Modern Food is Failing Us — Dr. Bill Schindler on Ancestral Eating, Industry Deception, and the Healing Power of Fermentation - Part 2

Welcome back, friends, to part 2 of my conversation with Dr. Bill Schindler. In part 1, we talked about relationships, community, and how modern life has stripped away the deeper connections our ancestors had around food. Now, we're getting into the real hands-on knowledge, how food preparation literally transformed human evolution. And why the way we prepare our food today is failing us. Bill breaks down the lost art of whole animal eating and why our ancestors thrived on organ meats, fat, and blood. And we even touch on the big question: are humans adapting to modern food, or is our species slowly breaking down because of it? This episode is packed with game-changing insights that will completely shift How you think about eating. So let's dish it up. What should we take from the past and that we should be replicating now?

If we're going to focus on one thing is not the what, but the how. And this is what I mean. One of the questions I get all the time after I get done speaking or people come for a class or whatever is, okay, should humans eat bread? Should adult humans consume dairy? And Those questions are actually silly. I understand why people are asking them, but it's the wrong question, right? Because for several reasons. One is when you say bread to me, do you mean Wonder Bread or do you mean a loaf of wild, slow, long-fermented sourdough bread? They're completely different foods and I have completely different answers for the two of them. When you say dairy, do you mean ultra-pasteurized skim milk or do you mean raw fermented dairy from this amazing farm down the road? Completely different foods. And I have completely different answers for them. When I say how, what I mean is I don't like the question, what should I eat? I like the question, how should I eat? I don't like the question, should I consume dairy? I like the question, how should I consume dairy? So, raw fermented dairy, completely different food for— in fact, raw fermented dairy is replicating all of the biological processes that went on inside of our bodies when we were infant humans, perfectly designed to consume dairy. Fermented vegetables are replicating a lot of the natural biological processes that are going on inside of things like ruminant animals when they're eating tough vegetable materials. That process, process that our ancestors have figured out over literally millions of years of experimentation to make food as safe and absolutely nourishing as it can possibly be, should form the basis, the foundation of everything that we're eating. To more directly answer the what part, I have very strong feelings, and I think we're very much in line with with what we should be eating, what should form the foundation. When we introduced animals into our diets 3.5 million years ago, we did so in the form of just meat and a little bit of marrow because we were scavenging. At 2 million years ago, we see our biggest jump in body and brain size, and it correlates with 2 major technological innovations. One is fire, which is very powerful, but the other is hunting technology. And for the first time ever, at 2 million years ago, we could take animals down at will. And because we were the hunter, we had first access to every part of that animal. And that every part of that animal means not just the meat that was left behind by other predators for the million and a half years earlier, but the entirety of that animal, the most nutrient-dense bioavailable parts, the blood, the fat, and the organs. And it is when we introduce the entire animal into our diets that we see the most massive explosion in body and brain size that we've ever seen in our evolutionary past. And I am confident it's because of that massive influx of incredibly bioavailable Nutrient-dense foods. Whole animal, not meat, whole animal should be the basis of our diets, 100%.

Define whole animal from your perspective.

Let me just back up to spend a little more time on that. I'm going to give one very quick example because what I would like people to understand is our ancestors introduced meat into our diets at about 3.5 million years ago because of one, the first technology we've ever invented was something called the Levallois tool. It's a very simple flake that came off of a larger rock. The same time these tools are being made, we start seeing evidence of butchering for the first time, which means on bones we find marks made by these tools that we know for sure. We've done a ton of experiments. We know these are not marks from carnivores or even scavengers from teeth or anything. They're made by stone tools. So we know they're making the tools. We know they're butchering. What we're pretty confident of is they're not hunting. So what they're doing is they're allowing nasty, crazy large animals, bigger and nastier than modern-day lions. So things like saber-toothed cats to take down other animals on the savanna. When predators take down animals, the first thing they do is rip them apart and gorge themselves on the blood, the fat, and the organs, especially with larger animals, which they're not going to consume in one meal. They eat the most nutrient-dense bioavailable parts first, then they go off and digest their meal. And when they leave, animals that are perfectly designed to scavenge come in and start, you know, feasting on the leftover flesh in relative safety until that predator has digested that meal and comes back to eat again. So you have this huge animal on the savanna and you have hyenas and buzzards and things like that, or at that time ancestors of those animals sitting there eating the meat. But we're sitting there at 3.5 feet tall as full-grown modern humans with nails like this and teeth like this. We can't be a part of this party. But as soon as they make this stone tool, Like everything changes because this stone tool is razor sharp and incredibly durable. In fact, it's sharper and more durable than the teeth and the claws on the hyenas and the buzzards. They can run in with this tool and start hacking off huge pieces of meat. And during that same period of relative safety, then bring these hunks of meat back and share it with their family. Like they can enjoy it. So that's the kind of introduction of meat into their diet at that time. We also have found bones at the same time, long bones that were intentionally crushed open for marrow. We don't know how much this made a difference in their diet. We don't know if this meant they were eating meat every day or eating meat once a month. But what we do know is they introduced meat and marrow into their diet at about, really about 3.4 million years ago. And what we also know is we don't see much biological change between 3.4 million years ago and 2 million years ago. There isn't this major jump in brain size because a little bit of meat's in their diet or they get a lot bigger. They stay pretty similar. There are some changes, but nothing statistically significant. The biggest change happens at 2 million years ago when, again, we introduce fire. And I think even more importantly, we introduce hunting. And when we introduce hunting, that means not only can we take an animal down at will, like we can choose, okay, we want that animal, we take that animal down. But most importantly, we're now sitting with the entirety of that animal in front of us. We've become the predators. We're not the scavengers anymore. We're the predators. This is the first time we become hunter-gatherers. We were scavenger-gatherers before that. We become hunter-gatherers. And because of that, we can now feast on the blood, the fat, and the organs, and then also eat the meat. That's the biggest difference in my mind. So, when I say whole animal, that's the whole animal approach. This was such a big deal that not only do we see the appearance of species like Homo erectus and Homo ergaster, which have much bigger brains than their previous counterparts. But if you're tracking their brain growth within the same species over a million years after that, it's increasing as it goes. So they appear larger and then their brains are actually increasing in size. Powerful. But what I'd also say about this, and I know I need to bring this back to your earlier question, but that whole animal approach is not only ancestrally correct, right? You know, you're eating the entire animal and we've done so for so long. The fact that we're only eating chicken breasts now or ribeyes now is a new phenomenon, or some would say a step too far back, right? To 3.5 million years ago. But it also checks all these other incredible boxes that I think are very important in our diets. It is more ethical to eat the entire animal. So right now in a modern American grocery store, 55% of a pig and 50% of a cow by weight end up on the shelves. So, that means to the typical modern American consumer, when we kill an animal, only half of it is available to go into our diets, which doesn't sit right with me. When you look at hunter-gatherer groups, especially people like the Sami in Scandinavia, when an animal is killed like a reindeer there, they're eating upwards of 96%, 97%, 98% of that animal is used to nourish themselves and their families and their community. That sits a lot better with me from an ethical perspective. From a sustainability perspective, same sort of thing, right? We have all these, some of them accurate, some of them not so accurate calculations on, okay, well, to raise this cow, it takes this much food and this much water and you only get this much in return. Well, all those calculations are thrown to hell when you actually are eating the entire animal. All of those calculations immediately overnight change Without even doing anything different with how you've raised that animal or fed that animal, just how you've used that animal. And then the final piece, which I think is also very important, is the economic part of it, right? These parts of the animal, the liver, heart, kidney, spleen, blood, fat, are a lot cheaper than ribeyes and filet, right? So from the consumer perspective, it's more economical, but also for the rancher or the farmer, You have a small rancher, a small farmer doing an incredible job raising these animals, caring for these animals. You have an incredible abattoir that's harvesting them and a butcher that's cutting them properly. And you now have a market for putting more money directly into their pocket for the same work they're already doing. I mean, that is a win-win all the way around. Everything changes with a full whole animal approach.

You know, though, it does Bring up something really important. And I think it's something that you're bringing back in the Modern Stone Age Kitchen, but with the homogenization of our diets, we're losing skills as well, right? So a lot of slaughterhouses don't have people that know how to slaughter an animal and retain those whole animal parts, right? Because that takes more money, that takes more retention of employees, you know what I mean? So I don't wanna leave the topic of ancestral eating 'cause I, I wanna keep delving into that 'cause you, I know you have more to offer in that. But what's coming up for me is a question I think that a lot of people wonder, which is we're talking about ancestral eating and how we've changed over the years. And we look at that 300,000 years ago and we go, oh, well, we improved there. And we're looking at our current times, we're gonna know, well, we're devolving to a degree, right?

Sure.

But are we? Is it more just that our bodies have to catch up to this modern food, or is it, are we just completely messing things up?

When you look at evolutionary change through time, evolution literally just means change. That's it. Evolution. The definition of evolution is just change. We have this teleological approach to evolution, most of us, and teleological means directed. And it's a false idea. The idea that Oh, we're just evolving in the way we were meant to evolve. It requires us to think outside of ourselves and the higher powers and all this. But this idea that if we were to do it all over again, we'd be in the same spot in 2024 because it's following, we have sort of the, you know, these primitive ancestors and they go through these different steps and then all of a sudden we become human and then, you know, humans are here and then, you know, we're in these little villages and then we create these tribes and then these chiefdoms and then these city-states and then these nations and, you know, all of these things and hierarchy and all of these agricultural was supposed to happen. And all of these things are supposed to happen to result in us. And we're the ultimate piece of this. That is the exact— that's called teleology. It's the exact thinking that evolution is directed towards some sort of goal. The only thing that evolution is doing is creating change, change in our gene pool over time so that when something in our environment changes, whether it's global warming or whether it's this new environment or these new resources, we have to pull from our gene pool, the variation there to produce members of our species that can survive in that new environment and produce viable offspring in that new environment. And when that happens, awesome, we survive. And when that breaks down, we become extinct. The key is that we're producing this variation in our gene pool and knowing that we're always adapting to the given environment at that specific time. So, with that said, there's been a lot of changes. I can definitely make the case to say Homo erectus at 1.8 million years ago in Eastern Africa was perfectly adapted to the environment that they're in. Great. And they're amazing and they're strong and they have these fairly big brains and they do all these wonderful things and that's great. But in that environment, it makes sense. If we pick them up and stuck them in the middle of New York City right now, they become extinct. Like they couldn't probably physically and definitely not culturally survive In that environment. We're faced now, and I do that the same question you, I ask, I think this way all my time. Oh my gosh, all this processed food, all these changes in our diets, all this, you know, getting rid of all these, this wonderful microflora in our guts and all of the, you know, cell phone radiate, all these things that are happening all the time. The fact that we're not, many of us are not even touching the earth anymore, ever, because we're insulated in these different ways. Are there members of our species that are Becoming perfectly adapted to that new environment.

Yes, you absolutely understand what I'm asking here. Because, because to a degree, like, I, I think about this sometimes. I'm like, okay, is glyphosate bad or have we just not adapted to it? Are we just not there yet? And is the future— is what's going to define their health going to be that they've adapted to it? Well, you did say something very interesting. The purpose of our species is to propagate. And so maybe a sign of whether your food systems is working or your lifestyle is working is whether can your population populate. And we are seeing a huge decline in people's ability to get naturally pregnant. That is probably an indicator that whatever these modern methods are, that maybe they're not working and they're not conducive towards Humanity's longevity.

One of the definitions of domestication is that you take a species out of its natural environment and put it in a culturally created environment. And it, within that culturally created environment, that species genetically changes in response to— when I say culture created, I mean like human-created environment. And over time, that species genetically changes in response quite often To the point where it can no longer survive on its own back in the wild. So an example would be we take these wild plants out of the environment, we start caring for them, we start watering them, we start feeding them, we start protecting them from other competing plants. Maybe we keep other animals away from eating it before it grows. We put a fence around it, whatever. That's domestication. Same thing with animals. We take these wild animals, eventually they're domesticated animals. That means the environment that they're responding to from an evolutionary perspective has changed. It's no longer this wild environment. I mean, certainly wild environments change. We have an asteroid hit, we have a climatic change, whatever it is. Those are changes in the natural environment. But now we've put them in an environment that we're controlling and they're responding to that and genetically changing over time. I get asked all the time, okay, what is the first domesticated plant? Well, I'm not confident right now. We're looking at probably Probably wasn't wheat in the Fertile Crescent. It's probably maize or even potatoes right now are kind of vying for some of the first plant domestication. What's the first domesticated animal? Well, most of the domesticated animals we think about, like from a farm, started to become domesticated somewhere between 9,000, 10,000 years ago. So things like cattle and that sort of thing, right? The dog, through what we think is a co-domestication event, happened at least 35,000 years ago. So way Well, predating anything like horses and cows and that sort of thing, about 35,000 years ago. But my answer to what was the first domesticated animal is us. We started to put ourselves in a culturally created environment the moment that we started making tools and using those tools to feed ourselves. We were actually living, existing outside of our own biology by creating these tools, and we weren't relying on our teeth anymore. solely or our digestive tract solely. We can now get food and start to chop up food that we never had access to before because we created that tool. And it became even more pronounced when we created things like fire to not only cook our food but to change the amount of light we had access to in a day or our microclimate and keep ourselves warm when it was cold. And, you know, all clothing, all of these technologies that we've created allowed us to create literally this artificial human environment that now we are also adapting to. Now, that includes things like glyphosate and ultra-processed food. So, the difference about evolution now than 6 million years ago is that we're not just responding to this naturally changing environment, genetically changing and evolving in relationship to that. We are obviously still changing because of that. Our gene pool's changing because, well, but even more pronounced is we're changing because of the culturally created environment that we have created as well, which is exactly what you're talking about, but in a lot of different ways. And remember the key here, natural selection only works on 2 things. One, if you die, and it doesn't work on an individual basis, it works on a species level, right? Because if one person Doesn't procreate, it doesn't make a difference on a species level. But if it starts to get at a species level, then it makes a huge difference. But at a species level, if you die before childbearing age, natural selection will work on it. So if you have a disease or if a disease presents that is killing people before they can have kids, natural selection will work on that and it'll work to edit it from the gene pool. But if it's a disease that hits you when you're 50 years old, natural selection will never work on it. You've already procreated, right? You've already done something for your contribution to the gene pool. It doesn't make a difference. Mortality before you procreate, natural selection will work on. And the second thing is procreation, right? The ability to reproduce. Natural selection will work on that because that will make an impact in the gene pool as well. But anything beyond that, natural selection, I mean, it matters, but it doesn't make a difference from an evolutionary perspective. Those things that impact the ability to survive until childbearing age and the ability to reproduce, natural selection will work on. And again, the idea is that it's more than just this natural environment. So part of it's diet. Diet and the ability to survive that long and reproduce is a very real thing, but it's also culture. So there's something called sexual selection, right? The idea that we are mentally selecting in a cultural context who we choose to reproduce with. If something's happening and doesn't allow you to even get into that gene pool because of who we're choosing to have be partners with, you know, natural selection will work on that as well.

Should we be interfering with, you know, like that idea of Someone's born with a hole in their heart and then we fix it. Where is the line for modern medicine, modern technology invading this kind of natural selection? Or is it just like, we have the technology, we should use it? Like, do you have— where do you sit on that kind of question?

That's a great question. And I think I have a great answer because I had students used to ask me, even 10 years ago, these conversations were coming up in college classrooms. This was my answer. I'm convinced, and this is going to go against some of the modern narrative right now about whether we should be using medical intervention or not with certain things. I think we should. And this is why. The key, the absolute single key to our species surviving during changing times is to have as much variation in our gene pool as possible. It matters what our gene pool's producing this very moment for all of us right now, but it matters more what we can pull from in the future when something in our environment changes, right? Because what is the most well-adapted now might be the least well-adapted in 15 years or in 100 years. And there's a whole new set of rules that we're playing by, whether some of it being from a natural environmental change, but also from a cultural environmental change. You know, what is it at that moment That is needed in our species to survive and survive until childbearing years. And then once we've survived until that childbearing years, actually bear children that can then also reproduce. I mean, that is the absolute key. So I know we have this sort of feeling, this idea inside of us that we need to be producing. And every single child, the absolute strongest, most resilient, you know, based on our modern ideas of what health and diet and physique and all of the look like. That's what we need to produce in every one of our kids. And yes, I think that's very incredibly important, but from not only emotional and cultural levels, people in our community that don't exhibit those properties are important, but also from a biological, just evolutionary sense, the variation in the gene pool that are produced from diversity in our world is absolutely essential to our survival as we move forward. We cannot think about evolution from this snapshot of a moment that we're sitting in now, because again, what is most well-adapted right now could actually be the result of our extinction in the future.

It makes me think of like a high school environment, right? Where the jock might be the most popular in that environment, but then 20 years later, they're now the least popular and it's the brainiac who's now popular, whoever it was. You know what I mean? It's like that change in environment that Changes the hierarchy of what's important to that time in society.

And your example right there is perfect because everything you just said is social. Like it's cultural. The change from that jock in high school, in high school, they were popular because of the culture, the context, right? This context that we have created around high school. And then the context changes. It had nothing to do with what the mean annual rainfall is of the environment. It's a culture-created thing that now all of a sudden they're floundering because of something like that. The other thing I also think we have to consider, this idea of survival of the fittest. First of all, that isn't Darwin's term. Somebody else said that. Darwin never said survival of the fittest, and it's not the way evolution works. Evolution does not select for the best of the best. The best of the best stay. I mean, they're there. But it's more like that joke about you don't have to be the fastest when you're getting chased by a bear. You just can't be the slowest. When you think about evolution and the way natural selection works, it isn't that you have a group of people running away from a bear and everybody gets eaten but the fastest one. No, it's everybody's running away from a bear and the bear eats the slowest one. The fastest one get away, but the ones that are in the middle, also get away too. And they're there to continue to populate, you know, and continue to put genes into the gene pool, create variation. Natural selection, it gets rid of the worst of the worst. And the other ones, you know, everybody else has made it through, at least in that particular trial. And when the environment changes, that changes as well. So, I am all for doing everything that we can to create as much variation in our gene pool as possible. But also, and this isn't necessarily going to be a popular opinion either, but remember, we are not just operating as a wild animal anymore in a natural environment. We are operating in a cultural context. So it isn't just a genetic gene pool that makes the difference, but it's also that cultural diversity that's there as well. Different ways of looking at the world, different ways of solving problems, different ways of organizing ourselves and adapting ourselves in a cultural way. are as equally important to have as much diversity as possible.

So, is something that we're potentially getting wrong, and maybe wrong is too strong of a word, but go with me, is that we're being too dogmatic about certain diets, about certain lifestyles, or is there a place for that? And this is, in a sense, kind of a trick question, right? Because we're talking about a specific way of eating, a specific way of coexisting, but should we even be so dogmatic about that? Or is that our downfall in contributing to the issues that humanity is facing right now?

If we were both alive 75 years ago having this conversation, I maybe would answer it differently, but we have created a place now where the modern industrial food system has spent What is it, $5.8 trillion? I forget what the operating budget of the modern industrial food system is now, but it's ginormous. We have people that are literally sitting in labs, in lab coats with test tubes that understand what our senses are like today as a result of millions of years of evolution and are sitting there creating food that triggers us to eat more food or eat crappier food or eat cheaper food.

It gets to manipulate— They're manipulating us. Yeah.

And they're manipulating us. It is a very, very evil thing. And we no longer, unfortunately, can rely solely on our senses. I am convinced that if we took a baby, a baby today, weaned the baby off of its mother, Presented it with real genuine food, allowed it to understand its own senses, and then provided nourishing food options throughout the rest of that child's— they would never need a nutritionist, never need a doctor, never need to listen to a podcast. But that's not the reality of where we are today. And we wouldn't need to be dogmatic. The conversation around food like we're having now would never have to happen because there wouldn't be a need for it. But we are at a place now where we have Some of the strongest forces on our planet for purely economic gain, tricking us into eating these incredibly poor diets. And the results of it are now impacting fertility or survivability, all the things that we just talked about earlier that natural selection does work on. So we have to pay attention. But here's the key, and it took me a long time to understand this, and I still battle with it as well. I grew up an incredibly overweight kid. I was unhealthy for most of my life in many ways because of the standard American diet that I had been on. So, when I started to understand what real food really was, I was incredibly dogmatic. I mean, to the point that for any health benefits the food was giving me, the mental strain was the negative, the complete opposite of that because my entire life revolved around, I can only eat this, I can never eat this. Actually, it's part of the last chapter of my book. But what I found after years of being too dogmatic is that I am convinced that our complex human relationship with food requires us to do more than just nourish ourselves through macro and micronutrients and probiotics and all these other things. That's a component of it. But to be fully nourished as a human, and this is important because our technology and our food have been interrelated for 3.5 million Our traditions, our religion, our politics, all of these things, almost everything that it means to be human has some link with our food at some level. And some of them very, very, very deep, strong-rooted levels. So you cannot separate the food you choose to eat and how you choose to prepare it and how you choose to present it, how you choose to consume it with everything else that you are, right? In order to be fully nourished, it's more than just hitting this protein threshold and making sure we get enough vitamin whatever in the food. That's very, very important. But for humans, we also have to meet or exceed our cultural expectations, our emotional expectations, our political needs, our emotional needs, our socioeconomic needs. I mean, all of these things are wrapped up. So, to be fully nourished, that means it's not only the food, but how you prepare that food, how you present that food, how you consume that food, Who you consume it with, the context of the table that you're sitting at when you're eating it. It's a very complex thing. And if we put too much pressure on ourselves, we can never meet those other needs at all. But that's really, really, really the key. So I do think there's moments in many of our lives that we need to be dogmatic. If you are suffering from something and food can heal you, then you need to jump on it and grab it and do everything you can to make sure you're healing yourself in whatever way you need to. If you need to get rid of oxalates or you need to, you're dealing with diabetes or something like that, absolutely. Once you get to the place of health, relative health, making sure you're meeting all of those other needs at the same time, I am convinced is the key to true human nourishment.

I'm so digging this conversation. I mean, this, these are the things that I don't feel like people are talking about enough. Your brand and your book name are Eat Like a Human, which brings up a couple of things and you just touched on them, which is speaking to what we eat, but then also our humanness. And I think sometimes we are so focused on, well, what are we eating? What should we eat? That we're forgetting, well, what, how does that mix with our humanness?

Absolutely.

Because they're not the same thing. And to your point, our humanness is being manipulated. As we transition into the latter half of this podcast, I really want to leave people with how do we connect— how do we connect this concept of ancestral foods, whether it's eating whole animal, fermented dairy, fermented vegetables, you know, these traditional ways of eating How do we connect that to not only our modern times, but our modern humanness? And what are some real daily practices that you would impart on this audience to not only support their longevity, but their fertility? Since those are the 2 things we kind of articulated are kind of what the human species is about.

Absolutely. There's several things, but part of it is a mindset shift. Actually, all of it is a mindset shift. We've been very fortunate as a family because we've been very intentional for decades now. We've realized the value of what not only the archaeological record has to provide, but what traditional and indigenous groups all over the world have to still inform us with. Many people listening know about the important work of Dr. Weston Price in the 1930s. And, how he traveled to a bunch of different places, documented diet, dental health, and recorded a bunch of other health markers. And, as the basis for both the Price-Pottenger Foundation and the Weston Price Foundation, it's amazing work. And, even then, it was a great time to do it because a lot of the groups he went into were starting to get impacted by modern life. Now, it's even more crucial because for as remote of a lot of the places that my family and I have been, are, everybody that we've been to has been impacted in at least some way. And a lot of these traditions are getting lost. So, they need to be documented, they need to be recorded, and they need to be used as a foundation for understanding what our diets have been like and what we can do to impact and infuse this information into our modern lives, which is exactly what we've been doing in our house for a long time, but also now what we're doing at the restaurant. And the reality is there's amazing information and we can get a lot of great information from. But one of the things that those trips and those journeys and experiences have done for our entire family is allowed us to reflect on ourselves. So many of us, and we did as well, and we're probably still a little bit susceptible to it, but we get caught up in this, however we're living right now is the way. Like, it's the right way. It's the thing we should be basing all our decisions on. And there's something inherently good about it just because it's the way we're doing it. And by looking back from an outsider's perspective, we get to say, wow, maybe that isn't the right way, or maybe we can manipulate this and make it even better. And it's more than just, I can start eating liver, right? It's literally systemic change about entire lifestyles. Anybody who's looking to start to get this perspective. There's an article that I've assigned. I taught college for over 20 years, and every single anthropology class I've ever taught, I've assigned the same article, and I suggest everybody read it. And unfortunately, in order to make the case that I'm going to make, I'm going to kind of give away the punchline, kind of like you just ruined season 3 of Better For Me. But it's an article written in 1956, I believe. You can Google it and download it for free. It's only a few pages, so it's worth it. It's called The Secret Body Ritual of the Nazarene, and it's written by a guy named Horace Miner. And I think it was from American Antiquity in 1956, but if you just Google it, it'll come up. And I read, I read this in graduate school and it still fooled me. But it's talking about this group of people that had just been identified in the 1950s in the middle of America, this culture. And it's talking about these weird body rituals that the culture engages in on a daily basis. And you start reading it. Who the hell are these people? And I'm like a second year in graduate school, and I'm like, wait a minute, I'm an anthropologist now. I've never heard of these people, and they're from anyhow. By the time you're done with the article, what you will have realized if you've read it very carefully and thought about it is that it is an outsider's perspective of us as Americans. And so, Nasserima is American backwards, right? So that's part of the title. And all these words in the article when they say, oh, they. They do this and they go to this place, or these nouns are actually our own word, common words backwards. It's mind-blowing because you spend most of your time reading this article thinking, who are those like really weird people? And then by the time you get to the end of it, you're like, oh, it's us. It's us from an outsider's perspective. It's powerful. So what I would suggest is if you really, really, really want to make the change to achieve true genuine health, you create in yourself this openness to critically look at the way you, your family, your community lives their lives and be willing to make changes necessary, even if they're uncomfortable, even if they seem weird at first, because a lot of these changes actually will not only nourish you, but in order to nourish you, They make your life better, right? And in many ways more fulfilling. So I say this because one of the suggestions that I have to directly answer your question is to truly look at the way you deal with your food. I don't mean what you put in your cart at Whole Foods and whether you're going to go carnivore or keto or whatever. All those, believe me, those are very, very important decisions, but how you prepare your food at home and how much time you spend doing it and who in your family's engaged in doing it? And at what level are you going to push the limits a little bit and maybe be a little bit uncomfortable at first, but for very powerful returns? So my number one suggestion, and this is very important and this is very empowering because I'm not going to say go listen to this person or go read this book. There's great people to listen to and there's great books to read. The number one person that you should be listening to is you. You have everything that you need. You just need to get back to the place where your senses are in tune and you're in tune with your senses and you trust yourself. And in order to do that, it's your responsibility to give yourself the education that you need. And this is the way you do it. You literally do it in your kitchen, right? You literally do it in your kitchen. So this is my example. And for some people, they're going to say, you're out of your damn mind. I don't have enough time because I'm living this busy life. But again, look back at yourself and the way you're living your life. Do you really not have enough time to do this? Can you maybe not watch that last episode of The Bear and spend a little bit more time in the kitchen? There was a study done, I think it was 7 years ago, 8 years ago, when food TV network was really at its height before they started doing these silly game shows and things. The average American household that was watching food TV spent more time watching food TV than they spent actually in the kitchen. It's insane. This is my suggestion. You take the food and be honest with yourself. You take the food that you and your family eat all the time, whether it's every day, every week, all the time, like your regular family go-to. Don't sit there and say, okay, I know that we eat hamburgers and hot dogs all the time and grilled cheeses, but I really want to eat this. Be honest with yourself. What do you go— what's your go-to thing? Is it chicken nuggets? I don't care what the hell it is. And then sit there and take a slot of site just a weekend and make that entire meal 100% from scratch. I mean, push the limits entirely from scratch. If you're going to eat chicken nuggets, then you go get the chicken. You do all of it. If it's mac and cheese, look, I know it sounds silly, but we started making cheese in our house 12 years ago. We make every bit of cheese that we serve here in this restaurant. Now, it is a very navigable thing that you can actually do. If your kids eat grilled cheeses 3 days out of the week, then make grilled cheese. Make the bread, make the cheese, make the butter, make the mayonnaise, grill it in a pan and serve it to your kids. At the end of this process, it doesn't matter if the cheese was good. It doesn't matter if it even looked like cheese. What you have provided yourself is the absolute best opportunity, the biggest window, the best insight unfiltered Into the food that you eat every day, the stuff that you literally put in your body all the time. And one of two things is going to happen at the end of that exercise. And again, it doesn't matter even if the dog wouldn't eat it. One of two things is going to happen. One, you're like, wow, I like this. I'm going to learn to make this really, really good. And when I get done with this, I'm going to learn to make the next thing really, really good and continue down that process, which is awesome. But for many of you, that's not going to happen. But something equally as powerful happens if you say, okay, great. I've done the grilled cheese experiment. It was absolutely terrible. I'm going to buy all my cheese and my bread and my mayonnaise and my butter from now on, just like I did before. But when you walk into that grocery store, you are a different person. You are no longer susceptible to all the marketing and the advertising and the shelf placement and the pretty boxes and the coupons that come in the paper every Sunday. You are now walking in that grocery store as an informed consumer. You now can turn over the back of that label of cheese And understand what all of those pieces mean. And you can decide for yourself the best possible options that you're gonna buy for your family. And not only are you gonna nourish your family better that way by seeing through all the nonsense, but you're also going to support the people that are making the best quality food possible. And that money's gonna go to them and it's gonna start this entire thing. That's the number one thing.

I love that. And, and I would even offer, if you're able to turn this into a palate cleanser, so do it long enough, whether it's just 2 weeks versus just 1 week. Then you're really going to also give your palate enough space to now taste that ultra-processed food in a totally different way. You actually taste the truly kind of artificial flavors of it. And then on the flip side, you'll taste that natural food in a very different way. We just need it. It's literally the palate changes in 2 weeks.

It's a great point, but it's not just your palate because the other thing that happens at the other side of it is we're filming a video for Wired Magazine a few years ago. Right before COVID And the whole film crew was down and the director was here. We broke for lunch and we walked about a block and a half down to a restaurant that's at the end of the road. And we're sitting at this restaurant eating and talking, and I was having almost a very similar conversation with them. And I said, look, people don't know what a nourish— a fully, truly nourishing meal tastes like, and they don't know what it feels like. And I'm convinced that if you provide, if somebody is actually able to sit down and eat a truly 100% nourishing They now have that context, right? That baseline to judge all their other meals, not only with how it tastes, but also how they feel. How did they feel when they got up from that meal? How did they feel a couple hours later? How did they feel the next morning? You know, what did their bowel movements the next day look like compared to the rest? You know, and all of those things. And in the middle of this conversation, it was a little bit longer than this, but it was a little bit longer than that. I look over at the director and he's kind of, I thought he had checked out of the conversation and he's kind looking up like this. I said, hey, what's up? Like, am I boring you? He's like, oh, no, no, no, no, no, no. I'm just actually trying to think if I've ever had a fully nourishing meal in my entire life. Wow. And he actually doesn't think that he had, but how many of us are making decisions about what we like, what we don't like, how should we be eating, how should we be feeding others? And we've never truly had that 100% fully nourishing meal to use as a baseline to make these decisions.

I would hypothesize that it's a high percentage of people that actually don't know what real food tastes like here in America particularly. And you hear that all the time, right? Oh, I was traveling in Europe and I could eat anything I wanted and I felt so good. It's like, well, yeah, but that's probably because it was all freshly made food. So it's less that it's in Europe versus America, but it's that it's freshly locally found food.

There is a food lab called the Nordic Food Lab who, when we first started at our food lab years ago, we were modeling some of the things we were doing after this amazing place. The Nordic Food Lab started as the test kitchen for Noma. And since then, they've become more aligned with Copenhagen University, but they put out some books, some videos. They, again, it was a test kitchen for Noma. They've done a lot of amazing things, but they also do some very, or used to do some very simple, simple things, but powerful. And I'm going to use it as an example here. In the middle of Copenhagen, they set up a table, And they would go to the store, the farms or whatever, and get all the apples that are available in the fall in Denmark. And they'd cut 'em up and put 'em out on the table. And you could go and as just somebody walking through the city, you could go and stop and try a bite, a bite of every single apple that you have available to you in the grocery store. And I thought that was so simple, but so powerful. I still, Have never tried every apple in the grocery store, but yet I go into the grocery store and make a decision about what apple I think I like best, but I haven't tried them all. Like, I haven't tried them all. So, you know, the ability to do that with your diet, try all these foods that you've never tried, see not only how you do respond to 'em, because it's one thing for you to think you don't like liver, and it's another thing to actually try liver prepared prop— fresh liver prepared properly. And then try it, and 2 completely different experiences. What you think it is and what it actually is is different. Try all of these different things. Try these things in your diet and then see what a nourishing meal feels like. Use that as a foundation, and now you can make better decisions as you move forward. They're simple, but again, one of the things that unfortunately the health industry, pharmaceutical industry, and even a lot of the social media influencer industry is doing is trying to tell you what to do. A lot of that information is horrible. Much of it is, I'm sure, very, very good. But again, it's just like forcing that kid to eat the jar of spinach no matter if I'm throwing it across the room. All of these inputs are teaching us to not trust ourselves. The thing we need to do is get to the place where we feel empowered to make decisions on our own.

We're talking about our own instincts, getting back to our ancestral knowledge of what our body needs. How visual should we be when we are looking outside of ourselves for some of those answers? And what I mean by that is, is because you brought up, for example, there's some people that work for FDA or, or licensure or USDA, whatever factions, and they look very overweight, and here they're telling us what we should be eating. And then there's someone who's on you know, social media who looks like yourself, who looks very fit, who looks very healthy, and then they're telling us something different. Where is that balance of like trusting my own body, but then visually using your eyes and what you see in front of you and the kind of congruence of what the person's saying and what they look like? Are they walking their talk? Where do those kind of come together?

That's a fantastic question. And I struggle with it as well. And I've seen like, you know, the stuff that Shawn Baker posts with the—

Yes, he does that a lot.

You know, that's exactly what I'm thinking about when you're talking. Even Ken Berry talking about, I don't know if you've heard him tell this story, it's a powerful story. And he's a physician and he remembers when he was terribly overweight, sitting in the chair with his belly hanging over his pants, telling somebody that they're pre-diabetic and they got to start cutting out the carbs or whatever, and how that made him feel hypocritical. I do think there's something to that for sure. I would also say it isn't simple though. Food, like we have been talking about this entire time, it's so much more than providing nourishment in a biological sense or making us sick in a biological sense. It's providing nourishment and fulfilling needs, many, many, many other needs that we have, cultural, religious, socioeconomic, whatever it happens to be, a combination of all these things. What we put into our mouth is determined by a whole host of factors, some in our control, many of them are not. While it is very easy to just say, never listen to a skinny chef, which is kind of silly, but you could very easily say, you should never take any sort of advice from an overweight doctor. That's very easy, but it's way too simple because there are some brilliant Brilliant physicians, brilliant people in the nutritional space that understand the mechanics of biological nutrition, but just haven't cracked the cultural or emotional part for themselves, right?

I love that. I love that answer. And that brings us back to the humanness of what we eat is you can't sometimes separate the two, right? That you might understand, even in your case, you might understand the ancestral logic and, and, and science behind why we should be eating these things, but then your humanness and how you deal with your lifestyle, your— the, the modern stressors, whatever it is, your environment, all these things are still playing into your lifestyle, you know, what you look like and, and how you coexist in this world.

You know, one of the things that's coming out of this, and it's something we put on our— I wrote in Broad post a few weeks ago. It's the need for grace. I mean, we have to give ourselves, our families, our, the people around us, we have to give people some time, some patience and space. I can't imagine there is anybody in the world right now that is battling diabetes or prediabetes or coronary heart disease or cancer or obesity or acne or anything that doesn't want to change it. But the power, the psychological parts of all of this, and unfortunately, the literally criminal ways that the modern food system is tweaking these foods to keep us sick is so powerful that so many people can't escape it.

Yeah.

We sit here and judge so quickly. Listen, I judge myself on a daily basis. And for as much as I've told you a few minutes ago how we need to relax a little bit about these things and give ourselves— I mean, I am really, really— I force myself every day to not be so hard on myself. We have to play that balance a little bit, right? There are things, it's those little tiny things that we do every single day. I just started cold plunging. I absolutely love it. So forcing yourself to do that every single morning. I do pushups and pullups and situps because quite often I can't get to the gym just with our lifestyle, with the business right now. But I force myself to do this every single day. I mean, there is that level of consistency and persistence that we have to have for certain things, but we also have to have that emotional and cultural balance with all of it, not only with ourselves, but with the people around us. I think we just have to give each other all this grace. And at the same time, there are things that I'm very confident about, and there's nothing that I said today on this podcast that I'm not 100% convinced is true. It doesn't mean it's all true, but I at least believed it to be 100% true. But there are a lot of questions, many, many, many questions that I still have that I'm looking for answers to as well. And there is nobody, nobody that has ever lived or that is currently alive that has all the answers for human diet and health. And even if they did, which they do not, something is going to change and we're going to, you know, then they're going to need more information as well. The way that I think we should approach listening to other people about food Whether they be a physician, a nutritionist, a social media influencer, whatever, is the same way that I used to approach, you know, buying a CD in the '90s, in the '80s. Like, other than Slippery When Wet, which is— every song on there is fantastic. You buy a CD for one song. You realize that, all right, there's some songs on here that are absolute trash, but that song is awesome. And you listen to that song on repeat over and over and over again. It's the same thing. None of— nobody has all the answers, but almost everybody that at least has good intentions has some really good information or a nugget that we can take away. It is our responsibility to figure out our own health. It is our responsibility to put these little pieces together, put those songs together and make the playlist that you give to your girlfriend, right? In 1992. Like, it is our responsibility to put those things together and make it work for us. But at the same time, you don't not buy the album because there's a bad song on it. There are some social media influencers right now that I cannot stand, that their entire platform is to pick holes in other people. And yeah, I agree, when they do that, the intent is not to discredit that one thing they said. Their intent is to discredit everything that they said. And I don't want anybody to fall into that trap as well, because there's amazing information out there. We just have to be able to filter it ourselves. And the way that we filter it is to take on the ownership of empowering ourselves to be able to do that filter.

People need to know this. You are truly an experimenter. You will try pretty much everything. I'm not aware that you haven't tried one thing. Everything you've been put in front of, you've tried. I'm pretty sure that's an accurate statement, right? So, is there anything that you have tried in your travels and your hunger for knowledge around ancestral foods and traditional ways of making food that you were like, Hell no, am I doing that again? You know what I mean? Like, like you're just like, okay, one and done, baby.

So remember, all these things are happening in most cases at the family level, right? Which means there's 5 of us. It's me, my wife, Christina, my oldest daughter, Brianna, my son, Billy, and my son, Alyssa. And all of us have different personalities as we should. I will try anything because I want the entire experience. And one of the best ways to experience anything is through food because it's one of the most sensual experiences that we have. And I mean sensual in all of our senses are firing at the same time when we're engaged in the act of eating food like we talked about earlier. So I want to experience the world through food and I also have that intellectual Curiosity. My son will try anything to gross out the rest of the family. My oldest daughter, Brianna, for example, has that same intellectual curiosity and will force herself to try something well outside of her comfort zone because she wants to experience it as well. That said, I've had it twice and I would have it again, but the most difficult thing for me to mentally consume and the strongest flavor of anything I've ever eaten is the casu marzu cheese in Sardinia. And for anybody who doesn't know what it is, it's unfortunately considered the most dangerous cheese in the world. So, in 1986, the Guinness Book of World Records called this cheese the most dangerous cheese in the world. It is obviously not. In fact, the most dangerous cheese in the world I would say is probably Velveeta. But this is how it's made. So there's several cheeses and most of the time cheesemakers want insects, bugs, things like that to stay away from the cheese. There's a few cheeses, a cheese in Germany where they invite cheese mites in. There's a French cheese, they invite cheese mites in. This particular cheese, they invite a fly in. They make a Pecorino, it's a sheep milk cheese, and they make little divots in the top of the cheese. It's good real cheese. These flies, a special fly comes and lays eggs in the little divots, and these eggs hatch and maggots come out, and then the maggots start burrowing into the cheese. And it's done all intentionally. So the maggots start burrowing into the cheese. And if you can imagine, the picture you should have in your head is, as these maggots are diving through the cheese, it's kind of like an earthworm going through the ground. Like the earth is coming in one side and it's leaving a little bit changed. So, the cheese is going in one end and coming out the other end a little bit changed. A lot of chemical and physical changes are happening as a result of this. One of the things that's happening is there's a lipase enzyme in the maggots that breaks down the fats in the cheese. And, it's the very similar reaction to what you get with the sharpest provolone in the world. If you've ever had incredibly sharp provolone where it smells really strong on the way in and it tastes really, really strong and your glands, a little bit of that saliva comes in the back, That really sharpness, that's because of a lipase enzyme that nowadays actually is intentionally added to the Pogrom. But so, these maggots are breaking down these fats, releasing these really strong flavors and aromas, making the cheese softer on the inside. And, you're supposed to actually eat the cheese with the maggots still crawling around in it. It's strong. I've eaten a lot of insects in my life, but they've almost always been dead by the time you put it in your mouth. So, you're taking a piece of cheese, well, you actually spread it usually on something, You're eating this cheese and it's crawling with live maggots and it's got this really strong flavor, really strong aroma. It's powerful. I forget what it is, but it's like a €40,000 fine if you're caught with this cheese. It's the most silliest thing on the planet. But because of the recognition of dangerous cheese in the Guinness Book of World Records and everything, all the fallout that followed after that, it's kind of like moonshine.

Right?

It's an illegal activity and it's all underground and it's all kind of hidden in all this. So, with that said, just like with moonshine, if you get the first pullings off of the still, you can get very, very sick or go blind. You want to make sure it's good moonshine. Well, just like with this, you want to make sure it's good cheese. And, there's 2 ways to eat this cheese. You can eat this cheese with the maggots still crawling around it or you can wait till the maggots mature, turn into flies, fly away, and then you can have the cheese. without the maggots in it. The advantage I understand—

How do they get out? How do the flies get out of the cheese though?

Well, they go back up to the top and they leave.

Oh my gosh. Okay.

The advantage to eating it with the live maggots is that it's a very good indicator of the quality of the cheese. If this thing is full of maggots and the maggots are live and vibrant and wiggling around, then you know the cheese is actually still good. Ah, something wrong with the cheese. If there's a bunch of dead maggots in it or the maggots have already left and it's been stored, you know, you, you don't necessarily, you don't have that at least indicator whether or not it's good cheese or not. It's powerful. It's powerful. But I will tell you, it's powerful in a, in a really cool way that if you ever have the opportunity, it's absolutely worth it. But that was the strongest flavor and mentally the most difficult thing for me to get over.

You always gotta wonder like, How did they discover this? You know what I mean? Like, like a lot of these kind of traditional foods, sometimes you're like, okay, that's brilliant. And how did you get to that? You know what I mean? So, because obviously for them to discover that the maggots did that, they had to have— first of all, the cheese had to have gotten infested with some maggots, and then they, they had to have chosen to eat it with the maggots. You know what I'm saying? Like, it's like, how did the first person discover how to do an artichoke? You know what I mean?

Yeah.

That kind of stuff is fascinating. But cheese bandit, cheese criminal, Bill Schindler, the authorities are going to be knocking on your door any moment from the European authorities because you ate this cheese twice. I just so appreciate you. I think a testimony to why you and I get along so well, we're such good friends, is that we really do look at food very similarly. And there's not many people in the industries right now, particularly on social media, that look at it the way we talk about it. And I quote you a lot, and I hope I do justice when I do quote you for how fantastic I think of you. Your book, Eat Like a Human, it's all tattered and, and read. Where can people find your book, Eat Like a Human?

A couple places. So it's on, uh, it's available through, you know, all the major bookstores and online. But first of all, I would suggest anybody who is anywhere near our area, we would love to have you come in and have us cook for you. So we're at the Modern Stone Age kitchen here in Chestertown, Maryland. We're very close to Washington, DC, Philadelphia, and only a few hours away from New York City. So we're very easy to get to. We certainly have copies here for sale. But on top of that, if anybody wants an autographed copy, we're selling— we'd sell it on our website, you know, for the same list price. And I'd be happy to autograph it. And if you put a little note in how you want it autographed, I'm happy to autograph it in any way and send it off for you. I sent it off to you. Also, if anybody wants, our major mission is to empower people to nourish themselves and have the tools that they need to be able to complete that seriously important, monumental important task. So, we have a whole host of classes. So, you can come here to our food lab and take a class. We do cheesemaking classes and sourdough classes and butchering classes. We have a sourdough pasta class tomorrow. So, we always have in-person classes. We have a ton of classes online that you can download as Well, we have a restaurant downstairs, Modern Stone Age Kitchen, where if you want us to just make the food for you, we'd be happy to. And we also have a bed and breakfast next door. We call it the Modern Stone Age Sanctuary. We've set it up the same way that we approach food with these ancestral approaches to nourishment. We've set that same sort of context in the bed and breakfast. So, ancestral approach to just living. It's a really neat experience to come there and then come eat at the restaurant.

You have a marketplace in the restaurant as well, right? So people can just come in and buy bread, you know, one-offs, right?

And we have it now. We're working on expanding it, but we also, all the food that we create, we have the components of that as we create it in, in the reach-ins. So we have a reach-in fridge and a reach-in freezer. So things like, and obviously stuff to take out that's at room temperature. So all of our sourdough breads, you can come and take for sale. Our fermented butter, you can get our cream cheese that we make, all of those. Sorts of things, our fermented ketchup. We have liverwurst, all of the stuff that we're making in-house that end up going into a lot of the food, the larger meals that we create. You can also come and shop. But the things that don't need to be refrigerated and non-animal-based, we are not USDA certified, so we cannot ship across state lines animal products. We're working on doing some dry stuff right now, but anything else like the breads and the sourdough cookies and that sort of thing, We will ship. So, you can find that information online. There's 2 great places to go look. One is modernstoneagekitchen.com, which anything that has to do with the restaurant, you can get information about there. And then, the website eatlikeahuman.com, you can find out any information about our classes and that's where our blog post lives.

And, if they want to follow you, where do they go?

You can follow me @DrBillSchindler on Instagram and Facebook. So, @DrBillSchindler. And, you can also follow The kitchen at Modern Stone Age Kitchen.

Bill, you gave me a lot of your time, and I am—I'm just so grateful. You're the person I wanted to talk to the most, and and and every time we have conversations, I gleam so much from you. And I love you and Christina. I love work. I've gotten the chance to work with you guys a little bit. I hope to do some more at the actual kitchen because we did it offsite. So thank you again for your time. You are truly a gem in this, what I would say is confusing and overabundant information kind of world. You, to me, stand out as a beacon of light. So thank you.

Well, first off, thank you. Thank you for those kind words. Let me just add, when you asked me to do this interview, you can't imagine how honored I was to be able to do it. So same sort of thing. I just have to say, we've, we've been able to work together. We worked together at the event last summer. That was a fantastic opportunity. But, and I love the work that you're doing with Pluck. I would also say I have had the opportunity to be near you and observe you set up at all sorts of different conferences. In fact, I think we first met at Polypace Farm, wasn't it?

Yep.

And you can't say enough about what those interactions are like. and how meaningful they are. And I have just watched you with so many people coming up. And I think it was last year when we were at Weston Price Conference and your daughter was with you as well. You can learn a lot from watching somebody and how they interact with other people. And I have been truly impressed every time. I love the work that you're doing. And it's been an honor to talk to you for these past few hours.

Thank you everyone. Truly, I hope you got something from this, but please dig deeper into Bill, not only his restaurant, but his book and his— the information that he shares, it truly, truly, in my judgment, is pure, heartfelt, and knowledgeable. And it's, in my judgment, the best way to eat like a human. So thank you again, Bill.

My pleasure. Thank you.

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.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.