Dan Kittredge: On the Cusp of a Nutrition-Led Revolution?

Welcome to a special 250th episode of the podcast! Are we on the cusp of a revolution in the nutritional content of our food? One that could change everything? Dan Kittredge thinks so. And he’s about to launch his next global effort to that end. 

When you get a chance to speak with the man who’s been called the global steward of nutrient density in food, the man who developed the very term ‘nutrient density’, you don’t necessarily expect it to go as big and broad as this conversation did. But then maybe should I have. 

Dan Kittredge is living one heck of a life, and as founder of the Bionutrient Food Association, goes as far as to say they're on the cusp of achieving their mission - that a revolution in the nutritional content of our food could happen within the next five years. It will be driven by farmers being rewarded for producing quality food, and set in tow enormous benefits for human and planetary health – from the physical to the meta-physical, and back again.

Indeed, this has been the nature of Dan’s journey, wandering from his roots with pioneering organic farming parents, across all sorts of intellectual and spiritual disciplines, experiencing the limitations of each, before arriving at an epiphany. 

Now he’s increasingly invited to engage with communities all around the world. And this month he launches a new program to spur the vision along. Those of us who won’t get to attend the program will get a chance to hear how it goes too, at the next major RegenWA Conference in Perth in September.

Chapter markers & transcript.

Recorded 14 February 2025.

Music:

Dan singing.

Stones & Bones, by Owls of the Swamp.

Together Road, by Paper Planes (from Artlist).

Regeneration, by Amelia Barden.

The RegenNarration playlist, music chosen by guests.

Find more:

My conversation with Fred Provenza.

And with Manchan Magan, igniting some of my ancestral roots. 

Chapters

• 0:00 250th episode intro, preview & music
• 3:30 Dan’s first visit to Australia
• 7:20 How Dan came to his insights
• 9:35 His parents’ journey, book & influence
• 10:30 The Transformative Potential of Collaboration
• 14:50 Surprise connections to ancestral lands
• 18:50 Interacting with Nutrient Density
• 21:45 When Dan’s life really gets interesting
• 25:00 Off to India
• 28:30 A profound vision
• 34:15 Confronted by the realisation growing ‘organic’ wasn’t enough
• 38:10 Founding the Bionutrient Food Association (BFA)
• 39:00 The Vision and Mission of the Bionutrient Food Association
• 41:10 How the movement is building, in varied political contexts
• 47:30 Just about everybody gets it
• 52:00 Creating off-ramps for people
• 53:25 What Dan is seeing during the Trump term
• 56:55 What to do if power structures hamper us, but politics is such a side show?
• 1:00:30 The art of engaging & disengaging
• 1:03:05 On the cusp of breakthrough - farmers getting paid for nutrient density?
• 1:07:50 The hand-held metre measuring nutrient density
• 1:10:45 Launching a certified course in Australia & NZ this month
• 1:15:50 Open sourcing it all
• 1:18:50 Getting an update at the next RegenWA conference
• 1:20:40 An invitation & invocation
• 1:22:40 Dan singing & closing words

Transcript

Dan: 0:00

The more I thought about it, the more I'm like you know, this is a really good idea. This is a really good idea. Somebody should have done this before. Why is no one doing this? I'm like, wow, that's a really good idea. This could actually, with nothing else I've done in my entire life, if I just did this for like three years, globally it could leave an amazing impact. By simply calling the game and saying who wants to come together and really coordinate, collaborate, synergize. That's the only way forward.

AJ: 0:33

Are we on the cusp of a revolution in the nutritional content of our food, one that could change everything? Dan Kittredge thinks so, and he's about to launch his next global effort to that end. When you get a chance to speak with the man who's been called the global steward of nutrient density in food, the man who developed the very term nutrient density, you don't necessarily expect it to go as big and broad as this conversation did, but then maybe I should have. Dan Kittredge is living one heck of a life and, as founder of the Bionutrient Food Association, goes as far as to say that they're on the cusp of achieving their mission, that a revolution in the nutritional content of our food could happen within the next five years, and that that'll be driven by farmers being rewarded for producing quality food and that will set in tow enormous benefits for human and planetary health. From the physical to the metaphysical and back again, indeed, this has been the nature of Dan's personal journey. Dan had wandered from his roots, with pioneering organic farming parents, across all sorts of intellectual and spiritual disciplines, experiencing the limitations of each before arriving at an epiphany. Growing and eating organic isn't enough, and coming back to our nutrition-oriented senses is key to everything. In subsequent decades he's been increasingly invited to engage with communities all around the world, and this month he launches a new program to spur the vision along. We're all invited, and those of us who won't get to attend the program will get a chance to hear how it goes later this year at the next major RegenWA conference in Perth in September.

AJ: 2:30

G'day Anthony James here for a very special 250th episode of The RegenNarration, your independent, listener-supported portal into the regenerative era. I couldn't be happier to mark the occasion with Dan, though of course it's all with thanks to super generous listeners like Nadine Hollamby and Kristy Brydon. Thanks for being paid subscribers for over three years now, making all this possible. If you're not yet part of this great community of supporting listeners, I'd love you to join us. Get benefits if you like and help keep the show on the road. Just follow the links in the show notes.

AJ: 3:04

With my enormous gratitude, an actually recently visited Australia for the Grounded Festival and some other stuff, but we connected when he had a brief window back home on his farm in Massachusetts, just as I had a brief window down the road a bit in Maryland. So we recorded on Valentine's Day, which, as I've learned in the States is a more universal affair, not just for romantic couples, n the name of universal love. hen, here's Dan. Oh, dan, it's good to meet Likewise. DK: Likewise, a hundred percent. AJ: I've heard your name over the years. You're one of those people that it's like yeah, can't wait to speak to Dan or meet at some stage. And of course, I wasn't at the festival in the end in Australia and you were yeah, but hey, before we go any further, happy Valentine's Day, happy.

Dan: 3:52

Valentine's.

AJ: 3:52

Day to you. You've got a warming fire behind you too. I do.

Dan: 3:57

I do. I have a nice Russian stove here. I built off my land and it's the only heat in my house and it's below freezing and windy today, so it's a good place to sit right in front of the fire.

AJ: 4:11

I'm a little south of you, of course, but yeah, it's cold enough. I think we're just above freezing today, and for a West Australian, that does test the metal a bit, I'll admit

Dan: 4:23

A t's not below zero, it's only below freezing.

AJ: 4:24

That's right. I believe that's coming next week. We might have to head south. But yeah, you hadn't been to Australia before, is that right? K hadn't been to the Southern Hemisphere. AJ: There you go, so how was it?

Dan: 4:35

It was quite exciting, it was wonderful to come down. I mean I was struck by the caliber of people, just the sheer level of like knowledge and skill and wisdom and capacity. Wherever I went, I I mean, I I think I stopped. I did like six or seven lectures in australia and three or four in new zealand and it was really impressive. I was like, wow, you guys, there's, there's a lot of you don't need to look anywhere for all the knowledge. You guys already have it all. You guys already have everything down here and maybe a few of us in the rest of the world could learn a few things from you guys more than we already have. So that was my takeaway was, um, a very high caliber of knowledge and and experience and capacity, etc yeah, so what did you do?

AJ: 5:23

So you went to Grounded Festival, obviously, where you made a real impression, I heard, and you did other things too, yeah, it was.

Dan: 5:31

I mean, there was a couple of keynotes at Grounded which was wonderful, Great, great, great group, great ambiance, everything. I did a couple of half-day things, I did a couple of full-day things, a a couple evening lectures, just a mix. I didn't do any of the full courses which I'm hoping to come down and do starting in March and April, but yeah, it was just my first time in the country and various people had heard I was coming and set me up with places to speak and people came and had a good time and yeah, it was wonderful. As usual, there's amazing people all over the world and you get to go, I get to go and meet them all and then they come in. Yeah, some brilliant people come and hear me speak. I'm like what are you doing? Coming to hear me? You're pretty damn cool. How far did you come to hear me? What?

AJ: 6:20

I noted that you were responsible for people's eggs in the mornings too at Grounded. So as much a hit for what you did bring to the table intellectually as what you brought to the literal table for breakfast.

Dan: 6:31

Part of being on the road. A lot is good basic bodily maintenance and one of those things I think is a proper farm breakfast if at all possible. So I try to stay at people's houses and, if I can, I try to make a nice breakfast. And, yeah, it was an amazing opportunity to make scrambled eggs for 15 there and all the organizers were there and the host and it was just great and it was wonderful. It was a wonderful, wonderful time. Yeah, it's community, right, I mean just culture and community and that's what we're all doing here. It's just being humans together, yeah.

AJ: 7:04

So yeah, right on, I'm very glad we started there, given what the material we're going to talk about. That that's the foundation of it all. Still, I also noted, when I spoke with Sadie and Matthew in a bit of a debrief on the festival for the podcast, that Sadie cited you calling on us to engage with the earth as a sentient being rather than a factory floor, which makes me instantly curious what the journey was for you to come to that understanding.

Dan: 7:34

Yeah, how long do you have? How many details do you want? I can go for a long time talking about my story, but I mean, is there a crux of that.

AJ: 7:45

I don't know if it was a transformation for you or was it an emergence. Given your, your parents and everything, they did something around that particular insight that dawned on you I think it's been an evolutionary process.

Dan: 7:59

Um, I, I mean, I've had spiritual transformations that have happened spontaneously, but as it comes to this deeper process and all of the work I'm doing, it's been a. You know, it's like the path. You just take the next step on the path and don't worry about steps two and three and four because you haven't taken step one yet. Four because you haven't taken step one yet. And if you just keep following the inner guidance of what the right thing is to do, you got multiple choices and you know what the right thing is to do. Just just take one step. Don't worry about steps. Like I said, five, six and seven are completely irrelevant. Two, three and four even is you in your head in the future, which is not reality. So just stay present and follow it.

Dan: 8:45

Um, yeah, no, it's been. I mean, I, I, I think I'm blessed to have been brought up on a homestead, back to the land operation, you know, with a milk cow and a wood stove and, um, freezing and canning and not buying stuff from the store. Uh, chopping our own wood, I think, I think, um, that's a complete blessing in today's day and age, especially at least for a white American male. Not many of us have been brought up with that and it may have been quite normal a while ago and I think a lot of other things were quite normal, like honor and integrity and culture a while ago that are being denuded like our soil. Yeah, it's been a process.

AJ: 9:28

I'd love to pick up a couple of those threads as we go, Dan, but let's start with your parents, Noting that they also wrote a book. Many Hands Make a Farm yeah, and given that the farm is Many Hands Organic Farm. I noted also that the foreword was written by Leah Penniman from Soil Fire Farm. Yeah, and this line really stood out to me. I mean, she talked about the invaluable guidance and so forth in her work at her farm, but she said they have also shown me and so many others how to love across differences, how to tell the truth and what it is to live. Well, I think it sort of stems from what you where you just tailed off at your previous answer some of the things that you'd still like to see more highly valued. I wonder if what she got from your parents in their book is akin to what you would describe you got from them too, would describe.

Dan: 10:25

You got from them too. Ah, yeah, I'm sure I think I mean in today's day and age, to have two people who are committed to living a simple life well, on land open to community, no screens, you know. Just it's anomalous, it's entirely anomalous, and I think I mean when they wrote that book they did a bunch of stuff. One of the things was they counted the number of meals that were cooked at the stove for people that year from food from the land, and it was more than 5,000 meals my mother served from the wood stove in the kitchen to people who come through. Just because that's the nature of the place, because it's a CSA, because there's volunteers, because it's it's effectively a community farm and people of all colors and ages and shapes and sizes and backgrounds and everything else are coming through on a daily basis.

Dan: 11:34

Um and uh, yeah, it really is a beautiful um thing. I mean, now they're in their seventies and eighties and when I grew up they were in their twenties and thirties and forties. So it's now they're in their 70s and 80s and when I grew up they were in their 20s and 30s and 40s. So they're different people now than they were then and the energy is different now than it was then, and sometimes time wears off our rough edges. So how do I say that politely?

AJ: 12:00

I think I'm blessed that it does. Hey, given we're approaching these transformations that awaits us. Yeah, but I hear you, I wonder who taught them. I mean, they were from Boston, right.

Dan: 12:15

Actually, my father was from Maryland, where you are right now. He grew up in Catonsville, in the suburbs. My mother grew up on a farm in Illinois, right, and that's the side. I consider my sort of matrilineal line mother's, mother's, mother's, mother's, mother's mother's. If you look at the sort of what do they call it, the mitochondrial DNA where your energy comes from, is unbroken on the land. So I can track my lineage not through the patrilineal line of Kittredges but the matrilineal line of mother's mitochondria to people on the land as far back as forever, basically. And so, yeah, she grew up on a farm.

Dan: 13:01

They did a lot of, they had a big garden and they did the canning and all that kind of stuff. And you know you don't have to go back too many generations to a time when 95% of people lived that way. So you know my grandmother was reading Adele Davis and organic gardening and I mean they were both I mean come from families of political activists and sort of stuff like that and social like if you've got privilege you should use it. You don't sit back and get comfortable. Get out there in the streets and make noise for those who need help, and that's what they were doing when they met, they were community organizers in the city in Boston. So, and that's what they did with the Organic Farming Organization when they decided they didn't want to raise their kids on the city in Boston, and that's what they did with the Organic Farming Organization when they decided they didn't want to raise their kids on the street in the city, they wanted to raise them on the land. And they bought some land and built a house and started a homestead.

Dan: 13:57

They rapidly realized that, like a lot of farmers, they couldn't make a living, because, well, I don't think necessarily understand why they couldn't make a living, but what they were good at was organizing people. And so they helped to found the Northeastern Organic Farming Association of Massachusetts and they ended up running the broader organization it's a seven-state organization for 30 years quite actively. So, yeah, they've never farmed for a living. It's never been an income stream, it's always been a lifestyle for them. And that, I think, is part of what I did differently than them was I loved the lifestyle, but I also wanted to be able to make a living and that's what brought me into the nutrient density stream.

AJ: 14:37

Bang, we're definitely obviously going to pick that thread up, but before we do, how far back do you know about that matrilineal line?

Dan: 14:45

My brother knows a lot more than I do. I don't particularly care too much, honestly. I figure I am who I am and I am where I'm at and I got what I got. I chose this incarnation when I chose it and I don't need to worry about it because I made the decision then and here I am now. But yeah, I mean I think it's more German on that side and more English on my father's side. I just spent a bunch of time in Germany recently, last month, and I was like, wow, I really feel comfortable here. This feels and I can almost understand, like I can almost read the road signs and when people are talking, I can almost understand the language. I'm like, holy shit, I got to look more into this. This is not too far below the surface. That heritage, that somewhere. It's not too far from the surface.

AJ: 15:33

That's interesting, mate. Yeah, that's so interesting because with my Irish and English but mostly Irish I've sort of approached it similarly to how you described at the top of your answer there. But I don't know, it's sort of creeping up on me in a similar sort of a way. So yeah, maybe we will end up delving a little further.

Dan: 15:50

Yeah, well, I've been spending a bunch of time in the British Isles and it's amazing, and I mean Wales. I was like, oh my God, I'm from here. Like, oh my God, something about here, this is amazing, amazing, wow, this place is oh viscerally, viscerally. I was like this is yeah, so it happens, you know. I mean, if you actually do get out and you go back to where you're from and you connect I think we do all have that connection to land, genetically and whatever you know we're relatively native to. But yeah, I mean my side, my father's side, came over 400 years ago and my mother's side was more like 100 years ago, so it's a little bit different in you know how recent it's been.

AJ: 16:30

That is fascinating because I felt that as a teenager growing up in Melbourne through my teen years but not wanting to be there, wanting to be back what I consider to be home, where the family was from in more recent times, in Perth, on the other side of the country, and I'd got pretty down and out by the age of 19 when a fortuitous set of circumstances took me back to Perth and it turned the lights on. I had all those feelings and then some family and stuff too. It turned the lights on for me and it was a little early example of that in tangible well, perhaps it's very tangible at a certain level, but that more subtle connection stuff that I've only learned more since.

Dan: 17:10

Well, I think I mean you can look at your genetic lineage and then you can just look at land, and I think this is part of the conversation about native versus indigenous. And there's a guy here in the States called Reginaldo Hazlitt Marroquin who speaks, I think, very well to this and he is both native and indigenous to North America and he says where you're native to is the place where your bloodline has been for a while recently, but indigenousness is the depth of your relationship to the land, and so we're all indigenous to earth. The question is, we may be native to different parts of the earth, but the question is what's our relationship to earth? And yeah, for me, I mean that's the thing is having a piece of land that you have a deep relationship with and being able to be in. I don't know love with symbiosis, with deep, you know respect and partnership, and nurturing with, I think is an amazing opportunity. You know all the metaphors of mother and goddess and the curves of you know the woman and the lusciousness and the lovingness and the support and the care and you know, I mean it's one of those things the more you, the more you attend to and care for and enjoy and appreciate the lands, the more the land loves you and it's a deeply, deeply, uh, fulfilling and gratifying experience for me.

Dan: 18:47

Um, and yeah, I no longer, you know, live on the land where I grew up on my parents farm. But I have bought a piece of land here 15 years ago and it's 20 minutes away and I've put a lot of love into this land and I feel so at peace and so empowered and so strong and so clear. I've got a really simple life. I mean it costs me like $10,000 a year. Right, it doesn't need to be much. I took a wreck and I fixed it up and it still kind of looks like a wreck on the outside, but it works really, really well. It's got ponds and streams and a big barn and rambling this and that and a porch, and I'm like you know, according to the government, it's not worth much. I'm like, great, my taxes are low, I can pay off the mortgage easily and I've got 15 acres and I'm like wealthy, wealthy. What else could I want? It's such an empowering place to be, to just have a piece of land that you can be connecting to and in a relationship with. And the thing is, I mean I was making $1,000 a week, working 20 hours a week when I was doing this as a full-time occupation off of less than an acre.

Dan: 20:14

You know, if you work well with the land, if you work well with nature, the fecundity, the profound vitality and just capacity of the land to produce amazingness is right there. It's right there. You know, when I first bought this land, it was tight, yellow, light, you know color, hard dirt. The weeds wouldn't grow more than a foot and a half tall. You know it was just in rough shape and through applying some basic practices, some basic techniques like air, water, food, minerals, life, in two months I had chocolate cake. Two months, two months.

Dan: 20:56

You just need to give nature what she needs and get out of the way. And get out of the way Like, be in service to and support of, and understand the needs of and serve. Don't try to impose your will. Try to support and understand the needs and care as though you were raising a child, right? Do you impose your will on a child and tell them you're wrong and I don't care if something scared you shut up? Or do you hold your child and say I'm sorry and here you know, I'll let you make you like. It's so simple. Do we act out of love or act out of fear. You know, I mean, where's the complicatedness? I don't think it's that complicated.

AJ: 21:39

So what sequence did things come for you in in the of? It sounds like sort of if I could pluck two threads there of our conversation so far there was the how can we actually make a living off the farm? Yeah, and getting paid for the quality of food, not the quantity of food, sort of a no-brainer when you, when you think of it but, but such as the way the system's gone, that would be a shift and the spiritual transformations you described at the very top. I'm imagining there might have been a bit of parallel and circularity in there.

Dan: 22:15

Yeah, well, I mean, I dropped out of university halfway through my senior year. What were you studying? I get in on music. I was. I mean evolutionary biology and 20th century physics and philosophy and sociology and history and organic chemistry. I finally ended up with a history degree three years later. But I thought I was. I mean, my father said I had to go to college and I was like I hated school from kindergarten. I hated sitting down, shutting up and being told what to do. I wanted to go out and run around. It was so boring. I was just like I hated it, and me too, and I had. You know, after high school I had four more years and I'm like oh jesus, and so I just um, and I'm like oh Jesus, and so I just yeah.

Dan: 23:05

Anyway, I was, you know, in my senior year, at the end of 17 years of school, and I could see the end of the tunnel and it was dark. There was no light at the end of the tunnel and I was just like completely depressed and I said I'm out of here. I had this vision. I wanted to be a shepherd on a mountaintop, I wanted to get the hell out of Dodge and just sayonara. I can't do it anymore. I've tried and tried and I've really given it my best and I'm done.

Dan: 23:30

And I heard about the Navajo in Arizona that were having their land taken away from them through devious means by the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the coal company to you know whatever cultural genocide basically. And they needed people to herd sheep for them and witness the things that were being done. And I was like great, so I took off and I showed up there and I said, sure, you want to herd sheep, go for it. And I had brought a bunch of books with me because I like to read books. And that's when I came across the science of the East. And you know the fact that there's other cultures in the world beyond the Western culture and they're actually a lot older. They have a lot more integrated wisdom and their writing and their texts are thousands of years older and they actually have a science that looks at the 95% of reality the physicists tell us is not in the physical plane and actually is. The scientific instrument of perception, is not a telescope or microscope, but it's the thing you incarnated into and there's a whole massive, brilliant science of enlightenment and the purpose of life is love and I was like that makes a hell of a lot of sense.

Dan: 24:48

Why did no one tell me? I was asking everybody what the hell's going on and no one can't. No one had a good answer. No one had a good answer. And then I was like, okay, these guys in india, they know what, they know what's up. So I'm off to india and I yeah, I just you know that was the up. So I'm off to india and I yeah, I just you know that was the part of the quest um, long story, all kinds of details, um, but you know, not less than a year later I guess you could say yeah, less, yeah, less than a year later I was up in the himalayas and, um, um, I woke up in a state of super conscious bliss.

Dan: 25:20

I experienced transcendent satchitananda, enlightenment. So you know, they write about it and you can intuitively know it's true. But then to viscerally experience it only for half an hour or whatever, will completely shift your perspective forever, because you know you can think you're a human, people can think you're a human and you're like great, yes, I'm carrying around a human body. But let's not make the mistake of thinking that that's what I am, unless you have a very enlightened definition of what a human is A soul incarnate or something along those lines. That was when I was 20, 21. Wow.

Dan: 26:02

So I spent a couple more years pretty heavily on that metaphysical track and deeply developing my inner faculties of capacity to access chakras and nadis and project energy and blah, blah, blah, got to a point where basically there was too much energy running through my circuits. The reason a lot of these techniques are hidden is because they're extremely powerful and if you don't know what you're doing, you can literally fry your circuits, the energy meridians in your body. You put too much prana, too much life force through them and if they're dirty they'll blow. And so I could feel that starting to happen in my second winter there in the Himalayas. And that's what got me thinking about the fact that I was young, I was healthy, I was raised on an organic farm You'd think my body's in pretty good shape and my body couldn't handle consciousness. And so if my body couldn't handle consciousness, then how about everybody who had a little less of an opportune initial life or as older and has gone through other issues, like if my arrogant judgmentalness of that stage in life was, you know, enlightenment is all that matters. You know, consciousness is the purpose of life. Why the hell is nobody paying attention to it?

Dan: 27:29

The response was, you know, it's very difficult to ground consciousness into an incoherent form, and this is where my study of music and harmonics and vibration and physics, you know, provided a language, a scientific language of explanation and understanding, and so that, over time, evolved into the rationale for the BFA, the strategy of increasing quality in the food supply, is basically understanding that, as we have, we get new bodies every six months or so. Um, you know. The question is, you know, is it more or less coherent? Are you able to tune into the overtones of consciousness? Can you ground your higher nature into your form? Or are you so out of tune, are you vibrating so dissonantly that the higher octaves of consciousness can't possibly show up in your being?

Dan: 28:26

And you know, after being a bunch of, I did a bunch of activist stuff too in my 20s.

Dan: 28:31

You know pretty serious activist stuff and fighting this and fighting this and fighting this, and I realized like all these structures of culture are made up of humans who are not necessarily operating from the highest light, and we can't solve the problem by fighting.

Dan: 28:52

We can solve the problem by healing. And if we create a dynamic where all the humans are more coherent, then all the roles they're in whether it's politics or economics or media, or education, or agriculture or medicine right. If the people are more well, then they'll make better decisions. And so the strategic way to create a dynamic where people are more well is to create a dynamic where their bodies are more coherent, and the way you do that is by having the food that they build their bodies out of be more coherent. And if the nature of the food right now is junk and we're building our bodies out of junk, we shouldn't be surprised that that's the nature of culture. So, strategically, increasing quality in the food supply, which is exactly the mission of the BFA, is the core agenda, because if we can increase the quality of the food supply and people get new bodies every months without them even knowing any better, they're going to become more coherent, and then we'll have a foundation for healing the apparently intransigent existential issues of human society.

AJ: 29:57

I'm hearing so many echoes of my conversations with Fred Provenza, yeah, and what occurs to me in this moment is the work that he did that I know. You know, I've read off your material. You focus on too around the innate human capacity, through the palate, through our senses, to attract food that would serve this purpose To discern, to discern between the things that are good and the things that are not good that we still have that capacity. We're wired, so we haven't lost it. Is that consistent with your observation?

Dan: 30:33

It's called your tongue and your nose. If the carrot tastes good, it's good for you. If it doesn't, it's not. It doesn't matter if it's local or regenerative or organic or whatever. A three-year-old is an animal with an inbuilt nutrient monitoring system, and the reason kids don't eat their fruits and vegetables is because they're not any good. They're better than they're better than junk. Yeah, right, which is not food? A snickers bar is not food. Let's be clear. That's junk, right, it's designed to pervert the senses. That should not be allowed.

Dan: 31:03

You want to talk about child abuse? We can talk about child abuse. I would can talk about child abuse. I would say that's child abuse perverting your children with exposure to these completely inappropriate things. So remove that from the equation because it's junk. It's not part of the conversation. End of conversation.

Dan: 31:20

The question is food and that's the thing that comes through natural processes in its raw form that our grandparents and great-grandparents would recognize. Yeah, and with those things, the vast majority of what's available now is relatively quite poor compared to what it could be, and that's why most kids don't eat their fruits and vegetables. That's why our bodies are slowly beginning to fall apart. That's why we're tempted to eat these other processed products, because our bodies are starving for sustenance, which is not actually in our food, but we're wired with these really sophisticated nutrient monitoring systems called noses and tongues. 30% of our DNA is associated with the function of your nose and your tongue. Nature thinks it's really important for you to be able to smell and taste well, because that helps you discern what will cause your body and your children and your grandchildren's body to be well or not. It's evolutionarily critically important to build your body from things that taste good naturally, because that is what will cause you to be able to flourish and, if you haven't had kids yet, your kids and your grandkids to flourish. And we've been eating junk for now three or four generations and we're physiologically degenerate and we're falling apart and we're starting to die off because we're denatured, because we are no longer in harmony with nature, and so what happens when you go out of harmony with nature is you die off and that's just the rules of the game, like we're in the game of life. We don't learn this in kindergarten. We should learn this. The rules of the game are life and it's not a chemistry set. It's not.

Dan: 33:04

You know physics and basic. You know it's like it's life, and life actually is consciousness. If you talk to the physicists, you know where do those electrons come from? They come from the field of consciousness and it's a really beautiful thing. It's such a beautiful thing and the question is, how can we work with it? Because a lot of us are experiencing pain and suffering and you know that's the pleasure-pain principle. If you start to experience enough pain, hopefully you begin to turn away from your current path and we're good. That fight or flight Like it's time to do something right. We're in this existential moment and we have everything we need to turn things around on a dime In five years climate change reversed, chronic disease reversed, you know, I mean all these things. We completely can do this globally with resources, knowledge, capacities we have. It's, it's all there. It's totally exciting.

AJ: 34:05

Oh, I agree, I agree. So you come out of india. I'm guessing you're doing some of your activist stuff back home here in the States, yeah, and then you decide to found the BioNutrient Food Association. When and what led to that? The founding of the BFA.

Dan: 34:27

Yeah, I think we founded the BFA in 2010. 2008, I started giving courses. That stemmed from my experience 2005,. I got married and started a family shortly thereafter. That's when I started being an activist and started trying to figure out how to provide for a family, because I was basically managing my parents' farm in the summer and then traveling the world and being an activist in the winter through my 20s. Farm in the summer and then traveling the world and being an activist in the winter through my 20s um, and it was. It was when I got married and, you know, realized I had to be a man, provide for a family. That I all of a sudden you know I was like you got 30 hot ideas. That's great. Now what the hell you can do about it.

Dan: 35:11

You know, and you know I thought that raising a family was the only possible way to appropriately do that is, in close relationship to nature, on the land, in a homestead, was the best model I'd had access to and seen and I'd worked on farms in India and Siberia and Central America and across the US and I'd seen all kinds of different experiences and I thought a simple life on the land looks like a pretty damn good plan and both parents should be at home and you should have all kinds of aunts and uncles and grandparents and community members and it should. You know, and you know low tech and off the not maybe not off the grid entirely, but keep the screens at arm's length and you know, just don't pervert them. Children are amazingly beautiful and profound in their nature. Just don't screw them up. So yeah, so that was when I started seriously trying to make a living farming, at which point I realized that, like a lot of farmers, I couldn't make a living. Like a lot of farmers, pest pressure, disease pressure, failure to thrive, etc. Logistically made it impossible for me to pay the bills, et cetera. Logistically made it impossible for me to pay the bills. And I had been raised in this organic orthodoxy of you know, we are God's greatest gift because we're organic.

Dan: 36:25

And when I realized that being eaten alive by a flesh-eating fungus is not a sign of health and that was what was happening to my plants then maybe I had to come to terms with the fact that organic was better, but not all the whole thing. And that's when I, you know, was able to accomplish a level of humility necessary to start learning and going to conferences and reading books and attending seminars and being exposed to the broad suite of insight that's out there from the multiple streams of thought. There's the permaculture and biodynamics and agroecology and this indigenous wisdom. There's the quantum components, there's the biochemistry and, you know, evolutionary biology and all the hard Western sciences. All that can be used as fodder for a deeper, you know, understanding. And so that's what I did. Um, and, yeah, in pretty short order, still staying within the organic rubric, like I can still be certified organic, but I was just changing practices. Um, that's, we're gone. Diseases were gone, yields were up, cost of production was down, economic viability was there.

Dan: 37:39

I was making my living farming, working part time, and I was like, holy shit, wow, this is not normal. I grew up on, if I grew up on an organic farm, if my parents ran an organic farming organization, if I didn't know any of this stuff, then probably other people don't also, and that was what caused me to feel like I needed to start talking about it. So it started off as workshops and that turned into courses and that turned into an organization. Basically, it was sort of organic, not sort of. It was quite organic and I knew enough to know. I didn't know what I was talking about, but that there was something important to talk about, and so we just started talking and 17 years later, I've got a pretty good shtick. I think I've got a bunch of pieces that are a coherent structure that can be presented and integrated and used to accomplish system function by anybody anywhere on the planet, and that's why I'm so excited to be launching this course, this, you know, certificate level course in Australia, new Zealand, coming up here in March and April.

Dan: 38:49

It just feels like the time is ready. I'm ready to do it. I know how to do this. I've been teaching this thing for 17 years and it's time for us all to raise the bar. It's in our own self-interest, actually, but enough talking about it. Let's see who's interested in actually accomplishing it, who's interested in actually pushing the envelope, getting to the point of excellent plant health, facilitating the dynamics of local system empowerment that are necessary because it's a collective, because we've got all kinds of broken pieces of the supply chain that we have to heal. There has to be a cadre of leaders who step up and say okay, I'm going to figure it out to the best of my ability. I'm going to have a support network of 20 or 50 or 75 people around me that are all in this process and we're going to I'm taking this piece, you take that piece we're all going to share together, we're going to share our learning, we're going to coordinate with what we need to each of us has pieces that other people don't have and see if we can get to that point of actually leading by example.

Dan: 39:52

Let's do the job of showing how amazingly powerful nature is. Let's stop talking about it, let's actually do it. Let's humble ourselves, let's collaborate, let's synergize and let's you know, in our little nodal regions around the planet, coalesce and actually start doing it. Yeah, it's exhilarating. It's exhilarating. It's exhilarating, yeah, when you see plants do things they've never seen them do before, it gets exciting. I mean, if you're a farmer when I say farmer, I mean somebody who's working with the land to produce food, just so we're clear. If you're a farmer, it gets exciting when you, when your land and nature, do things that are so, yeah, vibrant and productive.

AJ: 40:42

In turn, dan I mean as a non-farmer the same is true To witness it, on the one hand, but then to be able to engage my, our senses, as a family too, and community, in that. Food and clothing and water, for that matter. You know the whole well, the microbiome, then we can talk about the air, I mean the whole kit. So I'm curious, dan, what you've observed over that journey with regards to the movement, let's say building appetite.

AJ: 41:12

Maybe we could say for this stuff that this next iteration of your courses are going to land in. And I ask that, I guess with recognition of the context that you talked about at the top. What did you use words like where integrity and honesty aren't in such ready supply? And you know we sit here now, not far from Washington DC and everything that's happening there at the moment. So I'm curious, in general and in direct reference to the current context, which has frankly has some people super optimistic too, but obviously others. So, how it lands in that context and in general over your journey, the 15 years of the BFA, how you're observing the shift in culture in society and how you expect your course to land in that.

Dan: 42:10

There's a lot of pieces there. You know I watched Organic from the 80s as a kid and my parents wrote some of the first organic standards in the US. And yeah, I mean, when I was a kid, in elementary school, I told my science teacher I was an organic farmer and she said organic means contains carbon. All farmers are organic farmers. She was a silly child and when I was in junior high and high school, all of a sudden it hit the collective consciousness and everybody knew that organic meant no chemicals. And then five years later the government took over the word and now you can grow plants not in soil and you can have animals never see the light of day and they're certified organic.

Dan: 42:58

So you know we have this, this creative tension between social movements, bottom-up lifestyle, you know human attempts, and then we have these binary structures of reductionist, mechanistic paradigm and certification and labeling and corporate incentive that pervert. And I've watched lots of local and I don't know permaculture had a good run there for a while and you know regenerative is obviously the one that's flourishing right now. And you know I have some brilliant friends in the regenerative community movement that are deeply looking at their inner life and the structure of their companies and really walk in the talk in a very honorable fashion. And then you've got the big corporates that are sort of you know, maybe meaning well, but effectively paying lip service, and it rapidly becomes a you know, a FOMO, a bandwagon effect. And once you've got a word and everybody thinks it's a cool thing, and everybody starts using the word and they start talking about practices oh, regenerative practices, regenerative practices. And I'm like guys, you can't just check the box and get the result. You have to sensitively and lovingly engage the land and give her what she needs when she needs it to get the result.

Dan: 44:15

But there's this whole layer of unconscious I call it colonized mind, where it's bureaucratic. It's like I use a metaphor of religion to discuss this and I say Jesus, I'm pretty sure, was a pretty cool dude, right. I think it's entirely likely that he was very, very, very highly conscious. And yet, you know, it wasn't too long after he was alive that the crusades were happening and people were, with the formal blessing of the church, raping and pillaging in the name of Jesus. And so you know, nature is one thing, regenerative may not be nature. So we have this creative tension between the words we use and the structures that fit into our political human dynamics and results. And the thing that's exciting is, nature doesn't care. If you keep going out of tune, you're going to die.

Dan: 45:21

And so that's what it comes down to is that we're at this point now where we weren't 20 years ago, where we're much closer to the edge, where chronic disease, where the level of human dis-ease, of human dis-ease, dysfunction, is so much more prevalent at such younger ages that it's becoming a survival issue, Maybe not in all parts of the world, but here in the US, I think to a large degree, and maybe other parts of the country. The world is coming along rapidly. We're in rough shape. We're starting to really fall apart and we don't. I mean, not everybody wants to die, right, some people want to actually live and even kids. You know, I've been speaking at universities recently and, like you know, they want to have kids, they want their bodies to work and they know their bodies don't work because they're on pharmaceuticals, because they're on, they've got diagnoses. We're in this point where it's visceral, it's absolutely visceral Climate change and all that is nice, like okay, yeah, that's there. But actually my body, my life, my ability to function is deep down inside. I know something's wrong and so I see it as an exquisite opportunity. You know I saw the vision, whatever it was, 17, 18 years ago I created the word nutrient density, then to begin discussing this thing, which I thought was really important, and had all these corollaries. And you know I've been working systematically at it ever since and I mean I'm in the middle of the seven month speaking tour right now. It's literally globally for seven months. I'm home for maybe three weeks of that entire seven months. It's all over the planet and I mean I just got back.

Dan: 47:01

I was at Harvard Business School yesterday. I was at, you know, spoke at MIT a couple months ago. I was at Davos and World Economic Forum last month. You know it's not just the grassroots farmers conferences and things like Grounded, it's all these other layers and I mean castles and you know whatever. Big corporates, massive multinational corporates, people of all walks of life are getting it. It's interesting. It's almost impossible to find a human being who doesn't get it, like almost everybody gets it. The issue is not the people in the positions of power, the issue is the structures of power. It seems to me the issue seems to be the way the model is built and the structure of business and the structure of government and things like that.

Dan: 47:50

So the first thing is to say we're all in this together and to not engage in this us, them. You know drama, like it's real easy to be an activist and say we hate you, we're better, you're, you're worse. That's just, that's ego. That's just ego. Like, get over it, right. I mean, if you're a young activist, if you're getting off, okay, go through your process. And then, with all the world's all screwed Yep, your process. And then, with all the world's all screwed Yep, there's all kinds of horrible, bad things happening, a hundred percent dirty dark, have been for a while, still are, yep.

Dan: 48:27

Once you've come to terms with that, then what are you going to do? You're going to keep making noise. You're going to keep complaining. You're going to keep getting obnoxious and like getting people's faces. You're going to sit down for a second and say, okay, what can I do? Maybe. How am I part of the problem? In what ways am I actually feeding the beast? Because most of us are plugged into the system pretty damn well.

Dan: 48:47

And if, the more we can take responsibility for our energy, for our actions, for our money, for our lifestyle, the more we actually begin to walk the talk, which is actually what you need to function, to flourish, to be vibrant, to be vital, to be renatured, is to unplug from this disharmonious dynamic. And as long as you're thinking about other people and like I'm good and they're bad and you're in this head trip binary, you're missing the point to a large degree, because probably the issue is with you and how you're living your life, and it's not your fault per se because of the way culture brings us all up and we're sort of programmed into this system. But taking responsibility for ourselves, shifting our priorities, shifting our actions you know every little thing you do that actually, you know secretly, is not the right thing to do. Stop doing it, or stop one thing this week and stop another thing next week and start putting that energy towards something different, because it's not hard to be in a much better place. But yeah, I think foundationally, I think the quality of food is a massive piece of this puzzle and I mean actually I think we need to get the hell out of the city in the first place.

Dan: 50:01

I think people belong on land. I think we're animals, we belong in nature. We'd be much happier if we had simple lives, and I was pitching this all across Australia when I was down there in December. I'm like I think it's in the constitution in Russia that anybody who wants it gets land like an acre for you to have, period. You can't sell it, it's just there for you to have a simple life, to be able to grow all the food you need, and then you can choose to plug into culture to the degree you want, and then you can choose to plug into culture to the degree you want. But how about that? How about if we had a rule which was if you wanted a simple life as a citizen in this country that has land, that makes it the country you get a piece to live a simple life and you can't sell it?

Dan: 50:53

This is not something that you can profit off of. This is something that you can have to provide yourself basic tenure and autonomy, because then you don't have to have a job, you don't have to work If you're not paying rent all the time, if you don't have to buy the fancy clothes to go to a job. You don't have to suck it up to the people you don't like to be part of a system you don't believe in. I don't know. I mean I think endgame like. I mean I think endgame like a simple life in harmony with nature, growing your food.

Dan: 51:18

I think it's absolutely the way children need to be raised, because when you raise children in front of screens inside buildings and you pervert them, then that's the whole next generation that's screwed up and the early childhood development phase of life is so powerful and I think a lot of younger people would basically see a very difficult path forward. They would like to actually have a simple life with somebody they care about and raise children. And I think I mean I meet a lot of people that are teens and 20s and 30s that are like you know what. I don't really want to be part of the rat race, but there's no off-ramp. There's no off-ramp Part of that. I mean I'm working on all these pieces behind the scenes and I don't know how much time we have to go into all these pieces, but a foundational component of that is the empowerment necessary to provide for your basic needs from the land with this course is to download that, develop those skills in all the local, regional nuances, with the land types, with the soil dynamics, with the climate zones, so we can have an open-sourced collective wisdom for anybody who doesn't have the skills but wants to plug in to easily and readily get to that point of being able to do what I can do because I grew up on an organic farm, so I have the privilege of 30, 40 years now experience working with land, so it's real easy for me to grow a hell of a lot of food with almost no effort.

Dan: 52:49

But it's only because I understand things, and so is there some way to take that understanding and get it out there into the collective in a practical and open way. In almost all cases, the things we actually need are from nature and really inexpensive. We're oftentimes taught to buy all the stuff, which is actually the thing that is the problem in the first place by the people who are selling us the stuff. Everybody's repeating to buy this because they don't know any better and they're just repeating what somebody else said, which is the way it works. To buy this because they don't know any better and they're just repeating what somebody else said, which is the way it works.

AJ: 53:17

So much of what you're saying is so consistent with what I've heard, not only through the podcast over the years, but in travelling across the states last year as well. But, of course, but and rural America was considered to be at the heart of the election of the Trump administration now and, like I said, some people feel I heard some people feel optimistic about that, including people who don't wish badly on anybody else 100%, yeah. So in that complexity, I'm wondering how you are seeing the communities closer to the land across rural America that, for what we see on the media, have succumbed in some numbers to the us and them thing and are fighting back and all that sort of stuff. How do you?

Dan: 54:11

perceive rural America and what's happening. I'm not sure if it's rural America or just people who live close to nature. I've been too far around the world and lived in too many places to differentiate between Americans and anybody else.

AJ: 54:22

Yeah.

Dan: 54:23

We're all people of the simple. You know nature of honor and integrity and community and family and culture. I mean, you're in India, you're in South America, asia, doesn't matter where you are, humans are humans and the basic dynamics are remarkably similar. I mean, what little bit. I was here in North America this last couple before the election.

Dan: 54:51

I saw almost no signs for Trump or Biden, even though the media was portraying this big, massive drama. Right, it's called bread and circus. Right, it was the strategy of the Romans, the empire, to keep people fed and entertained, and then divide and conquer is the other strategy. So keep them fed, entertained and engaging in polarity. So I mean, one of the things I did when I was an activist 20 years ago was I worked for a presidential political campaign for a guy named Dennis Kucinich and I got to see behind the curtain how the American political system works and it is completely rigged. It's like the Truman Show. It's a complete, managed reality show and they pull the strings. It's like the Real Housewives of wherever. It's all managed. It's all to keep people distracted from actually doing the things in their cultures, in their communities, which are important, and a lot of us get distracted by it to one degree or another.

Dan: 55:58

It's embarrassing how many places around the world I go when people know the nuances of what's going on in America. I'm like, guys, what about your country? The fact that you know all these nuances of America, like Jesus? What's going on in your country? What are you doing in your land? Why are you paying attention to us? Why aren't you taking your power and building the solutions you want in your land? I mean, it's a deep and dirty and dark structure that's sophisticated and has succeeded in taking our minds and messing with them, but you have to unplug. And messing with them, but you have to unplug. You have to disengage from the shiny object and focus on the real things. Get the screens the hell out of your life. I don't know. There's so many opportunities, so many opportunities, so how does that?

AJ: 56:49

relate, dan, to what you said before about the structures of power being in the way, before about the structures of power being in the way.

Dan: 57:01

Well, the thing is, we've been trained from childhood to sit still shut up and repeat after me, right, yeah, the indoctrination system they call education, which takes children away from elders and community and land and real skills and dumbs them down dramatically so they can become cogs in the industrial wheel, trains us not to think for ourselves, but trains us to repeat what we've been told. And now, with kids and with screens, they got them completely plugged into their screens early on. So we're basically programming children and programming the culture to pay attention to this faux reality and in so doing, create, as far as I'm concerned, cogs in the industrial wheel whose life force has sucked. I think the metaphor of the matrix was brilliant, right, we're all there plugged in, getting our life force sucked. But the thing is, you do have freedom, you do have the capacity to unplug if you so choose. It's just not the way the dominant paradigm is set, and so you need to take responsibility for your life and for your choices and how you organize things. And what's exciting is we've had enough of this experience to know we don't like it, right, the first thing you have to know is you want something different. And if you think you want it, then keep at it until you think you don't anymore. And some people still want it, great.

Dan: 58:22

But I think there's a greater and greater number of people who are like this system is screwed. How the hell do we get out of here? What's the off ramp? Like there's walls on both sides. I can't see an exit. I can't see an exit. And that's what we need to do those of us who have the privilege, who have the experience, who have the relationships, have the knowledge is to facilitate those structures that can empower people to take an off-ramp from this dominant paradigm.

Dan: 58:47

That's what our conference is going to be this summer your winter, our summer. It's called, you know, renaturing Ourselves, and you know, and we're going to go all into that. You know, renaturing ourselves and you know, and we're going to go all into that, deeply into, like, all the dynamics of our, of our. You know our, our basic biochemistry and function in our, in our, in our mitochondrial DNA, like in many cases, like we're so weak, we're so energetically incoherent right now we can't follow through a thought with an action, right, we're really so like we're just sucked dry.

Dan: 59:24

And understand that, understand the science of that, understand what you need to do to start to build energy back up in your body. What are the things you can focus on? Take a weekend and go do this. How can you begin to slowly build that energy back up so that you have the capacity to actually make a shift? Because a lot of people are in that weakened state. So we're doing everything we can do in the organization to talk about it, to share, to empower, to coordinate, and I just see amazing people globally all coalescing. It's like we're all downloading the same insights, right? We're all getting the same visions and there's so many of us who are on side and bubbling up together and call it divine order, god, universe, whatever you want to call it. I would say there's order in the universe and we are supported. We are totally supported, but we also have free will and we need to choose to take those decisions and follow through with them.

AJ: 1:00:27

Yeah, so interesting, dan, that you use that term order. I know the order you're talking about is a bigger, transcendent order. The paradox, of course, is how many people are perceiving the current reality, the grounded reality, as disorder. If we specifically talk about what's happening in the States, what the Trump administration is doing, like we've said and you've echoed me that some people feel optimistic about it, some people feel like it's the ultimate disorder. Yeah, I'm wondering if we are to get off the screens and so forth, to what extent are we just letting that happen for better or worse? Or are you seeing what's happening as a necessary part of the change that we're looking for to break that old nexus?

Dan: 1:01:11

The first thing to ask is what can you do? Is there anything you can do about what's happening in Washington right now? If you don't have any capacity to impact it, then spend five minutes a day staying roughly abreast and focus your attention on what you can do. The brilliance of this game is to distract you, to put your attention on things you have no power over, and so then you are functionally disempowered when, in reality, you have tons of power. You're just not using it because you've been distracted with the shiny object of all the drama, of all the bread in the circus, right, I mean, the real game is to control your mind. So I could answer your question and talk about what I think is going on, but it's really, I mean, whatever. I can answer that as well, but I think the important answer is use the amount of you know waking hours you have. With the creative capacity. You have to do as much that you can do.

Dan: 1:02:16

That is step one, cause you know in your life you got 50 things that you could do right now. That would all make things better. So stop being distracted or even, while you're distracted in the background, start doing those things. Like it has to do with each one of us doing the things that we know we need to do, and if we all stood up together and did what needed to happen, the world would be different in three days. But we're not, and so we. So we're passive, and so we're able to be manipulated and controlled and governed right. The. The government is supposed to serve us, not manage us, but if we aren't taking our power, then they're going to take it.

AJ: 1:02:58

So let's circle back to that original motivation of farmers getting paid for producing food that would reignite our renaturing. Where is that at? Where is that at? Perhaps is the question what's the pointy end that's required to get?

Dan: 1:03:14

there. So watching my parents go through the process of you know organic and creating labels and having it taken over, and watching what's happening with regenerative and these other various certification labels have come up and claims and things like that One of my critiques from having watched it for more than 30 years. There's a couple of critiques. One is that they're binary. You're either organic or you're not. You're regenerative or you're not. You're local or you're not. You're biodynamic or you're not, and that's not life. Life is a continuum, right? You're not healthy or sick. You're biodynamic or you're not, and that's not life. Life is a continuum, right. You're not healthy or sick, you're somewhere in the middle. You're 80th percentile or 40th percentile. That's just the reality of things. So the first issue is we have to get rid of the binaries, the reductionist, mechanistic black whites, and engage a continuum. The second issue is you get rid of the priests. Do you want to talk to God directly or do you want to have a priest tell you what God said and communicate back to God through you? Like I would suggest, the best way to do it is to download your direct insights yourself and act on them and have your conscience communicate directly, and that basically means you don't have certification labels. In this metaphor, that means you can check the thing yourself. It's no marketing, it's no labeling, it's no brands, it's you can directly see the essential nature of the thing itself. So the design, the vision for nutrient density is that it is something that anyone can discern themselves and they get a number that's part of a continuum one to 100, as opposed to black and white. And so for that to occur, we have to have a definition of what that is. There has to be a rock solid scientific conclusion which integrates microbiome, biochemistry, human nutrition, soil health management practices. We need to use the beautiful principles that science is and the capacity of our technology to look at all these things to find the patterns where nature is showing us this is what she thinks is better and this is what she thinks is worse. And if we can humbly and honestly, with integrity, do that science and come up with that standard, then we build the meters and then people can access them and then we're off to the races. And we're pretty far along that track on our first crop, like we did a bunch of stuff for a number of years, proving that nutrient variation was massive, proving that it did correlate with soil health, proving that you could build handheld meters people could afford and this whole thing was a possible vision. Okay, done, we got that done by 2021.

Dan: 1:05:55

Now, what the hell is quality? How do you define nutrient density? It's not a you are or are not. It's a you're in the 80th percentile or 40th percentile or 20th percentile, but what is the definition of that? And so we've been going through the process of doing that science, which is very complicated and serious and expensive, and so it takes time. It takes money, really is what it takes. It wouldn't take that much time if we had the money, but we don't have the money, so it's taking time. So, yeah, basically, it's a million dollars a crop. At least that'll give us a great baseline to start with.

Dan: 1:06:30

How many crops do you want to look at?

Dan: 1:06:31

25 crops, $25 million I'm talking US million, not Australian million.

Dan: 1:06:36

If someone wrote us a check three months from now, for $25 million, we could have definitions of nutrient density for 25 crops in two years, and then I think the market would be able to take it and run with it, because I truly do believe people want the best for themselves and their kids, and if, given the opportunity to make a small difference in their actions.

Dan: 1:06:55

Like I'm at the grocery store anyway, I'm just going to buy these carrots instead of those carrots and this milk instead of that milk, because I know that this one's better and that one's worse. I think that level of engagement based on self-interest could easily and readily occur broadly, rapidly. And when that starts happening, start counting back three years, five years and we've completely transformed the planet. We've completely transformed the planet because we've shifted the way the incentives in ag culture work which completely affect the climate. And if we've shifted those incentives, then we shift people's health and then we shift their consciousness and then we shift the structures of human culture. It's really simple. It's just that $25 million hurdle we haven't gotten over yet.

AJ: 1:07:41

as the way I see it, the meter, then, is a key development to be able to link the human senses, if you will, to the way that the structures work.

Dan: 1:07:53

It's really the definition of nutrient density, it's the science, because there's a million meters out there. I mean, actually, right now, the cameras in my phone are good enough. We've already got a meter. We just don't have a calibration for it. We don't have, we don't. We haven't told this camera which frequency ranges of light off of the carat mean 80 and which mean 20. Got it, we already have the tech. We just don't have the clear definition. Interesting.

AJ: 1:08:22

That's how I see it. Yeah, so to someone from the outside like me, the meter that you've developed can appear like magic, but there is a scientific grounding to it. There it is. Yeah.

Dan: 1:08:35

Yeah, there is a scientific grounding to it. Yes, how does it work? What the? How could you possibly? What? Ray guns, that's Star Trek. That's not possible. Ray guns, that's Star Trek. That's not possible.

Dan: 1:08:48

People have heard, maybe, of the what's it called the James Webb Space Telescope. It's a big one that got sent up a couple years ago. There was the Hubble before that. So we are able right now, with the James Webb Space Telescope, to read the atmosphere of a planet 10,000 light years away. 10,000 light years away is a decent distance and we can say this planet, right there, has methane in its atmosphere with complete scientific confidence.

Dan: 1:09:26

Because of this technology or science called spectroscopy, which basically is every element in chemistry, every compound, is actually a vibration. Copper vibrates at a certain frequency, zinc vibrates at a certain frequency, protein vibrates at a certain frequency and those vibrations are light, effectively, if you look at it the right way. So a spectrometer all it's doing is taking a picture of the light bouncing off of something. So the meter we built I mean, and if we can build it as a very small nonprofit educational organization and it works and is published in Nature like this thing works that's what our paper in Nature said.

Dan: 1:10:02

It's like, yes, this works, and the variation of polyphenols is 40X, which is really really big, then certainly Apple can do it right. And it's just 10 LEDs. It's really really simple and they flash at different times and it just takes a picture of the light that bounces back and from that it can determine what's in the carrot, and technology is there to be used. It can be a devil. It can be a devil. It can be a servant Right on, like money and everything else. Yeah.

AJ: 1:10:34

Fascinating, fascinating. All right, so, when it comes to this course that you're going to launch in Australia and is it the first time that this certificate level course will run at all will be Australia and New Zealand.

Dan: 1:10:46

Yes, exactly.

AJ: 1:10:48

And what's going to happen in those courses.

Dan: 1:10:50

So it's basically a digestion of what I've been doing for 17 years. Taken to the next level, the concept of the course is, I mean, what I've always called it is principles of biological systems. It's effectively you know how did nature evolve things to work? How have plants been growing for the last 420 million years? You know what, before agribusiness got invented? You know how was it that nature was doing things so brilliantly? And the more we can understand that, the more we can work with it, the more readily we can experience the fecundity. That is what indigenous peoples were able to accomplish globally with no wheel and no plow and no piece of burden. And so we can integrate their practical insights along with our cutting edge Western scientific facts and instrumentation and data, and really dial in this process of tuning into nature. It's a four-day course. The first two days are in the fall, the second two days are in the spring. I basically say, if you think of the fall as the end of the growing season at least where I live here in the Northern Hemisphere, where we've got winter, we sometimes think of the winter as not the growing season. Then you start again in the spring, in a linear fashion. From spring to fall is a growing season and then the fall to spring is whatever, doesn't count. So what I like to say is you know it's a circle, it's a cycle and you can think of the end of one growing season as the beginning of the next growing season. So we start in the fall and we walk through a bunch of basic principles and you know how to's cover dozens of different topics and, yeah, yeah, basically lead people with okay, in the next three months or four months, these are the things you need to be focusing on and why. This is how you can address these imbalances. We want to leave you with a series of very practical, detailed, specific steps you can accomplish to get these results and ways of measuring and monitoring to confirm or to recalibrate. And then we do the same thing in the spring two days in the spring to cover spring and summer, everything about soil preparation and seedling, starting and monitoring and management in season, et cetera. And yeah, there's a whole bunch of content that's covered.

Dan: 1:13:04

And what's the different thing about this is people have been asking me for years like, can I get a certificate? I'm like no, you just took my course. Why should you get a certificate. I just meet talking to you for a couple of days. That's not doesn't count, yeah, All the more given what you were just saying about certifications.

Dan: 1:13:25

Well, there is a desire to accomplish, to get somewhere, and so what I'm saying here is I'm going to teach a course and ideally everybody who's taking part is going to be working on a different piece of the puzzle. If you're any part of the certificate level course, you know part of the course. You are going to have extra homework, which is we have to. There's all these pieces of system function in the bioregion that are necessary, like where are your sources of natural minerals? Where can you get your cover crops? Where's the high-quality seed? There's? You know what's in the subsoil? There's a bunch of deeper questions that no one has answers to, which is why most people aren't able to get to that level of overall system function. So part of it is everybody not only learns the content, but takes on a specific piece of homework which they then bring to the collective and say, okay, I got this piece for everybody to share. I got this piece for everybody to share and all of a sudden you have a greater capacity to implement because each person has done a piece of what needs to be done for everybody else. The second part is everybody who's part of it documents their efforts. You only get the certificate if you're able to achieve excellent BRICS reading in the crop that's harvested on five different crops. So I'm not providing the certificate. I'm saying if you can work well enough with nature to accomplish what we call excellent in BRICS in five different crops, then I think I'm happy to say you can work with nature and you are accomplishing, you are producing nutrient-dense food. There you go, Interesting. But the idea is, yeah, that might take two years or three years and there's a support network of people that are there that are coordinating.

Dan: 1:15:04

Something like seed quality is massively important. The health of the grandmother affects the health of the mother, affects the health of the daughter, and if you're going to be taking seed that did not have healthy grandparents and planting it into otherwise reasonably good soil, you're not going to get the results because of epigenetics, and so there's all these dynamics that need to be dialed in that actually take time, and so we shouldn't expect everyone to get it all accomplished in the first year and there's no pressure to. What there is is a structure of support and collaboration. So everybody who's involved on their crops is documenting what they're doing. They're taking their bricks readings, they're taking their soil samples, they're taking their tissue tests. They're reporting what they added, what their foliar sprays were. They're open sourcing it all.

Dan: 1:15:49

Everything is collectively shared so that we can have, if you have 50 people in a course, 50 years of learning for each participant every year, Because together we can figure this thing out Together in any bioregion, we can dial it in pretty quick. If we actually decide to work in nature's model, which is symbiosis, If we try to keep it to ourselves and keep it private and control it and compete, I mean you can do that if you want. You're not welcome in this course. What's welcome here is people who want to collectively discern and humbly attempt to accomplish a very high caliber of function which almost no one globally is accomplishing. It's almost impossible to find any excellent bricks reading crop, much less five, much less any farm producing five. So it's a high bar, but it's entirely an accomplishable high bar if you actually set your mind to it, and so that's the vision. Accomplishable high bar if you actually set your mind to it, and so that's the vision is that we do this in whatever we want to call it, 500-mile radius locations all over the planet, Mm-hmm. All over the planet. And so, in short order, you've got communities of knowledge who have relationships, who can speak to what needs to be done in this bioregion with great wisdom and capacity to support anyone who wants to dial done in this bioregion with great wisdom and capacity to support anyone who wants to dial in from their bioregion, and we can actually accomplish this level of function everywhere. So that's the vision.

Dan: 1:17:19

And it was after my tour through Australia, New Zealand, and I was like why the hell are all these people who really are very knowledgeable coming to see me? And it was some guys in New Zealand who were like you know, Dan, you know you are able to integrate the soil food web and the Albrecht mineral balancing and the reams and the savory, and you're able to speak to all these things in context because you're an organization, you're not a company, you're not selling a product, you know you're a farmer first and of all the people on the planet who are speaking out there, you're. You know, you're pretty good. And I was like shit, maybe that's true and maybe I should act like it. Instead of just bumming around, I should actually say okay, who's up for a real collaborative process together? So yeah, we're launching it and it'll start in end of March.

Dan: 1:18:12

In New Zealand, the fall sessions and then the spring sessions will be in August or September, and then April sessions are going to be in Australia and again the fall sessions will be in September. And, yeah, minimum 50 people, per course. If we don't get it, we'll cancel it. No pressure, I got plenty going on. If we don't get it, we'll cancel it. No pressure, I got plenty going on. If people want to show up, that's great. That's in various states too. Eh, yeah, I think there's Western Australia, there's Tasmania, there's Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland.

AJ: 1:18:41

Yeah, it'll be fascinating, dan, to hear how that vision evolves. It'll be utterly fascinating and, as you say, potentially utterly transformative. And you're going to be speaking. We're going to get to meet on the other side of the world, in WA, right In Western Australia. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, in September, because you'll be at the RegenWA conference. Exactly, it'll be a big conference that's the first one it's run of that scale in six years pre-COVID, really and it will have six or 700 people. It will be significant and so I'll be back for it. You'll be there speaking and I guess I mean, I don't know, I mean it'll just be interesting to hear you speak about this in general again, but also, I guess, to report back on what that six months, or whatever, has shown.

Dan: 1:19:27

Hopefully we'll have had a lot of, I mean a couple of these courses we'll have subscribed and we'll have they'll be running, and I mean, ideally, this is all happening openly. So it's all the learning and the sharing is happening is happening publicly. That's the vision. Yeah, this is not a private, closed thing. This is a who wants to be a leader? Show, leader, show up, put your shoulder to the wheel, open up and let's do this together. I think it could be. The more I've thought about it, the more I'm like this is a really good idea. This is a really good idea. Somebody should have done this before. Why is no one doing this? I'm like, wow, that's a really good idea. This could actually, with nothing else I've done in my entire life, if I just did this for like three years, globally, it could leave an amazing impact by simply calling the game and saying who wants to come together and really coordinate, collaborate, synergize. It's the only way forward. It's the only way forward is if we work together deeply and humbly and openly.

AJ: 1:20:30

In that, sense people can obviously join, I guess become members of the association, the bionutrient food association, and in terms of the courses too, like is it? Is it just farmers or others too.

Dan: 1:20:42

No, no. So I mean, I've been giving this course for 17 years and there's many versions of it online on YouTube for free. So you don't have to attend, you don't have to pay. You don't have to If you just want access to the content. Right now, you just look up my name on YouTube and there's a bunch of different versions.

Dan: 1:21:00

You know, anything that says Part 1 through 8 or Part 1 through 9 is versions of this course. This one is longer, it's more comprehensive, it's more comprehensive, it's more systemic. There's an infield component, there's the classroom component. But really, what I'm talking to there, who were pretty progressive, were like is it really possible? Is it really possible to make a living working with nature? I'm like, yeah, we've been to the no-till in the plains, we've been to acres. Like no, we've never been out of Idaho. I'm like, well, we have this issue with our water quality, but this issue with this, I'm like, great, every bioregion has its issues, right. Every bioregion has its one or two systemic issues which there are solutions for. But let's work on them together and collectively. Let's figure out what the dynamics are that everybody's struggling with. Let's come together with the it's all possible. It's all possible. It just sometimes takes a deeper thinking and a broader and a broader structure to to come to these solutions.

AJ: 1:22:11

So yeah, yeah, and the transparency I mean. I just I want to echo that that you mentioned before that the transparency in in the whole system really, but in any way we can, is just so central and it's so opaque in the system, I mean probably across the board it's a model of nature.

Dan: 1:22:29

Are we operating as colonized people or as indigenous people? Are we operating with symbiosis and collaboration? Are we operating with control and separation, like? If the objective here is to be in service to nature, then we have to act like it. We have to act like it. We have to look at all of our actions and understand when we're being hypocrites and change our actions. And if we're being closed and reductionist and controlling and competing as opposed to supporting, then it's on us.

AJ: 1:23:01

We're the problems right Full circle, dan, beautifully in our conversation. It's just been fascinating speaking with you, mate. Thank you very much. My absolute pleasure and, of course, you also. Another element of coming full circle. You also introduced at the start that you had been in music in a significant way, so I'd love to know as I customarily would do, ending our episode what a piece of music is that's been significant in your life?

Dan: 1:23:30

ah, um, yeah, do you know the garden song?

Dan: 1:23:33

no inch by inch, row by row, gonna make my garden grow, gonna mulch it deep and low, gonna make it fertile ground. It's an old actually I think it's a Welsh tune Really, or maybe it's Irish, it's in Gaelic, huh. But it's this deep, deep prayer about everything, about the land and growing food and being in touch, and your bones are built from the land, and just the prayer and it's just a real sacred, sacred, sacred song. That's the first couple lines of the English version. But back to the point about our cultural heritage. I think a lot of the pre-English languages in the British Isles had a lot of indigenous wisdom and sacred perspective and that's one we could argue comes from that perspective. Oh yeah, profound, it's a prayer, it's a song, it's a beautiful one. So the garden song I think Arlo Guthrie covers it and Pete Seeger done a couple of times.

Dan: 1:24:49

They were sort of folk musicians and I think Arlo's still alive. I'm pretty sure Pete Seeger died, but that's a good one. I like that one. I sometimes sing Dora Nobis Pacem at my courses. You know that one. Yeah, dora Nobis Pacem, that's a round and you can get everybody going. No, peace, patem, patem. That's a round and you can get everybody going. It just means grant world peace. Yeah, it's a beautiful thing to do every now and then.

AJ: 1:25:17

Wow, there's extra incentive to get along in person. I'd like to see that. Oh, fantastic mate. Thanks so much for chatting with me. It's brilliant to meet ahead of September when we'll actually meet in person. But good luck in the interim, of course, in March and April. I hope it goes brilliantly.

Dan: 1:25:35

Yeah, me too. And for those who are interested, there's a brand new website. It's dankitridgecom. It's just been up for about a week and I'm not sure when this is going live, but We'll get it out quick and I'll link to it. Yeah, brilliant, much appreciation and a great time. I I was told you're an amazing interviewer and uh, yes, this has been a wonderful conversation. I love, I love how you weave things in and pull things out. It's been great fun.

AJ: 1:25:59

DK: So thank you very much AJ: thanks a lot, dan, and just all thanks to you for going there, and it's been terrific speaking with you. So, yeah, good luck and and we'll meet soon enough. Hey?, brilliant, brilliant, be well. AJ: That was Dan Kittredge, founder and ED of the Bionutrient Food Association. For more on Dan, the BFA, Dan's new masterclass launching in a few weeks and the RegenWA conference see the links in the show notes. I'll include links to my conversations with Fred Provenza and irishman Manchan agan magan too, related to some of the enticing threads in this yarn with dan. I look forward to seeing some of you back in australia in september at that regenwa conference too, and, with luck, some of dan's world famous eggs will be on offer. As usual, I'll have more for paid subscribers to the podcast and new sub stack soon, in great thanks for making 250 episodes of this podcast possible. You can join this great community of listeners by heading to the website or the show notes and following the prompts, thank you. Thanks, too, for sharing, rating, reviewing and recommending the podcast.

AJ: 1:27:09

The music you're hearing is Regeneration by Amelia Barden. My name's Anthony James. Thanks for listening. I'm going to press record and hope nothing changes. Okay, oh we're in the game.

Dan: 1:27:56

You're a genius. The old turn off, turn on trick works about 90% of the time. Oh my God.