The RegenNarration Podcast
The RegenNarration podcast features the stories of a generation that is changing the story, enabling the regeneration of life on this planet. It’s ad-free, freely available and entirely listener-supported. You'll hear from high profile and grass-roots leaders from around Australia and the world, on how they're changing the stories we live by, and the systems we create in their mold. Along with often very personal tales of how they themselves are changing, in the places they call home. With award-winning host, Anthony James.
The RegenNarration Podcast
223. GROUNDED! Launching a Holistic Farming Festival (& a book on Milk), with Matthew Evans
A new holistic farming festival is about to launch back home in Australia. Inspired by the famed Groundswell in the UK, GROUNDED! lands in beautiful southern Tasmania on the 4th and 5th of December - with a pre-festival event on the 3rd of December too. It’s billed as a cross between a world class conference, an informative field day and a cracking food festival. This is big news, and a huge undertaking by some great folk. So with the draft program released, it was time to chat about it with founder Matthew Evans.
Matthew is also a farmer, and TV producer, and was recently called ‘perhaps the best food writer in the world today’, in a Country Life UK review of his new book. No surprise to us, having had Matthew on the podcast a few times now. So this gave us a chance to talk briefly about the new book too. It’s called ‘MILK: The truth, the lies, and the unbelievable story of the original superfood’. And as it lands in a context where milk and dairy are often reported to have large climate and biodiversity loss footprints, I’m all ears. All the more given my 30-year avoidance of the stuff!
This episode has chapter markers and a transcript (available on most apps now too). The transcript is AI generated and imperfect, but hopefully provides greater access for those who need or like to read.
Recorded 22 September 2024 (intro recorded outside by the wetland once the traffic had died down at night).
Title slide: Fat Pig Farm, the site of GROUNDED! (pic: from the festival website)
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Music:
Green Shoots, by The Nomadics.
Regeneration, by Amelia Barden, from Regenerating Australia.
The RegenNarration playlist, music chosen by guests (thanks to Josie Symons).
Find more:
Get tickets to GROUNDED!
Listen to ep.209, Ultrawilding with Steve Mushin.
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If that's the case, if soil health can be tied to plant health, animal health, human health, brain health, planetary health, then is there a way for farmers to be paid for nutrient density? Because that's the question. A nd so this is, for me this is a topic that would interest nutritionists, i t would influence people who are planning school meals. It would be of interest to people who are interested in farming systems generally or food systems generally. And yes, we're an event on farm by farmers, for farmers, but it's for farmers and their friends and their supporters, so people who are anywhere in that mix.
AJ:G'day Anthony James here for The RegenNarration - Ad-free, freely available and entirely supported by listeners like you. So thanks a lot, Edward Surgeon over in the Middle East, for very generously increasing your subscription this week and for sticking with me for almost three years now. You're a big part of why this is possible. Big gratitude your way. If you're also finding value in this, please join Edward and a great community of supporting listeners by just heading to the website via the show notes regennarration. com forward slash support. Thanks as always.
AJ:This week, as you can probably tell, I'm calling home. A new holistic farming festival is about to launch in a way that hasn't been done in Australia to date. Inspired by the famed Groundswell in the UK and, with their blessing, Grounded lands in beautiful southern Tasmania on the 4th and 5th of December, with a pre-festival event on the 3rd of December too. Ticket holders will be the first to learn of that. It's billed as a cross between a world-class conference, an informative field day and a cracking food festival. This is big and a huge undertaking by some great folk back home.
AJ:So, with the draft program released, it was time to get on the blower with founder Matthew Evans to talk about it. Matthew is also a farmer and TV producer and was recently called perhaps the best food writer in the world today, in a Country Life UK review of his new book. No surprise to us, having had Matthew on the podcast a few times now, so this gave us a chance to talk briefly about the new book too. It's called Milk: the Truth, the Lies and the Unbelievable Story of the Original Superfood. A nd, as it lands in a context where milk and dairy are often reported to have large climate and biodiversity loss footprints, I'm all ears, all the more given my 30 year avoidance of the stuff. A massive storm happened to hit Matthew's place at the time of our call, causing all sorts of trouble, but he found a safe hilltop with some range and, notwithstanding a glitch here and there, we found a way. Hello.
Matthew:Hey mate, how are you? The power just went out at home and the internet's gone, so I've just driven up the hill. It's crazy winds 152 kilometres an hour on Kanani 20 minutes ago so yeah.
AJ:You are joking, no, so you're on the phone in the car in the wind. Yeah, yeah.
Matthew:And if this reception isn't good, I can drive somewhere else.
AJ:No, it's remarkably good all things considered.
Matthew:Oh, now it's raining. The rain will add to the ambience.
AJ:Yeah well, I'm here in Savannah, Georgia in sweltering heat and I've come into the I mean, these are the things you do, right. In my case I'm in this sort of motel room and I'm facing into a cupboard, partly because I couldn't fit in the cupboard but partly because it's still the best sound in the house to face into the cupboard and air con off because it's a clunker and fridge is loud around the corner too. So I've come into this corner for multiple purposes but, fair to say, it's a bit hot. It's 30 degrees even still at 7 pm here, so crazy. And outside's lovely right now, but um, and I could have shown you a beautiful view over the wetlands around here, but for the, of course, too many machines. There's traffic not far away which can be loud, I guess someone's mowing, maybe with a tractor at 7pm on a Sunday night. It seems unstoppable at times. But I'll duck back out there later. But this will do our recording well enough, I think, and I'll just sweat it up and have a cold shower later.
Matthew:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, and I've got a million things I want to know about what you're doing, but we won't have time to cover much.
AJ:Exactly. Yeah, we'll get a good long conversation another time, but let's hit up our high priority at the moment. So, basically, earlier this year, before we left, we had a phone conversation with you contemplating a festival and wondering if it was crazy and easy enough to do. From my side, I'm not going to be here, but I think it's a great idea and you have to do it. But you actually have done it. What's happened between when we spoke and this? What's the story of how it's actually come to pass?
Matthew:So I spoke to a whole bunch of people. I spoke to people in national farming groups and, uh, you know, soil and land care groups and nrms and people like that, and and a lot of people were like, yeah, that sounds brilliant, you should do it, matthew. Uh, you should do it, matthew. And yeah, yeah. So, um, and then my wife went off the farm, she took a job off farm for the first time in seven years, eight years, and so I was left unchaperoned, essentially, and so, yeah, so this idea of having an on-farm conference, slash festival, slash field day, which I love the idea of, but I guess based on the groundswell model, so lots of different things happening at one time, so like a music festival where there's more than one tent, you know, there's more than one act happening at one time. You have to decide which one you're going to be at. That idea where you take learning but make it, you know, put it on farm, where farmers do better and learning, make it more fun by providing music and food stalls and a good bar, and then just piling on the information, but in a way that people are just going to be absorbing it almost by osmosis, and everyone thought it would be a great idea. So I put it together. We've got like over 40 demonstrators and talks and things going on over two days, three different marquees, lots of walk-arounds. I've planted wheat, anthony. I've planted not by hand, this time, I actually got a man with a tractor and we've planted wheat and we've done a wheat trial with two different seed coatings, two different methods of planting, to see what happens, because this area has never been arable really, and yet we fatten pigs and we have chickens, so't we grow some grain to to be able to support that? You know, shouldn't we be? We provide everything for our table except the flour. Essentially, that goes into the breads and, um and pastries that we make. Um, yeah, well, I'm not going to do sugar, so, yeah. So there's a few things we don't do. We're not growing pepper except pepper. But what I wanted to do was show what can you do on farm, what are the ideas that people have got, and I wanted to value, I guess, everything from ancient wisdom to modern technology. So, whether it's the latest bee nose, the little soil bee nose that can smell the microbial activity in soil through electronic means, or whether it's someone like Terry McCosker with their sort of you know 30-35 years of of regenerating landscapes and put all of that on one site over two days. And so that's what I've done and, yeah, we've got the draft program out now, which is looking crack, and we've got eight international speakers. We've got about 20 speakers from around Australia.
Matthew:It's. It's scarily someone described it as ambitious the other day, which I really that made me clench. We're not trying to be ambitious, but I just wanted to put a whole bunch of ideas together, things that I might enjoy, that others would enjoy, because we know there's lots of people out there with this sort of pent-up demand for knowledge. So it's like, well, how can we get as much knowledge on you know down at one time? And then and we're going to film it all so if you can't be at one of the sessions, you could watch catch up later. If you can't make it to see us, then, um, you know you'll be able to look at it later. It's never. I mean, I've been to stuff where I've thought I'll catch up later and it's's only the stuff you really, really want to see that you're going to catch up on later. But on the ground, yeah, you'll be able to watch.
Matthew:You know probably 20 different things, if you want, over the two days. If you come with someone else, you can divide and conquer and then compare notes. There'll be lots of social interactions. We'll open the gates about 7.30, have some coffee and pastry and a bit of farmer stretching going on and maybe a bird safari, insect safari, go and see all the beneficial insects and then we'll get into the hardcore stuff for a few hours during the day. Everything from you know how the soil microbiome inoculates the human microbiome, that kind of like, sort of like, that kind of esoteric stuff. To what cover crops do you need to grow to get a better yield out of your cat, your cattle? You know what? What's the latest on that out of the um lincoln university in new zealand?
AJ:yeah, yeah, you say there's a pent-up appetite for knowledge. Certainly one of the key threads of the five months so far across the states that we've seen has been more of this stuff, this stuff encased in festival and to such effect that it's gone way beyond what the program might suggest. Way beyond, for example, you know, the very compelling and comprehensive outline you've given and even some other things that I saw in the draft program that suggest terrific curation but outcomes that just sort of you know, alchemically, almost spring out of the fact that it's not. I don't want to be unkind to conferences. We've had some great conferences, but not just a conference, not just the knowledge, it's the arts, it's the crafts, it's the in connection with the land, it's, dare I say, it's joy.
AJ:There's something else that seems to happen such that well, we've seen plenty of this coming across this country because it seems it's being valued. In some cases has been for a little while, like groundswell, but in other cases for a short while, like old salt festival in montana, two years in, and one such example that's just bringing an outcome and leaving people with sensations that's transcend farming altogether. It's just something more about the human presence in the world, it seems so. I guess it's part of why I was all guns blazing for you to find a way, and great that you have.
Matthew:Yeah, I think you've nailed it there, anthony, because we can come up with a bunch of topics. I go to conferences quite a bit, sometimes stuff I'm not necessarily thinking I'm that interested in, and then I'd come away and I've learned a bit of stuff. But the magic, the magic moment, is the bits in between, the threads in between. So it's that chance bumping into someone when you first arrive, when you're in the queue to check in, and realizing they're on the same journey as you, or they're 20 years further on that same journey as you. Or that moment where you sit down and you go my brain's full. Or that moment where you sit down and you go my brain's full I can't bear to learn another thing and you sit down and have a regenerative beer, sitting next to someone who you've just heard on a panel, and you get to pick their brains about something that maybe is completely unrelated to what you do on your farm and what they do in their science or on their farm. And that's when, for me, the magic happens, and so all we can do is put the things in place for that to happen. So give you some talks that would you know, maybe. Exercise your brain, give you the opportunity to socialise, give you some music so you can just let your hair down and relax and give and have a lot and have a couple of days of that so you're really immersed in it.
Matthew:And and I was talking about how we're filming this and I'm not there's nothing wrong with that.
Matthew:It's a great way of storing knowledge, but there's nothing like being there, and I think that we all know that from covid.
Matthew:You know we haven't got anyone beaming in their presentations because, much as that is a beautiful way of sharing knowledge, what we wanted was this the personal connection. And what I dream of is that people go away with not only this good feeling about the planet and about farming and how farming better can help the planet, help them, help with their mental health, help with the soil, health, whatever it is that they want to get out of it, but they've got the tools to put that into place the very next day. So it's not just this euphoric feeling which you get sometimes when you go to events, but it's maybe this feeling of connection to other people who are in the same boat, a knowledge to be able to farm better or to manage landscapes better or to advise your clients better if you're someone dealing with land managers and the skill set or the ability to reach out to know where the next thing happens. So the day after you leave you can actually make change on a landscape.
AJ:Yeah, speaking of being there, geez, I wish I could be there. It has been hovering that maybe we still might, but I don't think it's going to happen. The call continues over here for the moment, but I'm curious, matthew, as to who is coming. I note it's not just for Farmers' Right, it's a broader, community-facing thing.
Matthew:Yeah, and I think that's where where the thing I'm most excited about anthony, and this is like my little thing, but but what I, what I think is beautiful is we're going to explore this connection between soil health, uh, plant health, animal health and human health, and then all the way up to planetary health. And so we've got, you know, people who are, who are right into the soil microbiome. We've got people who are like dan kittredge, the bionutrient food association out of the us. We're bringing him over to talk about how farming system affects the nutrient density of food and what what nutrient density is. We've got people like felice jacker, who's a nutritional psychiatrist, who can talk about how what you eat affects your brain health. Stacyacey Kirchhoff is, you know, a nutritionist but an interest in farming, and so she's going to sort of thread, you know, I guess, between Dan and Felice. You know how what you eat affects your body, and then Felice is more about how what you eat affects your gut, which affects your brain, and there's beautiful connections between all of that. And so I think what, what I'm trying to do with that is just that's just one thread of the many is to say, well, let's, let's unpick this, let's and can.
Matthew:If that's the case, if soil health can be tied to plant health, animal health, human health, brain health, planetary health, then is there a way for farmers to be paid for nutrient density? Because that's the question, and so this is for me, this is a topic that would interest nutritionists. It would influence people who are planning school meals, it would be of interest to people who are interesting in farming systems generally or food systems generally. And, yes, we're an event on farm by farmers for farmers, but it's for farmers and their friends and their supporters, so people who are in in anywhere in that that mix. Well, there's a lovely woman out of new zealand, angela clifford. She's very interested in how regenerative systems, you know, go from that first mile of that first thing that happens, you know, off on the farm, and then what happens and processing where the stuff goes off farm, and then what happens in that last bit, so how does it get into the mouths of the most vulnerable or the most needy or the you know, and that sort of stuff. So we're exploring food generally, and farming obviously is the heart and soul of that.
Matthew:Yes, but what we're exploring, I guess, is way more broad, in the sense of, you know, we're even looking at finance. Like, honestly, anthony, for me it's got to be the most boring topic ever, right, I can't read a spreadsheet, which is basically bad when you're running a festival, right, and money really matters, right, and chatting to these wonderful people from well, from Stuart in the US. We've got Bridget Helgson I think her last name is from Stuart, you know on different ways to finance farming or things associated with farming, like milling of grain and stuff like that, and so I'm suddenly getting interested in the money side. You know, like, how do we actually bankroll the people who are doing things better?
AJ:Yeah, yeah, yeah, good one. Speaking of which, how do you bankroll a festival? Yeah.
Matthew:Yeah, that's a really good question, anthony. Look, it's very. I've got a friend who's a merchant, he's a chartered accountant and he's volunteering as treasurer on our committee. Look, there's a lot of goodwill, there's the Bank of Sadie and Matthew and only one of those is. One of those is very yeah yeah, yeah.
Matthew:One of those is nervous and the other one's very nervous. Oh look, the numbers don't look good. You don't run a festival. The advice I got, anthony, when I first came up with this idea a friend who'd run festivals and sort of food-associated and agriculture-associated festivals. She said to me first things you've got to decide are how much money do you want to lose? And the second is take the number of people you want to do it for and divide it by 10, and then do a really small event. So you work out. You never want to do it again. So that was the advice I got in my first week. So, apart from that, though, everyone was a bit like you being really positive about it going. Yeah, yeah, matthew, you can do this. What I'm realizing now, anthony, is that none of them have skin in the game. So they're all still very excited for me to do it, but none of them have a risk. So, look, I can tell you, the numbers on any level do not look great financially for this first one, but we believe this is an event that will have legs, and I also believe in doing things that will do good. So it might be that I work all year for no gain, or it might be. I work all year, even lose some money on this, but that's not the point.
Matthew:The point is to say, well, I don't think anyone's put together a program like this on food and farming in Australia before right, and that sounds like I'm, you know, big-headed, but I just think that's the truth. I don't, you know, it's not like I'm some kind of fucking genius. Truth, I don't. You know it's not like I'm some kind of fucking genius, like I'm just a bloke having a go. And I've been lucky that people have said, yes, they'll come. Whether it's james rebanks, the shepherd, you know, the best-selling author out of the uk, or whether it's, you know, um, anita fleming, the, the research, the farm, dairy farm researcher from, from new zealand. People have very kindly said they'd come across in and I, haggardy chler from, from West Australia.
Matthew:We've got, you know, all these people have been very helpful and supportive and they're doing it for.
Matthew:You know, I can be really honest.
Matthew:They're not doing it for the money, um, as as I'm not, and it's this beautiful thing that I think what's happening is all these people would like, you know, like-minded people are saying, wow, wouldn't this be great to have this happen, and then what we'd like to do is, I guess, scale it up on the mainland because, you know, we're in southern Tassie, we're limited size and scope, but let's work out how we can do this every year and have this as a celebration of the good things, because farming comes in for a beating all the time.
Matthew:Let's have this as a celebration of all the good things that farming does. Yes, a place where you can value all this knowledge, this wisdom, all of the latest science, but also not forget that there's a lot of embedded knowledge in the people who walk this land, whether that's Indigenous people who have done it for 60,000 years, or whether it's farmers who've practised a different form of agriculture for seven or eight generations. We've got people coming who, for you, know seven or eight generations. We've got people coming who've been running farms, for you know, seven or eight generations in Australia, and there's an amount of wisdom there that we should never forget, we should always value and never forget, is as important as the latest science in terms of how we manage this landscape.
AJ:I couldn't agree more with all of that, matthew, including what you've bitten off, but the importance of it and the prospects of it and for what it's worth. You know that old salt festival. For one, the first year sounded a lot like this. The second year, which they'd just run before I got there in June, actually did break even and made a little bit. So it can be done. It seems it has to. You know, you have to lead, you have to just get it done, to start set the model, but it doesn't have to stay a ball breaker in future.
Matthew:Yeah, look, and from my perspective, you know, I looked at some of the cost of some of these other things that are going on and we've got early bird tickets at $400. So you've got 40 sessions over two days. You know, um, uh, it doesn't include. You know we'll have some food on site. It won't be expensive. You like bowls of soup and you know pizza and stuff like that. So you have to buy your own food. You bring your own food, I don't care.
Matthew:But 400 bucks for a two-day conference including some music, you know, workshops and all sorts of stuff is we're trying to make it accessible and for me that's really important to say look, this is, this is knowledge that we should try to impart. And, and you know, it might have been a better business model to charge six or eight hundred bucks and just have, you know, half the people and and not have as many workshops, all that sort of stuff. But what I wanted, I guess, was say this is let's see if we can do this in a way that mimics that idea of a writers' festival or a music festival where there's something for everybody. So, because you know, you probably go to things as well as I do where there's a really great speaker, but they're covering stuff that you kind of knew five years ago or 10 years ago or even six months ago. And then you go to something else that maybe at that same set you know conference, and there's something that's way over your head and you're like, oh my God, like he's talking to the people next to you. Do you understand that? I can't understand that.
Matthew:Well, what's beautiful about this is it's saying you make your own plan, you find your own path through and, being intense, it's got this beautiful thing where, if you're in a marquee, you can stand at the back and go.
Matthew:Oh, I don't know if this will be over my head. Oh, hang on, it's pretty good, I'll find a seat, or no, this is stuff I already know, or it's a bit over my head, whatever I this stuff I already know, or it's a bit over my head, whatever I might go off to do something else, or my brain hurts. You know what I'm just going to go and you know, learn how to make a native bee hotel out of blackberry leaves or something with their local entomologist. Or you know, go and check out the cover crop trial and look at the root zone and see how that's going. You know, whatever it might be, check out the no dig market garden, and so I think that's a really lovely way of of tailoring it to um the individual, because we don't have to tailor it, we just provide all the stuff, and then you make your own adventure terrific.
AJ:I'm also conscious that on that draft program there is a session called the milk shake-up. Now, does this give us our segue to your latest book this year?
Matthew:yeah, it's. It's interesting. Look, there are a few sessions on dairy. We've got it. You've got a couple of organic dairy farmers, uh, coming from new south wales. I've actually got a dairy farmer organic dairy farmer coming from the uk, um, who happens to be doing her nuffield who's is in australia. Um, sophie aplin, and um, yeah, so I guess I'm interested in milk. Yeah, I've always been interested in milk, but I have a heightened appreciation now because I just put out this book on milk on. You know it's called Milk, but I guess it covers dairy more broadly and I wanted that to be part of the conversation because I think it's a big part of farming and it sometimes gets left off the agenda. And I also want to have a milkshake stand as well, because you know I just love a milkshake, don't you love a milkshake?
AJ:Well, I used to. All right, this is brilliant, give me the perfect segue because I used to love a milkshake as a young guy, oh yeah. But my dairy story is that I stopped Well, I stopped, certainly, with milk and most dairy in my early 20s and I stopped with meat too, right. So I went vegetarian and I wouldn't say vegan, because there were still bits of cheese and maybe the occasional bit of yogurt or something, but not much, and like stopping meat at the time it felt like a health boost for me. I came to pay the price later for at least my body type and meat's come back, and you know I converged with this movement and so it makes sense in a way that meat didn't before. You know, the industrial model that you've written about is a horror. So I have a way into meat for my personal health. That doesn't contradict those ethics and values, and that's been a revelation. And the fact that dairy sort of layering on top of that now is very interesting, because someone who stopped having milk and most dairy in his early twenties stopped snoring. I should say this is part of what was making me think, oh, yeah, yeah, because I remember.
AJ:I remember reading one particular I don't know what, what book it was, but it was one of these, theses that suggests it's not a healthy thing for humans, and it was a line that said, why would we consider the product of a cow, another species with four stomachs, and for calves who, like, quadruple their weight in some unbelievable short amount of time, would be good for us?
AJ:And I thought, oh yeah, that makes that sounds like it makes sense and that sort of never left me as one of those sort of real pivot frames that underpinned my decision. Then fast forward to being at Churchtown Dairy in New York just a few weeks ago and having raw milk for the first time ever and having even just the smell of, you know, industrial milk around me at times in cafes, putting me off still thinking I'm still not a milk guy, but having a taste of this raw milk and it was beautiful. It was a moment I said in the podcast I was like what's becoming of me, but this is something I mean. You're not a big milk drinker yourself, but yet through this book you've been blown away in similar kind of terms. It sounds like.
Matthew:Yeah, and it's that interesting thing.
Matthew:So I milk a cow. I don't have any issues drinking milk. It doesn't make me snore, it doesn't make me, you know, I don't get any problems. I can drink liters of the stuff you know, but I don't actually drink. You know a lot of milk, but it is.
Matthew:I think, writing the book, I was expecting to write a lot more about plant milks and less about, you know, dairy. But when I explored it, like the stuff that's in all milk and I cover, you know, human breast milk and seal milk and wolf milk and all sorts of stuff, but I focus on the two milks we consume the most, which are, you know, human breast milk and cow's milk. And cow's milk is 90 identical to human breast milk. So there's a lot of stuff in cow's milk that is the same as in human breast milk. So there are big differences but there's a lot of components that are identical. And so we've done this 10 000 year experiment where humans have consumed cow's milk and worked out ways to make it more digestible by fermenting it and processing it and things like that. And it's done important that we consume um milk as infants, ideally human breast milk, um, but if we're going to get rid of it, then what's the repercussions? And so I try to look at it and say, well, what's it done for humanity gastronomically, what's it done for us historically, what's it done for us culturally and what's it done for us nutritionally? And I think that's where I I was blown away by dairy was what it has in it that has the potential to do us good. And, and it's interesting, you're talking about the raw milk. I just had a chef visiting and, um, they were staying at the house and um, a couple um, and I gave her a taste of the cow's milk, the um bessie. I'm milking two cows, bessie and myrtle at the moment. I gave her um, actually it was myrtle's milk. I gave her a glass of myrtle's milk and she said, oh, my god, that's sweet, that's amazing. That doesn't taste like milk, like I know milk. And I was like, well, that does taste like milk. That's actually what milk is.
Matthew:What you're used to is something that's gone through a whole bunch of other processes, and so I guess what I'm interested in is are those processes, what are they doing to milk? And oftentimes, well, pretty much every time we, from the way we treat soil to the grass, to how we treat the cow, to how we treat the milk once it comes out of the cow, how many pipes it goes through, how it's pumped, how it's heated or not heated, whether it's homogenised or not. Every single process in that has an impact on the way the milk is, uh, the nutrient composition of the milk and also the way it's absorbed into our body. And so it turns out that the least processed, the least steps in that, and the and the most varied diet of the cow and the healthier the soil, that's going to be the best milk for us. There's a lot of people have little um issues with milk, so they might be able to consume some amount of dairy, but not a lot, and they think it's lactose. It's often not. And there might be other issues with milk, with the proteins that have been altered through the way it's been processed, and so you know what I don't want us to do is say, oh well, milk's making everybody sick and just get rid of it.
Matthew:Actually, at the moment, three quarters of the world's population are pretty much dependent on dairy for a substantial part of their nutrition. So you get rid of dairy at humanity's peril and you can get rid of it, but you're going to have to replace it with something. And when you look at the nutrient density of dairy and milk is nothing that is comparable. It's the most complex lipid fat known to humanity. And then you add in the. You know, in cow's milk there's 4654 different proteins over a cow's lactation. There's a lot of complexity in there. That's what we know of. Plus, there's all these complex sugars, there's things that affect, you know, there's micro rna that affects the way our dna behaves, so it has an impact on our genetic code. And so if you get rid of that, you can't just replace dairy with almonds or with cashews or with soy. You have to replace it with 10 different things.
Matthew:And I think that's where we kind of make the mistake is we go, well, we can just replace it with, you know, milk, with oat milk, and expect, you know, nutritionally that we're in the same position. And the reality is we're not. Oat milk, if you make it at home, is real food, but if you buy the stuff in a carton, it comes in, you know, six layers or seven layers of virgin materials, unrecycled and unrecyclable. So it's an environmental catastrophe from that point. The oatmeal guy by here comes from singapore, that home of the oat. You know the massive oat farms they've got in singapore not. And then it's all this other stuff added. So our bodies essentially don't recognize it as food. They recognize it as an ultra processed product. So our bodies are a bit confused by it.
Matthew:And so if you want to have the oat milk to make your coffee whiter or because you think you're saving the planet, that's fine, but it's not doing you any good, it's potentially doing you harm. If you're having dairy and you don't have any allergies or intolerances, it's probably doing you good, potentially doing you great good. So if you get rid of the dairy, you're going to have to add in a whole bunch of other things into your diet. You're going to have to be thinking a lot more about what goes in your standard Western diet.
Matthew:Get rid of dairy? Well, you can't just get rid of dairy and replace it with a plant milk. It just doesn't work that way and the evidence out of the UK is compelling. So they've found that hospitalizations in the UK have something like tripled in 10 years because of people eating less dairy and having more plant milks is a major part of that, and it's mostly women of childbearing age. So there's real-world repercussions of us removing dairy from the diet and not doing it sensibly.
Matthew:So to your question about why we're doing it at the conference, at Grounded, at the festival, we want to cover a little bit of that. But we just want to cover the fact that this is a product that we know it's lower impact than meat in terms of how much protein you can produce. We know it's a complex substance, so how can we, can that be integrated into a modern farming system that's good for the planet? Or is it something you know that we maybe need to? You know, consume less of but better of? Or you know, how does how does that need to look and what does it look like at the moment?
AJ:Yes, well, even just in that little question which I appreciate too, by the way the festival program's drafted in very question form, as an inquiry, and a communal inquiry at that, and these are the common themes that come through, whether we're talking about meat or milk or whatever it's how do we shift the overarching frame and make choices along those lines? And it was part of my dilemma around what I'd started to find out about soy farms and oat farms and the packaging and the miles, and so I sort of dropped the lot. But yeah, relearning.
Matthew:Yeah, and you had that really interesting conversation.
Matthew:I can't remember the guy's name, but I've got his book which is sort of reimagining cities and how we can I think he lives in Melbourne but how we can sort of recycle waste and reimagine how to grow food, and it was a really interesting conversation.
Matthew:And he's very much a vegan and he lives in a city and I was interested in your chat with him because oftentimes we forget that if, like, how is it going to look?
Matthew:What's the future look like? Is it going to be a city fringed with factories, you know, producing microbe meat and microbe dairy, which is what some people are suggesting, and then nobody living in the country, or just people living in in the regions who are, you know, just there, as you know, I don't know what they'd be doing, or does it look like it does now, but with sensible farming systems that are looking after ecosystems, looking after biodiversity, looking after natural capital, um, and producing nutrient dense food for the for, for everybody else, and um, and maybe we need some, you know some factories with fermenting chambers, um, producing some protein stuff to put in ultra-processed food. But I think we risk a lot by just throwing out farming and saying it's inherently evil and replacing it with other stuff. And I was interested in your conversation with him because you had been through that journey of almost veganism back to meat and saying, well, meat can be and animals can be healing to country as much as they can be harmful to country.
AJ:Indeed, and almost the giant piece that was left off that conversation I thought it had sort of run its course on the day, but was the nutrition piece and the fact that it came up in our conversations around soil and meat previously too, on your previous books, didn't it? You can try and engineer something close to the miracle of what you said 4,600 proteins or something. But good luck, and do you, do we want to be doing that?
Matthew:well, yeah, and that just on that. The really easy number to remember on that one, um, anthony, is that that they're, when they make these fake dairies, they're going to have maybe six, maybe 10 proteins in to replace milk proteins. So 10 versus 4654. So that's, that's where we're going to be at in terms of replacing dairy with factory-made dairy. So there's a really easy number for you yeah, yeah it.
AJ:So I want to know two things. Firstly, give us a one-minute summary just for the purposes of this conversation, right here now. We'll go into more depth another time On the miracle of breast milk.
Matthew:Okay. So I think breast milk blew my mind. And what's really beautiful. When I've been giving talks, there's always been a woman breastfeeding at the talks and this is lovely. And women have come up to me and said, oh, the book has made me feel validated for the effort I went to to breastfeed my child. I didn't really understand the vitality of it. So I guess what breast milk made me realize was that milk is not just nutrients. You kind of go, oh, it's got lots of high-quality protein and nutrients, whatever. Yes, it's got fats and proteins and carbohydrates. Yes, it's got minerals and vitamins. Yes, it's got all these micronutrients.
Matthew:But it's actually a form of communication. And so a baby and a mother. There is intimate communication that happens at the cell level between a baby and a mother. So a mother tailors her milk in real time to the baby. That is suckling from her that she suckles, so that's a miracle. That's utterly amazing her you know that she suckles, so that's a miracle. That's utterly amazing. And you've got so you've got this a grown person with a fully mature immune system, um, and a tiny infant barely formed with a very weak immune system. Wouldn't it be great to have a pipe just to pipe the, you know the immunity from one to the other. Where we do, and that is through the breast milk. It's beautiful.
AJ:It's incredible. All right, mate to close, you've got music at the festival. What stands out, who's on? And we'll take that as our parting salvo.
Matthew:Well, so we've got um, well, hopefully, the opening night. We got a little um, a separate ticketed event for interstaters and we'll put the tickets up soon. But that's with uh, esther, um, esther wood, I think her name is. She used to be a singer with Kylie Minogue, but she runs the local health food store. And then we've got Claire Ann Taylor, who has been travelling the world, who's got this sort of smoky, husky voice, so she's coming with a trio to sing. She just lives just up the road here in Mountain River, so she's going to be bringing her beautiful tones to the farm. We might even get the stranded whalers. You know it's hard to get away without having a group of men doing the baritone you know, yeah, wonderful, wonderful, jeez, that's good mate.
AJ:Let's do a big debrief on this afterwards too. Eh, yeah, yeah, love to Terrific mate. Well, it's still amazing, notwithstanding the weather and difficulties that we've had to go to to get this happening, but that we could From Savannah, georgia, to the top of a hill near your place in Tasmania. I'm glad we did too. It's great to see you, mate, and power to you.
Matthew:No nice to speak, and I'll just have to keep up with you on the pod because we didn't get to talk about what you're doing.
AJ:Yes, stay tuned, i n all your spare time. You've been listening to Matthew Evans, food writer, farmer and founder of the new festival Grounded, taking place at his place, Fat Pig Farm, in beautiful southern Tasmania. Tickets are available now via the festival website Links in the show notes, as usual, and kudos to Sadie, Georgie and everyone who's helping to make the festival possible. We're sorry not to be able to join you, but we'll sure be there in spirit. Thanks to subscribing listeners for making this episode possible too. Special nod to you, Sadie, for being there since almost the very beginning. If you'd like to join us brilliant, Just head to the website or the show notes and follow the prompts. Thanks, too, for sharing the podcast wherever you can.
AJ:Incidentally, if you missed the news a few weeks ago, Chris Henggeler, the bloke Matthew mentioned, who'll be at the festival from all the way over in northwest Western Australia, features on Australian Story in a month or so, just ahead of the festival, and some other big news pending. And if you missed that chat with the city-dwelling vegan, tune in to episode 209, Ultraw ilding with Steve Mushen. I'll link to that in the show notes too. The music you're hearing is Regeneration by Amelia Barden, and at the top it's Green Shoots by the Nomadics. My name's Anthony James. Thanks for listening.
