From Food Critic to Regenerative Farmer: Rethinking What We Eat with Matthew Evans

SHOW NOTES

🌐 𝗪𝗲𝗯𝘀𝗶𝘁𝗲: 

• https://groundedaustralia.com.au
• Official/primary presence:
  • SBS Food (host profile & TV work)
• Associated property/business:
  • Fat Pig Farm (Tasmania) – his farm and food project (no official direct site confirmed in sources, but widely referenced as his base of operations)

📧 Email Address

• tastejunkie@iinet.net.au
• matthew@groundedaustralia.com.au

📱 Social Media Accounts

• Instagram: commonly associated with Fat Pig Farm / Gourmet Farmer content
• Facebook: pages linked to Gourmet Farmer / SBS Food

📗𝗕𝗼𝗼𝗸

He has written 10+ books on food, farming, and ethics. Key titles include:

     Major works

• On Eating Meat – ethics of meat consumption
• The Dirty Chef – transition from critic to farmer
• The Real Food Companion – comprehensive cooking guide

🏢 Organizations / Affiliations

• SBS Food – TV collaborations
• Fat Pig Farm – his farm, restaurant, and education space in Tasmania
• Works with food festivals, markets, and ethical food advocacy initiatives

00:00 Intro & guest background

01:30 Journey from food critic to farmer

04:40 Industrial fishing & seafood truths

07:30 Farmed fish and antibiotics

12:30 What “better meat” means

15:50 Nutrition & food quality differences

17:30 Soil crisis explained

25:40 Regenerative agriculture

30:00 Dairy myths & plant-based debate

37:00 Ultra-processed foods

43:00 Raw milk discussion

43:30 Grounded Festival

47:40 Practical consumer advice

From Food Critic to Regenerative Farmer: Rethinking What We Eat with Matthew Evans

Dr Ron Ehrlich (00:05)

Hello and welcome to Unstress Health. My name is Dr. Ron Ehrlich.

Well, today we are covering many, many topics with someone whose work I have followed thoroughly enjoyed for over 10 years. My guest today is Matthew Evans. Now Matthew has worn many hats. In fact, many more hats than most. He’s a food critic, used to be the Sydney Morning Herald food critic. He’s been a chef. He’s an author. He’s a documentary maker and now a regenerative farmer. 

And I would add also the organizer of a festival, I’ll tell you about in a moment. Now, Matthew traded restaurant reviews for raising pigs and growing food on fat pig farm in Tasmania in the Huon Valley. I visited him there about five or six years ago. And along the way, he’s written books and hosted documentaries on many subjects, including soil, milk, seafood, meat, and all of which challenged how we think about what we eat. He’s also the co-founder of the grounded festival.

Australia’s only roaming food and farming festival, which arrives in Victoria in April this year, late April. So we’ll have links to that in the show notes. So I hope you enjoy this conversation I had with Matthew Evans. Welcome to the show, Matthew.

Matthew Evans (01:23)

Thanks for having me, Ron.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (01:24)

Matthew, I have been following your career for many, years and been a great fan. So this is great. I’ve been looking forward to this opportunity. You went from being one of Australia’s top food critics, regenerative farmer in Tasmania, where I’m talking to you from today. What triggered that shift?

Matthew Evans (01:46)

Uh, gluttony. Really, Ron? I relate to that. Yeah. Yeah. I’m, you know, I, I’m afraid to say that a lot of my life choices have been very much in self-interest, and I have always, since I was a kid, I wanted to eat, I wanted to eat more originally because I was really hungry. And then I want to eat better. When I realized there was a difference between good food and bad food, was like, Oh, I want to, I want to eat better food. And then so I became a restaurant critic cause you know, I found someone who could pay me to go and eat in restaurants and I thought I was eating the best food in Australia and sometimes the best food in the world. 

You know, cause Australian chefs are pretty talented people and,  and I did travel the world and got to, to, you know, sometimes on someone else’s dime. But then I guess what happened was I started tasting food that was even better than these fancy restaurants and it was home gardeners was people, you know, it was farmers who really cared about soil and I ended up going, actually really good food comes from somewhere doesn’t just sort of, it isn’t like, every carrot is the same. 

And there are, there’s a person in the, in, this, in this mix and it’s the farmer or the person who smokes you bacon or the person who, you know, makes the cheese or whatever it might be. That person, once you put them in the mix, actually, when you’re eating and getting joy, you’re actually tasting the fruits of their labor. You’re, you’re getting an impression of you know, of their soul. and so I was like, wow. 

You know, growing food, you can actually grow really good food and do it, you know, like you can actually have an impact on flavor. I’d love to grow my own food. And I’d always had a dream of having a farm. probably like a lot of people like naive, ridiculous, I just like to have a farm, you know, no idea, ⁓ how much money you can spend farming. and,

And just did it lept in had moved to Tasmania went, I can book, you know, I was looking at buying a little house with a veggie garden. I went, I can buy a little farmhouse with a veggie garden and enough space for two pigs and three sheep and you know, a dairy cow. Well, there wasn’t really enough space for them, but then, you know, the two pigs became 10 and the three sheep had twins. So they became nine and the dairy cow had a calf. And, ⁓ so I sort of outgrew my farm, but,  but I fell in love with growing food, you know, having a garden, having access to really good food. ⁓ So I became a bit of an accidental farmer, really.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (04:10)

Well, I’ve been down to that farm, the fat pig farm down in Tasmania and it is a wonderful, it was a great experience and we had a great meal down there as well. listen, you’ve done a lot of the specials and you’ve written a lot of books and I wanted to touch on a couple of them. Cause I know fish is something that people are always recommended. 

You know, it’s a top of lots of seafood and yet you did a documentary to what’s the catch and it exposed some uncomfortable truths about seafood on our plates in Australia. What was the finding that stayed with you most of all?

Matthew Evans (04:49)

Wow. You’ve got a good memory. What’s the catch? be 10 years ago now. Yeah. Okay. 12 years ago. ⁓ What stayed with me the most? There’s a few bits and pieces. I went out, I think the worst was going out on a fishing trawler in Thailand. And these were fishing boats that were fishing close into shore, which was against the law. you know, they obviously didn’t have the resources to police the boats. And we’re out on this boat and the size of the net, I couldn’t get my

Dr Ron Ehrlich (04:52)

2014 I think.

Matthew Evans (05:18)

My little finger through the holes in the net. So you can imagine everything that’s bigger than the diameter of my little finger was caught in the net. And the nets went, they had mud in them, so they’d been scraping the bottom, but they were also in the top of the water column. So they were catching everything from jellyfish to tiny little crabs and everything in the net was kept. And then they would sort through it and about 1%, maybe 5 % of what they caught, they could sell as seafood and the rest. Went to these massive factories which we went to visit where they turn all of that, they call it trash fish. What a terrible name, trash fish, the abundance, the bounty of the oceans. They took everything else that wasn’t a decent size fish that you could fill it or sell and they turned it into a pelletized prawn food. And then we went to the prawn farms and saw them feeding the prawns that would end up in Australian buffets and in Australian supermarkets.

And I was mortified because it was ecological destruction. was, you know, the people who were running it were, know, some of the people on the boats were in semi-slavery. You know, was this indentured labor where they put them into poverty and into debt. And they never quite pay their debt back. So they’re sort of like stuck on the boats for years. it’s a form of modern slavery. And then the company that was making the prawn food and.

And talking about how we can’t really catch many fish anymore. There’s hardly any fish compared to 10 years ago. And said, what are you going to do? You know, she said, don’t worry. We’re getting into palm oil, you know, and being around that kind of like, my God, this industry is like sort of bad on every level from the personal to the ecological from the, you know, from the local to the global. And we are party to that when we go out and buy seafood. So I think that’s stuck with me the most.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (07:08)

I remember being down in Tasmania and visiting an oyster farm and one of the oyster farmers there had worked at a fish farm, which uses a lot of that by kill. think it’s called, uh, that, that for fish food. Um, I mean, it’s, uh, he made the point that he wouldn’t really like to be eating the fish from that, from that fish farm. What’s your view of farm fish?

Matthew Evans (07:35)

Oh, I actually think farmed fish, it’s a bit like, um, you can think of it as a comparable to land. So we don’t really eat wild animals very much. Uh, and there’s not enough wild animals to sort of feed humanity, the, you know, 8 billion people or whatever they’re on the planet today, um, and get sort of protein. So what we’ve chosen to do is choose some species and breed them and domesticate them. I think the problem with farmed fish is not farming fish. It’s how it’s done. So I live just near the salmon pens. went, I went for a swim last week and,

And I suddenly realized, like I live so close to the salmon pens that they’ve now found the antibiotic that they’re sort of dumping into the pens to stop a disease that happens when you have overcrowded pens and warming waters. That antibiotic has been found in oysters and shellfish. It’s been found 10 kilometers from the salmon pens. And so I’m like suddenly closing my mouth, making sure, don’t, you know, like, ⁓ hang on. I’m like, I’m dripping with this water that’s probably got antibiotic in it. And I’m like, that’s…

That’s a sign, antibiotic is a sign of if you’re just feeding it to every fish in a pen, that’s a sign of bad management. Like antibiotics, like if you imagine ass, if we are healthy and we looked after, then you know, it’s only when we’re sick that we need an antibiotic. If something goes wrong, something’s in the wrong place or it’s taking over, doing the wrong thing, we might take an antibiotic and I, you know, even humans to try to avoid them when we can, but they’re amazing, amazing products. But would you feed, feed anybody to everybody? 

You know, in your city or in your town or, know, even if they’re not sick, well, no, because that’s a dumb idea. And if you had to do that, if you were doing that, would probably show that your living conditions are not very good. You haven’t looked after hygiene from the other end. You haven’t, you know, given yourself the best chance at immunity. haven’t, you know, given yourself enough distance or space or fresh air or whatever it is. And so it’s the same with the salmon pens. 

They have to feed them antibiotic because they aren’t farming in a manner that looks after fish health. And then what they feed them, know, apparently is more chicken fat in a salmon than there is in a chicken, you know, because they feed them chicken fat and they feed them blood and bone and they feed them crushed up ⁓ feather meal and bone meal from chickens because they’re waste products. And I love the idea of using a waste product, but I’m not sure that I want to eat salmon that’s been fed blood and bone and chicken fat and, you know, soybeans and…

You know, a coloring agent and everything else, as well as antibiotics. Before I get it, I think that farming is, it seems to be done in a way that suggests it’s not going to be able to be done very far into the future. And I don’t, it’s done in a way that I don’t think is actually making a very healthy product for us to eat.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (10:12)

Yeah, I’m reminded of a mentor of mine, a hero in fact, I’m sure you know, Alan Savory, who said, don’t blame the resource, blame the way the resource is managed. And I think that kind of highlights it. I had heard that in Japan, there are alternative ways of farming that are looking a little more promising. I don’t know whether you’re familiar with

Matthew Evans (10:36)

Yeah. look, there’s ways of doing not just salmon, but also other fish. mean, salmon, problem with salmon is it’s carnivorous. It’s a pretty energetic fish. needed quite a lot of food to get a salmon. So it used to be four or five kilos of wild fish would go into a salmon to get a kilo of salmon. They’ve dropped that right down. It’s less than two kilos of wild fish to create a kilo of salmon. But what they made up the difference with, because these are energetic fish, they’re burning lots of ⁓ fuel and they need lots of food.

That’s where they’re making it up with soybeans and blood and bone and all these other sorts of things that, know, really salmon aren’t probably designed to eat. They would say they’re breaking them down into component parts and they’re designed to eat protein and they’re designed to eat calcium, whatever. you know, I would, doesn’t, you wouldn’t say similar things about land animals. You know, you’re not going to, you know, a cow is designed to eat grass. So you don’t just break it down into component parts and say, well, you know, blood and bone is a component part you know, protein is in grass. know, that’s not, that’s not what we do with, with, those animals. 

And I don’t think so. So to answer your question about like, actually like farmed fishes as a concept and they’ve been farming fish in parts of China for 3000, 4,000 years. You know, it’s not unusual and they’ve been able to do it in a way that, you know, didn’t poison waterways and kept, obviously kept the fish healthy well before they had antibiotics and all these other sort of, you know, people with chemistry sets coming in.

Are we doing it that way commercially in Australia today? Well, I don’t think that we are with salmon. I think we’re doing it. It’s built down to a price, not up to a standard. I think like all of these things, always think we can do humans out our approach. will be, how can we do things better? And are they looking at how to do things better? No, I think they’re looking at how to do things cheaper.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (12:26)

I love that Matthew down to a price, not up to a standard. that’s a good one. Listen, public health message that we’re getting a lot is the demonization of meat. And here’s another one that you, did a program. think it was called, for the love of meat. ⁓ but you also have written about this. what does better meat actually mean when it comes to meet the meat that we eat?

Matthew Evans (12:55)

Yeah, well, I think that’s a two pronged, well, it’s a three pronged thing. so for me as a farmer, think of landscapes and are we looking after the land better? then I think a lot of people think about the animal as the animal expressing its instincts is a pig able to express its pigness and then to live a good or decent life. Because if we’re going to eat an animal, we know it has to die. But it’s not the death in that case that you obviously want a quick death and painless death. 

But it’s the life of the animal that a lot of people would would consider. And then I also think it’s what’s in that meat. we are what we eat eats, I guess. so that, in the case of salmon, if you’re feeding them, you know, sort of rubbish stuff, then you’re getting that when you eat the salmon. In the case of livestock, we know that, you know, ruminants like cows, sheep and goats, they’re designed to eat living plants and have a mixture of stuff in their diet. 

And we know that the meat from those animals that are fed a mixed diet has way more of the good things in it that are better for our bodies and we’re more adapted and better able to use. So when you grain feed those kinds of animals, you end up with meat that is lesser. So it’s not necessarily, it can have some stuff that’s not as good for you, but it’s certainly not doesn’t have any of the things that are really good for you. 

There’s this great study out of New Zealand, I call it the One Hamburger Patty Study, where they took cattle, these were Angus cows, and they fed them, one of them on a very simple diet of just grass and clover and another one on a mixed diet, but they got to eat essentially like, you know, at a buffet, they got to go and try lots of different things over their life. they minced the, well, they killed them first, they minced those cows up and they took the meat and they fed them to, it was 40 people or something like that.

And then they measured, so they’ve measured what’s in the grass, what’s in the, in the meat, different, um, uh, biological compounds that they believed have, um, a nutritional effect. And then they, uh, looked at the humans who ate those and said, does this have any impact on you? So we’ve, we’ve, you know, we’ve, we’ve changed a bit of the diet. We’ve changed and they could measure that they changed a bit of stuff in the meat. 

And after a single hamburger patty, you could measure the biological difference in the human that ate that patty, you know, and, generally in a positive trend. the good things have gone up and the bad things have gone down in the hamburger patty for the animal that had a more diverse diet, which more closely replicates the diet it would have had as a wild animal and when it’s free to choose as opposed to what we might impose on that. 

And that wasn’t even looking at animals that are in feed lots, in sheds, eating just brown stuff and a lot of the stuff they were never designed to eat like grain. This was just looking at animals in the paddock. I call it the one hamburger patty study because a single hamburger patty from a different animal can change our metabolism and have a measurable result on us.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (15:53)

Yeah. Look, reminds me of the fact that my, my wife had visited an integrative doctor for a blood test and came back with an incredibly high and concerning mercury level. And she was shocked. She was shocked. And, we could not work out where that was. And then we realized we’d been to a Japanese restaurant the night before and had all fish, Shimi, ⁓ tuna and the whole lot.

Nothing else had changed. And we were not prepared to do that kind of a test. You don’t go to a blood test after you have a Japanese meal, but that was what we came up with. So not exactly the one hamburger, but it was pretty close.

Matthew Evans (16:38)

Yeah, and it’s interesting. I’ve got a friend who’s a sushi chef and his wife had the same thing, really measured high mercury levels. so she’s eating a lot of small fish, not big fish these days, because the mercury gets taken up the food chain and concentrated up the food chain. she needs to eat small young fish, not old fish for most of time.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (16:57)

I mean, I used to always, I was very preoccupied with mercury toxicity and I used to advise that until the microplastics issue came along and that’s a whole other story. But coming back to what you’ve, what you’ve written about and done, because another book that you’ve written recently in fact was called soil. And it argues that it’s the foundation of everything. And this is music to my ears because.

Nourishing Australia that I founded 15 years ago is all about healthy soils. Our food and our health and our future are tied to it. How badly have we damaged that foundation? And why should we all care about soil?

Matthew Evans (17:36)

Yeah, it’s an interesting one. Like I didn’t care about soil 15 years ago, you know, and I’d already been farming for a couple of years by then I was in a process of destroying soil through my farming and it was only through that process actually that I went, hang on. ⁓ What is this stuff that grows all our food? So soil’s imperiled. So in Australia, we’ve lost roughly about half our top soil since white people arrived, since colonization.

So in less than years, we’ve lost about half of our topsoil. Now topsoil is the magic bits, the very dark bit on the top of the earth. It’s very, you know, there’s this old cliche that the only reason humanity exists is because we have six inches of topsoil and the fact that occasionally rains, right? Obviously written in America or Europe, because Australia, most places doesn’t have six inches of topsoil. We have about one centimeter or less on most of Australia. And so topsoil does all the world’s growing.

So that little dark bit, that little one centimeter or six inch, whatever, dark layer on the top of the earth, that is the bit that does all the world’s growing. so to give you a context, 98, 99 % of all the calories that humans eat come from the fact we’ve got topsoil. So it’s lower if you measure protein. That’s a better, in some way, better measure, but you’re somewhere 85 % of all the that humans consume comes from the fact we’ve got topsoil. But the important thing with that is

The other 15 % comes from the oceans and rivers and actually all of topsoils run off, all the nutrient run off, the organic matter that runs off our lands, that actually provides the seafood that we eat as well because that usually exists around our continents where there is a continental shelf where it’s higher nutrient because there’s topsoil, because topsoil is always being eroded, little bit of nutrients are always washing down rivers. 

But we sped that up. The loss of topsoil, so topsoil has been around since plants, say 450, 600 million years, you want to measure it a long time. it’s co-evolved, topsoil is co-evolved with plants. So they need each other. And generally, most places around the world, we’ve generally grown topsoil as there’s been more plants and more life on land. We’ve sort of grown topsoil because there’s this feedback loop of building topsoil with living plants. But for the last 200 years, we’ve managed to lose topsoil.

And so in Australia, lost half, but globally, if you think since the agricultural revolution, since we invented European style farming, we’ve abandoned about 40 % of the land that we once farmed. So you go to the land of milk and honey, the bread basket, the biblical times, and it’s a desert. We have ruined topsoil and it’s become desertified. So it gets washed or blown away, loses its nutrients and steps, and then we go, we can’t grow food anymore. 

And traditionally, we’ve just moved on a bit like I did with my first farm. It’s like, I’ve ruined that bit of land. I’ll just go over here and grow something over here. We can’t do that anymore. Yeah, we’ve run, we’re running out of bits that we can go to. And yes, some people think we can go to Mars. Some very rich, powerful people think we can go to Mars. But if you think of topsoil and everything it does for us, because there’s this entire ecosystem in soil that, you know, this is biome, this has a microbial  life within it. 

It’s a super organism really, and it mirrors our microbiome and a lot of it is the same stuff that’s in us and that’s in soil. We’re supposed to be around soil. So what soil does for us, it’s been very hard for anything else to do. so growing food on Mars, you don’t have a biome which new plants need. You don’t have top soil which plants need. this is the only place we’ve got. If you unleashed every chemical weapon, on the planet tomorrow. 

If you unleashed every nuclear weapon on the planet tomorrow, you sprayed every herbicide and pesticide, every bomb, just tried to destroy Earth tomorrow with all of human technology. We could not create anywhere as inhospitable as Mars. We still couldn’t ruin the topsoil as much as Mars already is unsuitable for growing. So you can imagine how we could damage the planet, but we still couldn’t create Mars.

So the thought that we could actually go to another planet and recreate it and grow the food we need is fanciful ⁓ and farcical, really. And it worries me that here on Earth, I play this game sometimes ⁓ where I try to compare. There was a Mars rover that was taking these really high resolution photos around, you know, Menindee and places around Mars. And for the first time, we could see what it looks like. I take and I on these farmers around Menindee, go, oh, is my place look like Mars? 

So I do this game sometimes when I do public talks or I say, have a look at this photo. Is that Menindee or is that Mars? You know, you’ve got Dingo Gap, you know, oh, is that Menindee or is that Mars? Well, that’s actually Mars, you know, and a lot of people, some of the people can get them right. But, you know, oftentimes people will get them wrong because unfortunately we are turning parts of our our landscape into a place that is unable to support plants, is unable to support growth, which means unable to support humans. 

So I’m very worried about the state of earth soil. I just want to give you one last thing before you probably want to ask other questions, but I find this really helpful visually, right? We lose lots of topsoil all the time and the numbers are insane. And so you need to break them down. And the way I like to break them down is into forms that I can understand.

If you imagine this for every breakfast and for every lunch for every human on the planet, there’s topsoil that’s lost, it’s washed away. So there’s soil erosion or wind erosion. And so for every meal that every human on earth eats, we lose about a bucket of topsoil, ⁓ somewhere between three and nine kilos. The highest estimates around nine, ten kilos and the lowest estimates around three kilos. So even the lowest estimate, three kilos of topsoil lost for everything. Yeah, for every meal that you, well, actually for

More because actually a of humans don’t get those three meals a day. So we’re losing crazy amounts of soil and it’s a lot of it. Some of it’s the way we design our cities. It’s the way the mines we build and some of it is the way we grow food. Actually the big impact is the way we grow food.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (23:59)

I mean, I had heard that it takes nature about 500 years to grow an inch of soil or, or two, two and a half centimeters of soil, which segues into something that I know we are both passionate about. And that is regenerative farming. Cause there is a way of rebuilding. Yet it risks becoming a little bit of a marketing term. How do you define it in plain language? How does it stack up at scale as well?

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Matthew Evans (25:41)

Yeah, they’re both very interesting questions that don’t have simple answers, like, how do you, defining regenerative is in my view, and there are ways they define it in terms of how you actually manage land. But my view would be simply to say, managing land in a way that builds, restores and builds ecosystem health. And so that would be from the soil up. And so how do you, build topsoil? How do you build biodiversity? 

How do you build resilience? How do you build soil hold, water holding capacity? You know, all of those things. So that’s what I see as regenerative agriculture. So it’s not just saying sustainable, which would mean we’re not going backwards, but saying, can we go forwards? And what’s interesting about that? Can you scale it? I think yes, but it’s like everything, becomes sometimes harder with bigger landscapes because I think it becomes management. 

It’s about human management. And so you need people on country to manage that. And so it gets more difficult to scale up. And it’s a lot easier with animals. So it’s a lot easier to move cows and sheep around and move soil fertility and increase soil fertility than it is to do it with vegetables and growing lettuce and stuff like that. So yes, it can scale. But ⁓

But what gives me hope, guess, Ron, is this idea we’re losing crazy amounts of topsoil and that we going to have to abandon land is that there are people who are building topsoil at crazy rates. So you said, 500 years to grow an inch of topsoil and some places might take a thousand years? lots of Australia takes about thousand years to get a centimeter of topsoil, right? So it’s really slow, but we can supercharge that. I’ve been on farms where they’ve grown 20 centimeters of topsoil in five years you know, sort of mad and that’s by building soil life. 

It’s not changing the basic composition of the land we get has ⁓ crushed up rock and it’s got sand and silt and clay, just grades of crushed up rock. That’s kind of the dead inert bit, the rock minerals. But how we can actually build soil as opposed to dirt is by building the life within, so the organic matter.

It’s leaf litter and roots and this biology in the soil that’s making it more, ⁓ giving it better pore structure, better water holding capacity, better able to drain moisture in times of flood. ⁓ Soil that smells great, grows more food per acre. ⁓ And we have this wonderful ability to grow topsoil at rates that nature couldn’t even dream of.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (28:30)

And worth mentioning, think that animals play a very important part in that being well managed. And I think a lot of regenerative farmers that I’ve spoken to, and I’ve spoken to many on this podcast and in person describe themselves as soil farmers.

Matthew Evans (28:46)

Yeah, it’s interesting, isn’t it? A lovely idea that, you you see someone and they maybe have beef as one of their brands, but what they’re actually, they’ll tell you, yeah, I’m actually farming soil. it’s like, so they’re seeing where everything came from and everything’s going to is soil. And so they’re saying, well, how do I build that ⁓ resource? Because it is a resource and it’s a finite resource because

You know, there’s only so much land that we can go to. only so many places that ⁓ feel comfortable and habitable to farm. There’s only so much water. ⁓ Yeah. so, I think what’s interesting about that thing with the animals too, is that a lot of people probably don’t understand the ecosystems, know, soil co-evolved with plants and animals. 

Like they’re really important in the ecosystem. So they don’t have to be domesticated animals, but you need to have micro bats or insects or something going across your land at some point, because that’s what soil wants and needs. using domesticated animals is a really good way of getting soil what it needs and to boost soil health to get what we want, which is food and fiber to feed us, clothe us and house us.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (30:04)

Now I know, and I’m looking forward to this grounded festival that you’ve organized. I’m going to talk about that in a minute, but I just wanted to ask you one other question about another book that you’ve written. This is a great opportunity for me, Matthew. Milk. Now it takes on this original superfood, modicum. What’s the biggest lie we’ve been told about dairy? What’s your, what’s your conclusion there?

Matthew Evans (30:31)

I think the biggest lie that we’ve been told is that there are substitutes that know, because, you know, I was just reading something in the paper about  the ecological footprints of different milks. it’s sort of the subtext, they don’t even address this, but the subtext is, yes, there’s something white and wet that’s called milk that comes from  an animal.’ And then there’s something white and wet that comes from oats or soil.

rice or whatever it might come from. And that they’re somehow equivalent. And I think that’s the biggest lie that we’ve been told is that you can substitute one with the other. When milk is so inordinately complex and so extraordinarily bioactive and bioavailable and so remarkable in its composition that we can’t even come close to replacing it. I think, I’ll give you an example. 

There’s these lab milks that they’re trying to make. So they call them, you know, dairy without the cow is how they’re sort of promoting them. And, let’s see if we can, they get some genetically modified yeast and they, they get them to produce milk proteins. So caseins is a group of milk proteins. And so they’ve got these yeasts and they’re going, we can get them to produce casein in in a fermenter, in a stainless steel fermenter, in a, in in a lab or in a factory. And so we can make milk.

And it’s like, so I was pretty interested in this because they’re talking about, you it’s not a single protein. Obviously it’s complex. They’re going to do six proteins and they’ll probably, you know, before they go commercial, maybe get 10 proteins. And I was interested in how many proteins are in milk, because if you’re going to have a substitute or replacement for milk, well, what’s in milk? And it took me like all of about 15 minutes. I’ve forgotten the numbers, but it’s something like 2,564 proteins in cow’s milk. Right. So there is no chance we can replace it. There are no chance that we can have a substitute for milk. 

We could create something white and wet and it might have a lower greenhouse gas emissions and it might have a smaller footprint in terms of water use or whatever it might be and land use. But what is it doing for us? Nothing. Well, generally, actually, most of those other substitutes are potentially doing us harm because they’re what you would know, they’re classified as ultra processed foods, the stuff our body is not designed to recognize, so our bodies don’t recognize those plant milks as food. 

So they’re potentially doing us harm, especially if they’ve got emulsifiers in, those barista ones are the worst. Whereas milk, even milk from a really industrial farm and a system that I don’t really love that’s been, you know, high heat treated and killed a lot of bioactive compounds, that is still a really nutritious product. So it’s the only people it’s going to do harm to are those who are the very, very few people who are allergic or have you know, intolerances to the proteins. And there are some people who can’t have the lactose, but they can still consume some of that before they have any issues. And then there are ways to get rid of the lactose, like make cheese or yogurt or, you know, take tablets or whatever. So milk is nutritional wonderland with all things that are having effect on everything from the way our DNA behaves to heart disease in a positive way. And then

You’ve got the substitutes, which are either doing nothing for you, except making your coffee lighter colored or potentially doing you harm by interfering with your gut microbiome or worse.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (33:58)

Yeah, well, this is an issue around meat, around milk, around any animal-based food and the words plant-based are being used to market a healthy, environmentally friendly thing that we can sell. But I think we’ve become, or they’ve become unwittingly foot soldiers for the ultra-processed food industry.

Matthew Evans (34:24)

Yeah. And I think that’s the tragedy because this idea, I love plants. just love vegetables and I love legumes and pulses and all of those things that people who don’t eat meat would enjoy. I think they’re amazing. But I think the problem is, yeah, we’re sort of demonizing animals and those kinds of things.

And we’re bolstering the ultra processed food industry. we’re saying, Oh, you know, you, shouldn’t have this or you shouldn’t have that, but don’t worry. We’ve got the quick fix for you. We’ve got the answer and yeah, unwittingly or wittingly. the great example for me, and I’m sure you’ve, because you read, so that you’ve read a couple of my books in terms of, know, whenever they say we’re doing a really good job with plant based, I just go margarine. Margarine. 

No one ever says, I really enjoyed a lovely margarine crumpet. Or I had a delicious margarine croissant. Right. No one has ever said that in the history of humanity. Right. Because margarine is rubbish. And so this is a product I’ve been working on for a hundred years that originally wasn’t…

It’s grey, so they had to dye it yellow to make it look like butter. it’s a product that they’ve been working on flavor-wise, texture-wise. And after a hundred years and billions of dollars worth of investment, they still have only come up with margarine. If you’re have a plant-based, have olive oil. I love olive oil. Amazing. But you can’t… What I think they’re trying to do is say, oh, butter is so dangerous and killing us all. And never was.

It’s just that they like the idea of being able to sell that. out that the trans fats in margarine were probably killing us in the eighties. But this idea that you can create something to replace the butter and all you can come up with is margarine, which is not doing us any good for our health and it’s not doing us any good gastronomically, socially, culturally. There’s no pleasure in margarine. 

And that’s, but the lie we’ve been told is that is somehow better. And you can translate that to every plant based process product out there. You know, like, you know, there’s a big difference between, you know, the, the, fava beans or, you know, broad beans and, ⁓ you know, and, and then the, those broad bean proteins that have been extracted and put into a fake hamburger patty that they, you know, they want to make look like it’s bleeding when you cut into it, you know, that’s not food.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (37:07)

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think you’re down to a price, not up to a standard kind of describes another problem. that is that so much the next to the health and environmental costs of food has been externalized. You know, like we’re not going to deal with that. That’s your problem. We’re going to give it to you cheap and tell you it’s healthy.

Matthew Evans (37:22)

Hmm.

Yeah, yeah. And then it is that externalization. It’s one of those things that I’m really hopeful that some of this new accounting, like natural capital accounting and things like that, that’ll do one bit of ⁓ capturing those externalities, but the impact on the health system. So, we have this attitude and I know you’re interested in milk, you have an interest in milk, we milk a cow. I have this attitude that raw milk is no one here as dangerous as people make out. And this idea that it’s

It’s illegal for my child to have raw milk, but it’s totally legal for them to have Red Bull. I think raw milk has inherent dangers, but I think we can manage them. And I think there are benefits to be had out of it. But the idea, I guess, is that you can’t see Red Bull killing someone straight away. You can’t measure increasing bacteria straight away.

This idea that Red Bull is safe because it doesn’t have the richness of milk in terms of its complexity, its proteins and sugars and carbohydrate. Red Bull biologically, nothing can live on, right? Or Coca-Cola, take any of your soft drinks. Nothing can live on them, right? And so from a food safety point of view, they’re safe because nothing can live on them.

But as a nutritional thing that we would consume and put into our bodies, well, nothing can live on them. So this weird anomaly of like, it’s food safe to have stuff that you can’t live on. the milk’s problem is it’s too nutritious because bad things can live on it if it’s not treated well, as can meat or chicken or eggs or any of those things that are so nutrient dense.

That they, yes, they have any, yeah, there is a inbuilt risk, but that doesn’t make them unsafe. It just means you’ve got to treat them as risky and treat them sensibly.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (39:37)

Yeah, no, think there was a whole, I think I read it in either your book or another book on raw milk, talking about why pasteurization was so important a hundred years ago, because there was so many dairies connected to so many breweries that these cows were living in a shed, living off slops, dying after two or three years. And the milk quality was so bad that it needed to be pasteurized. But, but that’s a different story. How a lot of cows are grown today.

Matthew Evans (40:07)

Yeah, yeah. that historic anomaly, you know, of when pasteurization came in, it was a great thing because at that time, yeah, there was no one that really had refrigeration. either, the milk had to travel a long way unrefrigerated or it came from these urban dairies where they were feeding the cows terrible, terrible things and the cows were terribly sick. you know, essentially just milk just became yet another vector for illness and disease.

And so, but now, yeah, we can chill the milk as it comes from the cow within about two minutes. It’s below four degrees. It can be transported in sterile containers. It can stay, you know, at a non-breeding temperature for quite a while. And yet we still have the rules based on, I guess, this fear of it as being something that could, that did kill lots of people. did, you know, especially young, people with weak immune systems. 

But that’s not the food system these days. So we’ve kind of got an attitude that’s based on historic problems that no longer exist. yeah, I don’t know why I can go to a vending machine in Italy and get raw milk and I can go to a supermarket in France and get raw milk and go to a dairy farm in New Zealand and buy raw milk. was in Ireland and they had a vending machine, know, bring your own bottle, fill up with raw milk from this beautiful little dairy on a farm in Ireland. 

And you don’t hear about everyone dying. It’s regulated, it’s small scale, it’s traceable, ⁓ but it’s not killing everybody. It’s just a different attitude to the product. It’s like saying, well, okay, we know this, people want this and how do we get it to them safely and manage it as opposed to what I call raw milk, the new moonshine because around us something like 3000 illegal steals in Tasmania. 

So everyone knows how to get illegal home brew. But there’s very few people actually milking cows. So as soon as you start milking a cow, you get knocks on the door from all sorts of people trying to get a hold of you, the good stuff. And it shouldn’t be like that. It should just be like, okay, this is an industry that obviously people are interested in. They have beliefs in how it might help them and they may be real or imagined, but they’re to do it anyway. 

So why don’t we do it in a way that’s not people selling milk out of the back of the ute in Bondi or, know, Sinclair Car Park, you know, which is where I know people are buying. I’ve got a friend who works as a barista in Melbourne and he and his mates go and buy, they meet in a McDonald’s car park and buy raw milk once a week, direct from the farmer. And so that’s fine, but I’d prefer it you got it from a refrigerated truck, you know, like

And you could buy it every day. Because I find my milk isn’t as good after three days. So if you could buy it every day, you wouldn’t be buying it once a week and storing it. It would be probably safer to have it regulated than not.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (43:15)

Now, listen, you give co-founded this grounded festival, which I’m looking forward to going to and it was first launched in, in Tasmania, your farm and went to WA and, this year it’s in, Victoria. Tell us a little bit about it. What gap are you trying to fill and what could people expect when they go there? Who have never been before.

Matthew Evans (43:36)

Yeah, I think the gap I was trying to fill was because I’m sort of in this, I sort of span between, know, because I was a restaurant critic and I’m a chef by trade and I sort of bridged that gap between the growers and the people who are eating the food. You know, I’ve written recipe books and all sorts of stuff over my time. And I was interested in this idea of how we can help growers and people interested in food systems do better. 

That idea of you know, that nothing stays the same, that we can always be getting incrementally better. I that’s a really nice human trait. And with this problem with soil, you know, as one of the fundamentals, how can we look at landscapes and say, okay, I want to feed people or I want to be fed, you know, because we get lots of people coming in who aren’t growers. And how’s that system operate? And is it operating in my favor? And is there a way to, you know, if you’re a grower, how do you

I’m farming better. don’t really know what that means for each farmer, but it might be they want to use less chemicals, fewer chemicals or none. They might want to have more profit or they might want more time with their family, might want more bird life on their farm. It might be better mental health, whatever that might look like. It might be higher yields, lower inputs, whatever it is. And then we go, okay, well, let’s throw all these ideas in the air. 

And I have lots of questions and I don’t have the answers. So I get in these people from around the world and around Australia and and say, okay, so tell me why if I cut all the mistletoe off my trees, I lose a third of my bird life. Because, mistletoe we think of as a plague problem, it’s killing our trees. So I get the researcher in who says, let me tell you about mistletoe, why the soil underneath it’s better, why they’re a hotspot of biodiversity, why are you going to lose a third of your bird life if you cut off the mistletoe as opposed to celebrating the fact you’ve got this amazing thing that’s supposed to be there. 

And you’re like, my God, that’s amazing. Who knew? You know, so I get people with the answers and sometimes I get people with better questions. And it’s a really joyous event. We have multiple talks going at once, has that sort of writer’s philosophy idea of like, you might be interested in different things. You can scale your own learning. When you’re sick of the talk, you can go to the bar because, you may be the most interesting person you’re going to talk to is not on stage. 

They might be in the, you might meet them in the line for the dunny. You know, they might be a farmer or a grower on a similar journey. might be a, you you might because we’ve got a food as medicine guy coming out of the US. might be another doctor who’s working in that. How do we nourish communities through the medical system? So there’s lots of opportunities for social interactions. We’ll have some food vans, we’ll have some live music. it’s almost learning by stealth as well. Someone said, it’s so educational. And I said, don’t say that. It doesn’t sound like any fun at all. This is supposed to be a really good time where you go away with with knowledge and tools and connections. 

And we don’t do anything over Zoom. It’s all done in person. it brings together, I guess, people of a positive frame of mind who want to see how we can look after the planet better, feed ourselves, our community, our families, our better look after the planet better. And it’s just, so uplifting. 

There could be people with very different…polar opposites points of view who have these beautiful, respectful conversations and come away sometimes having changed their mind about stuff because they don’t feel threatened. It’s just like, this is a cool group of people to spend a couple of days with having conversations about stuff that interests me.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (47:12)

Well, I’m certainly looking forward to it and I’ve never been before. that’s coming up on the 22nd, 3rd, 4th of April.

We’re going to have links to that, listen, just finishing up now, if there was one thing the average Australian or anybody in the world could do this week and not on a farm, but in the kitchen or at the shops to honor the soil and the farmers behind their food, what do you think it would be?

Matthew Evans (47:42)

That’s a great question. Gosh, that’s such a good question. I’m going to say buy a vegetable that you’ve never bought before because every plant gives something to soil and every plant takes something from soil. but we’ll buy or buy a grain you’ve never bought before. So, so farmers grow wheat all the time, which is growing wheat all the time. It’s not good for soil. So it loves to have a mix of things grown in it. And, but if you just keep buying wheat, well, they just keep growing wheat. 

But if you buy Triticale or sorghum or, you buy barley, you buy rye, that actually gets the farmer to grow something different. And when they grow something different, they change the soil and improve the soil. So it might be buying a kohlrabi that you’ve seen and never, you know, didn’t know what to do with, or it might be buying a different type of weird broccoli, or it might be, you know, just mix it up. And by doing that, you’re actually, you’re going to be doing better for your gut, you know, because the more diverse.

things we can put in ourselves is a good thing. But you’re also doing better for the soil because soil loves diversity too.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (48:46)

That’s great note for us to finish on. And as I said, we’ll have links to the festival and your books. Thank you for everything you’re doing have done and will continue to do. look forward to meeting you in person at the grounded fest. Thanks. Well, we covered so many topics there. And as I said, Matthew has written books on or done documentaries on most of them, but the one that I’m drawing your attention to is the grounded festival. I’ll be there.

Matthew Evans (48:57)

Great, see you soon Ryan.

Dr Ron Ehrlich (49:11)

In, think it’s the 22nd and 23rd of April this year in Victoria. I’m looking forward to it, but I would also recommend many of Matthew’s books and documentaries. I’d also encourage you to leave a review for, ⁓ unstressed health podcast on Spotify or on Apple podcasts or on whatever platform you’re listening to this and also joining the unstressed health community, which you’re going to hear more about in a moment. hope this finds you well until next time. This is Dr Ron Erlich, be well. 

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