Food Chain Radio Podcast with Michael Olson

Various Participants World Ag Expo, Tulare, California  How do they provide us with all our food?  We all get our food from grocery stores, and we all take that food for granted – even the “fresh” tomatoes we eat in the middle of winter!  It’s time we take a serendipitous stroll through agriculture, via the World Ag Expo in Tulare, California, to meet the people who provide us with the food we tak...

Jack & Sarah Kimmich, Farmers / Owners, California Kurobuta Pasture Raised Pork http://californiakurobuta.com/ Follow along:  If one is curious about what one is becoming, one then should be curious about what the food one eats, eats as well.   Now if one is eating a carrot from one’s garden, its pretty easy to know what that carrot ate, because one fed that carrot by feeding the soil in which...

Cynthia Sandberg, Farmer, Entrepreneur & Teacher,  Love Apple Farm It was a soggy wet winter, that broke a bone-dry years-long drought, that capped off three dreary years of pandemic.   But Spring did arrive, and with it the hope of new life bursting forth out of the soil with great shouts of joy.  “Hallelujah! We are alive!”  And we are alive, too!  So we head out into the garden and pull bac...

Andy Dyer, Professor of Biology, University of South Carolina,  Author, Eaters’ Digest   Does our microbiome have a vote on how we live our lives? It is not just us that needs to be fed.  It’s also them– the 100 trillion microorganisms that live on and in our body.  Wow!  That is a population 10,000 times greater than all the people on earth, give or take!   But as the 100 trillion microorganisms...

Various Participants World Ag Expo, Tulare, California   How do they grow our food?  Given the extent to which we take food for granted, and how far we have removed ourselves from the source of food, and how much we pay for cheap food, we think it wise to pause and ask those at the source:   How do you grow our food?  Welcome to Part IV of our “Serendipitous Stroll” through the world of agricultur...

A Serendipitous Stroll Into Agriculture III Various Participants World Ag Expo, Tulare, California   How do they make our food appear?  As if by some kind of magic, our grocery stores get filled with food in the middle of the night, while we are sleeping!   It happens every night, and every morning there is food to eat!   That food is always there in the morning we take for granted­– even the fres...

The World Ag Expo Tulare, CA We all get our food from grocery stores, and we all take that food for granted– even those fresh tomatoes we eat in the middle of winter!  It’s time to meet the people who provide us with the food we take for granted, and ask: How do you provide us with all our food? Welcome to our “Serendipitous Stroll” through the world of agriculture at the World Ag Expo in Tulare,...

What is not eating what this year is we-the-people eating king salmon.    The kings, which are also called “chinooks” by those in the know, are those salmon that are hatched in the rivers and streams of California and Oregon, and which, when of age, migrate down the rivers into the Pacific Ocean where they spend their working lives.  Then, when its time, they migrate back up the rain-swollen river...

Sally Fallon Morell, Founding President, Weston A. Price Foundation I tell this story often, because the telling feels so happy.    Some time back I had the opportunity to attend a Weston A Price Foundation convention.  What I saw there was one of the most hopeful things I have ever seen in my travels up and down the food chain.  Everywhere I looked in that big convention hall, there were babies h...

Blake & Stephanie Alexandre, Alexandre Family Farms, Crescent City, CA  Can the cow help save the earth?  My attention was recently directed to an environmental organization in Texas  that was helping farmers transition their farms from raising cows to raising plants.  Other than the fact that the organizers were working over farms in Texas, their effort seemed to be in keeping with the times,...

Mark Shatzker, Author, The Dorito Effect & The End of Cravings Have we become the food for our food? If you were to watch back to back videos of crowded street scenes, one from just about any city in China, and one from just about any city in America, you would see two different populations of people. The population on the streets of China would appear slender, while the population on the stre...

Dr. Julia Skinner, Author, Our Fermented History & Founder of Root, A Fermented Company How did fermentation help we-the-people survive and prosper? 10,000 years after brewing up our first batch of beer, we are only now coming to realize how thoroughly those little bubble-making bacteria have infused themselves into our lives. In fact, we can now look at ourselves in the mirror and say good mo...

Dr. Omanjana Goswami, Interdisciplinary Scientist, Food and Environment Program, Union of Concerned Scientists Will there be enough fertilizer to feed our future? We are living in a world at war.  The world’s major powers are now standing in opposition to each other’s interests, and doing so with all the armaments of political and military warfare. Though the hellfire of this war has not yet...

Lee Ann Pearce, Senior Vice President and Manager, Food and Agribusiness Industry Advisors Group, Wells Fargo Bank &Karol Aure-Flynn, Vice President, Food & Agribusiness Industry Sector Analyst, Wells Fargo Bank Where is the money to grow our food?' It takes time, money and know-how to farm our food. When most everyone lived on a farm, farmers grew crops by using a lot of time and know-how...

Amanda Starbuck, Research Director, Food & Water Watch Will we be made to eat the elite's guilt-free meat? Franz Kafka, author of The Trial, once said, “My guiding principle is this: Guilt is never to be doubted.” There are a lot of ways to make people feel guilty, and so most of us go through life being guilty about something. What if our guilt could be used to make us to do something we woul...

Andy Dyer, Professor of Biology, University of South Carolina & Author of Eaters’ Digest Does our microbiome get to vote on us? It is not just us that needs to be fed.  It’s also them– the 100 trillion microorganisms that live on and in our body.  Wow!  That is a population 10,000 times greater than all the people on earth, give or take! But as the 100 trillion microorganisms th...

Survival Food: Buy or Build? Brooke Whipple, Host, The Girl in the Woods What goes around, does come around.  That being the case, it’s time to reconsider the motto of the Boy Scouts: “Be prepared!” Why be prepared?  For one reason, President Joe Biden warned that the sanctions placed on Russia for its invasion of the Ukraine will result in food shortages.  The President said, “It’s...

Gretchen DuBeau, Executive and Legal Director, Alliance for Natural Health Do they not want our food to be our medicine? Hippocrates is said to have said, “Let food be thy medicine and medicine by thy food.” In 1994, those who believed food should be medicine, and medicine should be food, gathered in Washington, DC, to fight back an effort by the pharmaceutical industry to register food supplement...

Christine McDaniel  /  Senior Research Fellow, Mercatus Center George Mason University & Fellow Clayton Yeutter Institute of International Trade at the University of Nebraska The United States appears to be getting into a food fight with Mexico… over corn! Regulators in Mexico are moving to ban genetically re-engineered corn for human consumption.  This ban would protect Mexican...

Dane Wigington, Lead Researcher, Geo Engineering Watch Is weird weather a consequence of nature or nurture? It used to be that our reservoirs out West held water, but if you were to look around, you would see that now they mostly hold air. At least, that is what I saw on a recent road trip up I-5 through California’s Central Valley into Oregon, which took me past the great Shasta reservoir that fe...

Yeyen Gunawan, Founder, Drink La Vie Where can one find food that lives? Consider Michael Olson’s Second Law of the Food Chain:  The farther we go from the source of our food, the less control we have over our food. There was a time­– not too long ago– that most of our food came from right here on the farm.  But then we moved into town and now our food comes from someplace else.  An...

Zen Honneycutt, Founder & Executive Director of Moms Across America, Author of Author of Unstoppable Are school lunches destroying our nation’s future? School meals are the only meals many of the nation’s children get to eat. As those meals are purchased, prepared and presented by institutions, they are most likely made up of the least expensive ingredients, including genetically modified corn...