🐮 Revolutionizing Meat: People, Planet, & Animals | Wellness Force #Podcast

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 Bill 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. So 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, right? 30,000 acres. I think there's six or seven different species you grow on the farms.

Yes.

And this is the way nature intended it to be. Like, nature has this amazing wisdom. We just get to trust her. And. 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 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.

You know, 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 gonna 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, 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 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, 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 eating 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%. Right. So we're both fighting that 99%. And many of the messages that the vegan movement says are 1,000% correct. Sure. Confinement agriculture uses obscene and inappropriate amounts of water. Confinement agriculture relies on genetically modified, high, 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 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 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 an original, organic way again.

I think a lot of our food today requires you to kind of pitch your nose and not pay attention. Right. 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. Right. 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.

It's.

There's moments and things, but we're, we're to the point where that's almost playing the agro industrial game, 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, they're all kind of the same components, right? So I think the real act of resilience, existence 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.