Realfoodology - 6: Why Grass Fed Meat is Going to Heal Our Earth with Anya Fernald of Belcampo

Episode Date: October 14, 2020

On this weeks episode of The Realfoodolgy Podcast, I speak with Anya Fernald of Belcampo Meat about factory farming, the kind of meat you want to be buying and why, the difference between grass fed and grass finished, climate change, how cows are fed plastic and why (!) and so much more! Show Note/Links: https://belcampo.com/ https://www.misfits.kitchen/ -NorCal Bakery, but they do nationwide shipping! https://www.instagram.com/belcampomeatco

On today's episode of the Real Foodology Podcast. we're eating, you know, our whole agricultural system is set up to effectively facilitate obesity in animals. And so it's not a head scratcher to me that we also culturally struggle with obesity. Hi guys, welcome back to another episode of the Real Foodology Podcast. That was a clip from today's guest, Anya Fernald, who started Belcampo, which is a regenerative farm in Northern California from where they ship their organic 100% grass-fed meat nationwide. Also, if you live in California and have had the pleasure of going to one of their restaurants, they have them up and down the coast of California in both LA and Northern California. And they have truly one of the best burgers I've ever had. And there's a reason why, why organic grass-fed meat tastes better than conventional factory

farmed meat. And you're going to find out why it tastes so good in today's episode. This is a jam-packed episode, just the way I like it. Anya is so amazing and informed. I thought I already knew a lot about this topic, but I learned so much. So many things that I had never even heard. We talk about factory farmed animals and the conditions that they live in, how they're fed candy and plastic and why, how climate change and the health of our bodies is connected, why the cost of grass fed pasture raised meat is worth the cost and so much more.

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real foodology for an extra 15% off your purchase. Thanks to neuro hacker for sponsoring today's episode. Anya, thank you so much for coming on today. Thank you for having me and reaching out on Instagram. It was really cool. Well, I'm a huge fan of Belcampo. I just love what you're doing. And I think this is such an important conversation to have right now, especially with everything going on with climate change and with our health. It's more important than ever.

So before we do anything else, why don't you first tell them kind of what you do, what Belcampo is? Awesome. I'm Anya Fernald. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Belcampo. We are a ranch-to-table meat operation. So the company produces seven species of livestock commercially on our ranches in Northern California. We have our own USDA-certified slaughterhouse, and we sell directly through e-commerce. We have a group of restaurants and butcher shops, and then we also sell it in a couple of different grocery stores. So amazing. I have to say that I eat at your restaurant probably at least a couple of times

a month. It's literally the best burger I've ever had in my life. Thank you. I just had one for lunch. Which one do you go to? I love, I think it's called the fast. Is it called the fast burger? The fast burger, yeah. With the keto bun. Yes, the keto bun is so great. And it's such a great story too. That product is made by a gentleman here in the Bay Area. He's an Egyptian immigrant, lost 400 pounds doing keto. He was in a wheelchair because he couldn't walk and really healed his own health issues with gluten-free and keto and developed this bakery. He actually just reached out to me on Instagram, and I was, wow, this product is spectacular.

He's a really precise and incredibly kind of like careful, thoughtful baker. So I just think in a good way, he's like a technician. His name is Mina. Just a fabulous product. just think he's a he's a in a good way he's like a technician um his name is Mina just fabulous product and it's just nice to be able to support local businesses immigrant owned businesses so it's a partnership and I think we've like you know he he's had some massive stability come into his business thanks to the relationship with Bo Campo um so it's just nice because I I do mostly keto for myself um I mean, actually all keto.

And I love it when I find a product like that, that kind of not too into like fake food in general, but every once in a while, like a product like that, where it's like you can really enjoy like a sandwich or a burger every once in a while and have it be out of something that's totally keto is great. So that product, I think the next step,

I want him to switch to making it with our beef fat in the bun. Oh, I love that idea. So I think that'll be even more delicious. So stay tuned. We'll get even better. Hey guys, I wanted to come in here with a little bit of a side note because after we recorded this interview, I actually found out that the baker that Anya is talking about is a local baker in LA and it's called Misfits Bakehouse. I didn't even know at the time when she was talking about it, but I recently got a shipment of their tortillas, their bread and cookies and brownies, and they're all keto paleo grain-free. And there's some of the best baked goods I've ever tried. I'm not even

joking. So I just wanted to come in here, give him a little bit of love. If you're in LA, definitely check it out. It's Misfits Bakehouse and go to their website and see. I have no idea if they ship nationwide, but hopefully they do. We have a large restaurant in Oakland, California, right on the East Bay. And we also have a restaurant in San Mateo, in the Hillsdale Mall. So it's like 20 minutes south of San Francisco. And those are both big format restaurants. So they're really beautiful, like dine-in experiences. Well, I have a feeling after this episode, everyone's going to be running to get your burger. Right on.

Yeah. So I wanted to have this conversation because I, so I went vegetarian about 13 years ago. And it was when I was first really learning about just the horrible factory farming conditions and the way that we treat the animals that we eat in this country. I was vegetarian for five years and then I realized how badly it affected my health. I got pretty sick. And that's when I started to really discover that it was not so much about the meat itself, but it was a way that we were treating them in these factory farm conditions and what we were feeding them. And that's when I started to get into grass fed and learning about the difference between like grass fed and grain fed. And so I wanted you to kind of talk about

that so that I want people to really understand why we want to go for grass fed and not grain fed. Absolutely. So you're very familiar, I'm sure your audience is too, with the concept of inflammation. Oh, yes. And so I think a good way to look at this is through the lens of inflammation. So grain for a cow is effectively a very inflammatory diet. Cows evolved with five stomachs where they digest really what I would call without judgment, low value food. So food that's very, very high in fiber and very low in calories. Grass, right? So these fibrous bulky grasses. So cows evolved eating and thriving on this grass. They were effectively the very bottom of the food chain. And the modern system switches them to eating a calorie-dense diet of seeds and other stuff. So when you have

five large stomachs that are designed to slowly digest high-fiber food and you pump it with this very nutrient-dense food, you get effectively an inflammatory response. Now, this isn't to say that humans have an inflammatory response to grains, although I understand many do. We as humans are monogastric, mono, one gastric stomach. So we have one stomach. And that's the same as chickens and pigs. And chickens and pigs, like us, are omnivores and carnivores, right? That chickens will eat other insects and other animals. Pigs, the same.

So animals, one stomach. That one stomach does a good job with very high density, nutrient dense foods. If you put like too much fiber in, you can also have an inflammatory response in that stomach, right? So there's different systems that are involved for different things. So if you look at a beef cow on a grain diet, you actually see like a lot of symptoms of a very inflamed system. One of them is the prevalence of E. coli. So E. coli is a disease for cows just like it is for humans. And it comes from animals that are sick.

So I actually thought that E. coli was just like part of cows and salmonella was part of chickens. And then if it ended up in humans, it made us sick. What I've learned in this industry is that those are actually things that make those animals very sick as well, right? So they get sick and have diarrhea and gas and nausea and crippling disease with E. coli in the same way that we do. They're more prevalent to have that. It's more common to have that in feedlot because they're in a context where they have a strong inflammatory response and their immune system is compromised.

Well, those animals are sick living in those feedlots. If you actually cut open the stomach of a feedlot beef, it's black and shiny and foul smelling. If you cut open the stomach of a grass-fed animal, and I can vouch for this because I've seen it in our plant. I mean, I am in the business of processing animals, but it's like, it looks like compost inside. It's green and kind of mulchy and it smells nice. Like it smells nice if you like to garden. I'm not saying it's like your next perfume, but like it smells decent. You know, it's not disgusting. It's not revolting.

And so that's interesting to me. You know, it's like, it's a, it's a healthy ecosystem within the animal. Now, what does that mean for you as a person? A, do you want animals that are super sick and densely packed and on concrete? No, right? So there's that ethical, whatever, energetic question. Then, but more functionally, just as somebody who cares about what they eat. I don't, you know, when you read like there's no corn and no soy in these animals, that's sort of less important to me because it's not like the cells from the soy can pass through the digestive tract and into the muscles of the meat.

Honestly, antibiotics can't pass through the digestive tract and into the muscles of the meat. There's other reasons why you should avoid antibiotics. I'll get into that. But it's not because the meat that's eaten or been injected with antibiotics has antibiotics in it, right? There isn't that transference. These bodies, our bodies, are miraculous at filtering stuff out of our food and turning it into consistent strong muscle.

The reason that you're going to be concerned is in the ratios of the different types of lipids in the meat. So this is actually something. There's some controversy around this now, and I'm going to make a stink about it soon on my platforms, which is, please make a stink about it here too. Okay. Well that people are claiming, Oh, you know, grass fed and grain fed. It's the same from a nutritional perspective. The omega three ratios are not, are not significantly affected. And that's actually not true. And I can say that because I've done the test with independent labs. Our meat on grass is a one to one, three to six ratio. The maximum I've ever seen it is a labs. Our meat on grass is a one-to-one, three-to-six ratio. The maximum I've ever seen it is a one-to-two, three-to-six ratio.

So that means that for every gram of omega-3s, there's one to two grams of omega-6s. Which is amazing. That's what you want. And that's what Wild Game has. And it's like in your diet, you're supposed to have a one-to-one ratio. And in the American bioavailable diet, like what's around for you as you eat your way through America, it's one to 30, right? Because we're so reliant on seed-based foods. Absolutely. And I want to explain to people that the reason that you want that ratio is because that's what helps keep inflammation at

bay. Because when you have higher incidences of omega-6s, that's when it starts leading to inflammation. You want higher omega-3s to omega-6s, that's when it starts leading to inflammation. You want higher omega-3s to omega-6s and you want them to be in a ratio, which is what she's talking about. So that one to six ratio is the human health ratio. In my independent tests, and we just actually buy meat at the grocery and then ship ours to a lab called Mario Labs, which is a very renowned lab. And we spend whatever, you know, 150, 200 bucks a sample. And every couple of months I get tested on this. I get our products tested just to monitor my own ratios. And we are one to one to one to two. And then our competitive set is anywhere

from one to 15 is the very best I've seen. And typically it's 120. So there's a lot of, there's certain people now are saying, oh, it's not really that meaningfully different. And the reason why is this. Some grass fed operators are feeding grass seed pellets to their animals. That's a technicality. It's cheaper than feeding grass, but it's a seed from grass. It has less omega-6s than corn, but it still doesn't produce the optimal ratio. And then there's also people who are straight up just not feeding what they say they're feeding because it's an unregulated industry.

So I think I read recently, sorry to interrupt you, but I want to, I want to see if you can confirm this. I read recently that sometimes they'll feed them candy, like expired candy, just candy bars. Yeah. And it's also, I mean, not just candy. It's also sawdust and plastic shavings. Wow. And I think about this too, especially for women, if you're looking at like endocrine function and hormone function, like you really want to stay away from BPAs. And you know I was talking about how animals can filter all the junk out of their food.

They can't filter the BPAs out though. Like we can't. Those end up in the musculature, in the fats, and the organs so yeah why would they feed them sawdust and plastic okay it's cheaper than throwing it away okay so the beef and confinement i mean they're they're feeding them they get the sawdust and the plastic as nutritional fiber they're being fed a diet that's so high in calories and dense that they that they can't process it. So they're fed this roughage in the form of plastic shavings and sawdust as roughage, right, to increase the fiber density. Yeah. God, that is infuriating. They're fed candy and Google cows and Skittles.

Every couple of years, there's a scandal about this and then everything just goes back to normal, you know. But when candy manufacturers have expired product or, you know, they do, like if they have a run where a machine's broken and so stuff ends up damaged for whatever reason, it's cheaper. Like a feedlot will come to your plant and pick that up for, you know, they'll pay you to pick it up. Otherwise, you actually have to pay to dispose of it. So as a producer, it's better for you. And then for the feedlot producers, it's cheaper than grain. So it's just a low cost. And actually, they're fed Skittles in their packages, M&Ms in their packages.

So they're fed a hugely mal- Wow. So then you've got plastic, so those packages on cheap candy are all just BPAs and thin plastic, thin pliable plastic. So it's a pretty rough- I mean, this is the thing. You need to look at meat and kind of most food broadly as being produced solely with the goal of being affordable. And it's kind of a noble goal. You know, it's kind of a noble goal. If

you take a step back, like there was a time in America where we had all these immigrants coming in that were from impoverished countries and were trying to build a new, and part of the whole American experience is like this abundance. You know, I think about it like having lived in Italy for a number of years where the meatballs are like in, you know, three quarters of an inch diameter and the meatballs in America are like three inches, right? So there's this culture of abundance and we love meat and culturally celebrate the fact that in America you got to eat all the meat you wanted. And we produce the most efficient meat production system in the world. It's an incredibly efficient system that produces for cost.

Yeah, but we are paying for it. And then it's kind of like, well, whatever else happens, happens. So we pay for it in our health, we pay for it in animals' health, and then the environmental impacts are disastrous. So getting back to why you should be concerned, that's that inflammatory marker of the three to six ratio. And that's really the key thing you can track to it. Now, there's a lot of other things that I can say as a cook and as an eater and as somebody

engaging with my customers really frequently that I've observed that's different. And those things are around the solubility of the proteins. Our proteins tend to be more soluble. So it's like there's less of that chewing on the meat. And I think it's typical of just slower, slow growing proteins tend to be finer and more soluble. So you never get that kind of like gritty chewing on the protein. And I don't know what the impact on your health is, but that's just saying that there's that kind of impact there. It's a better tasting burger. And the omega-6-3 thing, it's got a real impact on the cleanliness and the greasiness of the fat. I'm not sure if that's the sixes in it, but one thing I hear a lot from my customers is like, I eat your meat and I feel amazing right afterwards. I feel like I could go for a walk

or be active instead of having that like, that like bombed out feeling that you have sometimes if you eat a steak where you're like, oh my God, I got to lay down and rub my belly now for a while. Our meat tends to be kind of like you eat it. It feels like you drank a protein shake, you know, you assimilate it quickly. And I don't know the why of that. And this is unsubstantiated, right? This is just like eight years of running this business and talking to my customers. And people say like, yeah, you're more expensive, but I can taste the difference in the quality and I can feel it in how I feel after I eat your meat. Well, because you really take care of the animals and that speaks for itself, at least to me, you know, they're living their lives out on a pasture, eating what nature intended for them

to eat instead of eating a highly inflammatory diet. They're getting sunlight every day and they're not crammed into these tiny little spaces. I think about this a lot too. Just the way that they're treated and they're scared, they're basically their entire lives. They live in hell. Whereas if you think about like a pasture-raised grass-fed cow, it really only has one bad day. 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 or carbs and gives you tailored guidance to improve your

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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. Yeah. And I do think a little bit about that energetically too, in terms of the people. One thing that I read that, from somebody kind of more out there than I am in terms of messaging, but saying how many American women prefer chicken. Americans, most of the meat we eat in America is chicken. And we've got huge issues with kind of endemic anxiety among female Americans, right? And so this idea that, like, is this connected?

Like you have these highly anxious, confined chickens that are raised in the dark. They're deviate. Their beaks are cut off. They're eating a slurry. They gain weight extremely rapidly. They gain weight. Our chickens take eight to ten weeks to come to full weight. A conventional chicken is two weeks, right? I've seen photos of ones at the end when they're

being taken to the slaughterhouse where they can't even stand up. They're so big. Their breasts are so large and they're just overdeveloped. Well, there's a true inflammatory response because then you have another layer because we talked about the inflammatory impact of the diet. And the next layer is the inflammatory impact of just the cortisol environment, right? So you have animals with huge competition for resources, right? They're unwell. They're medicated with antibiotics that suppress their microbiome. And the reason that their microbiome is suppressed, it's an active verb there, like the producers will suppress the microbiome to enable faster weight gain. And so in the cases of chicken, my chickens raised outdoors compared to a confinement chicken,

it's the rate of growth is one quarter to one fifth the speed. And unlike the beef, so the beef, it's like we're eating grass, they're eating corn and candy. Okay. And the beef, the rate of growth in my operations is three quarters as fast. Okay, fine. It's different, right? But it's not massively different. Chicken, they're both eating grains. In the case of confinement animals, grains plus a little bit more garbage, in my case, cleaner grains, but not as substantially different as in the beef. And in there, the rate of growth is four to five times as fast in the conventional environment. So you have to be really careful about the chicken. It's very, very fast growing.

And, you know, the crazy thing is that you ever heard the Herbert Hoover quote from the Depression where he's like, in America there's going to be a chicken in every pot. It was like this quote, this very famous quote about the Depression. And the reason he said that, I always thought that it meant that it's like, oh, we're all going to have some food. And I learned that it was the same now as saying there's going to be filet mignon on every table because chicken was the most expensive per pound. It used to be the most expensive meat per pound, and now it's the cheapest per pound. And at a conventional grocery store, you can buy a whole rotisserie chicken for less than one pound of my chicken raw,

right? So my price difference is so much greater. And the reason I'm not like making, chicken is actually my lowest margin product. We don't, we barely make money on it. And the reason why it's so much more expensive is it just takes way longer. So I also think for your own body and your own health, it's like, do you want to eat the meat of an animal that grows at five times its natural rate? And then you wonder why you struggle with weight issues, right? Like we wonder as a culture why it's so hard and why we don't have like a calories in, calories out understanding of weight. I say it's like we're eating, you know, our whole agricultural system is set up to

actively facilitate obesity in animals. And so it's not a head scratcher to me that we also culturally struggle with obesity, right? Yes, absolutely. I mean, you made such amazing points there. I wanted, so yes, I wanted to go back really quickly so that someone listening, if they don't understand the difference, because there is a difference between grass fed versus grass finished. And I wanted you to explain that a little bit so that when people are shopping at the store, they know exactly what to look for. Absolutely. So grass fed means that the animal has eaten some grass during its life. Yeah. So if you say grass fed, it means that

can be one day that it's fed on grass. Okay. And typically all American beef is on grass when it's with its mom. So the first stage of the conventional beef operations was called a cow-calf operation. And they're typically on pretty impoverished, low-quality land. They have mother cows that they impregnate annually and that drop one calf a year, nurse that calf till five or six months, and then it's sold to a stocking operation, which then goes into a feedlot. So in that operation, that first six months, they're on grass. So many of these grass-fed claims are simply that in the first six months of the animal's life,

when it was still on its mother's udder, it also had access to grass. It has zero impact on the fat quality and the health quality of the animal later on, however. In a grass-finished operation, it means that the entirety of the life cycle is on grass. Really meaningful impact on fat quality. There's a really great study out of Chico State by a woman named Cindy Daly, which showed that there's actually a change in the fat ratio that's very significant with just like 10 to 15 days on grain at the end of an animal's life. Here's why it's important for you as a consumer to know, which is for us in the ranching industry, getting an animal to be what's called a fat cattle. So fat, like fully filled out so that when you cut open the steak, there's marbling in the steak, right? And

when you eat the brisket, it's got a fat cap on the brisket, all the things that consumers want, like we want some fat on our product, it tastes better. It's also good for you. It's good for you. You want fat, you're very lean beef is suspect. So we look for what's called fat cattle. To get that animal fat, there's a nutrient load that's needed at the end of its life. It's effectively going through adolescence, and then it's coming coming into adulthood and you're trying to get it all the way to being a young adult. And to do that, you need a heavy calorie load. The fastest and easiest way to do that is to feed a grain, right? And that'll get it fat very fast. That's a mix of it being inflamed. Yep. Inflammatory fats.

So doing it on grass is really hard why imagine if you were trying to gain 15 pounds and i was like here you go there's this great like spinach subscription i'm gonna get you and then there's another one where i'm like here's this ginormous bag of fritos i'm gonna have it delivered every day if you were desperate to gain 15 pounds which would you opt for i mean the fritos okay all day All day long. So the more calorie dense things are, the easier they are to consume and the easier it is for us to gain weight. It's the same thing with cows, but from a rancher's perspective, having to get an animal from being an adolescent to being fat cattle on this very lean, very high fiber diet that is grass, right?

And grass has bricks. It has natural bricks is the technical word for like sugar in plants, like use it for grapes and stuff, but it has sweetness, especially if it's peak grass in the, in the peak of season, but in places, especially like in California and Colorado, where we have seasonal grass season, it's hard. It takes a long time. And you often have to move animals to irrigated pastures. You have to move them around from place to place. They clean up one field. They put on a little bit of weight. You move into another field. Very labor intensive, very calorie intensive. So that is what adds the extra cost. And it adds a good like six months of life to the animal because it's that much slower to gain that weight in the

natural diet. But it's exactly like people. You know, I think about the times in your life when you're eating a lot of processed grain-based foods, you're not moving much and you don't get any natural light, right? Compared to times when you're outside moving a ton, getting a lot of natural light and eating a very natural diet. Like when did you gain the weight? In the former scenario, right? Exactly. So that's what it's like for the animal. So putting them in this high cortisol, high stress environment, feeding them effectively a bad diet, you get the weight gain and the weight gain is what you're selling. You know, you sell meat by the pound. So you're effectively as a farmer disincentivized. farmer, I mean, anybody in my industry on the supply side, I've looked at my cost of production and it's like, for the case of a chicken, it's five times expensive to grow a chicken the way

we do it. In the case of a cow, it's like two to three times expensive. But I can't even claim that price back from the consumer, right? If I was to charge $40 a pound for ground beef or something, people would be like crazy, right? So the way I can claw back some of that is I can sell direct. Right. So I pay fewer people. I pay fewer middlemen and I use those savings to pay for better farming. Right. So that's the kind of that's the rub, though.

It's very difficult for people like me to play in conventional channels because our ingredients themselves are way more costly. And this isn't just Belcampo. I mean, there's a dozen farms I can think of right around the Bay Area that are usually at a smaller scale. We're a pretty small operation, but in the regenerative space, we're a big fish. And there's a lot of smaller operations as well out there that do it. But for all of us, it's effectively like a labor of love because it just doesn't make as much sense economically as doing things that consolidated faster, like inflammatory way. Right. Like it's a faster way. It's a faster way to make money.

Well, we're paying for it not only in our health, but also with climate change. And this is something I watched a documentary last week called Kiss the Ground. And it is incredible. Everyone listening, please go watch it immediately. It's on Netflix. And I didn't know too much about regenerative farming before, but it really seems to be the only way that we're going to get through this, through climate change. Because I feel like you're going to have a much better way of explaining this than I can. But from what I understand, it pulls the carbon out of the atmosphere with the way that we're farming. Is that correct? Absolutely. And on our farm, we started tracking carbon sequestration in our own soil

in 2013 with a third party called the Soil Carbon Project. Google them. It's a reputable third party organization. And six years later, we tracked all 13 samples had carbon sequestration and 11 of the 13 were like significant increases in carbon in the soil. So we've already tracked from the atmosphere into the soil. And so when we started farming, I mean, the land that Belcampo operates on now wasn't farmed regeneratively prior. So basically our baseline was like a non-regenerative farm and six years in significant gains in carbon sequestration. And that's like I'm even saying like for Belcampo, we're a pretty commercial operation. We're doing things the right way, but we're not like the most radical, you know, on the leading edge of doing every single thing possible. Like we're going to try things when they're a little bit more like at scale. So our operation though is leading the edge in terms of regenerative,

but we're not even like the woo, very, very bleeding edge. Right. And we, we still are showing really meaningful changes. So I, I mean, it's amazing to me that the power in agriculture and the power in livestock, because livestock are crucial to pastures that regenerate. And regenerative, just broadly, the definition is agriculture that's increasing soil fertility and health. And so instead of taking extractive soil fertility and health, so extracting it is like you're going to be using nitrogen to add different fertility later on. You're going to be tilling. You're going to be using lots of water. You're going to be doing annual crops, which means like you're planting every year, harvesting every year. You're going for maximum short-term yields. I think of it like this.

Like, imagine if you were like, oh my God, I've got this insane like month of work ahead. And I'm your friend. You're like, Anya, should I just like, should I just drink like 20 high balls a day and like, you know, go hard, pump it out and just do this? Or should I like rest up now, get massages, like get a workout program going, commit to going to bed by nine every month, you know, every night, whatever. Like you're like, do it thoughtfully and intentionally. So regenerative approach is that where it's like, do you want to just go to the effing wall and like get everything out of this that we can right now? And then who cares what happens afterwards? That's the conventional model. And our model is like, well, let's think long-term. Great. This next month is important, but what's more important is that we're around in five years with the same plot of land doing well. And, you know, it comes from a different

time too, because in the olden days, like if, if I was a farmer, I would be pretty damn certain that my great, great, great, great, great grandchild would be farming that same land that I was farming. So I was pretty damn vested in that land being fertile and healthy. You know, that was like how, how things worked is that we were thinking long-term about the soil fertility as an asset, you know, as an effectively like annuity. We're treating soil health as if it's an annuity. It's going to pay it forward and sustain us for generations to come. Did you know that 50% of Americans are deficient in vitamin A, vitamin C, and magnesium? And nearly 40% of people in the U.S. are B12 deficient and about 42% of the U.S. population is vitamin D

deficient. We're ironically overfed and undernourished in this country. And that's really thanks to our diets of highly processed foods and pesticides that we spray that are killing the very ecosystem of the soil that plays a key role in the nutrient component of our food. So even our fruits and vegetables have less nutrients than they once did. I like to believe in the inherent good of people. And I think when we first started down this track of doing agriculture, the way the industrial agriculture that we do now, I think that we had good intentions. We thought that it was going to feed the world. And we really thought we didn't think about the impact that it would have. But now that we're seeing this impact on our climate and on our health, we do need to change it. And I know that

it's really expensive, but is it possible to do this on a larger scale? I know that it's more expensive, but if we see more farmers doing it, is it going to bring the cost down altogether? I don't know if we need, if that means we need to change subsidies that we're paying to farmers or how do we fix it? That's a really good question. I mean, the first piece is we're going to have to spend more on food. Yeah. Right now we spend 8%. We spend a historically low percentage of our household budget on food. Compared to other countries. And compared to our own selves 30 years ago. We spend one third of what we used to spend on food as a proportion of total income. Okay. So, and this is what is feeding ourselves. This is quite literally what gives us life. And we, we act like it's, you know, something that we're like, not,

we don't have enough time to worry about it, which is insane to me. It's an afterthought. Yeah. I mean, it just also thinking long-term about your own vitality. Absolutely. You know, like I get people ask me all the time, I'm like, Oh my God, do you eat like this all the time? And I don't even eat that crazy, but it's like, I eat all, I cook all my own food. I eat very natural. Like, and it's like, of course I do. It's like, I only like, God only gave me one body. Like I'm, I'm here for the longterm. Like I want to, I want to thrive in my skin. And like, I think I want to be able to jump up in the morning and move. And that's like, you need to think about your own vitality as your biggest asset, you know, cause it's like

a source of joy and, and energy. And I feel like food is your energy. And so you have to really look at that as a priority, but it's interesting to me too, because I do think there's some categorical issues about expense around food that we are funny about. So here I am, I'm drinking a Topo Chico, right? Another thing I love to drink is like a kombuchas, right? These are like, like California lady things, right? Where we were happy to spend like, and then if I see like coconut water kefir in a store, I'm like, Ooh, I got to buy that.

And it's like $12, you know? And I am not the only one that does this. Right. And I've like, I I've slowed my roll on beverages. Cause I looked at what it was costing me, but you know, I'll happily drop like nine or $10 for some cool beverage. That's got like 40 calories, but then, and, and, and lots of people will, but then, then they'll look at 699 for a pound of ground beef. I'm like, Oh my God, why is your stuff so expensive? So there's some of it's sort of of funny to me because we have like some allocation, you know, or I'll drop like $15 on a side salad at a restaurant.

Or someone will spend like $8 on a latte and then complain that their eggs are $8. So there's a thing, right, that we have to – there's an opportunity for growth for us as a culture to think a little more critically about what it took to make something and what's the value that we should associate with that. You know, so if I think about beef, I'm like, well, an animal had to live and die. So there's like a psychic energy around that. And then also it's like four years of life cycle, right? And grassland and nature and sun and water. Now, coconut water also plants that to live and die, but it's a shorter cycle, right? So think a little bit about the weight of the product

and how you proportionally, how you think about things. Because I think that there's also, like we fall for sizzle pretty quick. You know, we see stuff at the grocery store, it's got a cool package and it's in the 27 cents of ingredients and it's $6. And we're like, that's great, $6. But think critically, empower yourself to think critically. It's like, is that really worth that? And we tend to look for things that are low calorie, but in some ways look for things like if they're natural and good, like if it's butter, it's like there's a lot of nutrition in that, right?

So if it's a jar of ghee or a jar of lard or of suet or whatever, and it's expensive because it's handmade and it's from a good animal, that's actually something you should really think about. Like what's, what's that, what's that, what should that cost? How long will it last? You know, is this a snack or something that's in my pantry for two months and I'm going to dig away at it, right? So there's one kind of framework to think about. The other framework I think culturally is that if we start to look at food more in like the wellness quadrant for our expenditures, we might feel differently about it. I see people now needing to, and I'm among them, I supplement. And it's like, we need to supplement because we're eating nutritionally impoverished foods.

So can we collapse some of our expenses instead of spending $30 for an awesome organic collagen powder that's going to last two weeks. Like what about if we spent like $30 or even like on a chuck roast with a lot of collagen in it? You know, like there's some, you could get more yield, more calories. And you know, there's an actual way to look at things like, okay, what am I trying to get out of this food? Is this the optimal way to spend this money? You know, that's a challenge that I would say. And that's a challenge. I think there's an opportunity for growth for me in this. I think all of us can think more critically about those expenses. Well, and I think about this a lot, too.

We eat way more meat in this country than we need to. And when I was really, really on a budget and I, you know, I was just getting into eating really healthy. And I mean, I mean, it was the brokest I'd ever been in my life. And it was at the same time I was just getting into eating really healthy. And I mean, I'm, I mean, it was the brokest I'd ever been in my life. And it was at the same time I was learning about all of this and the need to buy pasture raised and grass finished and those kinds of meats. And all of a sudden I was like, Oh crap, you know, these are so much more expensive. However, I would spend the extra money on that meat and I would just eat less of it because we don't mean to eat as much as

we've been conditioned to eat in this country. Yeah. Yeah. And we also throw away 40 to 50% of meat that we produce in this country because we do tend to overproduce, you know, and we tend to have like a buffet mentality, which is like, it's good if there's leftovers and it feels abundant, you know? Um, but you know, so the first part of it is like, sadly, let's just rip the bandaid off and just say I'm going to say it really directly. We either need to eat way less meat or spend more on meat. That's the first step. Second step is that because the problem is that with scale, regenerative agriculture is increasingly complex. It's not an industrial system, you know. So when you're talking about moving animals from pasture to pasture to facilitate optimal weight gain and natural foodstuffs, OK, that's amazing.

That's what we need to do. It's really it's not something where you just say the bigger it gets, the easier it's going to get. You have to have people who know how to move animals around. You have to have systems to be able to segregate pastures and understand optimal grazing. You know, these animals, because of development, you can't just walk from pasture to pasture and there's not like a million acres of prairie somewhere where you can just let them go with their ear tags on them and then corral them up at the end of six months like we used to do. Right. So there's a, it is, unfortunately, it's like a fairly high friction production system. So there isn't like a turnkey way to say, well, let's make this big enough. But there are for pigs and chickens, absolutely more scalable solutions because they're based on, it can be based on feeding organic grain. And then the other piece

is that, you know, you mentioned subsidies and that, you know, changing the subsidy system isn't going to meaningfully reduce the price of regenerative meat, but it is going to level the playing field because regenerative products are competing against products that are effectively almost free. So if you think about, if I was to take scenario A is a cow that I buy and I park it in my backyard and I, you know, get corn delivered that's been held in a silo before that it was, you know, cut with a tractor that was powered by gas, before that was planted with a tractor that was powered by gas and fertilized with nitrogen by tractors or airplanes powered by gas. And then it has to be trucked to me and I'm feeding it to this animal in its box.

The other system is that I let an animal out on my backyard and I pick it up four years later, right? Move it around a little bit. And in our American system, that first scenario is cheaper. And that is confusing to me, right? How can you have to have a product that's like fed in a food grade grain, right? Corn that's been chemically farmed, processed multiple times, trucked, harvested, stored, bagged, unbagged. I mean, there's all these things that happen to that corn and then it gets taken, then it has to be actually delivered to the animal. How can that be so much cheaper than just letting the cow move around, eat grass? Eat the grass. How can that be so much cheaper than just letting the cow

move around, eat grass, eat the grass. And you brought up a really good point that I was wanting to touch on. We grow the majority of our grains and our food grown, um, wheat, corn, and soy. We actually, or the grains we feed to our livestock, we feed them. They eat more of our grains than we do as the humans, which has always been so like what you were saying. It's so crazy and backwards to me because we don't eat grass. So let's let them eat the grass and we'll save the grains for us and we'll grow less grains and we can save on the cost of that. Absolutely. And that's, that's the kind of that, that was the miracle of American industrial agriculture. You know, after the Second World War, there was this whole sort of transformation of the munitions industry into fertilizer industry.

So they're both nitrogen based. Right. And so when we were scratching our heads about what to do with this vast munitions infrastructure that we had built for the Second World War, fertilizer was like a nascent industry at the time, didn't have any scale, right? It was very niche and specialized. And what was used as fertilizer was animal poop, right? That when spread out and not confined in a lagoon is actually pretty great for the environment. So what we did is transformed these munitions factories into fertilizer and that started kicked off this vastly increased capacity around growing wheat and corn. And the subsidy system was effectively, you know, like, let's guarantee that we always have these

grains. There's eight subsidized products in the U.S., right? Only eight. So the idea, like, the subsidy system is it's wheat, corn, soy, cotton, rice, oats. I don't know. There's two more. But there, there, there's a mix of like what are considered like essential crops, right? I think it's sorghum is one of them. It's kind of a weird one. Oh, that's random. Oh, probably for beer. And for everyone listening, take note, all of those that we subsidize, we see those foods in everything and all of our processed foods across the board, especially corn, soy. It's a huge reduction in the cost. And there's no, so if you look at Europe, right, the way that they subsidize farmers is that all

farmers get the same tax break. It doesn't matter what you produce. How it should be. You could be producing really fancy things like truffles or wine. You could be producing, you know, like safflower oil. It doesn't matter. You get the same tax break. Because then it allows for diversity in our food system. Our subsidies, like that's the problem is we've really like, and we've taken the least healthful foods. We put them at the bottom of the food pyramid because it's the other crazy thing. You know this, you're in the space, but it's like, we, in all of our marketing materials, it's from the government about what's healthy to eat. They're talking about the subsidized crops, right? And so there's a marketing effort to say, you know, eat these. I mean,

I mean, some of the marketing stuff from like the American Diabetics Association saying, make sure you get like six servings of bread a day, right? I mean, there's crazy vested interest in encouraging people to eat in this way. Absolutely. And think about it. We use these grains to fatten up our cows so that we can send them to slaughter faster. So what do we think they're doing to our bodies on such a massive scale when we're eating so much of it? So, you know, we barely touched on this, but I want to talk a little bit more because I'm so fired up about regenerative farming now after seeing Kiss the Ground. Can we explain to people the difference and why

regenerative farming is so much better for our climate? Because there's so much, this is really bothering me a lot right now. There's so much conversation around climate change and meat being such a huge factor of that, but we're completely leaving out a really important component of that is that it's not inherently the meat. It's the way that we're doing our, the way that we're doing our, the way that we're processing our meat in this country and growing it. So can you talk a little bit about that so people can understand the difference? Yeah, it's, it's, it's a real challenging thing. I mean, I look at all the marketing from companies like impossible foods

or beyond meat. Oh, which by the way is pea or soy protein and nasty canola oil wrapped in plastic. How is that eco-friendly? Exactly. Well, aside from what's in their boxes, their marketing about conventional agriculture is actually spot on. Right. So I, it's funny, I get the question of like, do you believe all this terrible stuff about beef at Impossible? And I'm like, well, maybe it's not, it's all a little bit, you know, through a lens, but it's directionally correct. You, but it's directionally correct. It's directionally correct. And it's actually the same fight that I'm fighting.

I consider them allies. And I think my path has been made easier because they've spent a lot of money in marketing how bad meat is to people and for the environment. So, I mean, it's kind of interesting. So the way that I think about it, it's like if you were to look at the carbon footprint of getting yourself down to wherever, Belcampo, from your house, and if you were to say, okay, the carbon footprint of me getting to Belcampo is X, and that's just true no matter what the case. And I'm like, well, what if you ride a bicycle? And you say it's just X.

And I say, well, what if you take a helicopter? And you're like, it's still X. That's the same mentality that people are saying when they're talking about the carbon footprint of beef. It's like, you're getting from point A to point B. Irregardless of how you do it and how you yield that product, I'm going to insist that it's the same carbon footprint. And that's just not correct. It's just false. And it's vastly different systems. I mean, in the case of conventional ag, you're chemically farming using tons of glyphosate and all the terrible stuff, right? You're conventionally farming with lots of water, lots of petroleum-based chemicals, lots of human intervention in the form of planting, sowing, tilling, spraying, harvesting, lots of carbon going into all those big machines moving things around. And then you're feeding that to animals in confinement.

And so there's an additional multiplier effect of all that waste, because it's one thing to have a couple of cow patties spread out over a big old field. It's another thing to have like 10 million gallons of cow patties and cow urine in a big tank, right? That's a potential, that's a huge putrefaction, you know, machine right there. And it's, it's off gassing and methane and all that bad stuff. So, yeah. Well, and not to mention, I think this is an important component of it. The poop from these cows that are eating grass as nature intended is going to be a lot healthier for the soil than that toxic crap that they're pooping out from, you know, eating all the grains and

everything else, the antibiotics and everything that they're put in their bodies. Yeah. And that's another sad thing is that they, a lot of antibiotics just end up straight in the waste stream of the animals. And so if you look like in the Southeast, when there's those big floods that happen every year, um, and then you've seen those pictures, like the overhead aerials of the swine farms, the confinement farms. And there's just like acres and acres of manure and urine. And they're overflowing and going into the waterways. Well, gosh, those are the same communities where you have major antibiotic resistance because of so much tetracycline in the water and the air.

They found, A, there's incredible research around prevalence of low birth weight and miscarriage in women living near factory farms. In general, just lots of toxicity issues, cancers and endocrine problems and fertility problems. All the spraying and

pesticides. Exactly. And the antibiotics. They've shown tetracycline airborne as far as three miles away from confinement farms. Wow. Well, a lot of those pesticides, they act like antibiotics as well. So they disrupt our gut flora, which is a very important component of our health and our immune system. Well, something like that that you might be interested in is that in chickens, you know, people talk a lot about growth hormone. Growth hormone is only used in beef because it's only – it's not because the USDA is a saint about things. They're only legal for beef because they only work in beef.

And the reason they've never been developed for chickens or pigs is that antibiotics work better than any growth hormone. They facilitate growth. So if you have with and without, antibiotics alone in a control experiment is one and a half times the weight gain. All of the factors held stable. So that's something that you have to be just, when I learned that, it's like, oh my God, there's like the connections are so, so clear. And the other thing that's crazy in these, you know, I've seen our animals in carcasses side by side with conventional animals and all the issues with the American diet are

like, it's like it's in our animals. So the pigs, it's way more's in our animals. So the pigs, it's way more adipose fat and way more visceral fat. So it's like it causes weight gain in the same ways that we struggle with now as modern day Americans. I mean, we've really created the system right for the animals that then has mapped into our own abnormalities and challenges, you know? Wow. And that fat that she's mentioning is highly inflammatory. And that's what we really see as, um, being it's the unhealthier fat to have in our body and we want to keep it lower. Wow. That's really the, I've never thought about the connection of that before. I'm a little like speechless right now. That's really incredible. I think it's also creepier to me is it's most noticeable in pigs, which is the animals that

humans share most of their DNA with. They're the closest to us genetically. And it's like if you look at my animals hanging next to a conventional one, it's so prevalent. I mean, even if it's the same weight, like the belly fat is twice as thick. The fat in the belcampo animal spread around the body. It's obviously more muscular. And there's way more of this visceral fat. So that's the fat that surrounds the organs that you have to be really careful about for humans. And I mean, it's just tragic, but we created that same system for the animals. But for, you know, getting back to the question of carbon

footprint, you know, these are radically different ways to raise animals between the confinement system, fed on grain, and a free-range regenerative system, outdoors, moving around, eating a natural, adaptive, evolutionary diet. So there's been this conflation of these two totally different systems. It's assuming it's like, well, if the output of this machine is a steak, then the input is going to be the same. And that's where you have to challenge your own thinking. You have to unlearn what you've learned about that. And I think it's just, once you start the research, it's really clear why. But the long and the short of it is that ruminants, which is lamb and cows are the most common ruminants that we have in livestock industry. And of course, elk and venison and bison are all part of that family as well. But they evolved in concert with prairie ecosystems,

with natural grassland ecosystems. In the history of the world, every great prairie ecosystem has a great herd or multiple herds of ruminants, right? Look at the sub-Saharan Africa and the wildebeest. Look at the great American prairies and the bison, right? There's every, if you look at every kind of ecosystem that's got grasslands, there's ruminants that evolved on that grasslands. Why is that? Because the ruminants eat the grasses as they sweeten and mature, and then they, you know, they'll pass through a lot of it as mulch, right? Enhancing those nitrogen as they degrade it. They'll also take in seed pods and pass those through, which effectively you're planting a seed in a patty

of moisture and fertilizer, right? So it's regenerating the actual pastures. So although they might trample and create a few bare patches, they're also dropping tons of seeds and tons of manure and tons of moisture, adding fertility and organic matter back to the soil. While they're doing that, they've got their big thick hooves and they weigh, you know, 1,500, 2,000 pounds. So they're digging little holes and cavities, which allow water to accumulate the next time it rains, allow aeration. They break up root systems and allow new root systems to penetrate. So they cause the renewal and the rejuvenation of the system, right? That whole process is the role. That's like the beautiful concert. That's the ecosystem.

That's nature on the prairie. And, you know, there's the biggest example when we break that cycle is right here in the U.S. and it's the Great American Prairie. You know, we had a prairie that was vital and rich and we had literally millions of buffalo. And when we started to eliminate the buffalo, uh, to, and fence in the prairie, the prairie lasted like eight years and then the dust bowl happened. Okay. Cause once the animals were gone, the prairie was no more. The prairie couldn't reseed and regenerate itself. So the crazy thing is it's just like with the rainforest,

when you cut down a rainforest, you have one great year of So the crazy thing is, it's just like with the rainforest, when you cut down a rainforest, you have one great year of crops, right? And then it's barren because the actual soil is not that rich. So with the prairies, the first and second years after they killed all the buffalo and fenced in the prairies were the greatest wheat harvests in history. Some of those records, they haven't even surpassed today. There's a growth guide that's called the worst hard time that lines out this whole timeline of when this happened so these boom towns happened there's this massive weed harvest it was like great this is it america we're set we're gonna farm here we're gonna have incredible harvests and then within two years the dust will happen and there was no more fertility to extract out of the soil because the animals were gone and the

ecosystem was broken. So it's like you can't, and that, you know, that, that was the dust bowl. I mean, it's a, the dust bowl was a man-made event that was the result of removing natural ruminants from a prairie ecosystem. So when a farming, like what we farm, we're removing animals and ruminants around, we're basically replicating a natural prairie ecosystem. Wow. I was just, the whole time you were talking about that, all I kept thinking was we're messing with nature, with our modern agriculture system. And nature always knows what's best. We have this whole ecosystem in place for a reason. Everything from the bees that pollinate our food to the worms that live

in the soil, all of it is connected. And when we work with nature and we work with that ecosystem, not only do we get a better product for our health, but we also, we nurture the planet. We nurture the soil. We nurture our earth instead of working against it. And there's all sorts of like analogies for your own body, right? And cycles in thinking about regenerative, you know, like if I think about my own health, if I'm taking care, if I'm cultivating my microbiome, if I'm getting daily light, if I'm in my optimal self, I'm much more resilient. Absolutely. Right?

If I'm not, if somebody sneezes on me, I get sick. Or if somebody yells at me, I fall apart. Right? Like there's just like resilience. So I focus in my own life on cultivating resilience, right, for myself. And if you look at farming systems, these farming systems that we've created, they're highly productive, but they're extremely fragile. You know, it's one heavy rain, everything goes to shit. There's like rivers are overflowing and like barns are rolling down the hills. You know, it's like a total mess. Like you'll read like a hundred thousand acres of tomatoes lost because it rained. Well, why? Why? Well, guess what? Glycophate, it actually, it kills the microbiome. It kills the nematodes.

What do the nematodes do? They're in there. They're like holding on. They hold everything together in the soil. They hold all the rhizomes, like the little teeny, teeny, teeny roots. They're all devastated with that chemical. So we take away all that little glue underneath the surface, and we pump in the nitrogen, and the tomatoes are going, but it rains,

and it's like, whew, there's nothing underneath them. There's no roots. There's no root system. There's no, there's nothing to protect against erosion. It becomes incredibly fragile. It's fragile. So I think about it as like modern agriculture is like the Ferrari, where if the road's perfectly clear, you can go so fast, but you're not going to suffer. You know, you can't really go anywhere. You got to be like on the Autobahn, you know, and our type of farming is we're like the ATV. It's like, whatever happens, we can kind of handle it. But we go pretty slow, you know, and that's actually for my own self.

I think like, I mean, I'm just assuming that your audience of listenership is interested in wellness. And that's just, for me, I think that's how we have to try to live our lives. It's like, I want resiliency and buoyancy. I don't want to have to be like, if I don't have the right coffee in the morning, like everything's a disaster. You know, I know those people and they are disasters and I don't want to be that person. You know, I want to be able to be like, hey, whatever coffee there is, is great. I'm still going to have a smile on my face. Whatever happens with getting my kids ready for school, it's all going to be okay. I can get frustrated, but I don't want to lose my top over anything. So I think we have to cultivate resilience in life. And this is kind of an analogous, you know, it's like

we talk a lot now about wellness. This is like a wellness agriculture system. You know, it's like we want to be buoyant, healthy, resilient, and ready for anything. And that's also, you know, it's also kind of relevant. I mean, now, gosh, we lost 8,000 acres with a fire this past week. I mean, it's like right now with the fires, it's incredibly important, more important than ever to look at organic matter in the soil, because that's actually one of the things that helps, you know, increase resilience in environments against fire as well. Right. So it's just, it prepares us for a world of increasingly kind of like dramatic and stressful climate events as well. Well, and ironically, if we would change our farming practices, we probably wouldn't be facing all this crazy climate change and dramatic weather,

to a certain extent, at least. It's all interconnected. Yeah. And I also think some more, even things like using animals more in the kind of liminal zones between agriculture and forest to remove brush. You know, things like goats and lambs are really good at eating brush and eating undergrowth. Like there's ways where we could really use livestock proactively to help reduce our fire risk. Yeah. You know, I wanted to touch on something that you, we kind of got a little bit off topic of it, but I just wanted to make note of this though, in that documentary kiss the ground, there was a farmer talking about before he switched over to regenerative farming, he lost four years in a row of crops because he was doing the industrialized agriculture,

you know, the standard conventional way. And then the second that he switched over to regenerative farming, he hasn't lost a crop since, because what we were saying is he built up that resiliency and then he was, his ecosystem and his farm was able to take on whatever was coming at it. And I also think that this conversation is very important for right now with everything that we're going through with this pandemic right now. I've been talking about this a lot lately that, you know, at the end of the day, it really matters how your immune system reacts to this virus, right? And if you're not prepared, you don't have your microbiome in check, your flora in a healthy balance of good and bad bacteria. If you're not taking care of your health, if you're not, you know, upping your vitamin C and really just making sure that your body is resilient and able to take on something,

anything that comes at it, then you're screwed. Yeah. You know, it really comes down to your own personal health. On the COVID front too, something just to, and I know we're getting top of the hour, so I don't want to keep it too long. But one thing that I think about that's relevant for right now is that, you know, COVID, swine flu, and SARS are all diseases

that come from the mistreatment of animals. Wow. Okay. They're all diseases like COVID was, right. And bird flu, right. Avian swine flu, avian flu, right. They're all like, I think the past five big, scary flus that all came from other places are all related to animal abuse.

In the case of COVID, it's like a wet market where you had species that were pressed together and intermingling and people eating carnivores, which is just generally not a great idea. So it's like we have this recent history of a global pandemic that came from abuse of animals, holding animals in close confinement and not monitoring them for their own wellness and safety. So if I was to look in my crystal ball right now, I'd be like, well, look at these American confinement farms with their millions of pigs in confinement on top of each other, covered in feces, under stress, eating their babies. Like, come on. Like, this is where it's going to happen next.

And so there's an even bigger level to get real about this stuff, which is that we're in an era now of pandemics that come from the intensification and consolidation and concentration of everything that's happening in the world. So I think too, like the meat choices that you make, it's potentially also choices in support of a system where we don't allow animal diseases to thrive and to evolve rapidly and to mutate because of confinement conditions. And we're, and also things like not feeding animals to other animals, you know, stuff like that, that we got kind of schooled on with mad cow disease, but it's still pretty prevalent. You see how many, how many packages will say, like, not fed only vegetarian feed. And you're like, wait, what? Oh, wait a second. That meant

it's not fed other animals. Like for a chicken, it's not fed like bovine remains. Oh, God. Like that's not just the normal. I mean, granted, chickens are omnivores. They can eat a little meat, but we're talking grubs. We're not talking steaks, right? I mean, and yeah, it's a very different mix, right? So there's, when things are not, you know, only fed vegetarian feed, you should really be perking up because that's the kind of thing. And granted that food is all hyper-processed and sterilized. So it's not like in a wet market and all these scary kind of stories you hear about people feeding animals to other animals that are all wild. And, but it just saying there's, there's enough similarity there that I would say that, that the confinement animal system is, is my top choice for the next mega disease.

And we have a chance to control that, you know? Yeah. And you made such a good point. I was thinking about this as you were talking about it. Think about all the recalls that we get for E. coli, salmonella. I've started noticing in the last couple of years that the majority of the times that we have those recalls, they're not in organic pasture-raised farms. Those are in those industrialized, conventional factory farms where these disease breakouts are happening. Well, we saw it in June when everything sort of hit the fan in the meat supply industry, right? Where you started to see what these slaughterhouses are like.

You read some of those stories? Yeah, briefly, but I can't barely handle it. It was just like a couple, it was like a week or two, you know, and it was a week or two where it's like, oh my God, there's this big interruption in the meat supply. But in those stories, they were talking about these plants where they're killing like a thousand beef an hour, or they were saying like this one plant shut down. So there's like 25% reduction in the national capacity for pork. And I'm thinking like

one plant is doing like 25%. So the size and the scale of the consolidation, where's going to be your attention to detail in that environment, you know? And then additionally, the fact that many of these plants had, you know, pretty egregious issues around safety and product handling that weren't related, like I'm sure that the sanitation measures were in place for the meats themselves, but how the humans that were handling the meats were not given productive gear, were not coached, were not, there was like major, major issues, right? And that to me is like, well, if you're treating your people that way, I'd say there's some cultural issues too, as to why those, those get, you know, you're seeing more frequency there. It's also a question of volume. I mean, obviously the small

operators like us are teeny, teeny, teeny, teeny piece of things in the bigger picture. But I think- Such an important component. Yeah. And it's like the more that they're nurtured and people are supporting us and buying us, the more of us. And that's one thing I think for Belcampo, like the great success in my life will be that there's 20 companies like ours. You know, like that there's a rising tide of people saying, you know what, we have to do things differently. We have to offer another. And a rising tide of consumers saying, you know what, I'm raising my hand.

I deserve better. Right? Yeah. Well, it's going to help us with the health of our bodies and the health of our planet. I don't see any other way. I'm with you. Yeah. Well, it's going to help us with the health of our bodies and the health of our planet. I don't see any other way. I'm with you. Yeah. Oh, this was such an amazing conversation. Thank you so much. Super fun. It was great to talk. Next time it's going to be a burger. Please. I would love that. I'm so down. So down. Will you tell all of my listeners where they can find you? Absolutely. Belcampo.com is our online store in Southern and Northern California.

We also have restaurants. Go to Belcampo.com. You can see where. And you can find us on Instagram at Belcampo Meat Co. And I am at Anya Fernald. Amazing. Thank you so much, Anya. This was great.

Thank you, Kori. Thanks again for listening to this week's episode of the Real Foodology podcast. The show is produced and mixed by Drake Peterson and Christopher McCone of Peterson McCone Productions. Hit them up if you guys have any podcast needs. They are amazing. My theme music is by the singer Georgie. Please subscribe, rate, and comment on either Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any major podcast platform. If you want to find me on IG, my handle is realfoodology. See you guys next week. You won't think twice about me, what you're thinking. I like to be heaven, heaven, heaven every day.

I like to be heaven, heaven, heaven every day. I like to be heaven, heaven, heaven every day. I like to be heaven, heaven, heaven every day. I know that smile is funny.