Know Your Crunchy Legal Rights

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Defend your right to drink raw milk, to buy food directly from your farmer and to keep your bodily autonomy! Julie Dean Richards, the Crunchy Legal Lady, helps us understand what our rights are when it comes to all of the above and then some.

She goes over how to obtain a religious exemption to vaccinations, how to identify health practitioners who honor your right as a parent (so that your children will not have to get shots if you don’t want them to). She discusses the Amos Miller case and Private Membership Agreements and whether or not they are helpful for protecting your rights to purchase food from the farmer of your choice. And last, but not least, Julie reminds us that we can be activists without ever turning up in a courtroom or at a protest at city hall.

Visit Julie’s website: crunchylegallady.com

Register for the Wise Traditions conference in Orlando at wisetraditions.org

Check out our sponsors: One Earth Health and the New Biology Clinic

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Listen to the podcast here

 

Episode Transcript

Within the below transcript the bolded text is Hilda Labrada Gore and the regular text is Julie Dean Richards.

Legalization Of Food Rights

You want to drink raw milk and protect your children and yourself from unnecessary shots. Understand your rights when it comes to what food you buy and who you buy it from. This is episode 494, and our guest is Julie Dean Richards. She is known as the Crunchy Legal Lady, and she has done our homework for us. She gives us a number of ideas for understanding more deeply our rights to eat what we’d like, live as we’d like, and protect our rights to bodily autonomy. Also, she gives us tips on how to defend those rights.

She covers everything from the need to be wary of foods that support the right label, but the wrong ingredients to how to go about developing private membership agreements with our farmers to avoid government intervention in our food purchases. She also addresses what’s happening with the avian flu, like monkeypox these days, and how the fear generated is intended in part to control our small local food systems.

Julie offers insights on the Amos Miller case, the Amish farmer in Pennsylvania, and she discusses Supreme Court rulings that make clear our rights when it comes to exemptions to vaccinations. She also tells us which states allow for a religious exemption and which do not, and what is required to obtain a religious exemption. Finally, she reminds us that being an activist does not always mean showing up in a courtroom or hiring a lawyer.

Before we get into the conversation, I want to invite you to join us at the Wise Traditions Conference in Orlando this October the 25th to the 27th, 2024. Mary Holland, the President and General Counsel of the Children’s Health Defense will be there. She is going to be a part of a health freedom panel that will answer important questions such as what have been the biggest legal successes in recent years, and the biggest disappointments.

What are the most pressing health freedom-related issues that need to be addressed today and so forth? Do not miss this chance to hear from Mary Holland, and you can enjoy nutritious food, gain valuable knowledge, and form meaningful connections at the Wise Traditions Conference. Go to Wise Traditions’ website to sign up. We look forward to seeing you there.

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Visit Julie’s website at Crunchy Legal Lady

Register for the Wise Traditions Conference in Orlando

Check out our sponsors: One Earth Health and the New Biology Clinic

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Welcome to the show, Julie.

Thank you for having me. I am excited to be here.

I think it’s important because one emphasis of the foundation is activism, so it’s important for people to know what legal ground we stand on. At the same time, I feel like can’t we just grow our own food off the grid and live our own lives without bothering with all these legal things and defending our rights?

It’s a teeter-totter kind of balance. I know many of us would love to just live our own lives and do our own thing, but if we aren’t activists, if we don’t know what legal grounds we stand on, then it’s hard for us to change the system or interact with it if it comes our way. Most of us in this world are going to end up having to interact with the system in some sense. My goal is to help people to be able to understand the system so they can use it.

 

If we aren’t active and don’t know what legal grounds we stand on, it’s really hard for us to change the system or interact with it if it comes our way.

 

That’s a good point because as much as I want to do my own thing as we were discussing, I come across moments when I’m like, “Why is raw milk illegal where I live?” Speaking of that, we have had to advocate for legalization across the US and around the world. What examples do you have either pertaining to raw milk or other issues that are important for protecting our food rights?

I think raw milk is a really good example of consumers pushing forward and pushing legislation so that we can have that natural milk but I think other times that this has happened is when consumers are coming forward and saying, “We don’t want antibiotics in our food. We don’t want these hormones in our cows.” Now legally, these producers do have to tell us, “Do these have antibiotics? Do these have hormones in them?”

I think another great place we see this is, and this is not necessarily food, but it definitely affects all of us, is things like packaging. I think BPA is a huge show of what consumers can do. Right now, almost everyone knows that BPA is bad, and producers have come in. Now, we have BPS, BPF, and all these other things that are toxic but we have made this push that has allowed people to see, “This stuff in our food, this stuff in our packaging is not good for us,” so much so that we have changed the way that producers do things. Now, they know that they do have to put these labels on their food, that they do have to go to the consumer and say, “I’m trying to give you pasteurized food. I’m trying to give you food that is real and not fake anymore.”

That reminds me. We’ve had Vani Hari, the Food Babe on the show talk about calling the companies to task. She is getting the public to pay attention to the ingredients. There are cereals and mac and cheese. Some of us might choose not to have those at all but those of us who do want to know why in the US is it legal to have all these food colorings and preservatives that are banned in the UK or Europe.

It’s calling them out. Also, fast food restaurants like, “You said you’re not using meat that has antibiotics in it, and yet your buns on your Chick-fil-A sandwich have glyphosate.” I’m not trying to call Chick-fil-A out, but I’m just bringing the point to bear what you’re saying, Julie, is that our advocacy and our holding these companies accountable makes a difference legally too.

Yeah, it does and I think we can see that. I know it’s sad. Now, we have what we call greenwashing. Companies take the products and they try to tell you that they’re healthy even if they’re not healthy. However, even the very fact that we have things like greenwashing is showing us that companies do care about what consumers push for, that litigation does have an impact, and that it can continue to have an impact in many spaces that have to do with our health.

Can you tell us a little bit more, about what is greenwashing, for those who are unfamiliar with the term?

Greenwashing is where a company will put on their packaging buzzwords like organic, free of sulfates, paraben-free, or things like that to get consumers to buy it where they’ve put in more harmful chemicals or they’ve just changed the formulation a little bit, where it’s still toxic. It’s still bad for you, but the packaging’s there to make you feel like, “It’s great. It’s clean. It’s green.” Greenwashing is something we have to watch out for. As I think we’ve come to learn, especially over the past few years, there’s more beyond a label. We have to look further into the label no matter if on the outside it looks like it’s green, clean, or organic.

 

I’m just laughing because these companies have caught on to the fact that we want real food and as clean as possible. If they don’t change the product as you were eluding, they’ll at least change the label. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen Cisco food trucks going down the highway that have a picture of a farm or someone holding strawberries in their hand. It looks so pristine, but I get the feeling that’s not the setting from which our food is coming.

Yeah, not.

Avian Flu And Regulations

I want to talk about something that’s happening right now, Julie. I want to pivot and talk about the avian flu. What do you know about that, and how can bird ranchers, farmers, or homesteaders protect their livestock and their birds from overzealous regulations enforcement?

I think this is a great question and relevant right now. The first time we saw the avian flu was in the 1970s, 1975. It came from Hong Kong, and it seemed to be like nothing we’d ever seen before. Since that time, the flu or H1N1 and the avian flu is often used as an excuse or a reason to have farmers vaccinate their birds or to have people get vaccinated too because we have this fear that the avian flu will jump into people and start affecting people.

In this case, what farmers or the government is really worried about is finding the avian flu in things like our milk. There’s been some pasteurized milk that has been found to have avian flu fragments in it and other animals and birds. There’s been this collective fear to push farmers to vaccinate their birds, and their livestock, and to treat them with harsher chemicals.

Julie, that’s not the only thing they’re pushing for. I think they’re going to farms and saying, “This bird is sick,” or, “This animal is sick.” They slaughter the livelihood of the farmers right there based on faulty evidence, I would say.

We saw this in COVID as well. This fear of COVID infecting especially cows and all these ranchers having to slaughter thousands of cows and destroying their livelihood. It’s difficult for farmers dealing with this kind of regulation, especially when they want to deliver a product or an animal that is pasture-fed living in a lifestyle that is as natural as possible. One of the things that I’ve found some protections for farmers is this may not be possible for everyone, but private agreements or PMA can often be good protection for farmers to be able to sell their crops directly to consumers rather than selling them on a bigger market.

I’ve heard of those PMAs, these Private Membership Groups. It’s almost like a country club. What happens in the country club stays in the country club. What happens between this farmer or rancher who’s selling me a product to consume is between us. In this case, it keeps the government’s hands off of what’s going on. Is that right?

Yes. That’s the point of A PMA. At its base, a PMA is just a contract. It’s an agreement between you and the consumer that you want these types of products. You want this type of animal, you want your animal pastured, living in a natural environment, eating its natural food, and you are willing to pay that farmer for that experience, and you’re willing to take the risks of something like the avian flu. There have been farms and farmers that have turned to PMA to protect themselves. Sometimes that can be difficult for farmers who’ve been selling on a bigger market for a longer time, but it is possible to shift your business into more of a PMA model.

What was the case in Pennsylvania? One of the Amish farmers? Did he have a PMA with his people or not?

Yes. That’s Amos Miller, and he did have a PMA. The FDA did go after Amos even though he did have this protection. The reason I think that this case turned out the way that it did was because of the arguments that his lawyers were using. Their arguments were not centered around this private contract or private agreement. The arguments were more centered around the fact that he was Amish and that he was a sovereign citizen.

They tried to use the argument that he didn’t have a birth certificate. He’s not a citizen of the United States. In the same way, he’s a sovereign citizen and I think that’s why that PMA had a harder time but I do think it is quite possible, and I have seen many PMAs be successful in helping protect their food and their business in having this private contract.

We haven’t talked about Amos’s case on this show. Tell me what you know about how it ended up.

Amos Miller was a farmer who was selling his food privately through a private membership agreement to people around him. You could buy it online all over the United States. The FDA came in and said, “We want you to treat your animals a certain way.” In particular, it was a lot about bleaching and putting this meat in bleach and other things to get rid of potential pathogens or bacteria.

Amos refused to do this. Why would you do that to your food? The people that he was working with didn’t want him to bleach his food. They wanted the food and the product as natural as possible. The FDA came in, gave him a bunch of fines, threatened jail time, and the action ended up going to court. As far as I know, I don’t know the full story, but he has had to pay those fines. I’m not sure if he’s going to switch his product or if he’s just switching who he’s selling it to but as far as the fine, he did end up being fined. Again, in my opinion, it had a lot more to do with the arguments that were chosen rather than the method of what he was doing.

Helping Local Farmers With PMAs

Thanks for that update. This happened in the winter of 2024. It was January or February when he had this trial. We will try to keep people abreast of that through the foundation’s publications and so forth but I did want to ask you, if we love a farmer, a local farmer, and a lot of us do, how can we help them develop a PMA?

Again, A PMA is a private contract between the consumer and the farmer. One of the things we can do, is the Weston A. Price Foundation has great connections. They have chapters and chapter heads that will connect you to those farms where you can buy and sell directly with them. That’s one thing that you can do but we can also encourage farmers by making contracts with them ourselves. By encouraging them to create private groups and to make this a private exchange.

Even if they don’t have a PMA, you are able to make contracts with whoever you want. That is part of being a citizen of America. Everybody has the rights and privileges to make contracts. Even if there’s not a PMA around you, you can talk to your farmer and make a direct contract agreement with them to be able to buy the food the way that it is and write the terms yourself.

 

Everybody has the rights and privileges to make contracts.

 

Anybody can write a contract and it’s not as difficult. Often we’re doing it all the time. Even with our words, we’re making promises and contracts. That’s all a contract is. We’re making a promise and you can put in the stipulations of that promise. “I want this food to be natural. I want it to not have these hormones, and I am willing to accept the risks that maybe this might be infected or that maybe I might get sick if the food is bad,” or things like that. You can make those terms yourself and go to your farmers yourself.

I’m smiling because we take this risk all the time with people we don’t have contracts with. In other words, anything I buy at the store, I don’t know where that came from. Hamburger meat, by the way, you might know this already, Julie, but it is a mix of cows from all around the country. Some of these big processing and meat provider companies are pulling it all together so we could never even trace where that came from but I’m saying I trust this because it’s got some little USDA label at the store. However, chances are, I’m taking a risk at all times with my food unless I’m growing in my backyard, and maybe even then.

No matter what we do in life, there’s risk especially when we’re buying from big companies that we actually don’t know. We don’t know how they work. We don’t know all their processes. We don’t know them personally. Why not instead, go to a farmer that you do know? Go to someone smaller. If you don’t know a farmer, you’re here at the Weston A. Price show. You can connect to your chapter head and you can connect to your farmers that way. They’ve done a lot of the work for you. I’ve worked with chapter heads before, and they are awesome. They do a great job vetting farmers. They do a great job helping you find what you need. There are resources if you want them.

 

I [Ma1] want to back up for a second, Julie, and ask. Amos Miller’s not the only one who has had a raid on his farm and an overreach of some federal agencies that are ostensibly trying to protect us. What is going on with these agencies that most of us are unaware of?

There are lot going on behind the scenes of that, but I think something that most people don’t know is that the way that things like the FDA and the CDC work is that often they’re working with the manufacturer rather than the consumer. What I mean by that is when products are tested, when products are brought to market, when you want something to be FDA-approved, what happens is the manufacturers are the ones doing the studies. It’s not the FDA doing the studies.

Many times people think that it’s the FDA doing the study. We think that the FDA’s job is to go in and check, “Is this all good,” and to do studies on these products but what happens is the manufacturer comes to the FDA and they say, “We want you to approve our product. Here is some money that we’ll give you in order for you to approve our product.”

The FDA says, “Show me the studies that you’ve done on your product. I’ll take a look at them.” The FDA sometimes can do some interim checking on what’s going on with these studies, but they are not the ones running the studies. The manufacturers are the ones running the studies, and the manufacturers are the ones giving the FDA the data that they then make a decision on whether or not they are going to approve that product.

What happens is the manufacturer will give them the data, the studies, and if the FDA says like, “These studies are looking good. We’re going to get a committee together.” Then the FDA takes this information that comes from the manufacturers and gives it to the committee. The committee sits there. In my experience, I’ve been in lots of these meetings and the FDA will come and say, “Committee, we’re going to take two days or we’re going to take a whole workday, eight hours, and we’re going to show you a bunch of presentations. You watch the presentations, and then in the end, you vote on whether or not the product is going to be FDA-approved or not.

To state the obvious, the manufacturer or the product is going to have the results that look best for them so that it will get approved, and then they can get on the market regardless of how it affects the health of the consumer.

Yes, they will. Sometimes the FDA will do some interim analysis. They’ll take what the manufacturer gives them, and they will do some analysis and look at that. However, just like you’re stating, even if they’re doing some analysis, the information that they’re receiving is coming straight from those manufacturers. The data that they’re getting ultimately comes from the manufacturer and the manufacturer is the one who gets to present their data the way that they want to these committee members who, in my opinion, often don’t have enough time with this data.

They’re given this data maybe a day ahead of time. They get to look at this packet, which is available to the whole public. If you want to look at these packets, you can look at these packets as well. You can attend these meetings if you would like, but they get the information maybe 1 day or 2 before. They look through the information. Then they have this presentation after the presentation and a little break for lunch. They get some public comment and another presentation. The manufacturer gets to make their statement of why, please you should make this product FDA-approved and then they vote with this little information that they have.

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Coming up, Julie addresses our rights for defending our children’s bodily autonomy and she goes over how to identify medical practitioners that will honor those rights.

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Protecting Children’s Bodily Autonomy

Julie, we’ve talked a lot in the first half of our conversation about food and our rights as consumers to get the food that we want at the quality that we want. Let’s talk a little bit about our rights as parents. How can we protect our children’s bodily autonomy from the onslaught of vaccines? Everywhere we turn, it’s hard to find practitioners of medicine who will work with the parents to find exceptions to the schedule that’s so heavy right now that’s recommended.

I do it on my website. It’ll be available to everybody, but I have a whole packet. It’s 23 pages all about how to assert your bodily autonomy in medical situations. This is one of my big passion projects. I know not everyone has a great doctor who they can turn to or who will work with them, but I would like to say, in the end, it is always your choice.

Now, a provider may come to you and they may say, you cannot come to my practice unless you decide to vaccinate your child or unless you take such and such product but you always have the choice to say, “No, then we’ll leave your practice.” Luckily, these days there are an abundance of telehealth providers that you don’t have to be in the same state as. You can call these providers. You can look up providers who are functional medicine providers online.

You can find people who are more aligned with you. I would like to state, it is your choice to even bring your child to the doctor in the first place. The Supreme Court has stated that parents are the guardians of their children. They are the ones who make the most decisions for them. They’re the ones in charge of their health. You have the choice to switch doctors. You have the choice not to take your child to a doctor, and you always have the choice to refuse medications. Now, I know a lot of parents get a little afraid about this.

Yes, because some school systems seem to be quite rigid about the requirements. As a matter of fact, when my kids were little, I didn’t know that I had the option to opt-out but I remember thinking, “I guess I’ll just vaccinate them because I know it’s needed for school.” I didn’t know what my rights were at all. Do you have any place where we can look and see if I’m in a certain state, what rights I have for a religious exemption perhaps, or some kind of exemption to the recommended vaccination schedule for children to attend school?

On my website, all these guides are free. The Bodily Autonomy Guide is free and the Vaccine Exemption Guide is free. It will teach you everything you need to know about exemptions for school, work, and even immigration. I link to great websites that will help you know what the exemption process will look like in your state but every state has a medical exemption, and almost every state has a religious exemption to vaccination. There’s a case called Jacobson v. Massachusetts. It’s been used a lot against people who don’t want to vaccinate their children but one good thing that came out of this Supreme Court case was that states must provide exemptions to any kind of product medication, and that includes vaccination.

Even California, I have to ask.

Yes, even California. That’s why California still does have a medical exemption. Whether or not you can get that medical exemption is another question but they have to have that discretionary medical exemption.

I’m glad you mentioned adults too, because not every reader has kids, and some people have felt pressed into vaccination schedules by their employers.

Yes, definitely. That has been a huge fight over the past three years between employers and employees. The reason I talk so much, and I think we talk so much about religious belief exemptions is because it is the exemption that is most available to most people. In some states, luckily, they have a philosophical belief exemption and that would be amazing. Wouldn’t it be amazing if every state had a philosophical belief exemption to vaccination, which I think every state should?

That’s something that we can work towards but not everybody has a medical condition that they can point to that says, “I can’t receive vaccination,” but everybody does have belief. The way that the Supreme Court has defined religious belief, you do not have to be part of an organized religion to get a religious belief exemption or to have religious beliefs.

We talk about religious belief exemptions, and many people may say, “I don’t go to a specific church,” or, “I don’t have some kind of organized religion. What about me? What can I do?” The answer to that is, if you believe in any kind of higher power if you believe in anything higher than yourself, then you can have a religious belief exemption, and you don’t need any kind of clergy to sign off on it. In fact, if you are being asked to have clergy sign off on it, then that’s something you should push back against and say, “The Supreme Court said you can’t do that,” because they did.

That’s so interesting because my husband has a Master’s of Divinity from Fuller Theological Seminary in California, and he was applying for an exemption. I won’t state with which school system where he was working at the time, they rejected it. Even though he has a Master’s of Divinity, they rejected it. They would not give him a religious exemption. Happily, he was able to get out of the employment situation but you would think that a man with a Master’s of Divinity who could be called to be a preacher anywhere would get that exemption but no. Some employers don’t know the law or I guess they’re throwing their weight around. Is that right?

Something that’s happened, there’s a little bit of good news and a little bit of bad news, but the good news is there’s a recent case in 2023 called Groff v. DeJoy, and this case was about Title VII, which provides protections for religion in the workplace. Under Groff v. DeJoy, the Supreme Court said, “Employers must accommodate religious practice as long as it doesn’t financially interfere with their business.”

Now, the business, in order to say that they have what’s called an undue hardship has to show accommodating this religious belief will put a hardship on my financial situation. They have to pull out their books and say, “Financially, this is going to hurt me,” which is not the case with most people and vaccination.

Maybe if you are a health employer, you could say, “This is going to affect my financials because of the rules we have in place,” but for most people, it’s going to be difficult to say, “No, I can’t accommodate your religious exemption to vaccination.” However, the bad news about this is it’s likely to push employers to then question people’s sincerity of their religious beliefs.

Now that you mention it, I think the undue hardship thing was the argument they had because my husband was working in a school at the time. They were saying it was not going to hit them financially, but it would jeopardize the student’s health.

Now, it’s going to be a lot harder for them to say that and to take that attack but what they will do instead is employers are allowed to look into a little bit the sincerity of your beliefs. There are several questions that they might ask about your sincerity of belief like, “Are you acting consistently before?” They might ask you, “Have you had previous vaccinations?” If you have, they might say, “Why is it this one?”

They might ask about that, but it’s not their job to question whether or not your beliefs are logical. Whether or not your beliefs are theological or aligned with theology. They can’t question that. All they can question is the actual sincerity of your belief. One of the big things that ends up happening sometimes in these employer-employee cases is that the employer will say, “I want to know X, Y, and Z about your beliefs,” or, “I want to know whether or not you’ve had vaccinations in the past.”

Employees feel pressed upon or they’re worried so they don’t end up giving all the information. They try to keep some of this information from their employer, and then that ends up looking bad because they do need to give that. If your employer requests information, they can ask for that information and you should give it to them.

In the end, what it comes down to is you truly sincerely expressing your belief. For example, I have a friend who uses the term, he fled here from Canada. He fled to the United States, and he did not want to be vaccinated. He said, “I don’t want to be vaccinated,” and he applied for a blanket exemption from vaccination. They said, “You’ve been vaccinated in the past. It looks like you’re just trying to get out of this vaccination.”

His argument back was, that I didn’t know before what was in these vaccines. Most of my vaccinations were my parents’ choice, not my choice because many of us are vaccinated when we are little. Many of us have those vaccines. You can talk about, “That was my parent’s choice, not my choice. I have sincere religious beliefs that prohibit me from being vaccinated. Now, that I have this information, I’m trying to repent. I’m trying to make changes in what I’m doing.” I would just tell people, “Don’t be afraid if they ask you for this information. Just be honest. Just be sincere,” because that’s the most important thing especially when working with an employer is that you show that, “I am sincere about my religious beliefs.”

It’s funny that we have to defend that though because on any given day, let’s say, I don’t believe in stealing, which I don’t, but one day someone sees me take an apple from a tree. If we don’t always live consistently with our beliefs, I guess that is what I’ll say but hopefully, no one would say to me, “Why did you take that apple without asking?” There are so many inconsistencies in our lives, but it’s the legal world. They’re trying to hold your feet to the fire and get you to comply.

I think what the Supreme Court and the law are worried about is using religious beliefs in a way to twist the system. They’re trying to keep people from using this in a way that makes it so that they are a law unto themselves, which is a quote from a Supreme Court case that they’re worried about people becoming a law unto themselves.

On the one hand, understandably, we want law and order. We want people not to attack each other. We want to make sure that we are being good citizens and that we can work together because we all live in proximity to each other. Be good neighbors but on the other hand, in many ways, your religious beliefs are meant to be a law unto themselves in many ways. Your higher conscious, whatever your higher power is, God, Christ, whoever is your higher law.

In that way, we are all laws unto ourselves. Whether or not we want to be or whether or not we like that, or the Supreme Court likes it. In that way, we are laws unto ourselves. It is this big balancing test that I think the legal system is trying to do but I do think we have made with our awareness of vaccination and how it can harm people. We have made some leaps and bounds and now there are even people in Congress who are starting to understand this is an important issue and we need to change the way that we look at these things.

 

That is encouraging. Julie, can you tell us another story that might encourage us when it comes to defending our rights to either make our own food choices or defend our bodily autonomy against shots?

I think one of the best ones that has been talked about in the past year is we have been able to restore religious exemptions in some states. I know that you know Del Bigtree and I’ve actually had the privilege of working with Aaron Siri and that legal team on some of these issues and trying to help free the five states who don’t have religious exemptions. We have been able to be successful in restoring some of those religious exemptions through our legal work. I think that’s incredibly important to acknowledge. We did that. We have done that. The people have spoken, pushed back, and restored religious exemptions.

Is it in the five states that you were trying to free?

In one of the five states, yes, in Mississippi.

What are the other four that we still need to free?

There’s West Virginia, California, New York, and Rhode Island is the last one.

Living Without Legal Concerns

However, it is encouraging that the tide is turning. I think you’re right. There’s growing awareness. Also, because of the whole COVID narrative, people started thinking, “Why are you incentivizing me, pushing me, or mandating me to get something that I don’t want?” This is encouraging on this front. Julie, as we start to wrap up, I’m thinking of the person who’s like, “I don’t want to do a legal battle at all. I want to live my best life and ignore all the legal issues.” What do you say to a person like that?

One of the things to acknowledge is sometimes we do have to do things that we don’t want to do and that is difficult. We do them very lovingly and willingly, oftentimes for our children. We don’t want to be up at 3:00 AM with our children helping them when we feel sick and they’re sick but we do it anyway because we love them. In the same way, we do this and we fight these legal battles for our children, and they’re not always difficult to fight. There are things that you can do that don’t require you to be in a courtroom and they don’t require you to hire a lawyer.

Oftentimes, we can just donate to different programs. We can write emails. We can show up and attend some of these meetings at the FDA or the CDC. We can listen in. We can make our voices heard in so many different ways. You don’t have to hire a lawyer to do this. You don’t have to do some of those big scary things. All you have to do is be willing to put your voice out there just a little bit. Just give a little bit and do it for the love of your children and the love of our nation in general.

As we started at the beginning, Julie, I want to restate that activism is a key component of the Weston A. Price Foundation. We send out to our email list simple action alerts pertaining to where they are in the world, usually in the US, and anything that has to do with legislation where they can do a simple action. Just you’re saying, where they can email a legislator or contact their senator or do something on a more local level to defend our bodily autonomy and our food freedom. A great word to end on. I have one final question to pose to you that I love to pose at the end. If the reader could only do one thing to improve their health, what would you recommend that they do?

My recommendation might be a little unconventional, but it would be to learn and to follow the cycles of the earth. Take your time to look up at the moon, look up at the sky, look up at nature, and follow its cycles. As you more fully follow the cycles of nature, you’ll see yourself, your hormones, and everything else falling into place.

 

As you more fully follow the cycles of nature, you’ll see yourself, your hormones, and everything else, falling into place.

 

Beautiful words to end on. Julie, thank you so much for this conversation. It’s been a pleasure.

—

Our guest was Julie Dean Richards. You can visit her website Crunchy Legal Lady to learn more. You can find me at Holistic Hilda. Now, for a recent letter to the editor from the Spring 2024 Wise Traditions Journal. “I have a small midwifery practice and a very large nutritional counseling practice, primarily helping Amish and Mennonite women across the US. I have been an advocate of Dr. Weston Price’s research for a long time.

Recently, I reached a crisis point in my midwifery practice. Although I have always encouraged healthy eating, my clients have not always listened. Since mid-December, in only one month, I have had 1 client with preeclampsia, 4 out of 7 clients with high blood pressure, and 1 stillbirth. It is heart-wrenching to go to the funeral and watch a young couple bury their first child, and there are more stories to recount. It has been a long four and a half years as a midwife. This is not normal.

I went back through Dr. Price’s book meticulously looking for answers. I am in the process of writing a nutritional manual, and I’m going to require all of my midwifery and nutritional clients to read it. It is going to focus on statistics that report the alarming increase in complications both in the prenatal period, as well as during labor and delivery in the US. I will weave in Dr. Price’s findings and how they co-relate to the current statistics. There are consequences to what we eat.

At each prenatal visit, I’m going to ask my clients to tell me where they stand on their nutritional goals. I want them to visualize where they are on the spectrum and help them move from the left side of the page with a lot of the refined foods of modern civilization to the right side of the page which lists foods that support bodybuilding, repair, and maintenance. I realize that I will not get everybody to jump to the right side of the page at the beginning, but I want them to see the need to walk in that direction.

I want them to realize that they’re not there yet and to take responsibility for what they eat. I am trying to reach people who eat bromated flour, packaged cereal, and Cool Whip. Unfortunately, this is not a group of people that is looking for how to improve their health, nor will they take the time to read Dr. Weston Price’s work yet. I will be working on that. I want to get this information out to a segment of the population that needs help and doesn’t realize that they need help. Name, withheld.

Thank you so much for your letter to the editor. Each of us is like a drop in the ocean that is making a difference until this huge tidal wave of healthy living and healthy information reaches each person. If you can hear my voice, you are part of that movement, and thank you. Thank you too for reading, my friend. Stay well, and remember to keep your feet on the ground and your face to the sun.

 

About Julie Dean Richards

The Crunchy Legal Lady, known to her friends as Julie is a law school graduate and has been a law clerk and legal researcher for one of the most successful law firms in the health freedom space. Before attending law school, Julie worked in the research sphere for seven years consulting clients such as Harvard, Yale, and Stanford on how to successfully conduct and fulfill their research. During this time, Julie became disillusioned with the research industry and began questioning the mainstream scientific narrative. After thoroughly researching regulatory agencies and their claims, Julie felt called to help fight for bodily autonomy and medical freedom, which led her to law school and eventually becoming, the Crunchy Legal Lady.

 

Important Links

• Julie Dean Richards
• Mary Holland
• Wise Traditions Conference
• Return To Real Food with Vani Hari – Previous Episode
• Holistic Hilda

 

Sponsor Links

• One Earth Health
• New Biology Clinic

 

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