Our bodies are a walking ecosystem that we share with trillions of microbes. While the majority of these microbes are native and beneficial, you might be surprised to learn that many of us are harboring parasites that can be the root cause of symptoms like chronic fatigue, brain fog, depression and more. Evan Brand is here to share the truth about parasites, how to test for them and how we can restore the ecology of our human animal. Evan is an Author, Podcast Host and a Louisville, Kentucky-based Board-Certified Holistic Nutritionist, Certified Functional Medicine Practitioner and Nutritional Therapist. He is passionate about healing the chronic fatigue, obesity, and depression epidemics after solving his own IBS and depression issues. He uses at-home lab testing and customized supplement programs to find and fix the root cause of a wide range of health symptoms.
In this interview, Evan and I discuss how to take a conscientious approach to many of the obstacles to robust health we face in our modern times. Our conversation leads us down many pathways — from glyphosate exposure to parasites to caffeine and stress response to mitigating the effects of EMF. Get out your notebooks for this one, folks, as Evan shares countless resources with us for our own personal investigation!
Today’s show explores terroir — the flavor of place. Discovering the wild flavors of your local bioregion is a smart and ecologically interactive way to intimately engage with your place and add context to the story of your food. Pascal Baudar — wild food researcher and a self-styled “culinary alchemist” — joins us to share his unique and inspiring niche in the wild food world: wildcrafted terroir.
Based in southern California with access to many different ecosystems (mountain, desert, chaparral, and seashore) and 700+ different wildcrafted ingredients, Pascal is a brazen wild food experimenter who combines his knowledge of plants and his local landscape with the innovative techniques of a master food preserver and chef. Pascal was named one of the 25 most influential tastemakers in L.A. by Los Angeles magazine, and his locally sourced wild ingredients and unique preserves have made their way into the kitchens of such star chefs as Ludo Lefebvre, Josiah Citrin, Ari Taymor, Michael Voltaggio, Chris Jacobson and Niki Nakayama. He is the author of The New Wildcrafted Cuisine, an incredible book of culinary concepts and ideas featuring recipes and preservation techniques using a local terroir.
Pascal is here to change how we think about wild food. He invites us to experiment with the wild ingredients in our own local bioregion and shares some examples of how he creatively crafts wild cuisine from the landscape he calls home. You’ll hear the wide variety of uses for wild sage, how he makes his own salt and how he uses insects in his wild ferments. Pascal’s work is rooted in love of place, and I hope he inspires you to infuse more local wild terroir into your own wild food plate.
Water — our most vital resource — is a topic that is quite often on our minds. There are the global water issues such as the fact that 783 million people do not have access to fresh water, droughts throughout our planet are becoming more wide-spread and the biodiversity of our oceans is declining at an alarming rate. There are the issues closer to home, like (for us in the United States) the droughts in California and the recent water crisis in Michigan caused by contaminated municipal water, potentially exposing over 100,000 residents in the city of Flint, MI to high levels of lead in their drinking water. And then there are the more personal water issues, such as considerations over what’s the best, most healthful water for us to drink and how much water is ideal for one to consume in a day.
Our relationship with water has profoundly impacted our history, and Brian Fagan — archaeologist, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology and prolific author — is here to share key pieces of our shared history with water and how we can reflect on this history to help solve water crises of the future. Brian was born in England, was educated at Cambridge University (BA (Honors), MA, and PhD) and worked in Central Africa as an archaeologist and museum curator before coming to the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1967. He is the author of numerous articles and general books on archaeology, ancient climate change, and most recently histories of water, ancient seafaring, and the changing relationship between humans and animals. Brian is regarded as one of the world’s leading archaeological writers and lectures about the past, especially ancient climate change, all over the world.
In this interview, Brian artfully weaves together the history of water and humankind. We discuss the timeline of water issues and cover some of the most prevalent water issues plaguing our planet at this time, as well as Brian’s predictions for what we can expect in the future. This interview is not a doomsday report, as Brian’s message is a wake-up call for our species that is filled with hope for our planet and Homo sapiens (the wise ones) and our ingenuity and adaptability. It is a call to regain the reverence for water that our ancestors possessed!
"How you live is how you die," Dr. Scott Eberle — a physician specializing in end-of-life care — tells us in today's interview. Having spent many years at the bedside of the dying, Scott has learned some important lessons from those participating in their final rite of passage, and he's here to impart a bit of that wisdom with us today, inspiring us to live and die more consciously.
Dr. Scott Eberle is a medical director of Hospice of Petaluma in Petaluma, California, as well as an experienced teacher and author, and a wilderness guide. Together with Meredith Little of the School of Lost Borders, he co-created “The Practice of Living and Dying,” an innovative wilderness curriculum exploring the human experience of being a mortal animal.
In this interview, we explore the practice of living and dying and what it means to be a mortal animal. Consciously approaching life and death calls for us to "confront the difficult questions" and "have the difficult conversations" right now, and Scott shares how he has integrated these practices into his own life. We discuss Scott's experiences working in hospice, thoughts on death acceptance, the common regrets of the dying and much more. If you’re a mortal animal, you’ll want to hear this conversation!
What a pleasure it was to speak with lifelong forager and pioneer in sustainable commercial wild food and mushroom foraging, Connie Green. Connie founded one of the very first and largest wild food businesses in the U.S., Wine Forest, where she still resides as “head huntress,” overseeing a beautifully rich and diverse selection of wild foods furnished to top chefs, restaurants, retailers and consumers. Friends of the forest, Connie and her team believe that wild food harvesting goes hand in hand with a love and respect for the ecosystems where these delectable wild edibles grow.
In this episode, Connie takes us back in time through the landscape of foraging over the past few decades and shares how she got her start in the commercial foraging business. She illuminates the commercial side of the foraging world with a focus on what she considers to be the secret ingredient in bridging the ancestral practice of hunting and gathering with modern gourmet cooking: sustainability and ethical harvesting practices.
We also explore some tactical “in the field” topics, such as Connie’s indispensable foraging equipment and her recommendations for how to get started foraging. Tune in and be inspired — or re-inspired — to participate in your local ecology by hunting and gathering from your landscape!