I'm not here to say I don't eat vegetables - I do, a lot of them - but, from a soil perspective, they're actually more costly than a cow grazing on grass.

Conventional agriculture has never succeeded in feeding the world, and it's never produced anything good to eat. For the future, we need to look toward alternatives.

In food, issues that surround purchasing and that whole realm have a very political component and they branch into stories that can be really compelling. Just being on the farm, interacting with all these people in the industry, leads to personal narratives that can be used to make a larger point.

The greatest lesson came with the realization that good food cannot be reduced to single ingredients. It requires a web of relationships to support it.

I'm not here to say I don't eat vegetables - I do, a lot of them - but, from a soil perspective, they're actually more costly than a cow grazing on grass.

Vegetables deplete soil. They're extractive. If soil has a bank account, vegetables make the largest withdrawals.

At the end of the day, yes. It's all about the marbling and maybe a few other things along the way. But intramuscular fat, that's where you get a lot of flavor. Fat carries the flavor but in the last 50 years it's been bred out of pigs. When American chicken exploded in the 70's and became such a huge commodity, it took away pork sales. The pork industry suffered and had to change.