How your "regenerative" grocery store meat is mechanized and industrialized with Daniel Griffith of Commons Provisions

"We're selling diabetic cows to humans..."

In this episode, Daniel talks with Joey and Liz of the Homegrown Podcast, where he really just yells for nearly 2 hours straight…

Really, he attempts to paint the grave challenge farmers face when selling under various grocery or online store labels. As an advocate for local food, Daniel outlines the issues with the structures  in place within our society. Tune in to hear the intricate nuance of America's meat industry to find out why local food trumps certified regenerative meat every day.

Podcast mentioned: Kellogg, Bill Gates, and Rockefeller—how extreme ideology shaped America's most quintessential foods with James Connolly

Listen on this page or click here!

What do you think? Should “clarity cause disquiet?” (John Ralston Saul).

………

Post podcast release thoughts.
Written, June 23, 2023

Well, if anyone has interest in listening to a 2-hour rant, this may be your life’s episode. At the time, I did not understand the level of my frustration and, listening months later after the podcast’s release, I was quite surprised myself.

I had just returned home after Keynoting Force of Nature’s What Good Shall I Do conference in Fredericksburg, Texas and was working to settle down from a conversation that their director had with me following my speech. Let’s just say they were not happy about the nature of my thoughts and my delivery.

Today, we are smacked with phrases like, “better is better,” or “your thoughts are too divisive. We need unity, not perfection.” And, I have to say, at times, I believe they are right. These times are those that occupy the stuper-slumped moment before complete exhaustion after 20-hour days, most likely.

But then I look into the hopeful and innocent eyes of my children who see the world as the world sees itself—as love and pain and maybe those are really just the same things.

Then I look into the land and see desertification occurring everywhere, yes, even on local, regenerative farms.

Then I talk to local farmers who are below poverty lines, who cannot afford this next round of chickens, who cannot afford to live another year on the land unless something changes.

Then I think—no, better is not better and unity is not goal. The industrial system demands servitude and the modern, regenerative movement is a great servant—servant to the machine and to its scarcity.

It is time that we bend down and kneel at the level of our children’s eyes and, staring directly into them which is also directly into their hearts, we say either: “I will forsake my convenience so that you may live, live long, live well, and live happily with your earth which is you and your neighbor simultaneously” or you will say, “Better is better, don’t you know? One day, you will fight over water, you will die at an increasingly younger age, your lands will poison you instead of heal you, you will suffer with sickness all your days, you may even will kill your neighbors over food and land and the last remnants of profits and opportunity, and you will strive only in death.”

The funny thing is … it is up to you.

It sounds outrageous. Yes. I get plenty of emails telling me so. In fact, you may be writing me one right now. But today, we have a question to answer, regardless: do we make our servitude to the industrial machine “better” or do we co-create a new (and also very old) story that involves no servitude at all?