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FC2O Episode 18 - Lierre Keith
17 Plays4 years ago
Never mind the arguments around health, is a more vegetarian way of living the only sustainable and ethical way forward for the planet? To find out, listen in to Lierre Keith make order from the chaos in this week's episode of FC2O.
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Transcript
Introduction to Veganism and Personal Journeys
00:00:00
Speaker
It's a very compelling argument. You can save animals, you can save the earth, you can save your health, you can feed hungry people. It just seems like the complete package. If you just do this one thing, you can be so happy that you're fixing all the problems on the planet. So I took it up with a vengeance and I was going to do it no matter what. So I did it. I did it for two decades and I nearly killed myself. So it didn't work in the end. I did permanent damage.
00:00:26
Speaker
in my body. And I, of course, regret it deeply. But you know, what can you do at that point? Damage is done. And so then it's a terrible day when you stop being a vegan, you know, you're in everything that you thought you believed in turns out not really to be true. And you're sort of left in the rubble like, well, what now? And it's, I mean, it's like, it's not just
00:00:49
Speaker
I mean, it's everything. You're gonna lose your friends, you know it. You're leaving a cult, essentially. So there's that. But it's bigger, too, because it's your own sense of who you are. And it's your place in the cosmos, honestly.
Leah Keith's Vegan Journey and Authorship
00:01:32
Speaker
Today we welcome the Air Keith to FC2O. The Air is a well renowned author and former vegan and those two things, as you'll see, go hand in hand. Now before we get into what some may find to be a contentious topic area, I'd like to preface it with one or two thoughts.
00:01:48
Speaker
There are many seemingly sound arguments for a whole array of dietary approaches, ranging all the way from breatharians, who Rupert Sheldrake talks about in his recent books, to fruitarians who will only eat food that has fallen, willingly, some may say, from the tree, all the way through to the carnivore diet, which has been found by some to effectively combat severe autoimmune and psychological ailments, popularised most recently by Jordan Peterson and his daughter Michaela.
00:02:12
Speaker
As someone who has experienced bells of vegetarianism myself and worked with many vegetarians clinically, I do have some concerns about its long-term viability for some people. I'm also very concerned about animal welfare and the environmental issues associated with mass consumption of animal products, as is the air as you're here.
00:02:30
Speaker
I would urge you to listen with an open mind and recognise that this is not an attack on vegetarianism, but is aimed to be reasoned dialogue taking into account individual, political, environmental and social issues associated with the most controversial and emotive of topics. Enjoy the show. Here we go.
00:02:57
Speaker
Welcome to another edition of FC2.0 with me, Matt Walden, and my guest today, Leah Keith. Welcome, Leah. Thanks for having me on.
00:03:05
Speaker
Yeah, that's a pleasure. It's a pleasure. And, you know, I've been excited about this interview for a little while, as you know, because I, well, I think I got your book shortly after it came out, his son, of course, the author of The Vegetarian Myth. And I think I must have got hold of that book somewhere around 2010, 2011. And
00:03:28
Speaker
I'm embarrassed to say it sat on my bookshelf largely on read for several years. And then I saw that the book was available on Audible.
00:03:39
Speaker
And so I downloaded it on Audible and listened to it. And I was just, I was, I just thought it was such a great book. Because I think part of the reason that I didn't initially delve into it too much was that I had my own story and kind of beliefs around vegetarianism. And when I did glance into the book, I thought, oh, yeah, it looks a lot like what I know. Oh, you know, it kind of felt like I knew it all. And then when I listened to,
00:04:06
Speaker
to the audible, I thought, wow, you know, you've done so much research and from such divergent areas as well. I was really impressed. So I thought we should start out with letting people know, you know, how you ended up writing the book, you know, what was it that led you into writing, not just a book about vegetarianism, but writing it from so many different angles. Sure. Well, back up a bunch of decades.
00:04:34
Speaker
When I was 16, I became a vegan and I became a vegan. The most common way that people are sort of converted to vegetarianism or veganism is that they meet somebody else who's already doing it and they are convinced. And that's exactly what happened to me. I was 16 years old and I met another teenager whose family was very, very involved in veganism. And within two weeks of this conversation with her, I
00:05:03
Speaker
was just completely and utterly taken up with this. This was the way forward. It's a very compelling argument. You can save animals, you can save the earth, you can save your health, you can feed hungry people. It just seems like the complete package. If you just do this one thing, you can be so happy that you're fixing all the problems on the planet. I took it up with a vengeance and I was going to do it no matter what.
00:05:30
Speaker
I did it. I did it for two decades and I nearly killed myself. So it didn't work in the end. I did permanent damage to my body and I, of course, regret it deeply. But what can you do at that point? Damage is done. And so then it's a terrible day when you stop being a vegan, you know, everything that you thought you believed in turns out not really to be true. And you're sort of left in the rubble. Like, well, what now? And it's, I mean, it's like, it's not just
00:06:00
Speaker
It's everything. You're going to lose your friends, you know it. There's people who are going to hate you now. You're leaving a cult, essentially. So there's that. But it's bigger, too, because it's your own sense of who you are. And you're placing the cosmos, honestly. So what does any of it mean now? It's literally the rubble. You've got not a clue how to go forward. So I had to kind of slowly put things back together.
00:06:26
Speaker
It was not a story that I could lay down lightly. I mean, it was really, really hard. And those few years afterwards were really difficult. And I, you know, did finally understand better what my place was as an animal, you know, on the planet, in the cosmos, all of it did come back together, but it took some time. And then having done that, it was really hard because
00:06:49
Speaker
You bump into people, especially people younger than me, who were still trying to make it work, their health was degenerating, they knew it, they couldn't figure out how to get out of it. And I had the same conversation, I don't know how many hundreds of times, and you get bored after a while. This takes two hours, I can walk you through exactly why what you're being told isn't really true, and what's going to happen to you if you keep on with this. But at the end of the day, I was like, I just need to write a book because I can't keep doing this one by one. It's not going to work.
00:07:19
Speaker
Sure, yeah that's amazing and you know it strikes me that the challenges that you faced are of course something that is what many people face and now my own personal experience was that I went into vegetarianism for a spell as a student because I was training in naturopathy and osteopathy and it seemed to be
00:07:43
Speaker
by all accounts, from the nutritional lecturers and from the naturopathic lecturers and so on. It seemed like a plant-based diet, as we now call it, was the most healthy approach. And of course, when I was training, it was the 90s and it was very much all of the discussion about cholesterol being the bad guy and saturated fats and all that kind of thing.
00:08:06
Speaker
So it made sense to me, you know, from a health perspective and also from a financial perspective as a student, it would be good to go vegetarian. And so I wasn't really following it in the same way that you did by the sounds of it, you know, with all of the moral side. I kind of got the moral side, but it wasn't what was driving it for me. It was more of a health thing. But similar to you, it didn't take long and my health was
00:08:36
Speaker
becoming increasingly compromised and you know I wouldn't say from what I understand from reading your book, I don't think I became as compromised as you did perhaps because I didn't go into veganism and or indeed even full vegetarianism.
00:08:51
Speaker
for very long but you know I found I was getting blood sugar dysregulation because I was sleepy the whole time after lunch and getting colds and cold sores and all that kind of thing yeah yeah so so for me that that was and that wasn't really what stopped me I didn't even realize at the time that it was related to nutrition it was only when I
00:09:17
Speaker
then met a guy called Paul Chek, who was talking a lot about the kind of Western A. Price type approach to nutrition, you know, which obviously you talk about a fair bit in your book, but also the idea that we have biochemical individuality and, you know, depending where we're from, of course, we need different food stuffs and different proportions of different food stuffs. And when I ventured into that, it became quite clear to me that I seemed
00:09:47
Speaker
it seemed like my physiology was better adapted for high consumption of animal product, let's say. And so I made that choice again from a health perspective and it switched me completely around in terms of my health and the various relatively minor ailments, but that was early enough for me that they didn't turn into more major ailments. But so,
00:10:16
Speaker
Let's talk about how with the book that you wrote, The Vegetarian Myth, you didn't just approach this from a nutritional perspective, did you? You approach it from multiple different angles. So do you want to talk a little bit about how you gathered that information and why you felt it was important to approach it from multiple directions?
Moral, Political, and Health Aspects of Veganism
00:10:40
Speaker
Right. Well, for me, when I became a vegan, it was total.
00:10:44
Speaker
So it was the moral aspect of I don't want to hurt animals. I don't want any sentient creatures die for me. They don't have to die. So why, you know, can I just not choose to have a life that's free from death? Like if I can choose that, I should. And that seems like a very moral.
00:11:03
Speaker
My dog is panting really hard. I don't know if you can hear that, but if... Oh, no. That's fine. That's the real world element of it. You hear that weird noise. That's my dog. She's got her face right on the computer. She wants to participate too. And she says, eat the meat. Fantastic. That's what she says. Every day. That's what she says. So there was the moral aspect and then a lot of what compelled me as well to be
00:11:31
Speaker
a vegan was that political aspect, that this was a way to make more justice for humans on the planet. And I had read Francis Morelopay and Diet for a Small Planet, that was one of sort of the kickoffs for me to taking this up. And it's very compelling. It takes 18 pounds of corn to make a pound of beef and all this. And, you know, it
00:11:53
Speaker
I mean, we can talk about why none of that's really true. But, you know, regardless, it seemed true. And yes, it is a very simple argument. And I made it for 20 years. And, you know, like I said, I wanted to address that, that there's, there's, there's a very real issue here about human justice that, you know, we do need to address as people who care, like it's the I mean, the underlying moral impetus for me is still there, like, and I always try to emphasize this, that
00:12:21
Speaker
The values that underlie that vegan ethic of compassion and justice and sustainability, those are the right values, right? That's the only thing that's going to get us to the world that we need. And it's just that veganism is not actually the best way to institute those values as it turns out. But I didn't know that at first. So I wanted to address that as well, because I think it's another reason that people take this up. And it's certainly something that'll sort of
00:12:47
Speaker
trip you as, you know, you're sort of grappling with all this, it seems very compelling. So I wanted to walk everybody through why none of those numbers are really true. So but that takes a chapter, you know, to get into that. And then, then finally, there was the health stuff as well. And that, again, was compelling to me. I don't know what it's like where you are. But in the United States, in the late 70s, they started instituting a lot of public health programs,
00:13:16
Speaker
you know, based on that whole sort of cholesterol myth, you know, telling people that eating cholesterol was what was creating heart disease and all that. We got that in school. I mean, they were telling us this in health class when I was in high school. So I was 15, 16 years old, and we were being told that this was a fact by the people in authority that we should be eating low fat. You know, if you're going to touch dairy, it should only be the lowest fat possible. And in my family, there's a lot of diabetes.
00:13:43
Speaker
You know, everybody just sort of degrades slowly over time from avid diabetes. Like it's terrible, the heart disease, all of it. It's that, you know, metabolic syndrome stuff. And there I was being told, oh, the best way to avoid this is to eat low fat, high carb. Now that turns out to be completely wrong, but I didn't know better. I was 15, 16 years old and it's, you know, the people in charge are telling you this from the government that this is true.
00:14:08
Speaker
So, and I was terrified because, you know, my great aunt had a leg amputated from her diabetes and like just horrible things in my family. And I said, I don't want to be, I don't want to end that way. It's terrible what's happening because everybody's older. So I was like, okay, I'll do this other thing and it will never happen to me. So I, that was the other thing. So I really, I really needed to grapple with the, the nutrition part of this. And especially as it ended so badly for me, I really wanted to understand sort of in better detail,
00:14:36
Speaker
Why doesn't this diet work for people? We were all told it was not this way forward. What exactly is going on here? And why would we all live so astray by the scientists and the doctors and the people who were supposed to know better? And how does that happen in public health that you can get completely? They did a vast experiment on the American public for decades. They all walked it back now, but the damage is done out here.
00:15:05
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. I wanted to understand all that as well. So that's how I ended up writing, you know, an entire book. Yeah. And how long did it take you to write the book? Honestly, it was about a year and a half of work. But honestly, I had been researching for probably four or five years before that. And I went to think of it as research for a book, it was more, I am compelled to understand what happens. Like what happened to me, what's happened to pretty much everybody.
00:15:31
Speaker
who's in my generation, my cohort, we all tried this to some extent. Everybody accepted that vegetarian, if not vegan, was the best way. Those of us who did it long-term ended up roadkill, essentially. We did permanent damage. So we all tried it. None of us could make it work. There's gotta be a reason why this isn't working. And I really, I had to understand. So I was kind of on a survivor mission of my own, just to get the facts right in my own brain.
00:15:58
Speaker
And then they got tired of having that discussion over and over. And also I could see that we weren't really making a dent. The younger people, they weren't using our lives as kind of a cautionary tale. And I wanted them to. I know there's another 16-year-old out there.
00:16:15
Speaker
who thinks that she's doing the right thing for global warming and for animal rights, she just be a vegan, it'll work. It's like, it's gonna work. Like, this is still not gonna work for you. And I know why, like we already tried it, it doesn't work. And I just wanted enough information out there that, you know, that that young person who is so, you know, rightly upset about the state of the world doesn't fall into that trap and do that damage.
00:16:42
Speaker
yeah yeah definitely definitely yeah so um you know one of the one of the things i think is uh you know you touched on there which is very very important is this idea of of death and um and the avoidance of death through not eating animals because i think that's a very fundamental point for for many vegetarians and vegans and you know i did say that obviously my vegetarianism was more um
00:17:09
Speaker
due to my focus on health in the first instance. But as I got more and more into it and started to think more about it and I guess just explore that world a little bit, it did become more about the morals and the politics and the ecology and so on. So I started perhaps from a slightly different angle to some people, but I ended up in a similar place. But what's your view on
00:17:38
Speaker
Well, I kind of know what your view is because I've read your book But how would you explain this whole this whole sort of phenomenon of people not wanting to kill? I Understand it and I have a very hard time with death. Yes. Yes, like right now outside my window There are spider webs on the outside and pretty much every day something gets caught in those webs and It's unbearable to me that there's you know, 10 or 15 minutes
00:18:08
Speaker
where this poor creature struggles to get out of the lab. And if it's something that makes noise, I can hear it. And I just, I find it horrifying and I have to leave the room. I can't go outside and free that insect because then the spider will starve. Like that spider has put all of this
00:18:28
Speaker
energy, like literal biological energy into making that web. It is the only way they know to eat. It is what they are designed to eat. It is all they can eat is insects. There is no choice. This is how life has evolved. And there's going to be 15 minutes. That's really miserable for that poor creature. And it is not my place to interfere. We need spiders, like they have to exist. Like they, I mean, the things that spiders do, like the more you get into this, it's incredible. And we can't have a functioning
00:18:58
Speaker
Biotic community without every creature doing their part and it's I can't and you know, I can't get involved I have to let them do the thing that they know to do but I hate it to this day I still hate it. I don't have an easy time with any of this and There it is. Like it's reality the moment that you are born from that point forward For you to live something else is gonna have to die. I
00:19:21
Speaker
Yes. Everything in my power to ignore that, to deny that, to get out of that, and there is literally no way to do it. All I could do is a vegan. I could look down at my plate and I could say, well, there's nothing dead on my plate. Therefore, my life is death free. And it was an utter fairy tale. There's no seavable way that there is food that does not involve death. So the first problem is why don't plants count?
00:19:45
Speaker
And I made all kinds of arguments that now seem just very silly, honestly. And even at the time, I knew that I didn't like the way this was going, but I didn't have anything else. And so I would say to people, well, plants don't count, animals do. But that, of course, is exactly what ranchers say to vegetarians. Well, humans count, but cows don't count. So I was shifting. It was like a slider bar. I was just moving.
00:20:13
Speaker
you know, the areas of moral concern a little bit over to include basically, you know, anything with a face, but nothing else counted. And I also knew already that I didn't like that hierarchy. That's essentially the chain of being that says, you know, there's got people, then you've got animals, and you've got plants, then you've got dirt, and then you've got rocks. And that's sort of, you know, the order of moral authority that to count. Yeah. And I didn't like that. Like, I knew the world that that kind of
00:20:41
Speaker
view created and it's a planet that's being killed. And I could see the problem with creating those hierarchies, but I didn't have a better answer. Well, why do, why, what about plants? And I was like, and then when I would observe and try to learn more about plants and have relationships outside with trees and, you know, all the flowers and the garden and it was like, they're so clearly alive. Yes. Responding. And the more you get into the actual science of this,
00:21:08
Speaker
It just blows apart. I mean, they help each other, they communicate, they talk, they have friends, they have communities. They think everything that animals do, they just don't move very quickly. That's obviously the only difference.
00:21:23
Speaker
Exactly. And sorry, I was going to say, you know, when I when I first of all listened and then read your book, you know, that that part about the trees and the forests and the way that, you know, essentially, trees parent, they're young and they communicate and all that kind of thing. I had I had been privy to that through a book, I think it's called The Secret Life of Trees. Yes, fabulous. Yeah, yes. Yeah. And but I'd only been made aware of that a few years after I'd actually bought your book.
00:21:53
Speaker
And so I'd actually listened to that one as well on Audible and it was quite blown away by that book, thought it was a fantastic book. And then when I read your book, it's like, well, hang on, you knew this even before that guy knew it. It was amazing to see that you had not only studied that but woven it into your whole discussion around vegetarianism.
00:22:15
Speaker
But you know one of the things that caught my mind, caught my eye from your book fairly early on, you talk about you know how the soil is alive and you know you give various figures, I've got it here actually, you say a square meter of topsoil can contain a thousand different species of animals and these might include 120 million nematodes, 100,000 mites, 45,000 springtails, I don't know what they are, 20,000
00:22:45
Speaker
Enkiter, how do you even say that? Worms. Enkitrade worms and 10,000 mollusks, which I thought you only got in the sea, but that's just a phenomenal number of just, well, I think you're listing there, you know, like five different species, but you're saying there's over a thousand species in that square meter of top soil. And so, you know, the question that my colleague Paul Chek says is that
00:23:12
Speaker
He says, you know, how small would you have to shrink your Alsatian or your, you know, your pet cat or whatever, until it becomes something that you don't want to eat? At what point? And this is kind of, you know, going back to your sliding scale thing, you know, of, you know, how small does it have to get before, you know, until it becomes okay to eat it? But, but yeah, so,
00:23:37
Speaker
I thought your exploration of the soil was great because really what I think the whole thing points to is this Ouroboros kind of motif that's an ancient symbol. And I thought I'd just lead into this next discussion by bringing that up and seeing if you've got any thoughts on that yourself.
00:24:02
Speaker
Well, at the end, I mean, you're exactly right. Because what I came to was that you can't actually draw a line. It is a circle. And so we can either be part of the death that's killing everything, or we can be part of the death that's actually making life stronger. And those are our only options because there's no death free option. And I do cry like I tried to grow my own food. It is not possible without death. It can't be done. That is what the soil wants. It's what plants eat. They eat dead animals.
00:24:32
Speaker
Yeah, they want manure they want animal parts blood meal bone meal all that stuff like you have to That's what plants eat. And of course, that's what they eat That's what the world is is dead plants and animals acted upon by you know, essentially bacteria to degrade them back Release all those nutrients into the cycle of life again. That's you have producers and graders. That's all you need and that's it and we're not either of those things we're just consumers so
00:24:57
Speaker
Like any wisdom tradition that tells you that humans actually need to be super, super humble, because we are dependent on all these other creatures.
Impact of Agriculture on Ecosystems and Society
00:25:06
Speaker
That is, that's really what we need. That's what we have to get back. Like the fact that we broke from that is the problem, because we need to be that humble. So that's all we can do is participate well, and try to support that cycle of life. But it's very hard to go from being a vegan to understanding that. I mean, it was just huge.
00:25:26
Speaker
And then the other problem is that all the foods that you're eating as a vegan are agricultural foods. It's all, you know, monocrop, grain, or beans. And that was like the other huge thing that I had to really come to terms with was that agriculture is the most destructive thing people have done to the plants. It's bio cleansing. It's destroying the soil. It's destroying the water table. Like we have skinned the planet alive.
00:25:51
Speaker
And since the year 1950, we've honestly been out of topsoil. We've been eating fossil fuel ever since. And we've pushed ourselves and the planet right to the brink. And agriculture is what did it. That's the problem. That's where all of this begins. And it's really hard to wrestle with that as a vegan because you're like, no, this is the food of peace and justice and kindness to animals. You've wiped out 98% of the habitat of all animals on the planet. There's no possible way this is good for animals.
00:26:21
Speaker
It's literally biotic cleansing. So it just all falls apart. And when you say, you know, since the 1950s, everything's been run on fossil fuel. Of course, you're not just talking about the machinery, are you? You're talking about the actual fertilizer. The actual nitrogen that is, you know, the substance that's, you know, the fertilizer.
00:26:40
Speaker
that's what it comes from, oil and gas. And that's what we're eating. Yeah. And one of the things that, you know, struck me when you're talking about this Ouroboros kind of the fact that life eats life is that there's a quote from Eckhart Tolle where he says, he says, you know, life is not the opposite of death. Yeah. And he kind of stops and says it again, life is not the opposite of death. His birth is the opposite of death. Life just is. Yeah, that's exactly it.
00:27:10
Speaker
And yeah, and that kind of captures it in some ways, isn't it? Because, I mean, and also, you know, another good example is, because actually, one of the things that you say in your book is that, you know, we really need to tell this story in a way a four-year-old can understand it. And I thought, yeah, you know, that would be an amazing kind of
00:27:33
Speaker
objective for a film or a filmmaker or whatever and then it struck me that actually The Lion King is that film in some ways because they talk about you know the antelope eating the grass and then the lions eating the antelope and then when the lions die they become the grass right. That's it right there, that's all you need.
00:27:53
Speaker
I thought that, you know, four-year-old can understand that. But that is the cycle of life. And yeah, I think, you know, quite clearly it is a challenge for many of us, especially when we've been brought up with this kind of scientific idea of hierarchies and evolution as a kind of upward progression of consciousness.
00:28:17
Speaker
The other week I actually interviewed a lady, I don't know if you've heard of her, called Monica Galliano, who is a plant consciousness researcher, and she wrote a book called Thus Spoke the Plant, which would be right up your street, if you haven't heard of it. Oh, I gotta get that. I'm sure you'd love it, yeah, she's a fantastic character. I'll send you the link to the podcast I did as well, so you can get a taster for her. She's a lovely, lovely soul, you know.
00:28:42
Speaker
But, but she kind of fell into plant consciousness research, because she didn't want to kill the fish that she used to be a marine biologist, and she didn't want to kill the fish that she was working with. And that's just part of the scientific method is you, you observe the fish's behavior, then you take them out of the sea and you kill them to see if
00:28:59
Speaker
you know the organs and the hormones and everything relate to the behaviour you saw and she decided not to do this and so she ended up studying plants and very quickly realised that the plants are conscious as well but as she's proved it scientifically through various studies you know sort of different levels of consciousness that you just wouldn't expect in the plants but I think what's unique about her book is that it kind of straddles two worlds in as much as it straddles
00:29:27
Speaker
the scientific world. She's a post doctorate researcher at the University of Sydney, so she's living in that scientific world where she has to publish papers and do her experimental research and so on. But at the same time, she's doing dieters with shamans and experiencing
00:29:45
Speaker
plant communication subjectively and the plants are telling her what her next experiment should be and then she goes and does the experiment. So she's got this very kind of shamanic but experiential side to it and subjective side and then she's got the really objective side and I think you know if you were to speak to
00:30:03
Speaker
most people, but especially I think if you were to speak to someone who's decided to adopt vegetarianism or veganism, then they would quite often say exactly what you just said, that, you know, I don't want to eat sentient creatures. And that's the reason that they have opted for, or one of the key reasons that they've opted for, because they don't have to eat sentient creatures, and therefore they've decided to go down this plant-based route.
00:30:30
Speaker
But Monica Galliano's research and many other people's research really suggests that actually that's not quite what's going on. Yeah, I mean, bacteria is sentient. And there's plenty of indigenous cultures that talk about the rocks as the most ancient people and that you can communicate with them. I don't understand why we can't at least open the possibility that the universe is filled with all kinds of tensions and that
00:30:59
Speaker
all of these are beings that deserve our respect and with whom one can enter into relationship. It just seems to me that the investors that believed that didn't trash their land. They actually lived for thousands of years and did no permanent harm. And we can look at the culture that believes the other. I mean, we can look out at the world and see a planet that's kind of on the brink of being over. And it's a very, very, you know, sort of direct correspondence here between
00:31:29
Speaker
who did well by their land base and who decided to just use it as a resource until it was gone. It doesn't lead to a place.
00:31:38
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, absolutely. So, you know, on that front, you know, there's a lot of issues with the view that vegetarians or veganism is the only way to save the planet. And we've already talked about that a little bit in terms of mono cropping being an issue and obviously just the kind of desiccation and decimation of the topsoil.
00:32:02
Speaker
But so that's the sort of downside. But what is the solution to that? How can we change things? Right. So this is the moment when you do have to talk about population, which a lot of people are scared about. For reasons, for good reasons. I mean, there's been a lot of racism behind some of these initiatives. And certainly terrible things have happened
00:32:27
Speaker
to women in places like China with the one child policy. I totally get why people are scared of this, but the answers are actually pretty easy and they're good answers. The number one thing that drops the birth rate, and this has been studied backwards, forwards, inside out. There's absolutely as a fact. The thing that drops the birth rate around the world is really simple. One thing, teaching a girl to read.
00:32:51
Speaker
And what that means is that if women and girls have even that much more power over their lives, they will choose to have fewer children and they're able to do it. So what we have to do is empower girls to be women who have control of their futures and then the birth rate drops.
00:33:06
Speaker
There are in fact, 24 countries that already have either negative or stable population growth. And it's the places where women have the most control over their lives. So this is something we should care about anyway, because women and girls count. But it turns out that it's actually the only way that we're going to pull back from the brink. So it was never people versus the planet. Like that gets set up as the sort of, you know, Malthusian race to the finish. That was never the issue. It really is people plus the planet is the only way forward.
00:33:35
Speaker
You know, so that is like the number one thing. You know, half of all the pregnancies that happen every year are either unplanned or unwanted. You know, like, this is actually not hard. If we just give women full human rights, then the problem is solved in a few generations. So that's one thing. And then the other thing is, you know, as our population shrinks, as we, you know, try to make that happen in good ways, then we need to start repairing what we've destroyed. And that's actually not that hard because life wants to live.
00:34:04
Speaker
If we simply get out of the way and we stop destroying, we stop taking what isn't ours, the forests and the prairies and the wetlands will come back and they will come back very quickly because life really does want to live. It's a very fierce force and you give it the tiniest little bit of reason to be there and it will come back.
00:34:25
Speaker
Yeah, that's that's really positive news. But there's obviously a long way to go with that. And, you know, what one of the so obviously population as you say, is probably the key thing. But then in terms of farming practices, have you got any sort of thoughts or advice on that front? What would you advise if you had someone coming to you to say, well, what should I eat? You know, and how should I go about this?
00:34:53
Speaker
So I think that ultimately the human race has to give up agriculture. I think it was, as other people have said before me, it was the worst mistake the human race has ever made. That's what Jared Diamond said, and he won a Pulitzer Prize. So I think we can listen to him. It's just true. It's backbreaking labor for piss poor nutrition. Human health declines rapidly. The moment people take up agriculture, they shrink six inches and their teeth fall out.
00:35:20
Speaker
It's just been a nightmare and human culture is destroyed with it. From that point forward, you kind of automatically end up with slavery, genocide, imperialism, hierarchical societies, militarized societies where 90% of the population is enslaved.
00:35:36
Speaker
I mean, it's just gruesome what happens from that point forward, as well as absolute ecological devastation. So I don't think it's a great idea. And I think we can decide we're not going to do it anymore. And I think we need to just back it up. We need to stop plowing. We need to stop taking over entire biotic communities and just growing humans on it. I don't know what we ever thought this was a good idea. It's not. But if we let the prairies, the grasslands come back and let the forest come back,
00:36:05
Speaker
There's still plenty of food for, you know, a reasonable number of humans could live that way forever. It's how humans lived essentially for two and a half million years. We have always been monsters and destroyers. So in the here and now, there are plenty of people who are learning how to do this. The farmers around the world, I mean, their lives are pretty horrible. They are essentially serfs to the six corporations that control the world food supply, and they can never get their heads above water. I know in the United States,
00:36:35
Speaker
those six corporations, their monopoly is, you know, so intense that they can command prices that are below the cost of production. So no matter what a farmer does, there's no way to earn a living from year to year. And the only reason they stay in business is because the federal government steps in with the farm every year and those subsidies and that and that money goes right into the hands of corporations. So it's just this really just a circle. So then every year they're forced to produce more and more to try to make a little tiny bit more money
00:37:05
Speaker
they're just making more surplus. And so then the price drops even further because there's even more. And this other thing that I think the vegetarians really need to try to understand, that's exactly what created factory farming, that before 1990, it didn't exist. And the only reason we have it is because of that mountain of surplus corn, it suddenly made economic sense to take cows
00:37:27
Speaker
off their native food out of their native habitat, put them in these bizarre steel buildings with cement floors and feed them something utterly inappropriate that kills them and that would be good.
00:37:38
Speaker
But the thing about corn, it does the same thing to cows. It does to humans. It makes them really fat, really fast. So from a capitalist point of view, it's really great. You can get a lot of meat really quickly. Now, never mind that it's going to make people sick because it's completely wrong and never mind that the animals are going to get really sick because it's not their native diet. You can at least make money and that's why factory farming exists.
00:38:00
Speaker
We could all stop eating factory farmed food tomorrow. It would not stop those farmers from overproducing corn because that's not the reason they're doing it. That's a side effect. We've completely put the horse before the cart here or the cow before the cart. That's not the reason. It's completely backwards. Those farmers are in a terrible position and that's why they're overproducing corn. It's not that cows need to eat corn and if we stop eating meat, that will end because it's not the issue.
00:38:27
Speaker
That is something I really want everybody to understand because it's not going to stop until we actually identify the problem. And then the other thing that you hear a lot that I certainly believed was, well, hungry people could be eating that corn. And that's not actually how it works. Right now that is actually happening and it's called agricultural dumping. So those six corporations can get really cheap food from places like America and Canada, and then they take it to poor countries and they literally destroy the agricultural sector by dumping
00:38:56
Speaker
those cheap commodity foods into the market. They can sell it for about half the price that local farmers can, and this has driven farmers off their land and into urban squalor the world over. It's exactly the model that the vegetarians seem to be suggesting, and it's just misery everywhere. It's not how it works in the world. The last place you want to put those cheap commodity foods is in front of hungry people because it destroys their local economies and means they will forever be dependent on
00:39:25
Speaker
essentially these imperialist powers that can wreck their economies. They need to stay on their land and provide food for their communities, which they know how to do if people would just leave them alone. So again, we've got this situation completely backwards. So anyway, yes, all of this needs to be restored. And the ruminants and the grasses and the bacteria, they all make an incredible biotic community together. And if we just let them do it, they're back to doing what they would do. So it's not actually hard.
00:39:55
Speaker
In the United States, there used to be 60 million bison 150 years ago. There was 60 million bison on the Great Plains. There's historical descriptions of this. You could sit on a rock for four days and watch as one single herd thundered by. That's how many animals there were. And they're all gone. We've traded 60 million bison in for 40 million really sick cows. It doesn't make any sense. And the whole thing is dependent on fossil fuel.
00:40:24
Speaker
So anyway, people are learning how to do this. They're learning how to restore the prairies. They're learning how to use the appropriate ruminants, bring them back, let them come home. And the world is restored. Everything comes back to life. You'll have birds and small mammals and reptiles that you haven't seen for decades, 100 years, will suddenly be there again.
00:40:46
Speaker
because they have a home once more. And that's all anybody wants. So we could do this. And the amazing thing about these kind of grass-based farms is that usually if they're done well, that even the first year, they're already turning a profit. So farmers are not stupid people. If you can explain to them how it's done, how easy it is to do it, it's a slightly different skill set than they're used to. But look, you can actually make money. It's really compelling. And so millions of acres now have been
00:41:15
Speaker
you know, sort of converted to this very much better model that is actually sustainable. And it's working. And this isn't none of the, you know, none of the institutions that are in charge of the planet are faced in the right direction. But even just talking to farmers about, you know, how hard their lives are, how much easier it could be if they try this instead. Most people love their family farms, they really want to do well, they don't want to lose their land. You know, it's horrifying for them, living in debt, always feeling like serfs.
00:41:44
Speaker
And to be given a different model that actually can work to provide them with sort of basic dignity and a way to support themselves is huge. And it also works, you know, it's not actually that hard. So if we could get a tiny bit of institutional support, like some government funding, just something, it would happen so much quicker. But even just showing people the facts is often enough to get them to start trying.
00:42:05
Speaker
And it works. Yeah. Fantastic. So when you say it works, there's been studies of this and there's sort of patches of land where this is being actually done already. Is that what you're saying? Yes, all over the world. I can send you some links you can put up with your podcast, but it's really amazing to watch sort of the land and back to life all over. I don't know about in the UK, but in the United States, we have a really great website called eatwild.com.
00:42:32
Speaker
And there's a woman named Jill Robinson, and she's all about pasture feeding, all about grass-based farming. And it's really great information, but even better is there's a state by state listing. So you can just click on your area and it will show you a list of all the really good farmers that you can buy food from. And it's really great. It's so easy. And you can talk to your farmers, you can go visit, have a personal relationship. You can see how they do things and you can watch the soil come back to life.
00:42:58
Speaker
Fantastic. We do have the soil association here who are the organic regulator, but I know organic farming isn't quite what you're talking about. It has some similarities, of course. It's bigger because you have to face that plowing is inherently destructive to the soil, that we don't have a right to just take over vast quantities of land and dedicated to humans.
00:43:21
Speaker
we're better off getting our basic nourishment from inside living communities rather than imposing ourselves across them. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Okay. So in terms of sort of social
00:43:33
Speaker
dinner with the right term would be social construction or social planning. Of course, you know, part of the reason, as I understand it, agriculture emerged is that as people began to congregate into bigger and bigger towns and cities, of course, they couldn't grow the foods within those metropolitan type areas. And so, you know, what they had to do was to grow outside of the city. And that's some of the sort of rationale for where agriculture emerged.
00:44:03
Speaker
But is that I mean ultimately I think where we've got to in our discussion is you're almost talking about the agriculture since the 1950s and the almost the tie-in with the military industrial complex and how you know these fertilizer factories are old munitions factories and so if we were to sort of trace it back a little bit in
00:44:31
Speaker
human history over the last few hundred, perhaps few thousand years. What's your understanding of agriculture? You know, let's say if we were to go back a couple of thousand years, we obviously, you know, we were well into the Neolithic and beyond the Paleolithic at that stage. But so would that be that kind of agriculture? Of course, I imagine they're plowing. So they were messing with the ecosystem, but it would have been a lot more natural and, of course, organic.
00:45:01
Speaker
than the kind of farming that we're seeing on a mass scale today. So there have been, I think, 34 civilizations in the history of humans, every last one of them ends in the collapse. And this one, you know, different, they last somewhere between 800 and 2000 years, they literally last until the soil completely gives out, and then there's nothing left. And then the pattern is it'll spring up somewhere else nearby, and then the same thing happens. So
00:45:30
Speaker
You have to think about, so what is a city? Like this word civilization, it comes from the same word as city. And what it means is people living in densities high enough that they require the importation of resources. So what that means is they've used up their own. So they have to go out and get those from somewhere else. And so from that point forward, it doesn't actually matter like what lovely, nonviolent, beautiful values people might hold in their hearts. You are dependent on imperialism and genocide.
00:46:00
Speaker
Because no one willingly gives up their land, their water, their trees, their fish. But because the city has used up its own, it has to go out and get those from somewhere else. So that's like the last 6,000 years and a few sentences. And that's the problem. The moment that you are living with overshoot and drawdown, you're going to use up your own stuff. You're all going to be starving unless you do something else.
00:46:22
Speaker
And the only other thing to do at that point is to go out and conquer your neighbors. So agriculture makes that possible. It also makes it inevitable. So that's like a really vicious circle. Why anybody started doing agriculture is still an open question. I've read so much about this. I've tried to understand what are the theories about this. And the theory that I learned all the way back to grammar school was, well, there were too many people suddenly. And the only thing they could do was
00:46:50
Speaker
you know, sort of intensify what you could get from the land that they had. And so they had to plant crops, and then everything was fine. And so that's the sort of the story, you know, like, oh, we figured something out and we were all lifted out of constant hunger and the threat of starvation and all these wonderful things happened after that. And the archaeological record does not prove that to be true. Like, there's not actually mass starvation amongst hunter gatherers. In fact, people are incredibly healthy.
00:47:19
Speaker
and their bones are long and strong and dense and disease free. And then suddenly agriculture and then boom, you've got crumbling bones, teeth falling out, just scarred with all kinds of diseases. We don't actually know why people took up agriculture. The only theory I've read that seems to ring true, and who knows if this is the reason, but the theory is that, well, this food is addictive.
00:47:45
Speaker
gluten being the number one culprit here. But for a lot of people, the protein will transform into this other thing called gluteal morphine in your in your intestines. And that's exactly what it sounds like. It's a little bit of morphine. And we all know those people who say I could not live without bread. Do not take my pasta away. I have to have you know, whatever every day and
00:48:09
Speaker
I understand I was one of those people like I completely understand how wonderful it feels to a muffin or a bagel or whatever. Yeah, you do get a little bit high from it. And it's legal and it's available everywhere. So you might not even realize how addicted you are. But yeah, is absolutely addictive to a great number of people. Best thing I said was stop eating gluten. But anyway, um, yeah, so that might be the reason is that it's addictive. And we just wanted to keep having that happy hit. And that was why we did it.
00:48:39
Speaker
I'm none of the other explanations make sense. You don't see signs of chronic long term hunger and let alone famine and hunter gatherers like they're doing really good. And then they take agriculture and then everything falls to shit and we don't know why.
00:48:52
Speaker
They did it. It just doesn't make any sense. So I don't know. I read a book by a guy called Steve Taylor called The Fool. And he's talking about the idea of the ego developing in human evolution. And he ties it in with the switch from essentially more of a hunter-gatherer paleolithic style existence to the Neolithic. And suddenly because
00:49:20
Speaker
at that point we're starting to look at ownership of things, you know, so we're starting to look at ownership of land, of people, of creatures, of tools and so on that we start to develop this sense of self whereas before it was much more a sense of tribe and working as a group and working with nature and the integration was the kind of key factor and of course
00:49:44
Speaker
it was a disadvantage to have stuff. If you're a hunter-gatherer and you're nomadic, you just don't want stuff. The less you have, the better because you're on the move. But then when you start to settle and you start to say, this is my turf and that's your turf or whatever, then suddenly the ego starts to develop, the warfare starts to develop this sort of antagonism over who owns what and what belongs to who.
00:50:13
Speaker
And so it seems like that's quite an interesting and logical explanation for how things emerged. But what exactly drove that change is still difficult to pin down. Why did we decide to stop moving and hunting and gathering? And it's such an easy way of life. It's so easy. Food is everywhere. You just go outside and there's whatever. There's a deer and there's some fish and there's some berries. And you don't have to do anything except gather it up.
00:50:43
Speaker
farming is just dawn to dust. It never ends. So why anybody would take it up? We just, we don't know. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So one, one thing I wanted to ask you now, my daughter is 13, nearly 14, and she is going through that phase of actually, you know, in this day and age, of course, looking on Instagram and YouTube at all of these animal cruelty videos.
00:51:07
Speaker
And you know, so my wife was saying to me, you know, a couple of months back, you just wait, she'll give us, you know, the line that she's going to become vegetarian sooner or later. And sure enough, over the summer, it happened. And I'm kind of fascinated to know what your advice would be. Now, I just so you know, what I did was I initially, you know,
00:51:30
Speaker
tried explaining a few of the facts that are presented in your book and reasoning it through with her and almost trying to get her to reconsider. And then I said to her, well, look, you know, if this is what you feel you must do, then you must do it. But I said, but can you just promise me one thing? I said,
00:51:48
Speaker
can you read the vegetarian myth before you do it? And she hasn't done it yet. So we haven't read it and she hasn't become vegetarian. But that's that's my stipulation. But I thought I shouldn't tell her not to because that's probably not the right thing with the teenage psyche. I said, you know, you know, if you wanted it, you must do it. But but please just do this, this one thing. And
00:52:12
Speaker
So I imagine you might have similar advice but what would you do confronted with that kind of a situation? Definitely like walk her through the facts of how many animals die because it's entire ecosystems that die for things like rice or wheat or corn. It's not non-deaf just because there's no face involved.
00:52:36
Speaker
It's not, you know, a quote dead animal on your plate. Well, it's dead plants. And beyond that, it's an entire ecosystem that died to get that food on your plate. So you're not actually doing a good thing for animals here.
00:52:48
Speaker
Like it's literally just biotic cleansing. It's wiping out all their habitat. And so she needs to look way bigger than just the food on her plate. Like how did this get here and what died in the process? Because if you're eating agricultural foods, the answer is honestly everything. And try to get her to observe that outside. You know, just go outside in nature or go to a farm or like try to, like the soil is alive, like start there. So much life in the soil. And every time you plow it, you're destroying that.
00:53:15
Speaker
We cannot have land life without soil. We're all dead without the soil. That's it. They do it for us. We can't do these things ourselves. And that's what we've killed doing agriculture is just the basis of land life itself.
00:53:31
Speaker
It's not nonviolent. It's not beautiful. It's not wonderful. It's not you know good for animals like it's just utterly destructive and I would totally support her in being against factory farming because it's hideous and Look at all that stuff and go this is bad. I don't want to be part of it But the honest answer to this is not to become vegetarian because that doesn't actually help like you're still killing the entire planet honestly with agriculture so there's better ways forward that restore the land and
00:53:59
Speaker
and that good lives to animals and some of those animals you eat and some of them you won't, but it makes their home be their home again. There's that book, The Wilding Book, that was written in the UK. It's so beautiful. You could go there and show her, this is what humans should do.
00:54:20
Speaker
We can eat that wild boar, and we could eat that deer, and we don't need anything else that's here, but that's our role as apex predators. We have to eat, so that's okay. We're sad about it, and we celebrate our lives, and we do it humbly, and that's really all you got. Yeah, so what I was going to ask was that I can imagine some vegetarians or vegans or people considering that way of listening to this and thinking, yeah, but surely I can
00:54:50
Speaker
eat vegetarian in a way that also is sustainable, that doesn't. So if you're saying, well, monocropping is not sustainable and kills lots of other creatures, well, maybe if I were to eat plants that are just growing naturally in the woods or in the countryside, then that's a sustainable way of being vegetarian. Now, where would you go with that? You can try that. Humans can't survive on fruit. We know what happens.
00:55:18
Speaker
Within two months, you're going to be very, very sick. The only other real thing you can add at that point for kind of fat and protein is nuts, which, good luck with that again. You're still not going to get any vitamin A, you're not going to have any vitamin D. It's way too many omega-6s. There's no omega-3s in it at all. And just without cholesterol, I'm sorry, but you don't have any hormones. And that's it. I mean, your reproductive organs are going to start shutting down. You're not going to be fertile.
00:55:47
Speaker
Um, good luck having a baby on that diet. Uh, I mean, you can try it. Like we know where it ends though. Like we know what humans need to eat. We know there are some things that we can't produce on our own to eat them.
Biochemical Individuality and Dietary Needs
00:56:00
Speaker
You're not going to get them from us in berries and like try that experiment if you really need to, but it's like, it's, you're, you're on nutritional drawdown. Like you're going to use up your own doors and then you're going to eat in a bad way. And eventually it will be permanent.
00:56:15
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. Where do you stand on the idea of biochemical individuality or just the notion that different people are adapted for different foods depending on where they're from on the planet? Is that something you've kind of looked into much or have your own thoughts around? I'm not super convinced about a lot of it. I think there's some truth in it. For instance, the vitamin A issue that there, you know, we can eat plant sources that have
00:56:44
Speaker
that a proto vitamin A, it's not real vitamin A that humans need. So this is where like, oh, you can eat carrots. Well, yeah, you can, but you need like 800 units of that to get, you know, 100 units of actual vitamin A. And as it turns out, there are people who cannot do the conversion. They simply lack the enzyme to do the conversion. And those people are absolutely obligate carnivores. They will die if they donate animal products. And if you are from a coastal or an island people, that could be you.
00:57:13
Speaker
Like that's mostly who ends up, you know, just historically not having those enzymes because they were eating so much of it. You know, evolution prunes and it prunes fast and hard. And if you don't need it, you don't have to make it anymore. And they just got rid of it. So a lot of people out there who tried being vegetarians and they couldn't make it work. And that's one of the reasons is that that obligate carnivore if you don't have the enzyme. So I think that there's some of that is definitely true. I do think overall, I mean, we have
00:57:39
Speaker
Paleolithic bodies and we need to be eating paleolithic food. I don't think anybody does good on a high carb, low fat diet. It's not what we are designed for. And I think that it's kind of foolishness to insist that we can. It just seems overwhelmingly that that is not what we were meant to eat. We cannot handle that load of sugar three or four times a day. I mean, it just wrecks havoc everywhere. And yeah, you're on nutritional drawdown again. So I just don't think it's a great idea.
00:58:04
Speaker
I mean, I think there's obviously some individual variation and that's also how evolution works. Like everybody has to be a little bit different. It's like, well, we'll try this. We'll try that. Who survives the longest? Who has the most children? Like, you know, who's going to be able to push the species forward? Like that's always going on in nature. So there's always going to be an individuality, but I think it's pretty well chopped out what humans need. That much variation, honestly.
00:58:31
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. Well, there's a book called Metabolic Man, 10,000 Years from Eden, and it's by a guy called Charles Heiser Wharton. And in his book, he talks about how different intestines and small intestines and large intestines from different peoples can be as much as 100% different in length. So you could have someone, I think it's four meters and eight meters for the colon.
00:58:57
Speaker
or would that be the smaller intestine? I don't have the figures right in front of me. But essentially, when you do the maths on it, it's 100% difference in terms of length. And you think, well, that's very interesting because if you've got a shorter digestive system, then you probably are better adapted for meat eating. And if it's longer, you probably are better adapted for plant eating. But
00:59:18
Speaker
at the same time, as you point out in your book, you know, we don't have the bacteria in our colons, no matter how long they are to break down cellulose. So not going to happen. Yeah.
00:59:29
Speaker
so you still still got a bit of an issue there right yeah yeah yeah and this this leads into you know sort of looping back around to talking about getting the the cattle back onto the parries and that kind of thing um you know i was at um the ancestral health symposium in la uh the first one they did i think it was 2011 or something um and um there was a guy there who
00:59:54
Speaker
who was from one of the American universities. He's a professor and unfortunately I didn't take down his name at the time and so you know I've actually tried to look him up a couple of times since but haven't been able to track down who it was. He was doing a presentation about the challenge of feeding the population and he was saying that you know when you've got as big a challenge as we have he said that you need to look for an organism
01:00:19
Speaker
that is highly successful that you can then turn into a foodstuff and he said so you know one of the most successful organisms on the planet is grass he said you can go to pretty much every continent and there's grasses there and he says so really we would need to be eating grass that would be one good solution for us apart from the fact we can't digest it
01:00:43
Speaker
And so actually, what we need to do is we need to find an organism that can eat grass and turn it into something that we can digest. And then he went into the whole explanation that you go into in your book about how grass, can you tell us a bit about grass and how it was a kind of evolutionary step change in the way plants evolved to do the thing? Grass is so interesting. And this is immediately observable to pretty much anybody.
01:01:11
Speaker
If you go outside or look out your window, if you see trees, you'll see that the tips of the tree branches, the leaves are going to be a brighter color. And that is this year's growth. Most plants grow that way. They grow from the far reaches of their bodies outward. Grass is different. Grass grows, the growth point is actually down near the soil. So they grow from the bottom, not from the tips of their
01:01:41
Speaker
blades, but from the bottom, from the, you know, where they are at the ground. And they evolved in grazed. That's why they do that. So every time that, you know, a grazer, let's say a bison comes by and takes a bite of grass, that actually stimulates the grass to grow more.
01:01:58
Speaker
So, which is very different than a tree. That doesn't happen when you bite off the leaf of a tree. So, it was this whole kind of evolutionary cohort that developed together. And that is what evolution is, honestly. That's what life is, is a whole bunch of interactions between different species. It's a series of relationships of life. That's what it is, honestly. It's a web, right? So, they all evolve together. And so, you have three main players here. You have the grass, you have the ruminant, and you have the bacteria.
01:02:27
Speaker
So first of all, the grass evolves to be eaten. Being chomped like that, being broken off right there near the bottom is a good thing for grass. It makes it grow more. It makes their roots stronger. It will make them grow deeper, which they need to do to survive the summer. And then it can grow faster from the top again. So it's this amazing thing that grass does. And they did that because they evolved with ruminants who were going to eat them. So then the ruminants, their role,
01:02:57
Speaker
Okay. Now you have to picture a grassland in the summer and it's really hot and it's really dry. And that's why it's a grassland and not a forest. Forests are much cooler and much wetter. That's what trees do. And grasses are totally different. They are for the dry parts of the world. So it's hot and it's dry. And what this means is that there's no bacterial, no bacterial activity at the surface of the soil. It's too dry. So all of the life goes to places. It goes underground where it's still moist.
01:03:27
Speaker
It's moist and dark under there. So there's still some bacterial activity going on along the roots of the plants. But the surface, there's nothing there. It's too dry. So who is doing the work of keeping the nutrient cycling is the bacteria that live inside the ruminant. So the bargain that they made with each other as they all evolved
01:03:49
Speaker
the bison said or the cow or whoever said, you can come and live inside my body where it will be moist and the exact right condition. And you can live in my four chambered stomach. And in exchange, you're going to feed me. So when a cow or a bison is eating grass, they're not actually eating it. What they're doing is they're feeding it to the bacteria. The bacteria are actually doing that. They are the only ones that can break down cellulose. That bison on their own cannot do it.
01:04:17
Speaker
So who's doing it? The actual work of that is that bacteria and they break it down and they're eating the cellulose. And then in turn, the bison actually eats the bacteria. So the bison is doing this really fun thing. It's taking very, very poor density food, which is, I mean, it's just pure cellulose grass. There's nothing there, but turns it into very good quality protein and fat in the bodies of bacteria.
01:04:42
Speaker
So again, everybody is eating somebody. Okay. There's no death free option. We're going to go back to that. The grass is eating by the bison. The bison is actually feeding that grass to the bacteria. The bacteria is eating the grass and then feeding its own bodies. Like they're getting eaten by the cow or by the bison.
01:05:01
Speaker
And then out the other end, you've got, you know, a little bit more bacteria is going to come out with the fecal matter and the urine. You're going to have a little bit of bacteria there as well, which will help in the summer. But the main, the main thing that keeps the nutrient cycle moving is that the bacteria live inside the bison. Um, right. So that's what makes that whole, that entire biotic community function is those are the keystone species without them. It can't happen. They are the ones who make it happen. Um, and this is extraordinary. Like if, if you.
01:05:31
Speaker
I just remember learning about this. I was like, God, your mind is just blown every time you learn more about the natural world. It's such an incredible thing. And over millions of years, like how long did it take for every one of those players to kind of work out their genes so that they could all look better like that? But there they are doing it. And take one player out, the whole thing collapses. If you take out the bison, if you take out the grazer in there, the plants that
01:05:57
Speaker
because nothing will degrade the plants. Their bodies just kind of fall over when they're done growing. And then you'll have, it just builds up on the surface of the soil, this like undegraded, cellulonic matter. And then the plants underneath will die from it. And so then the plants are further and further spaced apart as they one by one die. And eventually you just have a desert. I mean, there's nothing there that can grow. So it would degrade to nothing. And you can take out the fliers and you end up with the same thing. You end up with a desert.
01:06:26
Speaker
And there is another point in here. I mean, those three are very crucial, but you do need the aprax predators as well. So you need both grizzly bears or humans or somebody. And our role is to keep the grazers moving because left on their own, they'll just stand there and they'll eat too much. They'll eat it down to the ground. They need to be moving. So the predators apply the pulse. It's like the heart. And that's what we do. We keep them moving and moving quickly. And then the grass will recover and it will recover really well.
01:06:53
Speaker
So a lot of the people who are doing what's called managed grazing or mob grazing, that's what they're figuring out. And in this climate, with this amount of rainfall, how fast do I need to move those grazers so that the grass is at the height of its productivity all the time? And it's a little bit of a fussing around, but you can figure it out. And then you have sort of peak production of soil, of food, of habitat, of water. Everything just comes back to life when you get it right.
01:07:23
Speaker
Yeah, amazing, amazing. And one of the things I think it's important to sort of point out here, at least my understanding from what I've read is that when you feed a cow grass, it doesn't burf up methane nearly as much as it would do on corn, if at all. And it actually becomes a net carbon sink as opposed to contributing to the carbon footprint. Is that something that you've come to understand as well?
01:07:51
Speaker
Yes, and also that the biological activity in the soil will absorb a lot of the methane as well as the carbon. And honestly, this is pretty much the only hope we've got to sequester all the carbon that's been released now is to let the ruminants and the grasses sequester it. Because what those two creatures do together is they build soil. That's literally what they're doing out there. And we have to let them do it. I know we've all seen the hockey stick graph of 1800 is the beginning of
01:08:21
Speaker
fossil fuel age and there's this huge uptick in carbon being released into the atmosphere and it's horrifying and we can see what's happening. But honestly, if you take that graph and you back it up like 8,000 years to the beginning of agriculture, we've released as much carbon from just doing agriculture to the year 1800, as has been released from 1800 to now. So clearly, fossil fuel wasn't accelerant. I am in no way letting that off the hook, but agriculture is the beginning of global warming.
01:08:50
Speaker
And what's happened is you vaporize the soil. Every time you put a pool out of soil, you're degrading that soil. And what happens when you degrade it is it literally just vaporizes. So the physical soil is just, you know, the bacteria runs through way too fast because there's too much oxygen and it just turns back into carbon, into atmospheric carbon. And all of that went just straight up and that's it. That's what we did. So we're going to have to sequester it all. But the best way to do that, we don't need any weird high tech, crazy science fiction stuff.
01:09:18
Speaker
Grasses and permanence can still do it. It is not too late. But we need all of the activists who are working on global warming to understand this because this is our only hope at this point. And it can't be done. It is not too late. Look at the statistics, at the numbers that people are able to produce in terms of soil. It absolutely can be done. It is not too late, but we need to get on it. So I really really hope
01:09:43
Speaker
Extinction Rebellion and Greenpeace and 350.org they need to get on this this train because this is yeah, it's our only solution Right. Yeah, fascinating stuff so, you know one of the things that ties in with this and you know, I'm not sure if it ties in so much with with the discussion of methane and carbon, but One of the the books I read in this area was meet a benign extravagance by Simon fairly and
01:10:13
Speaker
One of the things he mentions in there about different, it's very fascinating actually talking about how different cultures adopted different animals and the accepted animals to eat and so on and so forth and how it ties in with their religions and all this kind of stuff. It's very, very, very interesting.
01:10:27
Speaker
But one of the things he says about people who favored the pig is that they tended to settle in areas where the food stuffs that were available were sort of substandard grains, food waste, feces. They're kind of more densely packed areas or forest dwelling areas.
01:10:53
Speaker
So what he was saying is that pigs, pigs can actually, they're twice as efficient as cows turning substandard grains or food waste or even feces into meat. Not that you want to do that, but they will eat anything. I mean, banana peels, like anything that never in a million years eat as humans. And that's the thing I really wish a lot of the vegans would understand. It's like, it's not a direct competition either between animals eating this and us eating that. Even the ones that are in factory farms,
01:11:23
Speaker
They're mostly eating the waste that's leftover from agricultural processing. They're really only eating about 13% of it is anything that a human can eat anyway. The rest of it really is the leftovers, like the pressed soybeans to get the oil, and then that oil is
01:11:37
Speaker
I mean, very stupidly used for humans. It's not particularly edible by us, but given industrial food supply, that's what goes into it is that soybean oil. And then they've got this mash left over and that's what's fed to animals. They're not getting whole soybeans that a person might eat. They're getting the leftovers from industrial food processing.
01:11:56
Speaker
Yes, yes and one of the important points I think you know we've already made briefly but I think it's worth coming back to is the whole concept of cholesterol and the concerns that there were around cholesterol in of course we can only get cholesterol from animal produce and the idea of course back in the 90s was that cholesterol was
01:12:21
Speaker
you know the driver of heart disease and I'm not sure I don't think this is from your book but I've certainly heard it from other people as well which is the idea that you know blaming atherosclerosis which is the process of course in heart disease on cholesterol is like blaming the fire brigade for causing fires because essentially the cholesterol is turning up where there's a problem right it's not that the cholesterol is the problem you know
01:12:48
Speaker
But then, of course, you go into great detail in the book about the importance of cholesterol for all kinds of aspects about health, in particular, hormonal health. And one of the things that struck me about it is that there's this figure of somewhere around 80 to 85% of the cholesterol that we need, we make endogenously, so within the body.
01:13:09
Speaker
But we need to get obviously the remaining cholesterol from foods. And the only foods that contain cholesterol are animal foods, right? So there's a little bit of an issue there. But it struck me that it's a little bit like the discussion around vitamin C and how
01:13:27
Speaker
certainly I think Linus Pauling's work when he discovered Vitamin C, he went on to suggest that the reason that we have stopped producing Vitamin C as humans, because of course mammals, most mammals do make their own Vitamin C indulgously, is that that's a certain point in our evolution, our ancestors were eating a lot of fruit, in fact they're quite frugivorous at one point, it was his take on it. And so we lost the capacity to produce Vitamin C indulgously. And
01:13:57
Speaker
You know, so the fact that we're not making enough cholesterol endogenously for optimal health kind of points to me to being a similar process as, you know, a certain point in evolution, we must have had to start eating a fair amount of meat for our bodies to stop producing enough endogenously. Does that make sense? Or does that? No, I mean, that just seems absolutely obvious. And I don't even know why anybody is still believing that kind of cholesterol myth. It's like so obvious that we need it.
01:14:26
Speaker
every single cell in your body surrounded by a membrane that is made from cholesterol. You would not have any cells. If we took all the cholesterol out of your body, you'd be a puddle of just liquid on the floor. And then I want everybody to think about this. What is an animal? What is a human? We are a series of electrical impulses contained inside a watery environment. Now, how does that happen? Well, all of those electrical impulses, they have to be insulated. They have to be coated in some substance that lets them fire.
01:14:56
Speaker
And that substance is called cholesterol. That's what, you know, that's what coats nerves so that your nerves can actually work. You wouldn't have a brain. You wouldn't be able to move your hands or your legs. Like it's not possible without cholesterol. And then again, yes, the hormones, every last one of your hormones is made. That's the mother substance is cholesterol. You don't, you don't have any, like from sex hormones on. And so.
01:15:17
Speaker
what your body will do is say, well, all right, you don't have to reproduce today, we can put that off to your feeling better. So we'll stop making sex hormones, but we'll keep the other ones moving because you really need those moments a moment. But this is why a lot of women, especially on the kind of low fat, vegan diets, have such terrible trouble with fertility as like, yeah, well, yeah, eat a little cholesterol, things might start moving again. So yeah, we can talk about brain health too and depression, like it's just
01:15:46
Speaker
ubiquitous, people who eat low fat diets, you know, you're like three to four times more likely to have serious issues with depression, with suicidality. They're even murdered at a higher rate. People who eat low fat diets murdered more often, like what in the world? Yeah, bizarre. That one I can't figure out. But it's true. So maybe because they're just like provoking fights. I don't know.
01:16:14
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's very sort of scary, this whole sort of, the over focus on certain, you know, what nutritionists might call sort of dietary culprits like cholesterol and saturated fats. Because also, of course, you know, we've mentioned cholesterol, but the saturated fats are another one that were, you know, very much put down as being
01:16:40
Speaker
you know, very detrimental to health to consume saturated fats. And yet, you know, again, a lot of the cell membrane is made from saturated fats, you know, cholesterol saturated fats is what this biolaminar lipid membrane is made from. And, you know, you've got 100 trillion of those somewhere, somewhere around that in the body, which are constantly being turned over. And if you're not, if you're not getting that saturated fat from your diet, and, and the cholesterol alongside it, then how are you going to make a healthy cell? And, you know, one of the things that I think
01:17:10
Speaker
fascinates me is that Bruce Lipton, who is this cell biologist that talks a lot about epigenetics, he is talking about the cell membrane is the brain of the cell. So a lot of people thought originally that it was the nucleus that was the brain of the cell, because it held all the information. But he's saying, no, no, the nucleus holds the reproductive information. He said, that's the gonad of the cell. It's not the brain.
01:17:38
Speaker
The brain is the membrane because the membrane is the intelligent part that decides what comes in and what goes out of the cell. And then he says, of course, in biology, if you look at how an organism, an animal develops embryologically, then you've got the endoderm, the exoderm, and the mesoderm. And so the endoderm is the organs. It goes on forming the organs.
01:18:01
Speaker
so that's these are the kind of primitive embryological tissues so all endodermal tissue goes on to form organs all mesodermal tissue goes on to form the muscles and not not just the muscles that move us but the muscles that squeeze our arteries and squeeze our intestines and so on and then there's the ectoderm and the ectoderm forms the skin and the brain right it's the same it's the same thing the brain and the skin are made from the same thing right so
01:18:27
Speaker
So then our cells, skins and brains are made from cholesterol and saturated fats. So you start removing them from the diet, you're going to have some issues with cell health. And so because it's the, it's the membrane that decides, do we take this, this substance into the cell to make it healthy or, or, or to feed the cell, or do we keep it out? So you start getting dysfunctions in the cell membrane. You have dysfunctions in the cellular function. And then of course the cells are
01:18:57
Speaker
everything, aren't they? They what power every part of the body. So yeah, it's pretty fascinating stuff.
Publishing Experiences and Ideological Reactions
01:19:05
Speaker
So I'm quite fascinated, I know we need to round off fairly soon, but I'm quite fascinated what has happened in your journey since publishing the book, because you know, of course, if people want this kind of detail and the stories around, you know, whether it be the political
01:19:26
Speaker
thinking around vegetarianism, veganism or the ecological. It's all there in the book and so I'd really strongly recommend that you get hold of the book to read or the book to listen to or both. But I'm interested to hear what's not in the book and what's happened to you since the writing of the book and have you been invited to conferences and got reactions there? Have you had resistance and backlash from people? How has your journey been since 2009 when that book was first published?
01:19:56
Speaker
You know, it's a mix. When I'm invited to speak at places that are about nutrition, or about sort of the politics of food, I'm very well received. There's a very warm reception. I get lots of people who, you know, say really nice things, you know, your book changed my life, like the kind of stuff that writers want here. So that's always fun. But you know, you're speaking to people who have sort of been on a similar a parallel path, and they at least get some of it already. So
01:20:26
Speaker
It's sort of fun to be amongst those people because they like me and that's always okay. But then there's other places where of course I'm not as warmly welcomed and it can be very controversial. And there is at least some set of vegans who hate me and wish I was dead. So it can be, I mean, it feels like a life-threatening situation sometimes. I mean, who knows, but they get a lot of hate mail, a lot of death threats.
01:20:55
Speaker
Um, that kind of thing is fairly regular as well. So that's one reason I have two giant dogs. Um, good luck getting past my dogs. Um, it's sad that it comes to it. Like we can't just have a discussion about different ideas, you know, the state of the planet and what might be the best way forward that it has to be that just kind of the same like, God, could we just talk if you don't like my book?
01:21:22
Speaker
you can just get back to the library. Like it's not, you don't have to read it, you know, but it's really like, it's, yeah.
01:21:32
Speaker
Yeah, do you think it's because people identify such a sense of self from their behaviours and from their group affiliations? I mean, because it makes no logical sense that anyone would have any kind of ill feeling towards you to the extent that they want to, you know, even be abusive, let alone physical harm or death threats that you've talked about. There's no logic behind that. Like you say, you could have a debate, for sure.
01:22:02
Speaker
I think that is part of it, that it's definitely true that if you're a vegan, it's who you are. It's not just what you believe. It's a thing that you are. And so any information that sort of counter to that, it really does feel like a threat to your sense of self. It's not just, whoa, this is a different idea about what might work for the planet or, oh, look at this. This is more science information about human function, my brain and my heart disease, whatever. It's way bigger than that. I mean, it just feels
01:22:30
Speaker
really kind of gut level, like reptile brain level, like, I'd be threatened by this information. And honestly, nobody should feel that way about facts. You know, like that's, you are now moving into a fundamentalist mindset, where you can't actually engage with different ideas. Like, that's a scary place. And it's a place that obviously humans can go pretty quickly. And we always, no matter what we believe, no matter where we sort of sit on the political scale, like we should always be guarded against that.
01:22:58
Speaker
That level of rigidity never ends well for anyone. And you have to stay open to other information. Because what if you're wrong, first of all? Because I was really wrong for 20 years. And that's kind of a permanent price. Like when you do permanent damage to your body that doesn't go away. It's forever. Like that was a big mistake.
01:23:16
Speaker
But then you wonder, what are the mistakes am I making? And it, you know, it should make us all more flexible. Well, I've been wrong about things like this stuff you believe when you're 16, you're not probably going to believe when you're 30, like a huge amount of things in your life. And you change. And that's good. It's called growing up. It's called maturing. It's called gaining knowledge.
01:23:35
Speaker
Hopefully wisdom at the end of it, but that's not going to happen if you're shut down. Like you had this incredible gift of a human brain. It was two million years in the making. Don't shut it off. Just stay open to other ideas. It's not healthy. If you and your friends are that insane about not listening to other ideas, there's something that's wrong.
01:23:55
Speaker
just really wrong with that. You're supposed to be able to debate, to talk, to think, to listen, to absorb new things. And if your ideas are still good, then you'll still believe them at the end of the day. But if there's something that you have wrong, wouldn't you rather know about it? Wouldn't you rather absorb something new and sort of change your framework a little bit, see what you maybe couldn't do better? That's what you're supposed to do through life. It's too much, some of this. It's too much.
01:24:20
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. And it's really the whole premise of how we got here is to be adaptable, isn't it? That's what evolution is about. It's about adapting to new information within the environment that you're inhabiting. And yeah, it strikes me that, of course, you know, one of the things that's happened very recently is there's been this film came out, come out called The Game Changers, which was
01:24:48
Speaker
What's the name of the guy? Cameron. James Cameron. Yeah, I was going to say Chris Cameron. It's James Cameron. He's the famous film producer and so very nicely put together film.
01:24:59
Speaker
really targeted to the kind of I would say young male CrossFit kind of mindset that you know it was kind of kind of trying to take a macho stance on veganism and I thought it was great they did a really good job at putting it all together but there were so many aspects to it that were off the mark you know one of the things they used to promote it was was the idea that
01:25:23
Speaker
I've got this strong man who holds some world records and he says that people ask him, how can you be as strong as an ox when you don't eat any meat? And he replies to them, have you ever seen an ox eating meat? But you don't have a four-chambered stomach that can digest cellulose, like you have a completely different body.
01:25:50
Speaker
I know, I know, I know. Go ahead and grasp your breakfast. Go ahead, try that. That's it, that's it. Go eat grass. See how well that works.
01:26:00
Speaker
Yeah and then they had a guy who was ex-special forces who had essentially decided that he had seen the light and that he realised that because he had since leaving the special forces he had gone to I think South Africa certainly it was one of the game reserves in Africa to protect the elephants and you know fight against the poachers and so on and then he realised that he was being a hypocrite because he's saving the animals in the park but then going home and eating animals that's this is how he described the story.
01:26:28
Speaker
And then he says, you know, and some of the most biggest powerful primates, like you take a gorilla, for example, you know, that thing's a vegetarian, but it'll fuck you up in three seconds flat. And you're kind of thinking, I think you're missing the point here, you know, this is like, but again, is to try and appeal to that macho psyche.
01:26:51
Speaker
And yeah, I mean, obviously, you've got a whole chunk of description of guerrillas and how they got functions and so on in your book. Think about this huge digestive system because they mostly eat plants.
01:27:12
Speaker
So it's basically like, you know, a cow essentially in there. Um, we don't have that. We don't look like that. Even just our silhouette is so different for obvious reasons. We have tiny little digestive systems compared to them and creepy grades. And the only way that's going to work. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Well, they might do it for a few years.
01:27:37
Speaker
Yes, yes, exactly. And then they're going to start cheating, and then they're going to feel terrible, and they're going to feel guilty. And then it's really hard because they've got a public persona that says, I'm a vegan.
Health Challenges and Evolution of Dietary Beliefs
01:27:46
Speaker
So then they're going to have to make a huge thing on social media about, well, I'm really sorry, I'm eating beef again. And everybody's going to hate them. And we've seen this story so many times.
01:27:56
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. Well, actually, Paul Chek did an interview on his podcast with a guy called Tim Sheef, who ran a vegan, I think it was a vegan clothing company, but certainly it was vegan related. But he is an elite athlete in the kind of obstacle racing world. And of course, it was very public about his veganism, and then started to get unwell, as you probably predict, across a period of time. And
01:28:22
Speaker
and ultimately listened to his body and decided that he needed to eat some animal produce and bit by bit you know he got healthy again and so then of course he got some real vitriol and attacks on him because of going against all of his values and all this kind of thing and it was really fascinating to hear his experience and you know probably similar to yours some real nasty threatening
01:28:48
Speaker
sort of interactions he'd had with people. But this this leads on to one of the key themes in your book, which is, you know, several times in the book, you talk about adult knowledge. Sure. And could you could you just briefly explain what that is? Yeah, so that was from I didn't make that up. That is a phrase from a man named Martin Prechteau. And he was in Central America, pretty sure was Central America.
01:29:15
Speaker
And he was adopted into a local people, their indigenous people. And they taught him a whole bunch of things about their life ways and their spiritual practices and all of this. It's called Honey in the Heart, I think, for the book. Anyway, it's really, really beautiful. But that was what he had to learn was adult knowledge. And there's a word for it in their language. But what it means is this idea that every single
01:29:41
Speaker
human and really every living creature is dependent on every other living creature that nobody can do it alone, that that's just not what life is. And that was sort of the profound thing for me was, you know, I can't grow my own food without killing a whole bunch of things. I have tried to do it as a vegan and it can't be done. And the soil needs to eat and the plants need to eat and the animals need to eat. And what do you know, we are all feeding each other. It's not actually about me dominating them. It's about we're all taking turns.
01:30:10
Speaker
And that was it. We're all dependent. Where do we think oxygen comes from? I can't make oxygen. You can't make oxygen. The phytotrophs are the only one that can do that. So mostly plants, some plankton. That's it. You can't make it any other way. And it's the same with those little degraders in the soil. Those are the people, tiny little people who are making all those nutrients available again to the rest of the community of life. You and I cannot do that.
01:30:37
Speaker
We can't do anything for ourselves, really, we are so utterly dependent. And that should just make us so humble and so grateful. Rather than feeling like arrogant dominators. I mean, the truth is completely so far in the opposite direction. We are so utterly dependent on everything else. And, you know, that's that moment where we have to say thank you, and we have to be grateful. And all we can do is do it well. Like, am I am I part of that cycle? Am I doing everything I can?
01:31:05
Speaker
to strengthen that cycle and to throw my loyalty in with that cycle, the cycle of life. Rather than the destruction of it, that's all you've got. So that was my adult knowledge, was I can't actually get out of this cycle. I tried my hardest to be the one that said, there is no death, but my existence does not depend on any more suffering of any being, but it just is not reality. It's every single thing I ate had once been alive and that living thing
01:31:31
Speaker
needed all kinds of other things to die to support it and then it was my turn and that's it I will die someday. Yes, yes, exactly, exactly and yeah and I guess it's the whole notion of taking responsibility and literally having the ability to respond to new insights and new knowledge and new
01:31:54
Speaker
information that comes your way. That's the sort of part of what I read into it, the idea that we can behave like children and be told by an authority what should or shouldn't happen. But actually once we understand the concept and we see the connections and then we have the lived experience like you and I have had and Tim Sheef has had and various people have had of going from
01:32:19
Speaker
one diet to a different diet and feeling the health benefits of that, then you have to take that experience and respond to it.
01:32:30
Speaker
You know, one aspect that might be worth just mentioning is that I think a lot of people that switch to plant-based diets do feel better for a period of time. And certainly that's, you know, I've experienced that and I know many people that have experienced that. But one of the things that
01:32:51
Speaker
in my view, my understanding causes that is that you're just changing the stresses on the digestive system and therefore unloading a part of the system. And that makes you feel a little bit more energized, a little bit better for a period of time. But I think as you've alluded to a couple of times, it's the longevity and the ability for that to actually sustain you in the longer term. That's the issue. Yeah. The average person who tries a vegan diet does not even last three months.
01:33:21
Speaker
Is that right? Yeah. Yeah. It's all it's only like, honestly, crazy people like me can do it long term, ideologically, absolutely compelled. Because everybody else is like, Yeah, I feel terrible. Like, I, you might feel good for a few weeks, because you're essentially fasting. But like you said, or, you know, maybe you've cut out other things too. Like I stopped eating white sugar. So that's got to be a thing. A lot of people drinking or they stop smoking. Like there's other lifestyle changes that go along with it. And that's all good.
01:33:49
Speaker
So you may feel better a little bit, but honestly, three months is usually the cutoff where people are like, I'm starving. I'm freezing cold. I can't get out of bed in the morning. I'm so depressed. I don't know why. You know, this is just, it's clearly not working. Please let me just see the burger. And then they feel dramatically better. And it's over and it's kind of a silly thing I tried. And then you have people like me who just, you know, grind it into the ground.
01:34:14
Speaker
I don't know if it's going to congratulate you for that or not. I know, right? Kind of an experiment. Yeah, exactly. Well, thanks so much for today. One thing I'd like to ask you in closing is, is there anything that you would change? Obviously, you know, I've got your documented kind of version of events from 2000. Well, I imagine you wrote most of that 2007, 2008, if it was published 2009. I'm not sure exactly you're writing years, but
01:34:43
Speaker
But is there anything that you reflect on and say, I think I would change that. Either maybe you make it even more harsh than it was back then or more direct. Or would you soften any of it? Or would you change any of the information that's there? I mean, from what I can see, it's all still valid today. I think I would change. I would add more about grass-based farms. I would add more about grass restoration and prairies.
01:35:11
Speaker
And that's really the way forward. I didn't quite understand all of that yet in a way that I do now and that that is just, it's so key to saving, honestly saving the planet is the only thing that's going to sequester that carbon and everybody needs to understand that as a baseline. So I would have a lot more in the book about that, but whatever it's fine.
01:35:31
Speaker
Those books are out there, too. Like, there's so many good books about that now. So it's really great. Yeah. Yeah, excellent. And do you have any final words of wisdom? The podcast is called From Chaos to Order. And the idea being that, you know, we've, we've obviously talked a lot around vegetarianism and nutrition and the environment and so on. And I know that you've certainly offered a lot of information and advice within that. Is there any way to simply summarize that? I would say that
01:35:59
Speaker
If you're listening to this and you are a vegetarian or a vegan, or you're considering that, always to keep your mind open to other information that the person that you are will not change, even if it turns out that you're wrong about some things. You will still be the same person who still really does care about animals and about the earth and about justice and about compassion. Those are not things you ever have to give up to be a good person.
01:36:26
Speaker
Like you will always be the same person, even if you decide that this is not necessarily, you know, the way to go. And that to me was the most terrifying thing was, you know, would I still be a good person, even though I have to eat this thing that I hate eating, like what's going to happen? So that doesn't have to change. It's just, you need to expand sort of the bandwidth of what you're looking at. Cause you may end up with different, a different way forward and still good. Like you can still be a good person.
01:36:55
Speaker
Yeah that's beautiful, that's lovely. I guess it's something that I think perhaps because of my own journey into vegetarianism wasn't initially from the moral side and that kind of like I say came a little later for me that that aspect of it perhaps was more hidden from my view.
Reflections on Food, Energy, and Life
01:37:13
Speaker
One sort of final thought for me is this idea that
01:37:17
Speaker
when you eat something, do you kill it or does it become a part of you? Does it live on through you and you live on through it? Because for me, that's one way that I would explain things as I have done to my daughter and how I view food with reverence and how it's providing life for me and I'm providing life for it.
01:37:43
Speaker
you know, I know you can always debate these things and twist them, you know, turn them in your head. But I think that that's an important concept as well that, you know, the chicken or the or the broccoli or the onion or whatever it is, is going from having an onion experience to having a human experience or chicken experience to having a human experience. So it's just transformation of energy, which, you know, as we know, that's that's
01:38:10
Speaker
a kind of irrefutable law is that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. It can only be transformed. And those moments where the transformation occurs, those are like the sacred moments because you're right on the verge from one thing to another. And that is, they're scary moments, but they're also sacred moments. And that's what we should be
01:38:32
Speaker
like just acknowledging and just trying to feel the fullness of it. Like it's not always going to feel good. It can be really scary to die. I know it's not everybody gets a good death. I understand there's there's terror, there's pain. But it's going to happen. And like we just we have to come to terms with that. But for me, it's it's just incredibly soothing to think that one day, you know, every last atom of carbon in here is going to be out there feeding the world again. And
01:38:58
Speaker
I'll be in a box and I'll be in a bird and I'll be in a sunflower and I'll be in a redwood tree. And that's like an incredible thing that you still get to keep participating. And when, whenever this ego is, it dissolves and this person, Lierre won't be here, but all of these cells, you know, it's, it's going to degrade and it will go back to where it came from. So I find that incredibly comforting.
01:39:20
Speaker
Yeah, beautiful. Well, thank you so much for today, Lierre. Really enjoyed that and ever so grateful for your time today, but also all of the time and effort you put into the book and for being brave enough to put it out there and face whatever consequences you've had to face as a result. It's certainly a message that I think the world needed and hopefully more people will get to share in that message and pass that message on through the podcast and through reading the book.
01:39:49
Speaker
Well, thanks for having me on. Thank you. Thank you. Appreciate it. So there's a glimpse into some of Lierre's work, which I found to be most fascinating and insightful, both because it digs so deep into all issues and concerns around plant-based eating, but also because it was laced with wisdom and real world answers.
01:40:08
Speaker
One of the testimonials for Lierre's book, The Vegetarian Myth, from Dr. Michael Eads, author of Protein Power, says, I can't remember anything I've read that has contained so many terrific lines. And it's true. This book is a real gift of prose and of wisdom. I'd urge you, if you're a plant based in your current dietary habit, or if, like my daughter, you're thinking about it, please do read Lierre Keith's book to see how her insights might adjust your path.
01:40:35
Speaker
In addition, Paul Cech and I have recently released episode one of a six-episode podcast called The Honest Vegetarian on his podcast channel Living 4D with Paul Cech. Details are in the show notes. In it, we share our own experiences of vegetarianism, including our clinical experiences, as well as socio-cultural, psychological, and spiritual considerations.
01:40:57
Speaker
The remaining five episodes of The Honest Vegetarian will be available on Chekiva.com. That's Chek, C-H-E-K-I-V-A, Chekiva, the new Netflix-style channel specializing in holistic edutainment from January the 1st, 2020. Thanks for listening. See you on the next show.