Anya Fernald: Regenerative Farming and the Art of Cooking Meat | Lex Fridman Podcast #203

The following is a conversation with Anja Fernald, co founder of Belcampa Farms that was founded with a purpose to create meat that's good for people, the planet and the animals, specifically treating their animals as ethically as possible. In this she sought to revolutionize the meat industry from the inside out. She's also a scholar and practitioner of regenerative agriculture and she's a chef who has appeared many times as a judge on Iron Chef. Plus she has one of my favorite food related Instagrams. On top of that, she's also a longtime friend of Andrew Huberman, which is how we first got connected. Quick mention of our sponsors Gala Games, Athletic Greens, four sigmatic and Fun to Rise. Check them out in the description to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that I got the chance to visit and spend a few days with Anya and at Bel Campa Farms in Northern California. I met many animals there, from cows to pigs and saw the amazing land on which they grazed. I butchered meat. I watched Anya cook many amazing meals. I ate raw meat and cooked meat and spent long hours at the bonfire talking with friends and listening to the sounds of nature. I hiked, swam in a cold mountain lake and slept in a tent underneath the stars. It was an amazing eye opening experience, especially in my first ever visit to a slaughterhouse. The term slaughterhouse is haunting in itself. The animals I met lived a great life, but in the end they were slaughtered in the most ethical way possible, but slaughtered nevertheless. Seeing animals with whom just the day before I made a connection be converted to meat that I then consumed was deeply honest to me. This ethical farm Bel Campo represents less than 1% of animals raised in the United States. The rest is factory farmed. I could not escape the thought of the 40 to 50 billion animals worldwide raised in terrible conditions on these factory farms. I've spent most of my life thinking about and being in contact with human suffering. But the landscape of suffering in the minds of conscious beings is much larger than humans. I must admit that I still am haunted by human suffering more than animal suffering. Perhaps I will one day see the wrong in me drawing such a line. Either way, the visit to Belcampo Farms made me realize that I have not thought deeply enough about the ethics of my choices and the choices of human civilization with respect to animals. And more importantly, I have not thought or learned enough about large scale solutions to alleviate animal suffering. Belcampo is paving the way on this and is the reason I wanted to show my support for their and Anya's efforts in regenerative farming and ethical treatment of animals. This is the Lex Friedman podcast, and here is my conversation with Anja Fernald.

If you're watching the video version of this and are asking yourself why we're in nature right now, there's actually a beautiful mountain in the background. There's an incredible vast landscape. There's a farm. We're sitting behind a table. Nevertheless, I'm wearing a suit and tie amidst nature. We're at beautiful Bel Campbell Farms. We're going to talk about that. This incredible place you have here. But you cooked some meat yesterday. It tasted delicious. So I'd love to talk about just the science and art of cooking first. You as a chef, when you think of cooking, is it a science or is it an art?

Art and service together, probably art to me because it's about creating something of beauty and. And being responsive and creating something that's expression of creativity and love. Cooking also has a very strong element of service, and it doesn't mean necessarily service to another person, but like service to health, wellness, environment. There's an element of supporting through food in how I approach cooking.

So it's bigger than just like, the. How the ingredients come together to form a taste. It's the whole pipeline. Like the fact that there's a lot of work that went into bringing the ingredients together and then, you know, making you. Giving you the ability to make the meal, and then who gets to consume the meal and the whole thing. And you see that as service as.

Opposed to just the taste.

Yeah. I also think of food as one of the key ways that we interact with our environment.

Right.

We. It's the part of our environment that goes inside us most visibly. Right. Of course we interact with our environment. We could have skin creams that have certain things in them, or our clothes can then be absorbed. There's things in the air, there's our water, and there's food.

Right.

It's like how we're engaging in the world physiologically. It's the most significant way we engage in our environment.

We're extracting resources, calories, energy from the environment in various ways in order to preserve our bodies.

There's also so many feedback loops that I don't think we know the beginning of the. That our bodies are picking up on around nutrients, available nutrients, immune response. Like, there's deep levels of sensory evaluation that lead to health and alertness and wellness. You hear about this a lot, like, with babies that, you know, if there's a risk of an infection, that a mom's breast Milk will help the baby develop a resistance. Like, there's this way that our bodies can tune into health and can't extrapolate from that in any specific way. But think about that as an example of, like, the many ways in which our body is reading available nutrients in food to signal other aspects of wellness and health.

That said, the final product of cooking is, when done well, is really delicious. And what we ate yesterday was really delicious. So that aspect of it, bringing the ingredients together in a way that tastes delicious. Do you see that as a science or art?

That's the art of it. I mean, the art is like creating temptation and indulgence and giving people pause. You know, like, creating experience that's, like, so sensual. And, like, I love that about when I make something really simple and beautiful and delicious. The way that, like, there's that moment of silence at the table, and that, to me, is the moment of art, like, of appreciation.

What about the buildup? I mean, we got to watch you make the stuff over a fire. So the calmness of the air, I mean, that's an experience we don't often get to have to see that experience of the prep. It's the anticipation, like you said, maybe that's the most delicious part of a meal, is the anticipation of it.

That's something that I'm glad you bring up, because it's an element that, with eating so many of our meals, like, out of a bag, and the instance where you start to eat the meals when the delivery shows up, and you might smell something when you open the bag, and no judgment on that. That's something I do too. Right. But that does take away a whole element of surprise and delight. And also, I think, of your body's ability to prepare for it. You know, think about our most common memories of childhood, for those of us who grew up in homes with parents who cooked, is smell of things cooking. And it's not the eating of it, it's the smell of things cooking. So why is that so memorable? It's an anticipatory piece of food. That's what you remember about your experiences of food is the moment of, like, sweet anticipation of some of this great sen. Experience that's going to be really gratifying on these emotional and physical levels. So I think we're also resonating on those memories because it's like. It's an experience of food where the sensuality of it is kind of extended. So it's a long kind of arc of buildup, and then you're eating it, and it's amazing. And then you're enjoying it, and your body feels good. So all those pieces together, it's a much more memorable experience than just grabbing the cookie out of a bag. Right. So look at our own and just revisit in your mind, like, the memories of food. The most compelling ones. It's the smell and then the experience, and then sometimes how one felt. Right?

Yeah. And the people involved with the smell. So, like, somehow it's all tied in together. Whether it's family or people close to you, or even if it's just chefs, there's something about the personality of the human involved in making the food that kind of sticks with you in the memory. And for me, I recently did a 72 hour fast, and there's a kind of sadness after you eat that, it's over. I think the most delicious part was the. I went to the grocery store and just actually walking around and looking at food with like, everything looked delicious. Even, like, the crappiest stuff looked delicious, and I missed that. I really enjoyed that anticipation. And then I picked out the meal, I went home and I cooked it, and the whole thing took, I don't know, maybe two, three hours. Like, the whole process. And that was the. The most delicious part. And the first taste, of course. And then after. After it was over, there's a bit of a sadness because the part I remember is the. The buildup, the anticipation. And then once you eat, it's over. We kind of focus on the destination, but it's the whole journey, the whole, like, even if you go to a restaurant, it's the. The conversations leading up to the meal and the first taste of the meal, that's where the joy is. And if you get to watch the making of that meal, that's incredible. That's where the smell, the visual, how the ingredients come together. Especially as we were looking over the fire, like, watching it, the fire play with the raw meat, and, you know, over time, bring out the colors, bring out the, I don't know, like, you can visually associate the flavor. You know, how it becomes a little bit burnt on the outside. You know, it has a crispiness to it. It starts to gain that crispiness. And immediately your past memories of the delicious crispiness of various foods you've eaten are somehow mapped into your. Immediately you start to taste it. Visually, I don't know. Yeah, that experience is magical. And of course, maybe it's the Russian thing, but I'm almost like, saddened when it's over.

I think fasting is gaining in popularity because we're having to relearn the importance of being hungry in anticipation and delight. We have such a fear of hunger, and that's really functional in evolution, but we have this deep fear of hunger. And part of the great American experience has been that we don't have to be afraid of hunger at all, because there's food everywhere and it's really cheap. In all that abundance, we've lost this edge of hunger, and we don't let ourselves get hungry. And that's one thing that I learned in part of my journey as a cook and chef has been, you know, moving abroad was the first time when I lived out of the US was the first time that I regularly experienced hunger because the time between meals was really long. And that was just what everybody did. And so I was hungry for two hours before lunch, and that was the first time in my life that there hadn't just been readily available snacks. So I wonder if the intermittent fasting and part of the popularity around it, I'm sure there's all these amazing metabolic things that are happening, but also, people might also feel better because they're really anticipating and enjoying food. Then, if you look at the feelings of fullness, there's a really interesting thing that happens when you cook and your sense of fullness, which is if you cook and you're hungry, the experience of being around the food, smelling it, touching it, sampling it, you'll take your hunger down by 40%. And this is my own observation, but as I mean, we've all had the experience of cooking Thanksgiving, and the cook never kind of wants to eat that much Thanksgiving, that's an extreme experience. But when you really dive in and you're cooking for a few hours and you're smelling and smelling and smelling, it totally changes your threshold of satiety and fullness because of other sensory things that are happening. And for those of us looking to maintain weight, and something to consider in this is that cooking is also part of what your appetite. When you're hungry, what are you hungry for? Right. So we tend to think about calories. But when you're hungry, you might also be hungrier for a wider range of things. And it might be smells, it might be stopping. There's other elements, and that's something. Think as a cook that it's powerful to explore and be with and observe how your hunger changes when you're cooking.

Well, let me ask the romantic question. When did you first fall in love with cooking?

Me falling in love with cooking was about solving a problem in my family. And it had to do with my mom feeling very anxious about cooking and overwhelmed frequently when it came to meals. And I'm naturally very good at juggling a lot of things. And it was just something I could dive in and help and help my dad, who's very. I'm very, very close to. So it was a very. It was a very functional role where I would see this kind of crescendo of anxiety around meal times as a kid and would be able to dive in and solve things. And I also loved women who cooked. Like, my father's mother was a great cook. She was. I remember her telling me as a kid, you know, I was asking her about church and why she went to church, and she's like, I mostly go to church because I get to cook for the, you know, potlucks. And so there was an openness around that, but she just loved to cook for people. And it was. And there was this real tenderness and expression of that love. So seeing women in my life who had this real tenderness and love that they shared through food and then also being able in my own home to kind of pitch in and add value and help my mom and dad was really powerful for me because I felt like I had a superpower. You know, I felt like, oh, man, I just made this stressful thing go away. That was huge.

It's kind of interesting. I don't know if you can comment on, especially for me growing up in Russia. It's probably true in a lot of cultures, maybe every culture, that food, and especially, like, in the family, the mother that cooks is the source of love and, like, ties the family together, creates events where everyone comes together. It's one of the only chances of togetherness. The thing that bonds a family is, like, dinner or food eating together. And I don't know what to do with that. It ties up with, like, dieting and so on. When I was on stricter diets, especially competing and cutting weight and stuff, it felt like I was almost like losing opportunity to connect with friends and family. It's interesting. It almost like cultures, we cannot fully experience love and family without eating. And on the flip side of that, eating enables us to experience love and family. I don't know what to do with that.

It's a tough one because there's lots of layers around kind of gender roles and families changing and things. I'd say I agree around the alienation. And I've done carnivore diet, and I've tried some of these extreme protocols. And I, too, I suffered from loneliness you know, it was like doing carnivore and not being able to eat what my kids ate and talk about it at the same time. Those pieces are real. And I wonder with all of these diets, if that structure is actually helping or just taking away from people's kind of sensual understanding. But I think that there's some rigor around that that helps people discover what's good for them by eliminating and then growing towards more intuitive food is a good evolution from that base. I love to cook for people. I love to pay attention to their. Their way of being and read what they'd like to eat. And it's my. My purest way of love. And that's for everybody in my life. I actually love to cook for people I love. You know, I don't. I would struggle to be, you know, putting out food all the time. It's like something. For me. It's a real act of caretaking. So I definitely have that in my makeup. And. And I definitely noticed, um, in times of, like, of. Of real stress, that's the piece that drops off right? And then. And it's like, if I'm unable to care for myself, I have a hard time cooking. So it's. For me, it's very emotional.

It's very connected to love and individualistic. So, like, focused on the particular individual. It's almost like a journey of understanding what that person is excited about in the. In the landscape of flavors. Like, figuring that person out, what they like, what they. What they love to eat. Yeah, I see cooking from. I mostly cook for myself, so I see that as almost a. This is gonna be, like, the worst term, but, like, an act of self love. This is gonna be clipped out that, like, it's almost an exploration of, like, what brings me joy. And it's surprising because I usually don't share, because the things that bring me joy are the simplest ingredients. Like, I'm one of those people. I don't know if you can psychoanalyze me because you also like basic ingredients. I like a single ingredient, two ingredients, because I feel like I can deeply appreciate the particular ingredient. Then I get easily distracted. Music and in their mind, extract the different layers and enjoy different layers at a time. Like the bass, the drums, the different layering of the piano, the beats, and all that kind of stuff. That's what it means to truly enjoy music. To listen to a piece over and over. Like, almost like, as a scholar in that same way, for food, I just can't do more than, like, three, because then it's just I have to give in to the chaos of it, I guess. But when it's just a basic ingredient, like just meat or just a vegetable, like basic grilled without sauces, without any of that, that I've discovered is what brings me a lot of joy. But that's boring to a lot of people, so I usually have to be kind of private about that joy. So. But that's mine. So I figured that out. And I guess as a. As a chef, you have to figure that out about everybody that you care for.

Well, also for you, you're very interested in things and interested in things being done well and appreciating them. So the single ingredient also allows you to control for perfection in cooking that which is probably really appealing to you. And I think sometimes I see people also, in the beginning of their journey of culinary, trying to do too many things right. So there's another piece, too, that you'll notice. If you recall, last night, I grilled us the salad, right. And then I did all those pieces separately. And that's something in general to be really attentive of when you're building flavor, to make sure you pay attention to every piece separately. You know, the idea that you can. Okay, with a soup or something or stew, there's workarounds. But, like, to make a great dish that's got four or five vegetables in it, cook them all separately to their optimal deliciousness and then combine them. So that's another way to approach that, is that you may also be able to look at the different ingredients separately and still have that sense of, like, understanding of it. But there's too often that we're layering together, like, four or five things and then cooking them all at once, and then surprised that it's not delicious. Yeah, because you can't. You can't really optimize on multiple variables at the same time for peak awesomeness. And that's actually, you know, the number one way you see this is roasting a whole chicken, which is a really difficult. It's the simplest dish, but it's very difficult because you have the breast meat, which is bigger chunks, they cook faster. You have the thighs and drums, which are smaller, and they cook slower. To optimize that and pay attention to it and do it all right, you're actually solving for different outcomes. So there's one example, but oftentimes food. Food is less delicious with multiple ingredients at the start because we're not able to pay attention to how each one needs to end up. So there's a way to parse that apart and achieve a better outcome.

I don't know if you've seen Jiro Dreams of Sushi. It's a documentary about. Yeah, so there's an obsession, that particular first of all set of humans, but also the particular cuisine that focused on the basics of the ingredients. What do you think of that? Kind of trying to achieve mastery through repeating the making of the same meal over and over and over for, like, decades? Like, do you find beauty in that journey towards mastery, or do you think it should be always an exploration to where you're always trying things? You're always kind of injecting new flavors, new experiences, all that kind of stuff?

I think you have to decide on a palette. You know, if we're talking about an art, it's equivalent to saying, am I a sculptor or a painter? Yeah, that. The sushi lexicon think that's a very, very narrow, small canvas that you're painting on. And that is a beautiful road. Right. There's. There's a. There's a beauty and a perfection to that. It's like. I mean, there's many things culturally around that that you could extrapolate for, specifically for Japan. But I encourage people on the journey in food to choose kind of a language that they're working within. And if you want to step out of that occasionally and have one or two dishes. But if you want to get mastery with food, you probably aren't going to be able to get more than, say, 20 ingredients that you use regularly that you really understand. And so we often see, you know, I see the American pantry. It's got tons of sauces and tons of spices and tons of spice blends. And then really, people only use just a couple things. And the idea that you can sort of splash out and do Korean one night and then tacos the next night. You can, absolutely. But to get in a regular cadence of specific ingredients, you're probably going to get more mastery with that sooner. And I think as much as you can do to get an understanding of the, you know, the basics around salt and acid and understand your palate. For me, it's lemon and usually sherry vinegar. Right. So that's my acid palette and my fat palate's suet and butter olive oil. So you can sort of choose your language, what you're painting with. But I wouldn't splash out and say, do I use sesame oil? Yeah, every once in a while. But that's not part of my base palette. Right.

Can you say again what your fat palette is?

It'd Be butter, suet and olive oil.

And olive oil. So not white olive oil. Is it your roots in Italy?

I like the flavor for finish because of the bitterness that it adds. So I like the bitter and acid contrast on meat and vegetables, which is mostly what I eat. And so I love that way that the bitterness and astringency complements and allows the flavors to come out.

What do you think about coconut oil? I recently discovered that there's a. I don't know, there's a sweetness. There's something to it that I really enjoy. Maybe because it's new, it's good with heat. I really love it for some reason as a chef. Do you ever try it? What do you think about it?

I like it in coffee. Like, I like it as a treat a little bit. I find the flavor a little bit challenging in foods. I also find that it's difficult on the quality of that ingredient. So I found often that I buy a high quality coconut oil and there's rancidity in it, and I don't totally know why. I think it's just the cold chain and how that product's packaged. So I've had some issues with product quality, quality in that. But for me, it's a little bit too much sweetness in my foods. But then again, I don't cook in like a Southeast Asian palate. I try to not have much sweetness in my foods in general. So I just. Because of the palate that I like to cook with. So for me, coconut's got a little bit too much of those high notes and earthiness, which is a nice combination, but it's more like a treat.

Yeah, it is almost like a treat. It has a flavor of its own that almost stands on its own. Like, I could probably just eat coconut. That's probably the only oil I could enjoy by itself. It sounds weird to say, but it feels like fat is often a thing that enriches the flavor of something else. Coconut can almost stand on its own.

You might also be responding to that. It's a complex flavor.

Right.

So there's also. There's an analogous. You know, if you look at butter, for example, a lot of the butter that we eat in the US Is just sweet cream butter. It's not cultured. If you explore like a cultured fermented butter, maybe a grass milk, grass fed and finished butter, you're going to get a ton more complexity. And so you may also just be responding to having fats with more flavor, which is the journey in the US has been towards refined foods that Are very neutral, and then you have to combine more of them to make things taste like things. And so if you're coming from a background of using mostly just generic butter or, let's say, canola oil to cook with, those are very neutral oils. So you can also take some of your favorite fats and look for versions of them that are more flavorful. I mean, I love olive oil as a treat in a spoon, really. Like a good California extra virgin olive oil. I'll just, like, have it as. I'll eat a piece of butter as a treat. Yeah, that's like. Or butter with salt on it. Like, good fats can. All of them can be if they're minimally processed. And they're fabulous and so delicious. Right. But there are things that you have to, like, look for a version of them that's got that full palette of flavor.

Well, for me, also, the flavors are inextricably tied to the memories I've had with those flavors. So for better or worse, back when I used to eat a lot of ice cream, I, for some reason, had a lot of pleasant experience with coconut ice cream. So that particular flavor just permeates flavor throughout my life. Not like I'm stuck with it, for better or worse, as a flavor that brings up pleasant memories. And I have a few such flavors. I have such relationship with all kinds of meat, too. It's just so many pleasant memories. And that's it. You're almost tasting the memories, and there's no way to separate the flavor from the memories, I suppose. And that's a powerful thing. What's your favorite meal to cook?

I. I'll roast a couple chickens, and then I'll poach them. Like, I'll boil them and let it cool down. It's a complicated one. I'll let them cool down. I'll pull all the meat off, put the bones back into the pot, and then cook that for, like, three or four hours. And then add in, like, shiitake mushrooms and all the chicken meat and the. And I. I'll throw in a bottle of white wine into the. Into the stock as well, A bunch of thyme and garlic. And I love it because it's the way the house smells. It's very laborious. It's soothing for me to spend time picking apart meat and chopping things up. There's a lot of manuality around it. So I'd say from a personal. I mean, I love grilling a steak and doing those things as well, but there's something about making a stock from scratch. And the way it smells, the way I feel, the time it takes, the kind of checking in on it that I really, really love. There's many things I love to make that I don't even love to eat. You know, I think you see this a lot in like baking and bakers, people who bake a ton and they love the process of it, even if they don't eat that many baked goods. So anything for me that's really like enjoyable is typically things like making cinnamon buns. I love, I don't eat very many cinnamon buns, but I love making them because it takes all the sort of like futzing around and taking your time and watching it. The way it smells, the way the house smells, all of that stuff is like, it's like almost like a, like a meditative exercise for me.

Is there a science, is there an art to cooking meat? Well, and the different kinds of meats, is there something you can convert into words in to say ideas, how to bring out the best out of what particular meat? Whatever steak we're talking about, whatever beef we're talking about, is there something that could be said?

The basic approach to cooking any type of meat, beyond the artistry of it, is pretty scientific. And it's what type of muscle is it in the animal and what's the surface area to volume ratio? Okay, so let's look at those two questions. So the first piece is what's the type of muscle in the animal? What's the functionality? You don't necessarily need to know that to evaluate it, but you need to understand, is it a tender muscle that's not used very frequently in the animal, or is it a big load bearing muscle that gets a lot of action like the cheek, right, or the shin or those pieces, the muscles like those along the spinal cord that make up rib eyes and New York steaks and things, those aren't very exercised. They're right next to the spinal cord. Spinal cord's doing most of the work there. They're kind of like stabilizing muscles around this big functional piece of skeletal structure in the animal. Other muscles like the ones around the diaphragm with the flatiron stakes and skirt stakes and things, those are really functional muscles that are doing a ton and moving. And if they're moving a lot, what happens? Well, functionally they've got lots of muscle sheaths because muscles that move frequently have to do a lot of like complex contraction. That's why, you know, there's in the cheek, for example, there's tons of Visible fiber of, like, collagenous connective tissue. That connective tissue is everything in how the meat cooks. Because connective tissue doesn't respond to high heat with becoming more tender. Mussels do. Right? They can get a sear on them. You can cut them and eat them. The collagenous tissue will glom up and get really tough. So you either have to liquefy it with really low slow heat, with moisture, right. Or you have to barely cook it. And so that's the major piece. So that's the question of, like, why wouldn't you just throw a brisket on the grill?

Okay.

It's not about the fat. You can cut the fat out. The reason you're not going to throw a brisket on the grill and cook it hot and fast is it's got too much collagenous connective tissue in it. Those are these giant muscles that have all this collagen and these fibers and tendons in them effectively. So you're never going to be able to just cook that up hot, fast. So that's the first piece. It's like, where's this muscle in the architecture of the animal? And then what does that mean for what's going on in the muscle? And that's actually more important than fat content. We get really kind of. We pay a lot of attention to fat content in muscles. You can make a steak tender if it doesn't have a ton of fat in it. It actually has more to do if there's. If there's collagenous and connective tissue in it.

That's fascinating. I never even thought about that. I just. I thought it kind of universe. I mean, adds to the texture of the meat, the chewiness of the meat. But you're saying it also adds to how heat, how it reacts to heat, how the entirety of the meat reacts to heat. And the fat is not as important to that as the. The collagen.

The fat will make the flavor more delicious, right? Like, it'll add unctuousness and mouth feel and things like that. But the. All the connective tissue in meat and in some of the cuts like that. We ate a skirt steak last night. You could see a web of that collagen sheath on the outside on a ribeye. That same collagen sheath is this big. There's only one. It goes around the outside. Okay. Because that's just that muscle. There's one large muscle fiber. So that specific. It's a myelin sheath.

Right.

That that material needs moisture and low and slow heat to become tender. The other side of that is that when it becomes tender, it liquefies and it adds all this beautiful gelatinous consistency. That's what bone broth is. That's why, like, a slow cooked pork shoulder is so delicious. It's not that it's full of all that fat. That fat's also great. But a lot of that mouthfeel comes from that really beautiful dissolved collagen. So when you're looking at, like, how do I understand how I'm going to cook a piece of meat? That first fork in the road is how is this going to respond to heat and what's the appropriate cooking technique? Then the second piece is that surface area to volume ratio. And that's important because the heat is going to impact the meat through the surfaces of the meat that are in contact with the heat. So if I have a steak that's three inches thick, I'm going to cook it extremely differently from a steak that's a half inch thick or 3/4 of an inch thick. And that's the major. And that's the truth. If I have a piece of pork shoulder that's cut into cubes versus having a whole pork shoulder, that surface area to volume ratio, that's going to totally change how I cook it. And same things like pot roast and a beef stew would be the same cut of meat, right? But how I cook them is going to change based on the surface area to volume, because you've got to let moisture and heat work its way into the center of the meat. And that's going to be determined by the amount of surface.