Why “Survival Food” Should Be Meat, Fat & Salt with Phillip Meece

Introduction to the Carnivore Bar 0:00

Forget trail mix. What if survival food wasn't junk, but real ancestral nutrition in its purest form? This episode is all about survival, food redefined. Philip Meese is our next guest on the Everyday Ancestral Podcast, founder of the Carnivore Bar and former combat medic. Joins us to share how ancestral wisdom and battlefield grit shaped a bar made from just meat, fat, and salt. We talk pemmican purity and why modern convenience food is due for a reckoning. I'm your host, James Berry. Welcome to Everyday Ancestral.

Who was Philip Meese before you joined the army? Oh, that's an interesting question. So, um, I did a lot of different things as a kid. Um, I went to Mongolia. What were you doing there? So my parents were missionaries, um, and they were there at the fall, you know, basically right at, uh, You know the iron curtain lifting. So the Soviet empire falls in the early nineties and They were going in as medical missionary. spread the good news and then also do deliver medical care to people in need, because there was a lot of it.

As you can imagine, you know, a government collapse, it's like, especially a dysfunctional government. And there's a a human need. So my parents were out there helping and they brought us along. It was very interesting childhood. from that reacclamation to society after they finished doing two, I think it's three years overseas, they came back to the States and I did Boy Scouts, a did theater and that was a theater major. And so part of my plan to get socially attuned to American culture is to learn how to speak to other people and be a theatre major and That was what I did before the Army.

Graduated in 09, just as everyone was losing their shirt. And I was like, well, I need a real job. I needed some real experiences. So I joined the army, got sick, been on a health kick ever since. That's me in a nutshell. Wow. What part of the drama were you doing acting or behind the scenes? What was your focus? Mostly behind-the-scenes. So I did like stage combat, violence, like special effects, things like that. That's what I love doing. I'm imagining in another life, you're the special effects guy on all those movies or something.

Should you have gone a different path, I can definitely see you doing that. Yeah, it was fun. It's a little unstructured. You can make it big or you can get totally devastated doing.

Philip Meese's Background and Army Path 3:08

If you health complications and you're not comfortable like sleeping wherever living wherever staying up into the middle of the night doing whatever it takes. I wouldn't recommend it. And so that's a unfortunate trend with people who are out there on the edges of society doing wild and crazy fun things is they often have undiagnosed illnesses or afflictions or they need support of the services that are in the middle of civilization. But yet they're out there on the edges where there isn't any. And so it's like, you know, part of what both of us do is to bring high quality nutrition to people, to everyday people.

Yeah. So making those support structures available is really, really key and making them accessible. Well, and you, you really came to that conclusion after your stint in the army. Can you talk about like, what, was it that spark? What was that Spark that led you from that combat medic to creating the carnivore bar? Well I mean, just because you asked him, the theater stuff also plays a role too. It's like. I'd be doing like amateur filmmaking and I would be on set for 12 hours. But, you know, and there's like free pizza, but the same is true for the story that I tell in most podcasts, which is that, I was a medic and the ER had free cake and free Pizza and a tiny little fridge that is basically only for doctors.

And, um, You know? So the, the medic, he's a low man on the totem pole. You know, I'm mostly cleaning beds and so And just running the labs, doing the grunt work. And it's the doctors and the people with tenure who get the coveted fridge space. But like all hierarchies, there's all these unintended consequences. Having a special parking spot, it doesn't confer any negative effects. but the fridge base does if you are not able to bring your own food or think ahead or prepare high quality foods, then you're stuck with a vending machine.

So it's like, you know, these unintended consequences of luxury are often benefit. And so with the army, um, You get the same kind of rank hierarchy. so in medicine and film and theater and in the Army, he got this rank structure where. Some of the privileges and perks of leadership and power and authority tend to have these unintended benefits when it comes to avoiding disease and supporting nutrition. I think that's where we really need to make healthy eating egalitarian. That's really important to me.

really, really critical because a parking spot fine, a fancy costume fine. You want a funny hat, everyone to salute you. That's cool. All that I'm up for it. 100%. But I think we make a really big mistake when we lower the quality of nutrition of the base rung and the ladder. Because we are promoting disease when do that. How do you feel though about this? This is a statement that, I talk about a lot. And I'm very mixed on it, but that healthy is for the wealthy. And here we are two entrepreneurs who have two products that are expensive.

Yeah. So how do you feel about that? I think that's definitely at the heart of my chief concern. It's like, especially meat prices. I just this year went up another 10% after going up 10%, the year before and the before. Since the pandemic, we've had this huge cost increase in meat. and bioavailable animal-based nutrition, which is kind of our stick.

From Combat Medic to Food Entrepreneur 7:31

It's, you know, what to do about that. For the average person who is, trying to be meat-base or at least nutrient-dense, as those elements of nutrition are getting more and more expensive, a little bit, it's kind out of out scope. You know, we can comment on it, but it's like, We can't fix the economy trying to be a health entrepreneur to sell nutrition and promote its use. But I think one of the things that I would say to you, you know just as a, a brother in arms in the space of fighting for human nutrition, and health and wellness is that it doesn't matter what it costs.

You know, if I'm spending 90% of my paycheck on groceries in a weird way that actually brings us back to our ancestral norm where you're spending ninety percent of your time looking for food. I think that food is that important that whatever it takes to get it, you spend that time. You if that means like not seeing your family and hiking for months on end to go chase down the bison. It's like on foot because there were no horses on this continent for thousands of years. Yeah, I mean, that sounds savage, like really, really savage in a way that we don't even realize how those people lived.

Because as soon as like 1500s came, Europeans dropped horses here. we've fundamentally changed the continent. So when we got to the plains and there were horses everywhere, we thought they were always horses, but they weren't. And so it's like, We have no idea what it was really like before we get here to write about it. We'll never really understand, I think globally, how people really lived back then. Now we'll do our best with anthropology, you know, every indication is that they spend a vast majority of their time looking for food.

I think that In a way, we're kind of de-civilizing ourselves that food has become so expensive and good food at that. Nutrient-dense food is becoming even more expensive. The fresher it is, the more nutrient-tense it, all these things are adding costs. And yeah, you could say they're a luxury, or you can say that people need to reorient their priorities. And I've certainly done that. I know you have too, with devoting so much of your time to promoting pluck and promoting this nutrition. It's like, you know, if you would map out how much your of time is devoted to this.

Well, what's your take home? What's you profit versus how time you've invested into helping other people. You're going to be skewed way towards philanthropy. You know, we in this food space, um, We could be selling, uh, cheap GMO wheat covered in sugar and, ah, chemicals that help make it more addictive. Sure. The same old stuff. We couldn't be. Selling what the general. For profit. Right? And so it's not that we are like, oh, animal-based nutrition. We found this really cool niche that's like insanely lucrative and profitable.

And like we have this unique angle that, we're going to make mad money. It's, like no, We've kind of taken a monastic step back into philanthropy. and is saying like, well, no human nutrition and human flourishing and Human Health is so valuable that no matter what the cost, I'm going to pay it to provide this to the public. And yeah, hope I can pay my rent. But like that's not the point. The point is that human Flourishing is almost like a sacred calling. and then if you feel called to Provide healthy food for people, You know, it really money is a secondary concern.

You want to be able to pay your people, you want be to support your family, but really making a product that's good to eat and available for everyone, even if it's not lucrative, is calling all into itself. There's so much to unpack to around it because there's the concept that, well, at least during our lifetime, particularly from the seventies into the nineties, you know, with the subsidization, subsidizing of food. You know we, we grew up where hamburgers were 25 to 69 cents, right? It's like this concept, that people thought, Well, really what people didn't have a clue on what the real cost of the food is.

Yeah. because we were being sold this idea that meat was cheaper than French fries, right? Right. It's like, so it's so skewed. And if anything, we're now even doubly skewd because now we are seeing some foods come out that are really basic, like really, not even meat-based. I'm talking like they're single fruits, you know, singular ingredients. And yet just because they're organic or whatever they are, you know, sourced from the way that food really shouldn't be source anyway, like their non-GMO, their organic, they honor a regenerative farm, all the ways that ancestrally it should have been done this way.

That these things are incredibly expensive. Yeah. You got a $20 pair. Right. And so we were doubly screwed. Like, so now people think. They're, they're learning the real cost of food, but then we still have people taking advantage of this concept. Well, yeah. So you, at the same time, you have someone going to extreme lengths to create something nutrient dense at what seems like an exorbitant price. And then you. People who will greenwash and spoof that product with something that came from Walmart.

And then they'll greenwash it and then the difference will be their margin. And so the consumers face with this impossible task of trying to, you know, weed out the snake oil salesman from the true believers and. Kind of parse out like, okay, well, this product is. is from a reputable source I've tried them, I trust them versus I don't really know the criteria to how to examine our food because we live in a world where our institutions have let us down. The food pyramid everyone knows and has known for decades is a joke, but that leaves us in place where opportunities can take advantage of us and they'll have a new fad diet, a thing to try, and new chemical.

You know, it's like, hey, don't worry about your diet, just take Ozempic. It's, like yeah, but it now puts the entrepreneur in an uncomfortable place of having to promote and distinguish themselves, where I think clarifying what we offer is good, But at the same time, having the tear down frauds, you know there's a huge conflict of interests. It's like, how do we ethically talk about people who are spoofing this idea or who we suspect might be spoofing it? And that's the thing. It is like when your own ego gets involved, you're like are they really, for me, I'm selling grass-fed grass finished beef and there are these changes that happen.

in the chemistry, especially with the lipids, with fats, because fats are like the cornerstone of pemmican. And so from there, I'm like, well, you know, people will say these general statements of like all grass-fed, grass finished fat should be yellow. It depends on how fasted, how oxidized, How much beta carotene is in that fat versus like, and it can come down to the, the goom count of the cow, of how much it ate. It could come to like the perennial grasslands or the latitude that the cows was raised in.

because different latitudes, different fasting, slaughtering schemes are going to lead to different oxidation rates in the beta-carotene and the retinol. Yeah, it's different outcomes. It's wild. it is a living organism. And it will change and be adjusted by everything you're mentioning, by the land it feeds off, the lifestyle, slaughter, timing. Everything. Yeah, and that's a huge thing. People forget that food is not controllable in that way. It's wild organism. And that when we talk about nutrition around food, that it's generality because every season it is a different nutrition.

Why Real Food Costs More 17:18

Every breed provides a new nutrition, you know, it always fluctuating. Yeah and it like, well then how do you establish you know, authenticity and authority in a space like this. It's like, well, unfortunately, it's, like one customer at a time face to face by being consistent and provided consistent results. I think that's I wish there was a shortcut or like an accrediting body that we could trust to just put a stamp on the good people. But I haven't found it yet. Well, okay, so let's take a step back, because we're assuming a lot of people even know what pemmican is.

So why did you choose pem? Pemmacan is one of the most, I would say, closest you can get to an ancestral food out there, in terms of that it's been used for, well, you tell me, how many years is pemacin, what's the oldest pemmacin they've found, and why do you chose this as your model? We know of it from a modern interpretation, modern being 300 years ago. So it's ancient. It's like the bow and arrow of foods. Until very recently, nothing was refrigerated. And like refrigeration was rudimentary.

It was a hole in the ground with ice that you smuggled from the mountains and someone had to carry a giant block of ice from mountains all the way down to your hole and your whole would be, you know, 50 some odd degrees. And so it's cooler than up above and you put the ice in there and it radiates cold and, you know, it is your cool room. And that's the best refrigeration that money could offer or money can buy back in the day. So, you know, and there are evidence of people doing that in every culture and climate, even in the desert, like you wouldn't believe.

It's just very impressive, the human ingenuity and spirit to try to refrigerate things. Long story short, you really need a way to preserve a kill. If you are going to be animal-based, if you're going be hunting, be a hunter and gather before the dawn of agriculture 12,000 years ago, we would have hunted and gathered. And a real big liability is that if cannot eat the entirety of the kill, You know, it's going to spoil because there's not a good way to salvage that without preparation. And so drying, drying meat into jerky into strips of jerkey is the first way you do it.

But jerking has some fundamental problems if you eat just lean meat, it's not satiating. So just-lean meat is not satiating by itself without the fat. But if you include the fatty bits in your jerky, the jerkey goes off pretty quickly. So it spoils the oxidation, the water content in the fat. It's connected the collagen, connected tissue, it's all very nutritious, but it is very, very perishable. And this is this paradox that we both face of high nutrition, high perishability. So pemmican is a way of separating the fats and the meat.

And then preparing both of them in a way that they're both going to be more shelf stable. So the collagen and all the bits of connective tissue are removed from the fat. The fat is broken down and then rendered. Under heat, preferably not too much and that fat, is rendered into tallow. a broad term, but traditionally would have been made at a suet. So it would've been very, very high in saturated fat and would be solid at room temperature. If your tallow is soft, it's probably more like drippings.

It's not really tallows. That's kind of a misconception, But tallowe is solid room-temperature. In the heat of the summer, It will melt. So, you know, up to 90 degrees, but in the back of a mail truck, it's more than just 90. It's good and hot. And so even very, very saturated fat, even a cacao butter, which is extremely high in saturated, fat a coconut oil, these things are peak saturated. Fat will turn liquid in high heat. You know, you have this problem ancestrally of like, okay, well, it's going to get 90 degrees.

There's no air conditioning as well as no refrigeration. So, what do you do? So you'll have rendered fat. You render it down on purpose, turn it into a liquid, and then you take the same jerky that you made, but you cut it extra thin. You cut it extra thin because you're going to break it with two rocks, essentially a mortar and pestle. You're gonna break and pulverize it. Break it and Pulverized it till it's almost like a dust. Sometimes it can be a little stringy. There are question marks on how pulvarized you want to go, but all the way pulversize is the best.

And if you go all question around it, though, why is there a question? Around how, how far you pulverse it? So, imagine it like a rope. So you have all these muscle fibers that have little myosin heads that contract and they pull. They pull when your nerves send acetylcholine to go contract the muscle, the calcium channels open. It has a binding site. The myousin head pulls, it contracts. Essentially, you will have millions and millions of these things. like ropes and they contract and that's the contractile power of muscle and it has a lot of protein in it.

So when you are breaking this down, you look at all the physiology, it's like, It's going to turn into these tiny, tiny little ropes. And it is like well, each rope while connected still has water in. So if you have all these strands of meat together, you'll have water locked in each strand. And so how do you break it out? You kind of have to smash it. You have the dry it, and so the water that can come out will come up. Then you will have break those strands, at least a little bit, agitate them so that water can comes out.

So you're going to pulverize it Ultimately, the pulverization conversation is about moisture. So it's about how far do you have to go to ensure that the pet mcken is doing the preservation job that it inherently is supposed to do. And it goes down to the two main causes of spoilage, which is oxidation. You know, being exposed to the environment. It's like 20% oxygen in the normal atmosphere. And it's slowly degrading and unravelling everything, you know. Rust, it is happening to everything at different rates and has different consequences to all.

all matter and at the same time, that's what allows us to be metabolically active. You know, it's a we don't want this mechanism to cease for any reason. We want the oxygen in the air, but it tends to degrade things. And then the second is moisture is biological life. So you have water and you oxygen. These are the two mechanisms that you to mitigate in order to prevent spoilage. For the the fibers you're breaking them up, you get all the moisture out for the fat, You're doing the same thing. Collagen is really hard.

It's like the chewy glycerin bits. it's gonna, it is very very hard to get that dry enough without modern technology. So, this is kind of a liability for fat. And you also don't want to just scorch the fats with infinite heat. Like you want break it up mechanically, remove all the lipids without scorching them, and then preserving any of the vitamins and nutrition that's in that fat. And then you want to discard all of collagenous bits and the fascia. Essentially, they're little packets of fat wrapped in fascial.

So that holds moisture. You break the fashion the same way you break muscle strands. Then you are melting it so only what is renderable and the fat is gonna be renderable and collagen is not. The collagen's gonna turn into this little brown crispy. You're gonna discard that because it has high moisture content. So you're going to get just the lipids and just amino acids and some of their trace vitamins as long as you didn't expose them to too much heat.

Pemmican, Preservation, and Shelf Stability 26:18

you mix them together a ratio of about 80% calories from fat, which happens to be by weight 50-50. So you take these two macros 50 50, it tends to because of the energy density of fat tends be way higher from calories. From fat just happens. To be perfect keto macross. It's like 80-20 calorie split from 50% dry weight combined. And they would pack it in rawhide bags. So this solves the melting problem. So they pack it in rawhide bags. You don't want to have a seasoned leather because you use bacteria and you like urine, use a lot of like curative ammonia, like use toxic chemicals to cure leather.

so you want take the leather that's been cleaned, de-fleshed and made into ra-hide. Ra-Hide is a dried leather product that is perishable when wet. And so you take that rawhide, you sew it up, You fill your bag full of pemmican and you just make these little balls, pack them tight, equal parts fat, rendered tallow and dried protein. You mix them together and then you pour a sacrificial cap of tallows, just tallowing on the top. Now that piece of towel should oxidize. And it's sacrificial for a reason.

You're gonna discard that. That is your wrapper. And they would do this in colonial situations too. They would potted meats. You know, so they would like can or pot a hot stew. So it's cooked out all the bacteria and then they put a layer of tallow on the top and they break it. Or you can even use wax. You can use wacks, you could use paraffin. And so, they use Wax or tallows on top, melted wax or tallow. Then they'd put cloth, just a cloth dust covering over that. and then seal it with a piece of twine.

And so you have a ceramic pot. So now you've shelf-stable food for a long time. They would use that kind of colonial art in this ancestral way, doing it raw hide. That raw-hide bag could travel with you. As long as you didn't get it wet, it was essentially impervious. You could get raw hide a little wet. Like you can get rain on it. A lot of crossing of rivers and stuff, so that must have been of concern, right? You can get it a little wet, but you just air it out, dry it, out and it should be fine.

It just can't stay wet. If it stays wet the rawhide will rot and then your pemmican will be lost. So you, they have found, like pemmic and viable pemic in like 50 years after its creation. I was just going to ask what's the, how long does it last? Wow. 50 year. Yeah, so essentially, that's wrapper dependent degradation. So, if you have a good enough wrapper, it should never spoil. It should, you know, there isn't a mechanism by which it shouldn't spoil because you'll have those two factors. And it's like the half-life of the vitamins becomes the next most interesting concern.

which I know you and I are interested in because you have to imagine that these vitamins, they're very bioactive. And if they are not being absorbed by microbes because it's spoiling or molding or bacteria getting into them, if you've successfully prevented that, there's not enough moisture for those things to grow and consume those vitamins. You got to Imagine that those proteins are denaturing at some point. Right. But we don't know how long it takes to do that, especially in an oxygen free environment, because almost everything is broken down by oxygen.

Oxygen, water, everything gets broken. So if you don' have oxygen, all life is predicated on their, you know, taking it for granted. It's in the air. it's assuming it' going to be there. It's like when you take something out to space, how does it break down? What mechanism is going to work on it? And it's maybe radiation. It is like, it is gonna take a long, long time for that to break. So if you're on earth and you are in an oxygen and moisture free environment, food lasts a very, very long. And once you get past the 25 year mark, its kind of like okay, for a human span of relevant time.

It's pretty much, it's good. We don't need to worry about that. And so the reason that I got so deep into all this science is because I didn't want to add preservatives. Preservatives made me feel sick. In Afghanistan, they fed us MREs and they were just like the plastic, just the worst kind of quality loaded with crap that tasted You know, passable once, but like made you terribly, terribly sick and eating it day in, day out. It's just no way to live. And it made people horribly dysfunctional without getting too graphic, horrible dysfunction as far as their digestive pathways.

I was like, I need something that's going to be ridiculously shelf stable if it's gonna make it to Afghanistan and not have any of this junk in it. MRE, for those of us that don't know, what does that stand for? So M-R-E is a meal ready to eat. So it's a field ration. Army doctrine is set so you're not supposed to have the field rations for more than 21 days in ideal conditions. You're going to rotate back to base. They're camping trip food. But that's assuming that you're in a normal situation.

And it's assumed that your war doesn't like persist longer than it ought to. Like World War II, those guys were out there for like five to seven years before they sold their families again. It's like we go on a deployment. It was 15 months, then they dropped it to a year. Then they had dropped into nine months. I went on the year long deployment. They started to see like degradation in the troops. And it's like, well, yeah, you're not feeding them well. Or sometimes they'd rotate back and sometimes it didn't.

You know, it was like we couldn't control the circumstances. That's because we have like basically an incompetent field rash. It's, it's a ration that if you went to war, you know, You wouldn't want, your soldiers eating that for seven years. Why do you think the military, the hospitals, The schools, just this, this institutional systems, why do You think they're, they are just pushing all these kind of very ultra-processed foods, these very kind-of like nutrient-voided, you know, nutrient avoided foods.

Like, do you think it's just because they're co-opted by a lobbyist or Big Ag? Or do think, it just absolute like ignorance? I just don't understand why is this system still pushing those types of foods that are not filling you guys in the way that we know you should be filled? Well, it comes down to the USDA. The USDA was put in place, the food pyramid, all of this, All the subsidies that we just take for granted to make corn cheap, soy cheap and cheaper than cheap. Just nearly free. This model was designed to support the American farmer.

back in a day where it was really, really important that, you know, politically, they thought it is important to support the farmer. And so we put these incentives in place, we've put this programs in places in completely unrecognizable time, and they've just lingered without being updated. So you have an unequal playing field where these agro products are incredibly cheap to make and they're incentivized. There's all these different things you can do with it. It's like a million different uses for corn.

You can even put it in your car with ethanol. So it's there's so many different ways that gums and products and corn solids and all of these things that you could do a corn because it is nearly free. And so because nearly free is a great price, you can add it to all these different things and then have all this different value adds. You don't need to make very much on corn solids, but you make a few cents and you put it in like 5% of the food supply. Like, okay, now you're talking big money and you don't want to switch anything nutritive because anything neutritive would be, you know, 10 cents, first five cents.

It's like, well, so we have stacked the deck in a way that deprioritizes current concerns for historical concerns. And then when we get to the government agency, we look at them and we grade them by whether or not they are on budget or off budget. So it's down to dollars and cents. So we have set up a messed up game with perverse incentives. And then we've told our hospitals, we told, our schools, We told are prisons, you better stay in budget. and so now they are interfacing with this system that has all these old laws on the books that incentivizes cheap ultra processed food.

You know, and so now you have this cheap, ultra processed food. You could buy this brownie, Brownie A for, you know $1 per unit. Or you can buy, this other brownies made with, With real eggs and real milk and a real real ingredients and pain sugar and all this and it's it actually like three dollars and forty forty three cents and you're like, well, how many people in this prison am I going to feed? It's like OK, Well, I just lost two dollars in some odd cents per person per meal. You know, for how many years and it's like, oh, well, you know this institution's been around for 120 years.

And it starts being millions and billions and millions of dollars for a brownie. The cheap brownies fine. Right. You're talking about a Brownie you're not actually talking. something that you're concerned about nutrition, really you just trying to like, this is a placating food designed to make people feel not so bad that they're stuck in a cafeteria. They can't see this, they can see outside, there's stuck under fluorescent lights, you know, it's palliative care. And so pallid of care with budgetary constraints tends to go to the lowest common denominator and that's ultra processed food that is terrible for you.

But do you think it's just budgetary constraints? Cause I'm even thinking going back to where you started with like, you know, movies and craft service, stations on sets, they're filled with just junk. And those people have money. They have the knowledge, the awareness. Is it just like oh, yeah, this doesn't fit our budget or is it and? We don't wanna actually do the work to re-educate people on like snacking differently or not snackin'. Like we just wanna give them the status quo of like, hey, you're used to eating this way, so let's just provide it.

Cause we know it gives the illusion of quick energy, even though we there's a crash right on the other side of it, but you know what I mean? Like is it also the psychology we're butting up against or the kind of common, the lowest common denominator in terms of what people are used too? Or is it just budget? I don't know. What do you think? Well, I think it's both. And I this is more your world, too. It's a chef. You're asked to do a spread. This multimillionaire will ask for a Coke. And it's like, dang, all this effort, you could have the most expensive, exquisite wine or whatever drafted that has low sulfite that's as good as wine can get for you.

And then people will just have this familiarity with their beverage of choice that is cheap and effective and gives them the energy that they need. and they become addicted to it. So the way that, you know, and as an entrepreneur you get this too. The way you make profit is you give people the thing of the lowest value possible. You hype it up in marketing and you charge the difference and that difference is your margin and it's your profit. If they are selling super high-end products, they need to be charging double that.

Like they can't give you something of high value for an affordable price. They can only give your trash for unaffordable price because the difference has to be their margin or their take home. So there's no incentive for them to deliver any kind of quality. And then once you become habituated to that, you're going to crave and want and desire and not be satisfied by anything other than that process junk. If you are not the kind of pretentious person that wants fresh oysters flown in this morning that were harvested, you know, in the ocean in, the morning, and by lunchtime, they're, 700 miles away prepared, If you're not that kind of person who wants the exclusivity, you actually not going to get high quality nutrition because there's not a middle bracket of sensible nutrition based food.

Military Rations and Institutional Food Systems 41:18

that people widely accept and understand. I think through health, all these people getting devastatingly ill and then realizing that nutrition is the missing link to their wellness. They are creating this category from scratch, but it's still nascent. It's so growing. People have to be more aware and that's part of why we're doing this podcast is try to help people be aware that You don't have to be the pretentious snob rich luxury person to get high quality nutrition. Nor do you need to just be a zombie going along with the standard issue crap that makes everyone rich.

There is a middle way and that middle is high-quality nutrition that's a high value product that has paper thin margins by someone who truly believes in it. And here we are. Yet it is. It is interesting. even like with our products, right? So yes, margins aren't like incredible when you're trying to push real food with very simple ingredients as well, because clearly the simpler the ingredients and the quality of those simple and ingredients make it actually more expensive than the product that is, as you mentioned, kind of more overly processed and subsidized ingredients because those are all cheap.

Yep. But what I find is interesting that if you were to price your bar too low, people would say, well, is it not? Is this conventional meat? They would think the quality of the bar was lower. And so it really is a dance of like, you have to meet your needs as a business owner, but you also. And, and yet also try to be true to like your mission of like, Hey, I want to help people. So I wanna make it as accessible as I can to as many people as possible. And yet I also have to aware of people's psychology that if it's cheap, then they think that it is cheap quality.

Yeah, exactly. So say you were completely benevolent and you wanted to have zero margin or a negative margin, you needed to give it away. But you want to do like offset some of the costs so you didn't give away completely. And you sold like a $2 stake. People would be like, What's that real meat? What is wrong with it? Yeah. Why would you give away? So people have this baked in expectation of what things cost and it's a two edge blade. Like as inflation especially hits food, like the hardest, you know, it something that's not even calculated in inflation.

It's excluding food and rent, the things you have to have. It's like, uh, that doesn't seem like a good measurement if it excludes the two things I absolutely have to have food and shelter. But, um, nevertheless, food costs keep going up and up. People's expectation of that is that it should cost a lot for good things. And so on the higher end, middle-class, upper middle class, you know, They probably will have like a dollar cut off if this steak didn't cost more than $20. It's probably not safe to eat and so.

If you can get your margin so that your costs, raw costs say you're a steakhouse and you want to get it low enough so you have a margin, but not cut yourself so thin that you cannot sustain that or keep supplying it because that's another thing. Equipment breaks, facilities need upgraded, the roof needs fixed, you know the plumbing needs upgraded. It's like there are all these expenses and all of these things are not on linear growth paths either. So like the HVAC guy who you could call it pre-pandemic.

is not going to cost the same as the age fat guy today. Like all the experienced people, you know, retired. They're like, ah, it's not worth it. You know two weeks to flatten the curve turned to you. Know what? Everything's fine. I'm just going. Retire early. And so now there's a bunch of young people in the pipeline. Or just not enough formed, not as informed as, you know, as practiced. Right. And, and there's not. Enough of them to go around. Yeah. So there're two young inexperienced people in the pipeline of our skills trade that don't know what they're doing.

and There's. Not enough of. Them. so the price is going to. Go up. You're going. To pay more and get less quality work. in plumbing, electrical work, HVAC, refrigeration, all these key ingredients to food manufacturing. And so it's like, okay, our prices are gonna skyrocket because you look at a big food plant with all of this refrigerating technology and all this energy and hard work going into it, and even the cost of energy itself, it all factors in. The more green we go, the more expensive energy gets as a base load, which means the money you will have to pay just to eat.

And, you know, not to get political, but that's just a truth, so if you don't have a stable base that is affordable, then you're going to have to pay for it somewhere. And one of the ways that you pay It'll grow bacteria will be unsafe to eat. They can't let cold food get hot. Same thing. It will mold. So all of that energy to keep food within these safe temperature range to defeat bacteria, they're mandatory. No matter what the price tag is of the energy, their obligate to keeping it within that range.

If we get hit with a solar flare and it's 200 degrees outside, In order to serve that steak, you have to keep your fridge at temp. It's like, well, so you do whatever you can. You're gonna have stacks of dry ice and blast coolers going. And it's whatever it takes, You have keep it at that temp or you cannot serve it. That'll be a million dollar steak because it 200 degrees outside. There are these hard limits when you come with microbiology and physiology. biology in general that is just not fungible.

And so for me, I like to preload my work into the pemmican and have all that hard work done. It doesn't require any refrigeration. Heat does not affect its shelf stability. I know that I have a high quality nutrient dense, energy dense meal. Anywhere in the world I would go. And for me, that just gives me peace of mind because no matter what kind of chaos we're going to be in war or otherwise, uh, I know I'm good. Yeah. I gotta say when I was traveling, moving from the West coast to the East coast, bought a box of bars and I brought them with me and they saved me.

No, no joke. Uh, we get to towns where. Everything was closed except like an A and W. And I just, I haven't eaten fast food in, 30 years I want to say. So I, just and I I can't go there, you know, now that I know what I right, it's hard for me to go backwards. and, and so I would just have a bar. I was completely satiated. Like completely. It was truly a meal replacement. you're avoiding all those seed oils and we make two of our bars, the zesty garlic and the honey barbecue. We make it with your spicy, spicy pluck.

And so because it has pluck, it as nose to tail nutrition, has that high energy density, and it things like that the normal bar doesn't have. Like I have a normal by that's just beef tala salt, but the beef, talasalt plus pluck has It has copper, it has trace minerals. It used to be able to rattle them off. I had them all memorized. But there's a lot of things. Watch one of those Nutritional with Judy posts. Has all the different things in liver and different organs.

Building a Better Ancestral Bar 50:08

And not just liver too. Pluck has so much more than just that. As like a full complement of these organs in it. For me, I just feel like if I'm worried about it at all, Like have real organs, like get, get nose to the tail, have all your bases covered. And that way you don't have anything to worry about. What's, what have you learned in, cause you guys have been around now, how many years? Four or five, five to six maybe. Um, yeah. So I started product development in a 2018 and I launched officially the Kickstarter in 2019. Yeah.

Okay. You've been in this process for about six years. Six, seven now actually. What's changed for you? What do you kind of see? Well, we could pull a few different questions from this. Let's first start, what are the changes that you've learned in these seven years just around the systems of making Pemmican? Well, I mean, it's a lot of hard work. I wish there were more shortcuts. Two to three years in, they'd be like, ah ha ha. But I found a way to make this really cheap and easy and quick and everyone can do it.

It's actually mind bogglingly difficult to makes good quality pemmican and to resist the temptation to just cheap out and use cheaper alternatives. the sourcing of good high-quality fat and suet specifically, the solid fat. It has all the vitamins and minerals that you come to think of beef tallow are from the suit. Like you're getting a completely different fat like bouquet of different fatty acids in the trim fat. Like people don't realize that cow fat from nose to tail is different every single inch.

Every single of the cow is a different amount of nutrition. Well, it's the same as why organ meats are so important. It's like, you know, liver is here and the pancreas is there and, the lungs are here. And the heart's there. Well, if you want CoQ10, that was the one. You got to go for heart. Yeah, and there are certain things that are only in the kidneys. There's certain B vitamins that, are that only are in pancreates. They're certain, minerals that're only the liver. Because liver does different things.

So, when you're thinking about the fat, stored on an animal, the fat does different things. You know, some places you want subcutaneous fat for cushioning because you don't want to get bruised up. Sometimes you wanna cushion organs, other times as a sign of ill health. Like the fatty liver disease, you do not want grain finish your animal because it has all these toxins that build up in the liver. So you want to make sure that your oafle, your organs are from grass-finished animals, at least when it comes to liver.

Now, the heart may be unaffected. So there's an opportunity there if you have grain-finished hearts that may less affected, but grain finished livers. It's going to have a milder taste, but it might have metabolites that are, you know, less desirable. So it's like, well, if you have certain grass finished animals, it is going have more of these different elements. It is like you got to analyze the chemistry all the way through every single histological process. As a medic, I am thinking about all of the different tissue types.

And all the different tissue types have different nutrition types if you're going to eat it. So you can't just, you know, blank out. You know one of the things that I love about organs is the collagen that I'm removing. And this is a big macronutrition element, the glycine and the methionine. So if you're eating a bunch of muscle meat, you are not getting the collagen on purpose. You're removing the Collagen. But what are organs like mostly made out of? The actual structure of the organ itself. Everyone's excited about the vitamins and minerals is like, but actually the physical body of it isn't Yeah, it isn't a connective muscle.

You know, your liver doesn't move things from A to B. It doesn' move thing from distance. Is just all collagen matrix. So it's that collagen that's in those organs naturally that because you've dried it and you have done the hard work of making it taste good. And it is like, I can add that to my pan making and I could get a whole different side of that nutrition. into my bar and not compromise the shelf stability, which for me is the holy grail of what I'm trying to do is like reach back in time to my past selves, you know, stuck on set or stuck in Afghanistan, God forbid, and breathe into that nutrition and life and the healing power of animal-based nutrition, Which I am strong proponent of.

How do you see the ancestral eating evolving in the next five or 10 years? I'm sure even in your seven years, you've seen the evolution, how people are kind of more keen to eating this way, they're more into organ meats, it's becoming a little bit more trendy, but so how do see it evolving? Well, ebbs and flows, certainly, hesitate to mention, I think it is worthwhile, liver king for example, the fraud of him using PEDs and he's promoting these organs in pills, desiccated organs and pills. And I'm like, at one point, I like that's not how you should eat food.

But in the other hand, look at the reviews. I look in reviews of a live change. And I'm just like blown away. Like, hey, I had this kidney complex and this issue resolved for me. I have this heart complex. How had the liver on desiccated organ in this change for, me in, this changed from me and, like, and I didn't have to taste it. So people are so stuck on like how organs taste. Um, which is why adding spices is such a great idea. That way you're getting your medicine with your flavor. But, um, you know, these pills have really been enlightening to me and just the understanding the biology and understanding, the changes that are happening in the human species is like, as everyone eats these ultra processed foods, we're specifically deficient in these vitamins and minerals.

That are so potent that even in these infinitesimal amounts like the amounts that are in. These pills are kind of that's where the inflammation comes from. It's like you go to your butcher and get like a whole liver. And they might even give it to you for free because no one's buying it and they have too much. People are buying. But yeah, I hear you. Now people are. Buying it. but like back in the day, especially it's like, this is waste. We just throw it, we just feed it the dogs and it like. That's actually incredibly, incredibly valuable.

And so when you're, when your getting it in a pill form, you are getting such an unfair amount for the every dollar you spend. Except that people value that not having to taste that awful. that liver tastes, or that whatever organ they're eating tastes. They're squeezed out by it culturally. And so they are getting healthier on taking organ pills, which to me says like, okay, as a species, like whatever it takes,

Ancestral Eating, Organs, and the Future 57:58

we need to get this animal-based nutrition into people. If these pills are helping, then God bless. Like, God bless. Like seriously, that's, I mean, at the end, we want human flourishing. I'd rather them eat whole foods, but man, if that working, then I think culturally, the more we normalize that, The more that every animal based brand is going to take off and do better because I've seen things get really, really hot and excited in 2019. things kind of surge with liver king, early 2020s, and then things kinda fall off where ancestral nutrition is a fraud.

And then it's like, no, actually people are still getting healthy. He lied about a physique issue, but his physique had really nothing to do with all of these positive effects that people were getting from including animal-based foods. The fact that we've outlived the scandal and it would continue to grow and we're growing and growing growing. And it's like. I think that really shows that we're not just a fad, that a scandal can't take us down and growth is still continuing unchecked. That people are getting healthy and that sick people, are turning to carnivore in droves and animal base in general, as an understanding of nutrition and these micronutrients that are absolutely critical for your health and wellness and happiness.

It's like, I, think the movement has nothing but a growth in its future. I think it's really fascinating that ultimately we're both in the business of helping to get people to eat real food. Both of us have very simple products. There's no additives. No fillers. It's like, this is all real. at its best, highest quality, real food. And do you, I still get pushback. Like I saw people get people to your point saying like, well, this isn't going to be that, or this is an enough of that. Or it's like questioning real.

I find that both fascinating and disturbing that we've come to a place where we're giving real food this scrutiny that we would give to the laboratory food. And sometimes we are giving less scrutiny to laboratory foods than we give the real foods. It almost seems backwards to me. Yeah, it's like if you have pizza and beer. as your breakfast, lunch, and dinner, people aren't concerned. They'll wag their finger at you, but they won't actually like look into what minerals and vitamins you're going to be deficient in.

Exactly. they don't care. Like, ah, you know you shouldn't do that. And then they'll grin at and say, But I understand. You do you boo. But then if you have like, Let's go more traditional than carnivore. You have a huge steak and you have fermented veggies and a little bit of perennial fruit, but you're eating this huge amount of red meat and saturated fat. You know, but you're eating what mainstream or paleo, you know would be like, okay, that seems pretty healthy from an ancestral point of view.

And then the mainstream people are like wow, what about your green leafy vegetables? Like, What about this or that? And it's like. In what world would we have had access to like exotic tropical fruits or acai berry bowls or, you know, giant heaps of unrefrigerated green leafy vegetables that don't have any like anti-nutrients in them. It's like, I mean, that's not realistic. And like people who have all this scrutiny for a plate that is, You know beyond defensible as far as ancestrally and it's Why is this under this much scrutiny?

It's beyond understanding. It really is. There's one thing that you're bringing up that I think is really fascinating. I'm curious about your perspective on this. I mean, we're both clearly very pro animal based foods. Uh, were also pro people following their dietary, uh, preference, you know, whether it's carnivore or any, whatever they choose to, however they chose to eat. But one of the issues I have with any dogmatic diet and carnival is part of this is that when I think of ancestrally I believe there is no world where we would ever have focused on one thing.

We were opportunistic. If there were strawberries on the wild strawberries growing on ground and we're walking by it, we were going to pass those up. Like there's no word where would not take advantage of a resource that was in front of us. Well, I would say I agree. But with the caveat. that a strawberry is no bigger than this. Yeah. The wild stories particularly are very tiny. And it's bitter. So as far as would we put it in our mouth, I grew up in Missouri where it is nothing to grab a piece of clover and chew on the stem.

You know, and just kind of play with vegetables and play it with vegetation and it's or honeysuckle. You bite the end of a honeyesuckle and there's a little bit of nectar at the bottom. It tastes really, it is an interesting thing. I definitely think that wild humans would have put everything in their mouths, just like a baby. We have to also like take serious stock going out into the woods and most of what we call fruits and vegetables today have been hybridized to the point of unrecognizable proportion.

I think we would have put everything in our mouths, but there are berries. There are things that look good to eat that are deadly. And I think there would have been exploration, death, and some acceptance in equal parts in the plant world. And i think that we would've. been hungry enough, protein hungry, enough that we would have really, really looked for animals to satiate that hunger. Because I don't think that if you're looking for like, take root vegetables, potatoes are awesome, right? People love potatoes.

They're medium to low on the inflammatory scale. But like if your going for North American root vegetable, you are going something like a leek. So go out there and hunt leeks and get enough to make a plate of french fries. First of all, the main work of the energy is going to be the oil. Where did you get the deep fryer? Let's pretend you have free oil and you are free deep fryer. Where do you get enough leaks, enough volume with enough starch to actually like fry them up to survive? It's like there's just not enough of volume of it.

I fully agree. We would have explored with anything and everything. And if there was edible fruit, I'm sure we ate it, it's. Just a question of like how much heavy lifting nutritionally is that doing compared to the animal products? And I am of the opinion that eat whatever makes you flourish. And if it makes your flourish, like don't listen to anybody on the internet, talking heads or otherwise, ignore everyone. If it make you flourish, again, God bless, that's the whole point. But if you're not flourishing, you should take a look at what you are eating and say, Okay, is this serving me?

Is this making me better? Or is it making it worse? And you know, for me, when I eat animal-based, When I more nose to tail, For me like, there's a certain amount of nose-to-tail that's good. And certain amounts that are too much. You know? A light dusting of a seasoning is really perfect for my. Because I don't want to do, I Don't wanna do tons and tons of offal. I dont feel my best if I like liver everyday. but a little bit like purposefully included in my diet. You know, you think about like special occasions or special metabolic conditions, like say somebody who's older.

Like you give the liver of the kill, the whole tribe shares the animal, You give a liver to the older person. The older the person literally can't absorb as much nutrition. So, as you age, your ability to absorb all of the vitamins and minerals that you need to survive goes down. So if you give them something that's super dense in vitamins, and their ability, to create enzymes degrades, their abilities to break protein degrade, the ability create acid to get those amino acids, all that degrades.

giving them liver might breathe life into them or someone who's pregnant, you know, You're building a whole new human being from scratch. You might be in a unique metabolic situation where you might need a little bit more vitamins and minerals for that short duration. That may not be for every time, but like I think you can target this stuff sensibly and really make sure that you're getting this high quality nutrition in in accordance with whatever other diet you thrive on. I think just adding it in, sprinkling it on top, which goes so well with Pluck, you know, I, think is a great way to add a awful into your life and just make sure you're covering your bases.

And if you are anything like the people taking the pills, a little goes a long way. It makes real change. Just a bit can make a big change in your overall health and how you feel. Well, you bring up a really good point too, which I've actually never thought about, sheath that's that embodying the organ is easier to break down. Yeah. And you're getting the more of that methionine. Someone who is older, someone who's not digesting their proteins very well is going to digest organ meats better. I get that mixed up.

The methionein glycine, it's a ratio and so they're a bonded pair. like copper and zinc are a bonded pair. You're getting zinc and the muscle meat, but you're not getting copper unless you eat the liver. So the methionine glycine is the collagen to muscle-meat amino acid dominance. They're more bioavailable, also joints tend to wear out. they have a finite lifetime if used under ideal conditions. But if you don't use them under ideal conditions or you get injured or get arthritis, it's like, where are you going to rebuild that?

And so it is the same thing. You got to do it with your, yeah, through the foods you eat. Yeah. That's great, man. It's so great to talk to you and I hope we can do this again because there's much more to mine. Always. We're going put in the show notes how People can save 10% on ordering carnivore bars should they want to try. My favorite personally is, is the honey barbecue. I just, I think you nailed that one. They're all great, but I mean that, that just hits my savory and sweet notes perfectly.

Yeah. But where can people, where should people look to connect with you, find you on socials? Just theCarnivoreBar or carnivorabar.com. We're fortunate enough to have a fan get the domain and sell it to us for a reasonable price during the Kickstarter. So we are, you know, community-based, communities-supported, Carnivores. for carnivores or animal-based ancestral, you know, we love talking about organs. We love taking about nutrition. So just hit us up on social. Yeah. You guys are knocking out of the park too.

There's so much, I highly recommend everyone check out their Instagram. It's just so informative. Your always keeping on top of like current news as well. And- We try. yeah, You do a good job. I think so at least. Thanks. And you're a good person, you know, I think as you mentioned, it's like I wish there was someone out there that was kind of highlighting businesses that actually have heart, that have good people with good intentions that are really trying to help because you would be at the top of the list.

Well, thank you. I feel the same about you, i think we find each other and we shout each We can't know everything, but you know, we have repeated experiences with this person and they're a rock star. Yeah. Well, thank you. Thank you, Phillip. And thank everyone for Joining us in today's talk, it means so much to have you with us and please leave a message, rate us, just give us some communication of how you're enjoying this podcast. And most of all, stay curious. and let's fight the good fight together.

Thank you.