Latest / REAP/SOW / Doing it live with Leah Douglas and Sean Sherman, the Sioux Chef
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- This transcript was exported on 04/16/2026 - view latest version here Theodore Ross: Welcome to Forked. I'm Theodore Ross, editor-in-chief of the Food and Environment Reporting Network, and this is a very special episode taped live in Washington, DC, at the Planet Forward Summit at George Washington University. I'm joined by two guests, Sean Sherman, the James Beard Award-winning chef and bestselling author known as The Sioux Chef, and Leah Douglas, a Reuters reporter doing time on the MAHA beat. My co-host, Helena Bottemiller Evich, couldn't make it, which was too bad because we got into Indigenous foodways, how restaurants are doing in Minnesota, and how GLP-1s ate the world and got us to quit eating. Welcome, everyone. I'm so excited to be hosting this live taping of Forked at the Planet Forward Summit. Let's get right to it. I'm going to introduce our guests. I'm going to let them tell us all a little bit about themselves as well. Why don't we start with you, Sean? Sean Sherman, known as The Sioux Chef. Why don't you tell these folks a little bit about you? Sean Sherman: Sure. My name is Sean Sherman. I grew up on Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. I'm an enrolled member with the Oglala Lakota Tribe. I currently live in Minneapolis, Minnesota. I founded a couple of different organizations, a nonprofit that I run called NATIFS, which is an acronym. North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems, because if you have a nonprofit, you obviously have to have an acronym. Ideally, that says something so you can remember it. Theodore: It's a good acronym. It pans out. Sean: Thanks. I started a restaurant in Minneapolis called Owamni, which has gotten a lot of acclaim. It's something completely different. We feature Indigenous foods. Our philosophy was cutting away colonial ingredients. We remove things like dairy, wheat flour, cane sugar, beef, pork, chicken, anything that European immigrants brought over. We just use what are the true foods of where we happen to be on this continent. We have a couple of cookbooks out. We have lots of awards and pieces from along the journey. Mostly, I do a lot of speaking engagements. We just try to figure out how to get healthy native food out there to Indigenous communities. Theodore: Great. We'll talk more about what you're up to in Minneapolis as well in a second, but I'd like to introduce everyone to Leah Douglas. Why don't you tell us about yourself, Leah? Leah Douglas: Hi, everyone. I'm Leah Douglas. I'm a reporter with Reuters, where I've been for almost five years. I cover agriculture and food policy from here in Washington. Everything from USDA to the Hill to state legislatures, legal issues, anything that has to do with the people who make our food, how it's processed, and how it comes to you. I also do other coverage areas for Reuters, including health. We'll talk about some health crossover topics today. Occasionally, I'm a ringer for all types of other things. I'm a FERN alum. I worked at FERN for three and a half years. Lots of love for FERN. Woo. [applause] Yes, love nonprofit news. I've been covering food and agriculture for almost 15 years. Here I am. Theodore: That's great. I just want to say, before we really jump in, the slogan for the conference, "Take the Mic, Shape the Story," I really like that. That's a great slogan. I will say, it's giving a little bit of a poetry slam vibe. If you guys feel at any point, because I would love for you to applaud when people say things that you like, but you can also, [finger snaps]. That would be in keeping with the conference. No problem here. All right, let's get to it. Owamni, Sean, you live in the Twin Cities. I think we're all aware of what's been happening there in this year under the Trump administration and the ICE crackdown. I think people are fairly aware of what happened there. We can talk about it a little bit. What I'm curious to hear from you about is the situation now. There was a report from Hospitality Minnesota that came out a couple of days ago, the State of Hospitality Minnesota 2026 Report, a likely name, which is saying that the restaurant industry in the Twin Cities is in near collapse. I'm curious to hear your perspective on that from somebody who's running a restaurant there and who is interacting with people who are hungry in Minneapolis, and you're a restaurant owner. I know many of your employees are Native American, but I'm assuming you have some immigrant staff or you're aware of immigrant staff. What's it like now feeding people in Minneapolis-Saint Paul? Sean: Yes. Minneapolis was definitely extremely shook by what happened. There was a lot of trauma happening on a daily basis for way too long. We saw it coming. We had gathered early in December to try and get in front of it to come together. We had Somali community. We had people from Ilhan's office. We had people from Tina Smith's office. We had people from food shelves, people from some of the Mexican markets. We all gathered to try to figure out how could we communicate with each other to make sure that people are getting food because people were already starting to get afraid. When things really hit the fan, it got bad really fast. When Nicole Good was murdered, and everybody witnessed it, and we saw the spin that happened immediately on it, even though you could see with your eyes what happened, things really doubled down. School system shut down. Restaurants were just barely struggling. I don't think any restaurant in Minneapolis would have survived another couple of months at most because we were all down 60%, 80% across the city at that moment in time. It was really super challenging. We had zero safety net. There was nobody that could save us. The city couldn't do anything about it. Our police force couldn't do anything about it. The state couldn't do anything about it. The court systems were too slow. The news reports weren't really getting out what we were seeing on a daily basis, and the government was doing it to us. We all just came together. It felt a little bit like what happened during George Floyd time, which we were also in the mix of there in Minneapolis. We came together with just a massive amount of underground communication. I had way too many Signal chats going on. We knew when Greg Bovino was rolling across town with how many cars. All these things were happening all at once. Things are better, but we haven't put down our guard because we know what they're capable of and we know what the intentions are. There's still a lot of watches, especially around schools right now, because I drive by them every morning. There's still a lot of people just monitoring to make sure people can get in and out of school safely, for example. Some of my staff were personally affected. I had three employees held up at gunpoint right outside of our building. One of my young staff from Ecuador was abducted, and he was in Texas by the end of the day. He was extremely traumatized. He was in, I think, five different holding facilities within just a couple of weeks. It took us some time to figure out how to get him out of that situation. They were taking Native people. What the fuck? Where are you going to send Native people? It was crazy. [laughter] Again, it's crazy. We know what this administration was attempting to do. They were just living out Stephen Miller's wet dream, Greg Bovino's wet dream. They were doing what they wanted to do. I tried to use my voice, my platform. I came to DC during that time period. I went straight to Tina Smith's office, who's our senator, and just said, "Do not give this more money. Stop this DHS spending bill in its tracks, because if you give them more money, this is what they're going to do." This cannot be the reality for other cities in America. I felt like in Minnesota, we were standing strong. I felt like we were going to survive this ICE storm, but we didn't want to see this happen to any other city. Theodore: It's a battle-tested city. [applause] Yes, absolutely. The reason why I'm focused on now, I was in Minneapolis a couple of weeks ago. My brother lives there. There are still people protesting at the Whipple Building. There are still people who are getting food delivered to them. There are still people driving other folks to work because they're too scared, they're too concerned for their own safety to go out on their own. It is not back to normal. It's not. Sean: No. I don't even know what normal is anymore because our reality changed so hard. I have a new cookbook out, and I completely forgot about it in January. It just didn't even exist in our reality because we were just trying to get through. We were just trying to figure out how do we get food to people? How do we get people across town? How do we get people to work? There were so many basic needs that were out there at that moment. If you were Black or brown in the city, you just couldn't move anywhere safely at all. That's just the reality that was there. Theodore: I'm going to shift gears a little bit away from the protests in Minneapolis. I want to talk to you, Leah, a little bit about some of the stuff that Sean does as it relates to the MAHA movement, which you've covered a lot. When you talk about the MAHA movement, a lot of the people who are involved in it are in favor of regenerative ag in some form or another. That form of agriculture is essentially Indigenous agriculture. You have a focus on regenerative ag in this movement from the right that is doing some of the same things that people on the left have been calling for for a long time. I'm curious, in your reporting on the MAHA movement, are they aware of that? Do they understand that this right-wing political movement is, in somewhat, ideologically aligned with things that are happening on the left? Leah: Yes. One of the things to understand about MAHA, and I know you all have talked about this on Forked before, is this is a very broad umbrella that includes a lot of different types of organizations and people who are not always coordinated on their message and might not even necessarily be aware of the work that's happening under the moniker of MAHA all across the country. I would say it's difficult to paint with a broad brush and say, "Is there awareness broadly?" It is an interesting phenomenon in time to see, not just in MAHA, but how the Trump administration has also adopted some of the same regenerative ag or sustainable ag programs. Theodore: Sort of, right? Leah: Well, there's been a lot of cuts to things, but there have also been, I get press releases all the time where there's new funding for this, new funding for that. It's the same type of programs that were funded, say, under the Biden administration, but packaged in a different way, mirroring what we're seeing in MAHA, where it's similar practices, similar values around soil health and conservation, but the wording is different to align better with right constituency. Theodore: How so? If you can think of it. I don't mean to put you on the spot, but what-- Leah: Even the framing of regenerative agriculture. That is obviously a technical term that has existed for a long time, but that's become a catchphrase for what, under the Biden administration, might have been called climate-friendly farming. If you look at how money at USDA, which is wonky, but what's being funded, again, there's been huge decimation, so not to equate the amounts of money or anything like that, but you'll see similar practices being funded under that new moniker because that resonates with a different base. Theodore: I want to bring you into this conversation, Sean. I don't know how closely you follow this, but if you look at the MAHA movement and they're talking about regenerative practices and they're advocating against pesticides and they're talking about very traditional types of farming that we don't do in this country at scale anymore, they're talking about things that you are deeply, deeply interested in and have made your name and your life's work about. How do you feel about that? Sean: Yes. My focus is on Indigenous food practices, Indigenous food systems, and regenerative farming is a big part of that, and permacultural farming, and all these pieces, but I don't trust the MAHA movement when it comes to this. I feel like it's greenwashing, basically. I feel like they're using these terminologies because if you follow the money, they're shielding Big Ag. They're cutting funding for BIPOC farmers and people of color and smaller farmers. I think that the money's telling you exactly what they're doing with the situation. Theodore: I think that's an important point. [finger snaps] If you guys want-- Yes. Is there snapping? Is somebody snapping? That's awesome. Go ahead. [finger snaps] Everybody should snap. I think that's great. One of the things that's a conundrum of the Trump administration on this particular issue, some things about the Trump administration are very clear, but is that they can talk about making changes to the food system, but they're not willing to regulate. It's a deeply anti-regulatory administration. If you want to change things about the farming system, you may have to implement new rules and laws, and that's impossible. Sean: Yes. They're following Big Ag completely, again, because that's where the dollars are going. Big Ag will use those terminologies. They'll use regenerative farming, but are they actually doing it? No, they're not going to be doing it. They're just going to be changing the way they're putting glyphosate in your food because basically, we're all microdosing glyphosate anyways, and so what's that going to do to us? If we're going to do big change, we need something completely structurally different. I think the ideology is there. I think what they're saying is they're not wrong that we do need better soil health, we do need to have some better farming practices, but we're not going to see that play out with this situation. Again, because follow those dollars, they're going exactly to the same people. Theodore: I want to talk about that some more. It is true that the Trump administration is allergic to regulation, and it is not that easy to change the way Big Ag operates or Big Food operates in this country without passing new rules and passing new laws, but there does appear to be a wider consensus in the US politically in favor of these practices. As a reporter, do you see anything happening within an anti-regulatory Republican government that may make some of this happen despite itself? That's not I'm asking you for an opinion. I'm asking you, have you seen any actual action yet? Leah: Again, what you're talking about to achieve any type of broad-scale reform, it's exactly what you just said. It takes huge amounts of political will and huge amounts of regulation. The farming industry is strongly regulated and is strongly subsidized and structured the way it is for a reason. To turn that ship would require massive reforms. I don't think, under this administration, there are massive reforms that the USDA under Brooke Rollins is interested in. They're implementing massive reforms to SNAP, for instance. They're implementing massive reforms to Conservation Service, to the Forest Service. Often, these reforms are cuts, right? Theodore: That's what I was going to say. Is a cut a reform? Leah: It's changing things. Theodore: That's true. Leah: It's dramatically and permanently changing things in many cases. Theodore: Fair enough. Leah: I don't think that they're allergic to change. I think that when it comes to incentivizing and subsidizing and regulating and all the things you need to shift the massive architecture of the US agricultural system, no. That has not been evidenced in the work they've done so far. Theodore: Not so far, yes. I think one of the things that we can talk about that relates to both sides of this is, and you brought it up already, glyphosate. For those of you who don't follow these things too closely, glyphosate is the main ingredient in Roundup, which is the primary chemical herbicide that is used to raise food at scale in this country. There is widespread condemnation among the MAHA movement for glyphosate. They are very, very anti-glyphosate, as I imagine, as you are. People coming at the food systems from the left are also opposed to glyphosate. Anybody who's interested in traditional agriculture is not going to want to have widespread microdosing of glyphosate, is the way you put it. One of the things that we're seeing, though, is a huge contradiction between the needs and desires of the MAHA movement, which, in no small degree, helped put Donald Trump in office in his second term, and the government about glyphosate. I think one of the things that's interesting to me, there's a Supreme Court case right now about glyphosate. It's actually called, what is it? Monsanto versus? Leah: Durnell. Theodore: Durnell. Bayer now owns Monsanto, and they are being sued around the country by people who've gotten cancer, they believe, from exposure to glyphosate, who say that Bayer should have warned them. The problem is, and this is where the court case comes into play. At the federal level, glyphosate is legal. If you have a chemical that is legal federally, you should not have to put a warning label on it warning somebody against potentially getting cancer. That's what's at issue in this Supreme Court case. If the Supreme Court rules in favor of Bayer, it basically means that many of these lawsuits, some of which have been successful, they can't go forward anymore. The MAHA folks are really unhappy about this. They are not happy with the EPA. They're not happy with the Trump administration because they feel like they've been betrayed on the issue of glyphosate. Then you have the people on the left who are saying, "Well, we've been against glyphosate all along." There's a big event that's coming up here in DC. I think it's April 27th at the Supreme Court. The MAHA movement is holding a rally. I think it's called The People vs. Poison. Do you expect to see, and I don't know if you're following it closely enough, but I think, along with right-wing MAHA people, there will be people from the center and the left there. Is that a sign of any of that political will that has so far not materialized? Leah: The glyphosate issue is a really interesting one because not only does it draw tensions between MAHA and the Trump administration, but it also starts to show some of the tensions between Kennedy and the Trump administration, because if we take a step back, the reason that MAHA-- Theodore: I'm sorry. RFK Jr., Secretary of Health and Human Services. That's it, yes. Leah: Apologies. Washington, shorthand. Theodore: [laughs] You can just call him Bobby. Leah: Yes, right. Exactly. The reason MAHA cares strongly about this issue is in part because Bobby cares strongly about this issue and has brought it into the-- that'll be the only time you'll ever hear me do that, by the way. [laughter] He brought that strongly. He's been anti-glyphosate for a long time, has spoken out very strongly about it as a presidential candidate, and toned back the rhetoric a bit once he became health secretary, but the MAHA movement really picked up that issue, and is opposed to the use of glyphosate in alignment with a streak in MAHA that's anti-toxins, and what any person in MAHA sees as a toxin, you'll have to ask them. It ranges, but glyphosate is one that comes up a lot. April 27th is the day of oral arguments at the Supreme Court for this important case, and that's why there's this rally. Just today, they released the list of speakers, and I thought it was interesting because we discussed there's one Democratic congresswoman, Chellie Pingree from Maine, who'll be speaking-- Theodore: It's mostly not. It's mostly right-wing folks, yes. Leah: Overwhelmingly, yes. It's MAHA-aligned folks and right-wing, Kennedy and Trump-aligned folks. That really seems to be the thrust of who they're expecting to be there if it's represented in the speaker list. Theodore: I'm going to put you on the spot a little bit, Sean. With this issue, you have an opportunity, if you are someone who cares about the food system, to influence events. Does it matter to you if that influence is coming from the right for this movement that you say you don't trust and that you think is actually kowtowing to Big Ag? Let's say, put that aside, that distrust aside for a moment. If you felt that this particular rally was sincere, would you go? There's all these other things that they do you might not like about, but you might be getting something out of them from this particular thing. How do you see that? Sean: Yes. I mean, we work with allies out there all the time. Theodore: Yes, but these wouldn't be allies. Sean: Exactly. Not necessarily in that context, but if they were aligned with trying to make some positive change towards some of the status quo that we've been dealing with at this moment, especially things like glyphosate out there in the fields, because our goal is completely different. We try to just push money towards Indigenous producers who are doing the actual work. Because they can't rely on government money, especially in a time like right now, we try to use our food service systems. We have restaurants, and we push $750,000 a year just to Indigenous food production out of a single kitchen. We're showing a model that actually works, right? Theodore: Yes. Sean: We just want to show what we can do. I would be happy if people were actually going to align, but again, I don't trust them because I feel like they're just going to cave into Big Ag no matter what happens. They're just going to monetize a term like regenerative agriculture, just like they monetize organics. I feel like either you're doing the work or you're not. You have to walk the walk at the same time. That's where it really comes down to it. Who's actually in the fields? Who's actually got their fingers in the soil? Who's actually watching these plants grow and taking care of those cycles every single year, and who's purchasing those foods? I challenge restaurants. Why are you blindly buying everything from a Sysco or Aramark, knowing exactly where those foods are coming from? If you're really going to be mission-based, then buy them from the people who are making change. Theodore: I agree with all of that. [applause] You mentioned your restaurant in Minneapolis. I think this is a good opportunity to talk about a new project that you have. Your restaurant, it's called Owamni. You are about to close that, and in June, you'll be opening a new restaurant called Indigena. Sean: Yes. Theodore: Why don't you tell us a little bit about that? Sean: Yes. I think all good things need to come to an end. Owamni is an amazing restaurant, and I know you've been there. Theodore: I have, yes. Sean: It's a beautiful space. We did something completely different. With our philosophy, it's probably one of the healthiest restaurants in the country. Everything's gluten-free, dairy-free, sugar-free, soy-free, pork-free. We've been able to really challenge how we think about American foods with that restaurant, but we're moving into something different. We're having an opportunity to move into a bigger space. The restaurant's owned by the nonprofit that I created solely because we wanted to use restaurants differently. It's a place where we hire a lot of intentional staff. We have a large Indigenous workforce. We move intentionally a bunch of food dollars to the producers we want to support. Like I said, over almost $750,000 a year. That number's going to grow exponentially as we continue to expand. It just creates a lot of attention for us. Plus, as a direct response to what happened in Minneapolis in January, with our own government demonizing people because they spoke a separate colonial language, Spanish, because English is also a foreign language on this land space, that we needed to-- I wanted to just-- There's no reason. Some of these Indigenous young people coming from Mexico and South America, their families have been on these continents for a millennia before the people kicking them off of this space because of these imaginary lines they've drawn in the sand. I leaned into a Spanish word, which is Indígena is the Spanish word for Indigenous, because I wanted to erase colonial borders. I wanted to think about what do the Americas look like without the borders, because I feel like if you're Black or brown in the Americas, you should get a passport that allows you to work anywhere the fuck you want to. Theodore: Good luck with it. [applause] I'm looking forward to going out there. I'm going to make a bit of a hard segue. You were talking about a transition. I would like to transition to a different topic, and one that you are covering in depth right now, which is GLP-1s, right? [laughter] Leah: These transitions need a little work. [laughter] Theodore: This is not as easy as it looks, you know? I appreciate it. Anyway, one of the things that I think is interesting that is happening, there was an article in The New York Times today, it's called the Great Ozempic Experiment. It talks about some of the stuff that I was familiar with, which is just this mass usage of Ozempic and other GLP-1s in the United States in a very, very rapid period of time. Just basically, dating to 2000, when it was mostly a diabetes drug. It also talked about all these other off-label uses that people were using it for. You talked about microdosing glyphosate. People are not microdosing Ozempic for glyphosate purposes, but they are microdosing it for longevity purposes. Apparently, it can help you live longer, maybe. There was a woman in the article who they talked about who used it to resolve her concussion syndrome. There's people taking it to break addictions to cigarettes, and sex, and to, obviously, food and all kinds of other things. I'm curious about you, as a reporter, have you encountered some of these more eccentric, I think, off-label uses for GLP-1s, as it just takes over the country? Leah: GLP-1s are just a fascinating topic that I've covered a bit more extensively in the last few months, as covering health at Reuters. I was saying backstage, I feel like it's one of these topics you could just become obsessed with and not think about anything else because it just encompasses so many phenomena happening right now in the US. One of the things I found so interesting about that Times story by Julia Belluz is that the science is people are using GLP-1s for all types of uses that have not been clinically studied or are in the process of being clinically studied, and are having all types of, in some cases, really wonderful, clearing up things like arthritis and eczema. Also, there is some concern and wariness, I think, among consumers and some physicians about is that appropriate, given that we've only had these drugs for a very short time? I did some reporting, speaking to obesity specialists in the last few months, and specifically about the rollout of GLP-1 pills, which is something we've just started to see in the last couple of months. In some ways, they've said this is one of the most exciting times to be working in this field because they're seeing patients who are having life-changing experiences in a positive way. Of course, there are some people who really can't take GLP-1s for a variety of reasons, but also, the sense of building the plane while you're flying it, I think, can be uncomfortable too for any science-based profession and for consumers. I think it's going to be something we're continuing to see as front-page science, and health, and food news for a long time. Theodore: I thought one of the interesting things in that article was it had always been explained to me that the way that Ozempic and these other drugs work is it does something to your gut biome, whatever that means. It's one of those terms. Gut biome is a term. I'm working in food journalism. I hear it all the time. I don't entirely know what it means, but it must mean something because people use it all the time. Apparently, that's not true. There are signals in the brain that it is changing that is helping people with their appetite and their desire to eat, which, for me, maybe as a cynic, I read as this is a mass national placebo delusion. If it's coming from the brain, I don't know why I'm valuing signals from the brain over signals from the gut biome, but that's just how I feel about it. Sean, I'll bring you into it a little bit and let you opine about Ozempic. You are a chef. You cook for people. You try to delight them with food, educate them with food, inspire them, all kinds of things. Have you encountered any change in people's diets now in the Ozempic era? If you have not, would you change anything on any of your menus to account for the way people are now going to eat? Sean: No, I wouldn't change. Our purpose is completely different, because we're showing a different way to look at food systems through a non-neurocentric lens. We're trying to showcase there's so much more plant diversity, which would create a much better gut biome for you if you had a lot more plant diversity in your diet. We want people to eat healthier in general. That's just why the Indigenous diet of North America just happens to be a really healthy diet, because, like I said, the entire restaurant is gluten-free, dairy-free, sugar-free, soy-free, pork-free, all that stuff. We don't even have to use the word health food with that situation. I just feel like with restaurants and chefs, we have a lot of followers, we have a lot of influence, and we should be promoting a lot of health. We shouldn't be coming up with the next 8,000-calorie hamburger to get in the paper. We should be really focused on how do we create just really solid, good food coming from really solid, good producers who we know are doing it right. I just feel like Ozempic, it's not going to go away, obviously, because it's easy, and people like easy, but I feel like we need to do the work. We need to educate ourselves better on our food systems. We need to have a lot more education on plants and where food comes from. We need to have a lot more plant diversity in our diet. We have to understand that this giant continent is a massively diverse area, especially for our purposes. For Indigenous cultures, it's massively diverse how people survive for thousands of generations without Ozempic. We've been able to do it really well and very healthily when we didn't even have tooth decay on this continent, for example. There are other paths for health out there, obviously. Food is just a massively important piece to that puzzle of what we eat and how we eat, and just considering all of it. Theodore: Are you maybe, like me, look, I'm not in the pharmaceutical industry. I've not taken Ozempic. I don't know if it works or doesn't work. It seems to be working for people, but I find it mind-bogglingly difficult to accept the idea that it is working for so many people that they are actually eating fewer Doritos. Does that strike you as plausible? Sean: It's very possible. Theodore: People like Doritos. They taste good. That's why people eat them. Apparently, not. Apparently, they're changing the way Americans actually eat with this pharmaceutical. Sean: It's very possible that it can make some major shifts in the snack industry, I suppose, which needs to happen anyways. I don't think it's the healthiest way. I think we need to be a lot more intentional with it. It feels a little bit of a cop-out to take something that kills your appetite, I suppose. I don't really understand it 1,000%. Again, I think we need better education around food. I think we need better education, again, on where we get food and where food comes from, and utilizing so much more plant diversity. There's so much cool stuff around us. We could be having cooler farms and stuff like that, but we're not going to see that right now. With the rollback of money going to BIPOC and smaller farmers, that's only going to open more doors for Big Ag to take over more soil spaces. It's going to go in the wrong direction, no matter what. The fight's bigger than this. Again, we need to eat healthier. That's the key to it. We just need to eat healthier. Theodore: It's going to go in the wrong direction, no matter what. I'm going to use that as another hard segue to our final [laughter] segment of this podcast. It's something that we call The Good Vibes. At the end of our show, we try to come up with at least one thing that we can take some hope for in the United States, in the food system, in food politics and policy, in some way. Oftentimes, I find that it is the hardest thing for us to do on the show. I've asked Sean and Leah to provide us something, but I won't put them on the spot just yet. I'll go first. I will warn everyone that my story of The Good Vibe is extraordinarily passive-aggressive, so you'll just have to bear with me here. At FERN, we put out a podcast recently about oyster farming on the Gulf Coast. It was with an NPR affiliate, the Sea Change podcast. It was all about these oyster farmers and how, in Louisiana, they were starting to switch away from off-the-bottom oysters to farmed oysters. As a result of that, I got invited to come down to a podcast taping in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, where they were going to talk about the future of oysters there. As part of the podcast, and maybe we should have done the same thing, they had free raw oysters at the podcast taping, [laughter] farmed. During the panel discussion, they were talking about concerns about the safety of Gulf oysters post-oil spill, which was a long time ago. One of the men, who was the owner of an oyster company, I won't say the name of the company, or his name, because I'm about to make fun of him a little bit, says that we shouldn't be concerned about Gulf oysters. They're delicious. They're safe. We need a bunch of Yankees to come down here and eat them all up, but we don't want them to stay. Then, at the end of the podcast, I started talking to him. I guess he heard my New York accent, although I am, in fact, half from New York, half from Mississippi. I have a weird background. He apologized to me. He said, "I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to call you out as a Yankee." I was like, "It's okay. It's fine." I will tell you, eat Mississippi-farmed oysters, but we're staying in Mississippi. That's my good vibe. Who wants to go next? How could you follow a story like that? [laughter] Leah: I didn't realize this was an opportunity to air our grievances against- Theodore: It's not the best part. [laughter] Leah: -anonymous strangers. I should have prepared more grievances. Theodore: Please do, then. Leah: No, I don't. I actually have a good vibe. We're supposed to dance. Theodore: All right. [laughter] She prepares one grievance right there. Leah: Oh, now I feel so innocent. I could have been ranting. My good vibe is not specifically food-related, but is news-related, so it still feels topical. We never have any good news news, so yay. Here in the DC area, we have a publication that's based in Baltimore called The Baltimore Banner. I don't know if anyone is a subscriber. [applause] Yes, we love The Banner. They're expanding into my home county of Prince George's County, which we love local news. The nonprofit that is backing The Banner also loves nonprofit news, double plug, just bought the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, [applause] and saved them from closure, which is very exciting. That was just a great piece of uplifting media news this week. There will be news in Pittsburgh, which is where I was born. There you go. Now I have a personal connection. Maybe I'll start reading the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. We love The Banner, local news for Maryland. Yay. Theodore: That is a good vibe. For me, somebody who works in nonprofit journalism, it's real evidence that that model of journalism can work. I think there's a lot of times in journalism, things were held up as a savior. "Oh, nonprofit journalism is going to save us. Video is going to save us." Nothing's going to save us. We're all going to have to make do ourselves, but nonprofit journalism is one very, very important part of the future of our media. Thank you for bringing that up. That's really a good, good vibe. Better than my airing of grievances. Sean, you're up. Sean: All right. Yes. I told them earlier that I was just going to come up with something off the top of my head, so I'll do my best. I think we can all feel good that our fearless leader can now heal people with the power of his hands. [laughter] We don't really need Ozempic or anything now. Theodore: Now that's the spirit of The Good Vibe right there. [laughter] All right. That's a man who knows what he's talking about. Sean: Aside from that, I do feel really empowered of my city, of where we come from, of Minneapolis, of how we faced this ICE storm. I feel really proud that we came together. We were under siege, literally, and being violenced every day. Our vibe was not that of defeat. Our vibe was not that of wanting to cave and turn it into violence, which we thought they were just trying to bait us for. We really came together. We became so organized. We became a voice out of nowhere in the face of all of this intensity. I feel very proud of how that all happened and how we showed this whole situation of how we can react. Theodore: [applause] Hear, hear. Absolutely. I just want to say a few words towards the end here. First, I just want to thank all of you. Thank you for being here. Thank you for being a present audience and responding to us with the claps and snaps. That's great. I want to talk about why I'm so happy and grateful that we had Sean and Leah here together. When you think about what they do, they're in tension, but also in support of each other. Sean, you are focused on Indigenous food systems and Indigenous foodways. It's hard to think of something that is taking more of a longer-term view than that. It truly is about the food system of this continent and about the world. I think that's an amazing thing. We're lucky to be here and talk to you about it. If you're ever out in Minneapolis, you should go eat it because it's an expression of those ideas and those concepts. Then we have you, Leah, who is a beat reporter, who is documenting the news as it happens and offering a way for people to understand it on a daily basis. That is equally important, although it is short-term by its nature. I think we're lucky to have a conversation where we are combining the very long-term and the very thoughtful, with the very thoughtful and the very short-term. I thank you both for that. With that, I'm just going to say thank you, all of you, and tune in to the next Forked. I appreciate it. [applause] Forked is a production of the Food and Environment Reporting Network. Our executive producers are me, Theodore Ross, and Tom Laskawy. Our sound engineer is Lauryn Newson. Our producer and video producer is Amanda Vicari. Our hosts are Helena Bottemiller Evich and me, Theodore Ross. To find out more about FERN and donate to support our independent, nonprofit reporting, go to www.thefern.org. Forked Live_41526_ _mixdown.mp3 (Completed: 04/16/2026) Transcript by GoTranscript.com