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Lots of people transition from the vegan diet to one that includes meat and animal products…but few do so on a public stage. Former vegan chef Mollie Engelhart had a dietary change of heart that became very public when she changed the menu and name of her restaurant in California. That’s when the virtual and in-person backlash and vitriol began. While Mollie’s restaurant has now closed, she is a regenerative rancher who is sticking to her dietary convictions.
Today Mollie shares her remarkable story, all that she went through, and why she has chosen to stand strong in the face of opposition. She also explains why she believes regeneratively raised meat, food traditions and food sovereignty are so important. And why she goes the extra mile to get raw milk to her community in Texas.
Visit Mollie’s website: Sovereignty Ranch
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Episode Transcript
Within the below transcript the bolded text is Hilda.
What if you were convinced that avoiding meat was best for the planet and best for your health? You became vegan and then over time, you decided to leave that dietary approach and lifestyle behind. Word got out that you made that shift and you started to receive hatred online and in person. Would you back down? Would you succumb to the pressure and go back to your previous philosophy or would you stand by your newfound conviction?
This is Episode 514 and our guest is Mollie Engelhart. Mollie is a former vegan chef who went through all of what I just described. She had a restaurant in California known as Kind Sage, and she switched it over because she had started to include meat on the menu. She got so much hate and betrayal in person from protesters and online, people maligning her reputation. Mollie decided to stand strong against the haters.
Even though her restaurant called Sage, A Regenerative Kitchen, has now closed, she is still a firm advocate of regenerative farming and health freedom. As a matter of fact, she has two regenerative farms now, and she even hosts events focused on health freedom, common law, and natural medicine. Mollie shares her remarkable story and how she chose to stand by her convictions, the importance of regenerative meat, raw milk, and food sovereignty.
You can find the Gubba Homestead Podcast on the podcast platform of your choice or on her website, GubbaHomestead.com. I’m telling you, you will be inspired to start your own homesteading journey. I think you’ll love it.
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Welcome to the show, Mollie.
Thank you so much for having me. We rescheduled and so we’re so happy to actually be here.
Ditching A Vegan Restaurant
I was actually going to meet you at your restaurant. This is what we have to kick things off with. You had a vegan restaurant for thirteen years and then you changed it. Why did you change it and what’s happening now?
My story is the story of a vegan chef in Los Angeles turned cattle rancher in Texas. That is my story. I started my journey with regenerative agriculture back in 2013. I heard a Graeme Sait podcast and it just blew my mind. Everything made sense. Carbon’s not the evils that we’ve been made to see. We’re all made of carbon and carbon is cycling. Methane is far worse than carbon and food waste. Everything he said made sense. I’m like a vegan chef in Los Angeles, with tons of food waste going into the landfill from my restaurants at this time.
There’s no composting in LA. I want to get a farm and I want to compost my own compost. I’m going to have this vegan farm. It’s going to be amazing and nothing’s ever going to die. I worked super hard, saved money, tried to convince other people to buy a farm, and realized I’m the one I’m waiting for. I bought this piece of land, fallow land, and completely brought it back from 0.01% organic matter to 20% organic matter in five years.
That’s huge.
Granted, we had tons of food waste coming out of the restaurants that we were able to make into compost and apply to the ground. That’s how we got there. In my journey of regenerative agriculture and in my journey of soil, watching my health and my family’s health while living closer to nature and soil, everything I believed as a vegan started to not make sense.
I’ve been raised vegetarian. My mom just did butter because she didn’t believe in seed oil. She was way ahead of the game on the seed oils. She did butter and then everything else vegan because she didn’t want to contribute to animal agriculture in the way that it was. I was just raised in that vegetarian world and that was normal for me but then I saw videos and it’s like, “You’re going to get cancer if you eat dairy and you’re going to get cancer if you eat red meat,” or whatever that was in the atmosphere.
I held those to be true and I believed them. I’m breastfeeding my baby and I’m looking at my cow that just calved, Una, and her cow is favoring two-quarters of her udder, and so we’re milking off two-quarters of her udder so she doesn’t get mastitis. My kid is drinking oat milk from Costco in a tetra pack that’s never going to break down. I’m breastfeeding my little one, and I’m thinking to myself, “Why is my breast milk gold and perfect immunity for this area and everything but my cow who’s living in a dirtier environment in this same area, so fighting all the same pathogens and more? Why is my cow’s milk going to cause cancer and my milk is gold?”
That does not make any sense. Pasteurized milk, I get it. It kills everything. That’s not good. Raw milk? How could raw milk be bad for you? It couldn’t make any sense. I’m learning everything about the microbiology in the soil. I looked up the microbiology in raw milk, and it’s 94% compatible with the human gut. I’m going, “This can’t be bad.” I start feeding my kid raw milk and then we’re eating eggs from our chickens.
This just went little by little, but my restaurants were exploding, $7 million a year per store, just doing amazing. It was scary. Everybody’s saying right now that I’ve made this change for money. The truth is, I kept them vegan. If we’re going to be really honest, if I did something for the money, I kept them vegan for the money. I had a deal with a big venture capital firm for $25 million in 2019. End of 2019, going into 2020, we’re doing the due diligence and the payout will be between $25 million and $31 million depending on certain markers.
It doesn’t make sense for me to change the concept. I’m going to get out and I can do my regenerative farming thing. I can be free to not be hiding the raw milk in my refrigerator. I’m like, “That’s what I’m going to do,” and then the pandemic hit. he venture capital goes away. My restaurants are now are losing money, bleeding $50,000 a month in rent and $40,000 a month in rent and four stores and a cloud kitchen. I’m bleeding money. I’m pivoting. I’m like, “This does not seem like the time to add meat and dairy to the menu.”
Also, everything’s to go. Remember, people live in different places. Just to remind people what the Los Angeles program was, it was no indoor dining for the better part of two-plus years. There were a few moments when they let us have indoor dining, like a moment and then no more. There were also many months with not even outdoor dining. Outdoor dining was too dangerous. This invisible virus was going to kill you on the street while you were eating. Ridiculous.
That was not the time to try to go, “I’m going to try to communicate what regenerative agriculture is and why this is all important.” We’re coming out of the pandemic and I’ve lost two full restaurants. I’m down to 1 cloud kitchen and 2 restaurants. I’m thinking of just closing everything. I’m still losing $1 million a year. I’ve lost all my savings. I’ve sold everything, trying to keep everybody employed through the pandemic.
I think, “What’s true to me and true to my heart is that regenerative agriculture is the path forward for humanity. I’m going to make an announcement on Earth Day and I’m going to tell the world that I made a mistake.” I was raised and indoctrinated that eating less meat and dairy is healthier and that eating less meat and dairy is the pathway forward.” When I started growing my own food, I realized you cannot grow enough food to feed your family, just fruits and vegetables if you don’t live super close to the equator where you can grow 365 days a year and basically be like a fruitarian. Otherwise, it’s super hard to get enough calories.
Regenerative agriculture is the path forward for humanity.
You decided to tell the world. nd I don’t know what you expected, but you were not received with the arms wide open.
I expected to lose about 20% of my customers and I expected to gain a bunch of the Weston A. Price and the carnivore and I want to only eat no poison. I thought that the mob of mothers that awakened during the pandemic to say like, “Enough is enough. I’m a mama bear and you’re not going to mess with my children.” I thought that I would get a wave of those women who wanted a raw milk latte, that wanted to get A2, A2 raw Gouda on their venison patty melt with kimchi on long fermented sourdough bread. I thought that crowd was going to bum rush me and I was going to lose the vegans and that there’d be a hard transition, but it would be fine. It would be like a wave. We haven’t gone on the up part of the wave yet. We’re just still on the down part of the wave.
Overpowered With Protest Voices
Let’s go back to that venison melt for a second. I have been to your regenerative kitchen restaurant. Two of the locations actually in California and they are to live for. I like to say that the food is so good. The fries are done in the tallow. I had some like Oaxacan flautas one time when I was there.
We grew that corn ourselves on our farm. My husband is an Oaxacan. He grew those.
It is so good. We need to get there. I’m not just doing this to be an ad for your restaurant, but the point is you flew from one nest to the next. I wish we had embraced you with open arms, but I think you told me one time, Mollie, what surprised you and caught you off guard was that the protest voices were stronger than the supportive voices. Is that right?
Yes, and I did not expect so much pushback on regenerative agriculture. Even NPR, and I know NPR is like a shill for whatever, but I didn’t expect mainstream media voices to attack what I was doing and to question the validity of regenerative agriculture. I thought that there was an agreement that regenerative agriculture was better than factory farming and that there was agreement that not everybody was going to be vegan in the world and that the idea that we were all just going to eat Impossible meat like that was not going to happen.
When NPR put out an article, they asked me for comment. I commented. They said I didn’t comment in time is not true. I commented in time. They tried to have me not comment in time because they asked for comment at 7:00 PM the night before and they said I needed to have had a comment by 8:00 AM the next morning. I got it in by 9:00 AM the next morning. Regardless, they went out for days.
The window was very small. Their article was attacking.
They were saying that regenerative agriculture is unproven and the best way to be good for the environment is to not eat meat or to eat less meat. My argument to NPR is, let’s say hypothetically, let’s just embrace the hypothetical that eating less meat is necessary for everybody to eat regenerative. I’m not sure that I don’t agree with that.
The math is wrong on that but let’s say that we agree with it. Let’s just take that fact to be true. It should be eat less meat and eat regenerative meat when you are eating meat. Sage is giving an opportunity for you to have that high-quality wild-caught or regeneratively-raised local meat. Those are the better options and we want you to eat less meat.
Let’s say that’s their stance, but that’s not what they said. They said regenerative agriculture is unproven. If drought comes, if the land changes hands and someone changes their practices. I have a question. Do people think that a windmill lasts forever like it’s never going to break down? What about a solar panel? Should we never do another solar panel because it doesn’t last forever or it could get cracked by a hail storm?
Yes, if there’s drought, we’re going to have more carbon go out. That’s all obvious and this is the best way to fight against drought and sequester water. Anyway, I was shocked that there was so much pushback. Regenerative agriculture is greenwashing, it’s not real. There’s no evidence for it. People just attacking me saying that I want to make money. I want to slit animals’ throats to make more money. That’s all I care about.
You’ve got blood on your hands. I think I saw some of the betrayal. I saw it on social media. It wasn’t just this article. I guess it was your former restaurant clients. They came around and started protesting and whatnot. That must’ve been a nightmare.
Also, on digital protesting. I was marking it as permanently closed on Google Maps and Apple Maps over and over again, until those reflected that I was permanently closed, going to Yelp and saying it’s a new restaurant. Even though it’s not a new restaurant, we kept the name, and we kept everything, erasing all of my thousands of five-star reviews over the thirteen years that I’ve been in business.
It’s much easier for them to shift it to a 1, 2 and 3 stars, getting the two-and-a-half star reviews, because now they can just post bad reviews and I don’t have a lot of other reviews to counterbalance it. With my history and thousands of five-star reviews, they didn’t have the power to do that. They petitioned Yelp and I petitioned back and got my account back and then they petitioned Yelp again. The second time, Yelp is saying that the public is responding and saying it’s not the same restaurant. It’s the same employees, same owners, same partners, same LLC, same location. I just added meat and still 70% vegan options.
Here’s the thing. They may win. We are struggling and I have to borrow money to pay payroll and we are struggling. It will be the saddest win for the vegans. If they win this and they prove what happens is a VC firm comes in with a sushi spot, a Mexican spot, a Brazilian barbecue, whatever it is, and it’s just going to be meat coming out of the consolidated feedlot system with no commitment to the environment, with no commitment to anything. That’s what comes in my place.
That’s such a good point, Mollie. I’d never thought about that before.
Saddest win for the vegans ever. They got interviewed and they said that they believed that I’m small enough and weak enough that they could beat me, which then will give pause to any bigger vegan chains that would think about doing this because they feel like they have deeper pockets and could last longer and make the change. They said that out loud. They said that this is what they do with the fur, too. When a small company uses fur, they battle them. The bigger companies give up because they’re like, “They put those people out of business.” That’s their strategy. They’re committed to it. If you live in the Los Angeles area, sorry to be like an advertisement for myself, but please support.
Why There Is No Turning Back
I have an idea on this already. I’m not trying to plant a seed, but why wouldn’t you just go back like, “You guys are right. I’m taking meat off the menu?”
We weren’t surviving after the pandemic anyway. California is broken. The pieces no longer fit together and this is not really a Wise Tradition subject. Over-regulation is not working. I moved out of California and started Sovereignty Ranch in Texas because I could see the writing on the wall. The restaurants were already struggling. From this superabundant pre-pandemic situation and ten years with year over year growth, quarter over quarter growth, very hard to do in California, very hard to do in the restaurant industry to not being able to survive.
People say, “You’re just a bad operator.” Apparently, I just became a bad operator through the pandemic and I was an excellent operator up until then and now I’m a terrible operator. I’m okay with that. Blame me. I would say that when a community works, people can live in a neighborhood and they can have a job nearby and that job can pay them enough to pay the rent in that nearby. They can have a little extra to go on vacation. That’s how the money slave system works.
The money slave system is broken in California because you can’t live in my neighborhood where my restaurants are and work at my restaurant and still have enough money to even put gas in your car. The only people that live in the neighborhoods where my restaurant is that they live from multi-generations in the same household. That’s the truth. That’s fine. I live multiple generations in the same household, but I’m just saying the pieces of California don’t fit together anymore. People don’t have as much expendable income.
How could they? Gas is $6 a gallon. Rent was raised multiple times through the pandemic. The minimum wage was raised multiple times through the pandemic. I’m not saying minimum wage shouldn’t be raised, but I’m saying if you just arbitrarily move the lever on one thing, it pushes everything else up. Imagine that when you’re recording music and all the levers move together, you cannot just think you move the minimum wage lever, and now all those people have enough money to pay for stuff because that pushes everything up exponentially.
If you arbitrarily move the lever on one thing in society, it pushes everything else up.
We were already having a hard time with guest flow post-pandemic. Secondly, I didn’t make a mistake. I’m someone who wants to tell the truth. Even if that’s hard to hear. I didn’t make a mistake. Seed oils are detrimental. I can see with my children, like the ones where I was vegan while I was pregnant and the ones where I was not, I can see differences. I don’t want to speak specifically here because later they could read. I see differences in their teeth. I see differences in their cognitive sharpness. I see differences.
I didn’t make a mistake. Seed oils are bad for you. We never used any of those ultra-processed meats. I never have. I’ve always been a whole food restaurant, but we did use rice bran oil in the fryer because, at the time that I opened my restaurant years ago, I was told pretty widespread information that rice bran oil had the highest flash point. It doesn’t hydrogenate. It’s the best for you. That was widely agreed upon at the time that I opened my restaurants, unfortunately. I know I didn’t make a mistake. I know that selling people rice bran oil for thirteen years is a mistake, not telling people tallow is better for them.
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Coming up, Mollie explains the raw milk situation in Texas. You can’t sell it at farmer’s markets, in restaurants, or even wholesale anywhere. She talks about what she’s doing to get raw milk nonetheless to her community, despite the hurdles.
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Experiences And Insights On Sourcing Raw Milk
I want to back up now and talk a little bit about raw milk, which you mentioned at the top. On your ranch, do you source enough raw milk only for your family Sovereignty Ranch, or are you sourcing enough to sell? Is that even legal in Texas?
In Texas, you could get a Grade A dairy product for raw milk direct to consumers from the farm. It makes it hard on the consumer. They have to come to the farm, or it can be delivered to a specific spot, but they have to pay in advance at the farm. They have to either call or go on the internet, and it has to be charged and paid at the farm. I cannot bring milk to the farmer’s market and sell it. There’s no wholesale. You cannot sell raw milk at a restaurant. You cannot sell raw milk wholesale in any way, shape, or form.
Cheeses that are over 120 days, I think, can be raw and can be sold in retail stores and stuff like that. We’re in the process of building our Grade A requirements in our milk room. Currently, we’re just milking for the family and we have about four cows in milk right now. One has a really big calf on her and we share for the first several months and so we’re not getting much from her. One cow’s about to calf. We have enough right now for the family and for cheese and stuff like that for us, but we have 40 cows, and a bunch of them are bred.
We’re rushing to get our milk permit in time for us to have all these cows. We have Jerseys, Brown Swiss and Guernseys, and we will be selling raw milk to our community here in Texas. Our ranch in Texas is a hospitality ranch. You can stay. We do retreats, weddings, family reunions, anything. We have a restaurant on the farm that only serves meat from the farm. It’s like lamb, pork, and beef from the land and then vegetables and everything from the land.
I imagine you’re not getting protestors there because it’s like no one’s had anything taken away from them. Plus, it’s Texas, right?
Nobody had anything taken away from them. Nobody’s mad. It’s funny, though, I did call this lady who was in Dallas to tell her about us as a filming location. She was like, “I know you.” I was like, “What do you mean?” She was like, “I’m a vegan and I eat at your restaurant in LA.” I was like, “They’re not going to book me.” She was like, “No, I live in Texas. I can’t be bad.” Anyway, I thought that was funny. Nobody’s upset here and we’re just getting off the ground here. It’s a brand-new business. People are super excited because here there’s no local produce, local meat.
People just sell their cows at the auction and then people stock them and then harvest them somewhere far away. People are super grateful to be able to get local lamb, local pork or local beef. If you’re in the San Antonio area, we’re close by and we also have lots of farm produce. Our community here is super excited because there’s a missing of this high-quality food. In California, we’re a little spoiled by how much high-quality food we can have so we can turn our noses up like, “Those people are serving meat and they didn’t used to. Forget them and they’re regenerative American farmed food.”
Food Influences From Her Husband
Mollie, you said your husband is originally from Oaxaca. His food traditions and food inclinations, how has that shaped where you’re at now?
In the restaurant Sage, you can see on the menu, there’s a lot of Italian influence from my family and a lot of Mexican influence from his family. It’s a beautiful blending of those traditions. Through my transition of coming from the indoctrinated vegan position, being married to someone who ate a very traditional indigenous diet, there was no road to his village until 1991. I remember one time asking him like, “What did you eat as a kid?”
When we were first married and he said, “Turtle eggs.” I was appalled at turtle eggs because they’re endangered. That’s my very privileged mindset from growing up in America, where there was plenty of food and I could be a vegetarian and eat what I wanted. He said, “Honey, you just don’t understand how much survival do you have to be in to send your children past armed guards with AR-15s in the middle of the night to collect turtle eggs for your family because it’s a staple indigenous food that we’ve been living on forever. You just don’t understand because you’ve had so much.”
Not just are his traditions impacting our menu at the restaurant, but it impacts how we utilize everything and how we bring the cow heads home. When we bring cows to the USDA facility to be harvested, we bring the heads home and bring all the bones home. We bring everything home, the ox tails and the whatever, so that we can utilize everything from that nose to that tail and make sure that we’re honoring that being because he comes from a place where there wasn’t enough. Dried fish, turtle eggs, corn, and lard are the foundation of his indigenous diet.
Have you all gone back to Oaxaca?
When we got married, we did it in the indigenous way. He’s like Zapotec, and that embroidery is called Ben za. There’s like different kinds of embroidery, like the first dress I wanted to buy, he was like, “That’s just not the thing.” I was like, “What do you mean? It’s really beautiful.” He’s like, “It’s like some other tribe’s style.” I don’t know. Anyway, we did it. We’ve gone back a fair amount. I remember the first time we had our wedding, like the night before the wedding, we had dinner at his mother’s house. I use the term house lightly as to what Americans think a house is.
This is like four concrete walls, a thatched roof with an overhang, with an outdoor kitchen in the porch area with a wood fire cup masonry stove. She was very nervous. Sixty Americans were coming to her house for dinner. I remember live-streaming part of it on Instagram and people going, “Are they making it all vegan dinner for you?” I remember thinking at that moment like, “Could you imagine I went to this village and then I asked this woman to make a vegan meal for 60 Americans?” She was already so nervous making it.
She did make potato and zucchini and tomato tamales for me, which I imagine probably still had lard in them. I remember thinking, “People think their life how it is in America is like how it is everywhere.” Meanwhile, she was running around borrowing chickens from neighbors’ yards and fish from the ocean, trying to get together enough food for 60 people. When she makes tamales, the bones and everything of the chickens are inside the tamales.
You have to eat off the little bits and spit the bones back out. We would never have bones in our tamales here. We just don’t realize how lucky we are to have such abundance. He’s helped me see in so many ways because I did grow up in America. Even though we were very poor, being very poor in America is very different from being very poor in Huamelula Santa Maria, Oaxaca. Totally different program.
Exploring Food Privilege And Quality
Correct me if I’m wrong, Mollie, but it seems to me that the people who are at an economic disadvantage in the US often have some safety net so that they’re not going hungry, but the food that they’re given at pantries and so forth, or the government issued food is all canned and packaged and with a long shelf life, but it’s not really very nutrient-dense, is it?
No. We talk about food privilege a lot. We talked about who’s getting what and who has access. Often, regenerative food, organic food, and raw milk are looked at as a privilege. For sure, they are. I also think cheap food that other people are dying to produce for you is also a cost and it’s a privilege to have access to that cheap food. There’s a cost associated with our own health. We’re going to pay now or pay later. In a culture where we live on credit, my house has a mortgage, my car has a payment, we are willing to pay later. We are not a culture of pay now and be free and clear later.
That is readily available to see in our food system. We are willing to take cheap food now and pay the cost later, but none of us are truly present to cost of our food. I often use the example of Sonia. She used to clean my house. She was on a team of 5 or 6 women that picked strawberries and the fungicides and everything with that. Out of the 5 or 6 women, only 1 of them had not had cancer before the age of 45. That is telling you that intense exposure to those, I think, mostly fungicides to make sure that the strawberries don’t mold is causing disease.
You could say, “I can’t afford that $4.80 strawberry. I’m going to buy the $2.99 strawberry.” For that $1.40, the cost on your body, but also Sonia and her girlfriends all had cancer, are part of the cost of that. We don’t always see that because many migrant workers who come here are highly exposed to pesticides, fungicides and herbicides, and then return home to their countries of origin. The sickness gets exported. We have plenty of sickness here. I’m not saying all the sickness is exported, but I’m saying that direct contact sickness, a lot of it is exported with farm workers.
I feel passionate about less suffering in our food system. As a chef, I put so much love into my food. From the store or whatever to the stove and to the table, so much love is in that food. My thought is that we want that much love in the food, from the seeds to the store. That is the breakdown. Mothers, we really want to feed our children the best thing, but we are only considering from the store to the child’s plate or to the husband’s plate.
We need to start considering the seed, the calving, or the lambing to the plate because there’s immense suffering happening in that space. No matter how much love we pour over it, we can uplift it a little bit with the love we pour over it. I believe in that energetically, praying over our food, we can uplift it a little bit, but I’m not sure if we’re powerful enough prayers to completely eliminate the effects of all of those poisons.
A friend of mine said that’s something we miss also when we take supplements. It’s because when we take supplements, we are so disconnected, even if it’s a whole food supplement, where that beef organ was sourced. We don’t know the hands that touched it. We don’t know the process that it went through. There’s something about reconnecting. We’re losing the value of that as well, which I think is what you’re getting at.
I agree and I think that many supplements have weird things in them and we’ve switched to a world of, “We don’t get enough nutrients. Let’s just add it in with a supplement.” The truth for me is at least I found very little supplements to make me feel much different. I’ve heard a lot of amazing stories, but I’ve not found that magic pill. For me, it’s drinking enough water, getting sunlight, moving my body, getting off of the blue light screens, and eating whole foods.
Many supplements have weird things in them. We have switched to a world of adding the nutrients we do not get from food in a supplement.
I do like Shillogy, and it’s expensive and so I don’t always keep up with it. I’m like, “Is it worth $100 to buy another bottle?” I mostly like that because I make an afternoon latte and I’ve stopped drinking caffeine in the afternoon. It’s more about the ritual than anything else, but I haven’t found a magic wand supplement that I’ve said, “I’m feeling so much better with that as the same as it is with food.” For me, it’s obvious. If I go out and my kids and my husband convince me to eat some roundup-laden pizza, I feel bad afterward. I’m clear like, “That was really clear.” I haven’t found a supplement that makes the opposite of that where I’m like, “I took that and I’m just on cloud nine today.”
Eat Foods In Their Whole Form
It’s really more the cumulative effect of all the things you were describing, the nourishing food, the sunshine, the connection with your family and farm, and all those things I think that are like that pill only they take work and they take an investment of intention and energy and love. Mollie, we are about to wrap up so I want to pose to you the question I love to pose at the end. I feel like we could talk all day which is so fun. If the reader could just do one thing to improve their health and take one step in the right direction to lean into those wise traditions we’ve been describing, what would you recommend that they do?
For their health or like the whole health?
No, just their personal health, I would say, but maybe it’s related.
I would say for your own personal health, eating foods in their whole form or as close to their whole form as possible. I often say if you can’t do the process in your kitchen, it doesn’t mean that you have to make every single flour, grinding your own flour, but whole foods in the way that they were meant to be eaten, so that also means maybe fermented and not pitch yeast and stuff like that.
That’s what I would say.When you’re looking at ingredients, you can’t imagine it growing in your grandmother’s garden or this product, you don’t think, “I’m not sure I could make this graham cracker in my kitchen at home,” then I would recommend that we don’t eat that. I also say that we have to eat of the soil. We talked about raw milk being 94% but healthy soil is 70% compatible with the human microbiology in the gut. I often speak about that is God inside of us.
We are a soul housed in the skin bag and that skin bag is kept alive by microbiology and we’re meant to eat off the soil and our food is so disconnected. The closer those ingredients could be from the farm, drinking milk that’s raw, eating food that did not get HPPT or dipped in sanitizer, and eating those foods with that microbiology, that’s the way we’re meant to eat and that is what builds health over time. Your microbiology is like a collection of everywhere you’ve been and everywhere you go. If you only stay in industrial spaces, you’ll have an industrial microbiome.
Those are powerful words to end on. Mollie, thank you so much for this conversation. On behalf of the Weston A. Price Foundation, it has been a pleasure.
Thank you so much for having me. It’s been such a pleasure.
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Our guest was Mollie Englehart. You can visit her website, SovereigntyRanch.com, to learn more. Now for a review from Midwife Melissa on Apple Podcasts. She said, “Loving this podcast Wise Traditions. Enlightened with timeless health wisdom, blending traditional knowledge with modern insights. Each episode feels like a clarifying guide through the world of wellness, offering practical, life-enriching advice. It’s a must-listen for anyone seeking a balanced, informed lifestyle.”
Melissa, thank you so much for that review. It means a lot. You, too, can go to Apple Podcasts, click on Ratings and Reviews, give us a bunch of stars, and tell people why they should listen to the show. These reviews really make a difference, and we can use more of them. Thank you so much for reading, my friend. Stay well, and remember to keep your feet on the ground and your face to the sun.
About Mollie Engelhart
Mollie Engelhart, a mother of five, is one of America’s foremost advocates for regenerative farming and health freedom. Her commitment to people having healthy food has intertwined her two regenerative farms (in California and Texas) and her restaurants, formerly Sage Vegan Bistro. Recently, she has made the brave choice to transition her vegan restaurants to Sage: A Regenerative Kitchen, incorporating regenerative meat and dairy and moving away from the use of seed oils all together.
She has hosted and co-produced two Confluence events at her Texas ranch and Sowing Sovereignty on her farm in California. These events focus on health freedom, common law, and natural medicine. As she has never been vaccinated; she is an advocate of health freedom and informed consent. She is dedicated to living and sharing a natural and practical earth-minded lifestyle. From her regenerative farms and restaurants to her deep concern for healthy eating and holistic family life (she delivered three home births), Mollie is showing a way forward for people who want to make a difference.
Important Links
- Sovereignty Ranch
- Mollie Engelhart on Instagram
- Mollie Engelhart on Twitter
- Mollie Engelhart on YouTube
- Wise Tradition Apple Podcasts
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Mollie’s courage to stand up and voice the truth’s newly learned, as she transitions to a nourishing diet is inspirational. How often do we allow our voice to be quieted? I would love to hear an update in a year from now as to how her story continues to unfold!