Modern Food is Failing Us — Dr. Bill Schindler on Ancestral Eating, Industry Deception, and the Healing Power of Fermentation - Part 1

Hey friends, welcome back to Everyday Ancestral. I'm your host, James Barry, and today I have an incredible conversation with my good friend, Dr. Bill Schindler, a food archaeologist, chef, and educator. He has traveled the world studying how our ancestors truly nourished themselves. You might think we'd start by talking about food, but Actually, we kick things off in a different direction, talking about relationships, connection, and how modern life is missing the deep community bond our ancestors had. Bill shares how he and his wife Christina have built a relationship rooted in daily rituals, communication, and shared purpose, and why this foundation is just as important for health as food itself. From there, we dive into the role of food in community, how indigenous traditions prioritize shared experiences over convenience, and why modern life has left us more disconnected from food and each other than ever before. This is a special and unique episode because it's the first recorded with me as the host. So please excuse some of the audio sections as I had not yet acquired the services of my fantastic producer, Curtis Goodwolf, and his merry team to make my voice sound as sweet as it does now. Anyway, this conversation is going to shift the way you think about eating. So let's dive in. The biggest question I've had for you all these years that we've known each other is, how do you maintain an amazing, loving marriage and relationship in these modern times of insanity? You and Christina are fantastic. Please share.

Christina is the absolute best part of my entire life. We met working together. My first shift as a new bartender and her first shift as a new waitress at a restaurant called The Alchemist and Barrister in Princeton, New Jersey happened on the same exact moment. I had seen her earlier in class that day, but we met working together and worked together for years. And since we both left our jobs several years ago, me at the college, at Washington College, and Christina as the director of special ed at a nearby county, We've been working together literally nonstop. For a lot of people, that wouldn't be an ideal situation, but it's brought us together even stronger. And the key to that is we have something called a couch bed. 10 years ago, I built it. It's the size of a twin mattress. It sits out front. It's like a porch swing, but we sit on it with pillows and we sit on that every single morning and start our day and talk and download and have a conversation. And That I think has been one of the major keys to our relationship, but she's absolutely wonderful. She's the best part of my life.

Is it a casual conversation or are there very specific points you cover every morning?

It depends. It's not always the same. We work together. We're not having like family conversations or we're not having, you know, relationship conversations. We're having work conversations because there's always something hitting us at any moment. It's the perfect opportunity for us to sit down and if there's Many things about either our relationship or ourselves or our family that we need to talk about, we talk about. We talk about work. I mean, we really try to keep that line between work and life or work and personal life, that very strict line. But the reality is there isn't a line. For so many of us, it's an artificial, I think, boundary because if you're doing what you're meant to do, if you're doing what you love, you should be living your life in In that same way as well. And, and, you know, and the, the wonderful thing about us is I've been able to, for many years, bring my hobby into my profession as an archaeologist and as an experimental archaeologist. And then, you know, now my only other hobby I really had was cooking. And now literally we're doing all of it at the same time. So there's no boundary. So we keep trying to keep this boundary. It, it doesn't exist. And I don't, and I really don't think it should. And it's actually a blessing that it probably doesn't. But we, we do sit there and, and take care of, I would call it our oxygen mask. We do do a quarterly retreat for the work, but the first day of our quarterly retreat, every single time, we call it Oxygen Mask. And the first thing we discuss is our own personal health. And I mean health, I mean not only physical health, but mental health, all of it. Then we talk about our relationship because we realize our family's not going to operate if our relationship isn't healthy and our relationship isn't going to operate unless we're mentally and physically as healthy and nourished as we can possibly be. And then once we've talked about our relationship, we talk about our family. And the entire first day is that, and then we're able to take and, and focus on, on work. But we realize that the Modern Stone Age Kitchen, the food lab, none of it is going to exist and thrive unless we're as healthy as we can be.

It's kind of interesting to start a conversation around, you know, ancestral eating and focusing on relationship, but I, I think it's really fitting, right? I mean, we focus so much on food, you know, particularly in these very social media times, but do you think there's an aspect of the loss of that community and the connection that maybe our ancestors had that we don't have as much despite having all these, these abilities to connect, yet we're not. Do you think, do you think there's something there?

100%. I'm so glad you started this conversation off the way that you did. And it's so timely because if we had this conversation even 3 or 4 years ago, I probably wouldn't have been answering as strongly as I am right now, because I mean, Christina spent so much time thinking about interpersonal relationships, family relationships, community relationships because of the place we're in on our own journey now with not only ourselves, but also our business and our family. I realize the importance of it. We were just having a conversation yesterday, believe it or not, in another context, but about how our family has changed due to all the work we've done with indigenous and traditional groups all over the world. And that focus The reason we went to different places, the reason we went to West Pokhara was to learn about ash yogurt made in gourds, right? And the reason we went to Eastern Kenya with the Samburu warriors was to learn about drinking blood and milk and bugs in Thailand or potatoes in Bolivia, wherever. The reason we went to these places to conduct research was solely focused on documenting and understanding different ways that people nourish themselves using ancestral traditional practices. But that conversation yesterday, we were asked, did the kids change? Is there something different? Do they look at the world differently because of these experiences? Not the food they were eating, not the fact they were eating bugs and ant eggs in Thailand. Did something about them change? Are they looking at the world differently? And did it make an impact? And absolutely. And Christina brought up the point that everywhere that we went, Billy brought a soccer ball. We always, no matter where we went, we brought a soccer ball. We took all the air out of it. We brought a little tiny pump with us and we showed up and it didn't matter where we We were in almost every case we— place we were at, we didn't speak the language of the people we were spending time with. We usually had a translator, but when you're there engaged in food, getting food, preparing food, sharing food, that is such a unifying thing that, you know, it's almost a language in itself. But so is play, especially for kids. So, you know, bringing that soccer ball was not only a great sort of way to break the ice, but also a way to just bring people together. And we always left the soccer ball because we've been places, especially in Africa, where balls are universal, but a lot of people don't have balls, right? So they would take rocks and wrap them in rags and rags and rags and tie strings. And literally that's what they're playing with. But things like playing, things like sharing food, things like dancing. I mean, my God, I can't dance. The most I ever danced in my entire life was our wedding. I knew Christina loves to dance. And I know most people go to have a wedding and they spend a lot of time at the bar. I literally drank half of a beer, my own wedding, half of a beer. I drank bouillie with my father and I had half a beer the entire wedding because I didn't leave the dance floor because it's so important to Christina. But I hate dancing. I love making her happy. I hate dancing. But everywhere that we've gone, we've danced. I think dancing is universal. Singing is universal. Telling stories is universal. Fire is universal. So all of these aspects of community and coming together, again, food is part of it too, is powerful. And I think a lot of that is missing in our modern lives for sure. So I don't know if that answers your question, but it's been a powerful component of our research.

Absolutely answers it. So I don't know if you watched The Bear, you know, that FX show. You may have seen, if you had time, season 3 or 4, the latest season when it ended, This chef in the last episode, she says she's closing her— a very reputable restaurant, and it has nothing to do with the main people. She's saying she spent her whole lifetime focusing on food and being precise with this Michelin-star restaurant. And she said, everyone's asking her, why are you closing? And she says, well, I want to live life. And she says, at the end of the day, No one talks about the food. They talk about the people and the conversations and the experiences they had in the restaurant. And I'm wondering, you're now— how many years are you into the Modern Stone Age Kitchen?

I don't want to be all kumbaya tree-huggy, but you actually gave me a little bit of chills when you said all that. As being open as a restaurant, only 3 years.

Okay. Well, that's significant for restaurants. You know that restaurants close sometimes within 2 years. So the fact that you're in your 3rd year is huge. So congratulations on that. And I, and I know you just recently won an award, right?

We've been very fortunate. We've won a ton of awards in the past 2 years, a lot of local awards, like best of the best restaurant, those sorts of things. We won Business of the Year for our county. What we're most proud of is we've won a bunch of awards about the workplace environment, which I'm really, really proud of. Christina and I both are. We're the first 12 Spoon Award for Weston Price in the world. So we met literally every one of their criteria.

Wow.

They have 12 criteria. So things like no nut or seed oil, using offal and that sort of thing are different criteria. So we hit all 12.

Now there's such an emphasis on food preparation, quality of the food, but in your 3 years, are you starting to find like, oh yeah, I know we're focusing on the food, but it's, I'm getting something else from this. Can you speak to that?

Yes. So remember we started this conversation, Christina and I met in a restaurant and we worked in a bunch of restaurants. We got married, ended up going back to the Alchemist and Barrister to work for just a little bit while we were still teaching. We started teaching just because we needed the extra income. And when we finally left, we said, we are never, ever, ever working in a restaurant again. And we were, for many reasons. One is the typical restaurant culture. The other is just the hours, you know, the hours that a typical restaurant does its best is the same hours that you want to go out and have fun, right? It's Friday night. It's a Saturday. It's a weekend. It's that sort of thing. So we're never working in a restaurant again. It was such a strong feeling for us that when this place started to take on its own life and it started becoming a restaurant, we even resisted calling it a restaurant. And we found all these different words. We called it this and we called it a foodery, then we called it something else. And finally we're just like, it's a restaurant. But then we sat back and said, this isn't like the restaurants we've been in before. In fact, we've had— and we're very deliberate in making sure that that restaurant culture you don't see in The Bear, read about in different publications or see typically on TV or whatever. It's not what we have. In fact, we have hired several people that have come from that restaurant world and they didn't last more than a few weeks. I mean, they came and they had their white this and they had this and they have smoke breaks and they unrolled their knives and they're all whatever, you know, the typical— they didn't last. We have regular meetings with our entire team and we have grown from literally a family business 3 years ago where it was just the 5 of us, the family, To, we have over 25 people on our team.

Wow. That's huge.

25 paid people on our team. We're really proud of the way that we're approaching food and nourishing the community. So we've just started an internship program. So we have several interns all the time. We have residency here. So right now we have an intern from Oaxaca, Mexico. It's been with us 9 months. He's leaving in August. We've had multiple interns over the past several months that are coming for 3 weeks or 2 weeks or 4 weeks. We have the entire fall just about slated out. We just started externship site for Escoffier Culinary School, and we're talking to a few other ones. So people are coming, leaving, finishing their coursework, and then coming to do their externship. So people can spend 3 months with us coming from there. And we just were approved by the state to be through the high school apprenticeship program. So local high school students can come and spend 450 hours with us and get an apprenticeship certificate. And what we're really trying to do through this, and I'm going to promise I'll answer your question, but every one of these things has threads. What we're trying to do here is the approach that we're taking, we feel is so incredibly powerful that we want to be able to make these sort of grassroots efforts to change the way obviously people are eating. And a great way to do that is to change the entire restaurant culture, culture from not only how people treat one another, but also how they're dealing with the food itself. And many of these people coming work in restaurants or will work in restaurants, but many of them that are coming just want to learn how to feed their families so that they're coming for that reason as well. All that is to say, we have about 30 people total at some level doing all the work that is happening in here. And the restaurant model we have is a completely different flipped model. Christine and I have no business experience whatsoever. We've never even taken a business class. And that's a wonderful thing because if we had, we would've never started this. Like on paper, it doesn't make sense. But what has happened is because we're so steadfast in making the process you talked about earlier, making everything 100% from scratch. We are making all of our cheese. We are butchering all of our animals. We are 100% sourdough breads. We're fermenting our vegetables. We're fermenting our dairy. We're doing all of it. Only raw ingredients come in here. And even with buying quality raw ingredients, we're saving money on food because all of the processing is happening in-house. Like, we're not paying anybody else to do that value-add. All the value-add's happening in our own walls. Which leaves money for putting our money into people. There's so many benefits of this. One is we get to work directly with local farmers, local ranchers. So we get to do a lot of that work that saves us money. It puts money directly into their pockets. They're making more money working directly with us than they are through several middlemen. All of that's wonderful. And we have money to employ people. Our payroll is off the charts. I mean, Christina does all the books. She's losing her mind all the time looking at payroll. But when you take that payroll and the food costs together, it's the exact opposite percentage as a typical restaurant. It's typically more food costs and a little bit lower on payroll or the opposite. But combined, it's about the same. With that, and to directly answer your question now, with all that sort of background, people are coming in here. They're not taking this off of, off of a Cisco truck and sticking it in the microwave or just heating it up on the flat top or on the salamander and sticking it out for service. Day after day after day. They're actually making things. They understand what they're making. They're seeing the entire process start to finish into a customer's mouth. We have a full open kitchen. You know, it's incredibly rewarding to be a part of that entire process and know the thing that you're putting out, it doesn't just look and taste good, it's actually nourishing somebody, right? So the culture in that kitchen is great. Everything's open. Everybody comes in, they talk about what the difference in the culture. Our dishwasher, for example, has an incredible personality, knows everybody in town. And I was just sitting downstairs before this. having a quick bite to eat before the interview, and I'm watching. And he came out 3 times to come out and greet different people that were in the front. I mean, the dishwasher's coming around the front to talk to people. It's a wonderful place.

So I love this, and I think you're alluding to it, but I'd love you to expand on this. So focus on culture within the restaurant. A lot of that's from your experience working in restaurants, yours and Christina's, and wanting to set the standard of what mattered to you in that environment. You care about how food is prepared. You care about where it's sourced. And you did already speak to this, but maybe you can elaborate even more. What about the energy that goes into the food as you make it? You did touch on this, that we're nourishing people, but is it conscious? Like, are you guys actually doing— are you doing any prayers around, you know, the kitchen or food? Are you doing any setting intentions at the beginning of the day when you start working with food? Do you advise any of the people? This is a 2-part question because it's within your kitchen, but also what kind of energy focus do you find is through your travels and learning about all these cultural foods? Is there an intention put actually into the food itself, or is it just preparation?

We do have a team meeting every day where— and I took this as a fantastic bakery in Dublin called Bread 41, and I staged there. Last year, actually, there was a pre-shift meeting, which is not rare for restaurants. They have them all the time. But the pre-shift meeting started with asking everybody how they were feeling, where was their energy being focused, all of these things that focused on the actual team. And then the focus was on, okay, daily tasks and all this. So we do do that every day. I wish, now that you say it, I wish I could say Yes to everything you had just said. But that isn't the case. Although now that you've brought it up, I think I do need to do a little more thinking about it and see if we can implement that. But in a non-intentional way, it is absolutely there. And it's there because, like I mentioned, we are in the practice, the entire team of nourishing people, whether they're working in the back doing sourdough pastries, whether they're butchering, whether they are working in the front part of the kitchen, or whether they're sitting there interacting with customers. Everybody knows what their job is. Their job is to take care of themselves, take care of everybody, all their teammates here, and to take care of every single person that walks through that door through not only the food that we are providing, but also through the context and the atmosphere that we're creating. So I will say for sure, the travels that we've had have been very beneficial because they've taught us so many things. They've taught us This is how this type of yogurt is made in this part of the world. I mean, that sort of thing. And we use this as a blueprint for some of the stuff that we do, but it also provides that incredible context. If you take food out of context, you lose so much of the value of that food. So, the ceremony around it, the traditions around it, the love around it, the everything around it, we've tried our best to capture as best as we can. We talk about it on our podcast, we talk about it in presentations, but we also talk about in our classes and also with our team. So, when people are making the food, for example, Zach downstairs now has taken over all of the cheesemaking. And, when I taught him how to make all the cheese that I was already making, all the stories of the cheesemaking went with it and every single step. And, we learned a lot about pasta filata cheeses on a mountaintop in Sicily with an incredible cheesemaker. His name is Giacinto and he would make 2 things every day, every day that his animals were providing milk, he would make caciocavallo, which is my favorite cheese in the world. And then he'd take the whey and turn it into ricotta salata.

What's your favorite cheese? What is that?

So caciocavallo is, it's a stretch curd cheese. It's in the provolone family. People have seen it. It looks like a sack, you know, kind of like a, like a hobo kind of stick with a, with a sack on the end of it. It looks like that sack. Some people have probably seen it because if you see sometimes in some Italian festivals, you have that like bag of cheese that's hanging over a fire and then you scrape the bottom onto a piece of bread that's kind of melting. I don't know if anybody's ever seen that. There's been some like TikTok things going around with it, but it's an amazing cheese. It translates into horse cheese. So caciocavallo means horse cheese, but it's not made out of horse milk. It's typically made out of, not always, but typically made out of cow's milk. Sometimes it's a mix of cow and other. But the way, you know, the shepherds in the mountains, especially in Sicily, would make this cheese and they'd make in pairs and then they tie a rope around, you know, on top of each one and put it on the back of the horse. And it would age as you're like going around and, you know, on the horse through the mountains for weeks. It's an amazing cheese, but it's the same exact process except for the very, very end is the same as making other provolones and ragusano and pizza cheese and all these other things. So, You know, we're sitting there as I am teaching Zach how to make the cheese that we put on so many of the things here. I'm telling him all these stories about Chiocinto and exactly how it was made and what the smells were like and what the experience was like. And I know every time I make that cheese, I'm thinking of that. And I'm hopeful that every time he's making that cheese, he's thinking about these things. So there is this sort of intention, definitely this intention in making the food, knowing that the goal of it. is to nourish people in every way possible. But there were also, every time we make something, there's a remembrance, or I don't want to say reverence, but a throwback to thoughts to people that we learned from. But I'll also say this, on a more physical level, there's something very special about making food traditionally. And I'll use sourdough bread as an example. And I'm sure a lot of people listening to this are very much in a low-carb or carnivore world, I would expect that many people are probably in more of a Weston Price sort of just nourishing food sort of thing where at least sourdough bread is a part of your diet at some level. Sourdough bread is obviously completely, and we can dive in deep, but a completely different food than other breads for a lot of very, very important reasons. But one of the things that it does in addition to providing all sorts of health benefits over more commercial bread, is that it brings in this sense of terroir, right? This sense of place. We talk about terroir in the wine industry because obviously wines, vines that are growing in Argentina and the growing conditions and the soils and the climate are different than they are in say Napa. And it produces different, even with the same vines, it would produce wines of different quality that are reminiscent of terroir, that sense of place. For the most part, people are only talking about terroir with wine. Other than that, in the modern food system, we celebrate uniformity. We celebrate the fact that you can get a McDonald's hamburger in New York City and a McDonald's hamburger in Tokyo and they taste exactly the same. Or you can get Budweiser all over the world and it tastes exactly the same. And while difficult to achieve, I mean, it is an act of incredible precision and technology to be able to produce the exact same food in different parts of the world. It's not something we should celebrate. What we should celebrate again is the fact that All traditional food provides that sense of terroir, that sense of place in so many different ways. And one of the ways that it does that is because the foundation of almost every traditional diet I've ever found around the world is fermentation. Fermenting dairy, fermenting vegetables, fermenting meat, fermenting sugars into alcohol, fermenting grains, all of these things. The colonies of wild bacteria and yeast that exist in different places are different. And they produce different qualities. Some of them are, are very, very minute but nuanced, but they're there. So even if I made the same exact loaf of sourdough bread here in Maryland and you made a loaf of sourdough bread using the same recipe and even the same flour in San Francisco, there'd be little differences. And that's something we should really celebrate. I think this is a fantastic story. Years ago, and I think it was 6, 7, 8 years ago now, there was a, there was a very large study done where the researchers went out and collected bread from different sourdough bakeries all over the world. And they tested the bread and wanted to see if starting with the bread and the wild bacteria and yeast populations that were in the bread, and obviously dead now because they were cooked, but if they could look at that and tell, identify the bakery that the bread came from by the colonies of, you know, unique colonies of bacteria and yeast, and they could. And it wasn't a big surprise. I would've guessed that they could, but what they found was something even deeper. And I think really more powerful and speaks a little bit to, to some of the points that you're making. They not only could identify the bakery, but they could, because of the colonies of bacteria and yeast present in that bread, they could identify it down to the baker. It turns out that the bacteria and yeast that are literally on the skin of individual baker's hands—

Wow.

Impacted the bread enough that they could identify it under a microscope. But, what was even more beautiful is that when they looked deeper, they could tell that it was a symbiotic relationship that the wild bacteria and yeast that was on the bread was also impacting the microflora on the skin of the baker. I mean, it was a give and take. To me, that's beautiful. That's what real food is all about.

Now, you just made a comment there that I think people may not know, but you said the probiotic properties of the bread are dead now that it's been cooked. In a sense, this sourdough process is more about making that grain bioavailable to you, not necessarily about you getting a culture into your diet.

There's a video circulating right now, and I hate to not like it. It's somebody standing at a podium talking about the fact that there's Lactobacillus bacteria in sourdough bread, and it has all these wonderful benefits and all these things. But what he doesn't say is it's dead. It's dead. Now, There are some studies that are being done right now that suggest, and I don't know all the science behind this and I don't understand why, but are suggesting even dead probiotics are better for you than no probiotics whatsoever. And I don't know what sort of benefit they impart, and I don't know if I fully believe it, but I don't know enough to make a statement on it. But this is what I do know. The benefits of true sourdough bread are many. From sort of that touchy-feely sense, that sense of terroir and that sense of tradition and all that are there for sure. True sourdough bread. And, for people who are thinking about trying sourdough bread or are in the process of consuming sourdough bread or any of this, please pay very close attention because what I'm about to say is typically missed in a conversation about sourdough bread.

Okay.

First off, what makes sourdough bread different than any other bread is that it is produced through a combination of 2 different fermentations. So, there's a yeast fermentation and a simultaneous bacterial fermentation. The oldest bread we know of in the world right now is a little less than 9,000 years old. And, the entirety of the time bread was made from then until the mid-1800s, all bread was sourdough. It was by default sourdough. If you were harnessing the wild yeast from the air, to leaven the bread, to make the bread rise, you automatically got the wild bacteria as well. And, by the way, same thing with beer. Beer, up until the mid-1800s, beer was a sour beer. So, it's a big thing now, people talk about sour beers. So, beer was sour until you intentionally in a lab took yeast strains out and just kept those yeast strains alive by themselves and stuck them in the beer or stuck them in the bread and just So, you have both of these fermentations happening at the same time. This is the traditional way of making bread and the traditional way of making beer. Now, the yeast fermentation produces 2 things: carbon dioxide, which makes the bread rise, and alcohol. So, if you're making beer, you want both the alcohol and the carbon dioxide, right? But, in the bread, you get a little bit of alcohol, but that burns off and it's very minuscule anyhow because the fermentation is nowhere near as long as it is for making beer. But, the production of that carbon dioxide is what makes that bread rise. The fact that that yeast is wild really doesn't make a difference because if you bought Fleischmann's yeast off the grocery store shelves, it's going to produce the same effect. The bread's going to rise the same amount. The important part of the sourdough is the bacterial fermentation. Now, these are wild strains of bacteria endemic to your area. So, they're the ones that are native to where you live. They're in the air right now. I mean, you can't see them in front of me, but they're between you and me. They're on my skin, they're on the table, they're on the flour, they're everywhere. And when they start fermenting, they are doing many, many things. One of the things that they're doing is that they are eating the available sugars that are in the bread. The other thing that they're doing is the byproduct of that is lactic acid. And they're chemically and physically transforming grains, which are Not meant for human consumptions. Grains are the babies of the plant, whether it's a wheat plant or rye, whatever. And, there's a lot of energy being put into making sure that these babies can stay dormant until they're in the right conditions to sprout and make new life. And, this is why, you know, how these species propagate. Phytates, lectins, all sorts of nasty things are there. Well, the fermentation process helps to detoxify and mitigate the issues related to things like phytates and lectins. And so, they're detoxifying the grains. They're also breaking, predigesting the grains so the nutrients are more easily available to our bodies. This is all fantastic. Plus, and this is really, really important, remember, the bacteria are fermenting, they're producing lactic acid. That lactic acid, as lactic acid rises, 2 very important things are happening. One is the carbohydrate load is decreasing because that's the food for the bacteria. And, there's a drop in pH, it's becoming more acidic. And, as that happens, as the pH drops, if it gets to— this is so important— 4.6 pH. So, 7 is neutral. When it gets down to 4.6, it activates an enzyme that starts breaking down the gluten even further. And, this is so very important because you have to reach that 4.6 pH to really transform the gluten into something that our bodies can tolerate. And then, you know, a number of different things are changing. So the final product of the final sourdough bread, if it's done right, is this. And all, all the flavors and the aromas come from the bacterial fermentation. So at the end, at the end of this, a sourdough loaf compared to a yeasted loaf has these qualities. It smells amazing. It looks amazing. It tastes amazing. The gluten for many of us is either more tolerable or fully tolerable depending on different makeups of us. I will tell you, our sourdough bread, we have a massive amount of customers that are gluten intolerant that are absolutely fine on our bread. And people are not going to believe this, but this is 100% true. As of this past month, we just identified our 7th medically identified celiac customer who is absolutely fine on our bread. Now, we have multiple customers who are celiac that are not fine on our bread. And celiac is a spectrum, right?

Yeah.

But we have medically identified celiac customers, 7 we know of, absolutely fine on our bread. And I know we have one that's an 85-year-old woman, she eats a slice of our bread every day. And I'm not suggesting you're supposed to eat a slice of bread every day. But what I'm suggesting is, or what I'm telling you is, a loaf of sourdough bread is a completely different food than other breads. It also has a lower glycemic index.

Okay.

Glycemic index, 0 to 100. 100 is pure glucose, our blood sugar response to this. Any bread, modern loaf of bread, I don't care if it is 100% white Wonder Bread or Petridge Farm multiberry, whatever, it doesn't matter what it is, they all fall on the high range in the glycemic index. So, that means we have a huge blood sugar response spike when we consume that bread. Same exact ingredients, But put through a sourdough process drops it through the middle range down into the low range. So, our body, our blood sugar responds to that bread just because the sourdough process is completely different than it is if it's not sourdough. There's 2 major types of sours in food. One is produced from lactic acid, which is a very pleasant sour. So, that's the kind of sour you get in things like yogurt, for example, or good sourdough bread. It has that very mild pleasant sour. But then, there's also acetic acid, which is vinegar. And, it's a very harsh sour. If I don't ferment the bread properly and if I let my mother go too long, in addition to the regular yeast fermentation and bacterial fermentation, all that alcohol that's building up starts to get acted upon by another bacteria, an acetobacter bacteria, which eats the alcohol and produces lactic acid and produces a really harsh, nasty for bread sourness. And unfortunately, so many people have had sourdough bread made poorly that they think it's supposed to taste very sour. And it's not. And a lot of times when you get that really, really sourness, it's so harsh. Like, what is this? Vinegar's great with fish and chips and French fries. It's terrible in bread. So, we don't want that fermentation to go to that extent. But at the same time, because we have this idea of sourdough bread having to be sour, the modern industrial food system has figured out a shortcut. There's no— and you need to understand this— there is no FDA regulation anywhere in this country. And in fact, in most countries, there are no governmental regulations, oversight to things you have to meet requirements to call something sourdough. You can call anything sourdough. And so, what the modern food system has done is if I'm fermenting this bread properly, it means I am literally babysitting trillions of wild bacteria and yeast dealing with all sorts of different variables like temperature and humidity and all these other things and trying to make this work over a very long period of time. Or, I could just get commercial yeast and do it and make another loaf of bread. So, obviously, that's what most of the food industry is doing. But, what they're doing for the sourdough is they understand that the customer expectation of sourdough is that it's going to taste sour. So, they make a regular, in many cases, most cases, a regular yeasted bread with none of the health benefits I just talked about and put in something that's sour, acetic acid, lactic acid, or citric acid. And, it tastes sour. They slap a label on it that says sourdough bread because they're allowed to do that. And all of a sudden, somebody listening to or watching something on TikTok or hearing that maybe sourdough bread is better, they go into the regular grocery store, buy a loaf of sourdough bread. Hell, it can even be over by the deli area in a brown package and away from the other bread, and it can cost more. And they bring it home and they see no differences with it. And that's because it isn't any different. It's the same exact thing with some acid put into it. The key is turn over the package of sourdough bread, and if it says Anything acidic, lactic acid, citric acid, acetic acid, which is also vinegar, sometimes it's vinegar. If you still want it, get it, but it's not sourdough bread. The other sort of problem that's happening a lot, and I even see this on well-respected websites, is there's recipes for all sourdough anything. And, you can make anything sourdough. All of our pasta sourdough, our pastries are sourdough, our croissants are sourdough, our cookies are sourdough. Everything we do here is fully sourdough. But a lot of these recipes for these other things, you use sourdough discard, right? The leftover mother. And what they've done is they've taken a basic recipe. So, let's say they're chocolate chip sourdough cookies. They take a Toll House chocolate chip cookie recipe and slap in a little bit of sourdough mother, mix it all up, and put it on a tray, put it in the oven, and bake it. The problem is the 2 cups of flour that you added to those cookies never had time to ferment. They've never been through that chemical and physical changes produced by that fermentation. It's never reached the pH of 4.6 or below. None of those things have happened. All you did is slap in a little bit of sourdough mother. You've called it sourdough. Maybe you've added a little bit of nuance of some kind of flavor, but essentially, you've literally just made Toll House cookies with a little bit of sourdough mother in it. And, you're still eating 2 cups of raw flour that hasn't been through the process. So, in order to do any of those things, and this is one of the things we spent many, many years working on, is once you've introduced the bacteria and yeast through that sourdough mother, you have to give it time to ferment. I don't care if it's a chocolate chip cookie or sourdough pasta, it has to ferment so that those flours go through that process and get safer and more nourishing.

You bring up an interesting point. So, When these kind of ancestral foods are made correctly, they have flavor. And sometimes you, you could say they're a little strong when compared to their conventional brother or sister, but when they're done incorrectly, they're even more intense. But we talk about picky eating a lot here in the US. I mean, people struggle with kids that are picky eating. And I'm just curious, like in your travels and your studies of ancestral foods, Is picky eating like truly unique to this kind of conventional standard American diet, or do you see it all over? I mean, I have to imagine if you're growing up eating some of these ancestrally prepared foods, then your palate is used to flavor.

Absolutely. And I think there, there's several layers to this. I'm reminded of the documentary Food Inc. Remember Food Inc.?

Oh yeah.

And I loved it. The very beginning of it. That was great. You see the shopping cart going through and they mention in the beginning of it that there's this appearance of choice in the American grocery store, but then they tear that apart and show that almost everything there is made out of the same like 5 ingredients. There's just little things change with it, like corn, for example. But the reality of our modern food system is there is a lot of choice and we expect that choice. And that isn't present in a lot of the indigenous and traditional communities that we've been in. This is what serves. This is what's here. We went out years ago. There's a fantastic woman out in Boulder, Colorado. She has transformed the school lunch program there. I think her nickname is Angry Lunch Lady. I forget what it is, but she's amazing. We had her come out and speak at Washington College, and she's standing up on stage and she's saying, look, and this is years ago, I make, or my team makes everything from scratch for the entire school lunch program for all of Boulder, Colorado. And she said all these things, it sounded great. There is no way she's doing it. And if so, are these kids really eating this food and how is it all working? So we literally went out to visit. We went and had a meeting with her and then we went into some of her cafeterias and we actually, we saw where she's producing the food. We, and we even brought our youngest daughter, Alyssa, And because she has the most discerning palate of the family, I'm like, if she likes it, then— and we ate and what we saw was remarkable. First of all, everything she said she was doing, she's doing. It's unbelievable. And at a scale, it isn't like this tiny little school district in Beverly Hills. It's an entire city school district. It's fantastic. But one of the things that I took away from that experience was, how do you do this? She goes, what kids are expecting when they go to the cafeteria in school, it's 7 different options and all of these different things. That's not how you eat. That's not even how you eat at home. You go home and your mother or your father, whoever makes one thing and everybody sits down and eats. That's how it's been forever. So, she gave 2 choices. She gave, I think, a vegetarian option and a meat option. That's it. That were the only 2 choices every day. I mean, the menu changed every day, but those were your choices. The other thing that I think about a lot when you're talking about picky eating and all of these things, we've allowed ourselves or our children or the communities To have this expectation of choice all the time, no matter where you are. And then to keep up with that demand and that choice is almost impossible. Like even here at the restaurant, like we have choices, but we by no means have a diner-level menu because we would never be able to create that food according to our standards, all of that different food. But this is, I think, is very interesting is when you're talking about Kids and picky eating. I think it's very strange what we have normalized and joke about and write about in baby parenting magazines is a very, very strange phenomenon in the modern world. And it doesn't happen anywhere else in the animal world, anywhere. We take kids, when we wean our babies off of their mother's milk, we put them in a high chair. This is the picture that we all laugh about, but Then, I want to paint it in another light. We take these screaming starving children and put them in a high chair and strap them in. And then, we take this completely dead nasty oxalate-filled food in a jar and open it up, put it in front of them, and fight with them for 45 minutes to eat this food and laugh about it and make up little games about airplanes going into hangars and trains and race cars and all these things to try to get them to eat this food. And meanwhile, they're spitting it up and throwing it across the room. And while we're listening to the parenting magazines and we're trying to be a good parent and get these kids to eat this food, what we're essentially doing is teaching them to not trust their senses. We have these senses, our smell, our taste, our feel. All of these senses are the product of millions of years of evolutionary pressures to allow us to make decisions for ourself and for a lot of different things. But one of the primary things it allows us to do is make decisions about what we should eat. Well before books and nutritionists and doctors and podcasts and all the cooking shows, in order to figure out what was good to put into our mouth, the first thing we did was see it. The next thing we did was touch it, right? The next thing we did was smell it on our way to our mouth, and we put it into our mouth and we started chewing, and then we got all those responses, right? From that experience, some of that smell, some of that taste. And then we either decided to swallow it or spit it out. And you know what? It's worked really well for 300,000 years. In fact, so well that our bodies and our brains grew to modern proportions, right? It's been an amazing thing. Very, very safe. But we are teaching our kids to not trust their senses. You know, there's a reason why we put down a jar of spinach in front of them and they throw it across the room because they have no business eating it. Like, it's not what they should eat. So when we go to a lot of these groups, we see kids eating. The kids are sitting down and eating real incredibly nourishing food. And you know what? They're relishing it. They're eating it. They're eating it down. They're not fighting. And you don't see this kind of thing with other animals either. And look, I'm coming at this and speaking about it from this top-down sort of view. I realize day to day, you know, how this all works and kids screaming and trying to feed them. I realize it's not as simple as what I'm saying. I also want to make sure everybody understands that we did exactly what I said. We put kids in the high chair, we put Beech-Nut baby food in front of them. This is well— we forced it, we made the trained things. I'm not trying to judge. I'm actually coming from a place of experience and wishing I had done it different. But I do know people that have done it different. I do know people that have gone directly from breast milk to chopped up raw liver. And the examples, and I know these are anecdotal, but the anecdotal examples that I know 3 years later, these same kids that started solid food on incredible things like liver, when presented with options including the liver on the table, they'll go for the liver. So, yes, we're training this out. And unfortunately, one of the things that we're training when we're forcing kids to eat something that every part of their body is telling them no, we're forcing them to not trust their own senses and forcing them to then listen to other people to have control over their diets.

You've really taken on the role of like, okay, I'm gonna study ancestral ways of living and eating. Now, now maybe you could actually talk about that before I ask this question, but, but I've heard you say that you are a professor of archaeology, and then I've also heard you say I'm a food archaeologist. So which came first, the chicken or the egg? And what made you then get into food?

I'm—

because I'm assuming you went into archaeology first and then gravitated towards food, but maybe I'm wrong.

I got very interested in primitive technologies first. I was drawn to it. My father had me hunting and fishing and trapping since I could walk. We're always looking for arrowheads in fields. We're always reading. I know this isn't ancient, but I remember in middle school, he and I would read all these biographies of all these mountain men like Jim Bridger and Kit Carson and all these people. And, I just love things that were older. I didn't really have a concept at the time, the difference between the 1800s fur trade and 2,000 years ago. But I just knew things. I loved things that were old. I loved old ways of approaching things. I started learning how to flintknap and I started making all my own archery equipment to hunt. So like bows and arrows and that sort of thing. Through that love of ancient technologies, I found archaeology because I had all these questions. So this is happening before Before the internet, before all these group listservs and all these, you could connect with flintknappers around the world and all the— this was all, I thought I was part of a much smaller population and I couldn't get answers that I was looking for. So I turned to archaeology to answer questions I had about the past and I dove deep. It was great. I got my PhD in archaeology, but my focus was on a part of archaeology called experimental archaeology. And this branch of archaeology allowed me to to fuse so many of the things I was interested in. One is just this love for the past, but also this sort of hands-on application, learning how to replicate these ancient technologies. And, I was very fortunate. I trained with some of the best primitive technologists around the world in ancient pottery and ancient stone toolmaking and hide tanning and all these things. In addition to just sort of regular field archaeology like you'd see on TV with digging in the ground, which I've done quite a bit of, My focus was on experimental archaeology, which means you can imagine you're digging a 6,000-year-old site. There's only bits and pieces of things left behind, and nobody throws away a perfectly good stone tool on purpose. But once it's been used too much and resharpened and no longer useful, or it breaks, that's when it gets discarded. That's when it becomes part of the archaeological record. So those are the things that we find, right? We find this broken bit of a tool and we're like, okay, We know humans made this, but we have absolutely no idea how it was made or how it was used. So my job was to go and, okay, an archaeologist come to me and say, I don't know what this is. Tell me what you think this might have been and how it was made and how efficient it was and what it was used for. So I would replicate the tools using the same techniques and then put it through a series of experiments to understand, okay, this functions best for processing plants or for butchering or for doing whatever. And then go back and say, you know, here's my interpretation of what this is. With all this going on for decades, I realized partially in a large part through Christina's urging for me to focus my passions on things that could help people beyond just sort of academic exercise, you know, actually help our family. I realized, and this is a powerful moment, I realized that almost every single prehistoric technology for 3.5 million years has something to do with food, period. Stop. Like, whoa. As soon as I realized this, I already realized that our diets changed drastically over the past several million years. And I also had realized that every time something changed drastically in our diets, we saw some sort of evolutionary response, right? So, when safer, and more nutrient-dense and more bioavailable food entered our diets, we saw jump in body size, we saw jumps in brain size, we saw jumps in community size. All of these things are changing. So, I knew the direct link between diet and evolutionary change and what made us human, but what I realized at that moment was that the direct link between technological innovation and dietary change. What's different about human? And it became the focus of all my work and everything that I do at that moment. And that's when I became a food archaeologist, to answer your question, because I then focused it on food through technology. One of the things that humans do different than most other animals is we don't rely solely on our anatomical features to access, process, and digest our food. Right. What happened over the past 3.5 million years with the introduction of the first stone tool, then advancing stone tool technologies, then fire, then fermentation and hunting technology and all these different things is that we began to outgrow our digestive tract. We began to process food outside of our body. And, I say process, I mean in a very positive way, not ultra-processed Doritos sort of sense, but in a very positive way. When we started to be able to detoxify foods outside of our body before we even ingested them, or make them more nutrient-dense, or make them more bioavailable, everything began to change. And our bodies were now nourished to the point where dietary change didn't push brain size growth and push body growth. Other things were sparks that got that going, but dietary change Fueled all of that growth, right? It fueled the body change. It fueled the brain growth. The link between technological innovations and dietary change is a very strong one. And the link between dietary change and evolutionary change is a strong one. So what I'm focused on is how did those technological changes over time, how we got food and processed food, literally make us human? And I'm confident that that understanding should be the basis for all of our dietary decisions today. We are still living in 300,000-year-old bodies. We appear on Earth as modern-day Homo sapiens 300,000 years ago and essentially haven't biologically changed since. Culturally, we've changed tremendously, right? There's a lot of cultural changes, but our basic dietary needs have not changed in 300,000 years. One of the things that I always turn to, the first thing I turn to every time I have a question about food, diet, health, any of it is what were our diets like when we first landed? You know, when I landed, when we first appeared on Earth. That should be the foundation. Now, I'm not saying we should eat the same exact diets now. In fact, I think those diets can be improved upon, but that should be the foundation for dietary thought, dietary discussion, dietary change.

Wow. There was so much to unpack in the first half. I love how Bill connected food to community, play, and human connection, something that is missing in our modern world. But trust me, we are just scratching the surface. In part 2, we get into the nitty-gritty of food preparation, whole animal eating, why modern meat consumption is so wasteful, And how we can eat in a way that respects both our health and the planet. So if you thought part one was eye-opening, wait until you hear what's next. Make sure to tune in for part two. Thank you and stay curious. Thank you so much for joining me on Everyday Ancestral. If you enjoyed this episode, hit subscribe so you don't miss the next one. You can find the show notes, links, and resources mentioned at eatpluck.com. That's E-A-T-P-L-U-C-K dot com. And hey, if you know someone who'd get something out of this, share it with them too. Stay curious, live well, and keep it ancestral.