Become a Sustainavore!

Eat for your health, the planet, and your values.

Become a Sustainavore!

Eat for your health, the planet, and your values.

Sustainable Dish Episode 231: Glen Burrows

Glen Burrows is the co-founder of The Ethical Butcher, a UK-based online marketplace for meat from regenerative farms. In 2020 Glen started Regenuary as a way to change the conversation around food and the environment. 

Instead of Veganuary, where the focus is solely on eating vegan for a month, Regenuary encourages everyone, regardless of diet preferences, to look at the sourcing of their food and to choose food from regenerative farming.

Even if you don’t live in the UK and can’t access The Ethical Butcher’s delicious products, you can still participate in Regenuary by engaging in open conversations about where our food comes from.

Glen and I are having one of those conversations today. Listen in as we chat about:

  • How Glen found regenerative agriculture and started The Ethical Butcher
  • Diana’s background and the need for meat in a healthy diet
  • Conventional vs. Grass-fed meat
  • The concept of Regenuary
  • Waste in the plant-based industry
  • What’s the definition of regenerative
  • Can we scale regenerative ag
  • Starting the Global Food Justice Alliance
  • Eating regenerative when you’re eating away from home
  • The great things McDonald’s is doing
  • What’s next for Diana

 

Resources:

Groundswell

Sacred Cow

Pastoral Song by James Rebanks

“Is plant milk hypocritical?” blog post on Ethical Butcher

Sustainable Dish Episode 220: Paul Greive

Charles Eisenstein

Wildfarmed Flour

Ham Street Wines

Feeding Britain from the Ground Up

Honest Burger

Claire Hill and FAI Farms

White Oak Pastures

Global Food Justice Alliance

 

Connect with Glen:

Website: The Ethical Butcher

Instagram: @ethicalbutcher

Facebook: The Ethical Butcher

Podcast: The Regenetarians

 

Episode Credits:

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

If you’re ready to take your support for a nutritious, sustainable, and equitable food system to the next level, join my Global Food Justice Alliance community on Patreon. You will have access to ad-free podcasts, exclusive videos, a discussion community, and much more. Go to sustainabledish.com/join to support my work.

A big thanks to the sponsor of today’s show, LMNT. Do you often suffer from headaches, muscle cramps, fatigue, or sleeplessness? It could be from an electrolyte deficiency, and drinking plain water may not be enough to replenish lost electrolytes. LMNT is a drink mix that has everything you need and nothing you don’t –  no artificial ingredients, food coloring, gluten, fillers, or sugar! 

LMNT comes in lots of great flavors, and when you go to sustainabledish.com/LMNT, you’ll get a free sample pack with your purchase. Plus, they have a convenient subscription program that makes it easy for you to keep your favorite flavors fully supplied. Head over to sustainabledish.com/LMNT to give it a try. 

 

Transcript:

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, an 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, on to our show. 

(Patreon Ad) Diana Rodgers, RD   

Ready to take your support for a nutritious, sustainable, and equitable food system to the next level? Join my Global Food Justice Alliance community on Patreon and have access to ad-free podcasts, exclusive videos, and a discussion community, plus so much more. Go to sustainable dish.com/join to support my work, and thank you. 

Diana Rodgers, RD  

Hi, there, this is Diana Rodgers from Sustainable Dish and I am here with Glen Burrows. We are doing a double-duty podcast today. So this is going to be airing on the Sustainable Dish podcast and Glen?

Glen Burrows  

And it’s going to… also going to be on the Ethical Butcher’s podcast, which is titled The Regenetarians. So yeah, I’m hoping it’s going to be less of a q&a and more of a conversation. But I think we’ve got quite a few things that we can talk about between us.

Diana Rodgers, RD  

Yeah. Glen, why don’t you kind of introduce yourself to my listeners, and maybe I’ll do the same.

 

Glen Burrows  

Cheers. Sure. So I founded, sorry, I co-founded the ethical butcher about four years ago with Farshad Kazemian. And it was kind of an unusual thing for me to do. Because I’ve been a vegetarian for 25 years, having done a degree in food science. The first year of my degree was when the BSE crisis broke in the UK. And that was caused from a pretty horrible practice of feeding ground up remains to back to farm animals. So diseases were cross mutating. And we had to kill a large number of farmed animals in the UK. That put me off eating meat from a perspective of not that I disagreed with eating meat, I disagreed with the way that we were doing it. And at that time, which was 1989, there really weren’t the kind of alternatives that we have now. So I followed a completely different career path. I went off and became a commercial photographer. I worked in the fashion and advertising world. And when I got to my kind of early 40s, I asked myself the question, how do I feel? And am I as well as I should be? And the answer was a pretty resounding NO. I started researching a bit into what might help me and what might be the cause of me not feeling great. I was developing autoimmune issues, terrible brain fog, I was not progressing athletically, despite training hard, and decided as an experiment to put a bit of meat back in my diet to see what would happen. And the results were nothing short of miraculous. So that caused me to do a bit of a deep dive back into what I thought I believed and start rereading a lot of nutrition science, environmental science, and this was kind of the proto early days of what we’ve now called the kind of Paleo Diet – Paleo movement. So it was… that sort of idea that I was following. And I had such a profound change. And it led me to actually doing a bit of nutrition coaching to some athletes, who had… some of the people around me had noticed, hang on a minute, how come you suddenly got so much… I was a rock climber and people around me again, hang on, you suddenly gone up through the grades, and you’re getting strong quickly, and what are you doing that’s different? And it was simply cutting out the junk and putting meat back in my diet. So this was the sort of journey that I was on. And then I met this guy called Farshad Kazemian, who was a meat trader looking to expand his business, and he needed some assets created for a crowdfunding campaign. And that’s how we met. And he discovered my passion for the subject. And we became co-founders. And yeah, that sort of took over my life. And here I am, four years later. And what the ethical butcher is, we’re an online meat business. We sell to the public. We also sell to restaurants, here in London. But we founded the business with a purpose of trying to source all of the animals from a farm that has benefiting nature. And I think to claim everything is completely regenerative would be a bit of a stretch. But one claim I can make is that every animal that we sell, has had some net benefit to the environment in which they live.

Diana Rodgers, RD  

Wonderful, wonderful. And I met you while we were chatting back and forth a little bit on social media, and then I met you when I came to groundswell last summer.

Glen Burrows  

That’s right. Yeah, that was fun one. Yeah. So you need to you need to do the intro bit now. Tell me who you are.

Diana Rodgers, RD  

I actually had a little bit of a similar background too. So I used to teach photography. And yeah, I was an art education and art history major undergrad, and then worked in advertising for many years at agencies doing marketing strategy, and then worked for Whole Foods Market for many, many years, until I had my children and then I joined my ex-husband helping to run the farm where we were living, running all the front of the house stuff. So our we had a 500 member CSA at the time. We did weddings and birthday parties and had a kitchen and a store and all of that. So I ran all that stuff while he grew the food. And my nutrition shift started a little bit when I discovered I had celiac disease at age 26. And I went gluten-free. And then, you know, I still kind of had these like blood sugar rollercoaster issues, I still wasn’t totally healthy. And just decided to dive more and more into nutrition as we were running this farm because we happened to be a pickup spot for a raw milk, like an underground raw milk pickup group. And I saw these people coming in and getting their butter and their raw milk. And I thought, well, who are these people eating those butter and so bad for you and started learning more about nutrition and ended up first getting like a more holistic nutrition degree from Nutritional Therapy Association, and then decided to become a dietitian in my late 30s, which took about seven years to do just because I was doing it part-time and juggling children and everything. So but it was important to me to become you know, the dietitian and to get that graduate degree and the medical credential because I really wanted to be taken seriously. I wanted to work with the medical community and publish information. And I really felt that that credential would help me best do that. So, started out kind of as a food and farming blogger, and my social media was full of like baby goats at dawn, you know, chewing on grass. And then quickly, I became more political, really pushing for regenerative agriculture practices, and the inclusion of meat in our diet and wrote the book, Sacred Cow and produced the film Sacred Cow which came out two years ago now about in during COVID, that fog of COVID. We did do some filming in the UK. We went to the Lake District and filmed with James Rebanks, who wrote Pastoral Song. And, you know, lately, I’ve been more pushing against this whole global narrative against meat period. And so you and I were chatting a little bit before, I’m supposed to be at a conference in England right now and due to some misunderstandings and people not understanding my work, I am sitting here instead of at the conference. And that’s one of the reasons I wanted to do a podcast with you as to kind of just talk about the nuance a little bit, but to also talk about the work that you’re doing with “Regenuary” and I fully support regen meat and the purchasing of regen meat and a lot of people wrongly assume that I see no difference between typically raised meat and reject meat. And that’s not true, I do respect and see the differences. I just think that there’s a lot of complexity to the topic. And you know, we’ve got some big global policy problems happening. And there are a lot of hungry people out there that need nourishment, and don’t have access to regen meat. So, you know, even typical meat is healthy, but we can still make a better food system while also helping the typical meat industry to get better. And so I’d say that’s sort of my elevator pitch for what I do. And I guess this conference told me that I could only talk about the health benefits of pasture raised meats, and I was not allowed to discuss at all, you know, the other benefits of meat. And, you know, my position is that is a little bit of elitist because the typical person, most of their diet is complete junk. And they would do better with even a little bit of typical meat added in if that’s all they can afford. And I think that there’s overall a lot of elitism and misunderstanding about nutrition in the regenerative movement, and it’s really kind of turned me off lately. And so yeah, so let’s dig into all that. I mean, again, I think “Regenuary” is great, I think improving your purchasing choices, if you have the ability to do that is something that is quite laudable.

Glen Burrows  

Yeah, no, there’s so many… okay, there’s so many points here, but I think let’s just pick up first of all on the nutrition and kind of related to, you know, the conference that you could have been at right now. And you know, what you just said is that when I was first introduced to the subject of being an omnivore, basically, you know, when I switched from being a vegetarian and I started reading all this paleo literature, what got me into the whole idea of just buying grass-fed meat was all the paleo literature was talking about the increased levels of CLA and all the increased levels of B vitamins, all the fat soluble vitamins that were supposedly so much higher in grass-fed meat than they were grain-finished meat. And I think, I don’t know, I don’t know if this what I’m about to say is true. But I imagined that I think we probably have less of a difference in the UK between our what we call conventional meat and the purely and the best regenerative meat because we don’t have the same type of feedlot systems, I believe for beef, and pretty much all beef is at least starts on grass and on pasture. But what’s come out from the research I’ve done more recently is that the differences are there, but they’re maybe not as huge as some people would like them to believe. In terms of the nutritional quality, particularly if you’re talking the difference between no meat and some meat, right, which I think is huge. And so we you know, we’re constantly fighting this narrative, and actually, where the Veganuary, well, Regenuary started as a reaction to Veganuary. And my problem with Veganuary is not people wanting to be vegan. It’s an oversimplified narrative, that meat is unhealthy and always damaging for the planet. And that every kind of meat production is always lower impact than any kind of sorry, any kind of vegetable-based food production is always lower impact than any kind of meat-based production. And I just think that narrative is oversimplifying. It stops people thinking but within meat, yes, there are nuances and there are degrees, but the degrees are maybe not as huge as even possibly I thought four or five years ago. I think the regenerative the reason for Regenerative is less to do with this huge differences in nutrition, and more to do with simply what’s happening out in the field, literally, and that farming practices and the impact they’re having.

Diana Rodgers, RD  

I 100% agree with production practices, though, I think you would be surprised to learn that, you know, 85% of the beef cattle population here in the US are grazing on land that can’t be cropped right now. Yeah. And so even within typical meat production, I think it is overly simplified that you know, grass-fed good, everything else bad, right. You know, even within grass-fed production, there’s continuous grazing, and then there’s regen grazing, you know, and movement. And I’ve even I know a lot of region producers that do great grazing, that then at the end, sell to feedlots because it just works better for their business model. And in fact, even in my film, the farmers in Chihuahua, Mexico, who are bringing back the desert from the Chihuahuan Desert from just bare, barren land to this beautiful oasis of grasslands, he sends to feedlots at the end because his land can’t support the finishing. And it just works out better for him. And so, you know, there was a study here in the US about grazing on public lands and found that, you know, for each animal, it’s over $1,000 worth of ecosystem benefits. And that’s just typical meat production. So, you know, any grazing is better than no grazing, but there is no no-grazing situation that’s happening in the US. There’s no animals that are born in a torturous feedlot current only fed right now. But that is the reality in chicken and pork production. And so, you know, that’s where I argue, you know, if you’re at the grocery store, and the only solutions in front of you are typical beef, typical pork, or typical chicken, which is the three main land-based protein sources here in the US, the beef is always going to be the best choice. It’s 30% more nutritious than chicken. And that animal had access to outside for most of its life. And even when it was on a feedlot it was still like able to move around. It wasn’t like in these like really toxic conditions that you see in chicken production. I think there’s also this perception that all feedlots are these horrific places, and I’ve been to quite a few. I think that’s, you know, most people haven’t been to a feedlot. I’ve been to many. And, you know, it’s kind of like Club Med for cows. Like, you know, they get there. They get to eat whatever they want. They get to walk around. They’re not like it… they’re not tortured. Much of what they’re eating is actually food that has no other use and like food scraps, right? The leftovers from the ethanol industry or the alcohol industry. So if we’re going to be…

Glen Burrows  

Talking off camera, the plant-based food industry that generates it huge amount of inedible by humans waste in making these Impossible Burgers namely.

Diana Rodgers, RD  

Yes. Oatly actually used to send their own hulls to feed pigs. But then their customer base found out, and now they’re trying to make some kind of human fiber bar.

Glen Burrows  

I wrote an article, which is on our blog called “Are Plant-based Milk Producers Hypocrites?” and it was exactly because of that they were getting in Europe, in Germany, they’re still doing it. And they’re getting so much backlash, because the irony, the beautiful irony is that they were feeding the waste products from making oatmeal to dairy cattle, which they justified by saying, well, otherwise, it’s in landfill, and it’s going to produce methane anyway, at least somebody else is using it. And I agree with that totally, but that the customer base was up in arms.

Diana Rodgers, RD  

Right? I guess just you know, for every complex solution, there’s no simple and correct answer, right. So I just tried to expose the nuances that meat production, and the meat industry definitely has faults, and I try really hard to influence them to be better. You know, another issue with this conference was, you know, I was accused of working for industry, which is not really true, I was… I will consult with them, to help them have better practices. And you know, any meat producer is also working for industry, because they’re selling… they’re producing meat, though, you know, so if we’re talking about a matter of bias, anyone who is a producer of cheese or meat or anything, obviously, once, you know only…

Glen Burrows  

I mean, as does any plant-based food producer. We’re all we know, businesses have to generate profit. It’s often turned turned against us when you know, when it sits in agenda. So one of the things I really wanted to kind of dig deep, and we kind of talked about it a little bit here and there is this idea that only regenerative is, you know, it’s valid and that everything should be striving to be regenerative. And if it’s not, you’re somehow, you know, in collusion with big meat and the devil and you know, everything that’s wrong with the world. And you’ve used the word “nuanced” quite a lot in what you’ve been talking about so far. And that’s something I really, really want to bring in. Because I think that we are on the cusp of regenerative agriculture being massively used as a greenwashing tool right now. And I see the beginning of it starting to happen, for many reasons, but one of the most obvious reasons to me is because it’s an outcome-based measurement, not an input-based measurement. So if you’re measuring what happens within a field, and you can say, well, we’re adding biodiversity, we’re adding soil carbon, things are improving, you can then say that field is regenerative. But there’s no thought or no measurement as to what the inputs are that are coming into that field to create that regeneration in one place. And I don’t think anything should be called regenerative if it’s reliant on destruction that’s happening somewhere else. And yet, I see a full blown certification that is allowing, for example, you know, there are certification for regenerative agriculture that allow the use of glyphosate that allow the use of Brazilian derived soil to be fed to animals within a particular system. Well, if you feed Brazilian soil to chickens, and you keep them on a past year, and the chickens are scratching their dung into that past year that passed, you will become regenerative because you’re bringing external inputs and adding nutrition to that land. I don’t think that should be called regenerative. What are your thoughts on this lifecycle assessment of what regenerative should mean?

Diana Rodgers, RD  

I think it’s so tricky, also because we have to take the location into context. I mean, what can happen in northern Canada is very different than what can happen in southern Georgia here in the US, or what might happen in Costa Rica, or, you know, on this, you know, this farm and in Chihuahua, Mexico, right. Like he had no other inputs. He’s just, you know, producing grass completely just from grazing animals. But he sells to feed lots at the end. So is that meat evil? You know, I think it’s really tricky. I had… I think I mentioned to you I had, I mentioned this on the podcast with Paul Greive that I did not too long ago, a seafood company reached out to me calling themselves regenerative. And they were… their inputs for the fish was GMO grains. And I said, you know that nutritionally, I think it’s probably a great product that you’re producing. And I’m sure these are you know, you’re doing better than from the other things you’re telling me you’re doing better than most other farmed fish companies. But I don’t think you can call yourself regenerative if you’re using typical sprayed grains as your input,

Glen Burrows  

Like Roundup Ready type?

Diana Rodgers, RD  

Yeah.

Glen Burrows  

So what was their justification for using the term regenerative anyway? What did they think they were doing? Just for a bit of context here.

Diana Rodgers, RD  

They actually said, Oh my gosh, no one’s ever questioned us. No one has ever asked us these questions and called us out. And how dare you and I actually didn’t get… they were mad at me because there was another seafood company that I was working with that actually had very similar practices. And they were saying, Well, you support those guys. Why won’t you support us? And I said, because they’re not greenwashing. And you are. So they didn’t call themselves regenerative. They were just like, you know…

Glen Burrows  

What were they doing to justify using the word regenerative?

Diana Rodgers, RD  

There was no, there was no…

Glen Burrows  

Nothing

Diana Rodgers, RD  

certification or anything. They just decided that they were such great people and had such good intentions, that they could call themselves regenerative. And, you know, I’m seeing this on LinkedIn a lot. A lot of people are on there calling themselves regenerative consultants, or using the word regenerative and, or even there, I was at a conference a few years ago, I was at a conference in Boulder, Colorado. And there were a bunch of vegans there. And there was a lot of, you know, regenerative cacao nibs, you know, imported from, I don’t even remember where, but they were regenerative. And these goji berries, and all this, and I got up on stage. And I said, even if you don’t eat meat, you guys should endorse the work that the Savory Institute, for example, is doing, because these grazing animals are improving the land. And that’s the whole spirit of regenerative. And so you can’t demand that everyone go vegan, if you want to truly be in the spirit of what regenerative means. And I got a lot of hate for that. And I was surprised. Yeah. But luckily, actually, Charles Eisenstein, I don’t know if you know him, but he got up after me and gave the keynote and gave me a nod, which was great at the end. And he’s a good thinker. So I appreciate that very much. But I think that it’s just really much more complicated than these people who are trying to make a buck at it, are making it out to be.

Glen Burrows  

No, I mean, I’ve said, something I want to pick up on there is, you know, regenerative is in the UK anyway, it tends to be applied to animal-based foods, you know, it’s very rare that I think I can think of a few companies which are like Wild Farmed, who made this… who do flour, I don’t know, if you’ve come across them. What they do is absolutely extraordinary – the way that they plant rows of wheat within pasture, and they have specialized, and it’s drilled in to the pastures growing as a complex ecosystem. And then there are specialist machinery that harvests it. And it really isn’t destroying the soil structure or anything. I mean, that is one of the true, one of the only sort of plant-based foods that I can think of it. You know, there’s few wineries I know that are regenerative. There’s a fantastic brand called Hemp Street Wines. The UK is getting warm enough to make half-decent wines now and the some of the new producers are doing regenerative wines. But generally, I think people tend to think of it as really applying to animal-based foods where the grip particularly with grazing animals, they’re adding nutrition and adding input to the land. And they’re improving soil, carbon, and biodiversity. But because the whole idea of ‘Regenuary’ started as a reaction against ‘Veganuary’, with subsequent years of running this campaign, I’ve tried to sort of throw my arms a bit wide and say, look, let’s all get on board with this together, right? Let’s not… let’s try and find the common ground because whatever anyone eats, I want it to be lower impact if you don’t want to eat meat, fine, but you should be really thinking that how can I minimize my impact and clearly, lots of important tropical fruit flown in from wherever that’s unnecessary to be in Northern Europe in the winter, etc, etc. Mono crops, GMOs, fake meat products, maybe that isn’t regenerative. So how can vegans even be more conscious, mindful? And the more I started digging into it, I came to the conclusion that the only way somebody could consider that diet  – could be regenerative as a vegan if there is if they also accept that regenerative practices involving animals happen, because there is no other way. This idea that veganic permaculture can feed the world through making composites and ferment and teas that are then spread by hand and you know, pixies and whatever else they think is going to do all the work instead of a cow walking or a salon is pure fantasy. The only way we can we can have a regenerative food system and that for omnivores is by including animals within those systems. Have you come across a lot of resistance to that message?

Diana Rodgers, RD  

I think actually, surprisingly, the biggest resistance that I’ve had throughout the release of the book, and the film has not been from vegans, but has been from people in the regen movement, who think that whatever I’m saying, is it because I try to be more inclusive. And, you know, my goal is just improving practices and trying to nourish people with the healthiest food they can get. Right. And I think I think people should eat a wide variety of foods that don’t give them, you know, un-health. Yeah, and I think that we should be farming food in ways that you know, are financially sustainable, and also create lower impact, and it’s going to look different for everyone. And what I have found is that there’s a lot of ideological people out there that think whatever they’re doing is the best. And everything everyone else is doing is wrong. There’s a lot of egos in this space. And there’s just a lack of, I think there’s a lot of people that are actually quite out of touch also with what typical people are dealing with, you know, and I found that a lot of the people in the regen space have never had to, you know, do what I’ve done, where I’ve worked in hospitals, I’ve worked with people who are very, very sick and are eating total processed foods. They only shop at at big box stores, they can’t go to farmers markets, or, you know, they don’t have time, they’re working very stressful jobs. They don’t have a lot of nutrition education. They don’t have the luxury of the privilege of worrying about buying local, or, you know, they just have other big things to worry about. And I think to worry about, you know, things that you and I worry about. So longevity? 

Glen Burrows  

Yeah, it’s a very privileged position to be in, right. The one that we’re coming from, and I think it is, you know, I think it is a middle class privilege to be able to buy organic meat and to be able to think, is my chicken regenerative, because when we launched our regenerative soy-free chicken, we were selling a three, 2.2, 2.5 kilo chicken for 28 pounds, which is what close to $38-35, $38 for a single chicken. And I know that you can go to a supermarket and you can buy that same weight chicken for four or five pounds. So sort of seven or $8. And it’s a privilege if you can afford it, it’s not, you know, but the only way in my opinion, the only way that these things change is by creating a demand at the top of the market, then through scale can trickle down. 

Diana Rodgers, RD  

Totally. 

Glen Burrows  

And it’s a bit like, you know, your it’s classical economics, right, it’s supply and demand dictate price. So if a price and something is very high, and there’s a high demand for it, that should force the supply to increase so that the price can come down and more people can afford it. I’m not against this being these products being expensive now. I’m against them being expensive in three, five and 10 years from now, because it should become the norm. But I think you know, where we’re pushing boundaries, and we’re experimenting, and we need more land to produce less food, we need more time to produce less food. And there’s regenerative ways. So I kind of agree with your message as well as like, if you’re faced with junk or real food, even if the real food isn’t, isn’t produced in an totally ideal way, it’s preferable to your other option.

Diana Rodgers, RD  

Totally. I mean, I’ve raised the point that, you know, No, doctor, no ethical doctor would say only eat organic vegetables or don’t eat vegetables. Okay, great. So everyone can get that, right. So as a dietitian, it would be incredibly unethical of me to say only eat regenerative meat or don’t eat meat. But I think for some reason, that is the message that’s being put out by the regen community. And it’s unethical, you know, there are rich people that are going to buy crappy food out there. And that’s just their values and where they want to spend their money. And it’s frustrating to watch it happen. But there are people that just have different values, right? There’s people that vote one way instead of the way you prefer them to vote, and you can hate them for it. Or you can just accept that, you know, they have a different worldview than you. Right. And they might have other quality things about themselves, even though they don’t think the same way. You do. Right. And I tend to be in that camp. I think that people’s own views can be valid to them and still not be my view. Right?

Glen Burrows  

Yeah, sure. Yeah. 

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Glen Burrows

You mentioned very early on that you work for Whole Foods, right? I did come across some… I saw, I listened to the podcast that White Oak Pastures and on Joe Rogan. And he was talking about Whole Foods. And I think explaining the problem that they got to where scale had become an issue. And with scale, the ethics had kind of, shall we say, gone out the window somewhat. And I find this something really hard to kind of get my head around is, what if anything you think we can do to kind of scale the movement? So that people do you think, I think because I came from an advertising background as did you, and it’ll be interesting to see if you share my view on this one, but I believe that scale is going to come from consumer demand. So with the Ethical Butcher, my focus has been not so much about hammering the farmers to do things the way we want them to do it, but more about educating the consumer as to the difference that w’re trying to push to then say to the farmers, we’ve got the market, would you make it. And that’s the way around, I think things are gonna happen. What are your thoughts on that? Do you think it needs to be led from the field or led from the table?

Diana Rodgers, RD  

Well, I mean, there’s cool stuff that can be produced at, you know, at the producer level, like maybe there’s this new cool flavor of jerky that, you know, came out in an experiment, and you then tell your customers about it, and they think it’s cool, and then that takes off. Right. But I think in general, I am on your side where I think most of the change is going to happen because of consumer demand. I think that’s just sort of a law of capitalism that has been proven time and time again. And I also think that scale is not a bad thing. And I think that that’s another problem within this regen gg movement, is that there’s this perception and there’s no magical number, but it’s like once a company gets to a certain size are no longer seen as good anymore. 

Glen Burrows  

Yeah, sure. Yeah. 

Diana Rodgers, RD  

There must be a term for this, but and I do in general think that they’re, you know, that we need to have more regional food systems and less globalism. I think globalism can be really harmful. 

Glen Burrows  

Well, there’s this idea isn’t that once a corporation has a board and shareholders they essentially become sociopathic, in that, at that point, the most important thing that they can produce is profit. And that the ethics tend to go out of the window if there’s a buck to be made somewhere. And I think there is probably as you said, maybe that’s the point. Maybe it’s the point at which, you know, a company floats, maybe it’s when they become a PLC, and suddenly, they’re trading. Maybe that’s the point at which it all goes wrong. And profits are more important than ethics. 

Diana Rodgers, RD  

I don’t know. It could be although, you know, I think that, um, you know, people, I think a lot of this comes down to the fear of death. And people don’t want to, you know, this is getting really deep now. But you know, people don’t want to hear about how their meat was produced. They don’t want to know about it. They just think it’s icky. And so they’ve allowed meat companies to be very quiet and secretive about how they raise their meat, because no one wants to see it anyway. But I’ve actually been to some very, very large… I’ve been to the biggest meat company in the world, in Brazil. And those animals were not like hollering out, you know, screaming and tortured. They were like hanging out. And, you know, and it doesn’t mean that I’m necessarily endorsing all of big meat, it just means that I’m curious, and I’m looking at all the whole entire system. I’m trying to figure out ways that the whole system can be better. But I think if even if a company has shareholders, I think there’s a level of consumer education that can happen that will, you know, consumers of higher-end products want to know that, you know, the labor practices were fair and all of that and so that’s where, you know, sometimes third-party certifications can be a good thing. You know, once you get to a certain scale or something like that. 

Glen Burrows  

Exactly. 

Diana Rodgers, RD  

And I don’t have a prescription for how to fix everything because just it’s a very complicated system. But I also think that makes me a really good person to be talking about it because I think anyone who’s got a one size fits all prescription on how to fix our health in our food system. That they clearly don’t know what they’re talking about, because…

Glen Burrows  

I love that expression. And anyone who thinks they have all the answers doesn’t understand the question. 

Diana Rodgers, RD  

Exactly, exactly. 

Glen Burrows  

And I think that that definitely follows through all of this. So if we can move back to sort of the talk around, you know, regenerative and kind of what it means. How would you know if somebody said, I don’t know what’s your elevator pitch for what regenerative agriculture is? How would you respond to that?

Diana Rodgers, RD  

I’ve been kind of a little down on that term lately only because as we were talking earlier, there’s just been a lot of greenwashing going on and a lot of people calling themselves it, and I’m regenerative, you’re not regenerative. And I want to trademark you know, this type of regenerative agriculture because I invented it. And you know, you can’t do it because … or use my word because I own it, you know. There’s actually that happening. And so I think that I don’t care what the word is. And I think that we should all be striving to be good people, healthy people. We should be raising our food in a way that benefits the environment without making us go broke. I think that’s another, you know, I’ve lived on farms. Farmers don’t make a lot of money. And a lot of them are, or can be subsidized by, you know, rich landowners, for example, or governments like our governments. Exactly. And so, or maybe they inherited all of the land, and they use, you know, intern labor that they don’t have to pay, you know, just have this fleet of apprentices that want to study with them, but that actually makes their model an unsustainable model, right. So I see, I don’t know how many, you know, 100% pure systems I’ve seen. There’s always something going on, either the person had family money, and so they were able to buy the land or their practices are so unrealistic with, you know, burying the horn underneath the tree at sundown on the full moon. There’s just, I think it needs to work… 

Glen Burrows  

Yeah. permacultural something? Yeah,

Diana Rodgers, RD  

I just think it needs to, it needs to work. And it needs to be a good practice. And I think there’s a lot of different things and a lot of different contexts,

Glen Burrows  

For which regenerative could be for what it could be

Diana Rodgers, RD  

And I get nervous about terms because there’s like, then an in-group and an out-group and a line drawn in the sand. And I think that there’s a lot of people with really great intentions. There’s clearly people also who are just trying to make money. But they might also have their own reasons why they can’t worry about the earth if they’re trying to just save their family farm. And their kids don’t want to move back because they don’t want that life anymore. You know, I’ve seen I’ve seen that, too. So I don’t know anymore what I think.

Glen Burrows  

Fair enough. I was when you’re talking there, I was like, thinking, gosh, I hope she doesn’t ask me the same question. Because I’m not sure how I would define regenerative other than to say, I think that wherever a producer is on their journey, they should be on a model of continuous improvement. So and I think pretty much that’s all I can say about it. Because as much as we can talk about it being an outcome-based measurement, or a measurement within you know, of what’s happening on the land, unless you’re taking into account the full lifecycle of the inputs. So to me, a regenerative system is… and I have met farmers who are operating like this is the only inputs of sunlight and rainwater, and they’re producing food. So if you can continue to do that year after year, and your outputs are increasing, that’s regenerative. But that’s a pretty rare system. And as you said earlier, it’s possible with grazing animals, but it’s pretty impossible with monogastric, which are the you know, poultry and pork. And then we get into a thing. Well, if you’re using a waste product, is that regenerative? Well, how is that waste product produced? Without waste product, the result of non-regenerative farming? Does it still mean that the, you know if we’re feeding waste bits of grains to chickens, and a great example of this was, you know, I discovered that it is possible to keep poultry in a way that could be certified regenerative having been fed Brazilian-derived soy, right. To me, that’s absolute nonsense, like, okay, so you’re adding nutrition to the field, on the basis that you’re destroying a landscape 7000 miles away, absolute, total and utter nonsense to call that regenerative. We have to think of the bigger picture. So yeah, it’s, you know, we run this campaign called regenerate. It’s hard to define what regenerative actually is, but what I do, what I never want to stop doing is talking about it. Thinking about it and discussing it and discussing the gray areas and discussing nuance without throwing sticks at each other.

Diana Rodgers, RD  

Exactly, exactly. And that’s what I see a lot happening in the movement. And I also think that it can alienate those who maybe want to make a change. Because there’s like the folks up at the top that, you know, think that they’re doing the perfect stuff. And they’re looking down their noses at everybody else, when they could be just helping to elevate them at the same time, right? Change in rural communities happens really slowly. There’s a lot of cultural reasons why you don’t want to stick out and be different in a rural community. And also, it can be a risk, if you know, people do things that their family has done, there’s very small margins, if you’re at risk of, you know, not knowing if you’re going to make it every year or make a profit every year. Why would you ever want to do something radical? 

Glen Burrows  

Yeah, completely change things, right. 

Diana Rodgers, RD  

So I think there needs to be a lot less judgment and criticism and a lot more open-mindedness to the fact that most people are just trying to do their best. And I think really, you know, age has a lot to do with this, too. You and I are similar ages. And I think with that comes a perspective that like stuff happens, and most people are trying to do a good job. And it’s a good… it’s a good idea to just help them do that right on the best

Glen Burrows  

They can, as you said, and do the best they can. I want to pick up on something, it’s kind of you mentioned it a little, a little way back, you were talking about one of the difficulties with farming is obviously the requirement to own land and buy the land came from whether you’ve had to buy it, you’ve inherited it, you’re renting it or whatever. And something I’ve seen a little bit of which I’ve seen here, and kind of from the last couple of ground schools that I’ve been to, which I find really interesting, and I hope will be the beginning of a bit of an agricultural revolution, is the idea that you could become a farmer without owning land. And what I mean by that is, I’ve seen some examples of some really incredible stacked enterprise farming systems happening. So like a great example of this is one of the one of the primary beef producers is based just outside of London. He’s got the most beautiful kind of plot of land. And he does, he grows beef and lamb. And he was approached by a couple of young guys who wanted to do pastured chicken, and then work farmers, they didn’t own land, but they’d watched Joel Salatin, and they knew how they were engineers, and they knew how to build a chicken tractor. And they engineered these incredible aluminium chicken tractors and shared the everything open source about how to build these things. And they became farmers on somebody else’s land without owning anything. And the reason the beef farmer said yes, is because they were bringing nutrition to his land. So they were bringing in organic chicken feed, which was obviously grain base as local as possible. And the chickens were running across the land, and you could see the increasing growth where the chickens had been. So this idea that more animals can actually benefit the land, if done correctly, I think is potentially opening up the ability for people to be farmers without thinking, Am I going to have to take essentially a land mortgage out for 6 million pounds to become a farmer? And I don’t know, I know, you’re sort of Patrick Holden in his Feeding Britain report. I don’t know if you’ve seen him. You probably have. But we’re suggesting that we need to put grazing animals back into crop rotations. Well, the only way that’s going to work is if the cattle farmers of the future are nomadic. You know, and I think what a fantastic thing to do. What a fantastic possibility is that I could be a farmer with 150-200 head of cattle and not own land, but provide a service to arable land, for example. It would be complicated, it would be difficult, it would require infrastructure that possibly doesn’t exist at the moment. But do you see any sort of movement like that happening where you guys are?

Diana Rodgers, RD  

Well, I think that that’s one of the major reasons why I started the Global Food Justice Alliance, which is the nonprofit that I have been sort of speaking on behalf of. And when we look at the global narrative right now to you know, countries, taxing livestock farmers are trying to dramatically reduce the head of cattle or the number of livestock in a country. The reality is that you know, there are a lot of places where people have a hard time having access to own land just because of you know the need for cash. But all or, you know, women and half the countries in the world can own livestock but can’t own land, like can’t…

Glen Burrows  

Because of the way the society structured, not allowed to, unless…

Diana Rodgers, RD  

Yeah, half. And so… 

Diana Rodgers, RD  

Sobering 

Diana Rodgers, RD  

Allowing women in particular to own livestock, gives them financial security, to be able to leave an abusive home situation, can provide better nourishment to their children, can provide income for books and for you know, a better future for their children. And, you know, we see Heifer International is doing this with women in Nepal in particular, by teaching them how to, you know, own goats and take care of goats. And it’s dramatically changing the life of of these women. And so that’s the reason why I’m pushing against this global idea that meat is bad, livestock are bad. And we need to absolutely stop that the future is not plant-based. It’s not what George Monbiot is talking about. And I really wish that all this infighting within like, well, it has to be pasture-based, or nothing, only grass-fed or nothing, you know, that needs to stop, because we have these huge, you know, we are all little David’s against a massive Goliath with the World Bank and the World Economic Forum, and Bill Gates, and all of these people that are trying to tech… tech know our food, ‘techify’ our food, and take food production out of the hands of humans, and…

Glen Burrows  

You can’t patent the grass-fed cow, right? You know, there’s no… 

Diana Rodgers, RD  

Exactly. And so we all need to be getting behind this message that we need small-scale agriculture, we need nutritious food for people. And yes, 100% This all needs to be advocated for and there can’t be this, you know, regen against grass-fed or grass-fed against people who might do a little bit of grain, but it’s local, or you know, someone who needs to go to the grocery store and just get meat, that all should be, you know, seen as different levels of grayness. And there is no diamond out of that.

Glen Burrows  

I really couldn’t agree more. I mean, obviously, as a business, we’ve had to take a stand and say what and say what we do and don’t do, and we are trying to source as much as we can, well, pretty much everything, some form of regeneration, according to how you would define that, but we’re just one company trying to create a differential for ourselves in a market. So I think, you know, I think in our case, we all very much saying it’s for us, for our brand is regenerative or nothing, you know. But it’s that’s not the message that we’re putting out to the rest of the world. And I appreciate exactly kind of where you’re coming from.

Diana Rodgers, RD  

And I think, you know, eat according to your values is a great message. Feel good about the meat you’re buying know that it, you know, was at our… at these standards. I mean, the majority of the meat that I eat is also regen meat, but I just don’t, I recognize that I have a privilege there that other people don’t have. And so I don’t put down, you know, other types of things

Glen Burrows  

You’ve you’ve kind of really neatly segued me and we’ve been going for a little while now, but you’ve really neatly segued into something that I wanted to kind of pick your brain about because every year when we’ve run ‘Regenuary’, we’ve tried to kind of look at okay, so you know, what’s our what will be our slant? What will be our kind of talking point this year. And I mentioned to you off camera before we started filming, recording this that we’ve seen our business have a bit of a shift towards the foodservice towards b2b. And I see the b2b, the restaurant trade, what people eat outside of their home, having a huge lag in both ethics and input quality compared to what people would buy in a supermarket. And, you know, I’m one of those people. I don’t mind admitting I am hypocritical when it comes to… I know damn well that sometimes when I’m in a restaurant, I’m eating things that I wouldn’t pick up from a supermarket shelf. I didn’t before I started becoming aware of how restaurants operate, but a lot of restaurants, they know how to prepare food very well. They know how to make it taste delicious. And they will do that with the cheapest possible ingredients that they can possibly use. Because profits are hard profits are tight. And it’s only when we started selling meat to restaurants. I realized the scale of the dissonance between the relatively wealthy educated consumer who would never you know who would only ever buy an organic chicken to roast for them. Only on a Sunday, we’ll order a chicken curry. And it’s probably Lithuanian battery farm chicken that’s been floated in frozen. You know, there’s a huge gap there. And it’s a gap that I kind of want to slightly name and shame a little bit, I kind of want to I want to push for that to be a change. It is related to profit. It’s also related to, I think, what people expect to be able to pay for things, you know, but what can we do as consumers to eat better when we’re out of the home?

Diana Rodgers, RD 

Well, if consumers want well-raised meat at restaurants, they just need to ask for well-raised meat restaurants. And the reason why restaurants are able to get away with crap meat is because no one’s asking, no one’s asking the questions. It’s just like the seafood company I mentioned. When I told them, you know, they can’t call themselves regenerative. Or they said, Well, they’re pushed back wasn’t out of, you know, how could we be regenerative? It was, Well, gee, no one ever… no one ever asked us, you know, doing. And so I have seen though, when I was living at the farm, there were a few restaurants that we sold briefly to and then they dropped us as suppliers. And I saw our farm’s name still on the menu. And so I do see greenwashing happening at restaurant level as well. You know, saying that their fries are made in out of tallow, you know, tallow oil, and they’re totally not, and, you know, and so I think that there needs to be a little bit of accountability. So maybe some type of, you know, if The Ethical Butcher were to highlight the restaurants, to their consumers, the ones that, yeah, I think that could be really great. And that could give those restaurants the incentive to continue to buy knowing that the customers came in asking for that meat, you know.

Glen Burrows  

So yeah, it’s kind of linking together the retail element of buying ingredients with the same aspect that you would for when you’re eating out. But yeah, I mean, it’s hard. It’s hard to do. And it’s hard because of cost and scale. But, you know, I think when you and I met at Groundswell, we had a stand next to Honest Burger, who are a burger chain in the UK, I mean, compared to burger chains that I’m sure your viewers are familiar with their tiny book, but there’s, you know, they have 42, I think 42 shops. Each restaurant is getting through the equivalent of one cow per week in weight. And they’re switching to a properly regenerative supply chain, and they haven’t had to increase their prices. But their prices were you know, we’re not McDonald’s prices. They’re not doing 99 pea Hamburgers, they’re doing you know, 10 pound burger and fries. And it’s delicious. And it’s several steps above but I find it quite encouraging that if you know brand like that, which is medium size, which is scaling up can can go completely regenerative then, you know, I think there’s hope for for bigger ones. And the consumers face the choice. Do I get my happy meal for actually I shouldn’t name and shame McDonald’s too much. Because I know they’re investing a lot in research into regeneration. 

Diana Rodgers, RD  

Yeah, and I know, you know, they’re an easy one to pick on. Because they’re so big. And they’re sort of synonymous with, you know, evil fast food. But they have made to their credit, and I’ve never taken a dime from McDonald’s. I’ve never worked with them. But I know that a third of their burger meat in Canada is grass-fed. 

Glen Burrows  

Wow. 

Diana Rodgers, RD  

Yeah. And they have I know, completely all the way through grass. 

Glen Burrows  

Yes, yes. 

Diana Rodgers, RD  

And I know that they’ve been making really great efforts. And so my opinion is if I could help a company like McDonald’s, be 5% more sustainable

Glen Burrows  

But such a big change is so much better

Diana Rodgers, RD  

Than you know, all of the, you know, pasture-raised

Glen Burrows  

Than opening a farm shop. Right? 

Diana Rodgers, RD  

Fancy cheese could be sold out of one small farm in England, right? Yeah. So like, you know, net benefit to the world, me if I can, if I can be doing something like that. Right? So I’m just a big proponent of you know, here’s the whole system, and how can we make it better?

Glen Burrows  

So the bigger the company, the smaller the change will have a bigger impact.

Diana Rodgers, RD  

Yeah, I truly believe that. And I mean, we do live in a world where a lot of people go to McDonald’s. So yeah, let’s go talk to McDonald’s and see what we can do. It doesn’t have to go 100% regen tomorrow, but you know, they can also and I again, I know that they’re investing in some really great research and are looking at ways to be more.

Glen Burrows  

Absolutely and I interviewed I’m Claire, who Claire Hill who’s head of FIFA farms in the UK, which is McDonald’s kind of research farm into regen. And I’m impressed and I think they use their research, they use their cooking oil to power their trucks and you know, it’s a biodiesel. And as you said, it’s often the first word that comes into your mind when you’re thinking about junk food. But actually, there they are, they are kind of pushing to do things a bit better. But for example, this might be a bit of a strange question. But if you’re out for dinner at a restaurant, when you are with family, are there certain things that no matter what you just can’t bring yourself to order on a menu? Are there certain food items that you just think there’s no way this is this is not, you know, ranked in for the bad impact a good impact are the certain things, for example, that you would always avoid? 

Diana Rodgers, RD  

When I’m out at a restaurant, I mean, I tried to choose farm-to-table restaurants where I know the owner and you know, my daughter works at a great one nearby that’s owned by a friend. She’s got her own farm, you know, that’s the type of restaurant that I go to. Yeah, we’re traveling. I’m in an airport. Oh, gosh, well, so being celiac, it’s really, I kind of allergic to airports, right? But if I’m starving, I’m just going to get a steak. I’m not going to be… I’m just going to get a plain steak. Add some salt and pepper and just eat the steak on the grill. You know, that’s going to be even better than eggs because they might be tossing eggs in some bad seed oils and they come out really greasy, and I’ll feel really sick from that. But I would always order a steak over chicken or pork conventional chicken or pork. I would always take the steak over that.

Glen Burrows  

That’s yeah, that’s pretty solid advice. And I think I would agree with you but I think some of the worst offenders are probably you know, tiger prawns and farmed tilapia and farmed salmon.

Diana Rodgers, RD  

Oh, yeah. Yeah, the seafood is just not… yeah sickly. 

Glen Burrows  

From a big restaurant potentially in a you know, in an airport, for example. It’s gonna be Yeah, I think that would be my number one to avoid and I’d agree with you on that.

Diana Rodgers, RD  

Yeah. And food safety-wise burgers from restaurants in general, I always get cooked well. Steak, it doesn’t matter as much because the pathogens can’t get inside the muscle tissue. Never been exposed to the air like with burgers. All of that is up for chance.

Glen Burrows  

And a lot of surface area.

Diana Rodgers, RD  

There’s a lot of surface areas that go into the inside of the uncooked burger. And so, you know, unless you really trust that restaurant, and know where their meat came from, get that burger well cooked or…

Glen Burrows  

Cooked all the way through, not pink in the middle, but the have your steak…

Diana Rodgers, RD  

Steak is okay. Steak is okay for pink in the middle. But yeah, not burgers.

Glen Burrows  

And yeah, that’s yeah, that’s quite interesting. That you went straight for the steak and didn’t mention like, oh, well, I might go a bit more veggie or something. But it’s just not…

Diana Rodgers, RD  

Well, I just don’t feel I’m you know, there’s some people that do feel good eating a lot of vegetables. If I eat a gigantic salad with lots of like raw kale and tons of veggies in it, I am running to the bathroom.

Glen Burrows  

No one wants to be behind you on an airplane.

Diana Rodgers, RD  

No, exactly. I just don’t have a digestive system that can really handle a ton of raw vegetables. So I’ll go for some steamed veg. But also if you know a curry or something like that, I get nervous about the sauces being celiac and everything.

Glen Burrows  

So with a bit of flour, and yeah, then you’re in trouble

Diana Rodgers, RD  

Plain seared steak with a side of you know, steamed veggies or something like that. Yeah, and some sparkling water. I don’t drink alcohol when I travel either. It just makes jetlag 10 times worse.

Glen Burrows  

I’ve found to my detriment a couple of times those three drinks on the plane, and they just feel like death when you get there. But…

Diana Rodgers, RD  

Yeah, totally. Well, thank you so much for such a long and complex, and nuanced.

Glen Burrows  

We’ve gone on for a little while here. Is there anything else you want to tell us about you know what you’re up to in the next coming year and or I mean, you can you can obviously share links that I can put on my end of as to everything you’re up to. But what’s this coming year look like for you?

Diana Rodgers, RD  

I don’t really know. Last year was insane with travel. It was in eight different countries. And a lot of them I didn’t even know what they were gonna happen until a few months before so it may be again this year with lots of different countries. I know that I’ll be in Sydney, Australia in April and moving my son into Puerto Rico to surf for a few months and 

Glen Burrows  

Oh wow! 

Diana Rodgers, RD  

work in a restaurant. From a guy that actually… he attended one of my nutrition and farm workshops at White Oak Pastures. 

Glen Burrows  

Oh man. 

Diana Rodgers, RD  

He was one of the attendees of the conference and owns a little brewery in Agua Dia, Puerto Rico and has offered a job, a car and an apartment to my kid. 

Glen Burrows  

Wow. Can I go?

Diana Rodgers, RD  

Amazing. I know how cool is that? So thank you, Renee, for that. And so I’ll be going down a few times visit him there. And then I’m really going to be pouring a lot of energy into my nonprofit, the Global Food Justice Alliance this year. Starting to…

Glen Burrows  

How much… you mentioned that. Yeah, tell me a little. Tell me more about that. Tell me so what prompted you to form that beyond the work you’re doing with Sacred Cow and everything else you’re doing? Because, yeah, I think it’d be really good to kind of wrap up with you telling us about that.

Diana Rodgers, RD  

Thank you. Yeah, the Global Food Justice Alliance was formed basically out of the impact campaign I was doing for Sacred Cow. We started it because of the UN Food System Summit that was happening in New York City where the Eat Lancet Commission had worked very closely with the Secretary General of the United Nations to try to, you know, get them to follow the Eat Lancet diet, which I’m very nervous about. It was not going through any voting process or regular committees. It was just sort of like…

Glen Burrows  

Such an incredibly flawed piece of work. Yes. Unbelievable. How nobody fact checked that whole thing.

Diana Rodgers, RD  

Yeah. And I think, you know, taking meat away, especially from at-risk populations, or, you know, low-income women and children is very dangerous. We know that micronutrient deficiencies, iron, B12, Vitamin A, these are all best found in animal-source foods and the highest nutrient deficiencies in the world. And so I started the Global Food Justice Alliance, as you know, this ethical dilemma we have with this anti-meat movement from privileged white people going around telling other poor people that they shouldn’t eat meat, right? So no worries, if you want to be vegan, live near Whole Foods in LA and you know, can afford all that stuff. Great, but most people can’t. And any meat is better than the no-meat to a lot of people that don’t have that choice, right. And so Global Food Justice Alliance started as an education organization. We are now starting to get meat to people. 

Glen Burrows  

Oh, wow. Okay. 

Diana Rodgers, RD  

Started getting meat sticks into the backpacks of kids in some low-income areas here in the US. And we are starting to work with a lot of meat companies that will be adding a donation to us at checkout. So customers will be able to just like bump up their order, or add an extra donation to Global Food Justice Alliance at checkout. And that money goes to I mean, basically support me and an assistant and all the energy we put into education, especially to young people, and then getting meat to people.

Glen Burrows  

That’s incredible. And also just, you know, I can throw in that having seen the content that you put out that I think the infographics and information that you guys put out through that on on socials is absolutely fantastic. It’s very clear, it’s no BS, it’s very direct is very straightforward, black and white, and pretty unarguable, fact-based information about what you’re trying to do. So I think that’s a great resource for people to go and look at.

Diana Rodgers, RD  

Thank you so much. Yeah, we put a lot of energy into that information, and really appreciate it when you get complimented on it.

Glen Burrows  

Thank you. Very welcome. Thank you.

Diana Rodgers, RD  

Great, well, again, thank you for your time, do you want to let my followers know how to find you?

Glen Burrows  

Yeah, so we’re, obviously we’re just a UK-based firm. So we don’t ship internationally. But we have a large quantity of content that I put out across social media. Sorry, I… we… that the brand puts out across social media. We’re pretty active on on Instagram, Facebook. And there’s a lot of blog posts written about a lot of things that you and I have discussed today, which were found on our website. But yeah, if anyone’s really interested in the idea behind ‘Regenuary’ and what it is, we are launching on the 10th of January, the campaign sort of officially launches and I will be spelling out the kind of where it’s come from what we’ve done in the past few years, the whole idea behind it. And then also the slight shift towards what the focus is of this year through January, which is going to be looking at food service and how both consumers and chefs can make better choices just to go that little bit to start improving things. So we’re not saying all the restaurants need to be regenerative overnight, but just what can they do to make that tiny bit of improvement? It’s going to have a knock-on effect for the future.

Diana Rodgers, RD  

Wonderful, wonderful. Yeah, just you know if Starbucks could just have one fairtrade coffee on tap all the time, can you imagine how great that would be?

Glen Burrows  

What a difference. 

Diana Rodgers, RD  

Yeah. Great. Well, and your followers and I do have some followers in the UK. Of course, they can. They can find me on at sustainable dish on Instagram and at global food justice, on Instagram, and then the website, sustainable dish, and also Sacred Cow, the movie and the book.

Glen Burrows  

Thank you. I’ll put all the links in when I post this up there. And thank you.

Diana Rodgers, RD  

Wonderful. All right, well have a wonderful rest of your gloomy day in the UK and the start of mine in the US.

Glen Burrows  

It’s gone completely dark while we’ve been talking. Yeah.

Diana Rodgers, RD  

All right. Well, happy January, and thanks. So much fun.

Glen Burrows  

Thank you. See you soon.

Diana Rodgers, RD 

Thanks so much for listening to the Sustainable Dish Podcast. If you liked the show, please leave a review on iTunes. And if you’d like to support the work I’m doing on Patreon, please visit sustainabledish.com/join. As a Patreon subscriber, you’ll get access to ad-free podcasts, plus exclusive video podcasts, never before seen interviews, and a discussion community. Go to sustainabledish.com/join, and thank you for your support.

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