to skip the birthday cake.
[SPEAKER_02]: So and so you've written about one.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and in fact, one of the, one of the traditions that we have here at the Monastery on its kitchen is, so we have twenty nine people now.
[SPEAKER_00]: So now it happens all the time, but when somebody has a birthday, we think birthday is very seriously here.
[SPEAKER_00]: And when somebody has a birthday, we do all sorts of things.
[SPEAKER_00]: Get them something to wear and they, this may have a little present for them on all this, but they get to pick their favorite dessert.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then it's my job to make it as healthy as it can be.
[SPEAKER_00]: And not sacrificing the way that it looks or the way that it tastes or the texture, whatever.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's great all the way around because somebody gets fully celebrated.
[SPEAKER_00]: Everybody here gets some sort of a sweet treat that's the healthiest version of what it can be.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's also good for me because it's pushing me out of my own comfort zone and the kitchen and trying to learn all sorts of different techniques and how to apply it.
[SPEAKER_00]: In fact, the edible gum arbor just did a huge article on our birthday things here or the bunch of recipes and pictures and things.
[SPEAKER_00]: But it's you can have
[SPEAKER_00]: So number one, if yer eating is the store bought cake because that's there, what's there at that birthday celebration, then do yourself a favor and eat it.
[SPEAKER_00]: What you would lose by not having that cake greatly outweighs the problems getting that in, but the larger part of this is you can make incredibly nourishing desserts by filling a few simple rules and it's worth trying to do it because I promise you, if you get these,
[SPEAKER_00]: Some of those skills down, you are not compromising flavor, you're not compromising the visual appearance of these foods.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's actually brilliant.
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, can I ask you what's your like sugar of choice?
[SPEAKER_03]: to sweeten our choice.
[SPEAKER_00]: So one of the rules that we have here at the restaurant is we don't use any artificial sweeteners and we use any refined sweeteners.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we only sweeten the three things right now.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we use maple syrup, honey, or muskabado sugar, which is completely unrefined.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like literally dehydrated cane juice.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the thinking is this.
[SPEAKER_00]: And there's two reasons we do that.
[SPEAKER_00]: One is because even though
[SPEAKER_00]: There's really no biological reason we need sweets in our life.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's obviously those emotional cultural ones, but there's no biological reason for it.
[SPEAKER_00]: But if we're going to consume something at sweet, there are some valuable things that come along with
[SPEAKER_00]: things like maple syrup or a raw honey or even minerals coming in with a musk a lot of sugar.
[SPEAKER_00]: So you're at least getting something good with the, there's not fully empty calories.
[SPEAKER_00]: The second reason is more of a philosophical standpoint.
[SPEAKER_00]: The more steps in the food chain, the more steps in the processing chain, the less money that you spend on that ingredient goes to the people that actually did the hard work.
[SPEAKER_00]: So if we're buying local raw honey, every bit of that money is going to the farmer that literally lives five miles away.
[SPEAKER_00]: For buying real maple syrup, there's only one or two links in that food chain between that person's getting one.
[SPEAKER_00]: The musk about a sugar.
[SPEAKER_00]: By the time Domino's refined sugar makes to the grocery store shelves, there is so much processing and shipping involved that Domino's makes a lot of money, but the people that are cutting the sugar cane are making almost nothing.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the musk about it, in most cases,
[SPEAKER_00]: the people that are cutting the cane and process and literally just dehydrating it, the only step in the processing are actually getting a lot more of the money when we actually buy the ingredient.
[SPEAKER_00]: So from a philosophical kind of cultural reason, there's an added post to that as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: We also don't use any artificial sweeteners whatsoever.
[SPEAKER_00]: We have a very firm stance against any artificial sweeteners, also things like plant-based milks and those sorts of things, they're not allowed in here at all.
[SPEAKER_02]: I grow my own stevia in the garden and use it
[SPEAKER_02]: and fresh as a sweetener.
[SPEAKER_00]: Have you ever used stevia that we don't from the version that we get at the that we can get our suppliers.
[SPEAKER_00]: I wouldn't be opposed to doing something like what you're doing, although it's just a little bit further than we have.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, you have to buy the plant.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's really hard to start from seed, but anyway, your book, like a human, it's not only an incredible information, it's got history, it's got recipes, it's got your story, so we highly recommend that last Christmas I gave.
[SPEAKER_02]: bought five copies and gave me to help thank you very much yeah and they're all like oh what is this we're all very interested in food obviously anyway bill thank you so much for your time today this was for having me wonderful conversation we will be in touch with you about what is coming up and it's really
[SPEAKER_02]: Thanks for your time and we can't wait to get up there and get to the restaurant.
[SPEAKER_00]: When you really need to come.
[SPEAKER_02]: We really did.
[SPEAKER_02]: We've been thinking about it ever since we interviewed Christina.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's been like we gotta go there.
[SPEAKER_02]: We gotta go there.
[SPEAKER_00]: Let us know when you're coming.
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_02]: All right.
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you so much, Bill.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_05]: Thank you for tuning in, calling in and spreading the good dirt.
[SPEAKER_05]: We love hearing from you.
[SPEAKER_05]: You can reach our listener voicemail at four, four, three, four, five, nine, one, nine, five, oh.
[SPEAKER_05]: That's four, four, three, four, five, nine, one, nine, five, oh.
[SPEAKER_05]: You can find this number in our show notes and in our Instagram profile.
[SPEAKER_01]: This show is produced by Lady Farmer, a slow living lifestyle community.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the original music is composed in perform by John Kingsley.
[SPEAKER_04]: For more from Lady Firmer, follow us on Instagram at We Are Lady Firmer.
[SPEAKER_04]: That's We Are Lady Firmer.
[SPEAKER_04]: Or join us online at www.ladyfirmer.com.
[SPEAKER_04]: We'll see you next time on The Good Dirt.
[SPEAKER_04]: Goodbye!