Enlightened Omnivore Podcast

Hello fellow Enlightened Omnivores, Last Friday, Nicki Sizemore and I hosted the second installment of The Seasonal Table, our quarterly Substack Live series exploring what each season means in the kitchen, at the table, and in our daily lives. You can watch the full replay above. This season’s conversation centered on summer and the approaching solstice. We talked about why seasonal transitions m...

Had an absolute blast this weekend talking weird food, hot dogs, Jell-O salads, presidential eating habits, duck pâté, giant wheels of White House cheese, White house ragers, and what’s hiding in our refrigerators with my friend Bennett Rea of Cookin’ with Congress. Bennett has built one of the most fascinating food history projects online — recreating the meals of presidents, politicians, and eve...

This is the final episode of The Enlightened Omnivore Podcast — Season Two. I’m taking a short break, but I’ll be back later this year with Season Three. In the meantime, there are more than 25 episodes waiting for you wherever you listen—so if you’ve been enjoying the show, please follow, subscribe, and leave a quick review wherever you download your podcasts. It would truly mean a lot. Now, the...

I keep hearing this phrase: clean alcohol. It shows up in product descriptions, social captions, and I hear it from the soccer moms as I wait in line for my decaf Americano. I wasn’t even sure what people meant by it. Was it a health claim? A vibe? Just a marketing buzzword? So I brought the question to someone who lives right at the center of that conversation: Jennie Ripps , founder and CEO of O...

In this episode of Enlightened Omnivore , I sit back down with my good friend and butcher doppelganger, Heather Thomason. The first few minutes with Heather are always the same: a quick audio check, a little screen glare, the shared relief that yes—this sounds good, we’re here. Then the real catch-up begins. Heather’s been on the podcast a few times now, and each time feels like a different chapte...

This week on the Enlightened Omnivore Podcast , I sit down with Jack Bobo of the Rothman Family Institute for Food Studies at UCLA to tackle one of the most polarizing questions in modern food culture: Can agriculture actually be part of the climate solution—or are we arguing ourselves into a corner? We start with regenerative agriculture, but the conversation quickly zooms out to something bigger...

This week on Enlightened Omnivore , I sit down with Shannon Ninburg , an artist and salmon educator whose work lives right at the intersection of ecology, attention, and awe. If you’ve ever watched a salmon run, really watched it, you know it’s not just a biology lesson. It’s a story about endurance, memory, return… and the strange beauty of an ending that becomes a beginning all over again. Shann...

This week on Enlightened Omnivore , I sit down with Nurit Katz , the Chief Sustainability Officer of the University of California, Los Angeles , for a conversation that stretched far beyond campus boundaries. UCLA isn’t just a university. On any given day, it functions like a small city, serving nearly 90,000 people. It has its own power systems, water demands, food operations, transportation netw...

There’s a specific moment that happens in a lot of homes—usually somewhere around 5:30 p.m.—when the day collapses into the kitchen. You walk in carrying all the half-finished thoughts of the day. Someone needs help with something. Someone is hungry. You’re hungry. And even if you love cooking, there’s that split second where dinner stops feeling like nourishment and starts feeling like one more d...

Alright—this week’s episode might be outside your comfort zone. But I encourage you to lean in. My guest is Maria Rodale : writer, publisher, gardener, and lifelong explorer of humanity’s relationship with nature. Maria comes from organic agriculture royalty. Her grandfather popularized the term “Organics,” in the 1940s, and her father launched one of the longest-running side-by-side studies compa...

Alright—this week’s episode is a fun one. Peter Giuliano is the Executive Director of the Coffee Science Foundation, and he’s one of those rare people who can talk about coffee in a way that makes you more curious, not more intimidated. He’s been in coffee since he was 18 (barista to shop owner to roaster to buyer to industry leader), but he’s also a serious food-history nerd—and the writer behind...

I can’t think of a better sound than when a cork comes out of a bottle of wine. It signals the start of a meal, a laughter-filled conversation with friends, a romantic evening with your special someone. My favorite literary influences loved their wine. Mark Twain had a hankering for champagne. Hemingway drank anything in a glass, but called wine the “most civilized thing in the world.” Jim Harriso...

This week on the Enlightened Omnivore podcast , I finally tracked down a guest I’ve been trying to land for months. Pascal Baudar wears a lot of hats: forager, brewer, ceramicist, photographer, survivalist. He’s one of those people who has spent much of his life examining and interacting with the natural world at ground level, sometimes on his hands and knees. He spends most of his time in the hil...

This week’s Enlightened Omnivore Podcast may be the most quietly powerful conversation I’ve had all year. I didn’t want to stop chatting with forest therapy guide, Sarah Abu-Absi about the healing power of nature. And I don’t think you’ll want to stop listening. Sarah wasn’t always a self-proclaimed “tree hugger.” She spent more than a decade working in a high-stress job for the City of Chicago—fa...

This week on the Enlightened Omnivore Podcast, I chat with someone who has not only reported on, but also shaped Southern California’s food scene. Cynthia Rebolledo is an independent journalist whose work has appeared in OC Weekly, KCET, KCRW, LAist, and a number of other influential publications that define what we think of as SoCal food culture. If you’ve wondered where the best taco is in Boyle...

On this week’s episode of the Enlightened Omnivore Podcast, I sit down with my friend Belinda Lau, founder of Elims, a woman-owned sustainable oral care company that’s rethinking both what we put in our mouths and what we toss into our landfills. When I think about sustainability, I tend to think big: system-wide changes, massive infrastructure shifts, moonshot technologies. The kind of megawatt s...

If you missed this week’s Substack Live with my new friend Nicki Sizemore of Mind, Body, Spirit, FOOD , the video above is worth a watch. We covered nearly every Thanksgiving question imaginable—from brining and carving to appetizers, crispy turkey skin, freezing green beans, and our favorite sides. Nicki walked everyone through her foolproof gluten-free pie crust, and I demoed the holiday stuffin...

The new episode of Enlightened Omnivore ventures into the wild with Hank Shaw — James Beard Award–winning author, chef, hunter, and one of the more thoughtful voices on eating from the land. Hank’s life defies neat categories: he started out as a sous chef at an Ethiopian restaurant, spent two decades in journalism (including a stint as political bureau chief in California’s Central Valley), and e...

The new season of Enlightened Omnivore opens with my friend and mentor, Michael Puglisi. Michael has worn a lot of hats, airplane de-icer, chef, butcher, and founder of Electric City Butcher, the Orange County shop that became a shrine to craft butchery, and a community hub for responsible agriculture. It was also where I learned almost everything I know about butchery. In our conversation, Michae...

In a world where most people follow predictable career paths, Mark Keller, Director of Operations & Product at Cream Co. Meats , chose to leap from the glamorous runways of international fashion into the muddy boots of regenerative agriculture. His story, shared in the latest episode of the Enlightened Omnivore Podcast, reveals not just an unconventional career change, but a deeply spiritual journ...

Just an hour north of San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge, nestled in the coastal hills of Marin County, fourth-generation rancher Loren Poncia has been making a name for California grass-finished beef. In this week's episode, I reconnect with Loren for the first time since closing Electric City Butcher to explore how Stemple Creek Ranch has evolved in an ever-changing food landscape. Our conversat...

This week, I had the pleasure of reconnecting with my friend Heather Marold Thomason , food system extraordinaire, and author of the popular HUNGRY HEART on Substack. We got to catch up on the next chapter in her fascinating journey since closing the Philadelphia neighborhood butcher shop, Primal Supply. So much has changed in her life, and her insights couldn't be more timely for the the current...

In this week's Enlightened Omnivore podcast, I take you deep into the undergrowth of Southern California's mushroom scene—and discover a perspective on nature that might just transform how you interact with the world around you. On the surface, my conversation with self-proclaimed “mushroom whisperer,” Brando Farr, covers the essential do's and don'ts of mushroom hunting for beginners eager to ven...

This month's episode of The Enlightened Omnivore Podcast puts me in an unfamiliar position - the guest chair. My friend and previous guest, chicken guru Tyler Dawley of Big Bluff Ranch , takes over hosting duties, turning the microphone around on me to explore my own journey with food, farming, and family. It felt a little vulnerable sharing my story, but once I got the hang of it, Tyler couldn’t...

We call it processing, we call it harvesting, we call it slaughter, some just call it kill. Between the pastoral scenes of cattle grazing in green fields, and those perfectly wrapped packages in your grocery store lies a mysterious world behind windowless walls - the slaughterhouse. I think this week’s podcast is my most investigative and fascinating yet, as I try to unlock some of the sterile and...