Written by Christopher Kelly
Dec. 6, 2017
[0:00:00]
Tommy: Hello and welcome to the Nourish Balance Thrive podcast. My name is Tommy Wood and today I am joined by Diana Rodgers. Hi, Diana.
Diana: Hi!
Tommy: Diana, for those who don't know, is a real food nutritionist, lives on a working organic farm and is consultant and nutritionist to many of our favorite or well-known people in the Ancestral Health world, Nom Nom Paleo, Dr. Kirk Parsley. We actually recently met in Iceland where you came to speak at the conference we did on longevity that I hosted, and it was absolutely great to have you there.
Today we're actually going to talk about your latest project which is going to be a film called "Kale Versus Cow: The Case for Better Meat." Very excited to hear about this, this is something that I personally am very passionate about and know many of our listeners are very passionate about. So maybe you can start by filling any gaps in terms of the very short bio that I gave and then start to talk about the project itself.
Diana: Yeah. Well thanks you so much for having me on the podcast, I really appreciate it. I'm a big fan of the work you guys do. My background, just the brief background of it, I was undiagnosed celiac until I was in my mid-20s, really sick growing up as a kid and then when I found out I had celiac, I was told to just basically switch my low-fat, "healthy" standard American diet with a gluten-free version of that. So I was doing gluten-free toasts in the morning, gluten-free sandwiches, gluten-free pasta, all that, and so although my guts got significantly better in just a couple of weeks, I was still a metabolic mess, and it took me another ten years or so until I discovered eating more fat.
I read the Paleo Solution and interpreted that as a keto-type diet because I don't really like sweet potatoes. I was like, well, I know I do better on more fat. I had been learning a little bit more about Weston A. Price and adding butter to things, which it took me about 30 times of hearing that before I was actually comfortable putting butter on something. So I did a higher fat, lower carb version of Paleo, and it fixed me. It totally fixed me in about two weeks. It was like my life went from black and white to color. I wasn't addicted to food. I didn't have to bring my snacks with me everywhere and have headaches and tunnel vision in between my meals. That really, totally changed my life.
I wasn't sure if that was going to work for all my patients. I opened a nutrition practice and, lo and behold, every single person that walked in the room, some version of real food diet with just the carbs, depending, just really worked for everybody and so I was totally sold. I ended up getting my RD, Registered Dietitian. So this is all a career change that I had later in my life. Meanwhile, I'm married to an organic farmer and that was a career change for him out of high tech. So it just all started coming together that, oh, look, the food that's grown in the most sustainable way is also the most nutrient-dense food.
As I was going through my RD program, I realized this really strong vegetarian undercurrent happening. All my professors were vegetarian and happened to be really unhealthy, drinking their Diet Coke and they had jellybeans on their desk, and they're telling me how to eat and we need to be avoiding meat, of course, because it's bad for you and bad for the environment. So I've really narrowed in, lately, on defending meat, and I find that there are really three categories that people are freaked out about meat. One is the nutrition. They're scared of saturated fat and all the studies out there that say meat causes cancer and some other recent media claiming that it causes diabetes and other things like that, which is just biochemically impossible.
Then the environmental concerns that meat emits methane and is causing all of our global warming, especially cattle, and that's why I'm focusing specifically on cattle in this because it's red meat and cattle that are really the most vilified. By the way, giving up red meat for chicken is probably the worst choice you could make as far as environment and nutrition. Red meat is just much more nutrient-dense than poultry. The real story that I'm focusing the most on is the emotional story, so we've got nutrition, environment and the ethical, moral dilemma that people have with, do we really need to have an animal die in order to feed us when we're so evolved as humans that we can certainly engineer food that must be morally superior because we are morally superior if we don't eat meat.
So I'm really going to be looking at why do people either not care about their meat, care so much that they see them as children or pets, can't eat meat on a bone, all that stuff. People are so weird about their meat consumption. So we're going to be talking to -- in the film, we're going to be really framing this as stories of people instead of like a talking heads documentary and really diving into the emotional backstory that people have surrounding their meat consumption.
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Tommy: It sounds fascinating. It's something that we definitely need, that information to get out there. You sent me some details of your project, and you mentioned being inspired by Chef's Table which is this amazing series of, I guess each is a mini documentary on a chef and just the way that's put together. Can you talk about how you think that's going to be important in terms of how it's filmed, how you put it together, how that's going to make it more engaging to the audience.
Diana: Exactly. So what we love about -- director Myna Joseph and I, we just got off the phone actually, talking more about how we really want to center this on a few main characters. Contrary to what you might think, the fewer characters is actually better for telling a story. I'm sure you've seen so many food documentaries that they're exhausting because they're almost so schizophrenic the way they jump around into so many different talking head experts and statistics. After not very long of watching it, I want to turn it off because I just can't deal anymore with how jumpy they can feel.
The best way to really sway somebody is to get them in the gut, to get them emotionally, so we're going to be following -- one of the stories we're looking at following is a butcher who really wrestled with all this stuff and had a lot of revelations about whether or not to eat meat. We'll be, hopefully, following her to her slaughterhouse, to her butcher shop, to talk to the producers, and as Chef's Table focuses on one -- they'll focus on one chef and then they'll bring in a few other experts to support it, that's what were looking to do.
So we have a few main story lines that we're going to be following of a few individuals who are really involved in meat production and selling to the public. Nina Teicholz is our main nutrition expert. She's really great because she doesn't necessarily align with one specific dietary philosophy, so we're really trying to break out the Paleo mindset even though that's the template that I follow. If we don't bust out of our own echo chamber, we've failed, basically, and so our whole goal is to just get as many people as possible thinking about why we need better meat, why giving it up actually could cause more harm than good when we just opt out completely of the system or switch to chicken instead of red meat.
Tommy: Yeah, I think that the dietary component is super important. You mentioned the Paleo echo chamber. There's also the low carb echo chamber. I think we're just telling each other the same story but not really branching out from there, so trying to encompass more of the world and teach the greater population who are the majority, how we should be eating and how we can do that better.
You mentioned how abstaining from meat or eliminating meat can cause more harm than good. One of the other tag lines you have in some of the promotional material says that at a time when the plant-based movement calls for world without meat, kale versus cow makes the case for better meat. Is that the answer to the same question? Because something that I think we could all agree on generally, both plant-based and the Ancestral or Paleo spheres is that we need better animal welfare.
When I have discussed this question with people who, say, have watched other media and have become swayed by the plant-based argument that we should just eliminate meat entirely, and then my response is sustainable farming, producing better grasslands, most of the world's surface isn't suitable for producing crops, all those things; they still don't think I've answered the question which is the beef agriculture is creating all these emissions, it's bad for the environment. So even though they agree with me that animal welfare is important, they're not sure that it's the same answer to the question. Does that make sense? How do we balance things up?
Diana: Totally, it makes complete sense. As we were looking at all the different stories our potential characters that we have, it was really interesting how nutrition was its one little area, like, eat meat, just meat is good, and really when you look -- I presented this in Iceland -- when you look at typical steak versus grass-fed steak, nutritionally, just from a pure nutrition science perspective, there's not significant health differences really, there are more omega-3s in grass-fed steak but it's still not a significant source of omega-3s for humans. So the nutrition argument is almost separate but the environmental and ethical arguments are completely intertwined.
So when you're thinking about how to cause least harm, when you look at what that actually means -- you could also imply least harm to humans, like, do whatever with yourself as an adult but please don't feed your children a plant-based diet because that's absolutely neglectful, in my opinion, but when we're looking at how to work with nature and how to really look at a sustainable food system, it absolutely requires animals to be part of that.
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When we look at plant-based agriculture only, earth didn't come to us as fields ready to be cropped. That sometimes gets me into trouble too when I even suggest that we didn't start at agriculturalist. We started way before that. But I've gotten so much crap from so many different philosophies that I sometimes hesitate to even go there.
Anyway, think, in order to make a field, to turn it into a monocrop, you have to either eliminate some forests or grasslands. You're eliminating a habitat for many thousands of animals or millions of animals. Then we need to till it, and that disrupts all the underground, releasing carbon which is incredibly destructive. Then we're going to sow just one plant, so we're eliminating food for all the other animals that would have eaten all the different life there too.
Then we've got the tractors driving on the fields which are decapitating all the little bunnies. So we're spraying chemicals that are not only harming our bodies because the residues get on it, but it also is going into our groundwater. It's running off into streams and harming fish. We're ruining all the insects and pollinators. Then of course we've got the water that we need to irrigate these fields. We're pumping it and diverting rivers, so that's also causing harm to the fish that are living in those rivers and all the animals that eat the fish down the river.
There is just so much harm that can come from plant-based agriculture that a lot of people don't realize. As you mentioned, the land use thing is huge. Most of Africa, you can't plant really water-intensive crops like kale, and most of the world where you can actually do very well with animals like cattle. To tell the Masai that their traditional healthy diet of mostly cow is not okay and they need to be switching to eating soy when it doesn't even grow near them, when they're totally healthy and they don't have an ethical problem with it, you do, so to impose your morals on somebody else's culture, I have a big problem with that as well.
Tommy: Yeah, absolutely. That point actually, you talk about Africa, I think it extends further north. Half of my family is Icelandic. I did my PhD in Norway. I think particularly the example of Norway where if I go to the supermarket and I buy a Norwegian local tomato, I think, this is great, locally produced. That tomato is probably the most energy-intensive thing to produce that I could possibly buy in the grocery store because of all the energy required to build the greenhouse, keep the greenhouse warm, create the environment for that tomato to grow in because tomatoes don't grow in Norway, surprisingly, at least in most parts.
You compare that to the elk or the moose that is in my stepdad, who is Norwegian, it's in his freezer, it was out roaming the earth, eating things that we wouldn't necessarily eat and turning it into something that's very healthy and has had minimal impact on the environment, if not beneficial impact. That's the important thing about Africa. I think that example extends to vast waves of surface of the earth.
Diana: Totally, and it's something that I notice when I was in Iceland as well. People are eating less and less lamb which is the most perfect food. Red meat, lamb is amazing, it's delicious and it's a traditional food and they do very well in that climate there. Yet what we're seeing in Iceland, once had one of the most beautiful diets and the longest lifespan of anyone, now they're eating more chicken. Chickens have to be raised 100% indoors on 100% grain in Iceland, and grain doesn't grow very well on Iceland. It's all imported.
I wonder what's going to happen when their economy isn't doing so great because that is a reality that happened not too long ago. So when they actually have to start looking at paying a lot of money for all these imports -- we did visit a tomato greenhouse in Iceland that was geothermal. That was interesting because at least geothermal, we went to a geothermal power plant too actually and even though it's not 100%, there are some issues with when they drill down and get to that power. It's still more efficient than probably the energy you would need to grow tomato in Norway.
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Another interesting story too is when I looked at a paper that compared the footprint of apples in England, eating them off-season, so all the energy -- you would think that, well, apples do okay in England and so if we just keep them in cold storage and eat them off-season, that has got to be better than importing them. But actually, the footprint was better even in the off-season of shipping them in from New Zealand. That's just because of all the energy it takes to keep them cool.
Now if they were to turn it into applesauce or dehydrated apples, that would probably be a different story but keeping them in cold storage and eating them off-season, it was surprising to me, compared to just shipping them in from New Zealand. I'm not saying we should be shipping New Zealand apples to England, but once you look at life cycle analysis of different processes, it's really fascinating.
Tommy: What about avocados because obviously they're such a big thing nowadays, and they're being shipped all over the world. Do you have any information on the energy requirements for shipping avocados? Is that something we should be worried about?
Diana: Well if you're really trying to go more plant-based, should we really be shipping all of our oils from tropical areas up to America? Should we really be only eating coconut oil or should we be using the fats from the animals that are grown closer to us which are really nutrient-dense?
Tommy: Yeah, absolutely. One thing I know many people listening to this podcast and myself included, is involved in conversations around all these topics with people who, again, have seen other things, are becoming swayed by the idea of needing to reduce the meat intake. Do you have any particular resources, places where people can go? Some people just need some broad strokes. Some people maybe want some hard data. Do you have any favorite places which lay out the real research that encompasses all of this rather than just talking about meth emissions or just talking about the ethical side so that it ties everything together?
Diana: Well I'm working on that myself. We will have a film website where folks can go. A lot of the work that I've done, I have a few blog posts that try to summarize all of it into one place because I think it's really difficult to look at all of these in isolation. I do have some -- like the work of the Savory Institute is really fantastic if you're looking to understand the benefits grazing animals can have on land and how that all works.
Once you understand that piece then understanding the nutrition piece is important too, but I'm guessing most of the listeners are on board as far as the nutrition benefits of red meats. We probably don't even have to go there, but Nina Teicholz's book is really great to talk about, at least, the benefits of red meat and fat and why it's so demonized. Because that's really fascinating to know, the story there. Anyone can pretty much make the argument for nutrition is pretty solid. There's just no questioning that.
The data on the environmental is a little harder only because when it's tried to be replicated exactly in other locations, it's hard to make it work in a very reductionist sort of way. For example, a study that worked well on the benefits of cattle in Vermont, it's really hard to replicate that in the Nevada because looking at a completely different environment. But there are studies coming out and it just needs to be all pulled together and put into one nice resource, which I am also working on as well.
It's all just so new because unfortunately, a lot of the bad science or the illogical conclusions, I should say, they'll be talking about, the water footprint is so horrible for red meat because it takes like a thousand gallons of water for one pound. Really what they're looking at is rainwater and, yes, yes, they're also looking at every inch of land that cow ever walked on in its life because they live a long life and they do walk on a lot of land.
Back to the land use thing, if you don't understand the land use, that's a huge one to get. So you cannot grow crops everywhere. There are so many reasons why you just can't put a patch of soy or corn or wheat or kale in so many different environments. We've got topography, water, soil health, how arid is it, what's the infrastructure like to put in an irrigation, all kinds of things like that. It's hard for us Americans to really wrap our heads around that though because most of America is pretty suitable for cropping but as you mentioned, Norway, Iceland, most of Africa, Mongolia, there are just so many places on Earth where you cannot crop but where raising animals is quite healthy and actually benefit the soil.
[0:20:13]
Their grazing actually stimulates grass growth and their manure is, of course, not waste. It's actually fertilizer, and they can actually encourage carbon sequestration through their impact on the land. It can actually help draw in carbon, and it's not just about methane emissions from feedlot cattle.
Tommy: That was actually something I was going to ask you about, the issue of carbon sequestration versus the emissions and how, if done correctly, these more sustainable grass-fed agriculture for beef can actually provide a net benefit or at least cancel out the emissions that are produced. Can you just go into a few more details there?
Diana: Sure. Basically everybody is looking at cow farts and blaming cow farts for everything, and cows do burp too so that comes out the other end as well, but that's what ruminants do. That's how they're actually turning solar energy in a form of grass, into protein. That's how they do it. What these studies -- and it's all reductionism again -- what these studies aren't looking at is that their impact on the land actually has a benefit if they're managed properly.
I'm not talking about cows standing on a patch of dirt n the feedlot. I'm not talking about cows that are never moved around. But when you're looking at more of a, again going back to Allan Savory's TED Talk which is fantastic, or any of the farmers that are doing intensive management where you're moving the animals, you're grazing them heavily on a patch of land and then you're moving them frequently to mimic how they would move around in nature, so they're constantly moving away from their predators. If they stay in one place, they're just sitting ducks for wolves or hyenas.
Actually the predator-prey relationship is actually really healthy for the land because once the animals move away, it allows the land to rest and that's when the magic happens. So the magic is happening after the manure is deposited, after the grass has been grazed to just the right height, not too low so it's overgrazed and the plant is damaged but just enough to stimulate new growth. Again, we've got the manure that's inoculating the soil with healthy bacteria.
As the grass goes through photosynthesis, it actually is pulling carbon down into its roots and feeding the bacteria in the soil. It drips little carbohydrates, so it's sugars, to the bacteria. The bacteria likes that, it eats it, and in exchange, it's actually getting minerals and vitamins to the plant, the plant's roots so that the plant can grow.
There's all this really great fungal networks that are mining rocks and also working in a symbiotic relationship with the plant roots. It's a beautiful system that only works well when we're allowing the plant to rest. So using these intensive, mob-grazing type strategies where you're giving a few days of intensive grazing and manure-depositing, fertilizer and then allowing the land to rest is really the right way to do it.
So we can, as farmers, mimic ourselves as hyenas and wolves by just using electric fencing and then calling the older animals for our food. Hyenas and wolves are not the only ones that should have access to these nutrient-dense meats, I think humans should too. So we can actually mimic what the bison herds were doing naturally before we were here in North America with cattle and with electric fencing.
Tommy: That creates a much more sustainable, I guess we've used that word many times, but enclosed --
Diana: Regenerative.
Tommy: Yeah, regenerative, enclosed system, so how does this balance in terms of our current food system? We are mass producing because of the nature of our population which is something we'll talk about in a little bit, and I'm sure there is a case for everybody just producing food in a much more close looped system much more locally, but is there any capability of actually being able to implement that on a wider scale?
Diana: I think it's absolutely going to happen once the price of oil goes up and it just doesn't make sense to be, for example, flying New Zealand apples to England in the winter. Once that doesn't make financial sense anymore, and this is where markets come in and are so important, but oil is a limited resource, energy. We will probably come up with new sources of energy, but it takes a long time for any new innovation to then -- we don't have really tons of electric trucks driving around and where would even get the energy for that yet to fuel them.
[0:25:06]
Basically regional food systems are going to make economic sense and also from a food security perspective, it really doesn't make a lot of sense for us to be eating food from five major companies. It makes a lot more sense to have smaller organizations that are more regionally based so that not everybody has to literally go to a farm like we have where people come and pick up at the CSA directly. That might be for more hard core people, I understand, but there definitely is a happier middle ground where we can have more regional reliance, and I think that that should be worldwide.
I think people should be less reliant, for example on US foreign aid, grain subsidies, all kinds of things like that because it's just not good and it's not actually helping anybody.
Tommy: Absolutely. This, I guess, brings us onto the bigger picture question which is -- this is where I always go. I start to think of these things. Actually I realized I could ask you about it when I saw a quote on your blog, which is that people end up always asking you, how can we feed the world if everyone switched to grass-fed beef tomorrow? You say it's not really a relevant question because there are actually just too many people on the Earth, and you liken it to asking you to put 200 people in your Subaru and you just can't fit. You just can't fit them all in.
I'm completely in agreement with this. The resources on our planet are not great enough and are not infinite enough to support the number of people that we have on the planet currently so my question always becomes -- it comes from both sides. The plant-based argument saying we'll just monocrop everything and feed the world's population that way versus the sustainable, locally sourced food on our side of the fence. Is any of that really going to make any difference considering the fact that we just physically can't support all the people that we have?
Diana: That's such a super loaded question that gets into worldviews and politics and religion that's just slightly untouchable, but there are too many people. That's a huge problem, whether or not they're eating plants or animals. Certainly what we're doing today isn't working. For the first time ever, we've got more obese people than underweight people in the world. So do we want a whole bunch of sick people or do we want some healthy people walking around? Do we want to have just a bunch of people surviving just long enough to reproduce a lot, or do we want to have folks actually living a high quality life?
My plea goes out to the people that care and that are looking to feel good. I think that's why you do what you do. I could be working in a hospital and just trying every single day to convince people to eat better and maybe have one out of every 30 people actually follow what I say, or I could be working with people that are coming to me specifically to my private practice who actually want to save themselves. That's part of it. We have to stop doubling our population every 35 years, and that's just a bigger topic that there's no way -- if you're looking at a plant-based system, we have very limited arable land left and we're going to max that out.
Tommy: Yeah. When I think about this, anybody who is interested in this, I always go back to, there's a book called "The Limits to Growth" written in 1972. I don't know if you're heard of that.
Diana: No.
Tommy: So they basically modeled what would happen to the world essentially based on population growth, population, resources, and it has been remarkably prescient. A lot of the people who read it were very dismissive of it because what it had was exponential population growth, which was definitely the case at the time, even though maybe leveled off recently, and they predicted that too, but what they did was they limited resources unlike traditional economic models which assume unlimited resources. You just keep digging stuff out of the ground and it's just going to keep on being there, and it's just not the case.
When the limited resources particularly, they basically said that they've become depleted; all of the money goes into trying to, all the money we have goes into trying to attract more and more resources and then industrial growth collapses and then because of that, the agricultural and service systems collapse. Basically there are no food and health services, and the population starts to decline just because death starts to outweigh birth. That was the standard model.
They've changed lots of things and created new models of whatever way you do it. However you set the initial parameters, the economic system [0:30:01] [Indiscernible] collapses by about 2100, so we've got about 83 years left, and the decline starts to happen around 2015 which is interesting because that's pretty much right about now. Where this ties into what we've talked about is one particular resource that -- my stepfather and my mother, they do a little work on sustainability. They do a lot of modeling and trying to update some of the models that were some of the things that were in The Limits to Growth, 45 years ago.
[0:30:27]
One thing they talk about is phosphorus. We've reached peak phosphorus which basically means that compared to how much we have and how much we're mining, we're basically on the downward slope of how much we can get out of the planet, and the most intensive use or the majority of the phosphorus that we extract from the earth is used to create phosphate for NPK fertilizers for monocropping soil.
So we can talk about emissions. Yes, animals do release methane. We can maybe offset a lot of that if we do it properly, but we don't talk about all these other resources that are actually, probably what's going to end up causing us problems in pollution, is an important problem but if we run out of phosphorus, we just can't grow crops. We don't have the fertilizer to grow those crops.
Actually one of the best ways to recycle phosphorus is to use animal poop to fertilize the ground again because then the cycle continues. It's just one of those things where if we don't look at the bigger picture, we don't look at our resources rather than just the food that's being grown, we're really going to get ourselves into trouble. Again, you go back to the bigger picture of, are we able to support all the people that we have? The answer is actually we probably can't.
So that we can just live happy lives and think that we're actually doing the best that we can, we can only influence the people around us who want to drive change and create a better agricultural system, create healthier people and then hope that you create a healthier population then they figure their way out of this, I guess, is the way that I have to approach it.
Diana: Exactly, and that shouldn't be discounted, what you were talking about with the minerals because there are other minerals too that we're running out of that are really important. So when we look at all the money that's going into things like lab meat, my question is always, what are the inputs and all the other things? How much energy did you put in this lab? Okay, if it's solar-powered, awesome, but how many resources did it take to make that solar cell when we can just have a cow on grass, sequestering carbon, using it directly?
It's all about, how can we harness solar power most efficiently and recycle it as many times as possible? That's why ruminants are so amazing, and that's why we need more red meat. I think for health reasons too, in general, people aren't eating enough -- most people coming to me are not eating enough protein in general or they're eating the wrong kinds of protein and so I'm a big advocate for more better meat. Instead of just telling people that meat is a condiment or we need less meat, better meat; I really don't necessarily think that that's the right message because the people that are hearing that are the people that have the money to be spending it on good meat.
Tommy: Yeah. I guess the best way to come at this and always seems to me, is that it's better to stand for something than against something. So it's better that we stand for better quality meat that's better for the animal, better for the environment, better for us, and we can hopefully drive demand for better quality meat which basically forces the producers and forces other people to explore those methods rather than if we just stand back and say, this factory-farmed beef is bad for the environment so we're just going to abstain from it. You never create that demand, you never drive that change, so just creating that demand is going to be important.
Diana: Right, and that's why I'm here fighting the fight and not full time in Costa Rica yet, living under a coconut tree, although sometimes I want to be there full time. But I completely agree with you, and to think that everybody is going to give up meat tomorrow is absolutely ridiculous, even for those folks that have personal reasons why they don't want to be eating meat. Actually there are a couple of them that have agreed to be interviewed for the film.
I do have a couple of folks who are vegan for personal reasons, but they realize that the rest of the population is probably not going to go vegan tomorrow and so what they can do is advocate for better meat. It's really great to see these folks accepting that and joining the cause for better meat because that's what we really need to be doing instead of just completely opting out.
Tommy: Absolutely. I guess on that note, that's part away your film project is going to come into play, so we want to make sure that that gets off the ground and then gets out to as many people as possible. So can you tell us about the timeline, what the plans are, how we can support it and get behind it so that we can make sure that that will happen.
Diana: My site, sustainabledish.com/film, will have more information about the film linked to the crowdfunder we've got. What we're really trying to raise enough money right now to do a couple of stories that then we can go and approach distribution folks and other major funders that will come on board and allow us to finish the filming, get into post-production and get it out there for people to see as quickly as possible.
[0:35:25]
The initial phase right now is to just help us get off the ground and help me get out of a little bit of personal debt that I've poured into this film because it's pretty much all of my money that I've now spent on it. We'll have more information -- some of the really cool perks include a stay at meat camp which is super fun. Belcampo runs a meat camp where you can go and actually stay at their farm and have gorgeous wine dinners. You can learn how to cook over an open fire. Thrive Market is on board. I've got a lot of really fun, cool perks for folks, so they can check that out.
Tommy: This is like a Kickstarter campaign so people can support that.
Diana: Yes, to help us just get off the ground and get this [0:36:07] [Indiscernible] going so that we can further launch into the film and get as many stories on there as possible.
Tommy: Okay, fantastic. Absolutely encourage everybody listening to this to go and check that out and support it. I think people in this sphere know that we're up against some pretty loud voices on the other side of this debate.
Diana: And a lot of money.
Tommy: And a lot of money, yeah, and it's obviously very personal, very emotional and so just creating something that puts together the important parts of the other side of the argument. It's not we're 100% right and they're 100% wrong but to move the discussion forward, we have to have a balanced debate, and this is going to be an important part of that so everybody should absolutely support it and go and do that.
Before we wrap up, is there anything else you'd like to mention, get people excited about this or any other work that you're doing currently?
Diana: This is my main squeeze right now. This is it. I do run a clinical nutrition practice here in Massachusetts, and I've called on another RD that's really educated in real food nutrition, to help me out with my client load as I wear all of my brain energy into getting this film off the ground. I'm a dietitian and farmer, so I have never done a film before so I'm on a steep learning curve, but I do have some great partners.
As I mentioned, I have an awesome director and a lot of other folks on board. We've got a really big list of supporters that people can learn more about, but we've got the full support of Robb Wolf, Mark Sisson, Chris Kresser. JP Sears is really excited about the film, and I'm a huge fan of his so we're going to try to figure out how we can -- because we don't want this to be one of those laying all this heavy stuff on you film. We want some lightness in there too. I think he's brilliant at poking fun at just dietary dogma in general.
So folks can follow me on Instagram, if they're on there, it's Sustainable Dish. Sign up for my newsletter and please help me support this film. It would really mean a lot, so, thank you.
Tommy: Absolutely. Thank you for joining me and for discussing all these topics, which I think are super important. Hopefully that helps people understand our part or their part of the story. Thanks again and I really hope that everybody gets on board and support your cause.
Diana: Thank you so much.
Tommy: Thank you.
[0:38:34] End of Audio
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