Podcast

Meredith Leigh is an ex-vegan now butcher, a butchery teacher, an author, a kitchen experimenter extraordinaire and meat fermenter, co-founder of The Fermentation School and a mum. She has so much to share and this is an intimate and engaging conversation. We cover some really important questions including conscious animal slaughter, Meredith’s transition from veganism to ethical meat, the safety worries around fermenting meat and the one we get so many questions about: nitrates in meat.

The world of essential oils is an ancient and ancestral one. From the Mesopotamian valley where the Sumerians, Akkadians and ancient Hebrew tribes were distilling, trading and using oils to the apothecaries and wisdom of the ancient Chinese; from the dusty tombs of Egyptian Pharaohs like Tutankhamun to the Silk Road and spice merchants guiding camels burdened with precious ointments, oils, resins and salves.

If you asked both Andrea and I who’s inspired us the most we’d both put our guest today, Sandor Katz, right up there in our top couple of names. We’ve read his books, underlining phrase after phrase, we’ve taken his advice; we’ve made his ferments, so many of his ferments. He’s inspired, educated, and hand-held us both through our food fermentation journeys.

All of us have tried to change our food habits at some stage, most of us multiple times. Maybe, as you’re listening to this, you want to. It sounds simple – I’ll just stop eating this and start eating that. But it’s never that easy, is it?! Today, we’ll take a deep dive into food habits and offer you 14 Tips for Changing yours.

In this episode we will share what a Slow Christmas is and why we choose to celebrate our holidays this way. We’ll talk about some specific traditions for meals, gifts and more – both from our homes and from the homes of our community of patrons.

Spelt is a wonderful, economical alternative to wheat. I’ve been baking with it for a decade now and I love its deep, nutty flavour, its flexibility and its digestibility – many people who don’t get on with wheat can enjoy spelt, especially if it’s in a sourdough loaf. Whether you’ve tried spelt or not, this episode will give you everything you need to know to get the most from this grain in your own kitchen.

Piper’s Farm was founded in 1989 by Peter Grieg and his wife, Henri. It’s just north of Exeter in Devon, Britain, and today it is run by their son Will and his partner, Abby, in a multi-generational partnership and succession achievement.

Oats are one of my ultimate comfort foods. Golden, creamy, filling, tasty – what is there not to love? It’s been that way for me for a long time. Long before I realised that huge swathes of my English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish ancestors subsisted on oats, sometimes eating them three times a day for many generations.

Before we read the books that our guest today, Chris Smaje, wrote, we knew we didn’t want a world where fake food, food manufactured in factories was what we ate as a society. We didn’t believe that protein made in stainless steel vats could give our minds, bodies, souls and communities what they need to survive and thrive. But what we didn’t know, is that manufactured protein, fake food or precision fermentation, however you want to term it, literally will not work.

If you’re bringing raw milk into your home, whether it is through a herd share, shopping from a local raw dairy or co-op, or you have a cow on the back pasture, it is inevitable that we start wanting to value-add that milk; both adding nutritional value to it by culturing it in our homes, and adding monetary value by making raw milk into what would be higher priced items from the store. In this episode Robyn who is the creator over at Cheese From Scratch on Instagram is here to teach us about creating your own cheese starter on the counter at home, and producing naturally fermented cheese in your own kitchen.

“I just can’t afford to eat ancestrally” is something that we hear all the time. And we get that, the mainstream, shop-bought side of ancestral eating can sometimes be eye-wateringly expensive. Notwithstanding that we’ve both been eating this way on a very tight budget for over a decade each. We’re going to show you that it is possible!

In a post-industrial world where globally imported subsidized factory food is perceived as the cheaper or only option for a budget, these are questions most of us have had at some point. In this episode Alison and I want to make the case that not only are there ways to eat an ancestral diet and save money, but you can actually save money BY eating an ancestral diet.

Just like the Ancestral Diet is so different from the standard American diet, so the ways our ancestors birthed bears very little relation to how modern industrialised communities bring the next generation into the world. In this intimate episode, originally recorded for patrons of the podcast, Andrea and I share our birthing stories.

Better Broths and Healing Tonics is a book that blew us away when we found it earlier this year. It is so thorough, so accessible and so creative – sharing many ways to make broths, and make them easy, plus incredible healing recipes for broth tonics, infusions, blends and meals. In this episode, Andrea interviews half of the pair that created the book, Jill Sheppard Davenport.

Every once in a while Rob comes out from behind the tangle of wires and sits down on the other side of the podcast microphone and records an epic episode with Alison. This is one of those episodes. It is awesome and their dry British humor is the best.

Putting food into jars: is it really hard? Is it complicated? Am I going to make my family sick? Does it taste better, am I going to save money, or both? What is the point? All this and a lot more is covered in this episode.

Rebecca Holden looks after a large organic dairy herd in Wales in the United Kingdom and makes raw, cheddar-style cheese from their milk. What made us want to bring Rebecca to you is an article she wrote for the farm’s blog which she called ‘Part of the Herd’ where she talks about the farm being an interconnected community and how she herself communicates with the cows and has become part of the herd.

Today’s episode is dedicated to covering the wide world of fermented drinks – all accessible to you, makeable in your own kitchen, right now. We talk about over 20 different fermented drinks, including scoby ferments, whey ferments, grain ferments, wild ferments and we tell you how you can incorporate these super-health-giving, delicious foods into your life.

We have a special bonus for today! Alison reads the article she recently had published in the Weston A. Price journal Wise Traditions: So Much More Than Porridge: The Rich Culinary History of British Oats Recipe for Traditional Scottish Oatcakes here Recipe for Naturally-Fermented Staffordshire Oatcakes here If you’d like to have a go at…

Have you ever thought the GAPS protocol might be for you? Are you considering trying it, or you’ve just heard about it and wonder how it fits into a healing journey? Are you struggling to bring grains into your diet without digestive issues, or wondering what you can do to replenish a gut system damaged by antibiotics? This is the episode for you.