American Thought Leaders - From Vegan Star Chef to Regenerative Rancher | Mollie Engelhart

Episode Date: October 9, 2025

Mollie Engelhart was once a celebrated vegan farm-to-table restaurateur in California. When she decided to put meat back on the menu, a targeted campaign forced her to close her business.She ultimately decided to make the painful decision to uproot her entire life, sell her farm, and rebuild from scratch in Texas.She’s the author of the new book “Debunked by Nature: How a Vegan-Chef-Turned-Regenerative-Farmer Discovered that Mother Nature Is a Conservative.”“We’re treating the soil and our bodies like we can outsmart them, but we’re getting sicker,” she says.Once an ardent believer in the vegan movement, Engelhart now questions much of what she once believed.“Nature taught me my ideas were ridiculous. ... My cow isn’t the enemy,” she says.Real environmentalism is “not to avoid nature, but to interact with her; not to try to out-science her, but to remember her wisdom,” she says.How does the health of our soil shape the health of our bodies? In this episode, we dive into the roots of our health crisis and why real change often starts small, with curious consumers and courageous farmers.Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

We're in an existential crisis with chemical farming and with ultra-processed foods, and all the statistics show that we're getting sicker and sicker and sicker, so we must have an awakening around that. Molly Englehart is a regenerative farmer and rancher at Sovereignty Ranch. She's changing the conversation around health and sustainability with her new book, Debunked by Nature. And so to be an environmentalist is not to avoid nature, but to interact with her. In this episode, we dive into Molly's journey,

From being a star chef and media darling. I had been a darling, like a, oh, let me do another piece. To stepping away from veganism, a move that sparked controversy. And all of a sudden, like, regenerative agriculture is a lie. We are constantly treating the symptoms. And what I'm saying is moving closer to the soil, moving closer to an agrarian society, being more related to God's design is going to have us be healthier.

This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Yanya Kellick. Molly Englehart, so good to have you back on American Thought Leaders. So happy to be back. I've been on this little bit of a journey with you over the last several years. You know, we first encountered each other in California, where you had vegan restaurant chain and the farm that fed those restaurants, and then you had to move out to Texas, where we visited as well. But along the way, you actually swore.

from vegan to involving meat in these restaurants and so like what what actually happened when you did that yeah I think that I was prepared for the vegans to be upset I lived in that ethos for so many years I had been a darling like a oh let me do another piece let me do a we'll do a piece about this and all the sudden like regenerative agriculture is a lie we must stick with wind and solar and the New York posted a full-page article in the physical magazine. I was like, wow, slow news day that this is like really that interesting. But I think that it was the drama. I don't know that the media really cares. Media is all about selling

ad space. And so I think that the drama of the vegans being upset had it float to the top for a little while. But it did cause a lot of upset and it caused people to not go to my restaurant to doubt my commitment to the environment. And, you know, I'm deeply committed to our earth, but not in a superficial way. And so it wasn't ideal. It didn't go well for my restaurants in California. And the end result is we eventually closed all of them. Just, you know, before I continue, just a couple of ways that that manifested. Like, what are the elements that force those closures ultimately? In full disclosure, to be totally honest, we didn't have that much runway when I made the switch because of the California policy of no indoor dining.

for almost two and a half years, and then once they reopened for indoor dining, we had to bring back all the staff, but our sales were still pretty dismal, and it was still more than 50% to go, but you had to have a busboy and a bartender and all the regular service stuff. So we were struggling already because culture had shifted from bad bureaucratic decisions, And I thought, well, if I bring in the whole healthy meats and that would bring in a new audience, and it was what I deeply believed for myself. And so I knew that there would be the upset, but I figured that the people that were really into tallow fries and grass-fed burgers would make up for that.

And ultimately, there was a lot of not great press, and then there was a lot of protesting and so that people don't want to go somewhere where they think someone's going to be yelling or talking on a microphone. And then all of the information on the internet is crowdsource. You go to a restaurant and you're like, oh my gosh, it's closed. You can go to Yelp and be like, it's closed, update your information. This information is wrong. And I understand why these websites do it.

They can't be everywhere and know everything. But there was a targeted campaign against me to continuously have my Yelp and my Google and my Apple maps to say permanently closed. And they would go to the stand outside the restaurant and six, seven, eight people would in a cluster and then it would take me days to get it re put back up as open and I'd have to prove that I was open, show that sales, show my bank account, da-da-da-da-da,

and then they would do it again. And so this hurt my business because if you're looking to go out to eat and it says Sage is permanently closed, you don't go back next week to check if it's not permanently closed. that permanently is the first word. Ultimately, why do you think these people were doing this? Well, I think that the people on the ground level that were doing it

believe that climate change is an existential threat and abuse of animals is the worst thing that you can do. And so I think they believe that on a level. I think on a bigger scale, veganism is another way that they use to divide us and to create chaos And I think that veganism probably started with good intentions, and it's just another thing that's been co-opted into a way to divide and conquer humanity and to have us other each other and think, like, you're bad, you eat meat, you're good, you save bunnies, whatever it is.

But I do think that there's powers that be above that, and there was funded coordinated efforts. These were not spontaneous protests, and they had professionally printed signs and people out there with cases of water. And there was some coordinated effort that was funded. And I believe that there's powers that be that want us to go to printed 3D printed meat. And I just seen a thing this morning about how we can make butter out of carbon. Just we're going to take carbon and make butter. It's going to be awesome. All you need is hydrogen and carbon.

and no cows and no land, and you can have butter forever. And I do think that there's a lot of people that are highly invested in these products. And I think that Maha, the paleo, the keto, like all of these things moving towards tallow and animal-based products is hurting billions of dollars of investment. And so I'm positive that there is people that have financial interests in the vegan world that want to keep veganism important and on top. And so I think it's a combination of all those things. Fascinating.

You mentioned earlier that you are very pro-environment, but not in a superficial way. And when you said that, I was thinking, you're talking about debunked by nature here. Of course, your new book that's come out, which I think is fantastic. As you obviously know, I've endorsed the book because I think it's so wonderful. But here's the thing. How were you debunked by nature and how did you come to understand that what you had been thinking was pro-environment was maybe more superficial than you realized? So I didn't set out to write a book called debunked by nature. And, you know, I thought of calling it like, nature never lies, something like that.

But it debunked by nature was like just like it debunked everything that I believed. And so environmentalism is just one of the many, many ideas. But I was this adamant, militant environmentalist. If you take me in 2015, I'm this militant environmentalist. I am running vegan restaurants. I'm driving a hybrid. I'm drinking out of a paper straw that's deteriorating in my mouth every time I drink a smoothie. And I'm bringing my reusable cup and I'm having an oat milk latte and I think, and I'm

bringing bags to the grocery store, and I think I'm doing everything I can for the environment. And ultimately, underneath all of that, I felt very apathetic and that we were going to burn in hell, and there was nothing we could do about it. That was like the underneath of all that drive a hybrid, bring your things to the grocery store, all that stuff. That was underneath it. And I heard a TED talk that my brother sent me by Graham State, and this started this journey. And where that journey started was, okay, food waste is actually way bigger of a problem than cow farts or cow burps as people are concerned about. And I realize that every one of us is a contributor to food waste. Like every one of us throws food away. We

don't eat everything at the restaurant. We buy groceries. It goes bad in our fridge. But as a vegan restaurant owner, I mean, I was throwing away massive amounts of food waste. And I knew after this talk, I could turn that into healthy soil. So I set out to get a farm. When I get on land, I have all these ideas of how it's going to go. I have all these ideas about veganism. I have all these ideas about the environment. And nature taught me that my ideas were ridiculous. Like that my cow was bad for the environment and my Lexus H-250 hybrid or whatever I drove at that time was good for the environment. It was so obvious to me in just being in nature and seeing something die and see it decompose going to nothing and then having to replace

the batteries in my hybrid car and they're having to be like a hazmat removal and pay for blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like how that can't possibly be better for the environment than my cow that will just disappear into the field. And then it just went to like, I realize we're constantly fighting against death the entire vegan concept is afraid to die and I thought death is just the flip side of the corn of life and for the first time in years I looked up from my phone on the farm I looked up and I was present to God I was present to the presence of something so much larger than my own ego and I everything I understood that we should be doing for the environment, which is essentially we are bad and wrong, we're a plague,

we're a scourge, we should just gather in cities and leave nature to do its thing without us. It was put on my heart so clearly that that's not true. We're meant to interface with nature and we've forgotten our role. And so to be an environmentalist is not to avoid nature, but to to interact with her, not to try to out-science her, but to remember her wisdom. Absolutely fascinating. Well, so, and how has that manifested in your, you know, kind of newest endeavor now in Texas, where we visited most recently? I mean, it's manifested in so many ways because it's, like, changed everything, I believe, it's changed, like, so everything is different. But in the business, like, our business is

a farm with a restaurant on the farm. So I am putting a burden on the customer to have to come out into the country but that's on purpose and maybe it's not going to make me as much money as a restaurant on sunset boulevard but there's a ripple effect if you drive out 45 minutes to the country and you drive a whole mile and a half once you get onto my ranch and then you come to a restaurant and you can see cows holistic planned grazing moving every day in the field you can see chickens and people are collecting eggs you can see greenhouses and your food being growed, my hope is that the ripple effect of that inside of the guest is a remembrance of what food once was and a coherence of eating food of the land that you're sitting on,

that there is a coherence there and there is a remembering that sparks a ripple effect that I don't know what it is, but that's my hope is that that's what happens when you come and you be in nature and then you eat of nature and there's a remembering that we belong to the soil, that we belong to this earth. You know, as we're filming right now, this morning, I actually saw a clip of Bobby Kennedy visiting a regenerative farm. I'm going to go out and check the Titus.

Hi, I'm Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., your HHS as secretary. I didn't even have time to watch it, because I was preparing for this. But so there is an interest, even at the, you know, kind of upper echelons of the government in this type of agriculture, which you're doing, the regenerative agriculture. The typical mantra that you hear about it is that in order to be able to deliver enough food for everybody, it has to be done economically. It has to be done at this much larger scale, that regenerative agriculture can only work

at a smaller scale, and that's a problem. This is one of the things I've heard again and again, as I've mentioned, my growing interest in regenerative agriculture. So I have a couple of things to say that. First, I did see that clip, Steve Jarvis' farm in. Idaho potato farm. So that was awesome to see the secretary showing interest. And Steve is a friend of mine. So I'm super happy that that is getting attention. I think if you look at the Rick Clarks of the world or the Gabe Browns of the world who have brought thousands of acres, and Rick Clark

is an example of someone who's farming thousands of acres profitably with no inputs. So I think that that is not a true story. And I think that people have an... Just to clarify, you mean the story that the traditional method at large scale is necessary in order to produce enough food because Rick Clark is doing 7,000 acres and Gabe Brown's come with, you know, and making money, doing 7,000 acres and making money and outperforming his neighbors and having zero inputs. Like he's growing corn.

He just said on the panel at the Heritage Foundation yesterday, he's growing corn. with zero inputs without putting any fertilizer down because he's just building that microbiology in the soil. And he says, my livestock is that microbiology in the soil. And there is no soil that doesn't have enough MPK or inputs inside of it already. There's only soil that's not alive enough to make it available to the plants. So when our focus is to have our soil alive, which is profoundly important. And so we were made of the soil. We belong to the soil. And when we, I think so many of us feel like we don't belong on this earth anymore or we don't fit in our bodies or we don't feel comfortable in our own skin and then we're drinking or drugs or watching things that we shouldn't

be, I think that that all comes from a disconnectedness from the soil. So I believe that regenerative agriculture is the way to meet farmers where they're at and bring life back to the land. And we're in an existential crisis with chemical farming and we are and with ultra-processed foods. It is a battle that if we do not wake up to, we could cause, and this is not hyperbole, a massive die-off of human beings. Like we are just treating the soil, the microbiology in our gut and our immune systems like we can outsmart it and all the statistics show that we can't. Like we're getting sicker and sicker and sicker, worse and worse and worse outcomes.

So we must have an awakening around that, but we're not going to just write a bill tomorrow. Trump is not going to write an executive order and say, by 2030, everybody's going to be organic. Not going to happen. But regenerative agriculture is our best pathway forward to meet the farmers where they're at. And the other thing I want to say is I think that people think of chemicals, farming as something that's been happening forever. But the first genetically modified plant in the mainstream was a soybean. And I think it's in 1996. Someone said 1997 yesterday at the event, but I'm pretty sure it was 1996. But 1996 or 1997 is when we started this pathway of highly

chemicalized spraying glycate directly. And then using glycate as a desiccant, which if your audience doesn't know what that means is prior to the late 90s or 2000s, we used to let wheat or barley dry in the sun and we would check the humidity in it and then we would harvest it at the right humidity between this and this. Now we can spray it with Roundup or glycophate and have it dry out and then we can harvest it right away in two weeks. You must wait 14 days. But all testing for a glycophate is 14 days with harvest. What had to do with spraying it around the bottom of trees, avocados, or oranges or something, and then picking the fruit up here. So we don't know the impact of spraying this chemical directly on our oats that we're feeding our children or our

wheat and then eating it. And so that is something that's happened even more recent than 1996. So we have not been doing this forever. We have been eating many of these foods forever. and they weren't making us sick. And now they are. Molly, you've been telling me that you get some very positive reactions to your columns in the Epoch Times. Yeah, I write for other outlets as well, and I have a large social media presence and all of that. And I do not get more people reaching out, the most loving people reaching out. I get 30 plus emails a week from Epoch Times readers that are,

interested in what I'm doing, asking me questions, thanking me for an article. People come into my restaurant with the physical one and show me that they read it, ask me to sign it. People text me pictures like, you made it into the physical one this week. I'm always happy when you're there. And I had some readers come in while we were doing all the flood relief in Texas, and they helped us. They drove two and a half hours to distribute burritos to Leander, Texas, and brought back

our hot boxes and everything. There's a woman that brings me cheese cakes and cookies. Oh, and she likes my articles. And I just think people drive an hour and a half. They'll say, I googled you after reading your article, and I saw you were only an hour and a half away in Texas, and I wanted to come and have lunch. I've never had a group of readers in any other space

that's so enthusiastic, and I don't have my email like on the header in Epoch Times. They're doing some research. They're Googling me. They're finding my web. website and then they're emailing the info at and emailing me and I just think that says something about how engaged your guys' readers are and I think it's an extraordinary testament to what has been built here at Epoch Times because people are not just like passively

reading and on to the next on to the next on to the next information but they're taking it in they're thinking about it and then they're taking the effort to email me or come and see me and want to discuss what I'm talking about. Well, that's absolutely wonderful. Thank you. Thank you. Can you build on that aspect? You were actually helping in the Texas flood relief, I think, by providing food. Just tell me a little bit more about that and how you engaged with some of our readers.

Yeah, so we live in Kerr County, Texas, which was where Camp Mystic is, and we've had over 100 deaths from these floods on July 4th. And so just starting on July 5th, we jumped into action and we started feeding people, housing people, because we have 40 beds on the ranch. And so people started like sending money. And this one woman, she sent money. And then she was reading her Epoch Times and I had an article in it about the flood relief. And so she texts me a picture of the article and she says, this is you?

And she was like, I love Epoch. I've read your articles. And then her son, a couple minutes later, text me the water article, and he had taken a picture of it in the physical one. And he was like, you're the same lady that is taking me the burritos because he was doing the looking for bodies and everything. And these other people that were driving the burritos all the way to Leander and people sending money to help feed and help us house these flood relief victims really just speaks to the heart of the reader that you have, that they want to make a difference, that they want to. want to help and how important community is to them. Thank you. So a couple of things.

I'm reminded of actually two columns that you've recently written for us in what you're talking about. I want to touch on those in a moment. But before we go there, you raised this alarm earlier. Too many chemicals coming into the human body might lead to a mass dive. It reminded me of what would you say if someone said, well, that what you just just said when it comes to this mass die-off of humans potentially, that sounds like the other side of the coin of this climate alarmism that you hear that from everything I've learned

it might well be happening, but isn't quite as alarmist as we hear. I 100% agree that it sounds like that. We're looking at statistics that say that at the current rate that men's sperm is dying, we will be at zero sperm in the modernized world by 2040. I have a five-year-old. That means that he possibly will not be able to reproduce. I think we need to be screaming about reproductive rights, the right for my son to make love with a wife and have a child in the normal way. That's the reproductive rights that I think we need to be screaming about. And women are infertile at higher and higher rates. And it's not one thing. I'm not blaming agrochemicals.

It's the pharmaceuticals that are in our water that's getting recycled back into our drinking water. And so people are getting high levels of birth control without meaning to because they're drinking other women's birth control. It's the sewage waste that's being used as fertilizer. It's the desiccants and the fertilizers and the other agrochemicals as far as pesticides, herbicides. those are all happening in conjunction with over-medication and vaccines. And so it's not one thing, and I'm not trying to be alarmist about the environment, but we're having a human health crisis, and if we can't see it, the environmental crisis, every storm, they're going to try to drum that up

and make us feel that fear. But look at your own family or ask the viewers. to look at their own family. How many people are sick in your family? How many people are on how many medications? I'm 47 years old. I'm still breastfeeding a baby that I had two years ago. I had a baby at 45.

I'm on zero medications. But that is not the norm. At 47, most people are on some medication. By 57, it's a lot more. we are constantly treating the symptoms. And what I'm saying is moving closer to the soil, moving closer to an agrarian society, being more related to God's design

is going to have us be healthier. And I don't want to be alarmist, but at a certain point, I think that we are in a spiritual battle and we are also in a battle for humanity, but it is nothing to do with what everybody's screaming about. Everybody's screaming about these little fractions of this and that and specific concerns.

We are all being poisoned. Nobody is exempt from what's happening. Another addition to that kind of complex of problems is, of course, this ultra-processed food being a common way that people nourish themselves. Yes. Those things, of course, are connected within there. But I want to touch on this one column

because you keep coming back to this, and clearly it's very much on your mind. And, of course, you have this incredibly popular column with us. We're very happy to have you. I'm so happy to be doing it. And this one was, I think, titled, We Are the Soil. Let's talk about the soil a little bit more. You mentioned that there's a very high percentage

of DNA, of genetic. material that's that's similar in the soil and in our guts that's amazing right and we've known there's been these studies that show that people that grow up in sterile environments have huge problems yeah but tell tell me more about how we are the soil so you could also look at the theologian level like if in the first beginning of the Bible God takes the soil it makes Adam and then before there's any commandments he puts Adam in the garden and says tend to the garden and then you could just look at societally we were living living in the soil. People were barefoot. People were cooking outside. People were cooking

over fire. They were picking carrots and rinsing them off in the river and eating them. And we've gotten so disconnected from that that we're no longer replacing that microbiology that is the same. And therefore, we're getting more and more and more disconnected. And I have a theory, and it's not proven at all. I don't even know that you could prove it. But they were always like, trust your gut, gut instinct, go with your gut. Well, what if we can't trust our gut anymore because that other brain, that microbiology that's running many parts of our body is disconnected. We're not connected to source. We're not, can't trust our gut so that we need the government and other people in every single interaction because we can't trust our gut. We can't trust ourselves.

And I believe that the more people spend time in nature, breathing, in that air, touching the soil, swimming in water that's natural, that we feel more connected to the whole and to God. And I think that as a society, we've gotten very connected to our devices. And I think that we're desperate for connection to the whole, desperate for connection to God, and desperate for connection to community. And social media is a poor substitute for. for actual community.

There's a certain wealth that comes from living and being in community with people that you love and you trust and you're building and working on something together. And it can't be replaced by Instagram or TikTok. You know, you're just reminding me how Bobby Kennedy, the HHS secretary, he has described the kind of phenomenon

that you've been describing this health crisis as primarily in its first position as a spiritual crisis. I believe that we're in a spiritual crisis. Right. When it comes to government, you know, and you're talking about us being kind of more becoming more credulous or more needy of government. So how do you feel this current government, whether it's agriculture department or HHS or whatever, is kind of dealing with this issue?

I want to say first that I completely see the frustration of the Maha movement and feeling like they wanted more, like didn't want Bobby to be recommending measles vaccines and da-da-da-da-da. And so I completely recognize that frustration and feeling like Bobby's not doing what they want him to do. But I want to take a moment as like a gratitude practice to just look at that we have an administration for the first time that is talking about the connection between soil health and food health and pharmaceuticals and how all and nutrient density and these things that no

other administration ever has talked about and Brooke Rollins is talking about possibilities for regenerative agriculture do I want her to be doing more in that department yes am I disappointed that they cut a bunch of funding for farmers that grants were already promised to from Biden and then they cut it with Doge yes and so I of course could cherry pick a bunch of things that I'm mad about. But when I look at how what's been my life mission for the last 15 years is deeply in the zeitgeist, I mean, we were at the Heritage Foundation yesterday doing a roundtable with all these people talking about soil health. And that's a major win. I would say that for many, many years, the Republican Party has had a blind spot around soil,

around the importance of the family farm, and they spoke to it that it was important but didn't take actions. And so I think that this is an amazing coalition that's happening. And if we can get both sides of the aisle, because traditionally, I've been in the healthy food space for a long time, it's been a liberal space. And so that now it's a huge amount of conservatives coming into the space. We have an opportunity to have a coalition of consumers that make a soft landing for farmers to go the direction that we want them to go. And so I'm happy that the government is talking about these things. I suspect that the Maha report that's coming out

is going to have a lot of stuff about soil health in it. And I'm grateful for that. I'm grateful for Cali and Casey memes and all the work that they're doing too. But ultimately, government is never going to save us. It's the consumer. It's you and I making the decision that makes a difference. It's voting with your dollars every single day.

It's driving to the farm to get that chicken that's more expensive, that's inconvenient to support the farmer. And then that farmer can get at scale and bring the prices down and then serve more people or maybe get a truck and be able to deliver to whatever. But we, the consumer, have the power. And right now there's a coalition of consumers that care about this. Do you ever worry about the use of the term consumer for regular people? I mean, it's, I think you're using it as shorthand, right, for just regular folks, I think, right? Yeah. I mean, no, I guess I'm not, I wish that it was like not even a thing you could use for shorthand

for other folks, but we are in a consumer society. Our whole life is a money slave system where we work to mostly consume and create comfort. Like all other mammals, I write about this in my book, all other mammals prioritize water, food, reproduction, and shelter, some not all mammals need shelter. We are so good at shelter and comfort and consuming things to make our comfort. But we have abandoned our water. We have abandoned our food system and we've largely abandoned reproduction. Our sperm counts are dropping. We highest, like tons of abortions, tons of birth control. We wait and wait and wait. And thank God that I was allowed to have children at 37 years old,

but I was one of those women waiting, doing something more important than bringing life forth. Imagine imagining that I thought there was something more important than that. This is something I cover somewhat regularly when I can on the show. When you think about it for two seconds, like it speaks a kind of deep nihilism.

I just wrote a column for you guys about this and that we've forgotten our, I think it was called something like we've forgotten our place in the statistics show, but basically saying that we have stopped caring about future generations. And almost no societies have reversed, or maybe no societies have reversed once you go to below replacement rate, it's very hard to reverse that. And we see China trying to, they went to the one baby plan and now they're trying to reverse that. I'm not even sure that Western nations are trying to reverse it.

Even the sentence, my body, my choice, people say that as a chant in the liberal sphere. I don't care where you stand, I mean, I do care where you stand out abortion, but I'm not trying to argue that right now. But just having that sentence as a chant in our society tells women the wrong message. Being a mother and being a wife, my body is rarely my choice. before 7 a.m., I could make love with my husband, change diapers, breastfeed a baby, hold another crying toddler, get out clothes and brush hair before I can get to my coffee. You think any of that was my choice? I just want to sit on the front porch, listen to the crickets, and drink coffee.

That's what my body choice wants. But being a mother and being a wife is not about my body, my choice. My body belongs to the commons of my family. And so even just have that chant in our society doesn't set up women to know the profound surrender that's necessary and the profound reward of the obedience to that surrender. Fascinating. Just a small comment before I build on that way you just said, there's only one country that I'm aware of that has managed to shift that statistic of the birth rate, and that's Mongolia. the way they did it, and there's been a number that have been heroically trying, like Hungary, very notably, has been heroically trying to shift it, but it hasn't been terribly successful, ultimately.

In Mongolia, they changed the culture. They made motherhood heroic. They celebrate it at a very deep level. And I think there's a hint in that, I think, for the rest of us to understand. And it speaks exactly to what you're talking about. In fact, you have a chapter in your book that's about your new, found respect and appreciation of masculinity, which has been a big topic in our culture, discussions or wars, as people call them.

I bet you could find if you were the eye in the sky, if you could rewind world and look at what's happening, there's a moment in time where I said, men don't matter, we should just have a few locked in a cage for reproduction. I'm sure that I said ridiculous things like that in my 20s. And I probably meant them. And I... This is embarrassing to say and probably shouldn't, but I'm going to say, for years, I used to have this little chant in my head. I would go into meetings where it's mostly men and I'd be trying to raise money for a restaurant or I'd be going into some situation with lawyers if I'm being sued and I would be like the only woman in the room and I'd be, and I would just do this little chant in my head and I mean, I can do anything. He can do better. Like I would do that in my head to set myself up to get into that meeting and get in the battle. I had babies and went right back to work five days later to prove that I could work as hard as a man.

The problem is a man can't have a baby. So what was I proving? A man is never going to know what it is to bleed for 30 days after pushing a baby out. That's never going to be his cross to bear. That's our cross to bear. And I should have known it was totally okay to stay home and rest. But instead, I was trying to keep up with that. and at the same time having no respect for it.

And I'm so grateful for farming with my husband because I believe it saved our marriage because I married my employee and he worked for me and there's a dynamic there. And it could have just, if we just stayed in the restaurant sphere and we made a lot, we sold my restaurant, the COVID didn't happen and we sold my restaurant for the $25 million that we were selling it for.

And we just like, there would have been a structural, in our relationship that was like I did this and you're here and in farming I know I can't do it without him I know that I need that there's a balance of the masculine and feminine which creates a balance in our marriage and our family and you know I talk about in the book being pregnant and there's a full we had a flood in California and my brother and my brother-in-law for my first marriage and my husband and all these men that work on the farm just saving animals and saving the propane tanks from floating down

and saving the tractors and moving and everything that needed to happen and how dangerous it was. And for a little while I'm out there pregnant and I had a realization like, what am I doing out here? Like it's dangerous that I'm trying to control what's happening and run the show

and honestly it's too dangerous for me and my pregnant baby to be out here. I'm going to go inside and make some beef stew and cornbread so when the men come back, they have something to eat. I got out. I realized all these people were going to have to sleep over because the road was washed out. So I went and found all my husband's extra sweatpants and stuff for people to change into when they got in. And I got all that ready and made sure my kids were not afraid. And I realized that in a moment of emergency, you don't want to be with just women and children.

You want there to be men. And anybody that thinks like, oh, I don't need a man, You're just outsourcing men by paying for them because the building you're in was built by men. The electricity that you turned on was largely infrastructure put in by men, the roads, the everything, the foundation of our society was built on the backs of strong men. And it's a disrespect to act like it's not necessary. And we talk about toxic masculinity. We rarely talk about toxic femininity.

But there's also that, and we need to find balance again. And remember that we're divinely reflections of each other that are different and perfectly yoked. We don't need to out-compete each other. We need to find our way to be in balance with each other. You know, I'm reminded, you know, a regular guest on the show has been Warren Farrell, who catalog would he describe. describes as the boy crisis and the sort of, you know, basically making men unimportant and society side effect of feminism, some people would argue, you know, the purpose or at least later stage,

later waves of feminism and so forth. The other part that struck me was that I have this realization, right? Is, you know, a huge cost of feminism. Women can do everything men can do, and there's some women can do many things men can do better than those than men can do. motherhood has simply become not important or not nearly as important it was central I mean it wouldn't you would argue women are the most women are the actually more important for this reason as a as a starting point never mind other reasons right but we kind of we kind of been brainwashed into thinking that that's not important somehow no and we and wait wait wait to live your

life first there's nothing more important and this I that we're telling women that they should do a career, they should do this, they should do that, and then maybe have kids. I'm going to tell you, you can't celebrate the holidays with your career. You cannot snuggle and read a book to your career. You cannot go out on date night with your career. Like, you can go on date night with your husband.

You can snuggle your children. Last night was the first night I ever left my children since my first son was born, 10 years in. 10 years and eight months ago. And I thought it was important enough with what was happening in the heritage foundation and coming here. But ultimately, I believe the greatest thing I'm going to do in my life is raise those human beings.

And if I don't do a great job, it could be catastrophic for the rest of their lives. So it's so important, bringing life forth from the other side that we all don't know what that is, but bringing that life forth comes through our bodies. How could that not be the most important thing? Why do we not celebrate that? What are we waiting for? To be able to go out more, drink more, sleep with more people, make more money? There's this theme throughout debunked by nature of reconnecting with many different things. And just kind of tell me a little bit more about this. Was that intentional or is it just something that emerged as you started writing? The ideas just came and came and came and just were reflecting on how moving out of the liberal

sphere, moving out of Los Angeles, moving into the country, reshifted everything. And in being more connected with God, I felt I could hear the truth more clearly. I could see the truth all around me. It was just like emerging. And there was so much focus during COVID about the truth. What's the truth? Who's telling the truth? And this is misinformation.

And this is the truth. And I started to just have this idea that when you're looking at nature, nature never lies. Nature does not lie. So you can't go. I could go out to my field today and say, Camila, you're a boy. you identify as a boy. Like something like that. Camilla is a very masculine cow with horns and she protects the herd and she has a baby every

single year and she submits to the bull and has a baby. Like nature is really clear. You can't get away. Nature knows what to eat. Nature is not confused what to eat. In all cases, it's always the truth. Nature doesn't put their baby in the other room. It sleeps next to the baby.

It doesn't put it far away. Like the most simple things that we are confused. Like we are in books arguing. Should you let your baby cry in the other room? Like no, of course, no, no. Nature does not do that. And so I think that just reconnecting, and I think that we are special.

I don't think like we're just another mammal. I'm not saying that. I think that we have a connection and a consciousness and an awareness that maybe other animals don't have. But we are a mammal. And there is some basic mammalian things that we've just forgotten. To your point a little bit, sort of beyond humans as mammals, you look at food as medicine.

Yes. Right. And so I think this fits into the rubric of nature doesn't lie, right, very well. But so as we finish up, tell me a little bit about that whole concept. Because it's something I hadn't really thought of until quite recently. Again, it's obvious the moment you start thinking about it, but just tell me a little more. I mean, I think that food being medicine has been around for a long time. And then I think that there was a shift in the early 1900s to allopathic medicine and we kind of moved away from nutrition being part of the conversation.

But there's so much evidence emerging or reemerging that what we feed ourselves really matters and that the mitochondria in ourselves and the carburetors of our cells need these certain nutrients. to really fire correctly. And you can't just look at the top fats, carbs, protein, and it can be processed or not processed, and it's all the same. Because there's all of these micronutrients and nutrient density that we're learning more about and the microbiology in our gut and how these are all

interconnected. And we talk a lot about genetics, like, oh, genetically, these people are, this group is more predisposed to diabetes or whatever. And I'll tell you that my husband came from a village that didn't have a road to the outside world until 1991. And there was no diabetes and there was no cancer. And now there's tons of cancer and tons of diabetes and all the women still wear skirts. And you can see, I was at a funeral recently and you could look at all of the ankles and see the black spots from the pre-diabetes and diabetes and the necrosis that's happening from that. And

And my husband was really taken back by it, but you look at the stores there. It's very out, far out, and it's mostly 100% processed foods. And when my husband was a kid, everybody grew their own corn, and they ate corn, lard, fish, turtle eggs. The environment would be mad about that, but it's the indigenous culture, and a little bit of chicken eggs from a few chickens at the yard. But that was their diet, like pork and then beans and corn and pumpkins. squash and that and nobody had diabetes and even though it's a high-carbohydrate diet and all of that nobody had any diabetes so we look at this ultra-processed food and then we look at how we used to eat and we're not growing the same microbiology and so do the people from my husband's village

have the genetic to be more predisposed to diabetes probably yes but it's the epigenetics that can turn that on off and that's deeply related. And they're now showing, like, if there's certain microbiology in your gut, this turns cancer growing off, this turns cancer growing on. This turns diabetes on. This turns diabetes off. So we want to have a largely diverse diet of multiple different colors of things, the least white things as possible. And you want to really eat for the macro and micronutrients, not just the calories. And we're in a world. where I think it's like 80% of our calories are coming from ultra-processed foods.

And I think that there's an argument right now about what the distinction of an ultra-processed food is, and I think that the government's gonna come up with a specific distinction very shortly here, so that number may change based on what that distinction is. But foods that are not the way that our grandmothers and grandfathers ate them. And if we look back just a hundred and ten

years, there was no refrigerators. So our diets have vastly changed in just 100 years. And our health is on that same trajectory. And so just by managing what we eat, many, many diseases can be reversed. And I think that people aren't, just like you said, you're just recently coming to this idea. I think that that's a good thing about RFK coming together with Trump, because I live in rural Texas, and people are coming into my restaurant every day and saying, I heard about no seed oils. I heard about organic food and I have diabetes and I have this and I heard and nobody told me that I could eat my way out of diabetes. They just said there's no cure for type 2 diabetes and I've been doing this and I'm getting better and I'm off insulin. And so I think that

it's getting into the zeitgeist of the culture that we can shift. And like we're in a spiritual battle and I think it's got to have to be a human awakening of reconnecting to God. I think the battle around food also has to be a human awakening. I don't think it's going to come top down. I think there's things that the government could do. There's a lot of buying power and there's a lot of ways that our tax dollars are paying to make people sick. We've all seen the statistics about snap and sodas and candy and 21 states have now made soda and candy or some combination of that not available with food stamps. I think the government could say some sweeping things around school lunches, military lunches, prison lunches, or prison meals,

and snap that could change everything because the food companies depend on those big buyers, the schools, the prisons, and the food stamps. And so if there was a like you if you made it like if I was going to make one executive order tomorrow it would be that with SNAP benefits you cannot buy anything that has more than five ingredients and I'm going to tell you what they would start putting less stuff in food because if you only have five ingredients to be able to purchase with SNAP all the sudden there'd be all these options with very few ingredients. And so that kind of sweeping reform could have a trickle-down effect. But there also has to be an awakening on the human level. And we are so good at suffering. Humans are so good

at sitting in the discomfort, certain kinds of discomfort. Discomfort that requires us to make a real change. We're very good at sitting in it. And not making the change. And not making the change. And not making the change. And so other kinds of discomfort, we're big on complaining about it and saying how it's violence and blah, blah, blah, but when it comes to shifting our health, and I was struggling not, I eat really healthy, but I was struggling to lose weight and I had to do something radical to do it and I ate and I thought I needed to reset my microbiology in my gut and I thought, how do the baby do that? How do we start out and with milk?

So I did raw milk for all of lent and I lost like 46 pounds in 46 days and I didn't gain it back and I changed all my cravings, changed what I wanted to eat. And it was amazing. For the benefit of the audience, this is not medical advice here. No, not medical advice. Raw milk is bad, everybody. It's go get pasteurized milk because you're going to die if you drink raw milk. No. Actually, as we actually finish up, I do think something very interesting that people have been talking about with me, numerous people now, is how this soil health or soil, the biodiversity and in the soil, maintaining that, rekindling that, getting that back is a place where this meeting the farmers where they're at might actually manifest, something you mentioned

earlier. So maybe as we actually finished up, let's just talk about that a little bit. Farmers, there's no farmer, real farmers. Of course, there's big conglomerates that are like doing whatever, just extractive, but farmers. And I don't care if they're 10,000 acres, or 20 acres or 10 acres, they all want their land to be good and healthy. But we have backed them into a corner so far. Food is still, people are still getting paid the same amount of money as they were in the 70s for cotton. I got paid 40% less for oranges in 2022 than I found a receipt in this old house that I bought from that same orchard.

I got 40% less money for oranges than in 1978. So, I mean, we are paying less for food than we were before. We're paying less for cotton or the same for cotton, but that's less with all the inputs. So we have backed farmers into this corner where they have to use more inputs and get more, the only way they can get enough more money is to get more yield, right? So that's on us. regenerative agriculture has pathways and on-ramps and off-ramps for that transition, and we're seeing a lot of farmers in Texas transitioning to regenerative agriculture.

We can't do this with just sweeping reforms, the government signing a thing. We need buy-in from the farmers. And for us to have buy-in from the farmers, we need a pathway for them because so many farmers are white-knuckling it. They're working a second job. they're leveraging their farm every single year trying not to be the generation that loses the family farm and we've lost more than 140,000 farms since 2017 so it's a real crisis and so I don't think we need more regulations we need to meet the farmers where we're at they're at and we need to support big ag on

making incremental changes there's an organization called regenerify where they give you a certification at the beginning and the consumer gets to support you, the customer gets to support you through your process. And at three years you have to have this much soil health and at six years and it's a nine years to get to the platinum. I like that model because then we can all participate in helping that farmer make the transition. And I believe that as a mom, I want to say,

no more chemicals, like I don't want, don't poison my kids, like no more this. And as a person that understands how complicated it is to run anything or do anything in the physical world, we got to be incremental about this. And so I believe that regenerative agriculture and soil health practices is the way to meet farmers where they're at. And there used to be all these eco-ag conferences that were organic, organic, organic, and you couldn't get the big farmers to come. And now that there's soil health conferences, you're getting buy-in. I mean, Gabe Brown himself brought more people into regenerative agriculture in 10 years than all of organic over since the 70s. This has legs.

This has a way to get farmers to incrementally come into it. And I think that that's what's going to make a difference. And it's really important to do that. And then I think we have to bring back an agrarian society. We need to bring back a lot more farms, small. farms and they are efficient and they are producing large percentages of the world's food 28% just by farms less than two hectares so it's less than five acres so this is that's a that's like a micro farm here in the United States

but worldwide they are producing a lot of food on small acreage and we are capable of doing that too but we need to create pathways so that will be banking products from banks to help people get on land and education and And that's what I'm out here doing, my brother's out here doing, educating people about the power of healthy soil and the connection to us, the human, eating out of that soil. Final thought is be finished? We don't ever know where life is going to take us. And I certainly never thought that I would be a pagan cattle farmer in Texas. Like I was so deeply rooted in being a vegan restaurateur.

And I never would have thought that my politics would shift either. But being willing to listen to the whispers and see what was happening around me, I think that that's true wisdom. And I want to invite humans to bring wisdom back and not be so tribal, to be willing to hear ideas and take them in, try them on like a jacket, say, does that fit me or does that? It doesn't. It does. And be willing to change our minds, even publicly, even if it costs us financially, but really be the truth and be authentic. And someone said at dinner last night, I think only one in 50 people do the right thing when it's going to harm them financially or like their brand or whatever, not necessarily financially, but like they would be shamed for it. I want it to be one-in-one person that does the right thing no matter what. And so I just want to invite people to be in the listening, hear the whispers, and remember you're part of the whole.

You're part of something much bigger. Well, Molly Englehart, it's such a pleasure to have had you on again. Thank you so much for inviting me. Thank you all for joining Molly Englehart and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Janja Kellick. Thank you.