Author: Alison

How do you know if you are ancestral enough, and what really qualifies as “doing the thing”? Is there somebody out there with a list of ancestral things you need to be doing so you can “count” as being truly ancestral, or is it just a moving, non-linear line we are constantly progressing along with our intention and heart oriented the right way?

Beans, Beans, the magical fruit, the more you eat, the more you absorb valuable minerals and proteins, improve your cardiovascular function and the health of your arterial walls as well as cholesterol and fat absorption, boost your digestion and gut bacteria health, and enjoy an array of bright and colorful foods – but what about that other, turbulent side benefit?

What foods will you find in an ancestral pantry in a modern world kitchen? Today we will share some of the foods we store in our pantries to keep our regional, from-scratch meals on the table on a daily basis, as well as talk about modern tools that help us to turn some inexpensive, bulk raw products into value-added products.

Fat is one of the cornerstones of ancestral eating. But getting hold of good saturated fat is not easy and can be eye-wateringly expensive. Making it at home, as Andrea and I do, you can cut your costs incredibly and also feel sure of the provenance and processing. This episode will talk you through everything you need to know about rendering fat.

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.

Humans have been eating porridge (of which the American oatmeal is just one example) for, as you’ll hear, at least 32,000 years (that places it comfortably in the ‘paleo diet’ era!) Listen in to hear us cover just some of the history of this word and the comforting dish associated with it, as well as taking a tour of the many, many ways it is made throughout the world.

Everybody always wants to know – is a nourishing diet an elitist, privileged ideal, inaccessible to people without a huge budget, and only for the super wealthy? In this episode we are going to share five complete meals. Each meal serves a family of five, and each complete meal can be made for about $5USD (£3.71GBP).

Sausages, bacon, crackling – good pork can be heavenly food. But both of us know that, sometimes, in the ancestral food world, pork is viewed as the poorer cousin to grass-fed beef or pastured chicken. That needn’t be the case and this episode will put real pork where it deserves to be – at the centre of our plates.

Why eat local? What if it isn’t easy? What if the things I want aren’t available? What’s the point? Alison and I have both considered these questions for ourselves and factored them into decisions that we’ve made about how we live our everyday lives.

Back in episode 117, we gave you 26 nuggets of ancestral wisdom. We’ve got more. Another 24 to be precise. And just because these are in this second episode doesn’t mean they are any less important! Over the next hour, on opposite sides of the Atlantic, with cups of tea in our hands we’ll be channelling our great-grandma wisdom and bringing you some ancestral truths relating to food, creativity, family, health, work and life.

Today I am so excited to introduce you to Grand Teton Ancient Grains! You can find this incredible family business online at www.ancientgrains.com and in this episode I got to sit down with Jade Koyl, the owner of this incredible family farm, and learn more about the way they feed the soil, their crop rotations, grain storage, and how their family uses grains in their everyday diet; as well as why they started growing them in the first place.

In so many of our episodes over the last four years, we have explored how no food we eat is intrinsically ‘bad’. Instead, it’s what we as humans living in a rapidly globalising and industrialising world, have done to that food that causes problems. The topic of today’s episode, cacao, epitomises this.

In this episode we share some of our favorite treats including a range of baked, custardy, dairy-free, gluten-free, or egg-free treats to keep you going all winter and into the spring. And the question I know which is burning in all of our hearts, is chocolate part of an ancestral lifestyle, can it be part of an ancestral life? Find out in this episode.