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HLG: And eating real food cooking at home— that was a sandwich. Sometimes I’d throw some peanut butter on there.
these are things that are sustainable, right? Tell It was a horrible diet but it was a diet that we were forced into because
me how your grandparents ate? Did they eat of our financial situation at the time. But also because the culture, which
real food? just sort of moved us in that direction.

RM: Yes, they did. My mother was an Alabama HLG: So how did you reconnect with cooking and real food? Where did
farm girl. Her parents were rural people doing you turn for guidance?
small-scale, subsistence farming. On my father's
side it was the same thing. I never met my grand- RM: Initially it was just a gut feeling. After my successful experience
parents but my mother told me stories about in New York, I returned to Virginia where I continued what my wife
them. Even when I was a kid and my family was had already started. We just began cooking. I like to cook; if I could
living in Michigan, it was not uncommon for have a second life I'd come back as a chef. And so I started cooking. We
my father to go out on a Sunday and buy a live taught our daughters to cook and the food just tasted better. At the time
chicken at the market. He'd bring that chicken I didn't really know too much about diet and nutrition—all I knew was
home and my mother would slaughter it. And that, wow, this food tastes a lot better than the stuff that I normally buy.
we would have fresh chicken for dinner. I also figured out that when you cook it yourself, when you make your
own food with real ingredients, it actually does cost less over the long
HLG: Wow. And how is it that your family and term. So not only were we enjoying good food, we were saving money.
you departed from that kind of real food? And although I say “good food,” at that time I didn't have any farmer
contacts, I was going to the regular grocery store. What I was buying
RM: I like to say that as humans it's just part of was industrial chicken, industrial beef and industrial vegetable oils. But
our nature that we're always looking for ways it's a spectrum. You jump into this approach wherever you fit. If you've
to streamline, to reduce the amount of work got the money to buy organic or if you have a local farmer that you can
that we have to do. When my family moved purchase from, then definitely go that route. But if you are like we were,
from Michigan to Arizona, we found ourselves where we didn't really know what we were doing at the time, then going
surrounded by cheap processed food. Since it to the regular grocery store is a good place to start. I like to say that an
costs less, you get lulled into the idea that it industrial whole egg is better than eggs in a box.
has a higher value. You begin to rate your food
by the price rather than by the quality of that HLG: So true. It's a matter of taking those small steps to upgrade your
food. The other thing is that there was a period diet, moving away from those labels with ingredients you can't pronounce.
where we were pretty poor, and we were getting Once you got rolling you probably realized that organic food would be
government food. That means we were basically better. Then what did you do?
getting corn syrup and white flour—basically all
of the junk foods. That's what was being given RM: Once I start something, I go whole hog, I jump in with both feet, so
to people on public assistance. I used to make I was all over the Internet, searching and searching, and then I stumbled
the sandwiches when I was a kid—two slices of across this organization called the Weston A. Price Foundation. I thought,
white bread with corn syrup as the filling and who are these people? But as I was reading the website, I thought, “This

QUOTES FROM RECENT PODCAST EPISODES

“Every piece of food you eat creates the landscape your grandchildren will inherit.”
Joel Salatin, “The Marvelous Pigness of Pigs”
“Right now if an adult follows the CDC vaccination schedule, they will get ninety-one doses of vaccines between ages
eighteen and eighty. The national Adult Immunization Plan would identify adults who are not complying to push the
vaccines that are coming. It verges on a police state. This is medical tyranny.”
Leslie Manookian, “Vaccines: What's All the Fuss About? (Part 1)”

“Today the top six foods in the American diet are grain-based desserts, bread, sugar-sweetened beverages, pizza, alco-
hol and fried chicken. I’d say we’ve strayed pretty far away from our native ancestral diet and we have this epidemic of
chronic modern disease as a result of that.” Chris Kresser, “The Wisdom of our Ancestors”
Wise Traditions SUMMER 2016 Wise Traditions 81