#126 – Living Like a Human with Tara Couture of Slowdown Farmstead

When Alison and I were starting this podcast, she asked who was on my dream list of people to talk to. I said Tara Couture of Slowdown Farmstead and today that is what happened. In an incredibly long and appropriately slow morning we sat down together to talk for the first time and it was like visiting with an old friend I had waited a very long time to see again. Tara once shared her life on Instagram and I followed her avidly there, listening to her wisdom both practical and philosophical on butchery and growing and shifting, and how in the midst of life we are in death. Taking words from the screen to the printed page, Tara recently wrote a book, Radiance of the Ordinary. Since I had dropped off social media and Tara soon would herself, I was no longer reading her words, so when my copy arrived in the mail it felt like unwrapping a long-awaited, much anticipated letter from a beloved mentor.

In this episode we discussed many things including what does it look like to be living life at a human pace, as a human, in an ever-increasingly inhumane world? Is it even possible or practical to be a human in a world that expects you to be, and treats you as, a machine? Tara and I went through a lot of tea and boza over this long conversation so I invite you to settle in and join in with us, and let’s be human together.

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The personal views and opinions of our guests do not necessarily reflect our own personal views or opinions. We recognize that our guests are whole persons and this may include views we or our audience actively disagree with; our guests are invited to the show because we feel they have something valuable to share with us all, and we do not ask them to censor their personal views on air. Our sharing of their work is not necessarily an endorsement of their personal views.

Resources:

Radiance of the Ordinary by Tara Couture

Slowdown Farmstead | Tara | Substack

Against the Machine by Paul Kingsnorth

 

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Transcript:

Andrea:
Welcome to Ancestral Kitchen. I am here today, not with Allison as usual, but I’m actually here with Tara Couture. And I realized as soon as I said that I didn’t ask you if I was saying your last name right, but I hope I am. Okay. Welcome to Ancestral Kitchen. Thank you. We’ve only been talking for two hours. So at some point we thought, oh, we should hit record. Anyways.

Tara:
Well, it’s a pleasure to be here. I just love what you and Allison are up to, Andrea. So I’m honored to be here, truly.

Andrea:
Well, to us, it’s a great honor to have you on. As you know, I think you have been on my wish list for so long. And to get to talk to you in person has been really far beyond what I could have expected. But anyways, it’s been a lovely morning so far. and I’ve got my boza here. Allison has got me completely hooked on this and I can’t believe it took me so long to make it but now that I’m making it, I’m drinking it every day. It is so good. But I wanted to ask you what you last ate before we got on to record.

Tara:
What I last ate? So for breakfast this morning, we had leftover mousse stew that I had made yesterday, and I had some fermented ginger carrots in it and had my obligatory coffee with warm milk and honey in it and a piece of sourdough toast with beef liver pate and marmalade on top, which is an absolute addiction. I could eat it every meal. I’ve been eating it for three years. Yeah, that’s what I had.

Andrea:
I’m not going to argue against a hyper-focus food. I heard in your description there, what you said before we even got on, a lot of slow, fast food.

Tara:
Yeah.

Andrea:
I heard a lot of summer foods and like long sit foods in there, which I want to pull that thread right now and ask you about that.

Tara:
That’s just something that sort of teased itself out just through cooking so much for so long. And a lot of these foods that we cook, these traditional foods take time and preparation. as you well know. And so for us having a farm, like the summer is really a heavy workload season and we’re preserving food. And I started just, I guess, out of necessity. I mean, I want to eat good food. And a lot of these things, the time it takes is mostly cooking, I find. Like, you know, There’s definitely the prep, but this morning before I spoke with you, after I had my breakfast, my plants were screaming at me that they needed to be watered. And so I’m running around the house watering them. And at the same time, I just put a pot on. I put some dollops of ghee in there and I was browning a lamb shoulder and a couple of pieces of lamb neck at the same time. And so it’s browning and I’m watering plants and going back and forth and flipping them around. And then I took out a jar of some plum preserves that I had is just like a sort of a Chinese five spice sort of a nice flavored plum preserve that I have.

Andrea:
Oh, that sounds really good.

Tara:
Yeah. And then, so when it was browned, I poured that whole jar over top. I quartered up an apple. I quartered up an onion. I put in some bone broth, put on the lid. And, you know, at noon, I’ll have a really beautiful lamb dish. And…

Tara:
So it’s just that idea of like eating this really, you know, beautiful, long cooked, deeply flavored, rich flavored food. But sort of I’m leaning into the work that I did in the summer and I’m using this time of my year, winter, as more of a resting sort of, you know, it’s being able to utilize that wood stove to like slow cook something. And being able to utilize the fruits of our labor from the summer in the growing season to make the meal cooking time less so right now. So it’s more of a time of rest. I think that’s one of the things I most have enjoyed about having a farm is getting into those rhythms of the seasons that I think get a little bit blurred when all foods are available at all times consistently throughout the year. You know, I like having that abundance and scarcity and really understanding what a raspberry is supposed to taste like because I’m eating it in the summer and not in the middle of the winter, that sort of thing. So, yeah, that’s just what I mean by sort of that fast food from slow food is we do the work beforehand and then it gives us some flexibility in our day to day when things get a little bit, you know, full or we just want to have some rest. We’ve earned that rest yeah yeah.

Andrea:
Yeah, you’re cashing in on all that energy expenditure, like splitting firewood and filling the woodshed and then snuggling up, shoving logs in the fire all winter. I split that wood. I was thinking when you were talking about that, it’s kind of interesting that moving into the slower food as a means of restoring some humanity for ourselves.

Andrea:
You were saying right before we got on when you had off the cuff mentioned the slow food and the fast food i was thinking isn’t it interesting that that’s the one of the primary ways that the machine unraveled our humanity was taking away the food the the tactileness of working with the food and then the immediacy the urgency the scarcity all that kind of went away into you know tomatoes year round and um i mean there are people who are shout out to elliot coleman and the likes that are you know growing lots of things all the time that’s not what i’m referring to i’m referring to like food being shipped in from all around the world so that never do you feel a sense of seasonality but it’s like trying to i feel like food for me started out as that kind of.

Andrea:
Like oh I need to eat like better or healthy or something is awry with what I’m eating and then, it started going from more of like oh this is like a sensory pleasurable enjoyable experience and then it started like evolving in further like wow I’m turning into a human again, instead of just a customer what are you eating these days you you pinged a couple things in there. That time passed, I remember you not eating. So I’m curious about like honey and apples and sourdough bread and things like that.

Tara:
Yeah, I’ve gone through a lot of different, transitions, I guess, different ways of, of shaping traditional food so that it fit how, you know, so I felt good eating it. I think that, I think that paying attention to how we react to foods is really important. And, and also that changes. It’s not a static thing. I mean, we are forever changing. Our bodies are turning over. We’re new people every few months. And so I think that it’s really important to tie into that in ourselves. And so, I know a lot of times people sort of have asked me questions about what to eat, and I truly can’t answer that for anyone. I think that, you know, the work of our lives is finding out who we are and how we do and what makes us, you know, be as fully realized as human beings as we can be, and food’s a really important part of that. Not the only part, of course, but so for me, I mean, I was, there was a time where I was quite sick with Lyme disease. And so I had to limit my foods because just because of the inflammation in my body. And so, you know, I was eating traditional foods, but I wasn’t eating grains for a long time.

Tara:
And I, you know, my diet sort of got dwindled down to very basic animal foods and stuff. And as I got better, I started experimenting and adding foods back in again. So it’s always changing, but it’s always most definitely, you know, sourcing our food from the same place, eating ancestral food. You know, there was a time I didn’t drink raw milk, just as raw milk. I would, you know, I’d have kefir, I would make yogurt with it, and that did well for me. But now I’m like a little calf. I, you know, I’m just drinking a big cup of milk with almost every meal. And I’m feeling fantastic with it.

Tara:
But I’m also, you know, in my mid s. And and, I’m not the same person I was when I was in my s. And, you know, so I think that’s really important to tie into those cues. And so anyway, that’s sort of a maybe a long winded, preemptive little ditty before my answer. But so for right now, I’m the same foods I’ve always eaten. I, you know, meat from our farm and also my husband’s a hunter. So that as well. And I’m eating sourdough grains and I’m that’s been an interesting experiment because some even though I only eat traditional organic grains and I’m very lucky that we have some fantastic farmers around us that are friends of mine that I can source my grain from some I’m doing better than with others and others you know it’ll seem like I’m doing okay like I was doing quite well with einkorn and then my body was like, nah, you know, but I do really well with rye. So I’m just playing around and experimenting with that. And, you know, like I said, the raw milk.

Tara:
And I, in the winter time, I’m eating the preserves that we’ve made during the summer. So we have a really large organic fruit co-op that I organize, and we get all of our fruit in bulk. And so I preserve a lot of that. And that makes its way into, like I alluded to earlier, like the plum sauce as an example, that it would be in the meat. So I’m not necessarily, you know, we do have canned peaches that I make. But other than that, it’s more of like cooked down sauces, which I think maybe is a little bit more in line with wintertime. I don’t necessarily want to be eating a bunch of fresh fruit or frozen fruit or however we would keep that. and so like a lot of stews and curries and um.

Tara:
Yeah, I’m eating my pache and marmalade every day. I just that sort of thing. So, yeah, I guess that’s, you know, meat, dairy, sourdough grains, potatoes, root vegetables, cabbages, a lot of soups. I eat bone broth every day. So that sort of shows up as as soups. I just, yesterday at lunch, we had rooster soup, which is the best type of soup to have. And yeah, stuff like that.

Andrea:
I love it. I feel like when I was introduced to the idea of ancestral food, I was like I’d been in the pursuit of, you know, the right way of eating or whatever you want to call it, as one does. And so i kind of dabbled with veganism vegetarianism paleo um probably the initial through line to that was realizing organic food and coming off of farms was kind of the dawning of all of that awakening but then when i feel like i was introduced to ancestral food it was like that vision peter had where like the food was coming down in the you know the hammock or whatever from heaven. It was like, you know, everything’s permissible. And when I started thinking along the lines of, you know, all the food that is God made on earth, you know, not the food like products from factories, but like all the God made food is allowed. And then you need to sort of massage into what is feeling right for the healing stage of your body and things like that i feel like that was a big mind shift for me because then it became more about preparation methods and growing methods and even ethics of food started to come into the conversation and.

Andrea:
Um that was that was a big push for me because i remember thinking like grains humans and grains this is okay because you know there’s like a lot of propaganda about that out there about a lot of things. Lard, for one. But yeah, it’s been kind of amazing. So it’s cool to hear about your shift, because I think probably, did you experience this on your Instagram? I’m sure you did, where people came to you wanting the, like, the list? Tell me what what I can eat or not and it’s like.

Tara:
That’s not how this works it’s so hard I was um I was a practicing nutritionist for a while in private practice oh yeah and that’s literally you just explained why I left yeah um people want a formula and I think you really miss out on the tremendous gifts when you don’t just have some patience with yourself, listen to the feedback of your body. And if you don’t know how to receive that, then spend your time figuring that out, you know, figuring, just spending some time, you know, eating something. How do you feel? How are you moving? What are your emotions? I mean, emotions are huge. People don’t realize how much food affects literally our personalities.

Tara:
And so just, I tell, Nobody wants to hear that when they pay a nutritionist to tell them what to eat, right? So I always felt like I just, I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t do it because of that. But I think that, I think I love what you’re saying about that. And I think that there’s just so much, so many gifts and just being able to, to listen to ourselves to develop that. Because I think we’re sort of in this culture where we’re not shown how to do that or we’re not given examples. Everything is about getting the right information and overlaying it onto ourselves. And hopefully it works. And if it doesn’t work, then we go to someone else for another right piece of information and overlay. And people are just.

Andrea:
The right information that we like.

Tara:
Exactly. And it can just really put us into this cycle of constantly searching outside of ourselves for these answers instead of, you know, listening maybe to, I think the best of us is when we can share our experiences and our stories and the things that work for us and people can take that and just, you know, take what works for them, try it out see what happens and then share it out with other people instead of like this idea of like someone holds a key for you that’s going to solve the problem it just doesn’t work that way.

Andrea:
We want someone to.

Tara:
Save us.

Andrea:
I i have definitely seen that um in homeschool and i know you homeschooled.

Tara:
For a bit.

Andrea:
And i don’t know if like is charlotte mason a name.

Tara:
You’ve ever heard of i’ve heard she’s an education philosopher.

Andrea:
But she, oh, side note, she adamantly says, whenever possible, eat outside.

Tara:
Oh.

Andrea:
And she was kind of like an anti-machinist in like that really burgeoning industrial age. And she wanted us to recognize the humanity in children. And she, you know, in an era of stifling indoor early industrial foods, she wanted people to make their children beef tea and put wool clothes on them and go outside. So, you know, our kind of person…

Andrea:
People often come to her education philosophy and they’re like, okay, what’s the list of books? What’s the right books to read?

Andrea:
And the answer is, well, it’s a philosophy. So there’s not really a list. Like, there’s definitely things that aren’t on the list, if there were to be one. But it’s it’s there’s um uh cindy rollins talks about charlotte mason a lot she’s a homeschooling mom down here in the states and she says charlotte mason isn’t compatible with open and go curriculum.

Andrea:
And my friend leah said ancestral food is not compatible with open and go food like that isn’t the way that the food works and i felt like that was such a good point that she made, and when you talk about the slow food that becomes fast food like that is an open and go food that was you know hours of your summer day toiling over something preceded by hours of the past months you know growing something and and then when you see all that food on your plate you think of all I mean I know I do and I’m sure you do but all the people who were there contributed to that plate and like you like feel this love for for them for the food the love they had for you like how it all contributed to this event that is now your meal versus the coldness of like opening a box of something that maybe is the right nutrients or something but just doesn’t, feed that anyways that comes to my.

Tara:
Mind all the time.

Andrea:
Like it isn’t open and go it just.

Tara:
Doesn’t work that way there’s this profound energy to everything and and you know we disregard it because we can’t measure it um i mean i think yeah the goal is being able to find that part of yourself where you can measure it for yourself where you can really tie into it um and whether that’s your home you know and having sort of natural materials and furnishings around you your clothes, you know, wearing natural materials.

Tara:
I’m wearing a pair of these wool socks right now that never in a million years could you fit into a shoe or a boot, you know, because someone knitted them for me and they are so chunky and the heels where the ankle should be and they’re misshapen, but they are just so lovely. And every time I put them on, I just think of that person with such fondness and imagine like her sitting there and knitting these with the intention that I was going to put them onto my feet and like the everything we do we can bring that awareness and intention even if it’s we can’t quite feel it it’s the desire to feel it and just to pause and reflect on what what we are about to eat or put on our bodies or where we are what we’re sitting on, what we’re creating, and sort of pulling ourselves into that. I think it’s one of the richest things about.

Tara:
Eating these beautiful foods is how you get slowly brought into this way of being and receiving and putting yourself into this flow of this energetic space that you start becoming familiar with over time. It doesn’t happen right away. At first, it’s like, oh, I’m going to eat this because I don’t want to eat GMOs and I don’t want to eat organic. And that’s fine. That’s great. I mean, you have to start somewhere, but that’s not the destination.

Tara:
The places it can bring you to, the wholeness and the richness of a life are not for anyone else to tell you or give you. It’s like a gift that you receive over time and with persistence and with humility to like to the awe of just the beauty of the design of things and and you just naturally start falling into this way of being in the world and for me like food very much was the conduit that brought me and started you know doors started opening and it wasn’t just oh I didn’t want to eat like Monsanto’s garbage anymore you know it wasn’t this like negative avoidance to bring me to something is that I started really understanding like the richness and the connection and that’s what that’s what keeps me there I’m not afraid of something so I I want to eat this way I’m in love I’m in love with this creation and the design of us and the.

Tara:
The absolute mystical beauty of of all these things that we were we so perfectly fit into and our culture hides a lot of that from us and it’s still there for us to excavate and and for me that is like being able to do that and being committed to that is a pleasure and it it brings my life great meaning and so it’s easy right because i’m i’m so in love with it and so of course i want more it’s not a chore and it’s not um i’m not trying to tick a box and i’m not trying to you know um eat sourdough because it’s good for my gut bacteria but i couldn’t give a, i mean yeah it’s so much richer than that i.

Andrea:
Feel that i think that you’re right it does sometimes start with okay i guess gmos.

Tara:
Are bad yes fact yeah they are and.

Andrea:
I think that is a perfectly fine.

Tara:
Place to.

Andrea:
Start i mean some people start homeschooling just comes to my mind as a just always an immediate comparison some people start homeschooling because they they’re like ah something was wrong with the school system that we were in and we needed to get out of it. And that’s perfectly fine reason to start. And then the farther down the path they go, the more reasons and joys and loves start to bubble up and then things start to get ordered properly. And that happens with food for sure, which is cool. I want to jump right to that question I had asked you from my friend because it feels like a nice segue. She had asked if you could kind of expand. you were a nutritionist and there was a reason you started that and then you…

Andrea:
Hold on. Everybody listening. Tara wrote a book. Finally. Finally wrote a book. I don’t know how long I was following you on Instagram, but a long time. And then Substack. And then I always said, I wish you’d write a book one day. Just want to read it on a page. And you did. Thank you. I know you did it for me. But you wrote this book, Radiance of the Ordinary, essays on life death and the sinews that bind and of course you worked that into the title like that’s just amazing the subtitle it’s so vivid like all your writing is and it was a real pleasure for me when i got this book which i think i told you i kind of binge read it in two days, and it was a real pleasure to see your words your story your the like pictures of your life, like i think this book is more vivid than your instagram pictures your your words are very articulate and um well i can tell you read a lot let’s put it that way and anyways so i really enjoyed it and it was really nice just to see all of that on a on a written page and you talked in this book about your progression it kind of threads throughout all the way towards the end and the way that.

Andrea:
All of that that you just spoke about, about the food, all the pieces of life move around it so much. That is one thing I think about a lot when I think about how much of my life has expanded and opened because of the food. And then I think, oh, in the obverse, that is what was taken away from us with the industrial food complex. Could you talk about that progression or the progression you’ve been making? You also did allude to it with the Lyme situation, but can we just go a little bit farther on that and expand a little bit more? And with your children too, as you, I don’t know where you were when they came along. And so I don’t know what transitions they had to make.

Tara:
With you um yeah so uh well thank you very much for the very kind words about my book you’re very kind um i i i grew up my mom’s sort of like home cook things and i, my grandmother, who was just an incredible, incredible cook and pastry chef. Oh, my goodness. So I was so blessed to be able to eat her food and to be able to cook with her a little bit and to, you know, have such a huge extended family that all the women could just really cook. We used to rent a church basement and have these traditional Slovak meals.

Andrea:
And it was, what’s something you would eat? Can you tell me?

Tara:
Sure, I can tell you. I can talk about that. Well, we, I’m just saying we would have, so, holopchi, which is like a cabbage roll. So it would have rice and beef inside of it. Those would be, that would be slow cooked. Of course, pierogies, always cheese and and and potato. There was a sausage, a very traditional sausage that actually had rice in it. It was pork and rice and it was quite dry, but it was it would have nutmeg, allspice in it. It was absolutely delicious. this um the the desserts uh were just uh there would be like pork schnitzel that was a big thing as well um and then the desserts we would a lot of poppy seed a lot of butter pastries that would sort of shatter you know layers like puff pastry, but for real, not the box stuff.

Andrea:
And that if you’re saying real puff pastry that shatters, that’s like a lot. Oh, that’s a lot of muscle into.

Tara:
I remember making pierogies with my bupka and she had this bowl that you had to extend your arms around. I don’t even know. I don’t even know if I could buy a bowl like that anymore. And she would have it on her hip with one arm around this bowl. And she would put in her right hand and fold the dough over and over and over. And it was a lot of heavy dough. And so this big bowl would be on an angle on her hip. And I remember her giving it to me and showing me how to do it. And I did it for seconds. I was oh my arm is so sore i was like you know a teenager and she would she would chastise me she’d be like oh what for you you need to be stronger stronger.

Tara:
Oh my god i love that she couldn’t be to shame um that’s a lot of love going without food right there but stuff like that and then anyway i um you know i as a teenager i basically lived off Slurpees from -Eleven and cinnamon buns from my high school. The ladies would make homemade cinnamon buns in the morning and I would eat cinnamon bun for breakfast and Slurpees for the rest of the day. And probably, I don’t know, absolute garbage. Um, and I felt horrible. I, I, my, I had like issues with my skin. I felt terrible. I joined the military and, um.

Tara:
Uh, sort of went from, you know, I guess you would say like mainstream healthy, like I would eat, you know, traditional food, but not like fast food and stuff like that. I would just eat whatever home cooked food. And then I kind of moved into, I experimented with vegetarianism and veganism. And I remember it was winter and here in Canada, and I was eating only fruit for breakfast. And I was my I was freezing. I was cold all the time. And I started getting like bladder infections and things I had never had before in my life. And I wrote about that in my book too, where I went to a German naturopath and he was like, what are you doing? And got me on eggs and all that sort of thing. And then I did, I guess you would say sort of like a paleo-esque sort of, because I didn’t eat any grains.

Tara:
And so my children were sort of raised initially in their first few years outside of the medical system, which I’m really grateful that I made that decision because I didn’t have anyone around me making that decision at the time. And so I actually think that was quite a saving grace. They were raised on sort of, you know, those traditions, like they had milk, but it was just normal milk. And we had, I made everything from scratch. um but then when they uh so my my oldest daughter now is um and so by the time she she they were both breastfed um they were all breastfed and um.

Tara:
But by the time they were my oldest daughter, by the time my youngest daughter came, I was like exclusively buying organic foods, but I was still eating grains and that sort of thing. And then that sort of morphed. I dropped the grains because all of us were having sort of different tummy issues. I would have done things differently, you know, but then I found a farmer and I found out about farm food and I found out about what we were just talking about. Sort of like the problems in the the commercial food system and i i wanted to avoid that so we were going to farms and buying our eggs and we were going to farms and buying our meat and um raw milk is insanely challenging in canada it’s not legal anywhere in canada um so i did find a goat farmer and then i uh we started moving around with the military more and every time we would move, I would find a new set of farmers. And so things just sort of, the more I got to know and understand about the food system, and I was very, at that time, impassioned. I had gone to school, back to school to be a nutritionist, and I was giving presentations. I remember we were living in Alberta, and I gave a presentation on the real cost of food, and it was just breaking down like the cost of a tomato, you know, just using something accessible.

Andrea:
Oh my gosh.

Tara:
Yeah. And I’m scared to even see that. Well, just what… The subsidies um i mean you know and if you take something like a canola oil or something you could or soybean you could you could even make now in today’s world at that time it wasn’t such a big thing but it could be exponentially more so i just got more involved in it that way and then i as i wrote about in my book i um i feel like i’m being really long-winded right now i’m trying to, shore things up this is what we’re here for no this is what we’re here for um yeah and then um I met a farmer, you know, I was buying food from farmers for years, but then I met a farmer who actually butchered his own meat. And then that changed everything for me. Not only because he butchered his own meat, but just who he was. And he became like, you know, one of my best friends and a real mentor to me and brought me into my understanding and connection with food in a way that was beyond sort of just, you know, going to the farm, buying my stuff, leaving the farm.

Andrea:
So far so yes and the scene you put in your book there’s multiple scenes that highlight things you’ve mentioned here like the with troy when you said you and him he was in medical school i think you said at this time and you went to that farm and he said oh the the earth is like like the gut and, I was like, yeah, Troy, when I saw that, because I remember thinking that when I first started learning about soil, and I was like, wait a minute, microbes. I was like, the soil is the gut of the world. And, you know, of course, with bad gut health, you know, the fruit isn’t as prosperous. And if we can heal soil, you know, there’s a lot of flourishing that can come behind that. I love that he said that.

Andrea:
And your story with Richard, which everybody should go in there and read that scene where you went with him on the hunt, as it were, was incredible, given the experiences that I’ve had out here on our farm now raising animals. And it is um we we name our animals too like you do i saw once you said you put the names on the packages and i thought yeah that’s right so we do that now we put their names on the package and one of our we’ve raised one beef steer we’ve only raised one and he was our youngest daughter’s like his her baby she absolutely loved him and the day um a friend was gonna do the slaughter then the day before that or the day of that I forget what day I went down with her I think what she would have been six maybe and went down with her to visit him and she had brought this little purse that she had and then she took out of a piece of paper and she’s showing him the paper And she said, it’s a picture of him and his dad and his mom and on the grass. And this is where he’s going. And I was like, oh, my God, I wasn’t expecting I wasn’t ready for that. And then when we the first thing we prepared from him was his heart.

Tara:
Yeah.

Andrea:
And so I like I made Allison’s oat cakes and then I cooked a heart and I shredded it and then we served that with sauerkraut on top. It’s perfect. That is my perfect meal right there. And so we put it in front of her and we said, you get the first, like you’re going to get the first piece. And so she took the first bite and she said, well, he’s in my belly now because he loves me.

Tara:
Oh, my God.

Andrea:
And I was like, oh, my gosh. Like it made me realize the communion of food. Like when jesus said this is my body broken for you and then she took the meat and she was like this is him and i get nourished from this because he loved me and i was like that is forever the like the way i’m going to look at this experience and oh that’s brilliant and i she’s.

Tara:
Brilliant what a what a dear.

Andrea:
Heart um she is i feel like there’s if we had just picked up you know like meet somewhere and of course that was the reality of our life for a long time and that was good too but she wouldn’t have had that and i wouldn’t have had that observational moment, it was gorgeous gorgeous.

Tara:
It’s amazing what those.

Andrea:
I thought of her with the scene with richard because yeah, Yeah, he felt like that.

Tara:
Oh, I wish that there was some way to bottle that sentiment and that innocence and to be able to share that with grownups who are, you know, really, I think, not everyone, but I mean, in my circles anyway, a lot of people are earnest and they want to understand, you know, like, what, why? What is it how can you like how we’re what kind of place are you in where you can put the name of an animal you cared for for four years on a package and eat it with like joy and reverence and and I understand that um and I guess that’s what I try to connect people to like you know I’m not trying to sell my book or whatever like my writing in general or even just speaking with people is because I feel like that was stolen from us.

Tara:
And it’s a hard thing to understand if you’ve never experienced it, because we’ve been sold this bill of goods that the things that have been taken were actually good to have taken because it protects us and it saves us from these hard things. But that’s where the richness is. And I don’t know how to have a deep reverence for an animal without keeping in my mind that this animal gave its life so that I can be nourished. I have to have that at the forefront because otherwise I’m just mechanically eating and swallowing the food if I’m not considering and holding gratitude for where that food came from.

Andrea:
Yeah. You did a good job talking about that on your Instagram back in the day. And I feel like I was able to absorb it. And then I was regurgitating it somehow. And a friend of mine who was vegetarian for a long time, I didn’t realize, but she said, well, I saw what you were saying. And she started with liver. That was where she started. She actually raises her own animals, but she wasn’t at the time eating any of it herself. She sold them. I would buy them from her because she raised them very well. But she said… I had said something about, you know, Tara talked about like the fear of our fear, like our cultural fear of death being associated with our inability to comprehend, you know, death being even positive in any way. And she said that was her number one fear and she hadn’t really realized it. And so we kind of we thought about that for a while. And, um, but it is, I, I often feel like I have more in common with the vegans of our society than, um, like my fellow meat eaters because they’re trying so hard to do it right. And I understand that feeling.

Tara:
Yeah.

Andrea:
I do understand that feeling.

Tara:
I completely agree. And over the years, I’ve had so many people contact me and tell me I was a vegan or I was a vegetarian. And I just considered something you said. And I love that. And I think that there is a way that we can appeal to that desire to do things right. So I understand a lot of people that are vegan or vegetarian having been there. I was horrified, horrified when I saw how the industrial food system, especially the caretaking of animals, caretaking in quotes, you know, the raising of these animals as just cold commodities is horrific. It was horrific to me and I wanted no part of it. So I completely understand that sentiment and I respect it. And.

Tara:
There’s another way where we can still be connected, not opt out entirely or not have to completely ignore or negate what’s going on and still participate and just eat coldly. Like it doesn’t have to be either, you know, we’re just part of the commercial food system and I don’t want to think about it. And I don’t, you know, just give me my burger and leave me alone kind of thing. Or I mean, I don’t want to have anything to do with it. And I think hopefully, I mean, I try anyway to show the things that for me brought, was taught to me. I mean, I’m only receiving other people’s experiences and knowledge and we’re all evolving in this life together. And so I think that it’s incumbent on us to like share these things and that there is a way in order to respect this life and still be part of the design that we were created to be a part of. Even in this warped and twisted culture we have right now, we can still do that and find our way. And in that, as we just talked about, sort of like finding the richness in there of being a part of something, not separating ourselves from it.

Andrea:
I think we want that, right? We want to be part of something. We have that kind of yearning. But then we’re also told how much better it is if we can just do everything from home with a button and not need anybody. You even said this in your book. We don’t want to be obliged to beholden. Actually, I’m going to pull up Allison’s question because that’s the exact quote that she wanted me to. I asked her, since Allison doesn’t get to be here today, is there anything you want to ask Tara? And she said, yes. I’m going to read you her quote because it works here perfectly. She said, Allison says, in your book, you said, quote, supermarkets ask nothing of us other than our money. End quote. That sentence really, really struck me. It is very true. The transactional nature of life in the modern world is so apparently clean. Just give your money and that’s it. You don’t need to do anything else. You aren’t beholden to anyone. You don’t have to do anything for anyone. You don’t have to feel guilty about anything. Just give your money. Might you riff a bit on what you feel we should be offering back to those who grow our food other than our money, and how the idea that the only thing supermarkets ask of us is our money? How that is affecting society? What that means for the whole of the supply chain? Big question. So for context, Allison…

Andrea:
There’s rare to very little or nothing that she picks up at supermarkets, but she lives in town in England. And so she shops from her farmers. Obviously, there are things she can and does grow, you know, herbs and whatnot, but she’s not, you know, raising cattle or something. So that’s kind of the genesis of this question. And I am very interested to hear what you have to say about this.

Tara:
Well, first, I would just say that I think people like Alison are integral. We’re not all going to live on farms and we’re not all going to raise our food. And we certainly do not have to, as long as we have robust communities around us with farmers that are being supported that can and will and want to do it, right? I mean, the farms can’t survive if people are not buying their whatever it is that they’re producing. So I think that’s really important because sometimes it’s like this ideal of, you know, getting on a farm and doing it all yourself and nobody does it all themselves. I mean, I was under that impression for a long time in my own, you know, this self-sufficiency myth.

Andrea:
Yeah.

Tara:
No.

Andrea:
And anybody who’s coming into the homesteads. Exactly. Hold on. The dog is chewing a screwdriver. Dog move charlie move i just don’t want it to come through charlie go upstairs, i’m gonna call jacob real quick and have him call his dog jacob, jacob or camille, jacob, Charlie’s down here chewing something. Can you call him up? Charlie. Hey, girl. Thanks. We’re not making too much noise, are we? Just turn everything down a little bit. It is kind of loud. I don’t know if you can turn this horse down. That’s fine. That’s fine. The horse is fine. Okay. That’s okay.

Tara:
Sorry about that.

Andrea:
I just didn’t want your backdrop to be chewing the whole time. No, no, no.

Tara:
That’s fine.

Andrea:
Okay. You just jump back in wherever and I’ll have Rob just snip that little piece out.

Tara:
But I think that food should be relational. I think that the big thing that’s missing is the relationship and the responsibility. There’s an obligation as an eater to take responsibility. Um the supermarket takes that away and and and we think that’s taking away sort of the guilt or having to look at what what actually has gone into the food there’s a label that tells us our ingredients but it doesn’t say this food was grown on this farm and this is what they do on this farm and this is the way that they you know these are the employees they have and this is where the employees come from. And this is the quality of life the employees have. And there’s so many secrets hidden, you know, and the disclosure is ingredients. And we don’t even know where those come from, you know, what labs they’re created and all these sort of things. So there’s absolutely no relationship to anything. And when there’s no relationship, there’s no accountability. I don’t have to be responsible for what I do in this relationship. And so it’s.

Tara:
Everything is shrouded. And we are given this guilt-free experience of, you know, the only thing that is requested of us or demanded of us is that we hand over money at the end of that transaction. That’s it. And it’s hollow. I can apply that to all sorts of things. You know, Anything that you do that the only requirement of ourselves is to hand over money, really, I mean, whether that’s at a gas tank or at a bar or people paying for sex, I mean, you are taking the soul out of it because there’s no relationship. There’s no depth to it. There’s no requirement, obligation from us and no expectation from them. I have… You go to the grocery store and there’s a pack of ground beef. Well, I can’t hold the grocery store responsible if that animal lived in a feedlot and was, you know.

Tara:
Lived a miserable existence with poop up to its knees and was cold and all these other things and transported here and done this. That’s not the grocery store’s fault. All of that stuff, all of that history, all of that responsibility is completely wiped away. And it’s called convenience. And it takes us away from the intimacy and the relationships, not only with people, but in our communities. I’m not building my community. I’m not reinforcing anything. I’m not supporting anything. I’m paying a faceless industry a business to bring me food and to put the label on the food and this drives me nutty it really does is all of these labels that pop up you know I mean grass fed, that’s the latest one you know but I mean over the decades I’ve seen all sorts of labels that come in like a phase, now it’s like no seed oils or, you know, whatever’s trendy. They’ll grab onto it, they’ll manipulate it, and people will say.

Tara:
If I had a dollar for everyone that said to me, well, it says grass fed. And I’m like, every cow on planet Earth is grass fed at some point in its life. Like, it’s a meaningless term.

Tara:
I need to say, okay, it was grass fed what? When it was three months old and it was on grass for a couple months before they took it away and put it into the first grow lot? Like, I need to know, I need questions answered. I want to know about these things. I want to know how old it was. I want to know all these things. And all of that is taken away in order to give a business maximum profit at the farmers and all along this chain, this food supply chain, all of that taken away. So I don’t know if I’m answering your question very succinctly, but I just think that in relationships, we have requirements of ourselves. And we can’t just be focused on what someone’s supposed to give to us but we’re not in a relationship in that grocery store we are just consumers cold hard consumers going to get the stuff we need to feed ourselves without any of the other things that go into the richness and the abundance and the honesty the honesty of having a relationship with someone that is giving us the food that nourishes us so that we can be the full expression of who we were meant to be.

Tara:
And that may sound grandiose, but I absolutely believe that food and our connection to the world that we live in.

Tara:
Is very much what shapes us and and who we are and how we present ourselves to be how we can be either fully embodied or not and I mean do an experiment with yourself drink a slurpee for breakfast and have like you know a pizza pop for lunch and tell me you know and then get your husband to put something challenging in front of you and tell me how it goes right I mean but There’s people that eat foods, these foods that fill us but never nurture us. And in order for us, I believe anyway, to be as fully here as we can, we have to get as close to the design of us as we are. No one puts a tiger in a zoo and feeds it kibble and expects that that tiger is going to be the same one that’s like in the wild. And yet here we are living these zoo lives with our zoo kibble in these zoo buildings wearing, you know, climate controlled everything.

Tara:
And we wonder why we are not fully embodied. And I think that all of these things that we can do brings us closer to that. And I’ll probably never get there. I’ll never be like my ancestors were hundreds of years ago without, you know, the stuff in the air and, you know, the whole gamut of things. But there are things that I can do and it’s incumbent on me to do those things. I feel very responsible to the animals that nourish me, to the soil that feeds us all. There’s things that I’m responsible for in that relationship, and I honor that. And yes, it’s harder, but it is integral to my sense of self-worth as a person.

Andrea:
Yes, I love that. And I know Allison will agree. If in a world where, you know, you and Allison were in the same regional area, say, and she was coming, you know, you were the person who was selling the meat and she was coming to you to shop. In what way could she show up and not just drop her cash? Like, in her heart, she’s not the cold hard consumer. So how does she not be that person? Like if she comes and brings her cash to you and then she walks away with, you know, a side of lamb or whatever. Is there something you feel that people can do? I mean, you did say relational and I know that that’s something I harp on all the time, which is get to know your farmer and like the names of their kids and the, you know, like just become a part of your family. Of their life and and let them be a part of yours and it does feel very different but um what would you say to her in that regard or would you say anything.

Tara:
I guess i guess it is just that is um well first of all i think just supporting local farmers her doing something i mean being there going out of her way not you know um accessing that food in that way having those relationships and those conversations where you can find, you know, what sort of maybe ways that you can fit into it. I know, like, when our daughters were younger, before we ever had a farm, I was, um, I had a milkshare that, um, I, I, um.

Tara:
Was dispersing, um, distributing. And, um, I used to go to, I used to go to the farmer early and I would just wash jars with her because she would, you know, it was a jar return day. And, and so there’d be enormous amounts, hundreds and hundreds of jars. And I just washed jars with her, um, because I asked like, what, what can I do to help other than just be picking up milk? And that sort of went on with different farms. And sometimes, you know, sometimes farmers are like, no, I’m good. We had like organic vegetable farmers in Alberta, and she made fermented kimchi. And so on those days, I would go over to her place, and I would just give a hand. And it allowed me to, you know, and I remember she was so delighted with that, that she gave me some of the seed that they had brought over from China for this cabbage that was really important to her. And she said it was the only way to make, you know, this kimchi with this type of cabbage that she really liked. She thought it was different than what we had here. But anyway, just, just, I think being able to, being able to develop those relationships and, and maybe the farmer doesn’t want anything. Maybe they don’t need anything. Um.

Tara:
Being willing to do it. I know, like, I have a friend here who has a little farm store. And she has, like, you know, it’s just an honor system. So you can go get your eggs or frozen meat from her farm store. And during COVID here, when everyone was panic buying, she had people showing up and clearing out her deep freezers. Like, someone came and spent thousands of dollars and just took everything out of her deep freezers and paid for it. But she didn’t know who the person was. She was just really upset by that because, you know, her regular customers that would just come and buy, you know, maybe a week’s worth of meat or something.

Tara:
Now someone just came and voraciously bought that. And that, to me, is like such an example of that mindset. Of just sort of like uh you know people were freaking out and buying their toilet paper and doing all this you know and and the meat was sort of people were flying off the shelves so someone went to a farm store looked it up probably online or something and just bought an enormous quantities and and cleared them out and everybody else that was in relationship and and was just consistently supporting this farmer now was in this situation where there was just scarcity where and.

Tara:
To me, that is a clear example of that delineation between the mindset of someone that is just using a farmer as a source. It’s that commodity mindset. It’s that transactional, I gave you the money, you gave me the stuff. Instead of another customer that would, because they’re in relationship, because they know her, because they know, oh, they just brought a beef in two weeks ago. And, you know, I can get the bones this time. That sort of thing. It’s a hard thing to really describe, but it’s just almost like falling into a rhythm with the farmer, whether that be for, you know, milk or all these other things. I know, too, with her, there’s a business that gets organic spelt from her and they have they sell their sourdough bread. But whenever they come, they also bring her sourdough bread. Like, so I think that’s just that, you know, interaction that brings not just because of the transaction itself, but also just the relationship and how we can be involved in our community to make sure that something that people that are feeding us are actually able to thrive and feed themselves as well.

Andrea:
So, yeah. I see that. And it does make me realize that even if she’s only able to go every week and make her purchase and leave her money, it’s not in the same, it’s not the same thing anymore. And it is relational by virtue of the fact that now she and that farmer intricately linked you know she’s part of their mortgage payment and their you know how she has dinner every night of the week um as opposed to in a grocery store you you come and go nobody knows your name and doesn’t make any difference i i was thinking about that like that that meat thing you said what happened to that farmer’s freezer with this conversation was happening in our discord discussion group over the last couple days which was during the whole great panic i.

Andrea:
I was trying to tell people because you know all the farms that i was going to were now suddenly selling out because all the grocery stores were out of things and and i was telling people, if you want these farms to be here you have to shop here all the time because that infrastructure builds and that you know relationship and dynamic evolves and you know when when that farm reaches its carrying capacity then there’s room for another family farm to emerge and but but it all takes customers you know like you were saying you know it takes a lot of people shopping because that is important. And, you know, maybe the lawyer is not a farmer, but it’s nice to have lawyers around sometimes. But, Nobody seemed to learn that because then as soon as the grocery stores are back up and running, then they’re back out of the farms and it’s unfortunate.

Tara:
Yeah, we were just talking about that. I was talking about that with my friend the other day about now where we are. Yeah, it just because I was talking to my older daughter who lives in Virginia and I guess they were having like a big snowstorm or something. Yeah yeah and so she it’s going down she was telling me how um people were like the grocery store shelves were getting cleared out and people were just like frantic and i was thinking didn’t we just do this like did nobody learn anything about maybe just making sure like shoring these things up. But no, I think everybody, unfortunately, I shouldn’t say everybody, but the masses, most people went back to that way of being dependent, you know, buying a week’s worth of groceries or whatever at a time. It’s too bad because, you know, I think that that was sort of a missed opportunity for sure.

Andrea:
What would you say to somebody because this this was me at one point and i’m always unsure like what i would have heard or not at any given time but what do you say to somebody who’s very much immersed in grocery store system right now that’s that’s the only, oh hello sliding down the stairs on his belly, um Sister’s coming to snuff him. Yes? Camille, can you take him outside for a minute? His boots and jacket are in that basket right there. You can take him upstairs so he can go into the yard.

Andrea:
I built him a big castle. Oh, I bet he loves it. Yes, he does. He’s climbing on it. Good. All right, I’ll start that question over. Sure. What would you say to somebody who is very much in a grocery store model? And that was definitely me at one point. And I think you said it was pretty much you at one point, too. And it’s the culture we’ve been immersed in. And there’s so many paradigms that change on the way out. But, you know, we can’t have every epiphany at once. What do you what would you say to someone who’s listening to this and is saying yeah i do like the idea of getting out of this grocery store system um, where to begin, what to do. I mean, there’s just so many.

Tara:
Yeah, I mean, you don’t, I don’t think anyone should do anything by just doing this major overhaul because it just seems so impossible, really, when you look at it like that. But I would just say finding what’s around you that, you know, like the farms around you and what they might have to offer that you can replace. And so I remember the first thing that I started buying was chicken and eggs. Chicken and eggs. That’s what, there was an old farmer. Which came first. I don’t know. We got him at the same time. I didn’t have to solve that problem.

Andrea:
Oh, the answer. We finally know.

Tara:
But yeah, that’s what we had around us. We were living on a little base, a remote base, army base. And there was an old guy and he was raising chicken and eggs. And all I know is he used to go on and on about them spraying grain and he wasn’t buying the sprayed grain. And I don’t think anyone even talked about GMOs. Maybe they weren’t around or in the food supply at that time. And that was good enough for me. We were like, we bought his chicken. And I was like, wow, this is incredible. And these eggs are wonderful. And so what if you just start with, you know, something you eat commonly, like if you eat chicken a lot, what if you start looking for chicken? And, you know, I think that I… I think that just taking it incrementally, things sort of naturally unfold because you start, you don’t really have to convince yourself of anything because it becomes glaringly evident that what you’ve been sold at the grocery store is there’s something not right. Like that is actually not, you don’t have to work so hard to get food to taste good. Really?

Andrea:
Amen to that.

Tara:
Oh my gosh.

Andrea:
If there’s anything we can take away from ancestral food cooking is that it doesn’t take these complicated ingredients and you cook something with just a little salt and everybody’s like, oh, you brought down the moon. But it was the sun and the grass and the moon and rain and movement. Like there’s a lot of things involved, but they didn’t happen in the kitchen. It’s so true.

Tara:
It’s so true. I say that all the time. I mean, really good food requires very simple cooking just to make it shine because it’s full. That’s the beauty of all of this is like, you know, food that is really nutrient dense because it’s been raised well tastes good. Like you really have to do very little.

Andrea:
There’s no masking it. There’s no trying to, you might not be trying to sell your book, but I am. I’m going to grab a quote from your book because I have about .

Andrea:
I don’t even know. I don’t even know which one I want to pull. I have so many marked here. But I like this one. It’s from your chapter in my kitchen, which is, I mean, a love beyond inspirational, this chapter. So you said, in this era of addictions and distractions, I have heard the words, food is not love, spoken often. Oh, but food is love, real food, real love. It is true that we can’t fill the hungry voids in our souls with items meant to drown, but not quench. But real food, what I call God’s food, as opposed to man’s food, is love when it is consecrated with our intention and attention. That is the role of the cook in the kitchen, the blessed transmuter of food into loving nourishment.

Andrea:
Amen. Chills. Well, I love a lot about this paragraph because, I mean, there’s a lot to pull out here but i’m thinking of your babka with the the dough and and um my daughter eating the beef heart and saying oh he’s letting us eat him because he loves us and um the intention, that that you feel not just from the person who put it in the pot but from the like the hands that prepared it and like in terms of growing it, That’s a lot. And I feel like there’s, and then you eat that outside. There’s a lot here. Yeah, I, that I really enjoy.

Tara:
I mean, I think back to my bubka who died in her late s and the food that she fed us and she, she wasn’t emotionally evocative. Like she wasn’t, you know, very, she was very kind and would hug me and take care of me when I was sick. But so much of her energy, you know, nine children’s worth went into her food and the care that she took and and wanting people to eat. You know, if you didn’t eat enough, she’d say, what for you not eating? Like you have to eat more.

Tara:
But I and it I.

Tara:
It is absolutely an honor when I can feed something to somebody, I can give them something. I mean, when you really just pause and think about that.

Tara:
That this, the design of us, like, you know, God’s design that the soil would nurture these plants that feed this enormous beast that we can then take the flesh of and be nourished by and the plants as well. And we can be nourished by these things and that I can take my hands and make myself now a part of this and offer it to somebody. Like i i’m one little piece just one little you know one little link in the chain but i can now take that and and take that energy and honor that energy honor the gift of it and add something from myself into it as well and then i can offer it to you andrea and you take it and put it in your mouth like what a blessed blessed interaction that is how intimate is that to take something and make it a part of us and and when we just.

Tara:
You know, treat it like this is this hole in our face that we shove stuff back into, and it’s going to go into our body and somehow nourish us? No. Like, we talk about getting like, oh, you’re fat-soluble vitamins, and you’re this, and you’re that, and all these things. But if our energy is that we take these foods, no matter how beautiful they are, and we just shove them back, and we’re trying to get our calories, and we’re trying to get our macros and do all this and we take away what is most significant and sacred about that moment, we can’t we can’t really.

Tara:
Get to that level of full nurturance in a way that is like beyond the physical I’m full I’m satiated like how are you really deeply satiated and I think I don’t think we have to eat every meal like you know um a monk and and stuff but just taking that and having that awareness in us of how intimate and beautiful this design is and honoring that um and feeling the love in it i want you when i’ve made something for you to feel my love for you in that meal like i if i can if I can give that to you. I want you to receive that. And I think that’s a big part of this sort of like food is not love. You know, it’s just it’s it’s energy. And you have to think of food as energy and it’s holy smokes.

Andrea:
Like it’s just, yeah.

Tara:
Missing so much.

Andrea:
It turns us into a machine. Like this is the electrical input. This is the battery that’s powering you up instead of. Thank you, Jake. Instead of the humans.

Tara:
Yeah.

Andrea:
That, that, oh, eating like a human and eating like the people who prepared the foods are humans. Um… Your book gives, I feel like there’s a point that you come to, you know, in the beginning with eating ancestral food, you kind of need some, like, some recipes or some ideas or, you know, an okay list or a don’t go here list. And then over time, I feel like you push deeper and deeper into that experience. Like, I get teased for this a lot because I always bring it up. But the idea that health bro out there says, well, you know, the way, the path is you eat an avocado every day. And I’m just like, that excludes everything about everything. Like, it isn’t the avocado that is the god that’s going to, you know, the avocado is a part of a life in some places. And there’s so much context involved in that, but it’s not like the avocado is the only path. And I it really irritates me when I see that health bro stuff online because it disregards.

Andrea:
Regionality and seasonality and um you know time time of your life and what’s okay for you and not okay for you right now and I just feel like there’s so much just gets lost but when you start it is good to have you know those kind of ideas of things and then push farther and farther out And I feel like for somebody who’s trying to push farther and farther out, your book is going to come in and probably speak to a lot of those aspects of their life, because it isn’t really a book on recipes, you know? And it’s sort of an expression of where this years and years of this kind of living has taken you.

Andrea:
And you do address intense grief in this book, so anybody who’s reading it should know that. And… Yet, it’s part, like you said, part of the sinews that bind. It’s part of what holds your whole story together. It isn’t complete without that story brought in and understood insofar as we, the outside observer, can understand it. But I really do enjoy it. So I am really thankful that you wrote it. I just don’t like reading things on screens.

Tara:
Yeah, I have a hard time reading things on screens. I can’t concentrate on them properly. And I, as you know, had like, I had a nicely sized sub stack. And I’ve chosen to leave that. And I’m hoping I can, I don’t know, I keep saying I want to find a little book binder that’s working in some dusty corner of the world that shuffles around and can put what I write onto paper. Instead of onto screens so we’ll see how that turns out but.

Andrea:
Yeah um.

Tara:
Yeah it’s it’s a challenge.

Andrea:
Well this is a this is a good indication in that direction it’s it’s hard i feel like allison and i talk about this like every time we get together the push and pull between you know if if we want people to you know we can have we can have the message and go live in the austere monastery somewhere and enjoy it for ourself. But sometimes you’re called to get it out a little bit farther than just your immediate circle. And I feel like you’re one of those people who is called to do that because you have spent a lot of time being able to articulate and shape into words these ideas. A bunch of us on the podcast are reading Against the Machine by Paul Kingsnorth right now, and he’s one of those people that you’re like, oh, wow, I’m only a few chapters in, but everybody kept telling me, you’re always quoting his book. I haven’t read it yet, so I’m okay. I better read it. But it seems like he’s also one of those people who’s articulating the ideas that you’re talking about, and I’m Allison. And so the push and pull between, like, we want to get this out there, but also then what does that mean about life with a computer and how to do that with our integrity intact.

Tara:
And I love that these conversations are taking place. And I think they’re taking place a lot. I think there’s a lot of us. I know, when I came out and said, like, I’m getting off this internet business, that so many people contacted me and were like, how? Or, oh, I wish I could do it. So many people saying, I wish I could do it. And I… And people recognizing that it’s not healthy for them to be there. It really astounded me how many people responded to me with those types of responses. And I really have the sense, and maybe because I’m in my mid-s now, and I’ve always been a bit of a renegade and done things differently.

Andrea:
No, really.

Tara:
You didn’t know.

Andrea:
I didn’t see that coming.

Tara:
And I don’t I don’t I am just the personality that I can do things and not worry about what people around me think I doesn’t I and the more I’ve done that in my life the more I’m I’m cemented into that just I that’s fine with me and so I don’t mind being alone like or maybe one of a few on a new way of doing something and I really have the strong sense that that a lot of us are are moving away from this intranet era. I’m not saying the intranet’s going to die or go anywhere, but I see so many of us that are like, you know, this isn’t for me.

Tara:
And we’re going back to community building, but it’s going to be in a different way. And I don’t, maybe we don’t know what that’s going to look like exactly. And maybe there’s going to be a lot of fumbling around and doing things and hoping other people catch up with us or hoping other people are like, okay, I see a light over there and I’m not really liking what I have over here. So I’m going to start moving in that direction. I really have the sense that that’s where we’re at right now. I think that things are shifting and they have shifted. And it’s just a matter of people starting to realize and take account of like, is this, are these practices that I’m doing, These habits, are they really enriching my life? And if they’re not, then how can I do things differently? And I, yeah, I feel really hopeful about it, actually, Andrea.

Andrea:
I don’t think I know anybody who’s like, no, I’m loving this being online all the time. I can’t think of a single person. Not everybody’s in the same place of I want to disengage fully, but a lot of people are like moving that way, like dropping off Instagram, dropping off. Which, by the way, do you think that’s why Instagram is making fake accounts of you? Because are they a publicly traded company and they need to show like memberships are increasing? Do you think? And do you think people are just disappearing? And they’re like, ah, make fake accounts and then don’t let people tell us it’s illegal.

Tara:
I obviously cannot prove that it’s Instagram doing it, but Meta, who owns Instagram and Facebook, yeah, they’re publicly traded, right? So, I mean, yeah, it doesn’t look good for them when I think, I’m pretty sure the last statistic was like % of the content on there is AI or AI augmented. So it doesn’t mean it’s… And so, yeah.

Andrea:
It’d be interesting to see that compared to like… That doesn’t probably mean an % increase in content.

Tara:
You know what I mean?

Andrea:
It’s like real content is in crude numbers dwindling. Yeah, and then the AI is taking its place.

Tara:
But why are we doing that to each other? I mean, you know, these accounts.

Andrea:
I don’t know.

Tara:
And people are like, oh, I can’t get it together and I can’t make, like, do this. And they hold up these people that have these huge funds behind them and it’s half of it’s not real and it’s AI and we’re saying, like, look what I’m doing. And and then people just feel like utter failures because nobody can measure up to this gloss and simulacra that they’re passing off as real life. It’s it’s just cruel. And yet we and yet we participate and you know we have a choice not to participate um and to create something of actual genuine flawed bruised um you know imperfect meaning in our lives and i i think that even if we don’t know what that looks like that we’re not going to do it until we start rejecting what what isn’t what’s what’s making us feel bad and you know the social media that’s pulling us apart from each other and there’s nothing social about it at all um it gives us this illusion of connection and yet the second you get off you’re like oh why did i do that or i feel bad or you know whereas.

Andrea:
If you sat at a.

Tara:
Table like.

Andrea:
If gary and i sat at you and troy’s table and we talked until.

Tara:
Midnight and.

Andrea:
Drank whatever you put in front of us and ate whatever we had brought and and, couldn’t couldn’t stop talking we wouldn’t walk away being like i feel so disgusting like why did i just sink like we would walk away feeling like i can go on exactly i i can continue because, this type of connection exists in the world and it’s so i mean we we have we have sunday dinners when we can my sister and i get together at least once a month and we do we call it a feast and.

Andrea:
We just talk for hours like our two families and and we had a new couple at our church over the other day for one of those dinners and we i think i when i looked at the clock later it realized we sat at the table for four hours like it’s not like it took us that long to eat but that’s how long we sat there and nobody went away feeling like gross or we just all felt like wow we learned so much about each other we saw each other and exactly yeah and and if we had just been like texting or even you know it still wouldn’t be the same yes it’s i feel like that that also contributed to when i was getting off was because um like you said we see these sort of polished versions and i always felt i always try i didn’t i don’t know if you if anyone my instagram still exists so if anybody went and looked at it you wouldn’t see perfection there would you know but then i felt like here i’m trying to balance like oh this looked pretty and cool I took a picture but then people like oh my gosh your life is so perfect so then I take a picture I’m like look this is how life is kind of hard and they’re like what you need to do is get it together and I was like like there’s just no you know if you try to be real and raw then the internet comes at you with like let me fix this for you and tell you what you’re doing wrong and then if you show what you’re doing right people are like you make such an impossible standard none of us can achieve it there’s just no winning so then I was like it’s because the medium is the message.

Andrea:
I’m no matter what, I can only give you a piece. But if we can talk in real life, you’ll, I mean, even you and I are talking, but you still only see of me what I want you to see, right? Like, and, and I only know of you, what you shared through your.

Tara:
Which is a lot.

Andrea:
Through your Instagram and your book, you know? So even then, it’s not the same as if we were, you know, actual neighbors and absolutely, you know, Well, actually, if you really want to know me, just talk to my kids and they’ll tell you everything.

Tara:
Yeah, kids will do that for you.

Andrea:
They do. They really do. Before we end our conversation, let me ask you a practical question that isn’t practical, which is your wood stove. You talk about it in the book, and what I drew from that was also the time it took you to get to the point in your life where you would even desire something like a wood stove, and the absolute inefficiency that that introduces to life intentionally. But then also in the practical sense, we have a wood stove that we used to heat our house and, you know, it’s a whole thing. You have firewood stacked and split and somebody’s got to bring it in and you’ve got to start it and the house gets cold and all these things. So I just want to hear a little bit about your life with wood stove, if you don’t mind.

Tara:
Well, we had our first wood stove. So at our first farm, that was our whole heating in the house, too. There was no duct work or anything like that in the house. We just had a wood cook stove. And I remember when we got it, we bought it from the Amish people here in our province. And a friend of mine, a couple who are in their s and have lived off grid their entire lives. And they had the same stove.

Tara:
And so their names are Bonnie and Charlie. And they, Charlie came over. They came over one day when we got our stove and he just started pulling things off it ripping out governors you don’t need this this is some thing they started doing the last few years and it’s not gonna get hot enough and he was like he’s just he’s like a savant with his like mechanical abilities and so he had brought like these little plates that he like took off what they had and put this on and took off the venting and put on chains and he like rigged it up and bonnie came for came and spent two whole days with me showing me how to cook and uh on this because it’s all i had i didn’t have an oven i had no hot plate it was trial by fire literally um because it was our heat and our only way to cook. And I was so overwhelmed. And I was, I just, it was such a challenge to me.

Tara:
And I’m so grateful for that. I’m so grateful that Bonnie came and spent all that time with me and showed me, here’s the hot part of the oven. Here’s the cold part. You don’t have a temperature that goes from to . You have a pot you slide to this part of the oven and this part, and you’re going to get to know it. Your oven is going to, yours is, even though we had the exact same stove, mine was very different than hers. Like, you know, maybe in the subsequent years, the metal was different or mine had different hot spots than hers did. And so they also taught us about wood. You know, when you want a really roaring hot fire, you use where we live, this type of wood called ironwood. It is scorching, scorching hot wood. It never really gets bigger than this diameter of the tree. But when you put in ironwood, you are lighting an inferno of heat like you will. The whole house is sweating. So and it was, you know, and then here’s what you’re going to put in for because we have hardwoods. So, you know, oak or if you’re going to be using like poplar, it’s a colder wood. But, you know, you could depending on the size of it. So.

Tara:
All of that whole education came into it too, which was not something I expected at all, learning about different wood species. And Bonnie says, if I’m cooking a pie, I want to make sure that, you know, I have the oven going for an hour before. Now I’ve got it dropped down to coals. Now I’m making sure I’m going to save my oak when I’m making like a pie. And when i’m making like a long simmering stew i’m gonna do a different wood species and get a different type of fire going than when i’m using um you know if i want to all of a sudden heat up some pork lard or whatever to make french fries or you know i just something that would be quick and there’s times when i have to open all my windows in the house because the fire is getting so hot and it’s minus degrees here. But the windows are open in the winter, which I love that. And people would say.

Andrea:
Like, yes, yes. Get that fresh.

Tara:
Yeah. Like when do you ever get to do that on central heat? So that’s how I learned to use my wood stove. And then when we moved to our second farm, the area in the kitchen, the people here did not have a wood stove. And I had to put a wood stove back, a wood cook stove. We have wood stoves in different parts of the house, but a wood cook stove, but it had to be smaller. And so I got a cast iron one. The other one was steel because it will hold its heat longer. And it was a whole new thing again. Like, So now I’m like, wow, what is this thing like I, you know, and I didn’t like it. And it became like a whole thing as well. And I had to learn this stove actually needs to get a lot hotter for a lot longer before I can start cooking things in the oven. And, you know, it was just a whole new education of learning how to use it. And. And this house does have heat outside of that, outside of a wood cook stove, which actually is nice if we go somewhere and I don’t have to get my daughter to rely just on like the heat.

Tara:
So it became a really big thing because it was sort of the whole heart of the home. It was our survival, not only with actually the heat, but the food that came from it as well. And it was like right in the center of the house. And so everyone sort of converges around it. It was like a way that I was able to actually build my relationship with Bonnie because she didn’t stop hearing from me for a year after that about, you know, I kept burning everything and what was wrong with me. So I, I, there is something very connecting for me to wake up in the morning and our house is really cold. Yeah.

Tara:
And the first thing I do is I go to the wood cook stove. My husband goes to the wood stove in the other room. He gets that fire going. I’m still half asleep and I’m feeding the wood into the wood cook stove that we have. And I’m getting that fire going and it’s got a glass door. My first one didn’t have a glass door. And so I’m in my kitchen and I’m cooking and I can see that fire and that radiant heat is warming my bones in a way that no other heat can warm your bones. And there’s just something very, you know, fire, right? It’s very connecting to us and it’s very traditional and it creates an energy in a room that is hard to really describe. But when you’re in a room where there’s fire, you can feel it. You can feel it in your bones. You can feel it. there’s a calming and a grounding and a centering sort of that light sort of dancing across the walls while I’m making breakfast it feels like yeah it feels connecting to my ancestors in many ways like this is something that we would have shared so much of my life doesn’t look like what their lives would have looked like but this we this carries through and yeah I think I would And it wouldn’t quite feel like a home to me without that.

Andrea:
Do people sometimes get alarmed at your desire to be so inefficient? Probably. And maybe they keep it to themselves.

Tara:
You know, I have little tolerance for things, you know, this greenwashing idea. And yet people will, you know, buy food from a grocery store or not think twice about wearing plastic pants or whatever. I have, my life is so tied to sort of the design of things that that’s what I use as my measure, not some sort of politically or monetarily designed system so that someone makes profit off. of it.

Andrea:
Yeah. Well, that’s probably the last place you want to hang your hat, because that’s going to change every time the wind blows. Dorothy Hartley wrote these books. I don’t know if you’ve ever read them. They’re older, like Lost Country Life or Food in England. Alison got me turned on to those. And she went around England, kind of observing and collecting the old ways that people were living as it was beginning to die out before her eyes. And so the books are pretty fascinating and she has a section where she talks in one of i think it’s lost country life where she talks about cooking on the stove and she says well.

Andrea:
If you if you know what you’re about you can get home and have water boiling in minutes otherwise not that good i was like oh my yes so that’s pretty impressive but that that does require an intimate knowledge of the types of wood that you’re using and it’s it’s a whole world and i think that’s beautiful that story with um bonnie and charlie and and um that’s the kind of, ancestral wisdom that is very hard to find and those people aren’t on instagram you know what i mean like that kind of knowledge isn’t being given away on instagram i’m not saying they per se aren’t up i assume they’re not but, Um, it’s, it’s, uh, you only find it walking with your two feet, you know, like moving your body into spaces with real relationships. And, and sometimes that does start online, you know, you find a farmer on Instagram or something, and then that cherry sort of spirals into more connections. And then you get farther and farther away from the internet or the web, as you said. I’m never going to forget now that you said it’s the web. Whoever told you that was, they were onto that. Pay attention to the words that we’ve chosen.

Tara:
Yeah. You know, and the thing about that, too, is just like the Bonnie and Charlie thing is I am astounded by how many relationships. No, I’m not astounded. I’m I’m blessed with how many relationships I have with people that have very little in common with me. I don’t need to be algorithmically fed the people that align with me because we have, I don’t know why, but my husband and I have always just had older friends. It’s just, maybe I just have appreciation and a reverence. I don’t know what it is, but… We’re friends with, you know, a retired welder who, you know, drinks way too much. And in his workshop, he has like pinup girls from with their boobs hanging out. This guy has no, nothing in common with me, you know.

Andrea:
And the personality is a out of .

Tara:
Exactly.

Andrea:
And conversations probably just light up your day.

Tara:
And he would do anything for us. And, you know, he brought us turkey hunting together and he, you know, wants about and I think that when we have these so-called interactions online that are so controlled and shaped and buffered for us, we lose that ability to just appreciate spending time with people that like, you know, maybe, maybe, yeah, they’re they’re rough around the edges. But you know what? So am I. I’m in real life. You know, my girls would say, like, I’m a salty dog. Like, really? And who isn’t at times? And let’s like stop pretending and holding ourselves to these ideals that when we get into these, you know, real life interactions, we’re just not even equipped to handle people that don’t come to us refined and filtered. Because I think that’s a real danger of this like massaged digital universe that we’ve created you know and on that idea what you were saying about the web I actually shared that I’ll just tell you this one little thing I shared that with a friend the other day and she said you know it’s the same thing with the apple logo with the bite taken out of it and Adam I’ve.

Andrea:
Thought this too.

Tara:
I thought the same thing.

Andrea:
I was like, are you telling me your symbol is the symbol of humanity’s downfall? That was a choice. Like it’s you’re just gonna remind us okay it’s.

Tara:
Got a bite taken out of it.

Andrea:
Like yeah just eden is gone that’s what that says, there’s this um company down in texas that um you can go to their website and hire them to make rain or snow whatever you need and um the friend who told me about them it’s in her area she said their their drone system is called the prophet oh and when i went to their website their symbol is an angel sprinkling and i was like these fools never read a revelation or maybe they did and that’s wow you know like these like don’t make it any more obvious for us please um it just gave me kind of like chills to say that somebody would say like yeah we are the prophet and we are bringing that we control the rain and the weather and and we are the angel that pours out the bowl i was like you don’t want that that doesn’t that’s not who you oh good thing wow.

Tara:
That’s that is just gobsmacking i.

Andrea:
The symbols are around us and people are not hiding what they’re doing that’s That’s the crazy thing. Nobody’s trying to be secretive about it, but by putting it into broad daylight… They know that it almost loses its, like, the tame for people because then it’s like, oh, well, they never tried to hide what they were doing. What are you bothered about?

Tara:
Yeah, we ignore what’s right in front of our faces. And I think that’s part of the diminishment and the sort of separation from what we’re supposed to be doing. It’s like, you know, we’re sort of dulled to what’s right there, but you can’t be dulled to certain things and not be dulled to the rest of it, you know? And when you’re acutely and you’re immersed into something, you start noticing again. And I feel like for me anyway, just making that decision and actually acting on the decision to leave the digital sort of sphere, yeah.

Tara:
You know, I just feel like I’m being tied in more intimately. And I’m really excited to see where that goes. And that’s the thing is, I wanted to find the terra that is not shaped by these things. Because as much as I’d like to think, oh, I’m an autonomous person, and I’m making my own decisions, well, then why are you going on something that makes you feel lousy after, if that’s true. Like, we have to get really honest with ourselves. And then, you know, I just, I want to be what I’m supposed to be here for. And I felt like these things are keeping me away from fully realizing that. So, you know, what that means, I have no idea. I just know that I have to go in a certain direction and have faith that whatever will come from that will come and that’s about all I can do but just to act on the callings of my heart is sort of my that’s the plan anyway and I however that sort of comes about right and.

Andrea:
The farther like you said the farther you get from it and the more you behave in agreement and this is something Allison has embodied very well for me over our years of relationship and she talked about this a lot when she did her… When she turned , she did like things I’ve learned, sort of, and they’re, you know, each one could be a chapter in a book. And the more you make those decisions, as you said, not only do the better you get at making those decisions when the situation calls for it, but the harder it is to go back and like return to the vomit, you know, like do the wrong thing, make the wrong choice for yourself again. Because now you feel it in your body. And when somebody is really used to eating bad food, I know this is me, when it was just my every day, I didn’t know how I felt because I didn’t know a day without it. And then after being away from it for so long, then you come back and revisit it and you’re like, okay, well, that was miserable. I’m never doing that again.

Andrea:
And then somebody says, oh, well, I eat it and I’m just fine. And it’s like, well, maybe you think you are, but you don’t know how you could feel. And I feel like the computer situation has been the same the farther I get from it. The more I’m like, oh, this is what it’s supposed to feel like. And I didn’t know how it was making me feel until I stepped away from it. And that’s daunting. And I think it would be simplistic for me to say to the whole world, just stop using it. Like, that’s just the way. But being open to those little epiphanies.

Andrea:
Repetitively over and over and letting someone like you speak to me and give me those your your understanding of your epiphanies and then the way I can like see how they dovetail with what I’ve experienced is is really helpful like really helpful and encouraging as well, I’m thankful that you got on here with me um trekking back through the snow so we can talk um, Thousands of miles apart or however far we are.

Tara:
It’s pretty far. Quite a ways.

Andrea:
I’ll take this piece from the internet and enjoy it. And then I guess write you a letter afterwards.

Tara:
Yes, that’s the way to do it. I really encourage everybody to find their little pen pals, even if it’s just one or two people. And with no timelines, like no expectation that I get a letter and I immediately, you know, No, we can pretend that it’s like, you know, the Pony Express. And if it takes months until it gets to you, then that’s fine. There’s quite a delight in opening your mailbox and finding an old-fashioned letter, you know, sitting there.

Andrea:
I said that exact thing to my sister yesterday. I told her there’s something that I dislike about emails and something that I love about real mail. And I said, nobody goes, oh, yay, I have a stack of emails. But if you open your mailbox and there’s a letter, you just get this thrill inside. You just, oh, yes. A letter with my name on it and it’s not from a credit card company?

Tara:
Like, trying to steal my money or something?

Andrea:
Like, yes, please.

Tara:
Absolutely.

Andrea:
So different.

Tara:
Yeah. And it’s the same with a picture.

Andrea:
Well, I guess I shall.

Tara:
You know, I got a parcel from a friend and she put in an actual picture of her baby. And it was just I just sat there staring at it you know looking at his little hands and his little kneecaps and I was like looking at the background and I was it was so delightful and you don’t get that same like maybe it’s because we scroll or we expect like uh the next thing to come but you don’t no one wants to sit there gazing lovingly at a blue light screen no matter what the image is, it’s, you know, it’s not the same effect. So, yeah, I’m like all for the snail mail and like finding, you know, getting things back into mailboxes and just trying to get back to this, world of tangible the tangible stuff we can feel and smell and and resonate with and good company and good food and i think that it’s really uh our culture is starving for that and we don’t even know that that’s what we’re hungry for.

Andrea:
So forward into the real into the real world i suppose.

Andrea:
Yeah i love it well i appreciate you taking the time to have this conversation with me and all the, there’s the listeners of ancestor kitchen are so amazing like if you can ever meet any of them i mean i’ve met quite a few in real life and and we talk a lot in our group and and the, the way everybody is approaching this is that their food and the thoughtful way that they’re thinking it just um has me in awe all the time so i know that this conversation will be well received and understood so thank you tara and um give also my thanks to troy for giving you up for a couple hours so i could visit with you i appreciate that gift from him as well so, until the next time or until my letter comes in the mail i guess.

Andrea:
Thank you so much.