Anya Fernald: Regenerative Farming and the Art of Cooking Meat | Lex Fridman Podcast #203
the following is a conversation with anya farnald co-founder of belkampa farms that was founded with the purpose to create meat that's good for people the planet and the animals specifically treating their animals as ethically as possible in this she sought to revolutionize the meat industry from the inside out she's also a scholar and practitioner of regenerative agriculture and she's a chef who has appeared many times as a judge on iron chef plus she has one of my favorite food related instagrams on top of that she's also a long time friend of andrew huberman which is how we first got connected quick mention of our sponsors gala games athletic greens four sigmatic and fun to rise check them out in the description to support this podcast as a side note let me say that i got the chance to visit and spend a few days with anya at belcampa farms in northern california i met many animals there from cows to pigs and saw the amazing land on which they grazed i butchered meat i watched anya cook many amazing meals i ate raw meat and cooked meat and spend long hours at the bonfire talking with friends and listening to the sounds of nature i hiked swam in a cold mountain lake and slept in a tent underneath the stars it was an amazing eye-opening experience especially in my first ever visit to a slaughterhouse the term slaughterhouse is haunting in itself the animals i met lived a great life but in the end they were slaughtered in the most ethical way possible but slaughtered nevertheless seeing animals with whom just the day before i made a connection be converted to meat that i then consumed was deeply honest to me this ethical farm valcampo represents less than one percent of animals raised in the united states the rest is factory farmed i could not escape the thought of the 40 to 50 billion animals worldwide raised in terrible conditions on these factory farms i've spent most of my life thinking about and being in contact with human suffering but the landscape of suffering in the minds of conscious beings is much larger than humans i must admit that i still am haunted by human suffering more than animal suffering perhaps i will one day see the wrong in me drawing such a line either way the visit to belcample farms made me realize that i have not thought deeply enough about the ethics of my choices and the choices of human civilization with respect to animals and more importantly i have not thought or learned enough about large-scale solutions to alleviate animal suffering belcampo is paving the way on this and is the reason i wanted to show my support for their and anya's efforts in regenerative farming and ethical treatment of animals this is the lex friedman podcast and here is my conversation with anya fernald if you're watching the video version of this and are asking yourself why we're in nature right now there's actually a beautiful mountain in the background there's an incredible vast landscape there's a farm we're sitting behind a table nevertheless i'm wearing a suit and tie amidst nature we're at the beautiful belcample farms we're going to talk about that this incredible place you have here but you cook some meat yesterday it tasted delicious so i'd love to talk about just the the science and art of cooking first you as a chef when you think of cooking is it a science or is it an art art and service together probably uh art to me because it's about creating something of beauty and being responsive and creating something that's expression of creativity and love cooking also has a very strong element of service and it doesn't mean necessarily service to another person but like service to health wellness environment there's an element of supporting through food in how i approach cooking so it's bigger than just like the how the ingredients come together to form a taste it's the whole pipeline like the fact that uh there's a lot of work that went into bringing the ingredients together and then you know making you uh giving you the ability to make the the meal and then who gets to consume the meal and the whole thing and you see that as service as opposed to just the taste yeah i also think of food as one of the key ways that we interact with our environment right we it's the part of our environment that goes inside us most visibly right of course we interact with our environment we could have skin creams that have certain things in them or our clothes can then be absorbed there's things in the air there's our water and there's food right it's like how we're engaging in the world physiologically it's the most significant way we engage in our environment we're extracting resources calories energy from the environment of various ways in order to preserve our bodies there's also so many feedback loops that i don't think we know the beginning of that our bodies are picking up on around nutrients available nutrients immune response like there's deep levels of sensory evaluation that lead to health and alertness and wellness you you hear about this a lot like with babies that you know um if there's a risk of an infection that a mom's breast milk will help the baby develop a resistance like there's this way that our bodies can tune into health and can't extrapolate from that in a specific way but think about that as an example of like the many ways in which our bodies are reading available nutrients and food to signal other aspects of wellness and health that said the final product of cooking is uh when done well is really delicious and what we yesterday was really delicious so that aspect of it bringing the ingredients together in a way that tastes delicious do you see that as a science art that's the art of it i mean the art is like creating temptation and indulgence and giving people pause you know like giving creating experience that's like so sensual and like i love that about when i make something really simple and beautiful and delicious the way that like there's that moment of silence at the table and that to me is the moment of art like appreciation what about the build up i mean we got we got to watch you make the stuff over a fire so the the calmness of the air i mean that's an experience we don't often get to have to see that experience of the the prep it's the anticipation like you said maybe that's the most delicious part of a meal is the anticipation of it that's something that i'm glad you bring up because it's an element that with eating so many of our meals like out of a bag and you know the instance where you start to eat the meals when the delivery shows up and you might smell something when you open the bag right and no judgment on that that's something i do too right but that does take away a whole element of of surprise and delight and also i think of your body's ability to prepare for it you think about our most common memories of childhood for those of us who grew up in homes with with parents who cooked is smell of things cooking and it's not the eating of it it's the smell of things cooking so why is that so memorable it's an anticipatory piece of food that's what you remember about your experiences of food is the moment of like sweet anticipation of some of this great sensual experience that's going to be really gratifying on these emotional and physical levels so i think we're also resonating on those memories because it's like it's an experience of food where the sensuality of it is kind of extended so it's a long kind of arc of build up and then you're eating it and it's amazing and then you're enjoying it and your body feels good so all those pieces together it's a much more memorable experience than just grabbing the cookie out of a bag right so look at our own and just revisit in your mind like the memories of food the most compelling ones it's the smell yeah and then the experience and then sometimes how one felt right yeah and the people involved with the smell so like somehow it's all tied in together whether it's family or people close to you or even if it's just chefs there's something about the the personality of the human involved in making the food that kind of sticks with you in the memory and for me i recently did a 72-hour fast and there's a kind of sadness after you eat that it's over i think the most delicious part was the i went to a grocery store and just actually walking around and looking at food with like everything looked delicious even like the crappiest stuff look delicious and i i missed that i i really enjoyed that anticipation and then i picked out the meal i went home and i cooked it and the whole thing took i don't know maybe two three hours like the whole process and that was the most delicious part and the first taste of course and then after after it was over there's a bit of a sadness because the part i remember is the the build up the anticipation and then once you eat it's over we kind of focus on the destination but it's the whole journey the whole like even if you go to a restaurant it's the the conversations leading up to the meal and the first taste of the meal that's where the joy is and if you get to watch the making of that meal that's incredible that's where the the smell the visual how the ingredients come together and especially as we were looking over the fire like watching it the fire play with the raw meat and you know over time bring out the colors bring out the i don't know like you can visually associate the flavor you know how it becomes uh a little bit burnt on the outside you know it has a crispiness to it it starts to gain that crispiness and immediately your past memories of the delicious crispiness of various foods you've eaten are somehow mapped into your immediately you start to taste it visually i don't know yeah that experience is magical it's and of course maybe it's the russian thing but i'm almost like saddened when it's over i think fasting is gaining in popularity because we're having to relearn the importance of being hungry yeah in anticipation and delight yeah we have such a fear of hunger um and that's really you know functional and evolution right but we have this deep fear of hunger and part of the great american experience has been that we don't have to be afraid of hunger at all because there's food everywhere and it's really cheap in all that abundance we've lost this edge of hunger and we don't let ourselves get hungry and that's one thing that i learned in part of my journey as a cook and chef has been you know moving abroad was the first time when i lived out of the u.s it was the first time that i regularly experienced hunger because the time between meals was really long and that was just what everybody did and so i was hungry for two hours before lunch and that was the first time in my life that there hadn't just been regularly available snacks so i i wonder if they the intermittent fasting and part of the popularity around it it i'm sure there's all these amazing metabolic things that are happening but also people might also feel better because they're really anticipating and enjoying food and then if you look at the feelings of fullness there's a really interesting thing that happens when you cook and your sense of fullness which is if you cook and you're hungry the experience of being around the food smelling it touching it sampling it you'll take your hunger down by 40 and this is my own observation but as i mean we've all had the experience of cooking thanksgiving and the cook never kind of wants to eat that much thanksgiving that's an extreme experience but when you really dive in and you're cooking for a few hours and you're smelling and smelling and smelling it totally changes your threshold of satiety and fullness because of other sensory things that are happening yeah and for those of us looking to you know to maintain weight and something to consider in this is that cooking is also part of the part of what your appetite when you're hungry what are you hungry for right so we tend to think about calories but when you're hungry you might also be hungrier for a wider range of things and it might be smells it might be stopping there's other elements and that's something think as a cook that it's it's powerful to explore and be with and observe how your hunger changes when you're cooking well let me ask the romantic question when did you first fall in love with the cooking me falling in love with cooking was about a solving a problem in my family and it had to do with my mom feeling very anxious about uh cooking and overwhelmed frequently when it came to meals and i'm naturally very good at juggling a lot of things and it was just something i could dive in and help and help my dad who's very i'm very very close to so it was a very it was a very functional role where i would see this kind of crescendo of anxiety um around meal times as a kid and would be able to dive in and and solve things and i also loved women who cooked like my father's mother is a great cook she was i remember her telling me as a kid i you know i was asking her about church and why she went to church and she's like i mostly go to church because i get to cook for the for the you know potlucks and so there was a there was an openness around that that but she just loved to cook for people and it was and there was a real tenderness and expression of that love so seeing women in my life who had this like real tenderness and love that they shared through food and then also being able in my own home to kind of pitch in and add value and and help my mom and dad was really powerful for me because i felt like i had a superpower you know i felt like oh man i just made this stressful thing go away um that was huge it's kind of interesting i don't know if you can comment on especially for me growing up in russia it's probably true in a lot of cultures maybe every culture that food and especially like in a family the mother that cooks is the source of love and like ties the family together it creates events where everyone comes together it's uh it's one of the only chances of togetherness uh the thing that bonds a family is like dinner or food eating together and i don't know what to do with that it ties up with like dieting and so on when i was on stricter diets especially competing and cutting weight and stuff it felt like i was almost like losing opportunity to connect with friends and family it's interesting it almost like cultures we cannot fully experience love and family without eating and on the flip side of that eating enables us to experience love and family i don't know what to do with that it's a tough one because there's lots of layers around kind of gender roles and um families changing and things yeah i'd say i agree around the alienation and i've done carnivore diet and i've tried some of these extreme protocols and i too i suffered from loneliness you know it was like doing carnivore and and not being able to eat what my kids ate and talk about at the same time those pieces are real and i wonder with all these diets if that structure is actually helping or just taking away from people's kind of sensual understanding um but i think that there's some rigor around that that helps people discover what's good for them by eliminating and then growing towards more intuitive food is a good evolution from that base i love to cook for people i love to pay attention to their their way of being and read what they'd like to eat and it's my my purest way of love and that's for everybody in my life i actually love to cook for people i love you know i don't i i would struggle to be you know putting out food all the time it's like something for me it's a real act of care taking so i definitely have that in my makeup um and and i definitely notice um in times of like of of real stress that's the piece that drops off right then and it's like if i'm unable to care for myself i have a hard time cooking so it's for me it's very emotional it's very connected to love and individualistic so like focused on the particular individual it's almost like a journey of understanding what that person is excited about in the in the landscape of flavors like figuring that person out what they like what they what they love to eat yeah uh i see cooking from i mostly cook for myself so i see that it's almost a oh this is gonna be like the worst term but like an act of uh self-love this is going to be clipped out but that like it's almost an exploration of like what brings me joy and it's surprising because i usually don't share because the things that bring me joy are the simplest ingredients like i'm one of those people i don't know if you can psychoanalyze me because you also like basic ingredients i like a single ingredient two ingredients because i feel like i can deeply appreciate the particular ingredient then i get easily distracted you know people who are really good at listening to music they can hear a piece of music and in their mind extract the different layers and enjoy different layers at a time like the bass the drums the different layering of the piano the beats and all that kind of stuff that's what it means to truly enjoy music to listen to a piece over and over like almost like as a scholar in that same way for food i just can't do more than like three because then it's just i have to give in to the chaos of it i guess but when it's just a basic ingredient like just meat or just a vegetable like basic grilled without sauces without any of that that i've discovered is what brings me a lot of joy but that's boring to a lot of people so i usually have to be kind of private about that joy so but that's mine so yeah i figured that out and i guess as a as a chef you have to figure that out about everybody that you care for well also for you you're very interested in things and and interested in things being done well and appreciating them so the single ingredient also allows you to control for perfection and cooking that which is probably really appealing to you and i think sometimes i see people also in the beginning of their journey of culinary trying to do too many things right so there's another piece too that you'll notice if you recall last night i grilled us the salad right and then i did all those pieces separately and that's something in general to be really attentive of when you're building flavor to make sure you pay attention to every piece separately um you know the idea that you can okay with the soup or something or stew there's there's workarounds but like to make a great dish that's got four or five vegetables in it cook them all separately to their optimal deliciousness and then combine them so that's another way to approach that is that you may also be able to look at the different ingredients separately and still have that sense of like understanding of it but there's too often that we're layering together like four or five things and then cooking them all at once and then surprised that it's not delicious yeah because you can't you can't really optimize on multiple variables at the same time for peak awesomeness and that's actually you know the number one way you see this is roasting a whole chicken which is a really difficult it's the simplest dish but it's very difficult because you have the breast meat which is bigger chunks they cook faster you have the thighs and drums which are smaller and they cook slower to optimize that and pay attention to it and do it all right they're you're actually solving for different outcomes so there's a there's one example but oftentimes food is less delicious with multiple ingredients at the start because we're not able to pay attention to how each one needs to end up so there's a way to parse that apart and achieve a better outcome i don't know if you've seen jiro dreams of sushi it's a documentary about yeah so there's an obsession that particular first of all set of humans but also the particular uh cuisine that focused on the basics of the ingredients um what do you think of that kind of trying to achieve mastery through repeating the making of the same meal over and over and over for like decades like do you find beauty in that journey towards mastery or do you think it should be always an exploration to where you're always trying things you're always kind of injecting new flavors new experiences all that kind of stuff i think you have to decide on a palette you know if we're talking about an art it's equivalent to saying am i a sculptor or a painter yeah that the sushi lexicon think that's a very very narrow small canvas that you're painting on and that is a beautiful road right there's there's a there's a beauty and a perfection to that it's like i mean there's many things culturally around that that you could extrapolate for specifically for japan but i i i encourage people on and the journey in food to choose like kind of a language that they're working within and if you want to step out of that occasionally and have one or two dishes but if you want to get mastery with food you probably aren't going to be able to get more than say 20 ingredients that you use regularly that you really understand and so we often see you know i see the american pantry it's got tons of sauces and tons of spices and tons of spice blends and then really people only use just a couple things and the idea that you can sort of splash out and do korean one night and then tacos the next time you can absolutely but to get in a regular cadence of specific ingredients you're probably going to get more mastery with that sooner and i think as much as you can do to get an understanding of the you know the basics around salt and acid and understand your palette like for me it's lemon and usually sherry vinegar right so that's my acid palette um and i my fat palates you know suet and butter olive oil so you can sort of choose your language what you're painting with but i wouldn't splash out and say do i use sesame oil yeah every once in a while but that's not part of my base palette right can you say again what your fat palate is it'd be butter suet and olive oil and olive oil so not uh why olive oil is it your roots and illegal i like the flavor for finish because of the bitterness that it adds so i like the bitter and acid contrast on meat and vegetables which is mostly what i eat and so i love that that that way that the bitterness and astringency complements and allows the flavors to come out what do you think about coconut oil there's i recently discovered that there's a i don't know there's a sweetness there's something to it that that i really enjoy um maybe because it's new it's it's good with heat and i really love it for some reason as a chef do you do you ever tried what do you think about it i like it in coffee like i like it as a like a treat a little bit i find the flavor a little bit challenging in foods i also find that it's difficult um on the quality of that ingredient so i've found often that i buy a high quality coconut oil and there's rancidity in it um and i don't totally know why i think it's just the cold chain and how that products packaged so i've had some issues with product quality in that but i for me it's a little bit too much sweetness in my foods but then again i don't cook in like a southeast asian palette i try to not have much sweetness in my foods in general so i just because of the palette that i like to cook with so for me coconuts got a little bit too much of those high notes and earthiness which is a nice combination but it's more like a treat yeah it is almost like a tree it has it has a flavor of its own that almost stands on its own like i could probably just eat cook that's probably the only oil i could enjoy by itself it sounds weird to say but it feels like fat is often a thing that enriches the flavor of something else coconut can almost stand on its own you might also be responding to that it's a complex flavor right so there's also a there's an analogous you know if you look at butter for example a lot of the butter that we eat in the u.s is just sweet cream butter it's not cultured if you explore like a cultured fermented butter maybe a grass milk grass-fed and finish butter you're gonna get a ton more complexity and so you may also just be responding to having fats with more flavor which is the the journey in the u.s has been towards refined foods that are very neutral and then you have to combine more of them to make things taste like things and so if you're coming from a background of using mostly just generic butter or let's say canola oil to cook with those are very neutral oils so you can also take some of your favorite fats and look for versions of them that are more flavorful i mean i love olive oil as a treat in a spoon really like a good california extra virgin olive oil it's like cabbage i'll eat a piece of butter as a treat yeah that's like or butter with salt on it like good fats can all of them can be if they're minimally processed and they're fabulous it's so delicious right but there are things that you have to like look for a version of them that's got that full palette of flavor well for me also the flavors are inextricably tied to the memories i've had with those flavors so for better or worse back when i used to eat a lot of ice cream i for some reason had a lot of pleasant experience with coconut ice cream so that particular flavor just permeates throughout my life not like i'm stuck with it uh for better or worse as a flavor that brings up pleasant memories and i have a few such flavors i have i have such relationship with all kinds of meat too like it's just so many pleasant memories and that's it like you're almost tasting the memories yeah and uh that there's no way to separate the flavor from the memories i suppose and that's a powerful thing what's your favorite meal to cook i i'll roast a couple chickens and then i'll poach them like i'll boil them and let it cool that's complicated one i'll let them cool down i'll pull all the meat off put the bones back into the pot and then cook that for like three or four hours um and then add in like shiitake mushrooms and all the chicken meat and the and they they'll throw in a bottle of white wine into the into the stock as well a bunch of thyme and garlic and i love it because it's it's the way the house smells it's very laborious it's soothing for me to spend time picking apart me and chopping things up there's like a lot of manuality around it um so i'd say from a personal like i mean i love grilling a steak and doing those things as well but there's something about making a stock from scratch and the way it smells the way i feel the time it takes the kind of checking in on it that i really really love there's many things i love to make that i don't even love to to eat you know i think you see this a lot in like baking and bakers people who bake a ton and they love the process of it even if they don't eat that many baked goods so anything for me that's really like enjoyable is typically things like making cinnamon buns i don't eat very many cinnamon buns but i love making them because it takes all the sort of like fussing around and taking your time and watching it the way it smells the way the house smells all of that stuff is like very it's like almost like a like a meditative exercise for me is there a science is there an art to cooking meat well and the different kinds of meats is there something you can convert into words in um to say ideas how to bring out the best out of what particular meat whatever steak we're talking about whatever beef we're talking about is there something that can be said the basic approach to cooking any type of meat beyond the artistry of it is pretty scientific and it's what type of muscle is it in the animal and what's the surface area to volume ratio okay so let's look at those two questions so the first piece is what's the type of muscle in the animal what's the functionality you don't necessarily need to know that um to evaluate it but you need to understand is it a tender muscle that's not used very frequently in the animal or is it a big load-bearing muscle that gets a lot of action like the cheek right or the shin or the those pieces the muscles like um those along the spinal cord that make up rib eyes and new york stakes and things those aren't very exercised they're they're right next to the spinal cord spinal cord is doing most of the work there they're kind of like stabilizing muscles around this big functional piece of of skeletal structure in the animal other muscles like the ones around the diaphragm with the flat iron stakes and skirt stakes and things those are those are really functional muscles that are doing a ton and moving and if they're moving a lot what happens well functionally they've got lots of muscle sheaths because muscles that move frequently have to do a lot of like complex contraction that's why you know there's um in the cheek for example there's tons of visible fiber of like collagenous connective tissue that connective tissue is everything in how the meat cooks because connective tissue doesn't respond to high heat with becoming more tender muscles do right they can get a sear on them you can cut them and eat them the collagen stitches will glom up and get really tough so you either have to liquefy it with really low slow heat with moisture right or you have to barely cook it and that's so that's the major piece that's the question of like why wouldn't you just throw a brisket on the grill okay it's not about the fat you can cut the fat out the reason you're not going to throw a brisket on the grill and cook it hot and fast it's got too much collagenous connective tissue in it those are these giant muscles that have all this collagen and these fibers and tendons in them effectively so you're never going to be able to just cook that up hot fast so that's the first piece it's like what where's this muscle in the architecture of the animal and then what does that mean for what's going on in the muscle and that's actually more important than fat content we get really kind of we pay a lot of attention to fat content in muscles you can make a steak tender if it doesn't have a ton of fat in it it actually has more to do if there's if there's collagen and connective tissue in it that's fascinating i never even thought about that i just i thought it kind of uh universe i mean adds to the the texture of the meat the chewiness of the meat but you're saying it's also adds to uh how heat how it reacts to heat how the entirety of the meat reacts to heat and the fat is not as important to that as the the calories the fat will make the flavor more delicious right like it'll add punctuousness and mouth feel and things like that but the all the connective tissue in meat and in some of the cuts like that we ate a skirt steak last night you could see a web of that collagen sheath on the outside on a ribeye that same collagen sheath is this big there's only one it goes around the outside okay because it's just that muscle there's one large muscle fiber so that specific it's a myelin sheath right that's that material needs moisture and low and slow heat to become tender the other side of that is that when it becomes tender it liquefies and it adds all this beautiful gelatinous consistency that's what bone broth is that's why like a slow cooked pork shoulder is so delicious it's not that it's full of all that fat that fat's also great but a lot of that mouth feel comes from that really beautiful dissolved collagen so when you're looking like how do i understand how i'm going to cook a piece of meat that first fork in the road is how is this going to respond to heat and what's the appropriate cooking technique then the second piece is that surface area to volume ratio and that's important because the heat is going to impact the meat through the surfaces of the meat that are in contact with the heat so if i have a steak that's three inches thick i'm going to cook it extremely diff differently from my from a steak that's a half inch thick or three quarters of an inch thick and that's the major and that's the truth if i have a piece of pork shoulder that's cut into cubes versus having a whole pork shoulder that surface area to volume ratio that's going to totally change how i cook it and same things like pot roast and a beef stew would be the same cut of meat right but how i cook them is going to change based on the surface area of volume because you've got to let moisture and heat work its way into the center of the meat and that's going to be determined by the amount of surface of the meat that's in contact with whatever cooking liquid or heat you've got is there different sources of heat to play with like a big flame versus a small or maybe even like almost no flame like over coals all that kind of stuff is there some science to the source of heat in how it plays with the meat there's indirect heat and direct heat and that really is mostly about temperature okay in more than actual i mean smoke is important as well that can permeate but really the smoke doesn't go into the center of most cuts that you barbecue it'll come it's like the smoke ring it's it's a it's a you know it's maximum like half an inch on the outside maybe a little bit deeper on a really long slow cook so they but this the smoke that does create a ton of flavor on the surface of the meat um but that's so the indirect allows you to have smoke contacting it and then a very very low and slow heat and what that does is indirect heat will be low and slow enough that the center of the meat will get warm at the same time as the exterior of the meat and it'll all cook equally and all get equally tender if you go very hot and fast you risk the interior of the meat not getting right you kind of create a shell on the on it um and you slow down the interior or the meat which you actually want to do with something like a steak where you want to keep it rare on the inside so it's really indirect versus direct then once you get into direct heat right like in that category there's wood charcoal gas right that's about it and those are meaningfully different they're meaningfully different charcoal and wood that's more of there's more poetry and wood there's a little bit more flavor not functionally very different but gas versus charcoal wood is very different um and that's because of the actual scent of the of the cook right the scent of the flavor um and then there's a i think an evenness of heat distribution that comes off of charcoal that's different from gas because no matter how awesome your gas grill is you do have hotter and cooler spots so gas grills are typically you can kind of control for that if you just are going really hot and fast yeah which is why grass grills are fine if you're just like throwing that steak on get a hard sear on those burgers put a crust on it that's fabulous for that that's perfect when you're doing things that do better with a low and slow cook like let's say a whole tenderloin or chicken thigh that's going to be a little bit less elegant on gas than on charcoal versus wood so when you have more more kind of nuance in the low slow cook over the natural fuels talking about like smoke and flame and charcoal versus gas it also adds to the experience and the smell and the whole thing of the cooking or like versus just like the taste it creates there's a certain experience to like when there's a bit of smoke maybe i don't know what the chemistry of it is but i feel like with smoke the smell is distributed more effectively i don't know if that's true but there there's there's a there's a smell and a visual aspect to the experience that's almost enriched with a bit of smoke and and uh or like an open flame like if you could see the flame this is magic to that and it goes to the experience piece that we're talking about we were talking exactly about that like the nuance and the beauty of like that long slow cook and your house smelling like something why do people freak out about barbecue yeah why because you go and it smells bomb it smells so good it smells like heaven right it smells fatty and delicious and the smells everywhere and everyone's smelling the same smell so there's like this collective experience it's incredible that's i mean i i think that's why barbecue is so sticky for people yeah it's like so yummy and you get this huge like anticipatory thing about it it's like because it smells incredible what was that incredible grill that we used yesterday what is that that's called a sea island forge it's a wood fire grill that's inspired by like a south american style cooking so it's like it's big it has also the the things with the crank it allows you to control the distance from the flame it's awesome really key with the wood fire so when we evolved um from cooking over wood to charcoal right when when that became more popular the reason that we did that is that allowed us to skip the whole part of making our own charcoal right so when you're cooking over wood all you're doing is making your own charcoal you don't ever cook over wood with the red fire like we don't like throw a steak on when the flames are orange and leaping up because you're just gonna get you know carbon like char all over your meat so you're when you're cooking over wood you first cook down the wood you create the coal base the natural coal base and then you cook over that so you saw yesterday i built my fire i let it burn down added some fresh wood so i could reinforce my coals with new coals coming in but then i was actually cooking over the embers you shorten that cycle with carbon with with charcoal it's more it's more efficient but what you lose is that whole cycle of you know that really beautiful experience of smelling now if you're cooking on a traeger you're going to get awesome smoke smell you know like you're there's plenty of ways to do this it doesn't always have to be wood fire i love all the different ways right but i i really like the experience of the campfire and i love that kind of just like sitting by it building it having to take the time i like building the fire going inside preparing all my meats bringing them out cooking them that whole experience start to finish is really just like something that it's my favorite it's my favorite way to spend it spend time you know so i think and why is that is the food that different than cooking it in a in a more conventional grill probably not you know like in a pure experience but i think the actual experience is super memorable because you are outside you are slowing your role you're enjoying the this you know you're just taking in you're watching you're anticipating i love that whole experience does the origin of the meat itself make a difference so we're here about campbell farms and we'll maybe you could talk about what your vision your dream is on in uh in terms of like food in terms of where food comes from where meat comes from but food broadly and how that affects the entirety of the the culinary journey on the question of where does it come from and does that matter i'd say though the way that meat is raised is massively important for flavor and for how it cooks um i think most cooks who try cooking grass-fed versus corn fed that's the first moment where they realize that right where corn fed meat cooks much more slowly it's got bigger veins of fat that slow the heat transfer throughout the muscle of the animal compared to grass-fed which is leaner heat moves through it more quickly those steaks will cook much much faster so there's very kind of technical reasons why how meat is raised uh and that we're aware of and there's other things that i've noticed like um that slower growing poultry has a very very different musculature and fiber to it than fast-growing poultry that's confinement animals it's just it has to do with the way that the muscles are built they tend to be finer and thinner and more tender and a little bit more susceptible to heat so they the character of the meat's radically different it's also much more flavorful when it's grown more naturally and i think some of the the reliance in the u.s on like sugary sauces and lots of salts and flavors and things like that's actually based on having the broadly available meat out there is pretty low on flavor and so we're adding in a lot to compensate for that so to your point of like enjoying things very simply and and with like salt and nothing else like the more flavorful that product is i think the more people will find that enjoyable let's paint a vision i mean you're a visionary you have you have a vision to have basically meat in every store that comes from a a farm like belcampo that's uh that's basically doing regenerative farming how do we get there it's about a network of smaller producers working together with shared values and it's true that there's a limit on regenerative farming in that it requires more human knowledge so regenerative farming is more difficult to scale in a single operation it'd be really challenging to have a regenerative farm that was like 200 000 acres because of the amount of manpower needed to pay attention can you first and i apologize to interrupt but can you say what is regenerative farming sure so they if you're looking at scaling regenerative farming it's a traditional system of agriculture regenerative farming is how we used to farm we used to farm with an eye towards the long term you might be on the friedman farm thinking about your heirs five generations from now farming that same land are you going to leave that land nutritionally empty no okay it's a long-term thinking also in traditional ag you don't have inputs that are very convenient you can put some chicken manure on but you can't spray or dump something that massively increases the growing potential of the land that was not available until the past 60 years so regenerative agriculture is an approach to farming where you're increasing soil fertility through your farming you increase soil fertility by feeding the soil you feed the soil through carbon that's why regenerative farming is better for the environment it sequesters carbon and puts carbon into the soil now it's interesting plants need carbon and put it into the soil when they're going through growth so if you have a beautiful field of grass that's just waving in the wind that's not sequestering as much carbon as plants that have been damaged and are regrowing plants that have been damaged and are re-growing are repairing and they're doing that by drawing down carbon as one of the nutrients that feeds them to damage the plants effectively that's what we're doing with regenerative grazing so the cows or you know lambs whatever out there they're eating and taking the grass down and that then cause a regrowth cycle that sequesters carbon wow there's a limit to it there's an edge because if those plants are so damaged that they can't regrow then it turns into a dirt patch and that doesn't sequester any carbon so it's a balance how do you find that uh balance so that has to do with like the frequency and the scale the grazing essentially exactly and so you have to find the right balance and that that connects to the both the the grass i mean is is the ultimately the focus here is that the life cycle of whatever is grazing whether it's cows or lambs or so on that's why the scalability question so all that stuff that i just talked about like think about all the actions that that requires somebody's out there looking and paying attention and understanding how far the grass is remembering what happened in that field last year there's a huge human intelligence need and human kind of availability of attention now industrial farming has done a great job at de-skilling agriculture industrial farming has taken agriculture from being art science to being entry-level employment yeah so that's the limiting factor on regen and that's why i think the human intelligence piece exactly i gotta ask uh i don't know if you think about this kind of stuff i mentioned to you offline that i spent a bit of time with some robots and boston dynamics do you think there's a way to use artificial intelligence to help so data collection so automating some of the some of the things that makes humans special make some of that decision some of that memory that's then utilized converted into knowledge to make decisions about the crops and so on is there a way if ai can help do you think i totally i mean that's that's that would be incredible that's one of the ingredients that could help with the regenerative number of discrete decision points that could completely be automated as well in order to supplement and work with somebody like a farmer in managing it about the the the performance on land and a bit of that's being done right now with some aerial mapping and but that type of ai would be huge in this i mean there's estimates that if the um damage and underutilized range land in the world was converted to regenerative agriculture at somewhere between like 20 and 40 percent of the world's carbon could be sequestered so there's a huge potential the problem is cultural we've like lost the generational threat of knowledge about how to do this it's kind of been two generations that haven't farmed this way also the science around it is limited by the scale and longevity so the data collection around regenerative farming is also limited by the fact it's kind of piecemeal there's small operations that are doing it they're learning and developing as they go and they haven't been documenting it and doing it for too long is the ethical treatment of animals a part of regenerative farming so in the way you do things about campo that's a huge part uh is that necessarily part of the life cycle so like the things that you're trying to measure is like uh like the way like like not damaging the land too much make sure that the sort of the land is constantly healthy and producing and then the grazing process and also the carbon piece the the fact that it's like carbon neutral or something like that i mean are all those pieces of the regenerative farming or is this an extra part to your vision that you're thinking about it's all implicit and regenerative yeah i call it out separately because we are certified humane right which is another layer of welfare that has to do with density and a couple other things but regenerative i mean think about if you're a cow and you're in a regenerative operation where the whole life cycle of the pasture means that you only eat the top six inches of the grass and then when there's whatever a couple inches left then that feels left dormant that's a better experience right okay so just think about it kind of functionally that way well grazing period is a better experience right yeah and that's that's not what's done in i mean that's the grass-fed piece that's the other piece with you know certified organics amazing there's you know there's plenty of certifications that you know grass-fed and finish is also great but there are workarounds for those you can have certified organic feedlots you can have grass-fed and finished which is uh in an animal-fed a grass seed pellet those aren't things that we do here right and regenerative captures that because if you're it's anything you're isolating these very specific certifications it doesn't have a holistic approach regenerative though unfortunately isn't certified yet we've gotten usda approval to use that word based on our carbon sequestration data but it's not a regulated term so that's kind of the mix right now is to figure out how to document it and it's not totally clear what it means like for pigs and chickens which are omnivores it's very clear for ruminants which are animals that have a rumen that eat grass for omnivores which is like what we are they eat primarily grain in farming operations and that's a little bit more complex so it's kind of a moving landscape but regenerative as a word is the better definition of the whole life cycle approach of letting animals and nature work together is it true that it's possible to have a farm that doesn't produce sort of is carbon neutral we have been third party verified to be carbon impact negative so belcampo's 25 000 acres and the animals here they in the all of the carbon including from our shipping on our mail order is all offset by the amount of grazing that's happening also that that encompasses our partner farms we we buy a number of live animals in from other partner farms that's their impacts also incorporate in that i mean first of all that's incredible and second of all is that possible to scale i don't see why it isn't i mean it's it's complex to scale but i mean we're putting people on the moon and you have a robotic dog i mean but those are that's more that's less about scale that's more about innovation so like in many ways what belcamp has done is innovative at a small scale the question is whether that innovation could be scaled that's where i feel like we in the industry need more help you know the ai piece the intelligence the the thinking about ways to do things differently is where we need more support and i think it's been a you know a kind of a swing in the past couple years where it's it meets a mess it's terrible so let's ditch meat and our opt for these hyper processed you know plant-based solutions and i am saying there's a way to make meat this a part of the solution and it's going to mean eating less of it it's going to mean paying more for it it's going to mean that the farming systems are more complicated it's not the easiest path but i think in the long term it's the better path and it's also better for human health can you comment on the certified humane piece so how do you run a farm like what does it mean to raise an animal from the beginning of its life to the end of its life in a way that's ethical that's humane i think the first piece you need to just be comfortable with is that making an animal into meat you know is is something you're comfortable with because i think that's the biggest question right and so certified humane actually goes all the way through the death of the animal how it's killed and handled that at processing so i put that out there just to say well that's you know this is all about producing an animal to die for me that's not necessarily that's something people struggle with with the word humane and i understand that like i have space and empathy for that it's a it's a complicated decision and when you have to be comfortable with at the outset to say this is an animal it's going to die to feed me yeah so we should pause on that because i actually just uh the two days ago read a paper that argued that you know the killing of an animal period cannot be humane so it's impossible and so and that's an argument just like you're saying we could make but if we now on the table kind of take as a starting point the idea that it's possible to kill an animal for food in an ethical way if we take that as a starting point so we won't argue about that it is worth arguing about it elsewhere and it probably will i will probably talk to a few vegan folks and we'll talk about the vegan diet i'm fascinated by it as well so i'm torn in the whole thing but if we just take that as a starting point what then is an ethical humane way to treat an animal i look at ethical humane animal treatment as the major phases of life so um conception birth and mothering diet those are kind of the major touch points of life so what we're looking at is evolutionary approach which means is the animal eating what it evolved to eat primarily is the animal primarily outdoors which is how all animals evolved um given when the climate's appropriate for it there's certain you know times when you can't have animals fully outdoors like here on our ranch we um have had issues with like you know cold weather and things but um so if you have if you have you know appropriate weather conditions does animal outdoors um is the animal able to nurture and engage with its young um those are the kind of key touch points but it's really the the birth of it let me start this one from the scratch um okay so when i'm looking at when i when i consider what's humane setting aside the death part i look at the evolutionary diet access to the outdoors and ideally spending the majority of its life outdoors low density so animals spread out and um engagement with young social interactions and that's all kind of social interaction is a cool one i mean i also read an article that like they're that like cows for example have social like they have friends yeah yeah that's fascinating i mean that piece with a young social interaction with young social interaction with each other that uh at a basic level i'm sure that interaction is not as rich as humans but they're that that piece seems to be part of the humane picture and you said also just a quick comment uh evolutionary diet meaning the diet that they were evolved to have and that's pretty simple you can look at the physiology of the animal and figure that out so ruminant species are lamb goats and beef and they have five stomachs there they evolved eating really low calorie high fiber foods that's why they've got all the stomachs they need a lot of processing you or i were to eat grass die in a week right we our physiology can't handle it cows were built and evolved to eat this very low calorie very high fiber very low density food and they walk around slowly they're moving constantly and they're eating it when we put them on a corn fed diet that's the opposite of their evolutionary diet and their systems really struggle with it now pigs and chickens are different pigs and chickens are omnivores and pigs will happily eat chickens for example yeah our pigs on the farm will hunt and kill rattlesnakes yeah and eat them um you know it's they're they they have they enjoy the they enjoy all of it they're they're they're omnivores so that you often see and i i've seen people try to raise like a grass-fed chicken and that doesn't exist i mean they need a higher omnivores eat everything they're what's called monogastric they got one stomach and that one stomach needs higher density nutrients so in the case of um chicken if you're to do you know look back in american history and in the 1950s it took you know commercial chickens took like 54 weeks to come to full weight and now it's two and a half weeks in the in confinement farming on our in our systems it's like eight to ten weeks typically so it's a very you have to give them some amount of nutrient density um but there's a the idea that no grain because you that's a misinformation for any type of commercial operation free range regenerative pastured everything you're going to have to have a grain feed to get any type of it's actually i think for the case of chickens unless you're in a place with like tons of natural seeds and grubs and worms and stuff to eat really challenging for the chicken so you got to give them some high density high calorie food different from that that's the evolutionary diet is a really key thing that's the fundamental thing for health and it's also interesting because that the evolutionary diet ties to human health i've looked at the nutritional analysis on on all of our products and it's the evolutionary diet is for the case of beef and lamb gets their omega three to six ratio is the same as wild game so it's not like beef is really radically different from elk a ruminant species right if you feed beef and evolutionary diet their nutritional profile is the same as wild meat there's a wild room in it i got a chance to witness neurolink i don't know if you're familiar with that company's brain brain computer interfaces and they have i got the chance to see in in person just a bunch of pigs who had neurolink chips implanted and taken out those pigs are so happy with life i don't know i've never seen a happier animal uh i mean because they get to eat you because you were mentioning sort of diets and stuff they basic pigs seem to love a lot of stuff if they're easy they're easily made to be happy i don't know if uh you can comment on your thoughts of um of you know exploring the capacity of the pig mind through some of this testing when you're a link whether that's exciting to you whether maybe on the humane side it's a little bit concerning um if there's something to be said and sort of like um yeah on the i don't know if it's even the ethical side but just because of your connection to me and to nature and understanding these living beings well pigs are incredibly intelligent so i'm not surprised that they're a subject matter for neurolink um they're smarter than dogs and they're empathetic and emotional um and they're we'll go look at our pigs afterwards and see but they're they're they're kind of like joyful and exuberant when they're in good health and um so that that makes sense i i'm interested in open i feel um that the kind of bleeding edge agriculture movement that i'm you know on the edge of in some ways we're a larger operator but we as a movement have to we have to get into the game we have to move forward in a way that allows us to scale if we want to be viable so i think there has to be openness to how that can happen yeah and i also think there needs to be more thoughtful and noisy data about how regenerative ranching can sequester carbon i mean thousands of american ranchers are selling carbon credits right now the data is that valid and they're not selling carbon credits from like grassland that just got a fence around it they're selling carbon credits for verified data from animals assisting in carbon sequestration right so there's got to be a way to to get the tech community involved in ways to help regenerative agriculture scale in different creative ways and actually yeah that'd be interesting if like neuralink somehow has i mean especially because the elon musk is involved in kimball mosques like has his whole effort and appreciation of regenerative agriculture that i wonder if neurolink has a role to play like exploring the the neurobiology of the animal if that somehow will create innovations that uh lead to uh improved uh scaling of regenerative agriculture it'd be interesting but you're saying you should be open to all those possibilities i don't think i don't know the landscape to know what yeah but my sense is that it's very hard it's very hard and our farming operation to scale has been incredibly complex and challenging we now work with partner farms i see their operations they're incredibly complex you know it just seems like there's got to be a way to make some of these things simpler and easier to share information yeah um i don't know what that answer is you know what would be cool is if we can understand deeper ways to measure the happiness of an animal because then we can optimize like a certified humane could be literally an optimization problem just make sure as opposed to kind of uh using our projecting our own human values actually measuring what the what the animal is happy doing that could be so understanding the pig brain might help us understand pig happiness and like reframe what it means for a happy animal and then maybe it's a lot easier to make a happy animal to make the animal happy than we think it might have to do with a variety of delicious food in the case is there something you can say about grass-fed meat is it all just out of my own curiosity whenever people say sort of grass-fed meat is better for you are all grass-fed meat made the same is there different like le it's like the word organic uh is there a lot of variety within that like the way belcampa does it with it others do it just more color if you could add to this whole word and what it means grass-fed beef has been on grass its entire life and you want to look for the words 100 grass-fed or grass-fed and finished now the challenge with feeding beef grass its whole life is that it gains weight more slowly although beef didn't evolve eating corn and things um it can't eat them and in eating them it gains weight more rapidly and has like a version of like an inflammatory response if you actually look inside the rumen of the animal inside the stomach it's like black and shiny inside compared to grass-fed animals like greens smells like compost so the animals themselves their whole physiology is is damaged by that food but they also gain weight really quickly and they put on a lot of fats like if you or me were to eat a bunch of processed food compared to eating a bunch of greens it's the same impact you're going to blow up so the problem for grass-fed is getting the animals to gain weight they're getting a ton of exercise they're eating really clean right and they're super chill so that's different from the animals that are kept still eating really nutrient dense foods and under a ton of stress which is a confinement animal so are all grass-fed meats created the same the diet yeah nutritional profile broadly but the length of time that the animal lives is extremely important for the flavor of the meat we're taking our beef to 24 to 26 months conventional is around 18 months so i'm always looking and if you're evaluating grass-fed animals you want to get animals that are typically allowed to live for longer because their flavor is going to be better there's going to be a bit more fat and their omega ratios also vary very differently and i've seen omega ratios you know on our farm everywhere from one to three to one to one you ideal as one to one game is typically one to one or one to two omega three to sixes but in operations where you don't have year-round grass it's more complicated you know you're feeding hay and you don't get that three to six ratio omega-3s come from green grass um they they're the fat in greens and so they're scarce and costly right so you can have grass-fed and finished animals that don't have that perfect ratio because maybe they're in a climate or for whatever reasons we've had to do it too during the droughts do hay finishing it's not optimal it changes the ratio but so there's a little bit of variance within it i'd say though the the variance within grass fed is still small compared to the variance between conventional and grass-fed right so there's definitely things to look for within it but the the real difference is between those two also thing to notice is that it's not a verified word okay so grass fed means animals that have been on grass at some point in their life the way the cattle industry is in the u.s there's segmentation so there's cow calf operations there's then those calves get sold to stalker operations which raised animals in their teens basically and then those get sold to feedlots and so those three phases that that first phase of the cow calf is always on grass it's mother cows and mom cows are amazing they can thrive on anything and still put all their nutrients into their baby and their babies will be healthy so you never are putting weather cows on really premium pasture so it's usually just kind of like okay pasture dirty life if you ever see kind of like you know scrubby lots with lots of you know cows and cats on that's a cow-calf operation so there's also a worm a loophole unfortunately where people use the term grass fed and they're actually referring to animals that at some point in their life had grass but that might be pretty far in the rearview mirror so you need to see look at that uh grass-fed and finished or grass-fed 100 percent that ratio of omega-3s to six is it changes in like a week on grain wow so it's radically different unfortunately it's the same thing for you and me you could eat clean for a month you eat you know junk for three days you're garbage right it's not like you can just like coast on that right we know what that's like same thing for animals our physiology changes food's the number one way we interact with our environment yeah and our body changes really rapidly and dramatically so so we know about campo and just the way sort of this regenerative farming approach of belcampo and the certified humane is good for the land is good for the animal can you comment on ways it's good for the human that eats the meat is is this meat better for you yes it's and this is where you know the kind of focus on the joy and animals doing yoga and all this sort of like cynical stuff about about this type of agriculture say just like set that aside you know it really is better for your health yeah it's got a better fat ratio it's less inflammatory it's got higher protein um it's just better product i mean in the case of beef it's lower in fat and that fat is a better quality it's higher in poultry and pork is also higher in protein so all the nutritionals are better it's got higher density of vitamins got higher density of minerals and none of this stuff is radically different than you know it's like not like it's the product is is black and white but their every metric meaningfully is better in the right direction across the board so why wouldn't you i hesitate to take anecdotal evidence as like final scientific conclusions but it does seem i've eaten quite a bit of belcampo meat for example it's just my body seems to respond like is less bothered by it meaning like uh less inflamed i just feel better because i mostly eat a meat diet and it does seem to be a little bit of a difference what kind of meat i eat where it comes from i don't know if that's my own psychology also i mean there is an aspect to like when you know that the meat came from a good place and all the ways we've we've defined good you feel better about it and that has an effect like decreased stress so i'm a huge believer in that like outside of just nutrition how you feel about the whole experience is a huge impact but it does feel like the meat itself is actually just leading to less inflammation for me or like less like the bloat bloat bloated feeling and all those negative effects that could come with me versus like certain other ground beefs that i eat like store bought chicken breast or steak all those kinds of things my my body is a little bit more uh works a little bit harder to process that food it feels like i don't know if there's science to that but sort of anecdotally that seems to be the case omega-6s are a big part of that for in the case of the you eat a lot of beef yes you love beef yeah and so in a conventional beef product it's a 1 to 30 ratio of omega-3s to sixes and it can sometimes 1 to 20 1 to 30 but that's the wrong direction in our beef it's you know as low as one to one right so that and the omega-6s are what's part of inflammation right now you know they the magic in animals is that they're incredibly efficient processors right and in the same way that you know they the the body can protect uh us from you know can process and take out tons of things that are toxic out of the environment i mean animals bodies can do that too so the beauty of meat is that it can be pretty clean you know things like roundup and stuff don't end up in the meat when we have antibiotics in our meat we're not worried about getting like tetracycline from the chicken breast what we're worried about is the workers getting tetracycline the chicken growing faster than it should the meat being chewier and not as high quality so they but the actual antibiotics don't the animals great at filtering that right they get that out so you have to think about meat not as like contamination of like oh there's going to be some of that garbage they used in the farming in my meat um but it's the more subtle things it's the fat ratio it's the protein density and there's also just i think in my experience um there's just more complex flavor and things that taste more complex this is you know science backs this up they fill you up faster so if you're looking to limit you know to to eat for fullness and but not eat as many calories more complex foods are the way to do that and that hit you know you hit your satiety he'll help you hit that society so things like i mean all the key um you know amino acids that help you feel full mostly from meat right so those are that's part of it like it but all meats have those then there's other kind of micronutrients and things around that complex flavor that help you feel full faster forgive me for this question but it is kind of an interesting one that people are curious about what does it feel like to be a uh or what does it take to be a woman ceo of a meat company i mean you're no longer ceo of campo but you did you ran you co-founded belcampo you ran it for many many years is there something that you could say in terms of challenges associated with that and how did you personally overcome it said to be a female running a meat and livestock operation i felt very alone a lot you know for a long time um i felt very uh like everybody waiting for me to fail or watching and assuming that i was like just good at marketing or whatever else and and um so it it's taken me a while to not internalize that i think the only reason i've i'm here is we have our own supply chain in slaughterhouse and i think had i really been playing in the broader meat industry it would have been a shorter journey you know it would have been very hard to make it even get to this phase um but i do you know i think the mission is my life's work the mission of cleaner ingredients that taste so amazing you don't need to do too much to them you know i i like creating food that's in support of good health yeah and then secondary to that it's the environment but like i want healthy food to be a joy to eat right and um that that's you know creating innovation the space for this company has been about building a brand that people understand and is transparent and that people believe in in an industry that's broadly perceived as pretty corrupt so those are things i feel enormously proud of um so you focused on the mission and the com the the push back all the mess the of the industry you try not to internalize it trying not to let it affect you focus on the mission you know and it's in the joy of it and the part where it's gotten fun for me has been returning to what i love about it and i've only had the privilege of doing that pretty recently um so i think for me personally you know starting i hosted these events on the farm called meat camps where i cook and teach people to cook and and you know taste and talk about flavor and all the like sensual aspects of it that i that are my fire like thank goodness i did that stuff because otherwise it was just such a beating you know so there were parts of it where i got to feed my fire and then now in the you know the past year since resigning i've been i do all the recipe development i shoot all the content i you know taste product i'm developing all of our new products i launched our meatballs i'm just about to launch our chicken meatballs doing a high protein bone broth like those are that's what why i did this was to be able to build this great product that i could build on so i'm kind of at that place now um but it's taken a lot longer and i think you know looking at the landscape of what to do in food this is definitely we tackled the most complicated problem well i can imagine you know and did it look like in the most old-fashioned way yeah right so it's been super complex and then i also look and i'm like yeah and it's been messy and it's going to continue to be hard but i'm proud of having tackled the heart problems so the hard problem here is not in the space of technologies it's in the space of bringing something that we've done for a long long time in our human history and uh scaling it in the face of all the other economic pressures like doing so successfully also communicating to the rest of the world that this is a powerful solution so inspiring the rest of the world that regenerative farming like running a company in this kind of way that's humane for animals good for the land good for people even if it costs like if there's an increased cost to the meat uh even if that if you have a broader vision that means eating less meat overall that that is that is like inspiring the world that this is a future we want and just taking that on and getting that done i got a chance to eat a little bit of cheese which uh which is a good opportunity to talk about your experience in italy he spent some time or as south of europe i'm not sure if it was italy yeah i lived in italy but and uh there's cheese involved right like what uh what what did you take away from that experience both as a chef and as a human being i moved to europe right after my early 20s and i worked as a cheese maker and i lived in really small rural farms in the countryside and i got up early and milked animals made cheese and i got to live in a traditional agricultural society and learn how they ate so it shaped me as a cook because it was a chance to have incredible ingredients learn how to cook very simple food i had been immersed and thought that i wanted to be like a chefy chef right um because i love food and i love cooking and i and i was just drawn to that world but i don't like um the experience of that sort of like fancy food experience is not my not what what is exciting for me about it so i loved working in that environment because i got to eat lunches and dinners and everything with the farm that i lived on and just very traditional simple way to eat the other piece of it is you know i went to high school in the 90s child of like the low-fat fat generation right and it was just really liberating and amazing to eat tons of super fatty foods and um olive oil all over the place and bleak slabs of bread and salami and be in this like vibrant health like be leaner you know happy no skin stuff you know stop getting split ends like i stopped having flaky nails like just stuff that had bothered me my whole life including like just moodiness and that all just changed and granted i was also like living on a farm in italy and getting up with the sunlight and like there were lots of great aspects of my life as well that happened in that time but i was just immersed in this diet that i realized like man this is so simple and i also loved that i had like you know you'd have dinner and it was just like some ricotta cheese with some olive oil some bread and like a bowl of fava beans it's like that's dinner and it kind of broke down my assumptions too about like dinner always has to be this you know a protein and a vegetable and you know being more fluid and more seasonal was exciting for me so i just learned kind of a lot about paying attention to food simple preparation and the vibrancy of health that i personally experienced kind of made me double down on that our mutual friend andrew huberman mentioned something offline to me about something involving the the mob is there is there something you could share or is this or or are people going to hurt if you share this it's far enough in the rearview mirror i mean i was hired by this group in sicily on and this is you know i was all of like 21 years old and to get a permit to work there you have to show that you have a competency that nobody else in italy has and that competency for anya farnald at the time was cheese expert so it's like this like stupid american girl being like going to the consulate so i already knew that it was like there was something wobbly about this organization but i went to work for them and um my boss from that time did end up in federal prison for corruption um many years later um embezzlement primarily but so i was definitely in an environment that was um answering to multiple masters and the best way to put it it was it wasn't i couldn't have asked for a better way to to kind of get with life and understand how things happen in the world though you know of learning as somebody who tends to be super direct and um not very subtle it was amazing to be in this world where like everybody communicates in multiple levels like my we're going to lunch with my boss with somebody we're going to do a business deal with and by the they ordered a glass of wine and with that order communicated like disappointment yeah because that the father the person who had made that wine had offended that other guys yeah and like that level of stuff where like nothing happened directly i'm like what are we talking about afterwards i'm like what happened at lunch it's like oh i just you know i told him this by ordering that whatever you know that kind of thing so understand that there's different ways of communicating um but it was also you know it it was interesting to see and i think i you know it's kind of the struggle that i've lived again and again in my life fundamentally what we were doing in that operation was there's a very traditional cheese called the raguzano cheese in southeastern sicily where i lived raguza and it was about scaling that operation so it was european union money that my boss was also unfortunately using for other things but fundamentally it was to take that this type of very small-scale cheese get them exported help them scale and we did it and it was really challenging i learned a lot about the safety issues and collaboration issues and creating groups of farmers for scale so it's kind of been doing the same thing again and again um but sicily it you know it was also just the first place where i would regularly forage for food yeah you know like there i'd go to friends houses and we'd like go out and pick nettles or go out and pick wild asparagus so every season there was stuff that you would be gathering and that was just part of how you lived and it was part of your your health so that was i just learned a ton in that time about like simple eating and and and uh really that healthy food the simpler it is the better right like this sort of sense that healthy food isn't in a tiny packaged granola bar lots of labels lots of powders it's like the more simple essential close of the land can actually lead to optimal health you've learned to appreciate the simplicity of food uh the the the beauty within the simplicity i think it's because of the first time that i had amazing food quality wow okay because in the where i grew up there wasn't that food quality like i had some stuff for my garden and things that were great but that's the kind of place where when artichokes in season all of a sudden there's guys selling artichokes on their bicycles in the street and they're just fresh-picked and you'd get that one thing or the torpedo onions or they like so there's a seasonality and celebration of things in their peak moment and you just had that one thing and that was the first time i'd ever eaten in that way you were a judge several times on an iron chef how do you judge a good meal like what uh your own other people's like what rating system is good i mean i go on experience and think about how many of your like most memorable fantastic meals are like three star michelin meals it's more about the experience right it's more about that slow down who are you with um and some of our best meals are like the most simple things yeah so iron chef you know those are those were fun experiences um it's a lot of sous-vide though it's a lot of sauces it's a lot of powders i mean it's kind of like magic food so that's not i mean it's incredible to watch it as science um but i don't know if those are my most memorable meals so the experience is how you judge a good meal for you personally if you were a judge of the entirety of the human experience in terms of the the culinary journey that would be like the people you're eating with the environment like how you feel the journey building up to that meal like the whole thing you can't separate it out when i was learning as an apprentice cheese maker in greece the one of the best meals my life is like a bowl of cold sheep milk yogurt with like a crust of cold fat on top so like the way that these fatty you know sheep milk can have double the percentage of fat than cow milk so like there's the yogurt and then there's this crust of fat and then they pour the fresh honey over the top and you just eat like this bowl of probably top five meals of my life right i mean it just that's the simplicity just the best thing and it was the fact that's in terra cotta and i'd had this amazing day and you know all these things come together but i still remember that feeling and i think most of us have those like really great sensual memories of food and they're not about necessarily that one ex fancy over-the-top restaurant or something it's really about the whole context of enjoyment maybe you can help me with something uh so we i think offline said that we're both introverts a bit but i certainly find joy in repetition so i kind of hide away as an introvert and eat the same thing over and over and over again but at the same time i had this conversation with tyler cohen who's an economist but he's also a food critic he writes these incredible posts about different foods um and we had this conversation about what his last meal would be if he had to choose like what is the best meal he's ever eaten that he would want to eat and he had a good answer about it it had to do with experience i think for him it was a particular mexican restaurant and it had in mexico because of the ingredients because of the experience because of the work it took to get there and all those kinds of things but also made me realize like when i was going home after that conversation that i couldn't answer that question myself like what is the best meal i've ever eaten because i really haven't experienced much and so it almost was like a challenge to myself like i feel like i should journey out a little bit more in this life and try stuff and to try to see like what is the best meal for me in the world you know like both the experience and the taste right so i was kind of wondering first i'd love to ask you like what your last meal would be or what is the greatest meal you've ever eaten but also and you're still very young and so the life is there's still more experiences to be had right um and for me like how do you go about finding the best meal in the world is is there a device you could give essentially there's that sense of anticipation right so if it's the best meal i'd say for for you it would need to be on the heels of something where you'd pushed yourself with a fast or with an athletic event right or something like you would be coming into it with a sense of anticipation because of deprivation yeah you would be hungry for it in that bigger sense of the word like hungry for deep nutrition on your soul level and your as well as your belly so i'd say that you'd have to think about it as a as a phase of things like multiple things um and then i also think you know you you love me you love cheese you have to have some things that come together right like there's got to be some specific elements of just your favorite flavors in that but there could be flavors yet to be discovered that's a whole other thing because i just uh emotionally and physically feel good on me but that's not that doesn't mean like maybe like a rice based dish like sushi or something like that or uh or indian cuisine where it's like sauces and the breads and whatever you know i love that stuff too so we're not talking about like you know a meal is an experience that could be uh like a one-night sand but with a with a piece of food right it could be a totally different than what actually makes you feel good when you eat it every day yeah absolutely completely completely analogous i get that i mean you also though there's elements of comfort and love and those different pieces for you but i think you got to look at like where would you go somewhere like would you go to a place where you could you know hike in japan and then end up in a little place where you'd eat something that's right that's where i would think you were going to have that magic moment yeah you know maybe some place you go to mongolia and you're in a in a really extreme environment for three or four days and then you come back and you're in a farm and you get something on the table that's a surprise and you're hungry like that's going to be the moment where you're going to explode in the instance of like the culinary level yeah for a lex that levels up right like that's the journey for you it has to be i think from understanding you like a combination of that pushing yourself anticipation and and something about this of some sort exactly and the environment well i definitely definitely like some fasting is part of a great meal for me so like 24 hours is like the minimum you're you're more sensitive to the richness of any experience for me when i fast 24 hours like and so that's a requirement for a good meal is 24 hour fast i think it's just like you're able to taste i don't know maybe psychological but you're able to disassemble the various flavors in a meal as simple as like even a chicken breast there's all kinds of flavors going on because like when you cook a chicken breast there's like the outside the inside i mean the volume of the meat tastes different as you eat like the different fibers and you can like tell all those differences as you're eating when you're you've fasted and you can appreciate that and of course you're right part part of the the journey is important it makes me think like whether restaurants is the right place to explore or i'm envisioning it on a farm for you and i'm envisioning it in a place that's like really into ag and food you know like even a place like romania you know like these incredible farms right where it's not gonna get any like fancy restaurants there but you're probably gonna have some amazing little cheeses and cured meats and you might go to some you know have some experience and end up in a place with like four things on the plate and each of them blows your mind yeah you know like or japan is another place like that um i think vietnam laos like i mean those are countries where there's like these incredible niche ingredients and this essentialism around food that's fascinating or maybe it's in russia with putin that might be the best meal with him on the farm yeah that'd be uh it's hard to reproduce that if that is in fact a good meal it'd be you know it's hard it's hard to get him out to the farm but maybe one time maybe the best meal what about you for me like it's the it's the ingredients that i associate with like indulgence like be fresh bread with like my favorite cultured butter on it be food in my childhood i grew up in oregon we always had salmon and i'd smoke salmon or salmon eggs like really good salmon eggs i love cheese i love goat cheese i love all kinds of cheese there'd be cheese i love meat obviously i'm imagining it's sort of like an abundance of like 10 things i love it's not a dish you know it's like all the yummy all of your indulgences on the same plate yeah yeah and there isn't like for me there's not like a big cake or something super like that it's like really yummy things that i love like really fresh crusty delicious bread that's warm and it's got a bunch of butter on it and i can put some salt on it and eat a big slab of that that's just that's where i'm at that's funny and so meat to you is not like one of those indulgences oh definitely that'd definitely be steak there too i'm just imagining not like there isn't a specific dish it's like eight or ten things right it's the fresh bread it's something like fishy yummy probably be really good fresh berries too there'd be a steak or a pork chop or something like meaty and delicious and savory there'd be some cheese just a bunch of different things that i love to eat that like all kind of check boxes for me is probably what would make me happiest i'm afraid of variety i like the focus when you can just this is all you have the scarcity of just this is the one ingredient yeah and really appreciating appreciating it or maybe one thing like one full complex flavor whatever the heck that is it's like the distraction this the serial dating nature of having a bunch of things in a plate is uh yeah for some reason that prevents me from fully enjoying any one of them i don't know why why that is the more healthy way to do it is the varieties your your way is the healthier way to do it is alcohol involved i don't drink very much okay i like red wine um but i just don't really i i love yeah i love red wine with good food um and i also co-founded a rum business um that's an organic rum so i love that product but that's not that for me it's like i'm i'm more interested in the in the food i'd say is there some connection between your chef life cooking and music does this music have a role in the experience like i love artistic expression and that's a that's always had a role in my life in the same way i love to paint and draw and um all the different things i was a professional musician when i lived in sicily by definition technicality because i played in the municipal band so i would march around the town yeah um with all the funerals i get like 50 euro every time i'd like march in a funeral playing my oboe so it's given me i like that because i like to like you were talking about going to farms like what i quested foreign was experience and connection right in places where i could learn things that's been the through line of my learning journey i've learned things and sought knowledge that i can't get in any conventional learning environment and so what are the tools that let me do that it was like being adaptable and comfortable in different cultures but also having common ground points right that are that are that are allow you to connect with people so music's one of those things so i love like you know music but i also you know any there's any number of enjoy of food being able to pitch in and help in the kitchen um you know to play cards like those are when you're dealing with getting into like farming communities and stuff that stuff really helps right so i basically have cultivated tools that let me drop into places where i can learn and so those are all kind of of a piece those are just tools to get in there that said we did listen to some justin bieber earlier today that was uh i need to get more into them i need to i need to understand the full complexity of the biebs you're trying to achieve what hunting stands for but at a much larger scale which is what kind of bill campos stands for but what are your thoughts on hunting as a source of meat it's amazing 100 pro hunting um i think the reason that hunting flips a switch for so many people is because it's the first time they've had clean meat in their lives wow okay so i think that the hunter's journey when people get so turned on by hunting they're just like oh my god i'm never going back yeah i'm saying that's great if you've got access to that if you know the guy he'll give you the backstrap awesome but like you that's not very that's not achievable for most of us yes um and i do think that talking to hunters about their experiences what they love about it many of them are just outdoors and i say that because most of them are men but most love the outdoors aspect of it and being out in in the wild but a lot of them it's because of how they feel when they eat the meat and it's because they're eating i mean 99 of meat in america is made a very specific way and it's in in a way that is pretty inflammatory not incredibly delicious and when you're on that extreme um and then you toggle to having this totally different style of product it feels radically different in your body so of course you're like i'll never go back so when i talk about us being on that spectrum it's like well it's hunted me to i mean i can never on any commercial operation create the variety of the biodiversity of species that an elk gets when it's wandering around of a zone i mean i could there's no way you can do that on a farm so there's always going to be that extra five or ten percent that those wild animals are going to have you know and those wild animals also fast for longer they go through periods of starvation and that creates an even like slower growth for musculature that's going to be create even more unique flavor and characteristics and so that's why there's that that extra in the hunted meat but you can come a lot closer with regenerative traditional farming to that flavor and health um than with any other type of farming i know so that's where i see it on the spectrum i love that people are getting excited about about game because it's all it's better for your health it's got all the same characteristics of regenerative reformed meat and it gets people turned on to like simple delicious food you know you shouldn't have to cover food with sauce that's got corn syrup and soy a bunch of junk in it to make it palatable if you got to put sauce on your food you need to look at your ingredients you need to revisit what you're starting from because if you have to put a bunch of things to mask flavor onto anything you're eating you're trying to basically fool your palate into doing what's not best for your body we're trying to to tell our palettes like just make it through this plate so you can get the calories in and we're masking the fact that we don't actually find it very appetizing so we're kind of teaching ourselves to overcome our instinct with food we're saying here's this kind of based substrate not very interesting i'm not like sparking to it awesome put sugar and salt on it this up the hyper-processed flavor profile great done and then your spark to it yeah that's not that's a very short road and that's i think a lot of the health problems we have now is because we're masking flavors and basically trying to get ourselves to move down this path of the same way we behave around all hyper processed foods yeah and that gets us into a mess with our health so if we can get things like game where people love the flavor out of the gate but it's natural simple mentally processed like that's a win yeah that it reverses that hyper processing trend that we're on as a human species and that's uh that's the promise of regenerative farming that's the promise of hunting obviously the former can be scaled the hunting i think cannot be scaled right but in many ways the hunting inspires the world that this is the right way to eat yes and and that naturally leads to then uh the humane farming regenerative farming idea which is this idea that hunting represents how do you scale that well if you look at like you know we're talking about people use the sort of marketing language of like happy cows or that kind of thing you know if you're talking about the happiest animals it's wild animals right so if you wonder why these practices are good talk to hunters you know you're talking about animals that have lived in their evolutionary capacity right who have played their role in the ecosystem who've lived their meaning of life right and that's a very powerfully different kind of role than than livestock production so i think if we can make our livestock production as similar to wild as possible then we're a lot of steps closer so you said the animals are happiest in the wild and that's where they find meaning uh what about us the human animal what's the meaning for us do you think if you've uh monitored the life cycle of a lot of living beings you ever look in the mirror and think like why the hell are we humans here ah i mean thriving reducing suffering um creating goodness i mean those are the things i see in in animals behavior they're mostly interested in in reducing suffering and and um nurturing right those are the things that i think evolutionarily and we humans are just clever we want to be able to try to do that at a bigger and bigger scale like as much as possible reduce the suffering in the world and somehow that alleviates us of our own suffering that's the russian thing let life is suffering and somehow helping others alleviates it and come up with creative solutions to do that that's really interesting it's almost consciousness is the thing that led to suffering but it also led to the desire to alleviate the suffering it's a it's a feedback loop consciousness creates suffering and the desire to alleviate it uh is there yet a pretty nonlinear life your parents were professors you have done a lot of sort of incredible things that many would say kind of like how the hell are you gonna get this done is there advice you can give to young people today like high school college about uh how to do uh how to live a similarly non-linear crazy life and accomplish be as successful as you have been about whether it's just their career or life in general the greatest gifts i've been given have come from pursuing curiosity just trying to understand the thing you're curious about and allowing yourself to be curious about and just going with it and also pursuing things that are like deeply joyful for me not what society wants but you just personally just on your own you're happy and that's something that in the times when i strayed from that my life has been harder right so it's fundamentally what are we on earth to do you know to live and thrive and so pursuing things that are curious and satisfying and interesting and joyful and allow me to to grow so the i made a number of choices to do things that were more complicated and kind of not not considered like so cool at the time although now it's cool to work on farms it wasn't when i started my career in animal agriculture and it was like but just deeply interesting to me and i felt like there was just lots to learn and so that's been the the path for me is like going for something that's like curious and hard and kind of sticking with it and being open to it and growing elements that give me joy through that so i also you know for people who are starting out in their careers and want to do something different too it's like get out of your comfort go to a place that you've got something to learn from and let it teach you that and you'll you'll get beat up like i got beat up by that experience like it was really hard you know i laugh about now working for insistently for tease me i mean like and the funny experiences i had there but it was hard i was lonely i cried a lot it was stressful it was like it was hard it was really hard when you inside of it you didn't know how it's going to turn out you didn't know it's going to turn out like why didn't i get a job doing something that all my friends were doing and and it and and i didn't speak the language i had to learn foreign language and learn how to function and it like it was very lonely and very challenging but then that's where my resilience started to grow right so the things i learned there ended up just being about resilience and understanding the language of subtlety and meaning so that's something that's carried me through my life but it was a curiosity about cheese making and about like just living in a village that was there i'm like wouldn't it be amazing just live in a really rural village and you just went with it and i just like this seems incredible and and have a place where you can you know and these like the the people seem interesting the food seems good and let's just like try this and see what i can learn and that like putting yourself out of your comfort zone in a place where you have a chance to learn and grow is is the the secret because it's you grow through discomfort you know people think that you grow when you get into this environment where everything's like kind of sailing along but like growth actually comes through pain you know it's like you you know growth comes from being cut down and beat down and having to re regrow and double down and so that kind of that kind of opportunity you have to seek it out you put yourself in the line of fire but if the situation sucks it's a sign that you might be doing something right in the sense that you're on the path at the end of which you'll be a better person if you allow yourself to grow in that way like as opposed to resisting it just uh going along with a journey and persevering and that ended us up in this incredible place this whole conversation i'll probably overlay a video i'm i'm looking at a gorgeous mountain and it's an incredible farm thank you so much for a meal yesterday that was incredible the cheese the fish eggs just everything about this place uh looking up you can see the stars the stars at night are beautiful and there's a peacefulness to it i had a pretty hard week actually just emotionally on many ways and just coming here it's immediately so much of it is lifted so i really deeply appreciate anya that you would invite me here and that you have this conversation this was this was really awesome so thank you so much thank you thanks for listening to this conversation with anya fernald and thank you to gala games athletic greens four sigmatic and fundrise check them out in the description to support this podcast and now let me leave you with some words from the ancient chinese philosopher lao tzu nature does not hurry yet everything is accomplished thank you for listening i hope to see you next time you