Latest / Beyond Labels Premium / Episode #207: Selling Food to Your Neighbor Is Illegal: Joel Salatin Demands Food Emancipation Now

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Episode #207: Selling Food to Your Neighbor Is Illegal: Joel Salatin Demands Food Emancipation Now · Beyond Labels Premium

0:00
SPEAKER_01: Our food system is enslaved.
0:02
SPEAKER_01: It's shackled by an industrial regulatory structure that disallows freedom of choice among voluntary consenting adults to give their microbiome personal agency.
0:21
SPEAKER_01: How's that for some powerful phraseology?
0:26
SPEAKER_00: Hello, everybody.
0:27
SPEAKER_00: Welcome to another episode of Beyond Labels.
0:29
SPEAKER_00: I'm Dr.
0:30
SPEAKER_00: Cena McCullough, and I'm here with our favorite farmer, Joel Salatin.
0:34
SPEAKER_00: And today we're going to talk about something that's near and dear to Joel's heart.
0:39
SPEAKER_00: The when it comes to ag policy, Joel is actually a one-string banjo with his food emancipation proclamation.
0:49
SPEAKER_00: Unfortunately, with the Maha movement and recent changes that we are seeing in our culture, Joel is actually getting an audience that can make possibly move this forward, move this food emancipation proclamation forward.
1:06
SPEAKER_00: So what I wanted to do today is really tease this out.
1:09
SPEAKER_00: What is a food emancipation proclamation?
1:12
SPEAKER_00: Why do we even need this?
1:14
SPEAKER_00: Like, why should you care, basically?
1:16
SPEAKER_00: And how do we help?
1:17
SPEAKER_00: How do we help Joel win this fight for food freedom?
1:21
SPEAKER_00: Okay, Joel, I'm ready to be dazzled.
1:25
SPEAKER_01: Okay, so so yeah, uh the hardest part of this whole idea is convincing people that we don't have food choice.
1:34
SPEAKER_01: People walk into Walmart, Costco, Kroger's, and say, Well, look, look, look at all the look at all the food.
1:40
SPEAKER_01: You know, what do you mean I don't have food choice?
1:43
SPEAKER_01: But the truth is that all that food at the supermarket comes through a very, very narrow industrial, regul industrially regulated um licensing system.
1:57
SPEAKER_01: If you've ever noticed, like if there's a recall of uh a product, and and and in the art, you know, maybe it's a recall for E.
2:08
SPEAKER_01: coli or salmonella or you know, some some pathogen.
2:10
SPEAKER_01: And um, and when you look at the article of the recall, it'll list all the brand names, you know, and it's you know, um Chef Boy RD, Jimmy Dean's, uh, you know, whatever.
2:22
SPEAKER_01: And you got 25 brands you know listed down through there.
2:26
SPEAKER_01: And the truth is, all those brands came from the same spigot.
2:30
SPEAKER_01: You know, they they came from the same funnel.
2:32
SPEAKER_01: Uh, they just slapped a different a different label on them as they came out the the door.
2:37
SPEAKER_01: So let me give you an example.
2:40
SPEAKER_01: Let's say that you have a dear, a dear neighbor friend, maybe, you know, maybe you attend church together.
2:47
SPEAKER_01: Everybody calls her Aunt Alice.
2:49
SPEAKER_01: Uh, she's not everybody's aunt, but everybody loves her so much they just call her Aunt Alice.
2:54
SPEAKER_01: And um, and at Potlucks, she brings a she and she's a you know, she's old school.
2:59
SPEAKER_01: She's got a garden, she's got some chickens, and uh, you know, and she makes a chicken pot pie to die for.
3:06
SPEAKER_01: And at the at Potlucks, whether it's a you know, uh whatever it is, uh her everybody runs for Aunt Alice's, you know, chicken pot pie.
3:15
SPEAKER_01: It's the first thing gone all the time.
3:17
SPEAKER_01: It's the number one thing at every you know, dinner.
3:20
SPEAKER_01: And so we've got we've got um uh some relatives coming next week, and I don't have time, we don't have time in our household.
3:29
SPEAKER_01: I mean, we're working whatever, we don't have time to fix uh extra food for these relatives, but we want to be hospitable.
3:36
SPEAKER_01: So we go over to Ann Alice and say, Ann Alice, who who who is just recently widowed, and so she's looking for things to be needful and helpful in the community and and maybe you know make a little extra money.
3:46
SPEAKER_01: And um, so we say, Ann Alice, would you make three or four uh chicken pot pies for us to feed to our you know our cousins that are coming next week?
3:54
SPEAKER_01: We you know, we just don't have time to fix the extra food, and um your pot pies are just unbelievable, you know.
4:01
SPEAKER_01: So could we, you know, buy four from you?
4:04
SPEAKER_01: It's illegal.
4:07
SPEAKER_01: It's illegal for her to make those and sell them to you.
4:10
SPEAKER_01: Let's take a food desert, an urban food desert.
4:13
SPEAKER_01: We hear a lot about food.
4:15
SPEAKER_00: Can I add in real fast?
4:16
SPEAKER_00: So, real life example of what you just described.
4:20
SPEAKER_00: Um, I have a friend uh who lives in my community, and she was trying to make some extra money for her family, and she's a great cook.
4:29
SPEAKER_00: And so that's what she did.
4:30
SPEAKER_00: She put together meals, like full meals, and she would post them on her Facebook page to let all her friends in our local community know uh what she had available meal-wise to sell for that week.
4:44
SPEAKER_00: And the friends would come and you know, give her the money and they'd come to her house and pick it up, you know, seemingly harmless.
4:49
SPEAKER_00: And everybody raved about her food.
4:52
SPEAKER_00: So she got in trouble and had to stop doing it, even though the friends all raved about it, wrote good reviews about it, and wanted to keep buying the food from her.
5:04
SPEAKER_00: She had to stop doing it because she wasn't preparing those foods in a government-approved kitchen.
5:10
SPEAKER_01: Right, right.
5:12
SPEAKER_01: Well, I have never gotten over this for me.
5:14
SPEAKER_01: This goes back a long time.
5:17
SPEAKER_01: When I was in high school and I was trying to figure out how do I make a living on this little farm?
5:23
SPEAKER_01: I wanted to come back to the farm full time.
5:25
SPEAKER_01: How do I make a living on this farm?
5:27
SPEAKER_01: At that time, we were milking, hand milking two Guernsey cows.
5:31
SPEAKER_01: And we always had yogurt and ice cream and cottage cheese and butter and and raw milk.
5:37
SPEAKER_01: I grew up on that.
5:38
SPEAKER_01: And we had we had neighbors that would have liked that would like to get that.
5:42
SPEAKER_01: And so I my first you know farm business plan was I realized, man, I'm 18.
5:48
SPEAKER_01: I could I could hand milk 10 cows.
5:51
SPEAKER_01: That's a lot of cows to hand milk, but plenty of people have done it for a long, long time.
5:55
SPEAKER_01: I could hand milk 10 cows.
5:57
SPEAKER_01: It would take it would take an hour and a half every morning and evening.
6:00
SPEAKER_01: That's okay.
6:01
SPEAKER_01: Um, and I could sell it at regular retail prices, not jacked up because it's organic or grass or anything, just regular retail prices.
6:10
SPEAKER_01: I could hand milk 10 cows and make a nice living on this little farm, hand milking 10 cows.
6:16
SPEAKER_01: There was only one problem.
6:18
SPEAKER_01: It was illegal.
6:20
SPEAKER_01: Neighbors wanted it.
6:21
SPEAKER_01: I wanted it.
6:22
SPEAKER_01: It would have made some really happy cows to live here.
6:26
SPEAKER_01: Uh, you know, everybody was happy except the government.
6:32
SPEAKER_01: And so, and so I have lived in this in this space.
6:36
SPEAKER_01: I even wrote a book, you know, everything I want to do is illegal, um, documenting numerous of our run-ins uh with you know with regulations.
6:45
SPEAKER_01: And so the the truth is that Anne Alice's chicken pot pie, your neighbor's raw milk, and and um, and and uncle Tommy's um you know homemade bologna, pepperoni, you know, charcuterie, uh, those are all unavailable and illegal in our in our food uh system.
7:11
SPEAKER_01: And so our food system is enslaved, it's shackled by an industrial regulatory structure that disallows freedom of choice among voluntary consenting adults to give their microbiome personal agency.
7:34
SPEAKER_01: How's that for some powerful phraseology?
7:39
SPEAKER_00: That is so good.
7:39
SPEAKER_00: That's that's the headline right there.
7:41
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it it it it is.
7:43
SPEAKER_01: I mean, we're we're in a time of of consenting adults exercising freedom of choice, and we're and and we're all about personal agency, right?
7:54
SPEAKER_01: You know, that's the that's the operative term.
7:55
SPEAKER_01: We want agency.
7:58
SPEAKER_01: What is more what is more intimate in that space than our food?
8:04
SPEAKER_01: You know, we've got freedom of choice in the bathroom, the bedroom, and the womb, but not the kitchen.
8:13
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
8:14
SPEAKER_01: And so the the the for the first part here is to help everybody to understand if we had a food emancipation proclamation, our food choice in this country, what you could buy locally, what you could buy from a neighbor, somebody in your homeschool group, your church, your your civic club, there would be an atomic bomb explosion of domestic culinary and small-scale farming entrepreneurship accessing our neighborhoods, our communities, with more safe, more stable, and more secure food.
8:57
SPEAKER_01: Right now we have AOC and Bernie Sanders running around the country talking about we've got to stop the oligarchy.
9:05
SPEAKER_01: You know, Bernie gets up there, got to stop the oligarchy, you know.
9:09
SPEAKER_01: And the only solution they can imagine is a government agency bigger than the oligarchy.
9:17
SPEAKER_01: Well, the problem is that's what we've had for 100 years.
9:20
SPEAKER_01: And look where it's gotten us.
9:22
SPEAKER_01: It's gotten us centralization, consolidation in the food and farming sector to where there's very, very little choice.
9:36
SPEAKER_01: And the way to stop the oligarchy is to free up from the grassroots, from the bottom up, to free up choice so that you and I can actually have a choice in our food system.
9:51
SPEAKER_01: And so so that that's that's the issue.
9:56
SPEAKER_01: The the the the pushback though is palpable.
10:00
SPEAKER_01: As soon as you start down this path, the pushback is palpable.
10:04
SPEAKER_00: The first one is wait, before we go to that, um, let me add to you, you talked about how there'd be like this uh you know, small farm explosion, increasing the um amount of choice for the consumer, right?
10:18
SPEAKER_00: And increasing business opportunities for the individual.
10:22
SPEAKER_00: There'd be a culinary explosion as well, all right, of people taking these raw local goods and creating these meals and baked goods and whatnot, and being able to sell them.
10:34
SPEAKER_00: Right now, um, my friend that I mentioned who can't sell unless she's in a government-approved kitchen.
10:40
SPEAKER_00: Well, that alone made it cost prohibitive for her to keep that business.
10:46
SPEAKER_00: So she actually had to stop her small business.
10:50
SPEAKER_00: I mean, that's that's that should not be happening in you know the land of the free.
10:55
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, like this is where you come to pursue your American dream.
10:58
SPEAKER_01: Like nobody's putting a gun to your head saying you have to eat her food.
11:03
SPEAKER_01: This is total voluntary, total freedom of choice.
11:07
SPEAKER_01: Uh and and what people have, and and people say, well, why didn't she just comply?
11:11
SPEAKER_01: Well, because it would have cost her a couple hundred thousand dollars and and numerous permits, zoning zoning uh special use permits and different things, attorney's fees to be able to comply.
11:22
SPEAKER_01: So, what people have to understand is in the food regulation space, every single regulation, every single regulation is size prejudicial.
11:34
SPEAKER_01: It's easier to comply if you're big than if you're small.
11:39
SPEAKER_01: Because the regulations are not regulations of empirical quality, like you know, bacteria counts or or you know, or or um, you know, how many fly legs are in the you know Cheerios.
11:53
SPEAKER_01: Um it's it's not empirical, it's not in empirical.
11:58
SPEAKER_01: It's it's it's subjective.
12:03
SPEAKER_01: Well, it's it's not necessarily subjective either, but but it it requires infrastructure and overheads.
12:09
SPEAKER_01: For example, for example, I co-own a small federal inspected slaughterhouse.
12:15
SPEAKER_01: We do uh pigs, chicken, uh, not chicken, we do pigs, uh, cattle, goats, and lamb.
12:21
SPEAKER_01: And and we have exactly the same investment in HACCP plans, hazardous analysis, critical control point.
12:32
SPEAKER_01: These are written plans for every single procedure in the plant that has to be stamped approved by a government inspector.
12:39
SPEAKER_01: It's the same for us that we do, you know, 50, 50 uh beef a week as it is for Iowa beef packers or JBS or Tyson that does 5,000 per day.
12:53
SPEAKER_01: Same thing.
12:54
SPEAKER_01: So what that means is it costs us$500 to do to a carcass what they can do for$100.
13:02
SPEAKER_01: And that creates price prejudice.
13:05
SPEAKER_01: People complain about local food being expensive or our food being expensive.
13:09
SPEAKER_01: Well, 30% of the cost of legal food in this space to sell is because of these prejudicial regulations.
13:18
SPEAKER_01: Well, the other side says, well, look, we got to have a level playing field.
13:22
SPEAKER_01: It's not fair for you to be exempted from these requirements that you know that that Tyson uh has to comply with.
13:29
SPEAKER_01: We're playing two fundamentally different games, Cena.
13:32
SPEAKER_01: I'm not asking, I'm not asking to go put on the shelf at Walmart and Costco, okay?
13:39
SPEAKER_01: I'm I'm not asking to outlaw, you know, to I'm not an abolitionist.
13:46
SPEAKER_01: I'm not asking to outlaw Monsanto or JBS.
13:49
SPEAKER_01: What I am asking for is a viable underground railroad so that those of us who want to get out of the system may.
13:59
SPEAKER_01: And and as far as the level playing field, people that say that, it's like saying, all right, we want football in America, but there's going to be a new rule.
14:09
SPEAKER_01: The only place you can play football is in an NFL-approved sanctioned stadium.
14:15
SPEAKER_01: So that Sunday afternoon pickup game in the backyard where, you know, seven guys and two girls, you know, decide to pick up a football game, and the goalposts are going to be the lilac bush and the clothesline at one end, and the the garden spade and the flower pot at the other end, and you know, out of bounds is you know, is the side of the house on one side and the you know the the the hedge the on the other.
14:41
SPEAKER_01: No, that that doesn't work.
14:44
SPEAKER_01: The point is those two games are complete, they're not, it's not the same game.
14:49
SPEAKER_01: You're not playing the same thing.
14:51
SPEAKER_01: One is one is completely choice individual, nobody's paying to go see it.
14:57
SPEAKER_01: You don't need referees, you work it out.
15:00
SPEAKER_01: The other is a totally different thing.
15:01
SPEAKER_01: And so, and so those of us in the private sector who want to interact with private transactions direct between a farm or a culinary kitchen with a with a with a consenting adult patron, we are not in the public sector, we're in the private sector interacting, you know, between ourselves.
15:25
SPEAKER_01: So the yeah.
15:28
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, quick question.
15:29
SPEAKER_00: So uh so there's I think I think uh people are starting to become aware that there's less choice, but I don't think people are fully aware of that yet.
15:42
SPEAKER_00: Like for you laid out the good case here that you know you'd have uh more more local foods available to you under this food emancipation proclamation, which would increase choice.
15:55
SPEAKER_00: But even in the grocery store, I know we've talked about this some and we wrote about it in our book how you don't have the choice that you think you have.
16:03
SPEAKER_00: And yet, um, so if you can expand on that and also piggyback that on um there's a safety, there's a perceived safety issue here, right?
16:13
SPEAKER_00: And so the governing bodies would say, oh, well, we're just trying to protect the safety of the consumer, the one who's eating the food.
16:21
SPEAKER_00: And there is this perception amongst many consumers, maybe not our audience now, but there is a perception among many consumers that what is sold in the grocery stores is safe.
16:33
SPEAKER_00: So if you can uh help us to maybe broaden our perspective of what is the choice that you really have in the grocery store, and is that food actually safer than let's say, you know, your Aunt Annie's uh pot pie or Aunt Alice's pot pie.
16:49
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, Aunt Alice's, yeah, yeah.
16:51
SPEAKER_01: No, that you you you've hit the nail on the head.
16:54
SPEAKER_01: Uh that is absolutely the number one pushback is what about safety?
16:58
SPEAKER_01: And I I hearkened back to, I don't know what, 10, 15 years ago, I was I was uh we there was a bill in in Virginia here to to do this.
17:08
SPEAKER_01: And uh I was down there testifying for it, and our commissioner of agriculture pulled me aside during uh during a break there in a hearing.
17:15
SPEAKER_01: And he, I mean, he was a very nice guy.
17:17
SPEAKER_01: He came over to me, he said, Joel, he said, we can't let people choose their food.
17:21
SPEAKER_01: He said, we couldn't build hospitals fast enough for all the sick people getting bad food from dirty farmers.
17:29
SPEAKER_01: Let me unpack that a little bit for folks.
17:32
SPEAKER_01: Uh our listeners, Cena, I'm sure, are already ahead of me on this, but but let me unpack that.
17:38
SPEAKER_01: Number one, number one, he's assuming that a private farmer selling to a neighbor or a neighbor to neighbor, that somehow that is that is more risky from a food safety standpoint than an industrial system going through a federal bureaucracy.
17:58
SPEAKER_01: That that somehow small private businesses are more untrustworthy than the federal bureaucracy.
18:06
SPEAKER_01: And I think anybody who has listened to us for a moment realizes the federal bureaucracy, and now with the Maha movement and what RFK Jr.
18:15
SPEAKER_01: is uncovering, we're realizing that the corruption, the graft, the fraud, the incestuous, the incestuous cabal of the uh of the oversight community, whether it's in whether it's in health vaccines, pesticides, herbicides, whatever it is, uh, that that that is a that is a an unbelievably fraudulent situation.
18:39
SPEAKER_01: And and so so the very idea that you can trust the government, but you can't trust business, just just on its on its outset is is uh is an indefensible position.
18:54
SPEAKER_01: You you can't defend the fact you can't defend business is more now what uh yes, plenty of businesses have a reputation and a history of cheating and fraud and and pathogenicity, whatever.
19:12
SPEAKER_01: But all those businesses that are like that are the big ones.
19:16
SPEAKER_01: They're the ones that are colluding.
19:18
SPEAKER_01: We've had a poultry exemption in this country for on-farm processing.
19:23
SPEAKER_01: This is what we're under at our farm.
19:25
SPEAKER_01: It was established in 1967.
19:28
SPEAKER_01: Uh uh and it is called the the Public Law 90-492, the producer-grower exemption, so we can produce and sell 20,000 chickens a year without inspection.
19:38
SPEAKER_01: See that there is not one single incident now in whatever it is, uh 40 from 67, it is like 60, almost 60 years.
19:49
SPEAKER_01: There's not a single incident of a single sickness from chickens processed under that federal exemption.
19:57
SPEAKER_01: Not one.
19:58
SPEAKER_01: Wow.
19:59
SPEAKER_01: And during that time, how many people have gotten sick from bad chicken?
20:04
SPEAKER_01: So I look at the I look at the commissioner and say, okay, the hotel, the the hotel, the hospital rooms are already full.
20:12
SPEAKER_01: They're full of people eating your stuff.
20:15
SPEAKER_01: They're full of people eating government stuff, red dye 40 and glyphosate and you know, everything else.
20:20
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
20:21
SPEAKER_01: So, so you know, don't sit there and tell me that you are the only.
20:26
SPEAKER_01: And then he went on to say, he said, you have to understand, I am responsible.
20:30
SPEAKER_01: He did this with a straight face, you know.
20:32
SPEAKER_01: He said, He said, I am responsible for every morsel of food that every citizen of the Commonwealth eats every day.
20:40
SPEAKER_01: And I thought to myself, if you really believe that, you know, you're insane.
20:49
SPEAKER_01: And if you really believed it, how could you sleep at night?
20:55
SPEAKER_01: If if if every morsel of food in the state is under your, you know, your your um uh prerogative.
21:01
SPEAKER_01: So so the the the food the food safety issue is simply a fraudulent argument.
21:10
SPEAKER_01: The fact is, safety is highly subjective.
21:14
SPEAKER_01: I don't think it's safe to drink three Coca-Cola a day.
21:17
SPEAKER_01: But the government says that's fine.
21:19
SPEAKER_01: I don't think it's safe to feed your kids Cheerios and Fruit Loops for breakfast, or homogenized milk, or I mean, we could go down a list, all right?
21:29
SPEAKER_01: Uh or Tyson chicken.
21:32
SPEAKER_00: Or many of the sterilized foods that you find in the grocery store.
21:36
SPEAKER_00: I mean, we need better food choice, better than the grocery store, in order to fully heal and thrive.
21:45
SPEAKER_00: Yes, like that's the bottom line.
21:47
SPEAKER_00: We need better food choices.
21:50
SPEAKER_00: So if we talk about like, why does this matter to the consumer?
21:53
SPEAKER_00: Why are we spending a whole podcast talking about this?
21:55
SPEAKER_00: Why does this really matter?
21:56
SPEAKER_00: And it's because, in large part, the food that is currently Available to us legally, grocery stores, gas stations, whatnot, that a lot of that food is making us sick for numerous reasons.
22:09
SPEAKER_00: Like you said, there can be pathogen overgrowth.
22:11
SPEAKER_00: Think of all, you know, the E.
22:13
SPEAKER_00: coli outbreaks on the lettuce.
22:14
SPEAKER_00: Like you're trying to do something good.
22:16
SPEAKER_00: You're eating spinach and then you get sick.
22:18
SPEAKER_00: Or, you know, there's been hepatitis outbreaks.
22:21
SPEAKER_00: So there's pathogen outbreaks.
22:23
SPEAKER_00: Um, but the food is sterilized.
22:25
SPEAKER_00: We've talked about that before on this program in our books, books.
22:28
SPEAKER_00: A lot of the food it has been sterilized.
22:30
SPEAKER_00: It's devoid of the healthy microbiome that can help build your own robust microbiome in yourself.
22:37
SPEAKER_00: And that leads to um lack of resiliency, you know, against disease.
22:43
SPEAKER_00: Um, but there can be contaminants in those foods as well.
22:47
SPEAKER_00: I mean, even in spices, the government allows uh like a certain amount of um hair and fecal particulates, even in spices, you know.
22:56
SPEAKER_00: So I think these are the things that people don't realize when they walk into that grocery store and they think, oh, this is all safe because it's gone through all this government bureaucracy and all the red tape that only the large businesses can afford.
23:10
SPEAKER_00: It's really a farce because there's a lot of things that are allowed to be in and on that food and done to that food that is not on the label.
23:20
SPEAKER_00: So the consumer is just not aware.
23:22
SPEAKER_01: Right.
23:22
SPEAKER_01: That's right.
23:23
SPEAKER_01: And and a lot of it is nutrient, it's nutrient deficient.
23:26
SPEAKER_01: When you compare the nutrient density of a home, you know, a homemade sausage, uh, you know, from a from a neighbor's pig uh versus the one from Smithfield, all that you said is true, plus plus the nutrient is all out of whack.
23:45
SPEAKER_01: I mean, the the omega-3, omega-6, the you know, the folic acid, the riboflat, all this stuff is out of whack.
23:51
SPEAKER_00: Yes, and I'll leave piggyback on that.
23:53
SPEAKER_00: Just this weekend, I was doing a little fun sleuthing uh of the research, and I have found studies that have documented now that when you compare um meat, for example, from a regenerative farm, so a farm like yourself versus you know the industrial farm, they now have studies published, peer-reviewed scientific studies published in the literature that are showing that you have a much uh much more favorable omega-3 to omega-6 nutrient profile from the animals that are raised like you raise them regeneratively, compared.
24:32
SPEAKER_00: You know, we all knew this intuitively, but I'm saying it's actually published in the scientific literature.
24:37
SPEAKER_00: And that holds true for crops as well.
24:39
SPEAKER_00: There's many studies now, even a review that came out in 2025 that um itemizes all the different nutrients that are higher, not just vitamins and minerals, but polyphenols, you know, what we think of as these cancer-fighting um compounds.
24:55
SPEAKER_00: These are all higher on average on these farms that are raising regeneratively.
25:00
SPEAKER_00: Now, contrast that to what's in your grocery store or most grocery stores.
25:05
SPEAKER_00: And we've talked about this on the podcast too, just the concept of things are often picked on ripe, coated in a wax, or after they've been scrubbed, you know, of their microbiome, coated in a wax that has could have fungicides, grass chemicals and chemicals in it, shipped how many miles, could be a thousand or so miles, and then gas ripened in a lot of instances, which you're that's what you're talking about.
25:27
SPEAKER_00: This changes the the nutrient composition, macro and micronutrient composition of those foods.
25:33
SPEAKER_00: And yet those are deemed safe, right?
25:37
SPEAKER_01: But then try to go buy a bushel of apples from so so so Cena, here here is literally a new thought that I've really just come to in the last literally two weeks.
25:49
SPEAKER_01: And and and you got to realize that's that's a big deal because I've been preaching this idea for decades, literally since I was a teenager.
25:59
SPEAKER_01: And and and I I've never um I've never gotten over the fact that the government kept me off the farm for several years um because it wouldn't let me do my my plan.
26:12
SPEAKER_01: And uh, and I mean I I don't I don't plan to milking the cows?
26:17
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
26:17
SPEAKER_01: I yeah, yeah.
26:18
SPEAKER_01: And so so you know, I could have been back to the farm years uh before I was able to and had to work off the farm and all this stuff.
26:26
SPEAKER_01: Uh and you know, I'm not I'm not vengeful about it.
26:30
SPEAKER_01: Um I've forgiven, but I've not forgotten.
26:34
SPEAKER_01: And and I mean that that you know, God forgives and forgets.
26:37
SPEAKER_01: We humans, we can forgive, but we can't forget.
26:39
SPEAKER_01: You know, that's just the way it is.
26:40
SPEAKER_01: But but but a but a new a new thought that just come to came to me on this in the last couple of weeks, as I've I've I've done, I'm actually doing a lot of speaking about this right now because I'm running in some some circles that are that are really interested in ag policy.
26:57
SPEAKER_01: And and people are asking me, you know, um you know, people who have who have the ear of you know, Brooke Rollins or or Trump or uh RFK Jr., you know, what would you do?
27:09
SPEAKER_01: And I'm I'm I'm seeing I'm incredibly boring.
27:11
SPEAKER_01: I I got this one thing.
27:13
SPEAKER_01: Food emancipation, you know, they want me to sign on to a petition to, for example, outlaw ractopamine, you know, for pork production, or sign on to this agenda, that agenda, you know, crates for different things.
27:25
SPEAKER_01: And and I'm concerned, I'm concerned that we have this little window of opportunity with the new administration and the and the rabble rousers that he's picked for some of these cabinet positions, um, that we have this window of opportunity to do something, and it's all going to be squandered on who knows how many little committee meetings, little petitions and little things to this, this, this, and nickel and diamond out to where all of our energy gets expended in fighting over, well, you know, uh is ractopamine more important than glyphosate?
27:56
SPEAKER_01: Is glyphosate, you know, and and and you just bleed off all this.
27:59
SPEAKER_01: So, so I'm just I'm just a one-string, okay?
28:02
SPEAKER_01: All right, and here's the new thought that just that just occurred to me in the last two weeks.
28:09
SPEAKER_01: Convenience food.
28:11
SPEAKER_01: So Maha has really shown a light on ultra-processed foods and and and the fact that Americans, 75% of what they eat is either processed or ultra-processed.
28:25
SPEAKER_01: Very, very little food consumed in the American diet now is actually a single ingredient stuff, you know, an apple, uh, uh a butternut squash, you know, very little of it.
28:37
SPEAKER_01: Uh, you know, even the chicken is breaded and spiced and got a pop-up thermometer and you know, all this stuff.
28:44
SPEAKER_01: And and so um the biggest, the biggest prophetic mistake I ever made early on when I started doing media interviews and stuff.
28:53
SPEAKER_01: What do you view in the future?
28:54
SPEAKER_01: And you know, the local food thing was coming on, Obama, uh um um, you know, Michelle Obama had the White House guard and all this stuff.
29:01
SPEAKER_01: And I'm thinking, oh wow, this is we're on a roll here.
29:04
SPEAKER_01: You know, within 20 years, Americans are gonna be cooking from scratch everything.
29:09
SPEAKER_01: They're gonna be buying local, they're blah, blah, blah, blah.
29:11
SPEAKER_01: You know, I couldn't have been more wrong.
29:13
SPEAKER_01: I missed it by 180 degrees.
29:16
SPEAKER_01: Instead, we have become more convenience oriented, more process oriented.
29:23
SPEAKER_01: So I'm sitting here thinking, okay, instead, knowing what we know about food, instead of going to single ingredient, getting back in our kitchens and cooking, people are more frenetic, hurried, harried, frazzled.
29:41
SPEAKER_01: They're buying more and more convenience.
29:43
SPEAKER_01: And I'm realizing I'm not going to stop.
29:46
SPEAKER_01: That's a trend that's here.
29:48
SPEAKER_01: I can't preach against convenience because it's it's just here.
29:53
SPEAKER_01: What we need is to allow people to buy good convenience food.
29:58
SPEAKER_01: If I can make a pot pie, chicken pot pie, or Aunt Alice good, without MSG and without spices with, you know, fly legs in them, you know, if if we could do that, then people could enjoy good convenience food.
30:16
SPEAKER_01: I mean, around here, we're always saying, you know, what people really want is polyface hot pockets.
30:22
SPEAKER_01: You know, um, but but as soon as you start down that convenience channel, that process channel, then you're into all this plethora of size, uh of scale prohibitive, small-scale prohibitive regulatory requirements and infrastructure requirements.
30:40
SPEAKER_01: Like, you know, we we we we tried to make chicken pot pies here, you know, at the farm.
30:46
SPEAKER_01: And so you got to have a commercial kitchen.
30:48
SPEAKER_01: Well, what do you need for well, you need a bathroom in a commercial kitchen?
30:51
SPEAKER_01: We've got a wonderful commercial kitchen.
30:52
SPEAKER_01: We do three and four hundred-person events here with this wonderful big commercial kitchen, but it doesn't have an adjoining bathroom.
31:01
SPEAKER_01: The bathroom, you got to walk 100 yards over to the bathroom.
31:04
SPEAKER_01: Well, all the people that work that we have on our team, they're happy to get out for a you know, for a little walk, you know, a couple times a day and go over to the bathroom, all right?
31:14
SPEAKER_01: But you have to have an approved, adjoining, hooked-up bathroom in order to be a licensed commercial kitchen.
31:22
SPEAKER_01: Well, suddenly you're talking about a$50,000 deal.
31:28
SPEAKER_01: And suddenly, to make you know,$10,000 worth of chicken pot pies for convenience food for our customers and our neighbors that want them, you can't justify that with a$50,000, you know, bathroom septic drain field installation just to make$10,000 worth of pop pie, or even, or for that matter, the first one.
31:50
SPEAKER_01: One, let's just say one, okay?
31:52
SPEAKER_01: And so this is where these regulations become become um market prohibitive.
32:00
SPEAKER_01: And let me say one more thing about that.
32:02
SPEAKER_01: I know you're ready to ask a question.
32:04
SPEAKER_01: Uh, let me say one more thing about that.
32:05
SPEAKER_01: In America, in America, we have this list of hazardous substances, you know, prescription drugs, fentanyl, cocaine, methamphetamine, you know, all this stuff.
32:16
SPEAKER_01: The the regulations concerning them are across all five sectors of use.
32:26
SPEAKER_01: You can't buy it, you can't sell it, you can't use it, you can't give it away, and you certainly can't give it to your kids.
32:33
SPEAKER_01: Okay?
32:35
SPEAKER_01: Those those hazardous substances.
32:37
SPEAKER_01: But in food, the prohibition is only on the seller.
32:44
SPEAKER_01: You can give it away, you can use it, you can give it to your kids, you can buy it, you just can't sell it.
32:57
SPEAKER_01: So clearly, this is not about safety, it's about defining what's accessible in the marketplace.
33:07
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
33:08
SPEAKER_00: You know, uh two quick thoughts, and then I have a question for you.
33:12
SPEAKER_00: So when we lived um in Virginia in our county, I called because my son wanted to have something that would be like the equivalent of a lemonade stand.
33:21
SPEAKER_00: And they told uh, and I'd heard about a couple kids having their lemonade stand shut down in a different state.
33:27
SPEAKER_00: So I called just to make sure it was okay.
33:30
SPEAKER_00: And that was my first mistake.
33:32
SPEAKER_00: Don't ask for permission.
33:34
SPEAKER_00: But um, they actually told me that no, my child was not allowed to have a lemonade stand, but um he could have the product there and he could ask for a donation, so it just couldn't be a transaction, a sales transaction, but it could be donation.
33:52
SPEAKER_00: And I was like, Oh, I'm starting to see here now.
33:54
SPEAKER_01: Like what what what is it?
33:57
SPEAKER_01: What is it about exchanging a nickel that suddenly turns it from a benevolent thing to a hazardous substance?
34:04
SPEAKER_00: Yes, they said that it was about uh safety and liability, that then you know we'd be liable if somebody got sick and whatnot.
34:11
SPEAKER_00: And I just thought, wow, because I remember having um a lemonade stand as a child, and it was very empowering for me to be able to do that.
34:19
SPEAKER_00: So um, so we did, we did have a stand and we did donations.
34:23
SPEAKER_00: And luckily, they're very generous, kind people that gave a donation, even though they didn't have to, you know, and it was a fantastic experience for my son.
34:32
SPEAKER_00: But that's just one example of how you're saying these regulations are affecting the little guy.
34:38
SPEAKER_00: So it's not just the little farmers, it could also be our children trying to become entrepreneurs, you know?
34:43
SPEAKER_00: Yes, absolutely.
34:44
SPEAKER_00: I love this epiphany that you've had, uh, where you're like, let's just create like a kind of like a parallel um processed food that's healthier, because that fits in line too with my belief and with our book and what we did in Beyond Labels is really meeting people where they are.
35:00
SPEAKER_00: It's very difficult to change someone's behavior.
35:03
SPEAKER_00: And I don't really think it's our right to do that anyway.
35:05
SPEAKER_00: Everyone has the freedom of choice.
35:07
SPEAKER_00: So I love this line that you're going down now, where that's fine, you want to eat all those foods.
35:12
SPEAKER_00: Let's just give another option.
35:14
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
35:15
SPEAKER_00: So, because sometimes you are in a hurry.
35:17
SPEAKER_00: Sometimes you do just want to grab something, you know, for your kids or you're on vacation and you want to know that what you're grabbing isn't going to have some long-term health effect on your on your child or yourself.
35:29
SPEAKER_00: So I would love to have some convenience options.
35:32
SPEAKER_00: Like I would buy from you if you got that up and running.
35:35
SPEAKER_00: Um, but my question for you is it it wasn't always like this, right?
35:40
SPEAKER_00: I don't think a lot of people are realizing that we get wrapped up in this mainstream narrative that these role rules and regulations set forth by the government were ushered in because the food supply was making so many people sick.
35:55
SPEAKER_00: And so they swooped in and they saved us.
35:57
SPEAKER_00: And so we need to keep these rules and regulations in place in order for us to be safe.
36:04
SPEAKER_00: Can you talk a little bit about how these rules and regulations came about and what was the situation?
36:10
SPEAKER_00: You know, back then when people were able to just sell to their neighbors, were all these people just getting sick?
36:16
SPEAKER_01: No, no, they weren't.
36:18
SPEAKER_01: This came about, Cena.
36:20
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, how did we get to where we are?
36:21
SPEAKER_01: Well, we got there in 1906 when Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle.
36:26
SPEAKER_01: Uh, that's the starting point for this.
36:27
SPEAKER_01: Now, Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle exposing the abuses in the Chicago, the Chicago uh slaughterhouse industry.
36:35
SPEAKER_01: That that was that was the the the center of American, you know, um cattle, cattle uh processing at the time, Chicago.
36:44
SPEAKER_01: And um, and he he was essentially trying to highlight abuses among workers.
36:50
SPEAKER_01: He he was a he was a socialist, and he was trying to highlight how terrible the the worker abuse was, but in doing so, he described how atrocious the the the cleanliness and the sanitation was in the in the industry.
37:03
SPEAKER_01: Interestingly enough, though, nobody was getting sick from it.
37:06
SPEAKER_01: Nobody was getting sick.
37:08
SPEAKER_01: But but the the whole that whole uh uh picture that Upton Sinclair painted, and many people today say that he made a lot of it up.
37:17
SPEAKER_01: So, you know, I'm not I'm not gonna say good or bad or indifferent.
37:20
SPEAKER_01: But the fact is that after that book came out, within six months, within six months, the big seven, it's at that time there were seven.
37:29
SPEAKER_01: Armour, Swift, uh, you know, uh the big seven who controlled 50% of America's meat supply.
37:38
SPEAKER_01: So think about it, in 1906, seven companies controlled 50%, and that was considered an oligarchy, okay.
37:48
SPEAKER_01: Today, four control 85%.
37:51
SPEAKER_01: All right.
37:52
SPEAKER_01: So uh clearly we have not, you know, we have not had more choice.
37:57
SPEAKER_01: Anyway, those seven big packers, they lost half of their sales in six months after that book was published.
38:05
SPEAKER_01: That's the power of the marketplace, Zena.
38:07
SPEAKER_01: You know, people say, oh, people are stupid, they don't know.
38:09
SPEAKER_01: No, no, no, no.
38:10
SPEAKER_01: No, people are actually very, very savvy when they get information.
38:14
SPEAKER_01: Very savvy.
38:16
SPEAKER_01: And and and within six months of that book coming out, half of those Big Sevens sales vanished as people fled back to their neighborhood butchers, neighborhood meat shops, neighborhood stuff that were that were alive and well back in that day.
38:32
SPEAKER_01: It was the biggest exodus of people out of the the nascent grocery store development versus you know the old neighborhood supply, the butcher, the baker, and candlestick maker.
38:45
SPEAKER_01: Well, those seven big executives went to to uh Teddy Roosevelt, who was president at the time.
38:51
SPEAKER_01: Of course, Teddy Roosevelt was a socialist.
38:53
SPEAKER_01: That's why I call him Teddy Rooseveltsky.
38:55
SPEAKER_01: And uh and so they went to Teddy Roosevelt on bended knee, begging him we need a government stamp to give us credibility with the American consumer, or we're gonna go bankrupt.
39:09
SPEAKER_01: We're gonna lose our businesses.
39:11
SPEAKER_01: And if Roosevelt had had any kind of American constitutional spine, he would have looked at him and said, huh, you guys, you made your bed, now go lie in it.
39:20
SPEAKER_01: You ever heard that, you know?
39:22
SPEAKER_01: Uh, but no, he didn't.
39:23
SPEAKER_01: Being associally said, okay, okay, we'll we'll we'll create a federal agency to give you a stamp of government approval.
39:31
SPEAKER_01: And he created it launched in 1908.
39:34
SPEAKER_01: So two years later, 1908, the Food Safety Inspection Service, F-S-I-S, Food Safety Inspection Service.
39:44
SPEAKER_01: That was launched in 1908.
39:45
SPEAKER_01: So we're, you know, a little over a hundred years with this experiment, and for the first time, the government determining what is acceptable to be sold or not.
39:55
SPEAKER_01: And what has happened is that that bureaucracy and the regulatory structure has chipped away and chipped away at community canneries and community butcher shops and and and small-scale stuff.
40:09
SPEAKER_01: I remember as a kid in the early 60s, our county, you could take, if you had a pig you wanted, you know, butchered, um, there there were there were 20, 20 places in our county you could take that.
40:23
SPEAKER_01: Some of them were just farmers that just enjoyed, you know, enjoyed that aspect of of um the process.
40:31
SPEAKER_01: And um and now there's not a one.
40:34
SPEAKER_01: Uh and so and so it's been chipped away.
40:38
SPEAKER_01: And so there was never really a food safety problem.
40:47
SPEAKER_01: It was a a point in time, uh, you know, a journalistic muckraker deal, okay, that suddenly made people aware, ooh, I don't want to eat that.
40:57
SPEAKER_01: And uh, and rather than letting the market what what what if we hadn't gotten an FSI?
41:02
SPEAKER_01: What if Roosevelt had said, hey, you guys, you know, have to go solve it yourself?
41:06
SPEAKER_01: You know what would have happened?
41:07
SPEAKER_01: A, those companies would have mounted a major uh cleanup operation internally themselves.
41:14
SPEAKER_01: Number two, there would have been private um private certifying agencies, you know, like AAA and uh and underwriters laboratory and you know, private folks that that you and I, we would, we would, we would join, we would subscribe, you know, we'd look at their criteria.
41:32
SPEAKER_01: Here's what we're gonna credential.
41:34
SPEAKER_01: Hey, you know, I kind of like that outfit.
41:36
SPEAKER_01: You know, we'd subscribe for 20 bucks a year or whatever.
41:38
SPEAKER_01: And the the the compounding power of that, they would send people in and and adjudicate, you know, and and and credential.
41:46
SPEAKER_01: Uh this one has you know uh XYZ approval, this one has ABC approval, this one has, and there there would been a completely privately certified um uh system.
42:02
SPEAKER_01: Instead, we got a government agency that, as RFK Jr.
42:06
SPEAKER_01: so eloquently points out, got captured, agency capture, you've heard that phrase lately.
42:13
SPEAKER_01: Uh, it got captured by the big players in the industry, and they have systematically eroded the freedoms and and and put shackles on small producers to lock them out of the market, and that's why we need a food emancipation proclamation.
42:32
SPEAKER_00: Wow, that was such a great uh explanation of how we got here.
42:36
SPEAKER_00: I love it.
42:37
SPEAKER_00: Let me add a couple things.
42:38
SPEAKER_00: So you talk about, you know, if Roosevelt hadn't come in um and swooped in and tried to save the day with with growing more government, we would have had these independent certifiers.
42:49
SPEAKER_00: And that's similar to what we've been seeing in you know here in the last couple of decades with the birth of the non-GMO project, like that third-party verifier, the detox project, third-party verifier for um glyphosate residue-free.
43:04
SPEAKER_00: So we're seeing some of these independent organizations come up and we're seeing people flocking to them, you know, like when non-GMO puts their label, their seal on a product, sales go up um instantly from that for that product, you know, dramatically.
43:20
SPEAKER_00: Um ironically, so I always found this quite ironic that the back then when we you know in 1906 and we were ushered in this this these new laws that ultimately birthed the FDA, the solution was a government stamp, as you said.
43:39
SPEAKER_00: It was a literal stamp on the meat, right?
43:43
SPEAKER_00: That it was like a government approved.
43:45
SPEAKER_00: And now we know that the dye that they use in that stamp causes cancer.
43:51
SPEAKER_00: So from the start, it was not a safer food supply.
43:55
SPEAKER_00: Right?
43:56
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, now there was, I mean, you know, to be clear, there was For ages, there's been since before America was even born, there's been adulteration of foods, you know.
44:06
SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
44:08
SPEAKER_00: And like even at this time of Upton Sinclair, there was um reports of like honey uh adulterated, like where they would add glucose to it and put like a dead bee in it, and you know, a little dye, and that would be honey.
44:22
SPEAKER_00: Or at one point there were like little candies that happened to be laced with um a toxic, I think it was a toxic dye.
44:29
SPEAKER_00: But but these things they were not rampant like a lot of people think, but they were also controlled for, right, Joel?
44:38
SPEAKER_00: Like the community knew if they would respond accordingly, correct?
44:43
SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
44:44
SPEAKER_01: The the reason the reason we know about those things is not because there was a government agency, it's because the the charlatans got found out.
44:53
SPEAKER_01: And and so at that time, the you know, the the bit the the food, candy, confectioner businesses were smaller and more more transparent.
45:06
SPEAKER_01: And so people looked at them.
45:08
SPEAKER_01: What with with the government stamp, if you will, the government stamp has basically given license for all of us to become ignorant.
45:16
SPEAKER_00: Yes.
45:16
SPEAKER_01: Say, well, it's got the government stamp, that's all that matters.
45:19
SPEAKER_01: And and and so so what's happened, Cena, is over time it has created a very opaque food system.
45:29
SPEAKER_01: You know, go to any big processing plant, cannery, whatever, it's surrounded by razor wire with guard houses.
45:35
SPEAKER_01: You can't go in there, all right.
45:37
SPEAKER_01: Well, what happens, what happens in any society when an economic sector becomes opaque?
45:44
SPEAKER_01: People fear what they don't know.
45:46
SPEAKER_01: Well, what's going on there behind the fence?
45:49
SPEAKER_01: And so people ask for a government agency that was a bully big enough to look over the fence and protect the people's interests.
45:58
SPEAKER_01: The problem is that that always, always, I'm sorry, all of you, you know, uh the one bigger government Bernie Sanders lovers, it always eventually creates this agency capture that RFK Jr.
46:14
SPEAKER_01: talks about because the big players, they whine and dine the politicians, they have dinners for the bureaucrats, and and and they they all go to the same college, they drank the same, you know, Kool-Aid, they go golfing together, and and it becomes this this incestuous cabal uh that that that uh operates.
46:34
SPEAKER_01: And so that's where we are.
46:36
SPEAKER_00: So what so now, like you said, you painted this great picture, we're shackled by these rules and regulations, and in large part they're not making the food safer, um, but they are stealing a lot of people's dreams.
46:52
SPEAKER_00: So what what is your food emancipation proclamation?
46:59
SPEAKER_01: So essentially, it it says that if two individuals want to engage in a food transaction, they can do so without a government bureau uh without without uh without government permission.
47:16
SPEAKER_01: I I I I don't have the exact wording.
47:19
SPEAKER_01: I'm probably not smart enough or not good enough, whatever, politician, legislator, attorney to create.
47:25
SPEAKER_01: But but essentially we're talking about about two people should be able to engage in a food transaction voluntarily without government permission.
47:37
SPEAKER_01: Period.
47:38
SPEAKER_01: Period.
47:39
SPEAKER_00: So that person who's selling, for example, do they have to file that they um are an LLC or that they they have a business?
47:48
SPEAKER_01: No, nothing.
47:49
SPEAKER_01: If you're my neighbor and I'm making you know a five-gallon bucket of pepperoni or summer sausage, and you come over, man, and I give you wow, that's good.
48:00
SPEAKER_01: Can I buy a pound from you?
48:02
SPEAKER_01: We should be able to engage in that transaction without government permission, period.
48:07
SPEAKER_01: Across the board, across the board.
48:09
SPEAKER_01: Dairy, poultry, chicken soup, tomato soup, you know, um green beans, whatever it is.
48:18
SPEAKER_01: And and and peep people are all you know, the the first impression is oh, well, you know, somebody's gonna get sick.
48:24
SPEAKER_01: You know what?
48:25
SPEAKER_01: Somebody will get sick.
48:26
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
48:27
SPEAKER_01: As if nobody's getting sick from government-approved food.
48:31
SPEAKER_01: Give me a break.
48:32
SPEAKER_01: Give me a break.
48:33
SPEAKER_01: I mean, this is the whole Maha movement.
48:35
SPEAKER_01: We're our culture is being sickened by government-approved food.
48:40
SPEAKER_01: To anyone who's anyone who says, oh, more people are gonna get sick with neighbor food, with neighbor to neighbor food, than you know, uh uh industrial to to Walmart to you know uh urban food.
48:58
SPEAKER_01: Anybody that says that, they're I'm sorry, they're not thinking.
49:01
SPEAKER_01: You're just not thinking.
49:04
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
49:05
SPEAKER_00: So let's say somebody uh so let's say we have this, you know, food emancipation proclamation, and let's say Aunt Alice sells her pot pie to you know somebody in her church, and that person does get sick, then what's the recourse of that person?
49:22
SPEAKER_00: Can they turn around and sue Aunt Alice?
49:26
SPEAKER_00: Yes.
49:27
SPEAKER_00: Okay, so that's how you would handle that.
49:30
SPEAKER_01: And you know what, you know what I would say?
49:32
SPEAKER_01: I would say, I would say, in the same vein, when we pass this, we're gonna take liability protection away from the vaccine companies.
49:42
SPEAKER_01: Let's link them.
49:43
SPEAKER_01: Let's let's link link the two.
49:45
SPEAKER_01: I'm willing as a farmer to take the risk for my food and vouch for it.
49:49
SPEAKER_01: Yes, it's okay.
49:50
SPEAKER_01: I want the vaccine companies to have the same thing.
49:54
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
49:55
SPEAKER_01: So and right now, Cena, as you know, if you're watching, man, I mean, this stuff is the news, the news cycle is almost um just like a tornado as you right now.
50:06
SPEAKER_01: And one of the things that's being done right now is trying to get the the the equivalent liability protection that happened with the vaccine companies and give that to the chemical companies.
50:18
SPEAKER_01: If their product is EPA approved, i.e.
50:21
SPEAKER_01: glyphosate is EPA approved, then they have no product liability.
50:26
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
50:27
SPEAKER_01: I mean, can you imagine what that would do to chemical usage and proliferation in this country?
50:34
SPEAKER_01: And and think about the pressure.
50:36
SPEAKER_01: When we talk about, when you talk about agency capture, think about the pressure on the EPA.
50:42
SPEAKER_01: The the I mean you can't imagine the um the behind the scenes politicization to lean on regulators from the industry.
50:58
SPEAKER_01: I mean, the reason we have K Street, you know, that's where all the lobbyists are, the reason we have K Street is because all of our freedoms are for sale.
51:06
SPEAKER_01: You know, if our freedoms weren't for sale, we wouldn't have K Street.
51:11
SPEAKER_01: I just had a fascinating conversation with a guy who's very, very high up in the administration, spent an hour with him a couple weeks ago, and it was it was it was again one of these, for me, it was a not a maha, an aha moment.
51:29
SPEAKER_01: Uh that, well, I never think like that.
51:31
SPEAKER_01: He said, you have to understand every time you touch a USDA anything, chemical use, um, factory farming, um, this kind of thing, anything you touch USDA policy, USDA, their position is, and and and and the thinking within the the political, you know, the legislative, the elected officials, that's a 30, that's 30 million jobs.
52:02
SPEAKER_01: 30 million jobs.
52:03
SPEAKER_01: Wow.
52:04
SPEAKER_01: And so every single policy, question, direction, whatever, gets gets filtered through jobs.
52:14
SPEAKER_01: How many jobs is it's gonna cut, how many jobs is it's gonna create, make, change, whatever.
52:20
SPEAKER_01: It's all about saving those 30 30 million jobs in the USDA.
52:26
SPEAKER_01: And so that's why I think for me, that's why I can't get bogged down in all that internal little minutiae of even as much as I hate food stamp snap going, you know,$15 billion going to soft drink companies.
52:44
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I just think that's insane.
52:46
SPEAKER_01: Even as much as I hate that, I'll give it, I'll I'll give all that up to have a food emancipation proclamation.
52:56
SPEAKER_01: Because I think that that this one thing, it would empower farmers, it would empower domestic culinary artists, it would give consumers choice, it would offer better affordable food.
53:09
SPEAKER_01: Now, local foods that are going through a federal, uh a federal bureaucratic licensing procedure, would people would be able to launch their entrepreneurial dreams at prototype scale.
53:22
SPEAKER_01: One of the one of the re one of the problems here is that we've got, I meet them, thousands and thousands of farmers that are ready to make convenience food.
53:35
SPEAKER_01: Convenience food without MSG, without a bunch of adulterated this or that or the other, to make a convenience food, a frozen, you know, uh a good ice cream, a good something for their for their community.
53:47
SPEAKER_01: I mean, ice cream is the convenience food.
53:49
SPEAKER_01: That's my favorite convenience food, but um you know, you you you can to make this stuff for our neighborhoods, but the but the food regulatory hurdles are so big and onerous that a prototype, an embryo, a dream, an entrepreneurial dream embryo can't be launched.
54:11
SPEAKER_01: The baby is too big to be birthed.
54:13
SPEAKER_01: And so what we have out here are thousands and thousands of of entrepreneurs in the food and farming space ready to to to compete with the oligarchy, but their dreams are stillborn because the baby has to be too big to be birthed.
54:34
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
54:35
SPEAKER_00: Oh, I love that imagery.
54:37
SPEAKER_00: Uh okay, so you've sold me.
54:42
SPEAKER_00: I'm there.
54:43
SPEAKER_00: Like I like this too much better than um, as you know, I'm not somebody who is gonna put all my eggs in the basket of the government changing things, so for good reason.
54:54
SPEAKER_00: So I love this, but let's say um let's look at some of the the practicalities of this.
55:01
SPEAKER_00: So, like when let's say we go and we're trying to talk to our representatives to get them to pass this, or just talk to other um citizens to try to get them on board with this, you know.
55:12
SPEAKER_00: We've talked about the safety part um already.
55:16
SPEAKER_00: Um but tell us, you know, you said we we need a functional underground railroad to help people escape the food bondage.
55:24
SPEAKER_00: What would this, and I'm I'm presuming that this food uh emancipation proclamation would lead us there.
55:31
SPEAKER_00: So what would that what would the first clandestine route actually look like?
55:36
SPEAKER_00: Like, can you paint a picture?
55:38
SPEAKER_00: So I'm thinking you don't have to get a business license, right?
55:43
SPEAKER_00: It's it's only a transaction between person to person.
55:46
SPEAKER_01: Well, I'm I'm I'm not sure that you wouldn't have to get a business license.
55:50
SPEAKER_01: I'm not I'm not re I'm I'm not an anarchist here, uh, but a business but but the business license doesn't have to have anything to do.
55:57
SPEAKER_01: I mean, we have a we have a business license here uh because on our in our farm store we sell stuff from other farmers in the area.
56:06
SPEAKER_01: And in our county, when you uh if we only sold stuff from our farm, we don't need a business license.
56:12
SPEAKER_01: But as soon as we start selling what other people do and we add it into our then now we need a business license because they view us as a as a kind of a uh a quasi, you know, uh like a hub, a food hub.
56:24
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
56:25
SPEAKER_01: So you you you you become open yourself up for a little more uh public.
56:31
SPEAKER_01: One of the reasons why we, you know, we're we're wheelchair accessible.
56:34
SPEAKER_01: We don't want to fight the Americans with Disabilities Act.
56:37
SPEAKER_01: Uh, you know, so there there are things there.
56:40
SPEAKER_01: But um, so I I'm I'm I'm not against all I'll just say this.
56:44
SPEAKER_01: If a license, if if if a license is easier to acquire if you're big than if you're small, it's an unjust license.
56:57
SPEAKER_01: So so the the business license, for example, in our county is simply a point, I think it's a 0.05, uh, it's it's a half a percent tax on sales.
57:09
SPEAKER_01: That's all it is.
57:10
SPEAKER_01: No, that they're they don't come and look at your facility, they don't, all they care about is money.
57:15
SPEAKER_01: And and so, and so that's based, so that is that's not a scale prejudicial license because if you're very small, you pay very little, and if you're big, you pay more, and it doesn't cost any more to to put the little you know permit on the wall if you're small than if you're big.
57:34
SPEAKER_01: You know, so that that's an okay.
57:36
SPEAKER_00: So I'm so Aunt Alice selling her Pop Pies uh to someone at church, she needs a license.
57:42
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, she well, she may.
57:43
SPEAKER_01: I mean, it she may or I mean it depends on if a county says she does or not.
57:47
SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
57:47
SPEAKER_01: Some some counties are freer than others, and so I you know, I can't I can't answer that, but I I wouldn't argue necessarily with that with that thing.
57:54
SPEAKER_01: I want to I want to stay true blue here on the food safety issue, the the food regulatory issue.
58:01
SPEAKER_01: That's where they get you.
58:02
SPEAKER_01: Oh, you have to have a$5,000 thermometer, you know, you have to have uh, you know, a separate building, you have to have a separate sewer system, you have to have, you know, this, that, and the other.
58:12
SPEAKER_01: That's where that's where they get you.
58:15
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, but my my thought is, okay, so now we know what it looks like currently, but create a picture for us of what would this food emancipation proclamation create in our culture?
58:30
SPEAKER_00: What would these transactions look like?
58:33
SPEAKER_00: Like what would the how would the food scape and our choice change?
58:36
SPEAKER_00: All right, how would it free us up as not only consumers, but as people who want to sell these products?
58:43
SPEAKER_01: I've got I've got the per the perfect picture.
58:46
SPEAKER_01: Uber.
58:47
SPEAKER_01: It would look like Uber.
58:49
SPEAKER_01: Suddenly, people who want to jump in can jump in without a chauffeur's license or a special car permit or any kind of special driving school that you would get if you were a licensed chauffeur, taxi cab driver.
59:02
SPEAKER_01: So anybody that wants to jump in can jump in.
59:04
SPEAKER_01: And anyone who wants to buy can buy.
59:07
SPEAKER_01: And here's the thing, Sena the reason Uber was worked was because of real-time accountability.
59:16
SPEAKER_01: So good farmers, good cooks, good, you know, good food purveyors would get five-star reviews.
59:25
SPEAKER_01: Their businesses would grow, they'd have all sorts of riders, if you will, okay?
59:29
SPEAKER_01: They'd be busy all the time.
59:31
SPEAKER_01: And uh and and a person that wasn't didn't get good reviews wouldn't get very many riders.
59:41
SPEAKER_01: And so you got to understand that 500 years ago, the butcher, baker, and candlestick maker were embedded in the village, and everybody knew who the scoflaws were.
59:52
SPEAKER_01: And so the dirty ones didn't get didn't weren't successful, and the the good ones were successful in in general, okay?
59:59
SPEAKER_01: Uh that's the way the market worked, the nuance of the market.
1:00:03
SPEAKER_01: Uh as Adam Sm Adam Smith talked about in The Wealth of Nations, the invisible hand of the market, okay?
1:00:09
SPEAKER_01: Um and so as so what happened in the industrialization of food and the you know, in the current regulatory climate, we made this very embedded butcher baker candlestick maker, we made it industrial scale behind razor wire, and everybody became ignorant about them.
1:00:26
SPEAKER_01: The internet now has recreated the potential, the capacity for the accountability of the embedded butcher baker candlestick maker in a global village, not just the little village that they had then.
1:00:44
SPEAKER_01: So, Airbnb, same thing.
1:00:47
SPEAKER_01: Who would have guessed 40 years ago that within 10 years of Airbnb's launch, globally, we would double the number of hospitality rooms in the world, double in 10 years, and nobody would pound a nail or cut a board.
1:01:03
SPEAKER_01: Double it over.
1:01:05
SPEAKER_01: We would recreate in 10 years, we made enough hospitality rooms to be the same as the combined total of Hilton, Marriott, and Sheraton worldwide, and nobody pounded a nail or cut a board.
1:01:21
SPEAKER_01: That's the power of freedom.
1:01:23
SPEAKER_01: That's the power of liberty, and it's been enabled by the the democratization of accountability through real-time assessment through the internet.
1:01:34
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, that's incredible to think that we can do that with food.
1:01:39
SPEAKER_00: We can do that and free ourselves from these shackles that we all carry, even if we don't realize that we're dragging these around.
1:01:47
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
1:01:48
SPEAKER_01: You you you see, you can't imagine, you can't imagine the the number and the um and and the diversity, the diversity and quantity of options that you and I would be able to get.
1:02:08
SPEAKER_01: Um I mean, right now, right now, we can we go up here to uh Dayton, uh 20 miles away, to a Mennonite, to an old order Mennonite family.
1:02:17
SPEAKER_01: They run a uh a wildlife summer sausage thing.
1:02:21
SPEAKER_01: So we shoot deer here, and we get several deer, and we take we we bone it out and we take the deer up to this um to this place, and they make summer sausage that is, I mean, it is to die for.
1:02:35
SPEAKER_01: I I I can live the rest of my life on a couple slices of summer sausage a day.
1:02:40
SPEAKER_01: It's wonderful.
1:02:42
SPEAKER_01: But we but we can't take a beef up there, it's illegal.
1:02:47
SPEAKER_01: So they can only do wildlife, they can't do anything that's and and and we can't sell any of it.
1:02:54
SPEAKER_01: So I can guarantee you, if you came and ate this and tasted it, you would be all over.
1:02:58
SPEAKER_01: You'd be wanting to buy those those little cloth tubes of summer sausage.
1:03:02
SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's it's like the best.
1:03:04
SPEAKER_01: Anyway, I just can't say enough good about it.
1:03:06
SPEAKER_01: I I love this stuff.
1:03:07
SPEAKER_01: But and our and our and our clients would love it.
1:03:10
SPEAKER_01: It would make the perfect lunch food for a child to take to you know, to take to school, you know, uh nutrient dense, uh, but it's illegal to sell.
1:03:20
SPEAKER_01: So so those kinds of things would just explode with opportunity both from the farmer's end to be able to bring money back to the farm, and on the patron end, the non-farm end, to be able to patronize much better quality artisanal craft options.
1:03:43
SPEAKER_00: It sounds incredible.
1:03:45
SPEAKER_00: Where does it sit right now?
1:03:47
SPEAKER_00: Like, how much momentum do you have behind this?
1:03:49
SPEAKER_00: Do you have supporters already uh you know in the government?
1:03:53
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I I do.
1:03:54
SPEAKER_01: I've presented this actually to um a handful of people over now the last six months who have uh either direct or you know, third, fourth party close access to Trump.
1:04:09
SPEAKER_01: So where I am, seeing I'm just gonna I'm just gonna lay it out.
1:04:12
SPEAKER_01: My dream right now, my my goal is I want 30 minutes with Trump to pitch this.
1:04:19
SPEAKER_01: Now, to tell you the truth, I don't know if he has the authority to do it.
1:04:22
SPEAKER_01: But good night, look at all the executive order he's already done.
1:04:25
SPEAKER_01: I don't think he cares about whether it's legal or not.
1:04:31
SPEAKER_01: And look, I'm not I'm not a Trump fan.
1:04:33
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I'm not a you know, uh there's plenty of things I disagree with, but I think, I think that we have uh uh a possibility here, an option.
1:04:43
SPEAKER_01: I think that this idea of a food emancipation proclamation to unshackle our food system and create a viable underground railroad in a in an enslaved food system.
1:04:54
SPEAKER_01: I I just think Trump would be all over it.
1:04:56
SPEAKER_01: I I think that it's very Trumpian.
1:04:59
SPEAKER_01: And I'm not saying this, you know, I'm not trying to be cute or or funny.
1:05:02
SPEAKER_01: Uh I I really do, I believe, for all of his faults and everything else, I think this is Trumpian.
1:05:08
SPEAKER_01: And I think if I had 30 minutes with him to pitch it, I think, I think he'd get it.
1:05:12
SPEAKER_01: I think he would understand.
1:05:14
SPEAKER_01: And um, and that's why I'm honing these little these little sound bites and bullet points, you know, you know, freedom in the bedroom, uh, the womb, the kit uh, but but not in the kitchen.
1:05:24
SPEAKER_01: You know, those kind of little sound bites are things that that he loves.
1:05:28
SPEAKER_01: That that's that's messaging, okay?
1:05:30
SPEAKER_01: That's X, X-type messaging and and uh on you know, on X, and which I'm not on.
1:05:36
SPEAKER_01: So anyway, that's where I am because I see it as the answer to so many things.
1:05:46
SPEAKER_01: Now suddenly, who cares about glyphosate?
1:05:49
SPEAKER_01: I'm not buying food with glyphosate in it.
1:05:52
SPEAKER_01: Who cares about ractopamine?
1:05:54
SPEAKER_01: I'm buying pork from a guy that doesn't use ractopamine.
1:05:57
SPEAKER_01: You know what I'm saying?
1:05:58
SPEAKER_01: I mean it it it just it just it cuts through so many things and and solves a multitude of sins with one pen stroke.
1:06:13
SPEAKER_00: It sounds incredible.
1:06:14
SPEAKER_00: What can we do now?
1:06:16
SPEAKER_00: Is there anything that as consumers, as listeners, we can do to help gain momentum behind this freedom cry?
1:06:28
SPEAKER_01: Well I I would say I would say that as I have um as I have you know what you know steps here in the process, I am I am blogging about this and I you know use this medium to push my blog.
1:06:44
SPEAKER_01: My blog is Musings from the Lunatic Farmer and and when I have additional stuff on this that's where I'm that's where I'm blogging on it and trying to keep keep the awareness out there from time to time I'm I uh I just wrote a guest uh um op-ed piece for Acres USA on this they wanted me to for their December issue so you know just all I can say is that if you're on this podcast or you're watching my musings from the lunatic farmer blog uh that's where you'll get whatever the latest development is on this issue.
1:07:21
SPEAKER_01: We've we entered Cena we've really now really introduced our audience to it and this is my soapbox right now I I'm just this is my soapbox and um and you know it's it's it's it's not it's it's obviously not all in my hands.
1:07:38
SPEAKER_01: If it is it'll be but um but it's it's where I'm investing it it's where I'm investing all of my political and persuasion capital right now culturally big picture.
1:07:54
SPEAKER_01: I mean I'm I'm always trying to you know get farmers to be successful and you know use compost and all that stuff but but this from from a you know a macro standpoint this is where all my energy is going right now.
1:08:04
SPEAKER_00: Wow I think it's an incredible solution I think it hits a lot of of the marks that we talk about including bringing the power back locally back to the people really empowering them allowing them to pursue dreams it provides more choice consumer choice it will bring more awareness as you have this second you know like kind of almost a parallel universe created it it will um bring more awareness to people which can do a lot for educating them on what is in the food that's that's mainstream and so I I think you know this is a I'm really excited that you've taken this on and I'm excited to see where it goes.
1:08:47
SPEAKER_01: And it's completely beyond labels.
1:08:50
SPEAKER_01: Yeah it's complete I mean it's the ultimate beyond labels thing it is yeah and I love how it's not a top down right approach.
1:08:58
SPEAKER_00: You know absolutely not a top down approach um so yeah anytime that we can empower the individual and provide more choice and more freedom I'm all about it.
1:09:09
SPEAKER_00: So yeah keep us posted and what question would you like to ask our listeners today?
1:09:17
SPEAKER_01: Oh uh question uh so have you have you um purchased anything from a uh a food purveyor farmer or culinary under the table that that you knew was a little bit clandestine or you know gorilla under the under the table um and and um have have you have you have you participated in the underground already and if so you know what was it tell us what it was I think you're asking people to out themselves like no no because see it's still it it it it's legal to buy it you just can't sell it oh okay so as long as they don't track them down and make them tell who they bought it from then yeah um you you don't have you don't have to tell you you can plead the fifth you can plead the fifth that's crazy that you can buy it but you can't sell it that's right that's right oh wait I'll be remiss if I don't ask you this one last quick question is it legal to barter like if I have like a salve I want to sell you and you want to sell me meat can we just barter like swap those two products is that legal um it's gray it's gray it completely depends on on uh what the prosecuting attorney the judge it it it's gray it's it's not black and white it's gray um so yeah that's so and and this this is why Cena John Moody and I have developed the Rogue Food Conference the next one's going to be in Cincinnati uh and our our motto is circumvention not compliance and so we actually are trying to create wiggle room until the Food Emancipation Proclamation uh to create legal you know legal um whatever you know uh run around the hurdles thing uh to to encourage these transactions but but but they're they're clunky they're they're they're it's it's ridiculous that we have to you know meet in a parking lot under the cover of darkness and exchange you know um quiche you know it is it's just it's it's crazy okay and and and so um so the thing to do is just let's quit playing games and tiptoeing around this and just be um be reasonable I love it all right so keep us posted and um let us know when it's time for us to get more involved and do more to help you.
1:11:50
SPEAKER_00: Super as always Joel it was so enlightening thank you so much and thanks to all of our listeners um if you have questions send them in we love hearing from you and we will see you all next week