In this episode, we talk to a man named Michael. He's a chef and owner of a restaurant called Antler in Toronto, Canada. We talk about the protest that went viral when he butcheered a deer leg in front of a group of people who were upset that he was serving meat in front to them. We also talk about how he handled the situation and what he did to get them to stop yelling at him. We also get into how he was able to get the heck out of there without getting into a fight with the protesters and how he dealt with it. We hope you enjoy this episode and it makes you think twice before you go out to eat. If you don't already know who Michael is, then you're in for a treat! This episode is brought to you by Vlogged Off, a food delivery service that specializes in vegan and vegetarian options. They offer a wide range of menu items, including meat, fish, vegetables, and other items that can be consumed on-site. They are located in the heart of the city of Toronto. They are open 24/7, 7 days a week, 7 nights a week. The service is great and the prices start at $10.00 per person! You can get 10% off the entire menu, plus free shipping throughout the rest of the week! v=a&feature=youtu.be and v=AQQQGQQmUoUoQwYVQ&t=3P8 Thank you so much for listening to this episode! We really appreciate all the support, we really appreciate it. We really do appreciate all of your support and your support. We look forward to hearing from you. -Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays! XOXO! -The Crew at Vlogging Crew! Cheers, Caitlyn and Sarah - Caitlyn Caitlyn & Sarah - Michael ( ) Caitlyn ( ) & Sarah ( ) ( ) and Sarah ( ( ) ( . Thanks so much Caitlyn's work and love you, Sarah ( . ) & Sarah's work ( ) ( ). . . . , , Sarah's new book, Sarah's book, Sarah's Book, , and so much more! ( ) , and much more!!
00:00:10.000If people don't know the story, we'll give them the brief synopsis.
00:00:13.000I found out about your story online because there was this viral thing that was going on about a chef who was getting protested by a bunch of animal rights activists and vegans who decided to camp out in front of your business and tried a restaurant called Antler in Toronto.
00:00:31.000I don't know what the fuck they were trying to do, but you decided to butcher a leg of deer in front of them, and it became this horrific thing.
00:02:22.000They went from like two or three people being kind of peaceful to being like 10, 15 people not so peaceful.
00:02:29.000So it's when it turned not so peaceful, they were shouting at our guests and shouting in our door and really trying to harm our business that I just kind of got fed up last resort.
00:02:40.000We get a whole deer a couple times a month and we butchered ourselves and I just said, screw it, screw it.
00:02:46.000I'm like, I'm going to get these people to get out of here.
00:02:49.000So I thought that that would make them go away.
00:02:53.000How did you think that was going to make them go away and not escalate it?
00:05:41.000There is such a thing as ethical farming and sustainable farming, and we work really hard to make sure that where we get our meat from is from the best possible place we can, and it's local, so it's supporting our local farmers that are within hours of our restaurant.
00:05:56.000Now, when you say that they started out nice, how many people were there in the beginning?
00:07:13.000They want to win and then it becomes this thing where you know look the reality is a Lot of people are idiots and they don't have a lot going on in their life And so when something comes up where it becomes a primary focus of their life one restaurant as illogical as it might be That becomes the battleground and it's an ideological battleground for you know don't eat meat ever Versus sustainable farming.
00:07:50.000And that's a big part of sort of my beliefs and my philosophy and why I'm working on this cookbook right now is because I think that if you do eat meat, you should be able to kill an animal and experience that.
00:08:02.000And I think that if people were to actually kill an animal...
00:08:06.000They would see, you know, what goes into that.
00:08:08.000And I don't think people would consume as much meat and I don't think people would definitely, you know, they certainly wouldn't waste as much meat as they do.
00:08:15.000And it's just really upsetting and I think it's totally misguided, you know, why we were targeted.
00:08:22.000Well, I mean, like I said, I think it just becomes a game.
00:08:53.000And that's a real problem that we, as a society, it's not obviously not you or I that has set up this system, but that this system is a system that we find ourselves a part of.
00:09:20.000Maybe that's the wrong way to describe it.
00:09:21.000But it's how the system's been set up and it's actually why I started hunting and doing what I do because I watch these documentaries like Food Inc.
00:09:29.000These things that kind of shone a light on the system and how this stuff is actually being produced.
00:10:46.000Yeah, no, and I don't have a lot of experience with that because where I am, we don't have that wild boar problem, but I hunt with these guys from Mossy Oak, and I've gone down there and done one of these.
00:10:57.000Pig hunts and they've shown me their fields and like one third of their cornfield is just destroyed.
00:13:21.000Overpopulation of wild animals is handled in one of two ways.
00:13:26.000Either you introduce predators or you manage them with hunting.
00:13:30.000There's a place in Maui Maui has no predators, but they also have a bunch of wild game that was brought in for King Kamehameha.
00:13:44.000I think it was in the 1800s they brought it in.
00:13:47.000I'm not sure when, but there's tons of Axis deer on Maui and on Lanai and on Molokai, a couple of different islands.
00:13:56.000And one of the things they've started doing is they were trying to figure out how to eradicate them from this area.
00:14:02.000So a bunch of hunters got together and they're hunting these Axis deer and then giving the meat to poor people, like making it free for them.
00:14:10.000And it's a really cool program, but that's another...
00:14:15.000Sort of situation where you kind of have to hunt.
00:14:19.000Unless you're just going to poison them or you're going to somehow or another capture them all and neuter and spay a certain amount of them every month, there's really no other way to handle it.
00:14:31.000Yeah, and I think that's a big misconception.
00:14:33.000Like, people that don't educate themselves about hunting, they're just like, hunting is bad, killing animals is bad, and they get on this bandwagon, but they don't have enough information about it.
00:14:42.000And I think people confuse trophy hunting, you know, with like, they see Cecil the lion, and everyone goes after, okay, it's hunting is the problem, but...
00:14:49.000You know, trophy hunting is the problem, but hunters that hunt for food and that hunt to, you know, help the sort of environmental impacts that they're having.
00:15:21.000Well, large-scale agriculture is also responsible for the boom in the population of deer.
00:15:27.000Deer in America, particularly in the Midwest, where all the farms are, what is it, a fucking coincidence that there's all the deer where all the farms are?
00:16:31.000The idealistic view of someone who lives in a city street in Toronto and is driving around on their bike looking for signs that are criticizing kale or whatever the fuck they're doing, they're not in the real natural world that these animals exist in.
00:18:31.000Like, when I see a deer come out, I hunt with a bow, a crossbow, and I see a deer come out, I'm trembling, the hair on my back is standing up, they're these beautiful, majestic creatures, and I'm gonna kill it.
00:18:43.000And it's really, really difficult, and I don't think that people understand that, that don't hunt and that haven't killed an animal, they don't understand the respect and the amount of effort that goes into that.
00:19:46.000Well, we can shoot afterwards, but we have to fucking practice.
00:19:49.000You have to be able to make an ethical shot.
00:19:53.000But now, when I sit down and I cook something for my family, I know where that came from.
00:19:59.000If we have vegetables that we grew in our garden, there's a great satisfaction for serving up some cucumbers or some kale or whatever it is that we grew in our garden.
00:20:21.000And for me as a chef, that's why I love hunting and foraging and having a garden in my backyard because when you go and pick something, nothing tastes as good as that.
00:23:26.000It's very unfortunate that I think these ideological groups get tainted by the most extreme members.
00:23:34.000And I think that's true on the hunting side, too.
00:23:36.000And you got guys like fucking Ted Nugent, you know, and all the people that I think that they distort the real sort of Fascinating and mystical qualities of wildlife and harvesting wildlife and being out there and experiencing nature.
00:23:55.000It's an almost psychedelic experience to hunt and be in the wild.
00:24:01.000That sounds so counterintuitive to someone who's never experienced it.
00:24:05.000The world of these animals, when you're away from your cell phone, when you're away from television and all the bullshit and the computer, when you're out there in the wild, you are almost in another dimension.
00:24:17.000If you're in complete silence, in the forest, in your mind...
00:24:23.000Goes into a completely different sort of mode that is familiar, but yet alien.
00:24:31.000It's familiar in a way that your body's like, oh, this is hunting.
00:24:35.000This is what humans have done for hundreds of thousands of years.
00:24:41.000I mean, this is literally one of the reasons that scientists believe that our brains grew.
00:24:45.000It's because we started eating meat, we started cooking meat, the nutrition became more accessible, and also we started thinking about how to hunt, developing tools to hunt with.
00:24:55.000I mean, all of this is the reason why humans are humans today.
00:24:58.000And I'm sure the vegan argument against that would be, well, that's then, and we're past that now.
00:25:04.000We're not because of controlling the population of animals.
00:25:07.000We're certainly not because of controlling the population of predators.
00:25:10.000And that's another thing that people need to accept and understand.
00:25:13.000There's a reason why they eradicated all the wolves in North America before they reintroduced them to Yellowstone, and now they're thriving in many parts of the Northwest.
00:25:20.000It's because they were fucking killing everything.
00:25:22.000And they don't have any predators, and the only predators that they have are humans.
00:25:26.000And if we don't keep the populations in check of them, and of grizzly bears, of black bears, and all the other predators, they start eating each other, they start tearing each other apart, they start coming after us, they start encroaching on people.
00:26:34.000And I think it comes with a certain responsibility, and that responsibility is really...
00:26:39.000We're really doing a disservice to that responsibility with factory farming.
00:26:43.000And that's one of the main arguments for veganism.
00:26:46.000One of the main arguments is the horrific treatment of those animals.
00:26:50.000Whether it's veganism, or whether it's rather factory farming, or whether it's...
00:26:56.000Large-scale dairy farms where they mistreat their cows, or the chicken farms, or all these different factory farms where they treat these animals not as a living being but as a commodity.
00:27:12.000Joel Salatin is a very fascinating guy.
00:27:14.000He runs a farm called Polyface Farms, and what he has essentially done is made large-scale animal agriculture possible in a humane and very natural way.
00:27:27.000He has enormous electric fences that he uses for his pigs.
00:29:07.000So the pigs that are in these factory farms or even regular pigs, there's many different breeds and a lot of them are hybrid.
00:29:15.000hybrid breeds the the wild boar breed has long black hair and tusks that actually come out so I can buy whole pigs and they don't have those tusks and when I buy the wild boar breed the meat is darker the the hair is black but we're getting them you know there's no hair by the time we get them and they've got the tusks in the jaw right but my point is that a boar is a male right you're definitely eating females too that's true Yeah,
00:29:57.000I do know there's tons of different varieties, like there's the Berkshire, there's Tamworth, there's all these different kinds of breeds of hogs.
00:30:06.000What's crazy about wild pigs is if you took a domestic pig, you know, like Babe, release Babe out into the forest, they morph in a very short amount of time.
00:30:17.000Their snout extends, their hair becomes darker and thicker, their tusks lengthen.
00:31:33.000William Randolph Hearst decided that when there was a cover of, I believe it was Popular Science Magazine that said, And they had invented a machine called a decorticator.
00:31:46.000And what a decorticator does is it effectively processes hemp fiber much more efficiently.
00:31:51.000And for the longest time, they used slaves to process hemp fiber.
00:31:55.000But then Eli Whitney came around with the cotton gin, and they switched from hemp clothing to cotton.
00:32:01.000Cotton is easier to produce with the cotton gin, but it's just an inferior cloth.
00:32:17.000William Randolph Hearst read this article, saw what was coming, and realized that he was going to have to transition all of his paper mills, and he owned forests that they would cut down the trees and make paper with.
00:32:28.000They would have to transition those to hemp if people were demanding hemp.
00:32:33.000He undercut the entire industry by saying that there was a new drug that blacks and Mexicans were smoking and they were raping white women.
00:32:41.000And he called this drug marijuana, which was really just the name of a Mexican slang for wild tobacco.
00:33:14.000Well, this same crazy asshole let a bunch of wild pigs loose on his property so he can hunt them because he was a gentleman hunter.
00:33:22.000So the pigs that I hunt in California when I go pig hunting probably are direct descendants from the pigs that were let loose by this asshole.
00:33:31.000I think what a lot of people don't understand is how fast they breed.
00:33:36.000My friends in Mississippi were telling me a pig can lay a litter three times a year, four times a year, up to 10, 12 piglets per litter, and they have no natural predators.
00:33:45.000So what are these farmers going to do when they start decimating their crops?
00:33:49.000Yeah, they're not a native North American species.
00:36:44.000You know, the mountain lion thing is a weird thing with California because I see their point.
00:36:49.000What they've essentially done is, and this is, one of the weird things about California is like, California is one of the places that doesn't have a fish and game department.
00:38:48.000They use dogs to tree the mountain lion and they shoot them.
00:38:51.000And when they empty the contents of their stomachs, when they do an autopsy on them, they find it filled with dogs and cats, which is really kind of crazy.
00:39:47.000This idea that like we're in their community, like they have an established gated community that we've entered and we start putting up houses and pissing off their neighbors.
00:43:01.000I'm walking into my deer setup and I had to cross this little river and it was like full of stones and stuff and I'm kind of walking up this river.
00:43:10.000And all I hear is like, brum, brum, brum.
00:43:12.000And I'm like, what the hell is that noise?
00:43:14.000And then it stopped and it was pawing at the ground and snorting.
00:43:17.000And I was like, holy shit, this is a buck.
00:43:19.000And I got goosebumps right now thinking about this.
00:44:24.000So deer season and turkey season, you can use a shotgun.
00:44:28.000And it's really stupid because you can shoot coyotes too with a rifle or shotgun, but there's no shotgun or rifle for deer, which is weird.
00:47:08.000So my daughters took this in and they put it in a large cardboard box and they had to figure out how to feed it because it was, I think it was on Saturday and the wildlife rescue place was not open on the weekend.
00:47:22.000And so we had to bring it into a place on Monday.
00:47:25.000So over the weekend, we went to this pet store that we go to, and they sell something called pinkies.
00:47:31.000It's a very cute term for baby mice that you can't really see yet.
00:47:37.000And they're separated from their mother, and they feed them to snakes.
00:47:39.000It's mostly reptiles they feed them to.
00:47:41.000But these hawks would fuck these pinkies up.
00:47:45.000And so to try to give this hawk some food while it was there over the weekend so it didn't starve, my daughters brought them the pinkies.
00:48:35.000Dude, I put that fucking thing down, and I have never seen those chickens so voracious attack that mouse, and then they were all chasing the one chicken that had the mouse, trying to steal it from her.
00:50:43.000They want something that aligns with their ideology, and their ideology is love and compassion, except for people that eat meat, and then death.
00:50:57.000It's an ideological battle, and in that sense, veganism becomes very much like a religion, because you support all the people that are on your side, and the people that are opposed to you are like apostates.
00:51:12.000They're like the negative people that are trying to bring you to the dark side, to hell.
00:51:19.000And there's a lot of evidence on their side in terms of, like, factory farming and the horrors of factory farming.
00:51:25.000And even the really incredibly poor modern American diet that they see.
00:51:32.000A lot of people, when they go vegan, what they're doing, one of the best things that they're doing is they're eliminating all the bullshit.
00:51:38.000They're eliminating all the trans fats and all the fucking...
00:51:41.000All the terrible shit that a lot of people eat that isn't vegan.
00:51:47.000The negative thing is, most of them are eating diets that are far too carbohydrate rich, and if they're not getting their blood checked, they don't even know how unhealthy they are.
00:51:56.000They convince themselves they're doing much better and they're feeling much better.
00:52:00.000But a lack of cholesterol can fuck with your hormone functions.
00:52:04.000A lot of vegans have low hormones because of that.
00:52:07.000One of our regulars at Antler was talking to me about his experience.
00:52:11.000He used to have an organic vegetable farm.
00:52:13.000And he's a 6'7", big, huge, tall Dutch white guy.
00:52:17.000And he goes to me, he says, you know, I was vegan for a long time.
00:52:21.000I had this organic vegetable farm and I thought that I was doing my body a service.
00:52:25.000He said, I thought I was doing something great for my body.
00:52:27.000And he got really sick and he went to the doctor and the doctor said, listen, man, you have to take supplements.
00:52:32.000Just supplement the things you're not getting from eating meat.
00:52:35.000Or you have to go back to eating meat.
00:52:36.000Because just some people's bodies do better than others.
00:52:39.000He said a lot of Asian cultures are more susceptible to vegetable diets.
00:52:43.000But in reality, he's like, you're a Northern European descent.
00:52:48.000And you need to eat this stuff to be healthy.
00:52:51.000And that's when he went back to eating meat.
00:53:17.000People say, well, there's iron in vegetables.
00:53:19.000There is, but it's not very bioavailable.
00:53:21.000A lot of the various vitamins and even protein in vegetables are not very bioavailable in most sources.
00:53:28.000And it's how your body absorbs those nutrients as well.
00:53:30.000It might be rich in that substance, but your body can't really absorb it.
00:53:33.000Well, it's just everybody's body is different.
00:53:35.000I mean, that is an absolute fact that there are some people that can eat certain diets and be very healthy, and then other people eat them and they have a really hard time with them.
00:53:45.000But the other thing is that most of these people that are talking about how healthy and how great they feel, there's a lot of it is sort of a placebo effect and they're not getting blood work done.
00:53:54.000Everyone, regardless of what your diet is, you should get blood work done just to find out if you have any potential problems that are on the horizon.
00:54:04.000Because there's a lot of times you'll feel okay and then you get your blood work done and the doctor will tell you, hey man, you're really low in vitamin B and D and A and you need this and that.
00:54:16.000This is the health consequences of not having this stuff in your diet.
00:54:19.000And if you are committed to a vegan diet, there's ways that you can supplement.
00:54:58.000There's a guy named Chris Kresser that I've had on my podcast before who's a brilliant guy who is an expert in diet and nutrition who started out as a macrobiotic vegan and had massive health problems and then switched to eating meat eventually and then really became a connoisseur of organ meat.
00:55:21.000Which is probably the most nutrient-dense food in the world.
00:55:25.000That's my favorite thing about hunting is the organ meat.
00:55:31.000I went hunting and I came back and I brought the heart into the restaurant for the guys because I wanted to share with them the experience of eating fresh, killed.
00:55:40.000The heart was still warm when I brought it to work.
00:55:42.000And the way I like to eat is either tartare, like just mince it up raw, or cook it like a steak.
00:55:47.000So I cut it, you know, horizontally into like, it looks like a tenderloin steak.
00:55:51.000And we all got like this like buzz, like we just like shot a double espresso or something.
00:56:37.000Even when we're buying from these really cool game farms, it's different than the deer that I go and shoot because that deer I just shot could be six, seven years old versus at the farm it's maybe one or two.
00:56:49.000But again, it's eating such a diverse diet and it's, you know, my belief is that that's how we're supposed to be eating.
00:56:56.000Well, it's definitely how we were eating for the longest time.
00:57:00.000And it is entirely possible that if humans, like, say if you got an isolated group of humans that stuck to a very, very rigid vegan diet for many, many, many generations, it's entirely possible that our genes would adapt to that diet and lifestyle.
00:57:17.000The reality of your current physical form is it's most likely not designed for that.
00:57:22.000And this is just based on genes and on genetics and epigenetics and all the various things that they've, methods that they've devised to try to study What makes you a person, and where your ancestors came from,
00:58:12.000I've heard that when the indigenous communities There was some program where they were trying to get them to stop hunting whales or stop killing seals, and the government was supplementing them with beef and cattle.
00:58:24.000And their argument was, this is not what we're supposed to eat.
00:58:26.000This is not what we're designed to eat.
00:58:27.000We need the fat in the whale blubber to stay warm.
00:58:43.000Well, it's also, you're looking at what we were talking about before, like white meat from turkey, domestic turkey versus the turkey that's a wild turkey.
00:58:53.000When you see cows, you get these corn-fed cows, you have this pale meat.
00:58:59.000That meat is pale because it's not as good for you.
00:59:02.000It's more filled with fat, which tastes good, but it's not as nutrient-dense.
00:59:08.000When you have a moose steak, you've seen a moose steak before, right?
00:59:26.000It's like the fattest, laziest person.
00:59:30.000If you thought about taking an athlete like LeBron James, who's just this super athlete...
00:59:36.000And compare, like, the composition of his body to some fucking slob who just drinks soda all day and is tired, is on antidepressants and antibiotics because his body is fucking deteriorating rapidly.
00:59:49.000He's got arthritis in all of his joints because he's too fat.
01:02:24.000And he travels along with these mushroom hunters.
01:02:29.000I think a lot of it's in Oregon and up the coast of California down in New Mexico, but they're professional foragers that then go and sell these mushrooms.
01:02:36.000But they track these foragers, and it's such a cool movie.
01:02:46.000My first experience in foraging for mushrooms, I was like an apprentice chef at this restaurant and the chef comes in and was like, hey, check these out.
01:02:52.000And I was like, whoa, what the hell are these?
01:03:46.000That is the subject of a book by a guy named John Marco Allegro.
01:03:51.000Who was one of the head scholars for deciphering the Dead Sea Scrolls.
01:03:57.000He deciphered the Dead Sea Scrolls for 14 years.
01:03:59.000He was an ordained minister, but he was also, in his study of theology, became agnostic when he started realizing that there was all these different religions that had similar stories, and he found all these different connections, and he was trying to figure out what the origins of all these stories were.
01:04:15.000Well, after studying the Dead Sea Scrolls for, I think it was 14 years before he wrote this book, He decided that all of Christianity was a massive misunderstanding.
01:04:27.000And what it was originally about was these stories, this collection of stories that were about fertility rituals and psychedelic mushroom use.
01:04:36.000And he traced the word Jesus back to an ancient Sumerian word that was a mushroom covered in God's semen.
01:04:45.000And that when God would come on the earth, that's what rain was.
01:05:16.000Foraging extremely serious and they knew what they could eat and they knew what they couldn't eat.
01:05:21.000Well, they knew that there was a relationship between carnivorous trees and coniferous trees would grow these weird looking shiny red and white mushrooms under them.
01:05:31.000That's what Coniferous trees is pine trees.
01:05:34.000That's what we use for Christmas trees.
01:05:36.000Those red and white packages, they are like the shiny packages underneath the Christmas tree.
01:05:51.000Reindeer are addicted to these to the point where when people are having psychedelic mushroom rituals and they go outside to take a leek, The caribou will knock them over to get to the Amanita muscaria piss in the sand, because they smell the Amanita muscaria in the piss.
01:06:08.000And one of the ways these guys trip their balls off is they eat the mushroom and then they drink their own urine.
01:06:17.000In the times in Siberia where it would become extremely snowy, when the shaman would visit, the way they would get into the house is through the fucking chimney.
01:06:28.000So they would climb in through the chimney.
01:06:29.000I mean, there's so many parallels to Santa Claus and to Christianity, to this one mushroom that they think was a massive part of shamanistic rituals.
01:06:54.000But I do know that they stopped production of it.
01:06:57.000I don't know if it was bought out by the Catholic Church.
01:06:59.000That's always been what's been told to me.
01:07:00.000But I do know that they stopped production of it forever.
01:07:04.000He came out with another book called The Dead Sea Scrolls and The Christian Myth, which is still available.
01:07:10.000Then, more recently, like really recently, within the last decade, a guy named Jan Irvin republished the John Marco Allegro books with permission from his family.
01:07:20.000I think it might have actually been one of those things where when a book is over 25 years old, it becomes like public domain or something like that, too.
01:07:28.000But this book and this story behind it is incredibly fascinating.
01:07:33.000And what he's basically saying is that, and it makes sense, if you were living thousands of years ago and you stumbled upon these psychedelic mushrooms and you took them, you would experience God.
01:07:43.000You literally would think that that psychedelic state was you communicating with God.
01:07:48.000They would want to hide those from the Romans.
01:07:49.000So they hid them in parables and stories, and he explains what the original meaning of all these parables and stories are.
01:07:56.000Because, of course, you're going from We're good to go.
01:08:18.000I'm obviously not one of those, so I'm just talking shit.
01:08:21.000But there's so many parallels, it's almost like, how could it be just coincidental that Santa Claus is red and white, that Santa Claus likes reindeers, that the Christmas tree is something that we use and the presents are under the Christmas tree, that Santa Claus lives in the fucking North Pole, which is Siberia,
01:08:37.000which is where caribou live, and which is where these mushrooms are very common.
01:09:27.000I was walking with the kids in a park downtown Toronto and I look over and there's this massive, it's on my Instagram, massive yellow kind of looks like goo growing on this tree and it was a premature chicken of the woods and it just looked like this blob and then if I were to leave it,
01:09:42.000it would start to kind of shelf out into like shelf kind of mushrooms.
01:09:46.000And so I left it for like a week and went back and harvested it.
01:09:49.000And it's like tender, juicy chicken flavor.
01:12:06.000Well, I was reading that, like, the philocybin is linked to curing depression and things like that, which I don't know a lot about, but it's fascinating, the effects they have on people.
01:12:18.000John Hopkins is doing some studies on them.
01:12:19.000The most fascinating of all the mushroom theories is by the late, great Terence McKenna.
01:12:26.000And his brother, Dennis McKenna, who's still alive and a scientist, Explained it on my first podcast with him.
01:12:33.000So if anybody's interested, find that and download it.
01:12:39.000And the theory is called the stoned ape theory.
01:12:43.000And this coincides with what we're talking about, about hunting and consumption of meat leading to us becoming humans.
01:12:51.000There's a doubling of the human brain size over a period of two million years.
01:12:55.000It's like apparently one of the biggest mysteries in the fossil record.
01:12:59.000They do not understand why something so important like the thing that actually created the theory of I mean that of evolution explained evolution like this very organ Doubled over a period of two million years.
01:13:16.000I don't know why Terence believes that the reason coincided with climate change and that as the climate changed These rainforests receded into grasslands and these lower hominids, like our ancestors, came down from the trees and started experimenting with new food sources.
01:13:33.000And one of the things they experimented with was psychedelic mushrooms.
01:13:36.000And that through psilocybin, which they found by flipping over cow patties, a couple things happened.
01:13:45.000Mushrooms, especially in low doses, increased visual acuity, which would make them better hunters.
01:13:50.000They could see better, made them more intuitive, made them more creative.
01:13:54.000And also, the way Dennis explains the effect of psilocybin on the brain, he was saying that it could have possibly led to the development of language, and that all of this could have come out of The consumption of psychedelic mushrooms.
01:14:32.000Now, when you first started cooking, how old were you when you became a chef?
01:14:39.000Well, it's kind of a fluke, funny story.
01:14:42.000I was a 13-year-old kid, and I wanted a part-time job, you know, like a newspaper route or something like that.
01:14:47.000And I went to, I lived in a little town on this horse farm in the country, and I rode my bike down to this gas station, and I applied to pump gas.
01:14:56.000And this guy had a diner on the corner and was like, hey, man, I don't need anyone to pump gas, but can you cook?
01:15:02.000And I grew up cooking at home with my mom because she would work late and she would call me on her way home and tell me how to start dinner.
01:15:08.000So she'd be like, turn on the oven, get the chicken out of the fridge, get the shake and bake, and she'd walk me through it.
01:15:14.000And I'd start dinner and she'd get home and finish it.
01:15:16.000So I told her, yeah, I can cook or whatever.
01:15:19.000And he had me in there dropping the fry baskets and flipping eggs and doing the brunch shift on the weekend.
01:15:36.000And then all through high school, I had a job cooking.
01:15:39.000And I really started to struggle with it because I was taking all these world issues courses and learning about the environment and watching these documentaries about food.
01:15:49.000And I didn't know how being a chef could help change the world.
01:15:52.000And how am I going to make a difference as a chef?
01:15:55.000And then I had my daughter when I was 19, and I had all this experience cooking, and I thought, well, you know, I'm just going to go to chef school and make a go of this.
01:19:29.000You know, I definitely want to do some more kind of studying about native and indigenous cooking.
01:19:35.000You know, traveling across the country is something I want to do and learning from the indigenous communities.
01:19:41.000But sort of my take on it is, you know, if there wasn't these farmed animals, what would we eat?
01:19:47.000And for me, it's morels, it's maple syrup, it's the wild leeks in this photo, it's deer and turkey and rabbit and these things we serve at Antler because that's what's growing around us in Canada.
01:22:13.000A lot of it would be open fire, and a lot of it's raw, like the seal meat and whale blubber.
01:22:18.000In the Arctic, they don't have a lot of wood to burn, and they would have oil lamps from the oil from the blubber, but a lot of the cooking is raw.
01:22:57.000And I mean, they're up there in the coldest of cold climates.
01:23:01.000One of the things we do that's kind of cool is I know the indigenous cultures would make cedar tea and it's full of vitamin C and minerals and nutrients.
01:24:02.000But if you forage for animal life, you can't do that.
01:24:06.000I think that is because of market hunting that really decimated most of the population of North American game animals in the 1800s, early into the 1900s.
01:24:33.000I do think that, you know, I think it's people's right to be able to eat wild meat.
01:24:38.000I think that as a human being, you have the right to try that.
01:24:41.000And if you're not a hunter, if you don't know how to go do it, you have the right to at least try it.
01:24:45.000And I do know, actually, in Newfoundland, they're allowed to serve wild game, and the hunter has to go and get a permit to sell, and then he has to bring it to a butcher that has a permit to process it and expect it, and then that butcher can then sell it to a restaurant.
01:25:36.000I think just staying alive, being a human is very complex.
01:25:40.000And I think we have very simplistic ways of looking at it.
01:25:42.000I also think that it's entirely possible that plants are communicating with each other and they have a level of intelligence that we don't totally understand.
01:25:51.000That's supported by more and more research every day.
01:25:54.000They're finding out that plants have some interconnected network of communication with each other and that they recognize when they're being eaten and they change their flavor profile to make themselves taste terrible to animals that are eating them.
01:26:09.000There's some communication between them, and they're some sort of a primitive life form that many argue are far more complex than things that vegans won't eat, like mollusks.
01:26:19.000Like mollusks, although we think of them as animals, they're the simplest, dumbest fucking things on earth.
01:26:25.000Vice just did an article questioning whether mollusks were vegan.
01:27:37.000But you can get these kind of pasture-raised eggs.
01:27:40.000And you vote with your dollars that you're spending.
01:27:42.000If you go to the store and you buy organic eggs and you buy the healthier version, yes, you're paying an extra buck or two bucks or whatever it is, but crack open an egg from the mass-produced place and you crack open an egg from the organic place.
01:27:55.000The organic ones are bright orange and super dark and even the yolk is really thick.
01:28:02.000And then the other one, it's pale and runny and yellow and you crack them and the yolks break sometimes and they're just like, it's garbage.
01:28:09.000And who knows what's in them and what conditions those chickens are living in.
01:28:17.000I mean, I guess it's just economics, right?
01:28:18.000And you give people the option to make the most amount of money and not have to account for ethics or cruelty standards or whatever issues were in place that allowed factory farms to materialize.
01:29:57.000There's one crazy video where this lady goes into this restaurant and she starts yelling in front of everybody about her friend and this beautiful creature that just wants to live.
01:32:37.000You know, I get that there's protesting, and it's our fundamental right to protest and have freedom of speech and have these things, but that's not protesting.
01:34:49.000So, you know, we did send an email trying to, we invited them to go foraging with us.
01:34:53.000And we talked about our different ideologies and how, you know, they're really far apart, but maybe we can come to some kind of understanding.
01:35:00.000And, you know, at the time they didn't respond.
01:36:53.000Asado is, I think it's the Argentinian cooking style, and it's a whole animal that's kind of split down the middle and kind of like filleted across.
01:38:30.000And they want their right, and they want you to admit you're wrong.
01:38:33.000And this is a real problem with something that's complex.
01:38:37.000Yeah, and the funny thing was, like, we've had vegan and vegetarian items on our menu since 2015 when we opened.
01:38:44.000And so I think it was like the second or third week they came, we thought, okay, we're going to feature one of our vegan dishes on the sign, and hopefully, like, that makes them happy.
01:38:53.000And so we feature one of our vegan dishes on the sign.
01:38:56.000And then we saw from their online post that they thought that we made their posts where we made them change a meat dish to a vegan dish.
01:40:27.000And they were saying that they have wild pigs there, and they would teach you how.
01:40:33.000And so that was something that I had considered before I met Rinella.
01:40:37.000And when I met Rinella, he took me on a hunt for his TV show, and I shot a mule deer, and we ate it that night over the fire, and I said, that's it.
01:41:01.000Um, and yeah, and I use all the bones to make a stock.
01:41:04.000And then when I, you know, a lot of the cuts, uh, and one of the reasons I want to write this book is to teach hunters how to use those tough cuts.
01:41:11.000One of my favorite parts of, uh, of the deer and different animals is the neck and the neck has got all this really super flavorful kind of gelatinous meat kind of in between the cartilage and stuff like that.
01:41:22.000Uh, and you make a stew with that stuff and it is unbelievably tasty.
01:41:26.000Um, and And a lot of guys, when they go hunting, they kind of breast out the birds and they leave their little legs and they don't really know how to cook the legs of a turkey or a duck.
01:41:36.000So that's one of the reasons why I want to write this book and to really educate people how to use those tougher cuts that can be kind of tricky to cook.
01:41:43.000Rinella has a couple of good books on that, and one of the things that he's really into is making shanks and asabuco out of braising things.
01:41:51.000And he's also a big advocate of not wasting anything.
01:41:55.000That's why he's into organ meat, loves liver, and we ate liver over the fire that night.
01:42:07.000Well, it's one of the reasons why it's so kind of crazy that you're the guy that they picked on and not the butcher shop across the street or not some burger joint down the street that's getting factory farmed meat.
01:42:18.000You do have a respect and appreciation for the wildlife.
01:42:22.000But this ideological battleground on their side, it doesn't leave any room for giving in.
01:43:14.000And some of our customers are actually vegan.
01:43:17.000And they come for, like, vegetarian risotto and, like, mushroom risotto that they know are, like, you know, really cool wild mushrooms that you can't buy in the store.