Kitchen Table Chats #53 – What if I don’t feel better on ancestral? Plus supermarkets, broth in the IP & fermenting mushrooms

In this episode we covered four supporter questions (listed below), plus:

• Alison’s lunch (cooked by Gabriel)
• Andrea’s recent sheep butchering
• Supermarkets, bird apps, the machine and convenience
• The intimacy of food
• Eliminating foods & how long understanding and healing can take Questions:

Brianna:

I was wondering what both you guys’s opinions on the Manager special meats from grocery stores? (The sale meats, the stuff that if not sold that day gets tossed). Is someone (maybe me…. looks innocent) who buys these meats contributing to the machine? Are they in a way giving the machine the bird? Or something else?

Christina:

A question that has been on my mind lately is whether you’ve noticed a connection between changing to a healthy ancestral diet/lifestyle and a result of worsening health? I feel like the more changes I make, the worse my auto-immune conditions have gotten. I thought it was perhaps temporary but after gradually making changes over the last few years, my health has continued to get mildly worse. I’m also in my 40s so that could be part of it.

It’s been frustrating because my family members who don’t follow the ancestral diet principles/WAP principles seem healthy despite continuing in the standard American diet and I seem to be the only one having problems. I’d love to know if you have experienced this or know others who have had a similar experience and thoughts on what could be happening. I sometimes wonder if it’s too much change too soon or if perhaps my body is so used to the SAD that these ancestral foods are unrecognizable to my body and so it is revolting. My kids who are eating my ancestral meals seem to be thriving and I still believe it’s the right path but just experiencing some frustration in the process right now and would love any thoughts or encouragement.

Rachel Duke:

Have you guys ever tried fermenting mushrooms to make a soy sauce substitute? I’m going to try it next week but would love your thoughts. This recipe recommended straining after it is fermented but I’m wondering if grinding the mushrooms would be better in terms of keeping all the benefits.

Rachel Nauertz:

KTC question (for whenever the next recording is 😊)

I’ve always heard to simmer bone broth low & slow, which is what I do. However, I know of people who pressure cook it in the instant pot to make broth quickly (say, within 2 hours). What are the downsides to doing it this way/how does that affect the nutrition?

If you don’t know I can always pose the question to discord but I’m sure you know something about it and would love to hear you share! Thanks!

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Transcript:

Hello, Alison. How are you today? Hello, Andrea. Yeah, I’m good. Thank you. I’m all wired up and a cup of tea in my hand and ready to go. Same.

Chords everywhere. Tea everywhere. It must be recording day. Yeah. And if I need to get out to go to the loo, we’re in trouble because I can’t. There’s no moving right now. Yes, exactly. Not until Jeeves comes to extract you.

Exactly. When I bang on the floor. oh so have you um oh go on then i’ll just say what did you eat before we got on because yeah we did we did eat we ate some nice food um gabriel cooked lunch yesterday and he’s under instructions that he has to cook enough for two meals so there’ll be leftovers for the next day um and i gave him the choice of ground beef or ground pork um minced pork or minced beef which were both um in the fridge from the farmer um on Saturday and he chose the pork and then he got the big wok out got a cast iron wok that was given to us and he put in there I don’t actually know definitely what he put in there I know he put mushrooms in there and the mints and then he tried to get me to guess what spices and herbs he’d put in which is a little game that we have, and I guess the nigella seeds and I could see there was tomato in there. He said he put blue poppy seeds in as well, which is rather random and two other things. I can’t remember what they were. He always puts in random spices. Exactly. Nigella seeds, blue poppy seeds.

I think he put cinnamon in something else and it tasted absolutely delicious. Then he put some kale in, I don’t know if you call it elephant kale, but we call it elephant kale over here. It’s my favorite type of kale. We have a thing called dinosaur kale. I think it’s the same thing as that. Yeah, dinosaur kale. That’s my favorite kale. So he put that in and we ate that yesterday. And then again today we heated up the leftovers. And I had mine with some extra kale and then a slice and a half of gluten-free bread, which I made at the weekend which is lots of different grains at the moment, and I put butter and salt on my bread That sounds good That’s lovely, how about you? Have you had breakfast? Well I was going to say, did Gabe have the bread too?

He doesn’t have the gluten free bread He’s not that He’s not that keen on it but when I first started making it I was putting eggs in it so I was like, you can’t have this bread, and he’s kind of sort of got used to it Sometimes he, has a slice in the evening if there’s no other bread or things available you know but generally he’s a spelt bread boy you know he he always wants spelt bread so at the moment because i’m just having gluten free um rob and him are kind of sort of sharing breads and so rob wants to make rye always gabriel wants to make spelt always and they’re finding some sort of compromise sometimes they’ll make a bread that’s a mix of the two sometimes gable just has to put up with the rye and sometimes rob has to put up with the spelt um but gable’s got spelt at the moment so he’s happy so he had a slice of spelt rob had the leftover of a percent um thatching wheat percent rye that he’d made um about a week ago i think it was like the last bit um and yeah so we all had different breads but apart from that we all had the same thing on our plates the meat and the kale.

Which was nice. Have you seen the latest post from Lizzie in the grain wheel? She tasted a wheat called turkey red. Yeah, she was telling me about that yesterday on our call we had.

This is so insane. I haven’t been able to keep up. I haven’t been able to keep up with her wonderful posts on Discord and what she’s posting on her own Facebook group. What was it about the turkey red well it’s turkey red she was saying like it’s really a very bold flavor and she said so bold that some people when they first get it it’s like too much they have like so you can mix another wheat yeah wow and i just keep thinking how crazy it is that all these i i don’t know if turkey red is heritage or whatever but it does seem like when you get into a lot of the heritage vintage no we would say heirloom grains they’re just so potent with flavor do you remember she said that she tried two different grains and um like one the when i read it i was like oh that sounds like the best one the flavor descriptions were so like intense and bold and then she said here’s the other one and it was really really just mild and neutral and i was like yeah that doesn’t sound as interesting. And she said the really, really mild one was the most preferred by people because they were coming from bread that has no flavor.

And so then the mildest possible wheat was what they preferred. Like that was actually the, oh, I like this one better that people were choosing. I was like, you want the thing with less flavor? That just seems so weird. Yeah. Well, that’s just what our taste buds are used to, isn’t it? If we’re used to a certain flavour, it’s really hard to.

To just say oh actually this is better for you this is a heirloom variety or this is a heritage variety yeah all this beautiful flavor in it and you still don’t taste it um for people who might be listening who don’t know what we’re talking about lizzie is um a supporter who’s been around for a long time and she used to be a professional taster we have an episode in our private podcast a couple of years back now where she yeah just kind of revealed you know the secrets of tasting and what it’s about and how you can improve your vocabulary and knowledge around it. And she’s currently on the mentorship level of the podcast supporter kind of thing we have. And that means that she has a call with me once a month. And she’s working through a project at the moment, which is called The Grain Wheel, where she’s taking lots and lots of different grains, lots and lots of different varieties, and using her professional tasting experience and knowledge, she’s tasting them and determining, you know, how they are in comparison to each other.

Which will help you determine, like you just said, Andrea, you know, if you’re used to a normal wheat that’s a standard shop wheat, well, you might want one of these milder kind of heritage wheats. But if you want to pair your wheat with, I don’t know, some vanilla pastry, well, which of these heritage wheats is going to taste better? And she’s going to be putting all that data together in a way that informs and educates everyone. And we’ve got a special thread on Discord where she’s posting.

What she’s coming up with and her writing. She’s posting literal articles. Like she’s writing articles about these things she’s tasting. I mean, it’s not just like, oh, I tried it. It was so good. You know, she’s a professional taster. It’s opened up another world to me in our mentoring calls, you know, because.

She’s kind of bouncing ideas off me and we’re coming out, both of us, richer, I think, because, You know, she’s able to tap into me and able to talk to someone who gets it. But also I’m learning so much about the tasting world and these grains that I just, I had no idea. It’s been a wonderful experience from my perspective as well as hers. I mean, I’m just watching you guys talk and I’m like, what? Just poking my head into seeing. It’s fun. But it just makes me think, again, as always, how much we lost, how much we gave up, and we were told, oh, this is better. You don’t want taste. You don’t want different varieties of wheat. You know, you just need one. and you know you think about a lot of things like at first there was you know people.

Um would fuss about like the change in milk or the change in bread or whatever and then after a while the memory kind of gets wiped away and there’s no more um new normal thing yeah there’s no more Like, nobody’s around to complain that bread doesn’t taste good or that, you know… Do you remember when you were telling me about in Ruth Goodman’s book where she said there’s all these different types of wheat for, like you said, the thatching wheat and whatnot? And some were used for certain kinds of bread and others were sold for different kinds of bread. Yeah, yeah. But now there’s just, you know, sandwich bread. And…

If we had it taken away from us now, we would rebel, but it was taken away before our memory. So we just are like, yeah, this is the world we know. And it also makes me think, be really cautious when anybody tells you objectively, this is better or this is worse, by what measure we need to know. Yeah maybe this wheat is the most popular but why is it because it has the least flavor.

You know that’s the story of you know the the pork the history bit of the pork episode that we put out in january you know the idea that someone was saying oh this is better if we make this pork so it can feed more people and so it is leaner and it’s better and then we’re left with the pork and the pigs that we have these days in the conditions that they’re in because someone said it was better and each step was better and and then we look back and think hang on a minute whose judgment better was that what what better is that because it doesn’t look better now from where we are anyway did you have breakfast no I wish I did but what did you eat last night um I was actually going to tell you a completely different meal that I had which was on saturday night so we butchered three sheep and over the weekend and it was an amazing experience i think all three would qualify in culinary terms as mutton okay because i think they were all past the age of being considered lamb yeah the youngest one was a year and then the others were like two and four if my memory is right and i was kind of afraid that they would be super duper gamey and tough and um.

Unpalatable. Yeah, yeah. All false. All false. They’re Katahdin sheep, so they’re not a wool sheep. They’re a hair sheep. Everybody, excuse me, everybody who comes out here calls them goats because they look like goats. Oh, I see. So you mean they don’t have long kind of curly hair. They just have short hair. They have short hair. Yeah. Interesting. In the winter, they kind of pack on a little bit of a fluffy layer. And then if you saw them right, then they probably would look more like sheep. But still, they might just look like a really fluffy goat.

And anyways, Gary butchered one Friday night. Our friends were driving out from Portland to stay for the weekend and help us. And they got here Friday night late. And then um gary and him the husband did most of the butchering and jacob together on saturday and me and the wife hannah we you know i have like kids between us so we like kids and food and whatnot yeah but jack also he’s the husband he has a variety of food allergies so um.

You know that it’s always fun for me when there’s a challenge and he can’t have nightshades, so anything like tomatoes, peppers, all of that. Yeah. No gluten, no eggs, no dairy, no apples, no stone fruits, just a range of things that he can’t have. Okay, yeah.

And in a lot of conventional american food those things pop up all over the place as anybody who’s ever tried to dodge them knows but we’re really only eating what we can buy around us right now and i told him well that’s perfect because everything you can eat is what’s in season, so all kinds of greens he can’t have um potatoes but he can have ginger and turmeric and turnips and rutabaga and you know so we we basically feasted non-stop all weekend and and it was all food he could eat saturday night it was actually valentine’s day when we did this butchering and we were joking oh this is how we spend our romantic weekend all of us butchering sheep together and i slow i slow cooked i had them while they were butchering they cut me up four or three-ish pounds of um stew meat from the loin and then i sort of seared it in some well i first covered it in spices that i blended up together coriander seed and cinnamon um i had some whole dried garlic that i ground um.

Uh kumin uh just whatever whatever i had that he could have that was kind of moroccan feeling yeah i blended together i covered the meat in that and then i seared it in some lard and then i just put the lid on the pot and let it cook at a very low temperature for a couple hours while i did everything else and then i also soaked some saffron threads in water and then threw that in there did you put did you put liquid in there or broth or something i didn’t actually i was going to put some in but after i had seared them i covered them and then i took the lid off to add some liquid and there was so much juices in there i didn’t want to okay push it so it was all right um i cooked some quinoa in beef broth with saffron i was kind of inspired by your risotto but i didn’t and i couldn’t use like anything that was in it so yeah yeah they didn’t have rice. So then we had a bunch of turnips and rutabagas and beets and a bunch of veggies. So I.

Again, I toasted them a little lard and then just cooked them, and I was going to add some spices, but when we tasted them, they were so perfect. I was like, we’re not adding anything to this. And then I cubed up some kohlrabi to kind of have as like potato pieces on the side. And then five years ago, I started a batch of preserved lemons, thinking I’m going to raise sheep and I’m going to have preserved lemons. Oh, wow. And finally. Finally. So we opened that and then we had a couple of different kinds of kraut. And then she had brought pickled radishes and I shredded up parsley and I shredded up salt. It was, I mean, a huge feast. Delicious, like a feast. Yeah, it was.

And he was excited. Because usually, you know, when you go somewhere to eat, you have to pick out or bring your own food. Yeah. But it was fun. It must be amazing for him to be able to go somewhere and be okay with it. Yeah, we just piled our plates with food. And then to top it all off, I made a dessert that was like basically oats and blueberries. But I made like a crumbly, I used beef tallow and made like a crumbly mixture. Mixture and I pressed half of it in the bottom of a pan then I cooked blueberries and poured them in and then I crumbled the rest on top and baked it and he loved it so much the next day I was gonna wash the pan like it was empty and he literally took it with a fork and like I mean there was nothing to scrape and he was like scraping he’s like this is so and he said I never get dessert because there’s nothing yeah that I think about dessert like that is though that you know, we think that dessert has to be a certain way we think there has to be pastry on it or we think there has to be a crumble that’s had the flour rubbed into the butter but you can make dessert out of anything you know literally like you said you can just.

Crumble oats in the bottom push them down a bit and put some fruit on it and you know if you’ve got, If you’ve got things in there, like sometimes I used to do that for Gable and just put a little bit of honey in, stir it around. Oh, for sure. And bake it. And it’s just, it’s really beautiful. And it is a dessert because it’s a treat because you’ve got the fruit there. And then the oats are a little bit more texture and perhaps the ones on the top go a little bit crunchy. Not quite like a crumble would, you know, because you haven’t got exactly the caramelization happening with the fat as well. But it’s still really beautiful. It’s its own thing. Like it’s it’s something else it’s something different and and he um he kept saying are you sure there’s no butter in this and I said yeah it’s tallow and what I did was I brought in a frozen piece of tallow and I shoved it into my food processor my new food processor okay to shred it and then put the oats in on that and perfect you know later I thought oh I could have sprinkled in some cinnamon or nutmeg you know yeah you could dress it up all different ways and And he loved it so much that the next day, before they left, I made another one. Oh, nice. And we put half of it in a bowl because they have to drive four hours home. So he had a little treat on the way home. Oh, that’s lovely. Anyways, it was such a meal. It’s so nice to be able to share with someone who struggles to have that sort of food and share with someone else.

It’s good both ends. You know, it’s really good for him because he’s like, wow, I can actually just relax and enjoy myself. And as the cook, whenever that happens, it feels like, oh, I did something special for them. You know, it’s a beautiful thing, I think. And his wife is amazing. You know, she is always creatively trying to just feed their family, you know. And she has a three-month-old. So I thought, well, this is kind of nice for her. maybe for a couple days she doesn’t have to cook. And so that was, you know, that was good because she… She definitely will figure out how to cook for him, and she does, obviously.

But it’s just nice to be supported sometimes. So what was the sheep like? You didn’t actually specifically say what the meat was like. Amazing. I mean, it was literally falling apart. It was so tender. Wow. So tender. I don’t know what I was expecting. I know what I was expecting. I was expecting to be like chewing gamey leather. And it was the tenderest meat. So I posted in Discord in the butchery channel, I put a ton of pictures and the list of all the pieces we got, like all the cuts and how much we got, the yields.

And so if anybody’s listening and they want to see that then go into the butchery and just look for the sheep um but it was definitely amazing and we still we kept our like our breeding sheep so we can continue to do more presumably so we still do you do you know that bit that you cooked you know whether it was from one of the younger sheep or one of the older sheep, i don’t know because they were cutting the pieces and putting them all into one container yeah Yeah, okay. So it could have been a combo. Yeah, I would be interested to know whether that three-year-old or four-year-old one tasted different. Well, I know it wasn’t the youngest one because they hadn’t done that one yet when I started. Okay, well, that bodes well. Yeah, so it wasn’t the very youngest. And because of the concern I had over the, you know, possible gaminess or, you know, whatever, I had pretty much planned, and we mostly did, but I had pretty much planned to grind it all and have it in packs of like one pound ground because I thought, well, if it’s just intolerably chewy, then at least if it’s ground, it’s easier to get through. Yeah, yeah.

Now, that was still a good choice because sheep, you know, unlike beef, like the kind of the cuts you get off of sheep, there were some good size roasts and we did get a number of roasts and there’s loin cuts and things. Which we ended up dicing some as stew meat in packs as well. But a lot of the meat, if you’re taken off the bone, comes off in rather small pieces. Okay, okay. Or maybe that’s just our sheep as well. They just graze, like they just forage around the property, so it’s not like they’re getting massive amounts of imported hay or grain or something. So they might be leaner than, like Megan raises sheep. I have no idea what they feed them. I know that they’re grass-fed, I’m sure. But I don’t know how big they get. But anyways, it was a very good experience all around. The kids had a blast. Everybody slept like insane afterwards. Everybody was exhausted. You know, we had to stay up until midnight. You know, both nights to get things done. But that’s just the way it goes. And then JC… Walked me through getting the hides kind of prepped to just, she said, if you salt him and fold him up, you can set him aside and deal with them when you have time.

So we did that. So you’ve done that. Okay. So we should have hides.

And then Gary saved more than I had initially thought. He did save the spleens. He did save the kidneys, hearts, livers.

The only thing we really didn’t save was the heads, surprisingly okay and that just didn’t get dealt with in the moment there was just too much at a certain point there’s a lot going on and i really would have loved to take the stomach and make um haggis yeah yeah um but then you have to face also the reality that there’s four adults and seven children and um one of those is a newborn being cared for you know of the time by her mother and then feeding everybody and then the guys are just trying to butcher and i’m like this is where we need like a couple grandmas in the mix that’s what i was you know dicing and um and you know what we described what um we established after making haggis at the uk get together last year was that it is just as nice when you just make it and then put the mixture in a loaf tin and cook it and slice it afterwards you know it doesn’t have to be it isn’t only tasty when you put it inside a sheep stomach or an ox bun I think the sheep stomach is because people didn’t have a loaf tin yeah you know they need a container like it’s a container Yeah, exactly. Like, how many of us have bought wine in goatskins lately? Well, not many.

They come in bottles. What are you going to do with the Hyde’s? Well, we’re just going to, you know, practice tanning them or whatever. They’re actually kind of fluffy right now since it is winter.

I don’t know. We’ll clean them. And this is my logic, is they’re not the most, not like they’re a show sheep or something, you know. They’re not like thick, fluffy, or, you know, the kind of sheep skin that you see people spending $, on. So I thought, what better time to practice? Yeah, on something that is not. Low pressure, you know, muddy hides from the pasture. So you know they’ve got little nicks in them as the guys were learning you know how to take the how to take the flesh off and so there’s a couple of nicks here and there and gary said well jack is sitting there and gary’s like well just you know any nicks in the in the hide were from jack, obviously of course oh they had a good time ribbing each other but um so it it just seems like a good time to practice because it’s a hide where you’re devastated if you really screw it up or something. Yeah.

Anyways. Cool. Well, we’ve got quite a lot of questions for today, haven’t we? Thank you ever so much for sending in your questions. It makes for really interesting recordings for Andrea and I because we learn stuff too. I’ll read the first one, if that’s all right, Andrea. It’s from Brianna who says, I was wondering what both of you guys’ opinions are on the manager’s special meats from the grocery store. And by that she means the sale meats the stuff that if not sold that day gets tossed, is someone maybe me who looks innocent who buys these meats contributing to the machine, are they in a way giving the machine the bird or something else um andrea do you want to talk about this one and tell us what you think yeah so i thought about this one when she first posted it i almost started typing up a reply and then um you said we’re gonna do it with the ktc and i thought i think that’s better to talk through yeah because i feel like there is a lot nuance here and i feel like my.

You know best world option is i don’t want to get meat from a grocery store at all right that’s the best world option i don’t trust the way it’s being processed i don’t trust the animals are raised and all of that and then there’s also the what about we live in the world right now and maybe we’re not there yet and then of course i want to fight back at we’re not we can’t do we can’t not be in the grocery store yet and say no but what if there’s a way it’s possible you know.

So

I know what she’s talking about, the manager’s special meats, because I’ve definitely got those before when I was in the grocery store. So I know what you’re talking about. It’d be like marked down super low. Yeah, yeah. At the end of the day or something, you know. Yeah. I always think of things as working like backwards, like with the sheep, for instance, that we butchered yesterday. I always say we worked backwards up to this point. So we started with, you know, depending on where somebody’s at, they might just need to learn how to touch a piece of raw meat. Some people have never cooked with raw meat before. I think Brittany said that when she got married or something, she had never, like, touched meat. Wow. And so she had to learn. Like, that could be the step one. And then there’s learning how to use maybe, like, a whole chicken. Okay, now you’re working backwards. And then there’s, you know, one day you’re looking online to find a farmer or driving to a farmer’s market or walking to a farmer’s market and you’re finding a farmer and you’re buying the meat from them. And then one day you’re raising the meat and a butcher is processing it for you, you know. Then one day you’re raising the meat and you’re processing it at home yourself. Like, I just think of everything as, like, working backwards towards my ideal. Yeah. Yeah. So…

I could see the manager special meat as being one of those steps on the way to your ideal. You’re learning how to pressure can your own stew. You’re learning how to make your own broth. You’re learning how to make your own ancestral style foods at home with ingredients you bought. I think as a step along the path towards getting out of the grocery store, in that sense, I would say… Yeah, that works, because I definitely know it was a step on my path to get out of the grocery store, even though I didn’t actually know that it was part of that path when I was doing it. Brianna’s consciously having intentions about everything up to and including raising animals on her own. So I see it as a step along the way. As for the machine, I think just by going to a grocery store, we’re contributing to Frank.

And I say that as someone who has gone to the grocery store. It’s not like I’m like, but me over here, innocent, as I record this online, never part of the machine. No, no. So don’t hear me saying it as that. Yeah, I fight with that every time. that I do step into a supermarket that you know and it’s highlighted at the moment because we’ve all been reading through Against the Machine by Paul Kingsnorth um yeah and talking about it on discord but I mean even without that highlighting because I’m reading it every day um I struggle with it every time I step inside a supermarket you know for for whatever reason I’m going in there because I want something particularly or because I know it’s cheaper in there or because there’s something that, you know, Gable can eat in there that I… Otherwise, I can’t get him good protein. Every time I go in there, I know that I’m contributing to the machine. And I try…

To weigh that up with the other things that are happening in my life because like with the, you know like with the butchering we can’t do everything absolutely everything in our lives you know you couldn’t get that sheep’s stomach because there was so much other beauty going on around you know the beautiful things with the family and the people there and you’re preparing food for them and you’re looking after the kids and there’s a little baby and so the sheep’s stomach didn’t get processed and always I think we’re trying to balance our sanity and what we have time from and our budget and how we feel about these things and and for me that’s a shifting those are shifting sands all the time so one week I might be like I am not doing this I am not going in the supermarket and another week I’m like oh you know I just I can’t find this anywhere else I’m just going to go in there and I’m going to buy it um and but I do know I do feel like whenever.

I go into a supermarket I am contributing to the machine whether I’m paying full price or whether I’m not um I mean obviously if that food’s going to be thrown away then I suppose it’s better to buy it and use it than to let it be thrown away but I know that in that moment I’ve missed an opportunity to potentially take like you said another little step towards the ideal you know supporting a farmer but sometimes that’s a choice we have to we have to make because we need to stay sane and stay okay in this world and like you said you know we know from the conversations we’ve had with Brianna where she wants to be heading and that is far more important than each tiny thing that we do the overall intention and the the the shape of years and decades of our life and the direction we’re going is more important than one individual choice I think.

There’s definitely a point where you can send yourself into a meltdown, you know, a perfectionist meltdown, a fastidious meltdown, a doing too much meltdown. You know what I mean? I mean, you and I have never done that, obviously. Oh, of course not. No. Not this week anyway, yet. And it’s only Tuesday. Not today. No. Exactly.

And part of that is because I think we, there is an aspect in our just humanity that is always, we’re always kind of yearning for Eden or the perfection, you know, we want. And then as soon as there’s a little bit of obstinacy in us, both of us, I know, I know. Whereas as soon as somebody says, but you can’t, I’m like, wait a minute, but why? Yeah.

So if I say to myself, well, this is really my only choice. And then I think, hold on, why am I saying that? What is in my life causing me to say that? Is it valid? Or am I, you know, sometimes I think, am I not trying hard enough? But then that’s where you can send yourself into a meltdown where you’re like, I will do everything. And then you collapse under the weight.

And then what good does that do to anybody? So I guess in summary… As part of the path to getting out of the machine, you know, step on the machine’s head on your way out, sure, you know, do it. And have an escape plan in mind is what I would do. It’s interesting, you know, because there are companies that redistribute food that is potentially going to be wasted from supermarkets. Yeah, gleaners and things. live ellie in australia um from ellie’s every day worked for one for a little while you know and they they have the whole they vans and they go and collect the food from the supermarkets and redistribute it and i always kind of i feel like it’s great that that food’s not going to be wasted, but i feel like well that energy we could potentially put into trying to get people to not shop at a supermarket in the first place so there’s not all this plastic packaging gonna go in the bin and all the food gonna be wasted and and so i’ve always felt a bit funny about.

You know is that the right thing to have companies like that in this in this world well I guess it is when there are supermarkets in this world but my ideal is that there aren’t supermarkets in this world that’s the hard thing is you’re saying well in a world with supermarkets then yeah let’s not be wasting everything and let’s figure out how to get it in the hands of people who need it and then and then you say so are we.

It was okay it’s like the this bird app actually this is a conversation i had with leah the other day there’s this bird app where you can turn it on and listen and it like listens to birds and then it tells you what it thinks they are yeah yeah i know and she was like if one more person tells me that they’re just using that app instead and i was thinking about it because we’ve used that app out here and i thought okay so i thought why why am i you know now this is where i get this is where i think too much and i thought okay so in a in a world where there’s no bird guides and there’s no bird apps you know people listen and they know when you tell gabriel and then gabriel tells his children and the on and on it goes and we know the birds that and we know what the birds are saying and the signals and whatever and then people started you know spending more and more time inside and then more and more time on computers and looking at their phones and nobody knew what the birds were anymore and nobody cared. And all the bird groups that you could have been a part of who would have helped you identify them disappeared.

And then some bird fanatics out there said, but we love birds. Let’s make a bird app to help people who want to find birds get back into the birding world and then they created this app which kind of is amazing and and it can stimulate.

You know that love of hearing the birds again but then i thought to myself that.

But it’s made as a response to the kind of the crisis that had already occurred. And what if the abstinent exists? Would I, A, have said, well, I guess I’ll just go inside and watch TV, you know? Or would I have said, there has to be somebody out here who knows birds. I will find a group and I will show up on Saturday and I will walk with them and I will learn the birds. You know what I mean? like would that have happened instead would i have that yeah you know and so then i think like well there can be a positive thing but if it’s as a like trying to survive in the face of the machine like then now what is it is it positive or i i have a lot to say about the bird app and lots of other things that could come off that i we amelia told us about that bird app and yeah it was about a year ago i think and of course we didn’t really have a device to put it on to start with yeah.

Because um rob rob just bought a phone at that point and he was like no you’re not using my phone, um and all the e-ink we just bought this machine you’re not taking it outside and putting it on top of a fence post thank you very much exactly um dropping it in the mud yeah um and all the e-ink devices most of them don’t have the ability to listen to things like that and they they apps don’t work on them so we can’t put them on that so we only have one device that we could put this app on and we put it on there and it didn’t work properly and I was like that’s the end of the app um but it made us go to the library and get a book and a cd on bird sounds and, Gabriel and I would listen to that yeah um I also feel like you know what you’re saying well, if there was no bird app would I go out and find someone.

To get the birds about that time we went on a walk with um to add a national trust property with a local community kind of project here with a bird watcher and he took us around the property and we saw skylarks and we saw all many different types of birds and he was a genius at identifying the signals and he tried to pass that information on you know with a like a two-hour walk you.

Can’t you get it embedded in your memory but it was it was incredible to to see that he just knew everything and I feel like that kind of idea of well if this wasn’t available would I just choose to go out and do something that actually is more nutritious to my community or my soul I feel like that was with us choosing not to have a car you know very often I’m like oh but I can’t do that because I haven’t got a car oh I get a bit frustrated or we got to try and move something from one place to another and we can’t do it because we haven’t got a car but because I don’t have that choice we don’t have that choice we have to make choices that are more nutritious for us that involve walking or cycling or not going somewhere that would probably end up being something that we kind of didn’t want to go to anyway you know you’ve really we’ve really got to commit to wanting to go somewhere to to go out of our way and make the journey three hours longer there and three hours longer back you know and it feels it’s like all these conveniences all these things are apparently good and encouraging us to do more but actually are they yeah no I exactly feel that. I % feel that. Any time that I’ve.

Said, no, I’m just going to stomp my feet and say I refuse whatever this aspect of the machine is that it’s trying to get me to do, then my life changes. In fact, when Jack and Hannah were up here, so they came to the campout over the summer, and they started listening to the podcast. They listened to their first episode on the way home from the campout. And Jack said, he said, you really said something when we were at the camp out about if you can start finding food from people around you and build relationships with them it will change your life in so many ways more so than just getting a bite of nutrition and he said.

It has changed our life. He said, I tried to find somebody who I could buy pork from. He ended up finding this old farmer. Jack went out and helped him do the butchering. And he’s like, this little guy just wanted someone to talk to.

And he told us how amazing it was. And he gave him all kinds of extra organs and fat and things. But it’s like, was that the point? like that wasn’t the point and and then him he brought a bunch of stuff home and him and hannah processed it themselves and packed their freezer full and they they he was just saying he said it multiple times he said this has completely changed our life finding local food and it’s just one you know one step at a time and you know what you’re saying worth it what you’re saying reminds me that you know I listened to the interview that you did with Tara Couture which went out it will be last month when this one goes out yeah and it was hearing her say things like that and I so resonated with it you know that and and you sort of put it in context you know that you you might start by worrying about should I be eating carbs should I be eating protein how much of this should I be having am I getting my omega-s am I getting this but once you once you walk down that path a little way it changes into something completely different where it’s not about micronutrients or macronutrients at all on that level it just it’s about connection with your food with the people around you with the inside of your body and it just.

It’s the same thing. You think potentially it’s about one thing, but there’s so much more underneath that once you give yourself to that world and you start doing it, it fills your life with so many other things. All these corners that you didn’t even know existed, it fills with color and life. And you just, you’re able to be a different person. So it changes your life in a way that you you you kind of wanted it to change your life because you wanted to be healthier or or you know a better person but it changes your life in a way that you never could have imagined, because you didn’t realize there was all these bits that that could be filled and and it just reminds me of that you know if people haven’t listened to the interview with Tara go back.

To last month’s and and listen to it because she expresses it so beautifully she the idea of you know it it it will change your life it really will yeah and remembering that she started as a nutritionist yeah so focused on the details in order to guide people on how to eat the best that they could as a human she had to quit as a nutritionist yeah because it’s not even about that yeah that’s the shocking thing i mean i just find that to be such a beautiful evolution She said something, which Rob and I have talked about quite a lot recently, which is the intimacy of feeding yourself. How…

It was quite strange because she was just echoing conversations Rob and I had had, you know, sitting on the sofa in the evening about, you know, every time you put food inside your body, it’s going inside your body. It’s going into all these tissues and organs in your stomach and the nutrients are coming from it. It’s going to places that you’ve never seen and you’ll never know, but that are so essentially part of you and so real. And it’s such an intimate act to to to put something in your mouth and swallow it and, the fact that we just as a society we just kind of ignore that and think we can just be like a machine and just put whatever in our mouth whether it’s using ultra processed foods or whether it’s oh I’m going to add up all these calories and nutrients and then it’s all going to add up right And I’m going to put that in my mouth. Whereas it’s a sacred, intimate act that, you know, when I bear that in mind, when I sit down at the table and eat, I eat differently. I mean, it’s just, it’s incredible. And I thought that was a beautiful, and we’d just literally been talking about that. And then I heard Tara say it, and I was like, yes, yes, exactly.

It’s so insane because it’s this most sacred trust. And we just hand it over to anybody and companies who literally hate us, you know, companies made up of people who think so little of your children that they have a cost-benefit ratio to how many children can die from their product before it’s worth it financially for them to change it. I mean, it’s not. This is going to segue us into Christina’s question really well, so why don’t I read it? Can you read it? Because it’s a long one. Yeah, it will be easier for me to see on my screen. Yeah, thank you. Christina says, a question that has been on my mind lately is whether you’ve noticed a connection between changing to a healthy ancestral diet slash lifestyle and a result of worsening health. I feel like the more changes I make, the worse my autoimmune conditions have gotten. I thought it was perhaps temporary.

But after gradually making changes over the last few years, my health has continued to get mildly worse. I’m also in my s, so that could be part of it. It’s been frustrating because my family members who don’t follow the ancestral diet principles or Weston A. Price principles seem healthy despite continuing in the standard American diet, and I seem to be the only one having problems. I’d love to know if you have experienced this, or know others, who have had a similar experience and thoughts on what could be happening.

I sometimes wonder if it’s too much change too soon, or if perhaps my body is so used to the standard American diet that these ancestral foods are unrecognizable to my body, and so it is revolting. My kids who are eating my ancestral meals seem to be thriving, and I still believe it’s the right path, just experiencing some frustration in the process right now, and would love any thoughts or encouragement.

Hmm christina you are not alone no for you absolutely allison why don’t you start yeah with okay i christina sent this in a few days ago and i i sat and thought about it because like you just said i thought you are not alone and this question needs speaking to definitely, um the first thing i thought was it was wonderful that her kids are thriving I give a thumbs up to that that’s a wonderful thing to see um I do feel like it’s more complicated for those of us who have more history potentially than kids and are in bodies that you know are decades older and not able to be as resilient as children especially as you know Christina said she’s got autoimmune conditions um and you know we’re all we’re all individuals we all have different things that have been passed to us as well, I can completely understand her frustration.

I was, what, , when I started, no, when I started Ancestral Food. And so it’s been like it’s over years. And I wouldn’t say I’ve got better, in quotes, on Ancestral Food. It’s not a case of, oh, I was not very well before and suddenly I’m better and I just keep thriving. I’m now, not , which makes a huge difference. You know, Christina said, oh, she’s in her s. I’ve continued to struggle with things, eating this way.

I think it’s really important to watch very carefully what you’re eating when you’re struggling. Because just because cultures in the past have survived and even thrived eating certain things doesn’t mean that you will. And I think in the world we’re in, it’s important for us to look at exactly what we’re eating and experiment with it. I mean, if you look at some examples from my life, You know, I have a problem with histamine, which has taken me a long time to figure out. And it’s something that if I’d carried on eating the standard ancestral way… My health would have got a lot, lot worse. And I’ve had to change what I’m eating, adapt it to be much lower histamine, even though I don’t want to, because I want to eat probiotics and I want to eat those histamine foods. I’ve had to consciously remove them from my diet because I know if I continue to eat them, my health will just get worse.

And that’s not saying I’m not going to eat them for the rest of my life, but it’s saying where I am now, that’s an experiment that’s in process. It’s the same at the moment for me with gluten. So I’m eating gluten-free at the moment. And because I’ve established that there were health things that were happening to me towards the end of last year, for most of last year, that.

I thought were being made worse by gluten. And by stepping away from gluten, as I have since Christmas, those symptoms have lightened.

And I’ve done some other things, so maybe it’s not the gluten.

But that was part of my strategy. I feel like potentially intolerances can play havoc with our health in ways that are very, very difficult to understand. And the only way as an individual you can begin to get a hold on that is literally by taking something out of your diet for a period of time seeing what happens and then putting it back in seeing what happens and sometimes you you won’t see a reaction until you put it back in so you might not notice the difference and in my experience and in Rob’s experience and in Gable’s experience you have to do it over and over again to start to see patterns you know you might be lucky and realize straight away that you’ve got a problem with something but you might not you might have to take eggs dairy gluten nightshades you know fruit sugar out of your diet again and again and watch and listen and feel notice problems and try it again um i think that the gaps protocol particularly intro is a a laid out good way to do that with you know some guidance you know because that does take out a lot of the common intolerances in that intro stage and so.

By following GAPS intro for some period of time and then slowly reintroducing things and maybe circling back and coming back to GAPS intro again, you can have a kind of a ground, you know, a level ground with which to start at. Um but i all you know in my experience and with my experience with rob and gable when health is when you’re struggling with things going down and looking at the intolerance route is very useful it’s hard really hard but really useful i also think um there’s usefulness in looking at the, macronutrient balance that we have you know how many carbs are we eating do we need more or do we actually need fewer does our body want fewer how much protein are we eating do we need more do we need less do we do well with a lot of fat or actually do we feel better with less fat when i.

Through experimentation, we have realized that each of us just does better with a different balance. My need for carbohydrate is very different to Rob’s need for carbohydrate. And if I don’t fulfill that need for carbohydrate through the day, then I don’t sleep, which then exacerbates a ton of other symptoms.

And and so playing with the rules of you know not necessarily saying i have to have this because that’s what the world says i have to have or that’s what western price says i have to have or.

That’s what you know my my nutritionist says i have to have but actually playing around and saying what what do i how do i feel do i feel better when i eat a lot of fat do i feel better when i eat less fat and again it’s a process of years of experimentation you know because it’s so difficult to pin down to isolate all the different things that are changing and shifting in your psyche and your body and your food every day and so you might take something out for a little while or up your carbs for a little while and think something is better or worse because of that and you know what you end up realizing it’s because of something else but you don’t maybe realize that until the third time the third time you’ve done it um so yeah i would i want to give christina a hug because i i agree with the first thing you said andrea that that she’s not alone, um i don’t think the ancestral food is a is a um a pill that makes everyone better i really don’t But I know that if I wasn’t on this path and choosing this way, that I’m almost certain that my health would be a lot, lot worse.

And the…

The depth of connection that I found as we were talking about with what Tara was saying and the intimacy that I found with my food and with my surroundings by eating this way has changed my mental health. And the way I show up every day, which I know has given me a far fuller life than the one I would have had if I hadn’t experienced and gone down that path. That was a bit garbled, Andrea. Does it make sense what I’m saying? And what do you want to say to Christina? I would underscore what you’re saying. You know that I’ve come on and griped to you before. Like, why can’t my life be easier, you know?

And I think there could be a bit of a bias, like, well, it seems like all the cars that come into this auto shop have something wrong with them. Yeah, that’s why they’re here. and sometimes we turn up to ancestral food because we maybe well for whatever reason we’ve pushed our body into some kind of a state where we now are confronted with the result of the lifestyle like for me it was the way i was treating myself before and the foods i was eating before had a cumulative effect that cost me. That combined with whatever pre-existed in my body that maybe was or was not triggered by my environmental factors. And…

So there could be a bit of a bias in saying, it seems like I’m having a hard time, nobody else is paying attention to their food, but has anybody else been pushed to that point, you know, what was happening in them? And then there’s also, I’ve heard this from doctor-type people, that somebody could look from the outside like it was okay, and there can be underlying issues that we don’t know about. So that’s a consideration. When you said…

I feel like the two primary points I took from what you said, Allison, I’m calling you Andrew, because I just looked right at my screen where my name is.

The two things you said, which is watch carefully. Yeah. And it’s going to take longer than you think. Yeah, absolutely. I feel like that’s literally, that is my story right there. One is that every time i think i’m like i think i’m like okay let’s like we’re we’re pretty we’re pretty on on point with this and then i get to a point where i’m like oh wow that’s that which was normal to my life at that time and i couldn’t imagine being without is now fallen away you know i can’t bring that back anymore and now i’m at a further point in my life and and then like i’m I’m refining and getting better at what I’m doing, if that makes sense. And so, in a sense, watching carefully what I’m getting is getting better and better. I don’t know if this is computing at all. Like, right now, I’m on a really strict—I don’t want to say strict—I’m on a just I’m going as long as I can without walking into a grocery store. And so, I am really having to resource around me, which I always have resourced around me, what I can get from the farmers. But now it’s like, well, I can’t get that from a farmer. So we literally don’t, we don’t, we’re not getting that. We’re not having it. It’s not going to exist.

And so then I have to figure out a solution around it. And.

I was telling Gary, I thought we were doing really good, but this has caused me to realize there was just pieces sliding in that I didn’t even realize were popping up that were either not necessary or could be replaced. And it is, I feel like everything is becoming sharper and clearer for me as a result of this experimentation.

And so, like when I said I thought I was watching carefully, the first time I started really, you know, recording what I was eating in recent, you know, because there’s been times in that I used to obsessively record to watch calories, and then I obsessively recorded to make sure I didn’t like go over limits. And then I started recording just to know what I was getting, not as a tracking calories type thing. And at that point, I was like, wow, there is so much random just stuff slipping through the cracks that I would have said if you asked me what I was eating, I would have been like, I mean, sometimes, but not very often, you know, those things. And that’s when I first realized, like, wait a minute, more slips up than I’m really conscious of. And I know that this is common with food. Food researchers always say the biggest problem with food research because it’s like self-reporting and people have, we have a hard time actually knowing what we eat. But anyways, I’m not recording what I’m eating right now, but I know there’s two places things come from, our dairy farm and the veggie stand. So that kind of whittles it down. And I’m, so I would say the watching carefully, like.

Post the watchman at every corner and take shifts and don’t let them fall asleep because the enemy could be sneaking in without us knowing.

That’s why sometimes it’s simpler to use something like Gap’s intro because you don’t have to be hypervigilant of all of these things. Just follow the thing that someone’s laid out. Just do it. And that will help guide you. in a way that’s exactly what this was was it’s not necessarily something that’s going to be no massively complicated i mean if i wasn’t aware of what histamine does to me and i carried on having histamine it’s it’s changing so many things in my life and causing so many problems and then i take that one thing out and there’s a huge shift so it’s not you know necessarily as yeah it as chaotic or as um difficult as it might seem but using a guide like gaps can just take all that kind of like you know need to have all the different watchmen there they can it can take that and just help you do it simply i think yeah i agree and in in a way i have found i mean i already alluded once to this that like I find it a bit of a like a game or a puzzle to have somebody come in and say well I have so many allergies you can’t cook for me and I’m like watch me just give me a shot let me try and I find that to be like thrilling but in a way um.

I, I sometimes like, like, I think if you listen to the interview with Tara Couture, I feel like we actually kind of spoke directly to Christina’s question there in some ways, because I talked on there and she did too, how we started out kind of trying to pursue the right way of eating and then the way it has shifted. And the more, like, I didn’t shift to eating, I’m not staying out of a grocery store because I want to eat healthy. You know what I mean? That is not even on my radar at this point. I’m wanting to escape the machine, you know? I want to live a life with humans, and I want to shake the hand of the person who raises the food I’m eating, and I want to look the animals in the eye that I’m going to eat. You know what I mean? Like, this is the moment I’m in, and that’s not necessarily what has to be for everyone, but that is what’s driving me right now at this time.

And I remember the first time I did, Weston A. Price Foundation put out a long time ago this, like, the % pledge, you know, get % of your food from local places. And that was what brought me back. Like, we had kind of naturally evolved into just eating from farms around us when we lived in Virginia. Then we moved to Washington, and it was like we had to reorganize our whole life. And that challenge brought me back to like, hold on, like, don’t just get, don’t just get everything at the grocery store. And I remember telling Gary, even at that time, I was like, just by trying to get half our food locally, we’re like automatically eating better. You just are.

So anyways um the watching carefully and it taking longer i i relate to that too and i feel like i’ve seen myself go through lots and lots of shifts and again this is something we talked about if you listen to the interview with tara she talked about how she’s like i followed her long enough to to have seen her when she was in severe limes and she said the only thing i can eat at that time was animal products and some herbs. Like that was all she could eat. She couldn’t eat vegetables. She didn’t have fruit. You know, there was like nothing that she could have. And she refers to that. And when she says, when we first start recording, she goes, I had honey in my coffee and milk and sourdough bread and marmalade. And I’m like, I know, like all these things were things she didn’t have for years so it feels like a triumph to see how far she’s come in her healing like it really does and you can hear it in her voice when she talks about you know the love she has for those foods but i know that it took like you said a long time so yeah and it and it is a it is a path that.

Needs and needs some encouragement you know it’s uh my gosh yes it’s a lonely path all the time it’s so hard it’s frustrating it’s it’s um yeah it feels like you’re blindfolded sometimes like but just what’s happening here why can’t i see this why is it this is that is it that did i do this and it why does it seem like it’s easier for everybody yeah it’s so frustrating and and when you’re tired or you’ve got your kids to look after or you’ve got work to do you just want to eat something it’s so hard and so yeah i said it to gary last night, i was like i’m so tired but if we’re not gonna eat from the grocery store i have to get up and Yeah. Yeah. It’s hard.

You know, I’ve had some conversations with Nicole recently, just on email, who’s in Italy. And yeah, just that’s made me think, this way is hard. It’s hard. If you’re healthy, it’s hard to do all of this stuff. If you’ve got kids, it gets harder. if you’re struggling with your own health issues which frankly like you said a lot of the people who come to this community are and that’s why they ended up here and some of them you know we’re the last stop they’re hard after veganism after paleo after keto after dr atkins we’re the last stop and and and we’ve talked to to you know so many members on the discord channel and no.

Struggles that they’ve been through and that they go through. And you are not alone, Christina. And lean on us as much as you’re able and to give you support. Go back and listen to more episodes if you can. You know, use the resources that we put out. She’s a huge encouragement to me because I don’t know how long she didn’t have any grains at all she’s eating sourdough bread now i’m just like what is going on it’s just amazing to me and you and i both they’re yeah i’m not eating gluten right now there’s things we were we’ve taken out because we’re trying like you said to see and some things take a really long time to get out and i would also say if she’s tracking autoimmune things.

If you take gluten out, it can take six months of being gluten-free for the symptoms to dissipate. And if you have a gluten incident, it can flare you up for six months. That’s a long time. So our American mode, like a doctor will say, well, try not having any gluten at breakfast or for a week or for a couple days and see how you feel it’s like that’s not how this works some of these things take a long time to to get out of our system like you said sometimes you have to like I took it out and I thought oh no is this really doing anything for me I put it back and I was like okay now you realize we found part of the problem right here and and that.

And I think I’m actually really glad I put it back that instance, because when I took it out the first time, I kept thinking like, oh, I really want that. Oh, no, I really want it. And then putting it back in the association with the effect is now so strong that you can’t pay me to eat gluten at this time, because I’m like, I don’t want to deal with it. But some of the symptoms, I was talking to a friend who’s dropping gluten free for a while, and I told her some of the symptoms I would never have really associated with gluten. So that’s another thing to keep in mind. It’s not going to be, you know, if you’re tracking things, it’s not always going to be digestive. Like for me, it was mood swings, how I feel, like how hard is it to control myself during the day?

Are my joints aching when I wake up in the morning and are they stiff and do my muscles hurt? And just slightly more subtle things that weren’t necessarily associated with like, oh, I ate this and then immediately I threw up or something. It was much longer track. So that’s something to keep in mind, too. Yeah, that makes sense to me. Is Christina, I don’t know if Christina is, there’s a Christina in Discord. But if she’s the same one, this would be a conversation that would be really good to have in Discord. Because I know there’s a lot of us that deal with this. Okay, I don’t think it’s the same one, but I’m not sure. Do you want me to read Rachel’s question? We actually have two Rachel’s questions, but two different. Yeah, two different Rachel’s. There’s lots of Rachel’s who support us. Yeah, go ahead and read the first Rachel’s question. All right, Rachel said, Have you guys ever tried fermenting mushrooms to make a soy sauce substitute?

I’m going to try it next week, but would love your thoughts. This recipe recommended straining after it is fermented, But I’m wondering if grinding the mushrooms would be better in terms of keeping all the benefits.

Have you ever done that, Andrew? I have not. No. I tried to ferment mushrooms once and my heart wasn’t in it. Yeah, I was, well, I was just, I was fermenting too many things. You know what it’s like when you’ve just got too many things on the go? And I was just like, oh, just put the mushrooms in here. And then it kind of, I was like, oh, I didn’t expect them to do that. And it ended up not being very good. But no, I know that you can ferment mushrooms and then the liquid becomes the soy sauce substitute. So you get that kind of like a mushroom broth, you know, the condensing of those mushroom flavors creates a sort of a soy sauce. And when you’re lactic acid fermenting them, you get all of the benefits of the fermentation in that liquid.

Because I’ve not done it, I don’t know whether it’s advisable to grind them up first before you do that. I did look at a recipe this morning and it didn’t say grind. And it just said, you know, do the recipe that you’ve seen, Rachel, probably just have the mushrooms and the liquid comes from and then you strain them and then you use that liquid. I think that the goodies from the fermentation will be in the liquid. You know, just like, you know, if you if you make sauerkraut, you can just have the sauerkraut juice as a probiotic and you can use that sauerkraut juice to start other things. So I’m sure that all the lactic acid goodies will be in that liquid. So i don’t think you necessarily need to keep the mushrooms in it for that the um the note that i saw on it this morning though and i looked it up said that the mushrooms that are left behind are really yummy and that you can dehydrate them and then grind them into a powder that you can sprinkle on things and i thought oh that sounds quite nice so you know even if you’ve whether you sliced them or chopped them up or if there is a separation between the liquid and the solid.

Then you can always save that solid and dehydrate it and make it into some sort of powder. I would think you want to not have the mushrooms thin enough that when you strain it, you’re going to get the mushrooms in the sauce because you want it to be like a soy sauce, which is clear and kind of not, you know, not bitty. Do you have anything to add to that, Andrea? Well, I’ve never fermented mushrooms, but I’m with you and I know Rachel too. We feel the same way about recipes. How dare you tell me what to do. And I feel like recipes are so wasteful. Like, cut the greens off your, you know, onions and then throw the white piece away. Are you crazy?

Strain out the strawberries from the kombucha. Throw the strawberries away. What’s wrong with you people? So I feel like a lot of recipes are just like drastically wasteful to the point that I just have no idea what they’re talking about. But I guess if I wanted a soy sauce, yeah, I’d strain them, but I wouldn’t throw the mushrooms away. I don’t know if, like you said, it sounds like the bulk of the benefits…

Can be in both the liquid and the mushroom which is kind of amazing.

I like the idea of dehydrating them for a powder probably a sort of umami powder yeah exactly yeah i don’t have usually the power to run the dehydrator so what i would probably end up doing is grinding them into a paste and then i would maybe freeze that paste in small amounts and i yeah that could be like a tapenade like an olive tapenade i’m thinking yeah you could put it in something or you could put it on little bits of toast it’d be lovely i guess if you wanted to blend it with the liquid and have like a thick syrup yeah saucy thing sauce yeah so i feel like all these i i don’t think you could go wrong it sounds good either way yeah no i agree and i all i know i mean i haven’t done the mushrooms but i know when i make beetroot kvass beet kvass that the beets at the end of it are delicious just as delicious as the kvass so always in these cases You know, if the thing that helps with the ferment is apparently waste, it’s not waste. No. You can eat it and it’ll be lovely. It’s just a different product. Yeah. And then you serve it and people are like, how do you make this, these beets? I’m like, I pickled them in kvass. Yeah, exactly. I don’t know. We’re left over. Can we just throw the kvass away? You got to decide. It’s like, what’s a weed? What’s waste? It just depends on your definition. Do you want to read Rachel, the other Rachel’s question? Yeah, I can, I think. Just give me a second to make it in front of me. If you need me to read it, just let me know. Yes, I’m here. Resisting my glasses.

Okay, so this is a different Rachel, and she asked this on Discord. I’ve always heard to simmer bone broth low and slow, which is what I do. However, I know of people who pressure cook it in the Instant Pot to make broth quickly, say within two hours. What are the downsides of doing it this way, and how does it affect the nutrition? Um, now I said to Rachel, let’s ask this on discord and it’s been out there a couple of days and, um, there’s no one who’s come forward as an, a pressure cooker, bone broth, nutrition expert. Someone did actually. Oh, did they? I was, I know that someone tagged someone. Yeah. Yeah. Ashley tagged someone, didn’t she? Another. Do you know who it was? It was the other Rachel who asked about the mushrooms. Ah, okay. And did Rachel apply then? She did. What’d she say? Let’s hear it. You said, Hmm.

And I think she confirms what I saw in your notes, what you had written. She said, I have used an instant pot many times. Right now I use the stove mostly, but I do love it in the instant pot. I’m not sure about the nutrients, but I do experience high histamine responses to the instant pot broth. I do, of course, experience the same thing with long broth cooking on the stove, but I tend to make more meat stock nowadays to avoid that. Yeah. And then Rachel said, she added, because Ashley said, I’m wondering why. And Rachel said, the long cooking time pulls out lots of minerals and histamine in the food. Fermented foods are often similar problems for people avoiding histamines. That’s really a useful response. I thought that was interesting that she gets the histamine response even from the Instant Pot, because I would have thought maybe you could avoid it. But yeah so obviously the instant pot although it’s only on there for like you know two hours or minutes it’s doing the same amount of drawing out of the bones of the stuff from the bones to create that histamine as if it was cooked in a slow cooker you know for hours or hours um that kind of makes you think if she’s getting a histamine response from it that it maybe is doing the same thing with the other aspects of it i mean because.

The the nutrition it’s like well are we talking about collagen are we talking about generally protein are we talking about the minerals each of those is its own thing in bone broth you know because or or stop because those all come as part of it um i have done um bone broth in both the slow cooker and the instant pot i haven’t done it in the instant pot very much and not recently because i’m not eating bone broth right now i’m only eating meat stock like the second rachel because of the histamine levels. Um… I was always a bit, is this the same as doing it slow cooked? And when you look online, there seem to be a lot of people asking this question and a lot of people proffering answers to it that, as far as I can tell, have no basis to them at all whatsoever. They’re just people’s opinions and they’re passing them off as the truth without any reference to anything. So I found one article that said a pressure cooker saves you time and you’ll get % of the nutrition benefits of bone broth. I thought, %? That sounds like it’s come from some research. So I’m scanning through the article, trying to find a reference, looking to the bottom. No reference at all. So absolutely no idea. Someone just picked that number out of the air.

What in the world? What does that even mean you’ll get % of the nutrition? What nutrients? Where does that come from? Do you mean? Now I am curious. They’re separate nutritional benefits based on what you’re talking about. Then I found another article that said, because the instant pot’s at a lower temperature, the instant pot retains more nutrients. Again, that one, not cited at all. So this would be % of the… Yeah, exactly. Or . Let’s pick a number. So my conclusion on it is that no one has done any research, you know, because you’d have to make them both in the same way with the same type of meat for the ridiculous you know conversion amount of time then you’d have to test the bone broth for the collagen levels for the different protein levels for the nutrient levels and that costs money and time and labs and who’s going to do that really um instant pot maybe and if you’re a business that wants to make it in a pressure cooker and sell it then you don’t actually want to know if it’s going to be less Exactly. Yes. Exactly. You just want to do yours more quickly and not pay the extra electricity to leave the stove cooker on. So first of all, we need Lizzie. Lizzie needs to taste it. Taste them. She needs the same batch of bones. She needs the same amount of herbs or whatever. You know what I mean? Like it needs to be the same. I know this now. And she needs to instant pot and she needs to cook on the stove and then she can tell us.

It’s an unanswerable question from us. I would trust Lizzie more than this % crap that we’re getting over here. Yeah. I wouldn’t trust that % thing. I was just like, oh my gosh, look at this. These people just put in whatever they want to put with no references at all. You could just do that. Anyway, so my answer is I don’t know.

Does your Bonn-Brath set that you make an instant pop? When I made it in Instant Pot, I didn’t put things in it that were particularly gelatinous because the Instant Pot is not as big as my separate saucepan stroke kettle. And so I wasn’t able to put a knee bone in it to fit it in there. And I didn’t have any chicken feet, so it didn’t set.

I think I read this morning that people say it’s harder to get it to set in an Instant Pot. I’ve only done it once in the Instant Pot on pressure cooker. And maybe that sort of tells you how I feel about it. I have done broth many times in the slow cooker setting in the Instant Pot because now I don’t have a slow cooker. The Instant Pot is my slow cooker. So I do use the Instant Pot, but I don’t use it on the pressure cooker setting. I use it on the slow cooker setting. So I either do my broth like that or if I’ve got bigger bones, I do it in the big saucepan on the stove. But I only do that for Rob at the moment, you know, with beef bones because he’s not bothered about the histamine. And then I’m just doing chicken carcasses, very short cooked to make meat broth for me. But I would say I don’t do it. So that maybe says how I feel about it. I perhaps don’t trust it. Yeah. No scientific determinant behind that. It’s just my opinion. You’re % sure that it’s not my favorite. Yeah, exactly. Let’s just start making up numbers. This is fun. I’m % sure everybody will trust us if we do that. Yeah, well, exactly. Yes. So yeah, that’s how I feel about it. I have found when I cook broth on the stove, and then sometimes I have to, I usually cook it one day, set it in the fridge, then get it back out, reheat it to can, like when I’m pressure canning it.

A broth that has set overnight in the fridge, even after I can it, doesn’t always set again. I have opened, like the beef broth that I opened the other day that I had canned, and I opened beef broth to make that saffron quinoa, that was totally gelled. It was totally set inside the jar. And I thought, oh, that’s kind of cool. That’s unusual. It doesn’t always set. Of course, it was, you know, it was all knuckles and things like that that I had put in there from when we butchered our cow. But yeah, so I don’t know. And I know that we talked about this in the broth FAQ where we were like, does pressure canning it ruin some of the collagen? And I know pressure canning does affect the collagen, not the gelatin or something, and it does affect certain nutrients. So I would assume that if pressure cooking it is getting it up to the degrees or whatever, then presumably similar effect, but I don’t know. I will say for me, aside from the fact that I can’t really use the instant pot because of power draw. Yeah, yeah.

I realized when I read this question that fully half of my broth effect is the vibes. So cooking the broth on the stove and smelling the broth and peeking at the broth and getting inspired to throw in ginger peels because I was making ginger cake at the same time. That’s half of it for me. You got the broth vibe. So i realized that’s why i can’t use the instant pot there’s no vibes with the instant pot no there aren’t i also tend to do gigantic batches and there would the instant pot just it would make enough broth for us to eat for one dinner and that’d be over so anyways yeah, that’s my scientific assessment is there’s no vibes with the instant great yeah no exactly clue yeah you’re right there’s no vibes hmm yeah okay well um i think we i am amazed we got through all these questions i think we put a lid on all those questions and i opened them up for future discussion um on the discord please do come and and jump in if you’re on discord and you have something to say about any of those questions or anything we’ve talked about at all um today, do come in and and talk to us and you know if you’re not on discord and you want to be.

Um look in your email because there should be a link to tell you how to join if you’re not on discord and you don’t want to be you can always send us an email to um info at ancestral kitchen podcast and we read them there, And if you agree or disagree with our answers, please. Yeah, give us a percentage. Yeah, give us a percentage. I think you’re % right, Andrea. I’ll take that. I mean, that seems pretty good for me. But I do love when we have these discussions and then somebody messages us or posts in Discord, you know. I heard the question here’s my answer to it because that’s really helpful getting multiple people’s insights yeah I agree or at least your percentages of what you think how much interest is left in the broad, gosh well Alison thank you anything else you wanted to get on this episode before we shut her down for the day all right I think that’s it nice to talk to you good to chat as always bye bye.