Anya Fernald | Belcampo: Ethical Meats & Immunity For A Healthy Body & Planet | Wellness Force

When you look at immunity, you're looking at wellness. Immunity is about peak optimal performance that your body is, your needs are met, you're not stressed and anxious, you're able to focus on the issues. I think that animal wellness supports that in terms of providing nutrient dense food that's optimally nutrient dense and with minimal inflammation. Our immune system is compromised when we're inflamed and inflammation comes from primarily junk that's in our food. We tend to blame the food, but it's more, I think the junk that's in our food. So that's like my sense on it is like eating clean, high density, high nutrient density foods is good and anti inflammatory. And that's probably the strongest line I could connect between meat and immunity. It's Josh Trent, Wellness Force.

Anya Fernald, welcome to Wellness Force. Welcome to Facebook Live as well.

Thank you for having me, Josh.

We had some tech issues and now we are here live. I'm so excited. Wherever you guys are watching from, let us know in the comments. And if you are in your car right now listening or if you are on YouTube watching us, let us know there too, because this is a global conversation. This is a big one. Anya, I have been looking forward to this for like three months. We've been planning and pivoting and like, here we are. You have created something so special with Bel Campo. And if people don't even know anything about Bel Campo and you're in an elevator with someone, what would you turn to them? If you're wearing a Bel Campo shirt, what's. What's the clean and just simple way you'd explain what Bel Campo even is? Meat.

You can feel great about eating.

Pretty clean. And I love. It's a really short one. Yeah, it's like a one floor thing. So people know you across the world. You know, you're an entrepreneur, you're a chef. In your background was cheese making as well, which we're going to dig into your story. I loved seeing you on Iron Chef. I hadn't watched the Food Network and I was prepping for this show and I saw how much you've been in the media. But one thing I love about you, you have been able to keep your feet on the ground in an industry, let's face it, media, that's not exactly always genuine. What is that about your character and about what you believe in for this world that allows you to operate like in the media world, but stay true to you.

So I think my superpower is courage. Ever since I was a little kid, I have been very comfortable being myself. So courage not in like charging into the fire, but courage in like I'm really comfortable being myself. And I remember as a little kid, even my older sister wouldn't walk to school with me because I used to collect antique hats and I used to wear different hats to school every day. And she was like, I'm too embarrassed to walk to school with you. And I was like, that's cool.

So you've always marched to the beat of your own specific.

Well, I kind of, I just remember that little conversation and being like, well, this is sort of what it is. And I've been nonconformist to some degree, but I think I've had a lot of courage to do what I, what felt right in my heart. I haven't always in life. There's definitely been times when I've fallen down sort of rabbit holes of decisions related to answering to other people's priorities or doing what seemed cool or, you know, so. But I think in, you know, I've had the benefit of being early in to many things that are now really relevant and being early into artisan handcrafted food, being early into kind of like authentic bas wellness early into farming. I mean, when I became a farmer first Post College was 1999, there was nothing of what we talk about now of like the back to the land kind of next generation.

You were doing it way before it was cool. I think it's really cool to be artisan now. I've seen that word be kind of abused when something's artisan, but that's more OG where you actually knew you were traveling for a long time. Way before you ever founded Del Campo in Italy, you were doing really unique cheese making. Like there's a rich background for you. Can you give us the highlights from whatever is conscious for you today? Like whatever highlights really light you up about your past today. Can you share that with us before we have this pivotal conversation about eating ethical meats and immunity?

You know, it was, I think back to that time in my life and it was just being on the quest for learning and chasing after things that seemed interesting and that freedom that allowed me to build. I also remember really struggling. I moved to Europe when I was 22. I ended up staying there for eight years. I became fluent in Italian. I became the director of a microfinance fund in northern Italy. But I clawed my way into that and fought for it. I ended up then moving back to the US and starting my first business in 2006. But it was a Journey that was not without a lot of just struggle, you know, being alone, not knowing a language, being afraid. You know, being a young woman. I only had a folding bicycle when I first moved there. I didn't get a car till a couple years in getting around being in dairies, learning to make, you know, learning really handcrafted food making, working in, like, artisan dairies without knowing the language, and then getting ramped up. But all that stuff. It's like, I recently I've been thinking about that time of, like, well, you still have that, and that's kind of the thing that's carried you forward. And the more that I can return to that element of my personality, the better off I am. But, yeah, it was about just questing, growing, and then having this personal health shift as well. You know, I moved to Italy as a. And I wasn't that into Italy. And, you know, I now, of course, have a lot of connections there. But it wasn't like some, like, romantic. I read under the Tuscan Sun. I want to go there. It was literally like.

It wasn't like, eat, pray, love. You weren't having a moment like that. This is.

I wasn't having, like, some big romance. It was like, I can't be in the US Because I didn't feel like there was anything that appealed to me to do. I was ambitious, but in a weird way. And I wasn't looking for money. I was looking for things that were just amazing experiences, and I wanted to feel really good. I'm a really sensual person. I love eating good food. I love cooking. I love smell. So I moved there and it was like I had this really incredible health shift. I felt. Well, I, you know, I didn't have any struggles with moodiness. Lots of little things that had plagued me as a teenager, like dry skin and split ends and like, you know, cavities. Like, stuff, like, kind of evaporated that it felt like they were forever part of my life. So there's a lot of changes that supported that. But more than anything, it was just, like, stimulating, amazing. You know, it's like I would go foraging on the weekends with my friends for herbs, not because they were like, let's try foraging. That was like a big calorie source where I lived in Sicily, wild herbs. And I got incredible wellness in that time of my life, too. So it just. It was like. It was. It was really deep nutrition.

We can learn so much from Europeans. They live life in such a different way. Specifically when I went. When I spent time in Sicily. Sicily and the hills and the wine in Italy, even southern Italy. So did you speak Italian? And can you share with us here in America, especially now with people in food deserts, what's so different about what you learned there when it comes to slow food and that movement and the understanding of what food actually means to our physical, emotional and spiritual health.

The concept fundamentally is that good food is simple and good food isn't like fancy chef y. Good food is simple, really good ingredients, what we might call clean. I would define that broadly as one, slower growing. Two. Micronutrient rich soils. Three, mindfulness around consumption. That's how I would now with the lens of today's wellness Anya mentality. It's really those things, plants and animals that grow very slowly at a traditional healthy rate. Right. Different from humans now. Right. Girls in the US go through puberty starting at 7 now compared to 13.

Yeah. And a lot of the chemicals that are in food, which later on in this conversation we're going to touch on. Not, not to mention the scary things I've heard you discuss about chickens and bleaching, the way they do things where you learn when you were doing artisan cheese making, you know, fresh out of school, those 10 years for you, when you look back on that, like, what's the things you pulled from that that make you a great leader now for Bill Campo?

Well, again, it's like getting back to trusting your intuition. And I'd say the times that I've been most astray in my life is when I didn't follow my gut on things. So having the confidence to trust your intuition, speaking your truth. Right. Being high integrity. Now, there are many different ways to lead, Josh. Like I personally have. I've seen companies come to massive valuations and massive success and read about their leadership and as anything but high integrity. But I feel a huge amount of confidence as a mission driven leader saying we're doing this because it's the right thing to do. Right. That feels really good to me. And I can say that with a lot of courage and a lot of myself. So from my perspective, the best way to lead is around a mission that you can then use as your backdrop and your justification. So it's not like what is Anya want? It's is this the right thing in light of our mission, is this the right thing to do? And that kind of has a heft and an ability to coalesce.

That's very different because you saw how things naturally were powerful when they were meant to be, where it was very simple. You mentioned the three Things earlier, that was what you really cut your teeth on when you were doing cheese making and when you were stepping into the culinary world in the early 2000s. So there's pieces of that that are still present. Like we can still have that here. We just have to reassociate the way we spend our money, the kind of attention we put on food, like revolutionizing meat to be well being for people and our planet is a massive conversation. We've had conversations with Rob Wolf a couple times in the show about this point with his sacred cow work. What is it for you that's really like the stake in the ground where you just will not sacrifice, no matter how much pain or torment the company yourself has to go through. Like, what's the stake in the ground for you and Bel Campo when it comes to the ethical use of animals for feeding humans in a closed organic cycle?

Well, the most important thing is animals outdoors. If I was to look at from a fundamental integrity perspective, it's animals being raised outdoors is the key piece of health. Everything flows from there. You can be organic, you can be certified humane, you can have other layers on top of that. But to support human wellness, evolutionarily, it's supported by animal wellness. We need to look at systems that allow animals to live in an evolutionary context and live in a way that's in line with their own evolution.

30,000 acres is what you have. 30,000 acres. I think there's six or seven different species you grow on the farms.

Yes.

This is the way nature intended it to be. Nature has this amazing wisdom. We just get to trust her. And I don't care if it comes to human health or food or the way that we can get vitamin D through our skin. Like, there's a lot of people that fight against this. And I'm not here to be anti anything. I'm here to be pro human wellness, just like you. But it brings me back to this, this fight between ethical consumption of meat and people that don't believe in eating meat. You were actually pregnant at one point. You were giving a talk and PETA comes up to you and you felt in the moment like they were going to assault you. Like, it was a very confronting moment. Can you share that? Because that's really the dichotomy of people's belief systems that are kind of grinding on one another right now. When it comes to ethical me, that's so hard.

I had about two years where I was a real target for PETA and it involved, you know, isolating me and trying to threaten Me at a talk and I was nine months pregnant and it surrounded me. It was really, really aggressive.

And was your partner with you too? Was.

No, I was, I was on, I was by myself. Like they moved me off the state. It was a very, it was a very sinister, very sinister thing. And then they, you know, they weren't going to hit me or anything, but they were just asking me like, would you eat your dog? And I'm like, I'm not going to eat a carnivore. That would be really dumb from a, you know, pathogen perspective, not evolutionary.

They probably didn't know what to do with that.

They were like carnivores because pathogens are really. Anyways, they were like, you know, yeah.

She's like, why are you bringing us the science? We're just angry.

But anyways, that's just an aside where I like, I've never eat a carnivore, but I, you know, and then it also was coming into my restaurants with a megaphone and yelling my name at peak times on Saturday nights for like a year. So I managed to wind that down through some pretty aggressive work on my end. But I'd say that all that taught me was, you know, I actually just have a lot of empathy. I think that that movement is trying to do the right thing. And I think I'm actually, I think I understand why I'm a threat and I understand that they'd be happy to see me fail. At the same time, I think my success is their success. I think we're fighting for the same thing.

How so?

I'm fighting for the end of confinement animal agriculture. And my way of fighting for it is offer a viable alternative that doesn't involve eating hyper processed soy or other GMO crops or whatever. And, or you know, basically I'm fighting for an alternative that, that checks all the boxes that you can feel great about that doesn't involve not eating meat. They're fighting for just not any meat. But we're fighting for the same thing, which is that. And we're, you know, I'm tiny, tiny, tiny operator. 3,000 acres sounds like a lot. It's nothing. Cows eat a lot of grass and our land is very low value, doesn't have a lot of grass on it. So it's not like a massive herd. Right. So the numbers sound big, but I'm a tiny player. And we're as a movement, the whole grass fed and finished movement in the US is still like less than 1%. We're both fighting that 99% and many of the messages that the vegan movement says are 1000% correct. Confinement Agriculture uses obscene and inappropriate amounts of water. Confinement agriculture relies on genetically modified, highly, basically carbohydrate, intensive and maladaptive and sickening foods for animals. This is all true. That's what they say. And this is all true. So from my perspective, it's like I don't. I don't really see us as at odds. And although I've been in moments when I'm angry or I've felt afraid, personally, I don't feel like we're fighting vastly different battles.

Yeah, that's a really beautiful way to describe. I haven't necessarily felt it the way you articulated it because there is these camps of division. And right now, especially with the COVID and the mask wearing in the division. Are you republican? Are you democrat? None of this stuff actually matters when it comes to humans connecting with other humans. And how is the original way we will connect? And we have connected forever. It's around a fire eating food. So we have come so far away from that. Like, we have strayed so far away from our roots. How is bel campo doing this from, like a social perspective where, you know, you're educating people about the value of this? Obviously, we know, and that's why we're so excited to lock arms with you. Like, we love what you're doing. You were introduced to me by a friend, Mike salemi. He know. He knows you very well. And so that's what brought us together. We trust and love mike. He's been on the show a couple times, so our audience and our community already knows him. But from that social fabric, from that social perspective, what's your narrative? What's bel campo's narrative? To bring people back to the fire, back to the table, so we can do things in original, organic way again.

I think a lot of our food today requires you to kind of picture nose and not pay attention. If you think about how we shop in the grocery stores today, we shop with no sense of smell. Everything that we're buying is from a bag and sealed. So we can't smell it, we can't touch it. We can't use our biggest superpower, which is our sense of smell, our sense of taste, Our ability to use, our sensory evaluation tools to evaluate food are taken away from us by the way that food is marketed. Right. So what I'm trying to do is to create a product that smells amazing, that has a great story, that's something you want to connect around and that you feel good about. It's not something shameful that you're putting in your body as fuel. And that's one challenge I have for the kind of wellness and health movement now is this like simplification of food as fuel, of protein, as protein powder. Those things have a role and I get it. I've used them myself. There's moments and things, but we're to the point where that's almost playing the aggregate industrial gain. Right. It's not a far leap to say you make the hyper processed cornflakes. Those don't do very well anymore. Toggle pivot, put some hyper processed protein powder out there. Right. They're all kind of the same components. Right. So I think the real act of resistance is to add mindfulness to food. Add cooking to food. Bring your wellness full circle. Engage your smell. Learn to cook. Taste while you cook. Eat meat that's so clean that you can eat it raw and you're not freaked out about it being dirty.

I want to go back to what you said. It's so good when you said to PETA, you're like, I wouldn't eat a carnivore. Just from a pathogen perspective. Can you expand on that too? Because a lot of people don't realize it's probably not the best thing to eat a tiger, tiger meat or dog meat or things that eat meat. It's probably not something that you want to consume.

Well, it's no accident that the most commonly common meat to not eat is pig, which is very carnivorous omnivore, given the chance.

Right.

And things like turkeinosis or, you know, porcine disease, which is totally related to similar kind of food stuff. So basically the idea with that is that if we eat carnivorous animals, we're going to be eating animals that have a very similar microbiome to us. And so parasites that thrive, pathogens, anything that thrives in their bodies would also thrive in ours. Um, so if you're, if you're concerned about, I mean, just from an evolutionary perspective, a, these are going to be harder animals to get a hold of. Right. So they're not. The exertion to, to caloric yield ratio is going to be off. So that's one thing. But the bigger thing is that, you know, if you were to eat a fox, you're going to be exposed to like a lot of worms and things like that that thrive in carnivores. And that's more why we don't eat foxes than that. They're hard to catch. Okay. So when we eat ruminants, or animals are primarily eating low calorie, high volume, low nutrient density grasses. Totally different microbiome, totally different pathogens that of course their meat can have things on it if it's maltreated, like salmonella, that can make you sick. Right. But in terms of actual pathogen transfer, it's going to be much lower load. So it's a similar microbiome as evolutionary humans, we ate a lot of protein and so we're predator species. So it's just a basic, basic rule of nutrition is you eat things that are more dissimilar from you genetically because of the pathogen crossover perspective.

Your education, your knowledge, your expertise is so profound because especially coming from someone who used to herself be a vegan, this was a way of life that you followed for how long? It was a good segment of your life, right?

Yeah, I was a vegetarian for almost a decade.

In that decade, was that the decade that caused you the skin issues? Is that why you went out to Italy from that?

Yeah, I mean, so I had, I started, I remember I was like, right, probably like early adolescence and it was the time of the Ethiopian famines and there was all these pictures of really emaciated Ethiopian kids in the news and I, I learned about it and it's like they're shipping grain and there wasn't enough grain to get there. And I read around the same time that it was 12 pounds of grain to make one pound of beef or one pound of meat. So I just stopped eating meat because I'm like, well, 12 pounds of grain. And then of course, years later I realized that's you don't need to feed them grain. Cows actually take the world's worst food stuff for humans, grass, and turn it into really high quality protein for humans. Right. That's something I figured out later on. But at the time it was like, cows eat grain, that's how they eat. And then if you eat the meat, that's not an efficient use of resources from a caloric perspective. So I made that choice and I really struggled. I gained weight, I had a hard time with energy, I struggled with depression. And then in college I became a competitive athlete. I was a rower. And as part of that I had to reintroduce some protein, but it was just lots of hard boiled eggs and cheese and stuff, still staying away from meat. I was also very interested in cooking, so I got into cheese making because I was baking. I worked as a baker for a year and then I started to make traditional biscuits and shortbreads and using whey in things like In a lot of traditional American cooker, I kind of go deep when I get into something. And so I got into traditional American breads and those use whey. So I started making cheese to be able to make my own whey. You know, whey, not as in like whey protein, but the stuff that's like.

The whey from the cow.

Yeah, whey from the cow, the albumin protein, stipulated album protein and water. It's a great baking ingredient. So I started to make cheese to make that. And then from there I was like, this is really fun. And I didn't start really introducing meat, reintroducing meat until I moved to Italy. And I think there's a whole suite of things that happened because I, you know, working in dairies, I get up at 2 in the morning or 3 and start milking and I basically fast until like, you know, for the first 10 hours of the day and then eat like 3000 calories of like salami and cheese. And that, you know, that diet worked really well for me and my mood improved. I was just on an even keel and the same way I am today, which is cool cucumber, I can kind of hold it together. I wasn't like that before when I was eating more. And I also would say hey to the people watching who are making vegetarian choices in their life. I also probably wasn't doing a very well informed vegetarian diet. I wasn't particularly well educated in that. I wasn't really paying attention to my macros or whatever it might be. So I wouldn't say I really nailed it with the vegetarian diet. I also am an O blood type. I know I thrive with a lot of protein. So it just, for me that worked really well. This is to say that I'm not anti vegetarian. I think it does work great for some people. It didn't work well for me and a lot of my, all of my vital signs improved and continue to improve. My got more and more aggressive on the animal protein through my 30s and 40s. And it started when I moved back from Italy. I started to, I had a real taste for meat. I ate a lot of raw meat because in northern Italy, where I lived for the second part of my time there, you eat raw meat at almost every dinner. And I lived in the. Where I used to live was a courtyard of a house and there was a butcher shop in the front of the courtyard. So I'd get like raw sausage there, raw beef. So every day I was eating raw beef and I loved it and I was like lean. I Felt amazing. It was like this. It was a great optimal performance time of my life. Came back to the US Gained a bunch of work weight, felt lethargic, had brain fog, was grumpy, waking up, feeling like I couldn't get out of bed. All those things. I'm like, oh, this is just me in college again. And just happened when I moved back here. So when I wanted to kind of clean out my diet after a few months of that, where I was like, peace out, this sucks, I started. My first choice was buy a cow and buy a whole cow that's produced the way that I know will make me better. And that's what I did. And that's like the sort of genesis of my Bel Campo road was buying my own beef back in 2006. And then I scaled that up. I set up a meat buying collaborative. I did a couple different things in a baby way with that. I also started buying and butchering pigs. I learned how to butcher. I got really hands on with it because it was also fun. And it was kind of like at the time I was starting some. I built and sold two smaller businesses in that time, and it was a way to kind of keep me connected to the. To the manuality of food that I love. Right? So it was. It was an exploration, but it was also like, gosh, this is so different than what I can find at the grocery store, and I feel so much better. And it's priced really well. It's like, why isn't this scaled? You know, why isn't there any way for anybody who's not like, got all this get up? I mean, I ran a produce company at the time, so I had refrigerated vans and I could cart a cow around town. Like, I had all these. These tools at my disposition. And I didn't, you know, you can't do that easily. So it was like there was a challenge where it's like, man, what if there was a way to make this type of product available at a wider scale?

And it is totally possible too. It's just a reappropriation of funds. There are, like, think of people that have $1,000 iPhone, or people that spend $200 a month on cable TV. There are costs. There are hidden costs when it comes to food. And one of the things I'd love for you to unpack is like, when we really look at the truth about organic, we've done a lot of content, but from your expertise, what is the real truth about organic? What are the hidden costs of not eating organic? Because People see the label. Oh my God. Organic is so expensive. Grass fed is so expensive. But on a practical and pragmatic level, also a spiritual level, what is the real truth of conventional versus organic?

That's a great question. First off, in my own household, in my own body, there are certain things that I will never eat if they are not organic. Those are anything that has a very thin skin and no protective exterior membrane. Something like a blueberry. Never going to eat a non organic blueberry. Never going to eat a non organic strawberry avocado. No problem. I'll eat a non organic avocado corn occasionally. Sure. It's got a husk, right? So it's like if there's a cabbage that's not organic, I'll peel off the exterior ones and do it. It's not going to be my everyday choice. I try to buy 100% organic. But just be rational. The thinner the membrane and the sweeter what's inside, the more careful you need to be about organic. Why? Well, a, anything that's sweeter is going to have a higher attraction for pests. Okay. And then you see this too, right? Like we see the difference in size. It's like there's the organic sweet potatoes and then there's the non organic sweet potatoes. Well, why are. If they're organic and they have all these great nutrients and stuff, why aren't they the bigger ones? Right. That's the question. And the answer is. Well, it's like it's a suppression of all stress. Right? There's no, there's, there's no predation. Right. Those plants are. And it's also a huge availability of chemical nitrogen. Those two things together cause these big. But the nutritional value is much lower.

Right.

So I'd rather have the smaller fruit that's sweeter and high nutrient density if I'm going to eat a piece of fruit. So. But just like the rule of thumb, if you're at the grocery store and someplace random, you can't. You're off your game. Just don't eat anything with a thin skin that's not organic. In meat, you got this amazing animal that is great at processing and filtering out toxicity. It's got all these organs that can take all the wooju and like figure it out and poop it out and do that. Right. So are you going to get glyphosate in your body from eating a cow to eat GMOs? No way. The cows, you know, it's an incredible. You couldn't make a machine that did a better job at filtering out toxicity and things than a cow. Right. So there's zero risk. It's not like eating a non organic versus organic blueberry where you're going to get X, Y and Z terrible endocrine disrupting chemicals. If you opt for the non organic version, that is not the risk. Eating the organic animals is more about being the change you want to see in the world.

That's right. That's really what, that's what hits home the most when we look at plants versus animals is that if you are.

Looking for what's meaningful in animals, it's being outside. Is it meaningful because it's woo and the right thing to do? Yes. Okay. But it's also meaningful because those animals grow much more slowly and they're under a lot less stress. That's important for your health too. Slower growing muscle protein has much higher density of protein. Our chickens have 20% more protein per ounce than a conventional chicken. Our chicken breasts on our animals have 20 times the collagen of a conventional chicken breast. And they're not tough, they're tender. But animals that are moving their wings because they're outside, they're getting more collagen. So is that great for your skin? Yeah. I mean those are good things for you to be beautiful and resilient and it's great protein to have. But it's like protein's not protein.

Right.

So our, our chicken breasts have 20 times the collagen. I mean it, they have as much as a cup, actually two cups of bone broth and a single chicken breast from Bel Campo because of the increased mobility. So they, it's like if I'm looking at the hierarchy of what to pay attention to in the grocery store, all of your soft fruits, zucchini, your blueberries, we talked about strawberries, anything that's in that lettuce, get that stuff organic, get it local. Great meat. Focus on being animals, being outside. And the word you're looking for is pastured or grass fed and grass finished. Another way that that said is 100% grass fed. So that's what you're looking for there. From a health perspective then the nice next level on that is if you're getting that product that's already been outside for us all its life, get it from an organic farm if you can afford it. Because that's going to be those change you want to be in the world which is pure nitrogen based. And it's also farmers that are able to offer more traceability, to have better record keeping. It's a great Movement. And I get this a lot. I can't afford to be organic. I get it. It's not for everybody. We're a big operation. We have an accounting office and compliance people who can help us with a lot of. I have some real resources that a lot of other firms haven't had, and we have real scale. So some of the stuff that I can opt to do. Am I going to say this is a must have for everybody else? No, But I think animals being outside and practicing regenerative agriculture, which is unfortunately not a very well known term yet, those are the key things that I'm looking for in protein.

That's powerful. I think about poly face farms and Joel Salatin, which we got to get him on the show, too, because whether it's Zach Bush or whether it's Anya Fernald or whether it's Joel Salatin, you're all really putting a stake in the ground for. Can we just let things be the way that they were designed? Can we stop trying to get in the way and use our ego? Honestly, for me, it's a bit of hubris and egotism that we think we know better than Mother Earth herself. Like, it really shocks me at times the way people can just disconnect from the eternal wisdom that is presented to us every single day. And on your farms, how do you see this playing out? Like, is it possible, Anya, to scale what you're doing across the United States? If so, how?

Well, I want to revisit what you're talking about earlier, too, in that of, like, I think the most common medicine in the US is antacid, right?

Yes.

The majority of men take antacid.

Most people have GI issues, period.

So talk about, like, the sort of, like, basics, right? Which is that we should pay attention to the basics. And if our body's saying, hey, this food's making me sick.

Also check the toilet. How's your poop? I mean, we all poop.

Okay, so there's a real willful disregard of the data. The data sample size of one. Your own body, your own life, Right? Like, it's the most. I mean, it's the most compelling thing to me. I mean, that's like, actually why I adopted a mostly meat diet, or more meat than I used to. It's like, because my GI feels my. My gut feels great when I do that. It sometimes gets a little boring. But, like, I. My physical health is so much better that I don't really need a lot of data. It's like, hey, I feel amazing. I have all the Energy I need like, like use your own intuition and, and your own body and your own performance. Right? And then a question around, what's the scalability? I recently read that the third largest greenhouse gas emitter is meat that we throw away. We throw away 40% of meat that's produced in America right now we overproduce using animals raised in torture fed non sustainable extractively farmed grains and inputs. So you have to look bigger picture. It's like, could bel campo be 50 million acres and feed America? I don't know, honestly, like they're probably somebody not me could figure that out. But could there also be some basics? Like what about we don't throw away almost half of the meat that we produce? And what about we, instead of producing it really cheap and then not valuing it, throwing it away, what if we charge 50% more and then we could afford to feed them grass? There's some really basic things that are out of whack and I think I actually really stand up for my pricing. Our ground beef is 9.99 a pound. Okay, that's expensive ground beef, but it's not $19.99 a pound. And it's produced in a way that's radically and demonstrably better for the environment. And it's a product that I can stand behind and you can feel great about. It's like all these massive benefits to that. And it's 999 a pound, which doesn't mean it's cheap, but it means you're not going to throw it away, right? So whereas if it's like 3.99 a pound, you're like, whatever, we didn't get to that this week, let's ditch it. Whereas if it's 999, just that little incremental bit, you might be like, okay, let's actually just braise this so we can put it in the freezer and eat it next week. You know, you're going to have a bit of that mentality. So I actually, I think this idea that like to be not elitist, everything has got to be cheap is a fallacy, right? Because what about consideration and mindfulness as a value in this, you know, what about like pricing that coaches mindfulness and attributes true value?

Plus we can't afford as a society to continue the way we've been going.

Like that's the number one killer.

We just can't. And also the way that the plan is being treated too, if you rotate animals, and I'm sure on your farms that you rotate the animals so that they're eating the grass at one time. And maybe you can elaborate on that. But the big piece for me, that hit me in the gut. I have eaten in my life conventional chicken. And I always wondered, like, huh, why is it so much bigger? You know, these are chickens that are not grazing. They're. They're. Actually, I watched the Morgan Spurlock documentary where he opened up the chicken restaurant. I don't know if you saw that. If you haven't, you have to see it. Have you seen it? Okay. So he talked about really the evils of the poultry industry. And it's like three companies that run everything, and they set the prices, they set the transportation. They have their own logistics. They basically have a stranglehold on these farmers and they're bankrupting these farmers. It really tugs on my heart. And he goes into it deeply in the documentary, what you do is much different because in some of the media I've watched from you, you talk about how conventional chickens are processed. And when they're processed, they're bathed in chlorine, they're pumped up so they can be sold for higher prices. Has less nutrient value. People need to know this. So please share this because it shocked me when I heard you talk about it.

Yeah, chicken is really complex. I mean, it's 60% of the meat that we eat in America is chicken. And chicken is 6,0.

60%.

Yeah. And chicken is the most changed in terms of pricing and perceived cultural value in the past six decades. So Herbert Hoover, at the end of the Depression made a speech where he said, I'm going to bring back an America with a chicken in every pond. And what he meant by that wasn't like, you're all going to have something to eat. It was, we're all going to be living a life of luxury. Because a chicken was more expensive per pound than filet mignon in the 1930s. A chicken should be more expensive than fully chicken is the pricing delta. So my beef is typically like 40% higher than conventional. My chicken is like three times as high as conventional. And that's not because we're like laughing all the way to the bank, right? It's because our chicken costs so much more to raise. So it's like the issues around chicken are husbandry. The animals are raised in confinement. They're in an extremely high stress environment. They have a continual exposure to antibiotics, suppresses their microbiome, causes rapid weight gain. They come to a full market weight in two and a half weeks in 1950. Market weight for a chicken was achieved in 54 weeks at Bel Campo market. Weights achieved in about 10 weeks, eight.

To 10 weeks, that's still pretty quick.

But it's like one fifth the time of a free range. Responsible operation is a. Conventional antibiotics alone have been shown to increase weight gain by 1.5 times. Then you add into that stress and enclosure, lack of light, all those different factors together and they get this massive, massive response. It's basically an inflammatory response. Now they're also, in the case of laying chickens, it's even worse where they're debeaked because in the case of broilers, they don't need to debeake them. They only live for two and a half weeks. They don't even get it together to start to peck each other. But in broiler chicken in layers where they're in confinement for months because they're laying eggs, they're under so much stress that they're pecking each other to death. So their beaks are cut off and they eat a slurry. They're also go through what's called forced molting, which is a, you know, forced starvation to cause them to ovulate and produce more eggs. And then they're kind of brought back to life after they push out a bunch of low quality eggs. I think that conventional eggs like the, it's something like double the protein per ounce in a really true free range pastured egg operation. It's a pretty disgusting industry. So it's the most consolidated. So there's like on the husbandry tries. You can google this. It's a pretty nasty rabbit hol. Very strong human element. I haven't seen the Morgan Spurlock documentary, but I've read an excellent book called the Meat Racket which is all about the consolidated poultry industry, the involvement of the USDA in financing it. It's effectively like an economic slavery. It's typically new immigrants, Southeast Asian immigrants that are roped into decades of debt to operate these farms. The chicken hoop houses themselves have really, really bad outcomes for human workers. The hoop houses are so contaminated that if the air ventilation systems break, the humans and animals have nine minutes to vacate or everybody in the hoop house will die. That's how bad the load is if the ventilators aren't working. That's from the Pew Charitable Trust studies from a couple of years back that stat. There's also really compelling information about women and low birth weight babies and high incidence of stillborn who live near the farms, even just like two miles away. Really, really increased negative Outcomes around miscarriage and birth weight. It's a bad system. It's bad for the people that work there, it's bad for the animals. And then the stuff tastes like garbage. It comes out, it's woody. Chewing that chicken breast, it's so bland that you have to douse it with teriyaki sauce and sugar and soy to make it minimally palatable. So it's just a lose, lose. From where I'm sitting, I come across a lot of people who have renounced chicken like I just can't do it anymore. And I completely hear that the problem with chicken too is that it's expensive to do it right. And the difference is what's challenging. So I think if you're going to eat chicken, go for pastured, go for organic and air chilled is important. That's that we were mentioning about the chlorine solution Dunk there's with chickens to get kind of technical with it, they have thin skins, they have feathers, they're small. In a conventional operation, it's three seconds to kill and eviscerate each bird. 1, 2, 3. Let me look at my 1002, 1003, 1000. So that in that time I killed and eviscerated a chicken. That's not very much time to do a careful, detail oriented job.

When you say eviscerated, what do you mean by that? Eviscerated.

Take all the guts out.

Got it.

Okay. When you take the guts out of an animal, if it's a little fragile, if you kill a beef and you take out all its guts, you basically cut it down the meridian. It opens up, you wash it out. I mean, this animal is dead at this point and all the guts fall out of a piece and they're really thick. You know, the beef stomachs are very thick. Nothing is bursting. There's no manure. Anything around. There's, you know, there's viscera, right? There's the guts. But you'll catch the livery, catch all the parts. There's. But it's, it's really. And then the animal is still totally protected by its hide because the hide is removed. So the potential for contamination right around kill with beef is pretty minimal. Beef contamination happens mostly afterwards because people are cutting up the things and they're sneezing or they've gone somewhere where they shouldn't and come back with manure on their hands. That's how beef gets contaminated. Pork too. Chicken is a different story. Chicken gets contaminated because these animals are very small and their anus and all of their Lower intestinal tract is right there near the surface. And it's very fragile skin. It's a thin membrane. Right. So you're working really quickly. There's feathers everywhere, there's poop everywhere, and it's very difficult to keep clean, especially when you only have three seconds to do it. Instead of making the proactive choice, like, we're going to go really slow and give people time to really make sure these chickens are being killed appropriately and slowly enough that they're cleaned out, we say get them done as quickly as possible, and then we'll do an end user solution and we'll dunk the thing in an antibacterial solution. And that does two things. One is it kills most of the bacteria. Although independent tests show that on average, 48% of chickens sold in American supermarkets has fecal matter on it.

Even with the USDA sticker.

Yeah, you can Google this. It's A group of 15,000 physicians sued the USDA three years ago.

Someone please, if you're watching on Facebook Live, put this in the comments, please. Anya, continue.

Okay, so they were sued and they actually won the lawsuit. They said it wasn't their responsibility. But 48% of chicken, according to this group of physicians that they tested randomly across the US Is contaminated with fecal matter. But most of it comes off. They dunk it into this bleach bath, and that kills a lot of the bacteria. It also causes about 10 to 15% of weight gain. You've had the experience of you cook a chicken breast or chicken thigh and it's gushy white liquid comes out. Yes, that's a solution.

Wow. So that's the chlorine that we're eating. I laugh. It's not funny. I just. I laugh because chlorine and lactic acid, sometimes the things that they're so obvious to people with the right kind of knowledge, they're really poo pooed, and they're kind of thrown away by people without that knowledge. And I get it. Like, if you're tuning in on Facebook, we're talking with Anya Fernald, the CEO, co founder of Belcampo. We're talking about ethical meat consumption. We're talking about immunity as well. What is the number one thing for all of us to do when we're looking at building a strong immune system? It is, first and foremost, do not bring in invaders to the system. And then secondly, build up your system so that it has the right microbiome, micronutrients, so that it can actually repel these invaders. Has this conversation come up around immunity and meat consumption with you and your circles and your colleagues. How do you address that immunity and ethical meat consumption?

Well, I mean, that's a great question. I don't know if I've got the full knowledge base to respond to that. I'll say we were just talking about chicken and definitely in the case of chicken, if you're eating a small dose of bleach, that's going to suppress your microbiome. I actually think a lot of the issues that we have with digestion have to do with the glyphosate and the bleach and the antimicrobials that are in our food. You know that, for example, flour is now all treated with antimicrobials because of the E. Coli issues in flour. I mean, like bread flour. Right. Or making cookies with your kids. They don't want you to get sick if your cookie kids eat the cookie dough raw. So there's an antimicrobial now in the flour. So I think a lot of these, like, I'm intolerant of gluten. It's like you're actually reacting to a strong antimicrobial that your food is infused with. So from an immunity perspective, that's the number one thing for me, is clear that stuff out. I have to say for myself, you know, now that I started traveling at the end of COVID it's like get on the airplanes and I can feel that fogging, you know, like there's this strong antimicrobials feel, stomach ache for the next day. I'm more worried about the antiviral and antimicrobial sprays on airplanes than I am about any potential, you know, exposure at this point.

Amen. That's right.

But it's. So I'd say staying away from stuff that's got stuff in it to kill it and focusing on stuff that's so clean that it doesn't need anything to kill it. That's one really key one. But I mean, in terms of, like, when you look at immunity, you're looking at wellness. Right. Immunity is about peak optimal performance, that your body is. Your needs are met, you're not stressed and anxious, you're able to focus on the issues. Right. So I think that animal wellness supports that. In terms of like, we providing nutrient dense food that's optimally nutrient dense and with minimal inflammation. Right. Our immune system is compromised when we're inflamed and inflammation comes from primarily junk that's in our food. We tend to blame the food, but it's more I think the junk that's in our food. So that's like my sense on it is like eating clean, high density, high nutrient density foods is good and anti inflammatory and that's probably the strongest line I could connect between meat and immunity.

It's a brilliant point. One of the key characteristics when I work with people and also in my own life, with my own body is like, if I'm holding on to water, like if I know my system is holding onto water, it's because there's inflammation somewhere. I mean, that's the key characteristic of being inflamed. Like what's the first thing that happens when we stub our toe? It gets bigger, like it expands. And so anyone watching, anyone that's questioning, like, should I actually be interested in changing my diet? Look in the mirror. Do you find that your body's retaining water? You know, do you sense that you have inflammation and you're not exactly sure where it's coming from? I would say start with your gut lining and then of course start with the food that's, that's coming in your mouth.

Absolutely. And skin issues in general. Right.

And this is something you had in the past was your skin issues. And this is why we had Paul Saladino on the show. And you know, he's very controversial with the carnivore code. But most people that start eating higher amounts of animal proteins, not only do they reduce their inflammation, they physically look less puffy. And it's not just because they're eating cleaner foods, it's because they're just not taking on all these things that inflame them, like the chlorine and the pesticides and the fungicides and everything else. It's a conversation that comes back around so much and I'm curious if you have any insight on that.

Well, again, I can speak to my own experience, having done two months of carnivore diet space about eight months apart.

Was it a strict carnivore?

Yeah. And I, I incorporated lemon and olive oil because I'm too much of essentialist. But those two things, like so, and everything else I, I did right. It's not for me for the long term, definitely great to quickly lean out. But I did notice the biggest joy was just that I had no bloating and no gas ever. And it was just nice to feel free of that. And I adjusted my vegetable and fruit consumption down permanently as a result. You know, like, I've actually, I'm more prone to have something like athletic greens or amazing grass as a Supplement, drink chlorophyll. Like, I'm more prone to that type of thing now. I'm never hitting the kale chips again. Never doing the big leafy dark green salads. Like, I'll have a little bit, but vegetables more on the side. And then when I am eating vegetables, they're really high water and very easily assimilated, like zucchinis and tomatoes. That kind of thing I'm going to do much better with. So I really noticed that some of these veggies that we consider like pillars of health, I'm like, but you're, you have gas and you're bloated. Why can, why these big piles of cauliflower and cauliflower rice and all this cauliflower, it's like, do you really need all that volume? You know, what, what's that about? And when I got rid of that, it was, yeah, it's sort of fun to eat a big bowl of something and it makes you feel full, but it also makes you full. You know, you're, you're really packed to the gills and that actually doesn' comfortable or good. So I, my outcomes for Carnivore were definitely just a longer term adjustment towards things and I'm actually kind of more inclined to like eat less vegetables. And if I'm splashing out, it's more like I'll have some bread or some chocolate or something that's indulgent and yummy, you know, but that's actually really refined and really count. Yeah, exactly. I'm not going to say like, oh, I'm going to have this huge. So whereas this idea that like a mountain of vegetables is really healthy, if I really look at my body, my body tells me for a day afterwards, you know, that sucked. And I wasn't listening to that beforehand.

The way that you've been able to listen to your body, it started really early. And then you went and saw the slow food movement in Italy and you really understood what it was to eat from the earth on the earth and really respect the earth. And speaking of the Earth, like 40%, I think it's around 40 to 45% of our lands. They're just not sustainable for animals to graze on. Right? They're, they're for growing crops. I'm sorry, like you can't grow crops on 40% of the earth. But what's really cool is that animals, they can graze them. I was just. Yesterday on the weekend, my love and I went out and we were looking at this Texas longhorn. We're here in Austin so that, you know, these huge cows with the horns on, they look so cool. And we were out there and I, and I fed, I pulled some grass and I reached over the fence and I fed it to this cow. It's the first time I've ever done that in my whole life. And I was just thinking, oh my God, I made the connection in real time, Anya. The sun shoots its energy down onto the grass. The cow eats the grass all day long. All that concentrated sunshine, vitamin E, all these beautiful things, vitamin D. And then I eat the cow. I'm actually participating in this closed organic cycle. And that is a really special cycle that needs honoring. Can you contrast that with the 40% of lands that are really not suitable for growing crops? And what does that even mean to you?

So that's broadly called like brittle landscapes. So that means lands. And it's ironic because some of the world's most lush ecosystems, like rainforests and prairies, grow on those landscapes that are not suitable for growing crops. Cropland is like rich alluvial plains, so places where there used to be rivers and so there's deep deposits of natural nitrogen rich organic material. And that's like here in California. It's the Central Valley is a massive alluvial plain down the middle the of of the state. But that's the exception. Right. And most of the land in everywhere is like, you know, brushy couple hardy trees and lots of seasonal grasses. So if you look at what that means, it's that, let's say here in California we have many types of grassland that will be green for like three weeks or a month out of the entire year due to the natural cycle of rainfall. Okay. So during that month of the year, the adaptability is that cows or deer or any ruminant can walk over that land and digest that nutrient poor, high fiber organic material. And while they're doing that, they'll typically aerate the soil through the movement of their hooves and they'll poop out mature seed pods deposited in a capsule of manure into the earth. That's great. They're receding. Right. So they put play a functional role. Same way birds do that. You know, birds eat fruit and then poop out the seeds. That's why fruit evolves. Right. So fruit evolved in concert with birds and grasslands evolved in concert with ruminants. Same role distribution and re redistribution of seeds. So that non adapted cropland, the idea that you could just take livestock out of the environment and be a net positive is a fallacy. Environments, you know, we See this all the time. We like to. It's kind of like almost like a colonial mentality to say that you could take the animals out. It's like a very masculine, like non feminine, non intuitive, non mother nature approach of like, well, we're just gonna put bunny rabbits in Australia and it's all gonna be okay, you know, like these again and again and again.

I don't think they would survive too long.

And we did, you know, and we just completely jack it up because it doesn't work, right. You can't just move one needle and say, oh, it's all going to just be okay, right? So you have to look at this holistically. And all these systems are holistic. So the livestock role in the environment. It's not something that we're saying hypothetically. We have numerous documented instances throughout history where when you eliminate ruminants, the natural ecosystem craters.

What'S one that comes up strong for you there? Like an example in your studies and just from your knowledge base.

The Dust bowl, the American Dust bowl kicked off the depression, right? Where we hunted the buffalo to extinction, which was an attempt to eradicate Native Americans and the Native American genocide, right? So it came from a really ugly place. But we sport hunted all the buffaloes, removed their food source, drove them into starvation and let the buffalo rot on the prairies, right? And within then we settled. This is the, you know, we settled that area and we planted the seeds of, you know, that we thought would then turn into this great vast cropland because this land was rich and, you know, it looked like a great cropland, right? So we planted wheat and corn. We had record crops for two years or some records from that time that were never beaten, have never been beaten because their yields were so high per acre. There's a book about this called the Worst Hard Time. It's a really good book all about this. Then within the third year, it cratered, the productivity crater. Because without the ruminant load walking through, redepositing, putting in manure, we completely killed the eco. Within a year after that, we had the Dust bowl. We had some scary days here in the Bay Area with the fires. Guys saw the pictures and there's like you couldn't see the sun. That's how it was for three weeks at a time during the Dust bowl, the erosion was so extreme. No micro roots, no plants. We tilled up the earth and we didn't put the animals back. So these things all work together as a system. And it's the same thing with the rainforest. You Take the rainforest. Rainforest land is never very rich land. Right. All the magic there is above ground, it's about an ecosystem of plants working together. So when we take the plants and animals apart from that and we deforest and slash and burn, those ecosystems are almost impossible to rebuild.

Right.

Same as the prairie. The prairie is like the North American rainforest equivalent. Right. Where it's actually got this very, very delicate balance of plants and animals.

Wow, this is profound because I remember seeing the movie Interstellar and there was that dust bowl that was in there and just knowing what they went through. As far as stressors, I'm sure you yourself have experienced a ton of stress when it comes to growing this business. What is the most stressful thing? I mean, you're a very outspoken woman and this industry has some ivory towers in it that are very kind of lock and key. And look, I'm not here to divide. I think men and women can rule in any category together, side by side, arm in arm. But I know with you that definitely there has been probably some unique challenges. What are some of those unique challenges? Been.

Being dismissed. As somebody who's good at marketing. That's been the biggest trigger for me emotionally, I'd say not being taken seriously as like, well, she's just good at selling or she's just good at putting a gloss on things, but she's not doing anything different. So I'd say that's been the hardest emotional obstacle for me to overcome and kind of a limiting belief or a source of self sabotage. Right. Would be that the biggest thing, the biggest lesson. And I remember this early on in the company, like we had just opened a store and I think there was some competitor that was opening up and everyone on my team was like freaking out about this person opening what was going to happen. And I just remember being like, this is the biggest waste of time. And I think that's the easiest. The key thing for me in both of the. It's like not focusing on my competition. I don't spend one second of any day thinking about my competition. I just don't. And I don't care what they're doing. You know, I. We might look at their pricing to make sure that we're not totally out of the ballpark. But our pricing is based on our cost. Right. And honest, more allocation of resources among our costs. So it's like there's been some things that I've learned that anything I'm focusing on what people think about me or whether or not they think my success is merited.