Podcast (sustainable-dish-podcast): Play in new window | Download

Today’s episode is a little bit different. I wanted the opportunity to talk about current events, topics that need deep exploration, or catch-up with friends. So, I am starting Fireside Chats, intimate conversations with people in my inner circle, like my co-host James Connolly, and Robb Wolf, my co-author of Sacred Cow. 

This first chat was sparked by responses I received from my Instagram post a few days ago. You can read the original post here and my response here. James and I talk about our feelings surrounding the food landscape in which we find ourselves living and how the food industry, specifically ultra processed foods, is using activist language in order to sell products. 

These tactics create a right versus wrong situation absent of all nuance, which leads to fights over language and word use rather than allowing us to get to the heart of the issue. As a dietitian, it is my job to identify foods that are better sources of nutrients than other foods. Those of you that have been following my work for some time, know that I look at diet holistically considering many factors.

For folks new to Sustainable Dish, I would encourage you to read my post on foods that are more expensive and less nutritious than grass-fed beef. Or listen to previous podcast episodes featuring experts in the field of climate change, sustainable farming, and other issues that impact human health (like poverty).

James and I continue our conversation discussing:

• Michelle Obama and the Let’s Move campaign leading to the Everything in Moderation mantra
• Processed food’s predatory nature on communities
• The importance of diving deeper into the issue and determining how less nutritious foods came to be culturally appropriate foods
• How the potato became a part of Irish culture as a way to control the Irish
• How food groups are made up
• Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and its effect on people’s food choices
• How food access is only one factor when it comes to eating healthfully
• The Universal Basic Income experiment that led to positive health outcomes
• How stressors prevent you from making choices that lead to a better health future
• A study of pregnant women from India that associated vegetarianism with positive pregnancy outcomes without considering class, economic status, or healthcare access.
• What James is up to now
• What Diana is up to now

Resources:

• The Four Agreements
• Food Compass Study
• Sacred Cow
• Wired to Eat by Robb Wolf
• Utopia for Realists by Rutger Bregman
• Death in the Garden with Jake Marquez and Maren Morgen
• White Oak Pastures
• Sustainable Dish Episode 164: Will Harris of White Oak Pastures  
• Center for Agricultural Resilience (CFAR)
• Jason Rowntree at Michigan State University
• Sustainable Dish Episode 167: Dr. Tony Hampton

Connect with James: 

Website: The Primate Kitchen

Instagram: @primatekitchen

Twitter: @jamescophoto

***

Episode Credits:

Thank you to all who’ve made this show possible. Our hosts are Diana Rodgers, Lauren Manning, and James Connelly. Our producer is Meg Chatham, and our editor is Emily Soape. And of course, we are grateful for our sponsors, Patreon supporters, and listeners.

This episode is sponsored by Paleovalley, my go-to, grab-and-go source for products that prioritize nutrient density in an industry that prioritizes everything else. Their epic lineup of products includes Organic Supergreens, 100% Grass-Fed Beef Sticks, Grass-Fed Organ Complex, 100% Grass-Fed Bone Broth Protein, and low-sugar snack bars. Visit their website here and enter the code SUSTAINABLEDISH for 15% off your first order.

Quotes:

“I study a lot of marketing initiatives that come through the food industry and one of the things they actually really love to do is they is they love to grab activist language, and then utilize it in a way to get people to buy products.”  – James Connolly

“We have a world that is constantly bombarding us with stressors and then we also have a new product market that is roughly 20,000 new products coming out of the ultra processed food industry. And so you walk into a supermarket nowadays, and how do you discern what is real and what is being heavily manipulated to you.” – James Connolly

“When you’re worried about your car starting tomorrow, or have so much stress in your life, long term health and not getting type two diabetes may not be a privilege that you are able to worry about.” – Diana Rodgers, RD

“I just think people are just really reactive right now and not able to even comprehend that there might be some nuance to someone’s message.” – Diana Rodgers, RD

Transcript:

Diana Rodgers, RD  0:00  

Welcome to the podcast everyone. We’re gonna start these fireside chats. And so this is the inaugural Fireside Chat I’m doing with my co host here, James Connolly. Hello, James. 

James Connolly  0:12  

Hey Diana.

Diana Rodgers, RD  0:12  

And what this is basically intended for sort of a catch up chat about current events and kind of riff on things that we’d like to talk about.  Because normally the podcast is… has been sort of featuring other people, and we’re going to continue to do that. But we thought that there might be value in just kind of diving deeper into subjects that we’re interested in. So it is Saturday morning. And the reason why I gave James a text saying I’d love to do it now is because I want to just talk about this post that I did on Instagram recently, suggesting that people consider if they want to have a different relationship with food, eliminating potentially problematic foods for 30 days, and got a ton of feedback that even a year ago, I would never have heard. And so let’s kind of dive into this and unpack it a little bit and talk about sort of this current diet culture, and all the things that surround that. Do you want to set the stage a little bit James?

James Connolly  1:20  

Yeah, I can tell, I can tell you it from my perspective, I, you know, originally, I looked at the post, and I scrolled through the first three parts of it, and then just kind of hit but love and, and kind of moved on. And I got a text from you that night. And it was like, wow, this is blowing up in a very weird way. And so I ended up reading it over again. And it’s, it’s an interesting thing, because the description of it is this overall kind of understanding of how much how much of a predatory economy we have on people. And so I study a lot of marketing initiatives that come through the food industry. And one of the things they actually really love to do is they is they love to grab activist language, and then utilize it in a way to get people to buy products. And you know, the more glaring aspect of that was when one of the Kardashians did a Pepsi commercial, in around the protests are happening around Black Lives Matter. And so they have this, it’s a group of the most beautiful people you’ve ever seen in the world dancing in the streets, like signs up and everything like that. And then you have one of the Klo…, I don’t *bleep* know, one of the K Kardashians. She goes, and she’s doing a photoshoot and looking beautiful, and all this stuff. And somebody she gets a word of that this protest. And so she like hands off, whatever she’s doing to this Black assistant, which is *bleep* ridiculous, then she goes out to do the protest. And so you have this huge pickup line of police and the other protesters on one side. And so she goes, and she hands a Pepsi to the policeman. You know, and it’s the most like, ridiculous commercial. I don’t even know if you can even find it anymore. And so I don’t know how that ended up on, you know, getting out because somebody somewhere along the line should have been like, hey, wait a second. This is a little tone deaf guys. But it’s kind of get back to it’s like, I think the the way that if you’re raising children in this environment, or if you’re a young adult in this environment, you become, like, constantly bombarded by imagery that is in essence trying to influence you to kind of create a dialogue so that you buy into a product. And is as it’s sort of moved away from the 1950s, like, create a level of discontent so that you buy a product to fill that gap in your life, it’s now moved into this kind of social media sphere, where they these companies want to align themselves with what they perceive to be a an activist market. And you can kind of see that going kind of global now. And so what we’re starting to see is a really predatory market, that’s co opting a lot of this language that is now moving into the space. And so it’s kind of hard to say where the the influence is coming from. So the first part of your post is centered around that. We have we have a world that is constantly bombarding us with with stressors. And then you know, we also have a new product market that is roughly 20,000 new products coming out of the ultra processed food industry. And it doesn’t matter if it’s keto, if it’s low carb, they are trying to just move with this whole market. And so you walk into a supermarket nowadays, and how do you discern what is real and what is what is being, you know, heavily manipulated to you. So when I’m reading the post, I’m like, Oh, this totally makes sense. Like we have to start to kind of like figure out what the best reset is for us. And that is having control over when you walk into the supermarket having control over what you’re buying, and then making that stuff at home so that you actually have, you know, you can discern what the ingredients are. And in Paleo is sort of a catch all term nowadays, I don’t necessarily know, you know, like, I would consider myself 15 years plus paleo, but I have dairy, because dairy doesn’t have an inflammatory effect on me. But I know people who are paleo who’ve been paleo for a long time, where they actually experience negative consequences from that. So it’s like a 30 day reset. And so that’s, that was my understanding what the post was. So you can go from there.

Diana Rodgers, RD  5:37  

Yeah, I, it really blew me away, because the it triggered a lot of… I mean, most of the comments were very positive. I have been, since I started working in this space in whatever 2008 or so I have advocated for folks to just give it a try and do a 30 day reset. Where they just kind of pull out ultra processed foods and potentially problematic foods, which include grains and dairy, and just see how you feel. And then after that, it for a lot of people, they go back to sort of an 80/20. But they realize, oh, you know, dairy was problematic for me, or I noticed that my joint pain went away when I pulled the gluten out. And every time I would reintroduce it, the joint pain came back. So now I’ve just realized I feel better when I don’t eat gluten. So there were a lot of people that have been following me for a while, but just you know, like the post or defended it, right? Because they know that I’ve always advocated for this. I think I have a lot of newer followers that saw this as a black and white, you must never eat gluten or dairy for the whole rest of your life. And I think there’s just so much reactionary energy on social media that it’s really hard for somebody like me, who has a lot of nuance, and I and I actually really care. I mean, I called my assistant Meg, yesterday. So this post went up on, I believe, October 28. And today’s 30th. I called her up and I was like, wow, there’s just people are so okay with just slamming other people and it I don’t really go on to other people’s feeds, if I disagree with them, I just disagree with them. Right. And so I wanted to do this post about the Four Agreements and just let people know that I believe most health influencers out there, actually, the majority of them are doing their best and do care and believe what they’re saying. I even think that Dariush Mozaffarian at Tufts believes that he’s doing the right thing. I actually do think that. I disagree with him. And I’ll point out why I think he you know, meat is healthier than a lot of the other foods that he put on that Food Compass. I mean, we can chat about that after but what I think we’re dealing with, like you said, is that we’ve gone from lets stick to healthy foods to everything in moderation. And I think a lot of that maybe came from the first time I started hearing about that really was the Michelle Obama, Coca Cola. And you want to kind of go into that a little bit, you know, the history of this stuff a little bit better than me, and you’re more articulate about that. But basically, she, she kicked off her, you know, First Lady campaign of wanting to change how we eat, and it quickly shifted to everything in moderation. Let’s move more.

James Connolly  8:43  

Hmm. Yeah, I mean, I think that there is and I think this is one of the dangers of, of partnerships with the ultra process, sort of industry, is they sort of make these promissory agreements that are actually non binding in many different ways. And so, you know, she’s stood up on stage with, with companies like Coca Cola, that had, you know, sort of funded a number of different sort of tangential industry groups like the Institute of Lifestyle Sciences, I think it’s called ILS, that had really pushed this idea of like, we need to get these kids to move more. It’s not it’s not about what you eat. And that the the level of influence that had on her program, and this is this is somebody who I really highly respect, who actually had no real understanding of food and diet had kind of grown up. It was a secondary kind of thing for her. She hadn’t really focused on food, she was really heavily focused on her career. She became a mother and started to actually have some some health related problems. I think she had one of her daughters was also having health problems. So she come into it with not a really great understanding and made it her sort of cause celeb. And you know, and when I ran the nonprofit, we would try to have as many conversations with them as possible about the level of pressures that are on the the communities that we’re working with. Because you, you would go into inner city schools, and we’d be teaching, you know how to make hummus from scratch, or we be teaching like, any number of different programs in the classroom, but then you would walk out and there would be a $5 pizza with a two liter coke for $5.99. You know, and so I think it’s in every single one of those is going to sort of bring joy to a kid’s face, rather than fresh pita and hummus. And so what we saw was a huge sort of predatory market in the inner city that was subsidized by any number of different factors after afterward, right, so the medical industry is, is, is a part of that. And so when you’re talking about the level at which the processed food industry has now aligned itself, with the sort of activist markets, they’re also aligning themselves with working on these inner city families, to, you know, to addict them to these foods. And so what we found was that she didn’t want to really weigh it that much into that it was too hard for her to talk about those things. She’s standing on stage with those groups. And so that, for me is like, the, you know, I look at it, and I’m like, this is, this is a hydra, you know, like as many heads is you’re going to cut off of it. And we could say that you’ve never actually cut one head off as many heads as you cut off of it, they just grow back. And so while we’re kind of on social media, attacking each other and saying, you know, your use of language here is this and all of that stuff. Every single one of these groups is making record profits, record profits during COVID. They’re buying up companies, and consolidating on a level that we have never, I don’t think I’ve ever seen since like, the, you know, the early 20th century robber barons, total consolidation of the processed food industry. And so I’m seeing it from that perspective, I’m seeing how they are jumping on the plant based dialogue and utilizing that, you know, when you look at internal documents from a lot of these marketing agencies that are talking about plant based, the pictures are young kids with protest signs, talking about the Earth, talking about like, all this stuff. They’ve co opted so much of that language. And, you know, in some ways, I’m very disappointed in the vegan community, how much they’ve in many ways align themselves with companies that are have a huge history of human rights abuses, environmental destruction, all under the guise, because now they’re moving towards plant base. And for me, like when I talk about it, I’m like, so they just figured out a way to make more efficiency out of their products, right. So they’ve dominated the animal feed market for a very long time. And now they’re going to take that animal feed, and they’re just going to feed it to humans. Oh, cut out the middleman. You know, and when you talk about language like that, it’s like, well, that’s sustainability, isn’t it? Isn’t that efficiency, that is the internal dialogue that happens within these programs. And so while we’re like arguing back and forth over the use of language, and we’re arguing back and forth over the totality of your argument for it, which is, you put all of it online, right? So somebody who comes in who’s a new user, you often reference, why don’t you look at the totality of my argument, what I’ve talked about for the last, you know, decade in terms of food, and then come back to me and say where I’m wrong. And I always find that’s very difficult, because then you have to spend the time and do research and find out who you are, you know,

Diana Rodgers, RD  13:49  

Right. Right. Right. And it’s really sad that saying, I use this in the post, but people are saying, well, what about equity? And what about our people can’t afford real food? So aren’t you being classist by suggesting that meat is a better source of protein than beans and rice? Right? And it’s really difficult because, one, it’s my job as a dietitian to point out which foods are better sources of nutrients than other foods, right? Like that’s just science. That’s just my job. And when we get to things like beans and rice, yes, beans and rice are cheaper. They also are culturally considered culturally appropriate for a lot of communities. Totally. But I also question, let’s look deeper and find out why these less nutritious foods are considered culturally appropriate. Because there’s reasons why beans and rice would be considered the main source of protein and not animal source foods, right? Because there was a restriction of animal source foods to a lot of communities. And so it just gets really dicey and it gets really hard to even talk about. So, you know, we can look at the human and and look at what are the most nutrient dense foods. It’s animal animal source proteins and fats, vegetables, berries, you know, things like that. But in a culture where Twinkies are more affordable than apples, and I’m being called elitist for suggesting real food over ultra processed food, it leaves me in a really uncomfortable position. I don’t I don’t know what I’m supposed to say. And it leaves me feeling really angry that people are blaming it on me instead of blaming it on our ultra processed food industry and our industrial food system, and crony capitalism, and all these other things that are going on, that nobody’s really talking about, and instead just attacking people that advocate for real food when I’m on their side, right?

James Connolly  16:00  

Yeah, I mean, I think when when I tried to analogize it to myself being 93%, Irish, English, Irish, the introduction of the potato, which is a cultural food in Ireland. It is, what’s, what’s the, what’s an Irish six pack, it’s one potato and five beers or something like that. So, I mean, it’s just so part of the idea of like, what what Ireland is, but, you know, the, the potato was part of the Columbian we call it the Columbian Exchange, but it’s essentially the move of new, all of this language is always very difficult. From South America, the potato varieties that were essentially just like stolen from indigenous peoples, and then brought over to Europe. And Europe at the time was going through bubble and burst famines all the time. And so the introduction of the potato was a staple crop that grows in high varieties that can be grown in the soils. But the debate in Parliament at that time was, well, what if we give the potato to the Irish? Like, all these people do is *bleep* and, you know, and eat, and what is going to happen, it’s going to be overpopulation. You know, and so, when you look at the sort of cultural history of foods, we have to start to understand that decolonizing some aspects of that also means that we have to understand the totality of every aspect of that, right. So it’s, I’m saying the potato was sort of part of the culture, but the introduction of it was meant as kind of a way of controlling the Irish, because it’s a low nutrient kind of food, it can give you enough calories to sustain yourself. But it’s not necessarily going to give you enough so that you are actually a strong culture. And so it’s kind of hard to get through the sense of that, you know, I think, the introduction of commodities like corn to Western Europe as well, after World War Two, the introduction of polenta and stuff like that is is actually a huge part of Italian culture now. But there was so much polenta that was brought over in the in the end of World War Two, that you actually started to see nutritional deficiencies like beri beri would come up, because that’s all that people eating. Until, like, you know, if you look at the history of a lot of that stuff, these commodities, they’ve always been used as like a staple to give people enough calories that they can continue doing the seminal work of propping up these oppressive regimes, but not enough that they actually strong enough to overthrow it. I think if you look at enough of the history of the literature, a lot of that stuff, it’s it’s actually pretty intentional. You know, it’s hard, like people say you’re eliminating food groups. Well, food groups are kind of made up, aren’t they? 

Diana Rodgers, RD  18:51  

But even the Mediterranean diet is completely made up. There is no one Mediterranean diet. I been to Spain I’ve seen the pork. You know, when you when you look at what is published from Harvard on what the Mediterranean diet is, there’s no pork in that. I’ve been to Spain. Pork is huge in Spain. I know, they’re not just eating salmon, and you know, grilled broccoli every day.

James Connolly  19:14  

No and I agree with that. I think that there is we’re distilling these things down to these very basic metrics. And one of the things I find interesting about the post was the totality of the post the thing that people grabbed on to was this one part of the language and take it to get back to like food group. Yeah, cereals are a if we want to go by it is a food group. But is that the same thing as some sort of oatmeal versus Lucky Charms? Are they part of that same food group? I don’t necessarily understand that. Like we we make distinctions between herbivores and carnivores. And then we see deer eating ground nesting birds, and we’re like, what? Like, Nature doesn’t care about these distinctions all that much

Diana Rodgers, RD  19:58  

And and really Ultra processed foods are cheap. They’re delicious, like Rob said in Sacred Cow. And like he talks about in Wired to Eat, which is one of my favorite books, you can eat like you can’t, you can have the flavor profiles that better than any king ever today for $3.99, you know. And I’ll always reference to when I was working at Daily Table in Dorchester, here in Boston, I was always trying to help them out. Because here was a great example of, okay, let’s solve a food desert problem. Let’s bring real food into this section of Boston that’s underserved and has a lot of ultra processed food. Let’s sell real food for less expense, you know, for less price. No one was coming in. And so I went around to all the health clinics, and I was like, what, what are they doing wrong? Why aren’t we getting the customers? And, you know, here we had brown rice, steamed collard greens, roasted chicken, beautiful jerk chicken, over steamed rice, things like that. And these guys were telling me on the hierarchy of needs, when you’re so worried about just your basics. And for those of you who don’t know, like the Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, right, so at the bottom is just the basics like shelter. And, you know, so so when you’re worried about your car starting tomorrow, or have like so much stress in your life, long term health and not getting type two diabetes may not be a privilege that you are able to worry about. And so those of us in this sort of like, I want to not just survive, but thrive, have to accept that that is not necessarily the mindset of everybody. And at the end of the day, if you’ve had a really stressful day, do you want roasted chicken and steamed collard greens? Or do you just want to feed your kids a Happy Meal, you know, there’s not going to be an argument. It’s delicious, it kind of maybe one of the most opiate stimulating pleasures of the day, right is just being able to have this delicious meal. And it really made me rethink a lot about this whole idea of well, it’s just food access, because it’s not just about food access. It’s about so many more things. And the ultra processed food industry provides us inexpensive, hyper palatable, addictive foods that light up the reward centers in our brain. And we have to talk about that. And so to be called ableist and elitist, to suggest that we look at the ultra processed food industry as the most problematic is something that’s like, what am I even supposed to do with that?

James Connolly  22:53  

Yeah, I could go in so many different directions right now.

Diana Rodgers, RD  22:55  

I know. I know. Well, that’s a fun thing about chatting with you. I you know, we can go down a lot of different rabbit holes with this.

James Connolly  23:02  

Yeah, one of the things that like, hit that kind of whatever tangential kind of spark in my brain was a story that I had been reading about a few years ago. But it was, I think, such a seminal part of your understanding of that. In the 70’s. Martin Luther King actually talked about Universal Basic Income. And so it’s not a new idea. Nixon had been sort of floating around. In Canada, they did a sort of a test trial of it. And so they went into, it was a single commodity farming community, very poor, I think they were probably growing like canola oil or rapeseed, or something like that. And so the the community was heavily dependent upon just that single commodity. And so you but you had, what is a traditional rural community to have schools that are based off of that are built off of that you’d have restaurants, you’d have doctors. You have the entire infrastructure built around that. And so they said, alright, well, what, why don’t we give it to this community, we’ll give them a Universal Basic Income. And we’ll see what happens over the course of this finite period of time. And during the time when all the research was being done, there was a switchover in the government. And the program was essentially scrapped, left in cardboard boxes, and somebody had found it, like perused all of this. And what they found was something actually very interesting. They found that rates of autism went down, they found that people did not stay in toxic relationships. They didn’t stay in toxic, you know, jobs, if the boss had to be less of a dick. There was all of these different metrics like health, health outcomes, all of these different things were, were were relieved because of the fact that people weren’t living paycheck to paycheck to paycheck. You know, and when you listen to enough people kind of talk about like, you know, if you have one outstanding bill, your IQ is lowered by like 10 points, and because it’s constantly in the back of your mind, we’re living under the stressors. Again, your post is talking about these stressors, right? If you’re constantly living under that, then you lose that ability at the end of the day to make choices about a better health future or anything like that. And so part of the reason why I gravitated towards your work and wanted to work on Sacred Cow, because I think as much as you talk… so Dariush’s food system thing is only focused on one thing. You think about things holistically, you want to understand the environmental aspects of it, you, you labor over the ethics of, you know, a healthy food system, you labor over all of these different things. And then you try to make a choice between all of these different factors. And I needed somebody who was going to be able to talk about these things that way, as opposed to just the environmental aspect of it, you know. Like that is so much easier to digest, if you can do a 90 minute film on that. But if you want to talk about the global landscape of all of this stuff, you have to dive into as much as you possibly… you have 90 minutes to make an argument, you’re talking about grasslands, and invisible gases in the air, and nutrition and social justice issues and colonization, like any number of different things. And trying to like distill that down to a 90 minute film, you know, or a book that’s going to go much deeper into all of that stuff. And so, it’s always interesting to me, when you get attacked, or when you get pushback that doesn’t seem to have a reasonable response to the totality of your argument. I’m always like, really?

Diana Rodgers, RD  26:29  

Yeah, you know, and what we know is that socio economic factors are the leading predictor of health and longevity, but period. And I’ll reference there was a study that came out not too long ago, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation funded this and it said, vegetarian, pregnant women in India have better births, then meat eating women, pregnant women in India. And it’s so ridiculous, because who has better access to health care in India generally the Hindu class because they’re a higher class, they have more wealth they have they have

James Connolly  27:06  

The Brahmin class. Brahmin class. Yeah.

Diana Rodgers, RD  27:10  

Who happened to be vegetarian. And so when you look at, you know, this meat vegetarian debate, it’s not meat or vegetarianism. It’s who has better access to healthcare and to all of these things. So I just continually feel more frustrated and the Universal Basic Income… I want to plug the book, Utopia for Realists. I don’t… Did you read that book?

James Connolly  27:37  

No but, yeah. I picked up his one that came out afterwards. That is really wonderful. Rutger Bregman’s books.

Diana Rodgers, RD  27:44  

I should mention James reads books, like for a week or something like that. Anyway, so. So I think I think a lot of people mean, well, I mean, well, I don’t think that the people coming at me saying that I’m elitist, or ableist, for suggesting that the ultra processed food industry is evil, and might not have our best interests at heart. If you don’t want to do a 30 day elimination diet, don’t do it, that’s fine. But I just think people are just really reactive right now and not able to even comprehend that there might be some nuance to someone’s message. So anyway, I don’t know if you want to say any more that I did want to give folks a chance to hear a little bit about what you’re up to. And for, for me to do a little update to so

James Connolly  28:37  

Oh, sure. So after Sacred Cow, I was like, no more documentaries. Just because, you know, in many ways that I think it’s, I just got really sort of frustrated with the documentary film world. Primarily, if you focus on vegan documentaries, like how, how much of how psychologically manipulative a lot of them are. You know, the way it was described, it’s like, some young kid who doesn’t know much goes off into his rented van and, you know, goes to seek out the truth. And, you know, his life is under threat and whatever. And so it’s always highly edited. It’s always like very stark, psychological reasoning to get people to essentially just in bring people into this argument. I get really frustrated with it. And I remember sitting, so this is gonna be a small tangent, but I remember sitting down in a cafe during the Tribeca Film Festival, and I was listening to a conversation that was happening right next to me. And it was a guy who was one of the judges for the Tribeca Film Festival. And so he was complaining about the fact that he was he had a better hotel room the year before, and he got champagne. And this year, he has a lesser hotel room and he only got Prosecco. And so he had been talking about how he had been weekending with the Gates’s the weekend before and I don’t like this is the guy that I have to entertain enough to get him to watch my film. And so like, I get really frustrated with this idea of this overarching over hierarchies, like, who gets to be the gatekeeper to the progression of ideas. But I found a small ragtag group of pretty amazing people, Jake and Maren, who also live in a van. We are also seeking out truth.  Who also really understood a lot of the nuance of this argument. And they were trying, they were trying to create a film primarily around the, what is happening to the environment, environmentalist movements. I mean, if you had sort of an elevator speech on it, it’s sort of centered around that. And they don’t necessarily like have an agenda, they just are trying to sort of figure out exactly what is going on, as we’re having this real sort of, you know, shock, doctrine changeover of everything that’s happening during COVID. So if you if you look at it, like from a global perspective, we are seeing enormous amounts of capital flowing from people to billionaires during COVID. And so the deployment of that is you being used by the environmentalist movement to kind of talk about, oh, no, this is all for good, because we’re gonna do good works for you. And that’s the Gates Foundation, that’s Bezos, that’s Elon Musk, and all of these different things. So we’re trying to like with a fine tooth comb, kind of go through all of it. But Jake and Maren are also tangentially following the story of Steven Donziger, who was a lawyer, who took on Chevron for to… originally, it was Texaco. And they had bought went into the rainforest of Ecuador, and extracted enormous amounts of oil, and then dumped all of their slurry and all of their toxic waste into the water system. And to the point where they were telling indigenous peoples that it was actually like, the the slicks that were growing on there were vitamins, and they were good for them. And so he ended up taking on this sort of class action lawsuit against Chevron. And he won one of the largest legal settlements in you know, in all, all of legal history. And since then, Chevron has essentially gone after him, they found a industry, you know, amenable judge who she, you know, she she is tangentially related to, I think it’s the Heritage Foundation, and Chevron supports them. And they’ve essentially, like put him under house arrest. They, for two and a half years, almost three years now he’s been under house arrest. They took away his license to practice law. They will go after, in essence, any any assets, the has, the judge put a prosecutor who has ties to Chevron to prosecute him.

They won the case, obviously. It’s the first time a lawyer has been sentenced to jail for what is in essence, a misdemeanor. He wouldn’t turn over as part of discovery wouldn’t turn over his laptop and cell phone. And so he just went to jail on Monday. And so we’ve been following that story, just because I think, I think when you’re looking at the the degree of power that’s been transferred to multinational corporations, since 9/11, really, but even just slightly before that, what you start to see is like, all of these things are starting to become legal fictions, the idea of freedom and liberty and all of this stuff. And for us, it’s an incredible metaphor for the amount of power that they have. So we’ve been following that story and filming it and filming the protests and filming him going to jail and all of that stuff. But you know, for me, it’s like part and parcel of Sacred Cow and in many ways, right? So you have Cargill and Tyson and these large multinational corporations, JBS and you know, that really run the show. And so, you know, can we actually start to have these long form conversations about who our new kings and lords are?

Right, right. Right. And actually, I think I mentioned this to you, but in college, I worked under Christobel Vomfass, as as paralegal actually working on that case.

Oh, really? Yeah.

Diana Rodgers, RD  34:18  

Oh, yeah. So yeah, that’s just kind of funny and interesting. But yeah. And that it’s that all lawsuit. I mean, I graduated college in 95. So I, it must have been at least 93 or 94 When I was working on that. So it’s, it was going on for a long time. Anyhow, so. So you’re busy with Jake and Maren. I’ve met them. They’re amazing, really bright and passionate young filmmakers. And that’s really cool.

James Connolly  34:52  

Yeah. And they’re working with Savory and you know, and stuff like that. So I think they’re aligned with so much of what we’re doing and I And he said, you know, the great interviewers narrative storytellers. And it’s a it’s a two man working group. So we’re tired.

Diana Rodgers, RD  35:10  

Totally, totally. Yeah. 

James Connolly  35:12  

And how about you? 

Diana Rodgers, RD  35:13  

Yeah, speaking of tired, I just got back from White Oak Pastures where I lead a… well, I co lead I guess with Will Harris a, I guess three, three and a half, three day workshop on nutrition and regenerative farming. We had 18 people. It was so much fun. The group was so interactive engaged. They talked amongst themselves really well. They were so interested in each other and in the material, both on the farm and with the nutrition and other information that I was doing. And it was amazing. And partly because it’s just so cool to go down to White Oak. And I’m looking forward to doing this again, they want to do it again. I had dropped Anson, my 17 year old, down this past winter to go work for Will for a little bit. And he wants to come back with me. So we’re trying to figure out a time where I can bring Anson with me for another workshop. But their hospitality is incredible. We had some amazing dinners.

James Connolly  36:17  

Can you can you give like a brief overview if people haven’t heard of White Oak?  Yeah, even people who know about White Oak for lifecycle analysis stuff of that may not know about what White Oak does.

Diana Rodgers, RD  36:29  

And yes, um, so there’s been a bunch of videos on Will Harris and he is definitely a I don’t care what other people think I’m going to do it the right thing kind of guy. He fully admits that he inherited a farm and that a lot of people don’t have that same privilege. But he has not only transformed the land to so much more biodiverse and healthy than it was before. He’s built a slaughterhouse with Temple Grandin that is amazing. So he processes all the animals on site. It’s mostly grass fed beef, although they do a lot of other. They do some poultry and pork as well. He has two daughters that have joined him, which I think makes the place extra special because one of them is in charge of hospitality. And so they’ve got these cool cabins you can stay in and the food was incredible. And you just we had these amazing snacks of like charcuterie and yogurt and berries, you know, the whole time. His other daughter does a lot of marketing and really very honestly talked about their trajectory, how they do online orders what’s involved in marketing these online orders and, and how they how they do it. Which so we had a nice group of both just consumers and producers who you know, want to learn more about grazing and selling online and White Oak, everyone there will fully admit they’re still learning, they’ve made some mistakes, but they’re also really good at certain things. They’ve got this they’ve renovated the general store into the cutest little store slash restaurant possible. They have converted the church in town to a Education Center. Will’s office is the old one room courthouse, which is super cute. And he has created so many jobs, and really brought economic livelihood back to a town in the poorest county in the United States. And what has gone on, I mean, across the United States with the loss of small and medium sized businesses, especially agriculture, is that now we have boarded up small towns, everyone shopping at big box stores or online and the economic livelihood of these towns is just gone. Right? And, and we’ll I mean, there’s a pulse at this farm that is undeniable. And it’s so it’s about two and a half hours south of Atlanta. So it’s just a really, really special place. And I’m looking forward to doing more workshops with them. And I know they’re really psyched about it, too. They just started a nonprofit there as well to train other farmers called CFAR is the name of the nonprofit so people can go to the website and White Oak Pastures and check it out. And and then oh, go ahead.

James Connolly  39:25  

Yeah, no, and then Michigan.

Diana Rodgers, RD  39:27  

Yes. And then I went to Michigan, Jason Rowntree at Michigan State University is starting a new project. I can’t talk too much about it publicly. But I’m hoping to get more involved with him. I was included in a very big deal meeting. He’s going to be looking at basically scaling up regenerative agriculture and how is this possible and what are what are some new metrics we can be measuring things and it is not just cutting edge. It’s bleeding edge. And he is is one of the smartest, coolest academics I know who can relate to so many different people. And he’s anyway, it was it was amazing. And I hope to share more about that soon. So now I’m back. I’m recovering, I’m drinking lots of broth and trying to get extra sleep and moving slowly and moving into the winter with a new website coming out and yeah, so Yeah, awesome. Yeah. Well, anything else, James, before we go?

James Connolly  40:34  

Yeah, that’s it. I think we did a good catch up.

Diana Rodgers, RD  40:37  

All right. So for everyone listening, I know we said um a lot. But we both just have that habit. And sorry, we’re not professionally trained speakers. But hopefully, you guys got something out of this. If there’s things you’d like to hear from James and I, for topics for discussion, we’d love to hear from you. So drop us a note. And I’ll also be doing some fireside chats with Robb Wolf. And I’m guessing that the number of curses coming out of his mouth might be even higher than the couple of times James did it on this podcast. He has a hard time controlling. But I’m really hoping that it’s a new way for me to dive into more issues that I’m really passionate about and to talk about, you know, topical issues that are coming out and we didn’t even get into the food navigator thing with Tufts, but maybe I’ll chat about that with you at another time or with Robb I did a really good I did a podcast with Tony Hampton about it too, which was really great. So I think that actually came out just the week before we’re gonna release this anyhow. Well have a great Saturday, James, and thank you so much for your time.