Realfoodology - 42: Chemical Warfare in the Grocery Store with Mollie Engelhart PT. 2

Episode Date: June 16, 2021

This is one of the most important podcast episodes I have released to date!  I meet with Mollie Engelhart of Sow A Heart Organic Farm.  She is also the Executive Chef/Owner of 4 Vegan/Vegetarian Restaurants in Los Angeles, called Sage.  In this TWO PART episode, Mollie passionately explains the importance of regenerative farming, why we need animals as part of the regenerative farming model, how eating cheap food is a privilege, the chemical warfare we are experiencing on the farm and as a result in our food, how sterile food is impairing our gut and immune systems and so much more! Show Links: Find Mollie https://www.instagram.com/chefmollie/ Sage https://linktr.ee/thekindsage Sow a Heart Farm https://linktr.ee/sowahearthttps://www.instagram.com/sowaheart/ CSA Box Order (Los Angeles Area Only) https://app.barn2door.com/e/5NzdL/all?sellerSubCategories=19633,19634,19635,23100

On today's episode of the Real Foodology Podcast. There's many steps to make us sick over our lifetime. And most of us just go along with the status quo and take these steps. And we ensure a life of sickness. And then the sick care system gets to make tons of money. This is really exciting. Organifi now has kid stuff. They just released two kid products. One is called Easy Greens,

and it's a refreshing green apple juice where kids will never know that it's packed with veggies. And the other one is called Protect. It's a delicious wild berry punch like the Kool-Aid that we used to have as a kid, but without any sugar. This is really exciting. And if you've listened to the podcast for a while, you know that I'm a huge fan of Organifi and most specifically because every single product that they make is glyphosate residue free. So you know that you're going to be able to give these powders to your kids and know that they will be able to consume them safely without any glyphosate in it. So let's break down each one. The Easy Greens is a nourishing and delicious blend of superfoods and veggies that

provides essential nutrients, probiotics, and digestive enzymes to bring balance to kids' growing bodies without fillers, additives, or junk. It helps to fill in nutritional gaps, aids in growth and development, supports digestive health, has a rich micronutrient profile, and includes digestive enzymes. This would be a great way to sneak in greens for your little one without them actually knowing that it's healthy for them. And the second one, which is the wild berry punch similar to Kool-Aid, is called Protect, and it is to support your child's daily immune health with food-derived nutrients that work to strengthen their body's first line of defense. I know just through girlfriends of mine that have children that

when your kids are going to school, going to daycare, they're coming home sick a lot more often just because they're getting exposed to different kids and different viruses when they're out in the world playing with kids. So this would be a great way to help to support your little one's immune health. It's organic, and it's also made with real whole food ingredients. It has a delicious berry taste, and it's low sugar, and it's gentle enough for kids to take every single day. And I really love the ingredients in this one. It's orange and acerol cherry, which is a powerful source of vitamin C and antioxidants. Astragalus, elderberry, and propolis. These are all really great for overall immune health. If you want to try the products that I talked about today or any of the Organifi products, go to Organifi.com slash RealFoodology and use code

RealFoodology for 20% off. Again, that's Organifi. It's O-R-G-A-N-I-F-I.com slash RealFoodology. Do you want to hear the biggest discovery of our time for promoting healthy aging? Of course you do, because all of us are concerned about aging. There is a class of ingredients called senolytics that were discovered less than 10 years ago, and they are being called the biggest discovery of our time for promoting healthy aging and enhancing your physical prime. Now, when I'm talking about aging here, I'm not just talking about on a superficial level, wrinkles and saggy skin. I'm talking about energy, joint pain, your ability to show up for your life, cognitive function. I'm talking about the real effects of cellular aging on the body and what it does to our body as we age. Now, as we age, everyone accumulates something

called senescent cells in their body. They cause symptoms of aging, such as aches and discomfort, slow workout recoveries, sluggish mental and physical energy associated with that middle age feeling. They're also known as zombie cells. They're old and worn out and not serving a useful function for our health anymore, but they're taking up space and nutrients from our healthy cells. Much like pruning the yellowing and dead leaves off of a plant, Qualia Synolytic removes those worn out senescent cells to allow for the rest of them to thrive in the body. And you just take these supplements two days a month. That's right. Just two days a month. Qualia Synolytic is an amazing product that helps to remove these senescent cells. And if you want to hear more about the product and more about these senescent cells that affect aging, go back to the episode that I did with

Dr. Greg Kelly of neurohacker. So you can dive more into the details of all of it. But the formula that I'm talking about, qualia senolytic is non-GMO it's vegan, it's gluten-free and the ingredients are meant to compliment one another factoring in the combined effect of all the ingredients together. If for some reason you don't like the product, you're not feeling the effects of it, it also has a 100-day money-back guarantee. If you want to resist aging at the cellular level, try Qualia Synalytic. Go to neurohacker.com slash realfoodology for up to $100 off, and make sure to use code realfoodology at checkout for an additional 15% off. That's neurohacker n e u r o h a c k e r.com slash real foodology for an extra 15% off your purchase. Thanks to

neurohacker for sponsoring today's episode. Hi guys, welcome back to another episode of the real foodology podcast. I am your host Courtney Swan. If you're enjoying this podcast, please, please rate and review. It helps me so much and it really helps me to get this podcast out to more people and I really appreciate it a lot. So this is part two of my conversation with Molly Englehart. So if you have not listened to part one yet, please go back and listen to that and then circle back around and listen to part one yet please go back and listen to that and then circle back around and listen to part two i hope you enjoy my husband is mexican he's from oaxaca he's um comes from a small indigenous community and when he got here to america food was so cheap compared to having to forage for it harvest it go fishing for it raise a chicken in your yard and make tamales out of it. They put like what it was so cheap when he got here and he was young and he just and he had a

job and he was sending money home and he was just eating and he never ate fast food. He said fast food never sat well with him for whatever reason. He didn grow up on it he seemed weird that it was all already made and wrapped in stuff but he loved him but he ate he ate a lot of meat a lot of heavy heavy heavy cheap food right yeah and I can't remember exactly how old he was but it was after we were married and I think he was 25 so pretty. He had like a panic attack or a mini stroke or I don't know, but he was like, his heart was beating, his arm was numb, and he was at work and he left and he went to the clinic next door. And the doctor told him to calm down. She gave him something to calm him down.

She took all his vitals and she took his blood pressure and everything. And his cholesterol, they did a test on everything, and his cholesterol they did a test on everything and his cholesterol was over 700 which is like fucking really for a 25 year old is that's really crazy high crazy high and she was like you're literally going to have a heart attack and you're a young young man who just had a baby. So you should do something. So she gave him a prescription for some kind of medication. And I am significantly older than my husband and been in this country for a long time and I'm in the food, healthy food business. And

so I said, baby, can we just try something? Just try something. I'm not asking you to be vegan. I'm not asking you to give up your culturally relevant and important foods. I'm asking you when you're working to eat at Sage. And I'm asking you to eat at home. When you're eating at home, eat vegan with me. And when you're out by yourself, you're doing running errands or whatever, eat whatever you want. But at work work eat at

sage don't go across the street to the road rodeo rodeo or whatever don't go to the taco truck oh yeah and echo park yeah and and don't and when you're at home if we get takeout or eat whatever i'm eating eat the vegan option and then when you're out about in your world eat whatever you want so he did that for 30 days and he went back to the doctor he never took the medicine starts with an l i can't remember it but anyways it was for blood for cholesterol the doctor literally came over to talk to me she walked out of her clinic and walked over to sage she's like i need to talk to you and i said what's up? And she said, she's from Sun Moon. It used to be behind my restaurant, but now it's on the other side behind the bike shop. Right. So she walks over and she's like, what did your husband do? It went

down to 169. Oh my God. In 30 days. And I was like, he just stopped eating meat and dairy. And she was like, no, I can't just, my customers, my patients all the time are telling me, I tell them to eat less red meat, eat less dairy, eat less fat. And they always tell me they are, but there's no difference even with the medication. And I said, well, he never took the medication. Here's the prescription.

He never fulfilled it. And she was like, he told me that, but I wasn't sure. Cause she has a very thick accent as well. And he does, and they don't speak the same language and they both have thick accents. So she wasn't sure she fully understood. So she came to talk to me and my husband was like, I told you I didn't do anything. And, um, so I, I'm not, I don't believe anybody should give up the foods they love, the foods that remind them of their mother and their grandmother. Like, I'm never telling anybody that. What I'm telling you is fried chicken should be special

because a chicken, a sentient being, died for that meal. So maybe we don't need to have fried chicken every day. I had a foster kid and I said, fried chicken should be special. And he said, why should it be special? Like, he just thought like fried chicken is like the normal thing to eat every day. And I was like, no, no, no, Christian. And so I think that the reality of, I don't want anybody to give up the foods that they love. I want people to learn to love other foods and have the foods that make them feel safe, make them feel at home, make them feel all those childhood memories in moderation.

Because the reality is those foods may not be the best for your body. And even if they're the best for your heart and your soul, you, you only need them sometimes for your heart and your soul, but your body needs other stuff every single day. Yeah, that's so important. And, and I would even take it a step further and say, you know, on those occasions that you do find yourself wanting the fried chicken, buy an organic chicken and make it at home. Because then you're not getting all the pesticides and the GMO feed that was fed to the chicken, not to mention the antibiotics and all the injections that those chickens were getting. And then on top of that, the inflammatory oils like canola oil, which is a whole other story. But I always tell people, I'm like, don't give up your favorite foods.

Just buy organic, healthy ingredients and make it at home. I say that all the time, too. And if you make, okay, if you make something from scratch, if it's lasagna, if it's chocolate chip cookies, even if it's the most indecadent kind of food like if you make a cheesecake it's a lot of work you're not gonna make cheesecake every freaking day so when you do it it's special but if you go to the store and buy a cheesecake you'll eat the family will just like bow it down and the next day you buy another one and another one another one that's not sustainable for our bodies no matter yeah with the chemicals or without the chemicals.

But when you're making it, you'll have it in moderation. And I just think less than a hundred years ago, every other person was growing at least a significant portion of their food. Right now in your life, in your community, how many people are growing a significant portion of their food right now in your life in your community like how many people are growing a significant portion of their food i'm not talking about herbs in their window i'm saying like i think i literally know like one friend that does and she lives on a farm

yeah yeah i i think that we have forgotten the importance like the value of food. When people say it's a privilege to eat expensive food, they've got it all backwards. It's a privilege to eat cheap food. And why do we have it in our mind that food should be so cheap? Why is a hamburger, why can you still get a hamburger for a dollar and you could get a hamburger for a dollar in the 50s, except for we've had like 100% inflation since then? Why is meat still so cheap?

Why do we subsidize corn, soy, beef, and chicken, and we don't subsidize healthy vegetable farming? Why do we subsidize conventional farming and not organic farming? Why? Because it's all about the money. It's all about the money. And here's the thing. There's many steps to make us sick over our lifetime.

And most of us just go along with the status quo and take these steps. And we ensure a life of sickness. And then the sick care system gets to make tons of money. And where is the outrage? Because there is outrage out there right now about healthcare. There's outrage out there about COVID. There's outrage out there about your neighbor having a party. There's outrage out there about somebody who was at the dog park without a mask on. Imagine having a metabolic coach in your pocket that you could access at any point, any time in the day, whenever you want. That's what Lumen is. Lumen is the world's first handheld metabolic coach. It's a device that measures your metabolism through your breath. And on the app, it lets you know if you're burning fat

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my mom came to my dorm room and made me get rid of all my nonstick pans because she was concerned about me being exposed to something called Teflon. Teflon is a coating that is used on nonstick pans and a lot of these appliances that I just named. So I've avoided Teflon, nonstick, PFA coated appliances, pots and pans, you name it for a very long time. And the only option for the, for a very long time was just stainless steel pots and pans. So I was really excited when a company like our place came out because they started creating really beautiful cookware and appliances that are like pieces of art. Every appliance that I have from our place, I legit want to store it on the counter. And I'm the type of person that does not want anything on my counter. Cause I like it to look really just clean and

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It was cardiovascular disease. What was the number two cause of death in 2020? Do you think it was COVID? It was not COVID. It was cancer. What was the number three cause of death in 2020? It was not COVID. It was cancer. What was the number three cause of death in 2020? It was COVID. But what was 90% of those cases, comorbidities were also had cancer or cardiovascular disease. So 90% or diabetes, which is also diet driven, by the way.

Of course it's diet-driven. These are all diet-driven. Yeah, unless it's type 1. And what was the number four? It's medical mistakes. So why do we trust our doctors? It's normally number three. Most years, COVID pushed it out.

But normally, the medical mistakes are the number one, number three cause of death. So why do we give our doctors so much power? Did you ever read this book? I'm totally plugging a book that I have nothing to do with just right now, but it's called Black Box Thinking. No, but I'm going to write that down and read it. Okay, so it's talking about the difference between the aviation industry and the medical industry. And it uses these as two examples to tell people how they can be in their business. And basically the black box, the idea of black box thinking

is about not making people wrong and letting people make mistakes and then learning from those mistakes, taking responsibility from them and making changes and how the medical industry never does that. It's the same conversation. It's one in a million.

Oh, it could happen. You signed a waiver like it almost never happens. Just human error. Doctors are humans, too. But that's they don't say that when a when a pilot crashed the plane, nobody's like, oh, it's human error. And but literally, we have a 747 falling out of the sky in medical mistakes.

I think it's said every week in this book. So it's crazy and we're not doing anything about it. And so I love doctors. I'm not trying to talk shit on doctors, but what I'm saying is we can't give our power away. You are in your own body. And I promise you, you have beautiful intuition of what's going on. I've, I've literally had the experience of getting a medication and holding it in my hand, like, and I've been like, oh, no,

my body, I'm cool on that and not taking it. And I've only taken antibiotics like four times in my whole life. I went to the hospital to have my first child after a failed attempt at home. And I had my next two at home. And I had a miscarriage and I went to the hospital for that. But essentially, I don't go to the hospital. And I didn't really need to go to the hospital for the miscarriage. But I was under the misinformation in my head that maybe they could save the baby. And it was actually a mistake.

I should have stayed home and lost the baby at home. It's okay. It's important to talk about because so many women don't talk about it. And then when I had a miscarriage and I was distraught, like I didn't think I would be that distraught. I was so distraught. And then everybody was like, oh, I had a miscarriage. I had a distraught. I was so distraught. And then everybody was like, oh, I had a miscarriage. I had a miscarriage. I was like, oh my God, why doesn't people talk about this? Right. I felt so alone. And so like, what's wrong with my body?

But anyways, it's very common. And it's your body just priming and getting ready. And literally life is such an amazing miracle. Two cells come together and they reproduce and reproduce and reproduce so fast. And if one little thing goes wrong, your body says, uh-uh, start over because we don't want to make a weird malfunctioning human being. And they prime your body and then get you ready to go again. So there's no shame in it. There's nothing to feel bad. It actually means that your body's working. It's present to what's going on

and that something went wrong and your body's shedding that and going back to start over again. So I don't think that people talk about it enough, but I diverse. I never go to the hospital except when I had a serious, I had a broken coccyx bone with my son that had healed wrong. And my son couldn't get around the coccyx bone.

And they had to give me some pain medication to break my coccyx bone. So, and then he had to be vacuumed out because he was stuck in a weird position. I was super grateful for the hospitals. I'm super grateful. My hospitals. I'm super grateful my best friend died of breast cancer. I'm super grateful for all the medical caregivers that over three years of in and out of hospitals, I could cry to think of all these women and men who cared for her over those years. So I'm not saying anything negative about doctors right now, but I'm saying we can't give our power away.

Can't give our power away to doctors, to governments, to lawyers. We know we have a guiding, we are part of the whole that is spirit, universe, nature, God, whatever your word for it is. And we are expressing that, that is love, God, universe at all times through our thoughts, our speech, our belief, our actions, and our attitudes.

And we have to trust our connection. We have to trust that we're part of the whole and do our best to be the best cell that we can be in the body. And the best cell of the body would eat the best fuel. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and I think with our industrial agriculture, we've gotten so far from nature now that people don't even, um, it's almost like, it's like our, our bodies and our innate need to fuel our bodies and our palate have all been hijacked because now so many are out of touch and out of intuition with what they actually need to fuel their body because they're so driven by cravings, you know, with sugar. And then the food scientists that we were talking about earlier, they're concocting

these, you know, just chemical concoctions in our food that are making them highly addictive. And what we need to be doing is getting back to nature and getting back in touch with what our bodies actually crave for fuel and really need for fuel and to nourish our bodies. For sure. But we don't, we're out of touch with nature in so many different ways. I mean, we look at these sterile orchards and this is the thing about the vegan and the not vegan and the farm. Like the farm that just grows one thing is killing rural America, is killing small towns. If you have animals and you have different kinds of crops and you have maybe some agro-tourism and you have perennials and annuals and all this stuff, you have employees. And you have a veterinarian in your town and some big equipment and that's it, the community dies around you. So do we want the farms to be something that fuels communities around them? Or do we want them to be monocultures that kill communities around them?

And then that food goes out to the urban centers and kills everybody there. That's not what we want. But we do need people to recommit to the earth. We need people to choose better. Because right now, the average age of a farmer is 70-something. I'm 43, and I'm like the youngest farmer around out here that I know. And everybody's like, oh, you'll learn. You're young.

And in any other career, I wouldn't be like the baby, but I'm like the baby out here, right? Yeah. And that's fine. But what happens? Right now, we are constantly talking about this guy on our street is 80 something and this guy is 80 something and this guy is 80 something.

And I just bought a new property that's right down the street from mine. The guy was 97. His kids were 77 and nobody wanted it. So what happens? What happens if we don't get new young, in quotation marks, people to want to custodian the land. We have to care beyond our own stratosphere. Like, I could totally have a much easier life. I could live in LA.

I could make good money with my restaurants. I could go home and lay by a pool and feel good about that I'm serving thousands of plant-based meals a day, my job is done. But that's not enough. The world is a system. The world is a system, and we have to be the best part of the system. So we can't look through a narrow view of just not eating meat or just not doing this or not doing that. We have to look at the whole world and how do we function in it as the best participant. We're all roommates on a rock flying through space. Are you going to be the best roommate or are you going to be the roommate who loses the dishes in the sink every single day? I'm going to be the best roommate. I'm not going to leave the dishes in the sink every day.

And that's my commitment. And I want to beg to plead with my friends, my family, your listeners. There is so many more people than me that can afford to do this. Yeah. I was talking to my friend the other day and she was like, well, I only have this much money in the bank and I only have this much money in Bitcoin. I only have this much. I mean, if I put a down payment on a farm, I'd have nothing else. And I was like, oh yeah, when I put my down payment, I had to borrow 80 grand from my dad and I had nothing else. And there was no money in the bank. And like, yes, because that's what matters. Like, this is the most important conversation that we're not having.

Yeah. Yeah, because it's being drowned out by other things and our attention is being directed in different ways so that we don't actually, so that we as a public are not aware of what's really, really going on. Of course, it's all a psyop. Yep.

And this is what I was trying to say earlier with the vegan thing. And I want to preface this by saying that this is not at all against being vegan. That is not at all what I'm saying. I'm fully supportive of the vegan movement. But this whole narrative right now that you got to buy Beyond Burgers and Impossible Burgers, and that's how we save the world. And that's how we save the environment. And I'm sorry, but that narrative is completely false. It's just lining the pockets of these agrochemical corporations further. It is 100% not true. They come packed in four packs, packed in plastic.

And I don't care if it's plant plastic. Plant plastic turns to microplastics that end up in the ocean, the same as petroleum plastics. Like to say, if you go and you made plastic out of canola oil, or you made plastic out of diesel, or you made plastic out of petroleum, or you made plastic out of cord oil, it's all still plastic. It all still is endocrine interrupters. It still kills fish. Like there's nothing. I actually transferred to plastic cups in my restaurant

and everybody was like, why did you do that? And I said, because it's greenwashing. We're growing GMO corn as a monocrop to make plastic cups that people can feel good about after their yoga class. And the reality is I can get a plastic cup that is 100% post-consumer recycled plastic. It's better. It's better. I'm making less plastic in the world. It's better. And people had a hard time with that. But the reality is there's also nowhere in LA to compost those plastic composted full cups.

And so I'm not sure that it makes a difference to do that. It just makes people feel better about it. So they don't feel as obligated to bring their own cup during COVID. You're not allowed to bring your own cup, but. That's contributing to a lot of other issues right now. Oh, don't get me started because with the everything's to go, everybody's like, oh, we're saving the planet because people aren't driving during COVID.

I own a restaurant and my to go where is up. It's so big that we had to create an extra different line and separate it out because managers were going to not get their bonuses because controllables were so out of control because it's such a big portion of everything. So, and the thing is, is like, just everybody's saying like, oh, we're not driving. Okay, great, we're not driving. That we should drive less. We should ride a bike.

I 100% agree with that. But when we eat everything out of a styrofoam or a plastic or a box that's paper or a plastic or a box that's paper or a plastic lined container. Think about how much more trash we made in 2020 than we did in 2019. Yeah, it's infuriating. It's crazy pants. So we can't just, again, it's about the system.

We have to have a systems mentality. When you think about your body, it's a system. And we can't just like give it a pill and keep eating canola oil over here. We have to, if you want to go with medicine, if that's urgent, but you still need to take the steps to give your body. Food should be something that's feeding your body, not something that your body has to overcome and survive. And food is something that we have to overcome and survive at this point. It's not something that's feeding your body. And I noticed that once you train your palate to what is nourishing you, I sit around a table with people almost every night

that get to eat food off of the farm. And it's like, it's palatable. You can hear people like they're making noises that you don't make when you're just eating. I mean, it's like, oh my God. The other day, my husband was like, stop. My body's just really enjoying this food. Don't talk.

I'm like, okay, great. But it's like, it's so, you can feel it. Like we made these roasted beet, roasted root vegetable bowls with the turmeric rice and fresh sprouts on top and a tahini dressing. And people were like making verbal noises with their mouths. Like, oh my God, this is so good. This is so good this is so good and i've had multiple people say from the csa or what having stuff from the farm and saying like i my body i felt there was something in this food there was something in this that my body was like i need more of that

but we have to train our body to even pick up on that because we're so uh disconnected and trained we're trained to these other things a quick funny story is i grew up in a small town and there was i didn't eat fast food because we were vegan and then a taco bell came to town and there was a lot of propaganda when i was in high school about taco bell having vegan options and this, yeah. I remember that too. It was big Taco Bell vegan options propaganda. And I remember starting to get the seven-layer burrito with no cream and no cheese, and this was like a big thing. And I remember having a conversation with my mom. I'm like 16. I'm like, Mom, there must be something in.

And I was like, rice and beans that my body really needs because I'm like always craving Taco Bell. Like, no, it was an MSG. Like MSG is in it. And that's why I was craving it. But because I grew up in a house where we thought about food and everything, I was thinking of it like,

I mean, maybe I'm just not getting enough protein and beans and rice is a complete protein or whatever. Like, I really didn't know at 16 that it was. And my mom, my mom was like way down the conspiracy rabbit hole at all times. So my mom was like, oh, you know, they're putting some chemicals in that to get you addicted. You shouldn't be eating that stuff. And she wasn't. She turns out she was like, turns out she was right about a lot of stuff.

I had to apologize about telling her to stop sending me emails a couple of years ago. She, no, yeah, she's, she's, she's awesome. She's a ayahuasca shaman in Hawaii. Damn, I might have to go visit her in Hawaii. I've been wanting to do ayahuasca. Oh yeah, awesome. She's, she has a church in Hawaii. It's awesome.

That's amazing. Okay, I might, I might want to talk to you about that later. So for people listening, what are some things that they can start doing in order to be a part like a very vital part of this movement, whether that be, you know, buying CSA boxes or and I know you talked a lot about this, um, buying farms and being able to grow your own food, but let's say for someone that really just does not have the ability to do that, what are some other things that they can do that will make a big impact? I know lots of people don't have the ability to do that. I'm not, I'm just saying, I also know we live in LA. There's people that can. Oh, absolutely. I mean, I have a couple of friends actually that have been saying this year, they're like, wow, more than ever, I want to buy land and go out. So there are people that are definitely talking about it, but I think that going to the farmer's market and there's really awesome things with the farmer's market and like snap and like, even if you're on food stamps and there's all these ways that you can still buy local organic produce from your farmer's market, even if you're on food stamps. And the farmer's markets give you, is it double?

I think it's double. There's like, because it's a program to support farmers and to support people, if you were to get $10 at the grocery store, it gets to be double. And it's $20 at the farmer's market. That's a great incentive. And we are in the process of being able to take SNAP for our boxes. So we're going to be able to take food stamps for our boxes. The inspector, actually I got to check about that because she came out last two weekends ago and did the inspection. So hopefully that's going to be happening. But buying from your local farmers market, buying from your local farmers, buying from farmers that have. Whether you believe in climate change or not, whether you think that climate change is a fear-mongering thing

or you think it's real, either way, this is separate from that. What I'm saying is the way we till our soil, it blows away into the ocean. It blows away into whatever, and it goes away. We have to change the way we're managing our soil. Yeah. So that is the one thing. And if you live here in L.A., you can be super lazy and support super hard because I will deliver a box to your door every single week of the most nutrient dense fresh produce you've ever had. And you get to experiment and play with seasonal veggies.

And so you can do that here in the Los Angeles area. And I'm sure there's CSAs everywhere. Ours is not a traditional CSA. You don't have to pay for a year. You could pay month to month or week to week. But, and we did really great during COVID, but now that people are getting more comfortable and going out, they are not supporting as much. They're more inclined to go to the

grocery store, but I highly encourage people to continue to support the local farms that they supported through the pandemic. Cause remember that your farmer had to gear up and take care of everybody when the supply chains, the food supply chains were bad in certain areas, when there was just not enough food, the grocery stores were empty. Your farmer geared up and they planted more food. And as I know, as someone who has 30,000 onions in the ground and my box is sales are declining or 20,000 cabbage heads in the ground or I mean 20,000 tomatoes in the ground and people are changing their buying habits. That's hard for us because we were we geared up the farmers geared up to support

try to remember to continue to support them even Even if you feel safe at Whole Foods now, I think that you still want to support those people that worked as a frontline worker through the entire pandemic and felt safe enough to drive around and deliver to your house and take care of you during that time. Let's not abandon our farmers now that we feel safe at the grocery store. Well, and there's a lot of different arguments to support that as well, because your food traveled less. If you're buying from the grocery store, that produce, some of that produce

traveled all the way from New Zealand. I've seen apples from New Zealand in the grocery store. So if you're looking at it from an environmental perspective, also from a nutrient-dense perspective, you're getting so much more nutrients in your food when you're buying locally. And even a budget perspective, I've been buying your CSA boxes, which I'm obsessed with, by the way,

and they last me up to two weeks, and I get more produce than I, I mean, I usually end up inviting friends over to make dinner with me because I'm like, yo, I have so much vegetables right now, like, I need people to come help me eat it. And for $35, I could never get that much produce in the grocery store. And it is organic. It's more nutrient dense than the food that I've been buying from the grocery store in years. And I just, I cannot speak highly enough about it. So if you guys are in LA, definitely check out the CSA boxes. I, I appreciate your enthusiasm and I hope that more people are enthusiastic towards it because it really is is currently a labor of love.

But I think that it can, I think it can work for the farm and I think it can be profitable, but we really do just need to scale our numbers up a little bit. And I do think that it is a really good value. And I think it encourages people to eat more vegetables, eat more leafy greens. Yeah. And so that all being said, please support your farmers wherever you are, please. And as far as the food, like if you're getting apples right now

at the grocery store, they were either grown in New Zealand or they were kept in cold storage since October of last year. Either way, why are you eating apples right now? Like this is not the season for apples. In our CSA box right now, the fruit is, we have strawberries, we have citrus, we have avocados, which are our fruit, but the fruit is always going to be seasonally relevant to where you live. And that's important.

I always talk about, I don't ever crave pomegranates when it's not pomegranate season. But as soon as it's pomegranate season, I'm like this, I just can't get enough pomegranates because there's like something in it that I need that time of year. And there's something about in-season fruit

that is just, it feels so good in your mouth. And the other thing I want to say about that is someone the other day told me they got my CSA box and my avocado never turned ripe. And I was like, you say never too soon. The average avocado in the grocery store is 30 to 40 days out from being picked. So sometimes an avocado, if it's fresh, we just picked it, may take 30 days to ripen. But if you get a box every two weeks or whatever, you'll always have avocados coming along. But the woman called me back and she said, actually, you're right. It ripened like a little bit later, but to say it never ripened, but a lot of food loses, avocados, obviously they need to ripen, but there's a lot

of food that loses its nutrient density in the first 48 hours. For every 48 hours, it loses some of its minerals, some of its nutrients. And so when you're ordering from any of the CSAs around you, or if you're in LA and you're ordering from Soil Heart Farm, you know that that produce was either picked that morning or the day before. And that's what you know. And it's going to last in your refrigerator. Now, granted, we don't dip it in any kind of weird chemicals. So some food lasts a long time in your fridge because it's been dipped in something to kill any pathogen that may start to make it decompose. We do not. But we need those microbes for our gut.

We need those microbes for our gut. So if you want to sterilize your food, that's on you, but we don't sterilize it for you. I love that. And then you think about, let's say your tomatoes are something that you bought at the grocery store. They were probably on a truck for like two weeks before they got to your grocery storeroponically. And hydroponic tomatoes, when you take nitrates and you don't have it go through the microorganisms and the microorganisms that feed it to the roots and have it go process it and make it into food for the plant, it's still just nitrates. So the roots of the plant just take up the nitrates. And yes, your plant grows crazy big. I was a pot grower.

I love hydroponics for that when I did that. But when you take nitrates and it just goes up into the tomato and now it's still nitrates, nitrates are carcinogenic. A tomato has lipids and all this stuff that's cancer fighting that grew in soil. And a tomato that was grown in hydroponics is carcinogenic and so there's no question whether we should be eating soil grown food or hydroponic food i'm glad we have the technology and if it all hits shit it's the fan and we're all like cyborg as we want to be living in cities and growing in towers and like huge buildings in New York City. I guess we're glad that we have that technology,

but we have an opportunity to farm alongside of nature and help reverse the damage we've done, draw down carbon and build soil. We have that opportunity right now, but we, the people that are willing to do it can only do it if people like you and other people out there are willing to support our mission and think that our mission has value. And I don't want to fight with anybody on the internet. And if you don't like what we're doing, there's lots of other places to buy food. But if you are at all inspired about being in growing food with nature, being in nature and eating food that is grown in healthy

soil without any fertilizers, pesticides, or anything like that, That's what I'm providing. And I need people to want to buy that for it, for us to keep doing that. Yeah. Well, love that so much. I want to ask you one more question that I ask everyone before we go. What are your health non-negotiables? Those can look like so many different things. Like for example, for me, I only buy organic produce. So basically anything that comes into my house is only organic. And I make sure that I have greens with at least one meal a day. And I always make sure that I have vegetables with every meal. And those are kind of non-negotiables for me that no matter what, I always make sure happens for me every day that, that provide, that are, that help me with,

with staying on track with my health. And so what would be yours? I eat greens every day. I didn't know. I never thought of it as like a health non-negotiable, but I eat greens every day. My kids, so my kids can't watch a screen until after dinner, after dark, after vegetable and after a bath. So I guess for my kids, they have to eat a vegetable to get screen time among other things but that um so that's a non-negotiable in my house that the kids can't just like eat some toast and some crackers and go upstairs and get to watch their tv show um so that is a non-negotiable i'm a little bit of a roundup nazi like i it even sometimes causes fights with my husband

when he's like ordering takeout. And I'm like, I don't want to eat that. I don't eat flour out. I don't eat like flour out in the world. I don't want to eat food that was sprayed, grains that were sprayed directly with that. So we don't eat 100% of the flour that comes into our house. If it's pancake mix, if it's crackers, if it's anything, it's organic.

So I think it goes without saying that all the vegetables that come into my house are from the farm. So they're all organic. And then in the restaurants during the pandemic, we had to make some adjustments of what was available and we had some non-negotiables. So we because it was crazy with the food chain, supply chain and stuff for a little while there. And so the non-negotiables are we were never going to have any of the dirty dozen not organic in the restaurant. So no spinach, no none of those were going to be no flour no grains there were going to be and um no flowers no grains none of the dirty dozens no strawberries uh i can't i think that that was like oh and no no root vegetables um because they sit in the

the ground and we were getting the smallest potatoes, like you couldn't believe. And people were like, your French fries are so ugly. They're wilty. There wasn't a French fry bigger than this big. And I was like, oh my God, I don't know. How can I be my commitment in the world and make my customers happy?

That's hard. So that's my non-negotiable. And can I just make a request? And this is a request I make of the consumer is life is driven by consumers. So if you're willing to eat a lemon that's not perfectly yellow or has a tiny little scratch on it from a branch, farmers can make a living wage. If you're willing to eat an orange that's not perfectly orange and it has a scratch on it, we throw away so much food because the consumer is driving the

demand. And Walmart and Vons and all the packing houses are driving these demands. So my request is, if you look at the produce in my box, it's fresh and it's delicious, but they're not perfect. And my request is that consumers remember that nature is not perfect and nature is not uniform. And why do we think that every peach, when you get a case of peaches, organic, even if they're organic peaches at Costco, every peach is the same size and they fit in those little pockets. Somebody somewhere is throwing away all the rest of the peaches that were not that size. So my request is buy from local farms, buy things that are ugly. I don't necessarily mean from ugly produce and I don't think they're ugly, but they're different. And it's ridiculous when we have to throw away huge percentages of our crops.

Naval oranges grow awesome in Southern California, but nobody grows them anymore because people will buy naval oranges with scratches on them because they're considered a peeling orange. Everybody still grows Valencia oranges because Valencia oranges are used for juice and it doesn't matter what their skin looks like. Yeah. So think about that. That's crazy. Like consumer demand drove it completely out of Southern California because we have too much wind and they get little scratches on them.

A little scab on the skin that you're not going to eat doesn't matter. Same with avocados. Well, that's just natural. That's literally how they grow in nature and i and we've again like i've said many times in this episode we have become so disconnected from nature that we don't even know what real food looks like when it's growing out in nature because everything is so commercialized now people ask me like so everything here is organic and like at the restaurant and i'll say yeah so what does that mean like tomatoes don't go to factories I mean what do you know tomatoes don't go to what like tomatoes don't go

what does that mean like people don't even know or I'll say hey guys when people are promoting all these fake meats and everything or that now there's gonna be printer meat that they use like chicken cells that they grew and they they're printing chicken nuggets and stuff. And I'm like, hey, guys, this is not a win for the vegan community. And people on the internet will say, who cares if it's made in a lab? Who cares if it's made in a sterile environment?

Shouldn't food be made in a sterile environment? And they're twisting it. But what I'm saying is, food should come from the earth, not from a 3D printer. Food should not be made in mass, huge quantities and stamped into patties and put into plastic containers. I want everybody to remember that just 100 years ago,

people grew their own food. Yeah. And the further we get away from nature, the closer we get to disease. that just a hundred years ago, people grew their own food. Yeah. And, you know, the further we get away from nature, the closer we get to disease, you know, mother nature knows always, and she provides us with everything that we need to feed and fuel ourselves. And it's every time that man intervenes, whether it's, you know, with the industrial agriculture that we were talking about, or so many other different ways that we intervene, instead of just learning to work with nature, you know, with the industrial agriculture that we were talking about, or so many other different ways that we intervene instead of just learning to work with nature. You know, for some reason, we've gotten this concept as humans that we think that we know better. But time and time again, if history has proved anything, it's that the further we get away from nature, the sicker we

become. Always. And here's the thing that we know of. There's three to ten zeros. That's how many viruses that we know of. And people think that we can sterilize and vaccinate against nature. We cannot. It's by the grace, we say by the grace of God, that human beings evolved on this planet, but it's really by the grace of viruses and microbiome that trained our evolution. Viruses evolve us. They are our friends.

They tell our bodies how to evolve for the next generation. It is by the grace of God in the shape of microbiome that we exist on this planet. And it is important for us to remember that that microbiome will take us out as easily as it let us rise. Yeah. Wow.

I mean, I think that's a great way to end. That was really powerful. Okay, great. For everyone listening, where can they find you online and where can they find your farm as well? I'm in Fillmore, California, just outside of Los Angeles. We have a website. It's soaheart.com. You can sign up for the CSA there. We have an Instagram. It's at Soahart. And I have an Instagram at Chef Molly. And the restaurant is The Kind Sage. And we have four restaurants.

There's one in Agora Hills, Echo Park, Pasadena, and Culver City. So whatever part of Los Angeles you're in. And we have our own app. Please don't order through the third parties. They take 30%. And restaurants operate at super razor thin margins. We've invested highly in our own app and our own cars and our own drivers, giving people jobs. Please support, download the app and support us directly. Yes. I love that so much. Thank you so much for coming on. Thank you for being a food warrior. And the food revolution is going to look a lot of different

ways. And the only social justice is food justice. And so thank you for the work that you're doing. Thanks for listening to today's episode of the Real Foodology podcast. If you liked this episode, please leave a review in your podcast app to let me know. This is a resident media production produced by Drake Peterson and edited by Chris McCone. The theme song is called Heaven by the amazing singer georgie spelled with a j love you guys so much see you next week