Episode 121: Building a Truly Regenerative Kitchen with Mollie Engelhart

Hi, friends, this is John. Welcome back to the Regenerative Agriculture podcast where we have all kinds of fun conversations related to regenerating landscapes, regenerating ecosystems, regenerating our relationships at all levels throughout the supply chain. And ultimately, of course, we care about regenerating our planet and all the macro and micro pieces that that entails. One of the pieces that is really important is connecting our relationships between, from actual production and growing food to the people who eat that food. I think it's very on one hand, as farmers, we often like to take pride in the mantra that we are feeding the world while at the same time being completely isolated and having no connection to the people who are actually directly consuming our food. And so I've been looking forward to having a conversation with Molly Engelhardt, who does bridge that last gap and is able to have conversations with many people who care directly about the food that they are eating and able to offer some insights and some perspectives for us into that dynamic. So, Molly, thank you very much for being here today, for being willing to share some of your story and some of the things that you've been experiencing. Tell us a little bit about your history and your journey and the scope of the work that you're doing today.

Oh, excellent. Thank you so much for having me. I've been a fan and a listener for a long time. I grew up on a farm in upstate New York, mostly apples, but I grew up vegetarian. My parents didn't eat meat and I went to Los Angeles to pursue a film career. And long story short, I ended up owning restaurants and I became a well known vegan chef with big locations, multiple, you know, four or five thousand square foot restaurants with full bar and huge, huge restaurants. And up until the pandemic they were going well. But in 2000, I want to say 13, I listened to a Graham St. Ted talk that really smacked me on the side of the head because I was in this illusion that I was in Los Angeles, living in my comfortable life, driving my hybrid and bringing grocery store bags to the grocery store, grocery store and drinking an oat milk latte. And somehow I thought I was more righteous or better than other people, that I was doing the right thing for the planet. And Graham say in 12 minutes broke it down that I, I wasn't and that the biggest cause of methane is actually food scraps. And so the first thing I thought is, oh, there's so much food scraps in my restaurant, I need to get those to a farm. And so I started telling everyone I knew that had Enough money to buy some land that you should buy a farm. I'm going to bring all the food scraps and we can make composted. Then I'll buy the rest, the produce back at the restaurant. It's going to be this awesome circle. And then I realized I was the one that we were waiting for. Like, there was nobody was going to buy this farm for me to compost my food scraps. So I bought a farm about an hour outside of Los Angeles. Avocados and citrus, primarily, and then vegetable row crops in between. We started planting, and so people are like, oh, you're gonna have a vegan farm? And I was like, yeah, I'm gonna have a vegan farm. I don't. My husband just, like, rolled his eyes and let me go with my plan. And I just started to realize really quickly when I was actually growing my own food and food for my restaurants, that there was no vegan farms, that it doesn't exist, and that nature is far harsher than anything human beings could possibly do. And the power of bovine and the power of the cow poop, like, the difference in my compost once I got my first cow, then before I had a cow, and the power of cow poop and soil and what that difference made. And then I'm breastfeeding my baby. I'm a prolific breeder. I have a bunch of kids, but so I'm always pregnant or breastfeeding, and I'm breastfeeding my baby, and then I'm like, milking off the cow because she's engorged, and I'm feeding my kids tetro packs of oat milk, and I'm like, this is the stupidest thing I've ever seen in my life. So I'm like, no more oat, no more milks. We're gonna feed the kids raw cow milk. If my breast milk is perfect and has all the antibodies from the environment, well, then so does Una's cow milk. So. And then this went on, and I still was not letting my husband kill any animals on the farm. I was crazy vegan mindset. And two things that shifted that for me were I had these khaki Campbell ducks, and they were beautiful, and I had a lot of ducks. They would make more ducks. And I never killed any of the drakes. And then I got these brand new 19 khaki Campbell ducks, and I put them out in the avocado orchard to eat the snails. And there was beautiful rain that day and tall grass, and I remember seeing them all waddle into the grass and feeling so good about how my ducks are eating my snails and fertilizing the orchard and everything. And I got home from work that day and my husband's like, you're not going to like what happened. And the drakes had raped all 19 to death. Like just continued to mate them until they died because the, the ratio of drakes to females was too high. And I called my dad so upset and wanting that it could work, that there could be some way to have a farm without death. My dad, who's also a farmer, and said, honey, that's just a silly idea that someone has sold us. It doesn't exist. We're part of nature and there's gonna always be death in nature. The males are cast out and they can't be with all the females.

They.

Because you can't have that equilibrium that you were trying to have. And so the next day I said, somebody kill those boys. And so they. 23 drakes got turned into food that following day. And that was that first time that I had allowed that to happen. And the next big thing for me is the neighbor dogs came and killed my whole herd of baby doll sheep. We have, we had vineyard and hops, we grow hops as well. And were grazing these sheep in the vineyard and in the hops. They're very short, little stout sheep that can't get on their hind legs and they're good for grazing and orchards and stuff. And they got all killed by a neighbor, two neighbor dogs without any bite of them to be eaten. They didn't eat any part of it. And I was so frustrated and angry and they were still just had happened. And my husband just ran into action, got a gun, shot. The two that were still alive, he strung them up, he skinned them, he harvested as much as he could. And I remember thinking, wow, that's actually honoring their life so much more. And carload and carload. My husband is Mexican and he's worked in the restaurant industry in LA for his whole life. And carload after carload families showed up and we sent them with five gallon buckets of meat to take home and freeze. And because it was so many sheep all at one time, and I remember thinking, wow, that really actually was honoring their life more than if I had just dumped them in the compost pile. And that would have been fine too. It would have been part of the system. And so that's how I got to where I went from a vegan chef to a regenerative farmer. And then very recently what happened is I Switched my restaurants yesterday. We launched the new regenerative menu. And so the vegan community is super angry with me after 13 years of having these vegan restaurants in Los Angeles. And the larger community is kind of like, what's regeneration? What does that mean? Why does your hamburger cost $26? And so we're in this new territory and we had to sell our farm in California because of economic reasons. The restaurant industry in Los Angeles, we were closed down because of bad policies around Covid. And so we were shut down. No indoor dining for years. And so it was very hard to recover. So we sold our house at our farm and we moved to our land in Texas. And so we're doing larger scale regenerative agriculture in Texas in the Hill country. And we are also running our restaurants from here. And so that's a little background of how I went from vegan chef to regenerative cattle farmer in the Texas Hill Country.

So you do still have your restaurants in, in la.

I'm in my restaurant in LA right now. We launched the new menu yesterday and we're partnering with a bunch of great people. Stimple Creek and Force of Nature and Origins Regenerative Dairy out of Ohio. We've moved away from any seed oil. So we're using for the vegan option for oil, we're using 0 acres and we're using FatWorx 100% grass fed tallow as the meat option fryer. And then we're, you know, really open slats. Our pizza crust is open slats and all of that. So we really upgraded the level of the ingredients. Not just saying organic, but I, it's not every single thing is regenerative because it's not there yet. We're just not there. Even just to get all these items into my restaurant, we've had to create relationships with, okay, Cisco, can you bring this in? Or US Foods, can you bring this in? But I think that just by me doing this, other chefs are going to see it on their list and be like, oh, I could get regenerative flour. I could get fully pastured whole chickens from Big Bluff Ranch as we bring them into these systems. So it does take somebody saying, I'm going to do this so that other people then can just bring in one item or two items. So that's where we're at today. We're in day two of the first regenerative kitchen in Los Angeles, which was a vegan restaurant for the last 13 years.

So you've mentioned a couple of times that people are really Angry? What are they angry about? Where's the anger coming from? What is the frustration coming from? In other words? I guess the question I'm asking is what is the nature of the negative reactions that you're getting from people?

I believe that when someone is angry, we have to look at what they're committed to that's not happening, and to see their commitment, because usually when we're angry, it's because something that we expected has been thwarted, and we're committed to something that's different than what's happening. So I think that people are committed to the welfare of animals, and they don't actually see that by me supporting Force of Nature and Stimple Creek and Big Bluff Ranch and other regenerative farmers, I'm actually doing more for the welfare of animals than just not eating meat. But they cannot see that right now because they've been told the lie that we could just not eat meat and we're doing less harm. And that lie, I believed that lie too. And so I have to say that I understand that, that it feels real to them. And it's very confronting when we identify with something. If you identify with I am a Republican, I am a Democrat, I am a vegan, I am a blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. When we think our. Our identity is that thing that we're saying our identity is like in our heart and with God and. But when we identify with something outside and then information is pushing up against that identity, it feels like you have to defend your own self. You have to. It's almost like me saying after 46 years of not eating meat and 13 years of owning a vegan restaurant, me saying regenerative agriculture is far more important than not eating meat on your plate, that is pushing up against what feels like people's identity.

So, of course change is uncomfortable, and changing your identity is extremely uncomfortable. So what does the nature of the conversations look like? You have the opportunity to be in a very pivotal role and as a leader in this space in la, what does the communication look like and what does the messaging look like? In other words, how are you hoping to get your customers to a different place?

In full honesty, I'm going to lose some customers. Yesterday, people walked out of the restaurant, but I'm holding space for people's upset. I'm speaking with compassion and I'm reminding them that I too believed the things that they believe. And that wisdom is to believe something wholeheartedly. But when something else makes more sense, we must be willing to shift our belief. And that's the space I'm trying to hold. Do I get triggered when people say, I hope your kids die of cancer and a slow, terrible death? And I do feel frustrated when people say stuff like that because I also believe that we're children of God and our thoughts and our speech and our beliefs and our actions and our attitudes have energetic effect in the world. And so I'm wanting to be mindful of that. But all I can do is respond with love and continue to say, I'm still the same person and I still care about the welfare of animals. And I recognize that the way we're going with industrial agriculture, monocropping, and what I would call the degenerative organic system, as well as the traditional degenerative system is causing untold harm that is beyond anything that people can understand. Unless you're in the space and you're listening to all of the thought leaders and then connecting the dots between all these thought leaders. I have young, young children. I want my sons to be able to have children. I want my sons to be able to get married, make love with their wife and have a child in the natural and normal way. And the path that we're on doesn't include that.

Many people are unwilling to take a serious look at the trajectory that we're on from a fertility perspective and acknowledging the risks that exist. What is happening now? We are not at replacement birth rate now. When we look at the overall health epidemic that is happening in the U.S. and in Western civilization generally, but particularly in the U.S. one of the stats that really caught my attention and almost makes you want to vomit when you really think about it is that post 1980 children born post 1980 are not expected to outlive their parents.

But it's already happening. But it, it is. My husband's father died a couple like a month and a half ago, but his grandfather only died last year.

Right.

And so my grandmother died four years ago. I was pregnant with my third child and she passed away. And her oldest daughter Barbara died six months later. Grandma died at 96 and Barbara died of some lung disease that didn't exist, also barely existed. And I think it's from all the chemical stuff, they don't know it's untreatable. And she died, drowned, a terrible death. And at just 70. And so this is our. They're saying it for 1980, but I'm seeing it in my own family today where the kids are dying within six months, within a year. And interesting people are adding a clause to their will that says if their Children die within two years of them dying, that they like hold the money and then do it that way so that if someone just is going to die right away and it's not going to be utilized or whatever. My grandmother put it in because she knew Barbara was sick and didn't want like collection agencies or whatever. But people are even aware of this, that their children are dying. And there's new language going into wills about what happens to the money if someone dies in quick succession to their parents. It's very, very scary. And people are still of the mindset overpopulation. I have a fair amount of people on social media that follow and people are angry. When I had my third child, I'm now up to five, so. But how dare you and your husband. One for you and one for him. It's plenty. This is ridiculous. And at what point is. And conscious conception and all these things. And I'm of the belief it's not up to me. I'm of the belief that if God wants me to have more children, then I will and if I'm, if I'm done having children, I will not get pregnant and that it's not up to me to do anything about it. That's my belief. But. So I'm 46, I'm probably done, but I don't know. I don't, I don't know. I have a one year old that's still breastfeeding and I guess until my fertility comes back from breastfeeding, I will not know. But I've had kids in quick succession for the last 10 years. And I think that that's, I'm so grateful for that. I lived in Los Angeles in a city with higher levels of pollutants. I waited very long. I was grew up in that era where there was like almost an energy of you don't need a man and you can do anything he can do better. And I was very career oriented and I was very successful. And I'm just grateful to God every day that I didn't lose my opportunity for the greatest gift of my life, which is to be a mother. And that not only did I not lose my opportunity by having my first child at 37, I still was able to have a lot of children. And so I'm ultimately so grateful for that. But it's not that way for everybody. And I look around at my girlfriend group. I have a lot of girlfriends that I believe are not. They're in their 40s, they're not in relationships, and I don't believe that they're going to be able to have children, and I'm sad for that. I'm. I recognize who I was when I believed that my career was so valuable, important. But I cannot snuggle a career. I cannot look at my career with, like, the utmost pride and adoration. You just cannot. And even my. I have a big son that we adopted from Guatemala, and he was already a teenager when I adopted him. And I still have so much joy and pride from. He's so into regenerative agriculture. If you'll want to follow him, it's Osmar Journey. Every day he's moving the sheep and moving the goats and moving the cows, and he's just like, so inspired about it. And what are the chances that someone that grew up in Guatemala would find me in Los Angeles and I would be able to adopt them and they would be so inspired about this. And it's actually regenerative agriculture that brought us together because he came here as an unaccompanied minor to reunite with his parents, and he got sick. And so he Googled, can the USA food make you sick? He was having high blood pressure and he was having migraines and he was having high cholesterol. And he found Dr. Mark Hyman on the Internet and then he found John and Molly biggest little farm. And they said he was too young to volunteer. And apparently we didn't have an age limit on our volunteer days. And so he showed up for a volunteer day on my farm during the pandemic and he never left. He essentially, he left that day and then came back the following weekend and never left. And we ended up adopting him and going through court and everything. And I'm his legal mother now. But what are the chances that he. That his biggest, greatest passion in life is regenerative agriculture and he would find me and I would adopt him. So all versions of motherhood that I have, I'm so grateful for, but there was a really good chance that I would not have that. And so not only do we have the fertility issue to deal with on the that we're not on replacement rate, we also have the cultural conversation that's not really preparing women for motherhood and the surrender that it takes to be a mother. And the truth is, we cannot be a great career woman and a great mother. I know that I'm short of a great mother and I'm short of a great restaurant owner because I'm doing both, and I don't really have a choice. I was already doing one thing when I started doing the other thing. And economically, we couldn't just stop it. But we aren't raising our daughters to say the surrender of motherhood is the greatest gift and the greatest sacrifice that you're ever going to make. And we're not preparing them for that. Even the slogan my body, my choice, whether you, whatever side you stand on abortion, that slogan is the opposite of motherhood.

It's a very selfish perspective. Yeah.

This morning I've changed diapers, wife butts, made love with my husband, and, you know, all before I could take a shower or drink a sip of coffee. Like, my body is belongs to the commons of my family. It has nothing to do with my body, my choice. I have a teething baby. Like, there's nothing about my choice. It's all about her. We're raising people to think that if anything is uncomfortable, you shouldn't have to do it. And the reality is, is, like, everything is uncomfortable. Everything worth doing is uncomfortable. Comfort is a silly thing to chase. And so when it comes to the fertility thing, it's not just that we're destroying our chemically, castrating all of us with all of the chemicals. We're also not training men to stick by no matter what. And women, the level of sacrifice that is required.

Wow, Molly, I think that must be approaching. Approaching the limit of, of the monologue that's been on the podcast. But. But it was wonderful. No, it was good. That's why. Why I let you coast. It was good. And I. I will just. I will just summarize simply by saying that I don't readily express a lot of the cultural sentiments that you're describing because I come from a very different cultural background, but I'm in very much in alignment with what you are describing. You know, we started this conversation on several occasions. You made comment about the negative reactions that you are getting from your historical customer base. And I'd like to flip that around. What are some of the positive reactions that you've been getting from both from your customer base, but perhaps from other people in your community as well? What have the positive aspects of the shift look like? And maybe it's too early to tell yet.

No, there's been some different. A bunch of people have said, like, we were vegan and that you were our special spot and my first date. And then I stopped, what, moved away from seed oils, so we stopped eating there. And now we're so excited to be able to come back and get tallow fries. Or we're so excited that you've added meat to the menu because we're eating meat. And other people have reached out and said, I never eat out anymore because I do eat meat. But I. I really want it to be of the level of quality that I believe. I only want to give my money to what I believe in. I want to vote with my dollars. And thank you for giving me the opportunity to do that in a dining out experience, because I miss that. And so all of those have been positive. There's a. A woman. The real foodologist, I think, is her podcast, Courtney Swan. She came and we did a little video right in front of the restaurant, just saying why I was changing. I believe that regenerative agriculture is better for everyone, including the animals. And I mean, it went viral, like, 400,000 views. And the responses were both, you know, upset and also just, thank you. Thank you for speaking up. I'm surprised how many people have said it's courageous, because I don't know that I think it's courageous. If I had done it when we were doing $7 million a year and I was flourishing, that would have been courageous. Right now, when my back is against the wall and I'm trying to survive, it's not that courageous. Honestly, I should have done it sooner. And I was afraid. In. In all honesty, I was afraid. And my. My biggest, I guess, gift in my entrepreneurialness is that I can be afraid and still take the next step. And so that's what I'm doing.

Yeah, I'm smiling because the position that you describe is exactly the position that many farmers first begin develop to develop an interest in regenerative ag is when their back is against the figurative wall and they have to figure out a different pathway forward. So, yes, there is still something to lose. And yet, on the other hand, if you continue down the pathway that you're on, you have a much higher probability of losing.

Yes.

Time to try something different. Speaking of trying something different, I do want to get into some of the agriculture and farming aspects as well. But you've mentioned on a couple of occasions that you have eliminated or are in the process of eliminating seed oils. And this is. My wife is a very gifted natural health practitioner, and I spend paying fairly close attention. Well, I've been passionate about food issues since the beginning. But for those who are less familiar with the conversation around seed oils, and this is a topic that might be uncomfortable for some farmers, because, after all, we grow hundreds of thousands of acres of canola and sunflower and mustard, and kind of the list goes on and on. What are the challenges with seed oils?

Well, my understanding is it's mostly in the processing like that, something like a sesame seed. You can just press it and you can see that there's oil in it. But some of these processes are very industrial. And the product that's coming out is not really food anymore. And it's causing a lot of issues inside of the body. It's also calcifying our pineal gland, causing cataracts and eye degeneration. And I think that I have some. I had 2020 eyesight my whole life and had a pretty sharp decline at 40 in my eyesight. And I think it's from years of eating vegan food that's filled with oils. It's also causing clogging, although we were told for many, many years that it doesn't clog, clog your arteries. There's a lot of evidence now showing that the seed oils are what's clogging our arteries and causing buildup of plaque. And if you look at the Western A price stuff, there's many stuff that's showing the amount of animal fats and animal proteins that a kid is getting, the better their teeth are. And I have an unfortunate experiment where I have two kids where I was vegan during the pregnancies and two kids that were not. And so I'm seeing it play out in real time. And I think it's true that unfortunately, I think that my two older kids are going to need braces and my two younger kids probably not. And then you look at when we brought in the first seed oils, it was after World War. I don't know which one, but it.

Was Second World War.

It was the Industrial Revolution. We had all of this essentially lubricant and motor oil that we needed to figure out what to do with now that we weren't at war. And so Crisco was invented in these other kind of fat alternatives. And there was huge amounts of financial push behind them to say that they were healthier and to not eat lard and to not eat tallow. And we switched. But if you look at the health decline from then to now, it's terrible. And you can see that it's not just one thing. Seed oils, excessive vaccinations, the spraying of wartime chemicals on our foods, all of these things happened kind of in conjunction with each other. And they kind of. It was like one in the 50s, and then the 60s and then the 70s, and you can see that our health decline and then to the 80s. And then in 1996, we started spraying Roundup prior to harvest There all of those things. You can look at any kind of chart of our health. And so is it any one of those things? Like, people will say it's the vaccines, people will say it's the seed oils, people will say it's the. The agricultural chemicals.

We are products of our ecosystem, it's the entire ecosystem, but it's all of.

Those things combined that we've stopped eating foods in their whole form. And so I like to think about it that if we could just get back to eating things the way they were. So if olives, you can just press them and get the oil out of them. I grow, I did grow olives before I sold my place in California. You could go to the press and they literally put it through and you could taste the olive oil. It's just, it's no extra steps. You know, when you see something like that, okay, that's just a fairly whole food. But when you have to refine it and centrifuge, and we're really not eating a whole food in the way that nature gave it to us. And so my approach to health and to the new menu is that I'm trying to get more and more foods to be just in their whole form that you can imagine. I can imagine what a cow looks like. And this is the knuckle of the cow cut into carne asada. Okay, I could imagine what kale looks like growing. And now this is sauteed with lemon and garlic. But not things that are no longer recognizable because they're just one component code. It pulled out of the natural thing. That's what I'm trying to get to, because I think that there's no way that that's not healthier. You can look at the ecosystem, I look at the field and the farm, and you can see that everything is healthy based on eating the things they're supposed to eat in nature.

When you were describing the transition of the restaurant and all the direct outreach that you made directly to farms and to. To your other providers, Cisco and so forth, you mentioned that there are a number of ingredients or a number of pieces that you simply are unable to source as of this point. And so within, within that context, what are some of the opportunities that you see? What are some of the pieces that just you. You haven't been able to source in the, in the mainstream supply chain at this point.

Rice. We have organic rice from Lundberg, California or Texas, but not. Or not regenerative. And then I'm looking for a mayonnaise with no seed oils that Comes in food service sizes. They exist. It exists in small jars, but it doesn't exist in big sizes, in food service sizes. And then the regenerative dairy space is really small and it almost maybe needs to be small. I actually think that the dairy. In order to do dairy regeneratively, we actually have to move to a smaller decentralized system likely. I'm sure there's people doing it big. I'm not talking bad about anybody, but I know we move our dairy cows every day and we walk them out to wherever the rest of the heifers are or the open girls are and then walk the girls back. And that takes labor. It takes. You can't. I don't know that you could do it on a huge scale. I only have about 30 dairy cows and so and we're maybe have 10 or whatever in milk at a time, but we walk them from whatever paddock that they're at back to the milking room or my other idea is that if we could do change the laws so you could milk because you could have a mobile milking room just like you have a mobile chicken hut or whatever. But it's not legal to sell the milk that way. But I do think that to do dairy really regeneratively that we need some. Either law changes or we need to make it smaller and decentralized. But so cream cheese, regenerative cream cheese in a food service size. And regenerative flour I'm getting from Oatman's Flats, but they're all whole grain. And for pizza I need to like cut it with a white flour. So I would need a. Right now we're just using organic from Italy for the pizza and then cutting it with the Oatmen's Flats flour. So those are some of the things. And with our beer, we're really working on getting other breweries to care about regenerative and organic because to do a molting process, we need a lot of grain to be. They're not going to just do a little bit.

So when you look at the challenges that you're seeing on the supply chain as a chef and also with your perspective as a farmer, where do you see the opportunities in farming? It sounds to me like your attraction to the farming space was not just purely economics driven, but also driven to an extent, I suppose you could say by the word idealism. But there, I'm sure there's probably a better word, but by a sense of the opportunity and the need that is, that is present in that space. But where do you see the opportunities for existing farmers across the country to transition and to have a significant impact and to have. Have a significant market?

I mean, I think that in the meat market, obviously, I think that that's an easier lift, like moving the animals every day. And if someone's already doing, like, for example, my neighbor in Texas, he has like thousands of acres that he has a lease on, and he only has about 50 cows and the way he's doing it and then the cow calf, so then once they have babies as a hundred and then. But he could have so many more cows if he moved his cows every day and he did some regenerative practices and. But he kind of just leaves them there for three months and then leaves them there for three months and leaves them there for three months and leave. So I think that the meat market obviously is a lot of space, but the grain area, I think is huge and could be really huge. And not just because you can integrate animals in through the winter and have it be regenerative, but also as people are waking up to what it is to have so much Roundup in our diet, I think if we can market the grains as been tested for no glyphates or whatever parts per million below, I think that mothers are starting to wake up to that and wanting that.

At the beginning of our conversation, you mentioned your customers at the restaurant asking the question is, why does your hamburger cost $26? And I have a kind of a group of questions that is wrapped around this. What are the implications for you as leading chef and restaurateur in the LA area? What is your potential to shift the marketplace dynamics in that local region and across a broader region as well? And then kind of related to that question. Let's pause there, and I'd love to get your reaction to that. How do you see the market evolving and shifting in response to the work that you are doing? What does the future look like?

Well, if we can survive, I think that the.