Podcast (sustainable-dish-podcast): Play in new window | Download
Our friends at Food and Faith podcast just released an excellent interview with my co-host James Connolly. The intersection of food and faith is often overlooked but it is important to acknowledge the influence of spirituality on what we eat and how we take care of the land.
Co-host of the podcast, Derrick Weston, is an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church, founding director of the Food and Faith Storytelling Collective, proud father, husband, and gardener.
Every Food and Faith podcast episode begins with the question, “What is your geography?” It’s a simple question that allows each guest to talk about the food, the music, or the culture that has shaped them into who they are today.
It shouldn’t be a surprise that James begins his answer talking about books and takes us through his life story starting with his time in the military, then heading a nonprofit in NYC, and ending up as a documentary maker.
Learn more about James as he talks to Derrick about:
- The problems with nutrition in schools
- How James found Diana’s work
- Insight into how the current meat industry works
- How there’s a vegan documentary that appeals to every type of consumer
- Vegetarianism and the Black experience
- Seventh-Day Adventists and their influence on policy
- The Pigford v Glickman lawsuit
- The war with nature and how it relates to the Garden of Eden
Resources:
The Man Who Lived Underground by Richard Wright
Dust Bowls of Empire by Hannah Holleman
Ishmael by Daniel Quinn
Cows Save the Planet and Water in Plain Sight by Judith Schwartz
Connect with Derrick:
Website: Faith & Leadership
Instagram: @derricklweston
LinkedIn: Derrick Weston
Twitter: @derricklweston
Podcast: Food and Faith Podcast
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 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 was brought to you by my new Sustainavore Course! Are you confused about which diet is best for your health and the planet? Are you feeling frustrated with quick-fix diets and conflicting nutrition information? Check out Sustainavore. You will learn how to feel confidant that the food you’re buying is the right choice for your health and the environment. The course includes over 7 hours of video instruction from me and 60 daily emails full of tips, tricks, and motivation to keep you going – plus lots of bonus material. For a limited time, I am offering special discount pricing so head over to The Sustainavore Course now!
Quotes:
“We’re stripping away all of the accountability for the folks who are actually creating the systems that are doing the damage. That continues to be a part of this push for less oversight, less accountability for the systems themselves, and more personal responsibility for being able to do the things that the system does actually doesn’t set us up to do.” – Derrick Weston
“What we’ve done is under this guise of efficiency. We’ve created and consolidated an entire food system with biological sentient beings, and created something that I consider an absolute monstrosity.” – James Connolly
“But the animal is not the problem. And the human eating the animal is not the problem. The problem is we’ve incentivized the system that only creates wealth at the top 1% of these agricultural institutions.” – James Connolly
“We were created to be in harmony with nature. We’re created to exist alongside fellow creatures, and that death is a part of that. I think we’re moving away from nature to our own peril.” – Derrick Weston
Transcript:
(Intro) Diana Rodgers, RD
Welcome to the Sustainable Dish Podcast. I’m Diana Rodgers, a real food registered dietitian, author, and sustainability advocate. I co-host this podcast with James Connelly who was a producer on my film sacred cow. I also founded the Global Food Justice Alliance and initiative advocating for the inclusion of animal source foods like meat, dairy, and eggs for a more nutritious, sustainable, and equitable worldwide food system. You can check it out and join me at global food justice.org. Thanks again for listening. And now onto our show.
(Intro) Emily Soape
Hey Folks. This is Emily Soape, producer of the Sustainable Dish podcast. Today’s episode is a little different. It was originally recorded for the Food and Faith podcast, a show that features conversations about the intersections of food, ecology, faith, and spirituality. The host, Derrick Weston interviews James Connolly on how he got his start, issues with nutrition in schools, how humans seem to constantly fight nature, and much more. You can find links to everything they mention in the episode in the show notes. Enjoy!
Derrick Weston
Okay, we are here with James Connolly. James, thank you so much for being with us today.
James Connolly
Oh, it’s my pleasure.
Derrick Weston
So we… I have so many things that I want to talk to you about. But we begin all of our interviews by asking this question, what is your geography? What is the place, the food, the music, the culture that has shaped you into who you are today? And take that question anywhere you want – the geography question, what is your geography?
James Connolly
I tried to think about this in certain ways. As a student, when I was in school, I’d never read a book that was assigned to me. I was a voracious reader. But I could not like I couldn’t get into… I would obviously read the book. But I could not get into a book that was essentially… like, I felt like libraries were these, you know, massive adventures that you would kind of walk into. And if somebody gave you a route or a map, and it told you where the ending was supposed to be, it would ruin the experience for you. And so I think at the time, even though I didn’t know how to express it or understand what I was trying to do, I was in essence, trying to educate myself. And a lot of it started in high school. A lot of it was what I would consider to be banned books. I went to a very conservative school growing up. So I read the autobiography of Malcolm X when I was 15. I started to read just a lot of history that was not being taught in school. And so I felt like I was on this real adventure to figure out what was the world that I was growing up in. I joined the military when I was 18. I don’t know why. It was some sort of weird mix of not necessarily knowing what I wanted to do with my life, not necessarily knowing… wanting to make my father proud. And join the military during a period of I would say, in between the two Gulf Wars. And what I found there was actually pretty particularly interesting. I grew up in Queens, New York. it’s like one of the most racially and ethnically diverse places on the planet. And so it’s a really interesting space. But when I went down to basic training I joined as a grunt, as a private. And what I noticed was that everybody who was there was essentially from farming communities and old industrial towns. Who… in every recruitment station in New York was essentially just in, in the inner city. And so what I noticed was, there was just a huge amount of what I would consider be sort of poor and marginalized people who are going to… off into the world, and being trained to be soldiers to fight wars that they didn’t particularly understand at all. I went to art school, I studied to be a chef, I did a number of different things afterwards. I got into documentaries because I’d spent nearly a decade… I founded a food nonprofit in New York City. And we mainly worked in poor and marginalized inner-city schools, mainly charter schools, because they had the facility for changing their food system. They didn’t have to go through a lot of the like, you know, the hoops that you had to go to. And so we did gardening programs. We did, mainly sort of nutrition education, but like, sort of, you know, Italian nutrition education, like this is food. This is delicious. You know, let’s make it in the classroom. Let’s see where it comes from. Let’s talk about food. Let’s talk about where you know who is making it. So I spent nearly a decade, we were teaching about 1500 kids a week. We had a whole source of like, volunteers were coming into the classroom and teaching kids about, you know, nutritious food, and then we’re helping to overhaul the school food system while we were there. So it builds trust within the administration. The kids were not necessarily a barrier for change. If you wanted to feed them fresh food and make it in-house. It was actually cost-neutral. We were working in some of the poorest congressional districts in America and the kids were never the barrier for change, and nor was a lot of the administration but as you moved up the ladder, you started to see eyes glaze over.
They didn’t really see a correlation between education and nutrition, which is just absolutely ridiculous to me. I don’t understand how you could sit in the classroom if you’re hungry, or you could sit in a classroom if you’re just bouncing off the walls with, you know, the amount of sugar that kids eat nowadays. Or disguised sugar. So I got more and more frustrated with it. I spent a lot of time with donors. And I think if you are working in the nonprofit space, and you are spending more time with the donors than you are with the people that you’re trying to help you start to get really frustrated. There seems to be a mythology in America that if you’re poor, it’s your fault. You internalize that poverty and it seems to be kind of part of an American ethos. The sort of “build yourself up by the bootstraps” culture, that doesn’t necessarily sort of work. And so I started funding documentaries. I wanted to focus on social justice issues, environment, and systems of poverty. And so up until this point, we’ve produced about seven documentaries. I have been personally involved with pre-production on a few of them. But mainly we… what we’ll do is we’ll get a documentary film producer is about 70% done with their documentary, we get to see what their point of view is, we get to influence the editing process, we get to influence how the film is going to be essentially structured together without, in essence, like, you know, overriding the director’s vision, but helping them get it to a point where it’s ready for the film festival circuit, and then we will try to help them get to distribution, so we can get eyes on it, and, you know, and all that stuff. So that, for me, is kind of what I’ve done. Everything… I think everything that I’ve done is sort of centered around being, you know, the best human I possibly can. And helping as many as I can before I exit stage left.
Derrick Weston
Right, that’s great. That’s great. I love how and I think maybe you’re the first person who’s answered that question by starting off with books that you’ve read. And I love that for that part of your geography is thinking of what you’ve read. And I think that’s true for all of us, you know, so much of what actually shapes us is, are the things that we consume, and the things that… the ideas that we let into our world. And so I just I love that that’s where you started. I want to go back to this nonprofit for just a second. You talk about the kids aren’t the issue, you know, the administration not so much. But then there’s, kind of, this higher level where problems start, where people glaze over, where they’re not making the connection between food and what happens in the classroom. Who’s in that room that’s glazing over? What is… where is the problem here?
James Connolly
I mean, it generally it’s upper-level administration. And so when you start to move out of the classroom, and you start to move away from the day to day experience of what the kids are eating, and you start to move into this process that is essentially governed by a lack of understanding of sort of real-world issues that are affecting kids in school and families and all that stuff, I think one of the better metaphors for it, or a better understanding of it is our relationship with schooling through COVID. So now, we’ve had a lot of parents at home with their kids. Kids on Zoom and listening to what’s happening in the classroom. A lot of it is sort of behavioral, a lot of it is getting kids to focus on things that are really abstract. For us, nutrition education was about, like having the kids with their hands in the dirt, with their hands preparing food. So much of what our educational system is, nowadays, it’s abstracted, it’s really abstracted. You’re teaching kids, something centered around this idea of like, it will have intrinsic value to you at some point in your future. Your adult self will look back on your childhood education, and all of its flaws, and say, “Oh, I understand what they were doing.” But on a day-to-day basis, it doesn’t seem to be working. And you know, for us, like we used to have home economics in the classroom. We used to have shop. We used to have hands-on tactile administration of learning, which really works for boys. It really works for people who are non… you know, they’re not the sort of traditional academic learners, and we’ve removed all of that stuff. And what it’s paved is a way… you know, I think Anthony Bourdain said it’s an actual tragedy that people can graduate from high school and not know how to roast a chicken, you know. And we everything… I think when we look at our agricultural administration, the way that we farm food nowadays, the way that we farm it for cities, the way that we have, essentially just segregated every aspect of our systems so that none of us can really get a good understanding of the complexities of it is part of that as well. It’s like, the way I tried to describe it, so you walk a kid into the classroom and for 45 minutes, he’s a poet, and then for 45 minutes he’s a mathematician, and he’s supposed to be a poet when he’s supposed to be a poet, and he’s supposed to be a mathematician when he’s supposed to be a mathemetician. And I’m sorry, it just doesn’t work that way.
Derrick Weston
That’s a great way of putting it
James Connolly
And you know the thing about it… so for me, being able to hide in the library and being able to hide within drawing and doodling and making art was paramount to my survival in school. And what I found now having three children on my own is that the administration is so fearful of kids, quote-unquote, falling behind that they’re on these kids all the time. Missed homework assignments, deadlines that are, you know, your child can’t pay attention in the classroom, you know, here, we recommend this medication or this medication, and we’re gonna… we’re, oh, this medication is not working for your child? Here and let’s try a different cocktail of medication. And what we found was that this educational system really is hyper-focused on testing, and this like forward momentum that really is just put so much pressure on these kids. And for what goal? I never really understood what the goal of it was, you know because most of the adults didn’t grow up within this system. We don’t necessarily understand it. We are afraid that our child will fall behind. And so we kind of we’ve, you know, we’ve essentially fallen into this system where we feel like, if we opt out in any discernible way, that we’re failing our children. Yeah. And I think the food system is that as well. I mean, we’ve functionally changed so much of it. And when you talk about something like a calories in calories out apparatus of thinking about the world, what you do to the consumer, when they started to gain weight, is you blame them. They’re eating too much, or they’re not exercising enough. And I’m sorry that that model doesn’t work. And it’s never worked. But what it does is essentially, it blames the end-stage consumer for a system that I think is actually harming them, both physically and mentally. Because if you can get the consumer to blame themselves for their own health outcomes, then you never really have to look at the larger system.
Derrick Weston
Yeah. And we’re stripping away all of the accountability for the folks who are actually creating the systems that are doing the damage. That continues to be a part of this push for, you know, less oversight, less accountability for the systems themselves, and more personal responsibility for being able to do the things that the system does actually doesn’t set us up to do. I came upon your work, your documentary that you produced Sacred Cow, and I came upon it at a time when I feel like I was being inundated with food documentaries. And I think the one that I had watched right before Sacred Cow was Kiss the Ground. And Kiss the Ground was fine. But there was this piece that like, there’s this piece where like, at the end of the day, I was like, okay, they’re a bunch of celebrities telling me to stop eating meat. And that’s kind of how I left… the feeling I had leaving Kiss the Ground. Whereas with Sacred Cow, I left with, oh, this is about systems. This is about understanding. This is about understanding nature. This is about understanding how our bodies are hardwired. It’s about understanding how we fit into systems of nature. And I found that way more compelling. Could you… would you mind just giving sort of a brief synopsis of Sacred Cow and what you found compelling about the project?
James Connolly
Yeah. Absolutely. I came across Diana’s work. And she’s the director of the film, towards the end of my nonprofit space. And what I had found was most of our volunteers are centered around nutrition and dietetics programs in New York City. Some great schools, NYU, Hunter… these volunteers are, you know, 28 to 30 volunteers per semester are going into these classrooms. And what I had noticed was this huge sort of paradigm shift from not necessarily away from what I would consider to be a proper and balanced diet, but towards a plant whole food, plant-focused diet. And so what I was constantly grappling with was this notion that meat was the problem on the plate. And so what I started to see was a lot of these schools, especially inner-city schools, or public schools, or anything like that, were trying to move towards these vegetarian programs that were functionally trying to change the landscape of what kids are going to be eating, and what was sitting on their plate. You know, you’re getting somewhere between 50% to 60% of your meals from the Department of Education, and that can be really nutritious and fulfilling and can really help with just early childhood development and education and everything like that. It can be a huge paradigm shift, a game-changer for a lot of kids or it can be junk. It can be total junk, just hyper-processed, like you know, plant-based is a bagel, right? And so in a lot of vegetarians, especially when they start out, actually don’t… they… we call them pasta-tarian. So they just eat a ton of pasta, they get a ton of like refined carbohydrates, with maybe some arugula on top or something like that.
What I was looking for was – can we talk about what happened to meat production, and the narrative that came about in terms of what meat production actually is. And what we saw over the past 50 or 60 years was a consolidation of the meat industry into two separate entities. So one is, we need to create these spaces so that we can create these biological environments where we can house as much animal protein as possible, produce it at scale, at cost. And we’re just going to, you know, send that out into the world. And when you look at it, like efficiency economies, what they started to do was say that this is environmentally sustainable, because we’re essentially housing these things, we’re going to deal with their waste or something down the road, we’ll deal with their waste. And we’re going to, in essence, we’re going to move our agriculture system towards something that’s going to produce food for these animals. And then we’re going to eat the animals afterwards. And a lot of the food that they eat, especially when you’re talking about ruminant animals isn’t something that humans would want to eat or could eat. And so what we’ve done is under this guise of efficiency, we’ve created and consolidated an entire food system with biological sentient beings, and created something that I consider an absolute monstrosity, you know. But again, I want to get back to the point is, you do not blame the consumer, for the system that he had no say in producing, right. And so if you if it is the best meat that you can afford, then you buy it. That the whole sort of ethical movement around that is ridiculous. Like I, I want people to be able to afford the most nutritious food that they can afford. And I want to functionally change the system from what it is. So this massive meat production system made enormous wealth for a few companies. And those companies went and they consolidated and they consolidated more. And then they started consolidating into meat production, the packing, and the abattoirs and slaughterhouses. So they actually, they dominate the entire environment.
So the best example I can use is, say you want to… you have agricultural land, you want to build a chicken farm. And so you go to the bank, and you look for a loan. The loan advisor will say, well give me a contract that you have with say, you know, Tyson or something like that. So you go and you get a contract with Tyson. They give you the loan, you build the building to the specifications of Tyson. You buy the chicks, and the feed from Tyson, buy probably the antibiotics from Tyson. You take all of the risk of housing those chickens, so the numbers that die, any outbreaks or anything like that, you take all of the risk for that. Then you have to sell the grown chickens back to Tyson for the price that they have colluded with the other four industries to give you just a marginal share of that.
So if you buy like a $25 bucket of chicken from KFC, the farmer gets 25 cents of that bucket. Right. And so, you know, you’re bought into this, like, you have to grow things at scale. Now, your housing, you know, 50,000 birds in here. This is not something you wanted is not something that you thought… you thought you were going to create something and at the end of the day, like, you know, you’re stuck in this system. Now, if you complain, then you’re going to get the worst chickens, you’re going to get downgraded feed, and you’re going to go out of business. And so you’ve stuck these farmers in this cycle of debt that they can’t get out of. And now the consumer is also a part of that because now you’re getting downgraded meats, you’re getting all of the after-effects of that, right. So the manure has to go somewhere, if you have, say, a hurricane, now these huge lagoons of manure are going into your waterways, you know, all the downstream effects of that, you know, the kill offs in your rivers and all of that stuff is essentially the result of a consolidation of an industry that says it’s all doing it under the guise of sustainability and efficiency. And essentially like that, that has happened across the board in all of agriculture nowadays. And they will tell you, it’s for the price of cheap food. Americans want to walk into the supermarket and see this incredible bounty. This is what… this is the future that we’ve foretold which we would have everything at our fingertips, and we would all be happy. And it would all be cheap food and all that stuff. But we actually pay for the cost of all of that stuff in secondary ways, right? So you pay for it in medical expenses. We pay for diabetes medication, we pay for it in environmental costs. We pay for it in any number of different ways that actually have a direct effect on our pocketbook. So for us, like, the film was like, Wait a second, you know, what we have is we have all of these food documentaries that are coming out that are produced by animal activists. They’re funding the cost of these films. They will come out and they will tell you like… to whatever consumer, you are, right? Say you care about health, then you get What the Health documentary. These are vegan documentaries. If you care… if you want to be an elite athlete, then there’s Game Changers. Then, you know, if you care about the planet and the environment, there’s Cowspiracy. Every single one of these things is centered around this original viewpoint was how do we teach? How do we educate the consumer into the effects of animal agriculture on that? And now, for us, Sacred Cow, like we understand this. But the animal is not the problem. And the humans eating the animal is not the problem. The problem is we’ve incentivized the system that only creates wealth at the top 1% of these agricultural institutions. And that’s what we’ve done. Now, if you went back to even the early 90s, you would have 90% of pig farming was small family farms. Now, it’s by the end of the 90s, it had switched. Now it was 93%, industrial agriculture, consolidated animal feeding operations. We essentially remove the farmer from the system, we mechanized and completely changed every single aspect of that, and it only really helps one person. And so you kind of get into it. So Sacred Cow was meant to be like, can we just have a reasonable conversation about this?
Maybe animals aren’t at the problem. Maybe they actually provide environmental like… Yeah, anything like… alright, so take poop, right? Poop is, is an incredible resource. You know, it is… if it is in the environment, it actually provides vital nutrition back to the land. Right? Can we talk about methane from cows? Well, what does that do in the atmosphere? Yes, it’s a global greenhouse gas. Yes, it produces heat at a much higher rate than carbon, right? So this is… so rumen animals they take in cellulosic material, grasses and stuff like that. And, they use all of their stomachs to convert that energy. It’s not very efficient. And so there are these methanotrophs that exist inside of their stomachs that produce these gases, the cows burp. They burp, it goes up into the atmosphere. Well, what is methane, it’s carbon and it’s water. It’s H… It’s CH4. It’s carbon and hydrogen. Hydrogen will exist in the atmosphere for about a decade. And the carbon goes back into the soil and feeds the plants. And then the hydrogen goes into the atmosphere, and mingles with oxygen and becomes water, right? And so we have the system. It’s actually a circular system that works in nature, right? It works for giraffes. It works for wildebeests, it works for moose, it works for reindeer, and it works for cows and sheep and goats and all these other ruminant animals. So why are we blaming animals for a system that we say is, you know, environmentally damaging? You know, it just doesn’t make sense to me. So I was like, this film will bring balance to the equation. But unfortunately, like, we couldn’t find distribution for it. And so the messaging coming out of Hollywood generally is just like, No, everybody must be vegan, right? And we can ignore Hollywood and they’re ridiculous. Like, Hollywood has never been on the right side of any issue. Right. So from like, Hattie McDaniel, you know, from like, the brown bag test? Does your audience know? So like, so you could not get onto a Hollywood picture if your skin color was darker than a brown bag. That Hollywood has been… they partnered with the Nazis to produce films, like, you know, like, Hitler was, he was a huge fan of Mickey Mouse and King Kong. And you know, they have never been on the right side of any issue. They are one of the largest marketing arms of some weird ethos that I just don’t understand. And why we listen to them for anything is absolutely ridiculous to me. Yeah. Sorry, that was a rant.
Derrick Weston
No, no, no. Totally acceptable rant. And I think it’s important to think like we’ve kind of outsourced that sense of expertise and wisdom to an industry that really is just there to entertain us. But you know, you put… I’m trying to think of who was in… Rosario Dawson. You put Rosario Dawson, who I think is a fine actress. But you put her in a documentary and all of a sudden, she’s supposed to be this authority figure. I think Woody Harrelson was the narrator. And so again, it’s like these are the people who are going to give us expertise on how we should eat and how the system should work like that. No, they’re actors. They’re artists who don’t know about these systems. And there feels like, there has been this kind of larger profit-driven agenda. My children have gone vegetarian. And we’ve had some pretty in intense conversations about that in the last year or so. And just kind of watching as their diets have changed, the number of plant-based options and the market for plant-based options that feels very market-driven and feels very much corporate-driven that and it doesn’t feel very connected to the…, even though it’s the idea of sustainability. It doesn’t feel very connected to nature at all.
James Connolly
Yeah, and I actually worry about that a lot. And it’s, I’ve seen a huge push for it. Especially in places like large cities where people have no relationship with agriculture at all. The idea of oat milk, which is just, it’s just sugar. It’s just sugar water. Somebody had defined it as gruel. Like Oliver Twist, it’s essentially gruel. There’s no nutrients. Any nutrients are added in. The sort of bioavailability of a lot of those nutrients is almost non-existent. So your body won’t really recognize it as food and won’t uptake it. If I’m completely honest and we can kind of take a small tangent here, I have a hard time pushing back against the vegetarian movement within the Black community. Because I have seen, you know, especially with the Black Panthers, there is an alignment with the way that we raise animals and the Black experience in America. I have, I’ve studied a lot of it. I have seen a dual sort of nature within… Ta-Nehisi Coates, his father went vegetarian for a while. There is a solidarity within the Black community surrounding diet that I think is really admirable. Why would you want to be part of this system if you can opt-out of it? I have also noticed that how much of an influence it’s actually had on the development of within the Black… Can we kind of talk about this? Is this?
Derrick Weston
Yeah, yeah. Of course, yeah.
James Connolly
I have also noticed that there is a sort of a religious, a fundamentalist religious overtone to a lot of the religitization if that’s a word, of diet. I’ve studied a lot of Seventh Day Adventism because it’s a vegetarian diet that’s also has a heavy, heavy influence on dietary policy. The diet is so much more of a part of their ideology than you would think actually. It’s sort of based off of a weird sort of esoteric like 19th-century history of vegetarianism that I would love to do a podcast on, but it’s really like it’s all over the place. But I have also noticed that like Richard Wright, had a short story that was released into a book that came out last summer. It’s called A Man Who Lived Underground. The actual story itself is really interesting because it talks about Black men’s experience of police brutality. I think it was written in the 60s and how he opts out of everyday existence, and he just goes underground. It’s very similar to Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison’s book, but it kind of goes into the sort of… so the story itself, maybe because it’s so omnipresent nowadays doesn’t necessarily sort of resonate, except it’s sort of prophetic, in terms of the way that we’re dealing with how much the phone camera has been able to really bring the world to the idea of what it feels like to be young and Black in America. But the interesting part of it is the essay that happens afterwards. So Richard Wright writes this essay, and he talks about his grandmother who he was raised with for a short period of time, who was a Seventh Day Adventist. And it talks about her understanding of the world, which is centered around this idea of this life is temporary. And so she is just preparing for the next life. And it really affected his psychology, his understanding of the world. He says it’s essentially the tracks that laid upon his existence so that everything was centered around that track that his grandmother essentially raised him on. And it’s a really beautiful and profound essay of somebody who’s trying to understand how he came to grips with his reality. But his grandmother was Seventh Day Adventist and so she raised the family vegetarian, you know. And I think within the Black community, especially up in Michigan. Malcolm X’s mother was a Seventh-Day Adventist. The level of like, influence that the diet of the Seventh Day Adventist had upon the upbringing, I think of a lot of these kids who grew up to be, you know, probably the greatest activists of the 20th century. I think, when you try to get to a greater understanding of all of this stuff, like, I think it’s incumbent upon, not for me to say in any way, but the understanding of vegetarianism and how much I think it actually has had an influence on the black community, and especially the social justice work, you know, it’s not for me to say I find it just something that I would like love to have more conversations about, because I think it’s the sort of plant-based movement is, is centered around a lot of these issues as, as we move towards an agricultural system that is taking its philosophy and forcing it upon developing countries in Africa. You know, we have seen that with the Gates Foundation with the way that they’re, in essence, like, you know, just overriding any degree of agriculture in Africa and saying they have to be part of this pesticide-laden, fossil fuel fertilizer, you know, Monsanto seed sustainability vision that I just find absolutely disturbing. It’s almost like a weird new form of missionary work that is centered on the guise of like, really, like scientific indoctrination, that has… really wants to wipe out a culture and force them into this sort of 21st century like, you know, I don’t know, techno-utopian worldview where everybody thinks the same thing, drinks Starbucks, and you know, all of that stuff.
Derrick Weston
Well, thank you for going there, because I think we… nuance is something that we’re just as a culture, not very good with. And there is a nuance to… African Americans are the largest or the fastest-growing segment of vegans in this country. A lot of that has to do with opting out of the system and the ability to actually own land and access to land. And when you have access to land, a lot of that access to land is only… is not enough land on which to raise animal protein, you know, it’s only enough land to be able to do vegetables and things like that, things of that nature. There’s nuance to this to this conversation of sort of the kind of corporate-led plant-based agenda, I think, is a proper word and sort of the individual and cultural moments that people are saying we are going to opt-out of the system because we think it’s detrimental to our communities or detrimental to our souls and ways of being so I appreciate your adding that level of nuance to the conversation.
James Connolly
Yeah, I mean, I think with there’s one of the largest class-action lawsuits in US governmental history was Pigford V. Glickman. And it was centered around the 20th century’s total disenfranchisement of the Black community from their land. At the beginning of the century, they were close to a million Black farmers. By the end. I, you know, I don’t even know if we can count the cost. But a lot of it was, you know, sheer total racism from the USDA. And it’s it…there’s a really wonderful episode of the 1619 Project that goes into a sugar farmer who essentially lost his land because what the USDA will do is, they will give you agricultural loans to buy the seed and the fertilizer and everything that you need. But within the Black community, it would be pushed off by a month, two months during peak planting season. And so you would lose, you know, at least one of your crops. If you have a two-crop growing season and you lose one, completely unsustainable. And so what we saw was white farmers essentially picking up Black lands for pennies on the dollar at foreclosures because the USDA opted for not funding, all of it. It’s a *bleep* lawsuit. It’s $50,000 for multigenerational lands, per farmer, I think Obama tried to extend the time for Black farmers to be able to go and even just get the 50,000 But yeah, I mean, I completely understand that the loss of farmland to the Black community is just you know, it’s on par with the loss of land from Native Americans. That total stealing of all of that land, all that agricultural land. There’s a wonderful book called Dust Bowls of Empire. And she kind of talks about it. She’s like, why farmers were so horrible on the land, that they essentially forced their own migration. And so they would deforest, they would clear cut, they would be, you know, just take every resource from that land, destroy its fertility, and then just move on. And Jefferson even talks about this. So this is happening for hundreds of years. And so it just meant that colonialism had to keep on going, and had to go to the most fertile land that possibly could, and had to take more and more. And when we saw after the Civil War was, you know, the period of reconstruction, the ownership of Black… the 40 acres, and a mule ownership of Black farmland was only taken from Native American reservations, you know, it’s like, like, we can’t get out of our own *bleep* way. You know, it’s, you know, it’s absolutely disgusting. And, you know, the Dust Bowl was a direct result of this process of colonization of land. We killed off the native bison, we killed millions of them, because we had to take away the protein from all of these native tribes, the Comanches, and the Kiowa, and stuff like that, because up into that, at that point, they were still a threat to any degree of colonization. They were a force to be reckoned with. You know, the Texas Rangers essentially were founded to deal with the Indian problem. I mean, they were superheroes that these guys would do on horses. And so you had to take away their food systems. And we’ve seen that globally, every single time you want to colonize a land or take away natural resources, the first thing you do is take away, especially meat. I mean, we see it with the Sami people in Norway now. We see it with the San, people of Kalahari in Namibia. Everything is done them to this idea of sustainability and conservation. We see in India as well. Indigenous lands are always taken away. Food is one of the first resources to essentially destabilize the power of that community. I mean, I think what we’re seeing now, with a further sort of Dust Bowl, that’s happening in the Midwest… sorry, I’m getting a little down. I’m getting myself down. I think what we’re seeing is, is that right? And so for us, like, you know, Sacred Cow is not… it’s in no way like addressing any of these issues. We could not find a way in 90 minutes to talk about all of this stuff. Kiss the Ground, I think was a good primer for Sacred Cow as well. I think they talked about what happened with the, you know, the chemistry industry, the utilizing, you know, weapons of war against nature to kill off pests. And, you know, that whole system was essentially based on the war machine, right? In so many different ways. Absolutely. Unbelievable. How much of our system is essentially just a war with nature? A continued war with nature from World War Two, and World War One.
Derrick Weston
One of the other projects that you produce is Death in the Garden, and I had an opportunity to listen to the episode that you’re on, where they interview you. I think this idea of a war with nature is actually a part of a mythology. You talk about a mythology. I really actually love the way that you talk about it. And you talked specifically… you mentioned the idea of the Garden of Eden was sort of this idea… this what the Garden of Eden was, was pre-civilization. I love that one because I’ve only ever heard really top-notch biblical scholars explain it that way. And so it was really great that to hear someone who’s thinking about the food system, also describe it that way. Talk a little bit about that, that idea of mythology and how civil… and the mythology of civilization and how that puts us at odds with nature.
James Connolly
Like every one of my ideas, it was stolen from somebody else. Daniel Quinn wrote about this in a book called Ishmael and Ted Turner. Yeah, so Ted Turner had issued a prize, I think it was in the 70s. And I think, to this point, it’s the largest prize ever given for a single work. The Nobel Prize for Literature is always for a body of work. And so this first-time writer – it was centered around, can you create a fictional narrative that could change people’s minds about the environment and the planet? And so this first-time writer wrote this book, and it came out, and it has a sort of a weird cult following all over the world. And Daniel Quinn spent his entire life kind of teaching how to think like an anthropologist or actually how to think like a Martian really. How far can you remove yourself from other cultures so that you could tell yourself a story of the world? And one of the things that he uses as sort of a parable is his understanding of the Garden of Eden and the book of Genesis. And, you know, for him, it, the thing that sort of resonated most with me was, we have created a civilization based off of moving out of the Garden of Eden. And so if it actually makes a lot of sense, it wouldn’t have been called The Fall, it would have actually been called The Ascent. Because we would have left our, you know, clothed nakedness, our superstition, our relationship with the environment. What we’ve done is essentially created a whole new civilization that’s based upon all of these hierarchies. Because it was… the thing about agriculture that I find absolutely fascinating. It’s like, say you spend an entire season growing grain. And that grain is supposed to feed you and all of the other people for a year. Well, what do you have to do with that grain? You have to guard it, right. And so you essentially create… you create a police class. You have to guard it from your own citizens, and you have to guard it from outside invaders. So now you’ve built an entire… you build fortress walls around your food, you create hierarchies, you create entire systems that are based on this thing that most hunter-gatherers… like, they don’t really have possessions, you’re moving like seven, eight miles a day, you build bows and arrows, but essentially, everything that you carry… you’re not really going to have possessions and there’s just story after story of hunter-gatherers walking into modernity and just like we don’t want any of this stuff. But so, Garden of Eden, the story, is sort of centered around that. What it… Daniel Quinn’s idea was that it was actually melded from hunter-gatherer stories, and then subsumed into a civilizational understanding of a creation myth. And the way that he also describes Cain and Abel is also very interesting because you have one, you have something that has built all of civilization and society, which is grains and fruits and, and you know, the commodification of agriculture. And then you have these pastoralists who essentially just walk the land to, you know, sheep and goats were one of the first domesticated animals. And so the sacrifices that were made… Cane sacrifices, you know, gives a donation to God of grains and Able donates a sheep, and God favors the sheep. And so that doesn’t make a lot of sense for a civilization of understanding of this ascent into what we have nowadays. Because what… why would God reject the thing that produces the hierarchy, the structure, the Kings, the armies, all of that stuff. And when you look at the agricultural and anthropological record, you will see with the dawn of agriculture, a movement that moves away from hunting implements to weapons of defense. And so ironmongery and all of that other stuff actually moves into the creation of things that are… that wouldn’t necessarily be beneficial for hunting but would be beneficial for armies because you have to guard all of this stuff. And you create all of these things, right? You create an artists class, you create a working-class, you create… you segregate all of society. And so his understanding of it, I just find very interesting, because this sublimation and this subsuming of these hunter-gatherer stories, which I think are warnings against this, right? Another story he tells is the knowledge of good and evil, like what is that Tree of Knowledge? And I find that a really interesting idea, because what… the narrative he tells is, the knowledge of good and evil is to… if you wanted to benefit the lion, the lion would always eat, right? If you wanted to benefit the gazelle, the gazelle would always get away from the lion. Each would result in a collapse of both of those species, that gazelle would over proliferate and starve itself, the lion, if it couldn’t eat, would also die out as well. And so you have the system of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, which is the lion eats some days, and the gazelle gets away some days. And that is balance and nature, like wants balance as much as it possibly can. What humans did when they ate from the Tree of Knowledge was it said, we don’t have to adhere to this anymore. There’s no longer a moment where we would have to essentially live from, this knowledge of good and evil. We can become like the gods, and we can create our own agricultural edifice that would essentially mean that we eat all the time and so it consolidated into this agricultural movement that then produced food and the mythology and the narrative around it is that we would always be… could always produce enough food to feed ourselves. But when you again look at the anthropological record we actually start to see an upsurge in nutritional deficiencies and bone loss. And we started getting shorter, our teeth started falling out.
We saw that with the dawn of agriculture, but the mythology holds. The mythology is we’re always moving towards something greater this utopian, like, perfect vision of the world where humans can exist independent of nature that we can, you know, and that’s what we see now. Right? Do you… would you agree that like, regardless of how much has been lost, we’re always with this notion that we’re like moving towards this greater something?
Derrick Weston
Absolutely. And that we’re… and that, that greater something will somehow not include deaths. And I think that’s, that’s another point that you that and Death in the Garden, by its title, kind of points out that, somehow, we have created these mythologies. And I think this is a lot of what happens. And again, like, I don’t want to… I have lots of respect for vegans, and some vegans and vegetarians, but a lot of what comes out of sort of that ideology is the idea that we can move away from… that we can eat without there being death. And like, that’s just total nonsense. And I think you’re absolutely right, that we’re constantly striving towards this thing that somehow doesn’t include nature. When we go to… when we look at the scripture, and we look at those first couple chapters of Genesis, we kind of go back to the fact that the first thing God asked humans to do, is to keep until, and some Hebrew scholars say, a better translation of that is to serve and protect the land. And that’s actually what we’re designed to do is to be in service and protection of the land. Part of what a lot of the conversations we have on this show are about is getting people to reconnect to, essentially an original design of let… we’re supposed to be in harmony with nature. We were created to be in harmony with nature. We’re created to exist alongside fellow creatures, and that death is a part of that. You know, I think I think we’re moving away from nature to our own peril in so many ways. I mean, as we’ve, you know… one of the things that, and this is a tangent, but one of the things that we’ve discovered is that our emotional health is linked to our abilities to connect with the natural world, that depression and anxiety are higher in cultures that don’t have access to the natural world, that we’re designed to be in these natural spaces. And that’s it’s hurting us to not be in them.
James Connolly
One of the things I always thought was sort of interesting… a wonderful book called Cows Save the Planet. Judith Schwartz wrote it. But she had also a book on water. And she said, one of the more interesting aspects of what civilization is the city’s fear of water. So everything the city does is to take that water and remove it from the environment. Yeah, so concrete, sewers, and gutters and alleys. And you know, everything is about shuttling away water from that environment. And I always find that it’s an interesting metaphor for how much even the Bible talks about, like, so much of the Bible’s metaphors are about the, you know, agriculture and rain and products of the environment, and seeds and all of that stuff. But the idea that water would also be like a harm is also in there as well, from the great deluge, other stuff, but you know, I just find it kind of interesting, especially when thinking about like, the total removal in cities of almost everything to do with what nature is. I find it absolutely fascinating. And growing up in Queens, like a kid growing up in Queens. I mean, if I’m not spending some time in nature, I feel at a loss. And you know, like, listen, and I’m reading a book right now, on psychology, and so much of our modern world is centered around dealing with these things that are symptoms of a larger problem. Right? And so the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual that is used, which is a tome. It’s like this thick of every single mental disorder that humans have, everything is disordered. There’s no like idea of an ordered human. Like, I don’t even know if it under has an understanding of what happiness is. I mean, I just find that so fascinating that like our mother culture is is meant to deal with every symptom, the way that a lot of the functional medicine doctors are trying to deal with it now. So the western medicine will, if you’ve got a rock in your shoe, we’ll go and give you like painkillers to deal with the rock as opposed to removing the rock from the shoe. And I feel for that. I mean, I think it’s hard, I think when we look at the level at which modernity, technology has segregated us from all of the things that make us human – human contact, human, you know, real conversations, just moments of awe, you know, we’re constantly inundated with this idea of like, you know, there’s always somebody who’s going to be younger, prettier, faster, stronger, like, constantly bombarded with this idea of like perfection and it moves into it… or constant youth, right? I’m almost 50 years old, like, you know, I just realized that this morning. I was like, I’m turning 48 in January, I’m like, Oh, my God.
Derrick Weston
I feel like I could talk to you for hours. But I do want to be respectful of your time. So we end our conversations asking, and we’ve talked about a lot of things that that are are downers, and they are depressing, but what gives you hope, and, and not sort of a hope that ignores all of the problems and things that we’ve talked about, but a hope that kind of gives you a resilience to kind of get up and still face them and do the work that you feel called to do to make the world a better place?
James Connolly
Because I read so much about, I mean, I wouldn’t necessarily call it even evil. It’s just like industry. When I break myself when I’ve delved too deeply into something I always go back to, like, just good writers who write good mythologies, good stories. And I do really enjoy Stephen King novels, and I enjoy Neil Gaiman. I love, I think, the stories that we’ve even told ourselves from the very beginning about the Hero’s Journey, it gives me hope that people will continue to do that. To, you know, St George and the Dragon to go out into the world and, and figure out like, what, what is actually like hurting us as a people. And, you know, that really does give me hope, I do feel like there is a massive paradigm shift. Even when I started the nonprofit, nobody talked about food. You know, we didn’t talk about food and the way that we talked about it, we didn’t talk about sustainability, with real advocates for understanding that. We didn’t talk to indigenous elders about how they maintain, how they… they are stewards of 90% of the biodiversity on this planet, like, elevating those voices has been a real paradigm shift. And, you know, I think even just listening, I think there is a real sort of change that’s happening now. Everything, even the vegan movement comes from a real dissatisfaction. And I applaud them for their tenacity to go after an industry that I think is, is really, really important. So I think that’s, that’s the thing. Podcasts are amazing. They changed my life. In so many different ways, you know, just the barrier for entry for people to have real conversations, it’s like, really just changed so much. If somebody invites me on, I’m always honored to have a conversation. And to you know, I think it’s it’s incumbent upon us to just keep on talking and figure out like, you know, it’s… figure out like, what’s, what’s actually happening in this. So I wouldn’t be doing this if I wasn’t hopeful. I wasn’t really romantic about envisioning a greater universe and
Derrick Weston
Yeah, no, that’s great. So I want to take this next couple minutes to just plug away any of the work that you’re doing any places where people can find you, can connect with you connect with your work. Go ahead and just shoot all of that out.
James Connolly
Sure. I’m most active on Instagram, Primate Kitchen is mine. Death in the Garden.org is our latest project. And we’re currently in pre-production and filming. So we’re following a number of different leads surrounding that. And then yeah, I mean, really just Primate Kitchen. I’m somewhere on Twitter, but usually, it’s in all honesty, it’s mostly like, I’ve had two whiskies and I’m arguing with people over nothing. Don’t follow me on Twitter. I don’t really understand it. It’s a weird platform and stuff like that. Archer Gray Productions is the parent company. It’s female-run, female-driven, mostly independent film, and then the documentary side of it. I would really recommend people see some of the films that we’ve done. Mole Man, I think is really interesting, just talks about the way that we treat mental illness in America. But really kind of interesting story that didn’t get much attention, you can find it pretty easily, I think. And then TransMilitary talks about the roughly 14,000 Transgender identified people currently serving in the military and what their life is like, both good and bad, and stuff like that. So, and just have fun read books, lots of books, be like a librarian. Just walk in there and just random chance, you know. You know, window shop in libraries and bookstores. Yeah. Read.
Derrick Weston
I love that. James. This has been such a pleasure. I’m so glad I got a chance to talk with you. Thank you for coming on the show. And thank you for all the great work that you’re doing.
James Connolly
Thank you. Thank you.
(Closing) Diana Rodgers, RD
Thanks so much for joining us on the sustainable dish podcast. If you like the show, please leave us a review on iTunes, and don’t forget to sign up for our newsletter at Sacred Cow dot info. See you next time. Thanks for listening.
