C (32:05)
And then now. And now with this movement, and I have a nonprofit called Food Fix Campaign and working with a woman who for the last five years, who now is the first lady of West Virginia. Her husband's the governor, and they were the first state to ask for a SNAP waiver, which means they asked the usda, the agricultural department in America, to allow them to prohibit the purchase of certain things on the food stamps, like soda. So, and now many, many other states have followed suit, and thank God the US Secretary of Agriculture has said, okay, let's see how it goes. So I think we're starting to see a revolution in this, but it's really unconscionable, and I'm actually planning to do very soon a demonstration of how, on a food stamp budget, of what you would get if you were on food stamps, how you can eat a delicious, healthy meal and do this for a week and show people how to do it. Because it's not that it can't be done. It's that people don't know what to do. They don't know how to cook. They don't know what to buy. I mean, you're not gonna buy a $70 regeneratively raised rib eye steak, but there are cheaper cuts of meat, There are cheaper cuts of Chicken. There are cheaper vegetables. I mean, my mother, we were Russian Jews, and my mother used to make this soup, which was onions, carrots, cabbage. Cheapest vegetables with flanken. We call flanken, which is short rib, one of the cheapest cuts of meat, and cook it with, you know, a little bit of raisins for sweetness and boil it up and it was delicious. And it's, you know, probably, I don't know, 50 cents a meal. And I make a big pot and have it for the week. So there's many ways to learn how to do this. And I've done this with families who worked in and lived in some of the worst food deserts in America. One family was in Easley, South Carolina, as part of the movie Fed up that you can watch on Netflix. And they were a family of five that lived in a trailer. They had $1,000 a month for food on disability and food stamps. The father was 42, already on dialysis for type 2 diabetes, kidney failure at 40, 42. The mother was, you know, 100 plus pounds overweight. The 16 year old son was almost diabetic. And I said, look, let me not give you a lecture, but let's go shopping. I gave them a guide on how to eat well for less. It's called Good Food on a Tight Budget. And it shows you which foods to buy and recipes and things you made. We made turkey chili. We made, you know, salad from like actual, not iceberg lettuce, but real lettuce and olive oil and vinegar dressing instead of this stuff. And I showed them everything that was in their kitchen and in their cupboards. It was all frozen, it was all packaged, it was all canned, it was processed, it was all full of all these ingredients you were talking about. They never cooked anything in their kitchen. And I showed them how to make a meal. We had this delicious meal together. And I said, listen, here's the guide how to do this, here's my cookbook. Try this. And the week later, the mother texted me. She says, we lost 18 pounds. You literally lost 200 pounds as a family. The father lost 45, got a new kidney. The son lost a bunch of weight. The mother lost £100. So I get the chills, just like telling that story because, you know, it shows that it's not that can't be done, it's that we don't know how to do it. The American food industry has disenfranchised people from their kitchen. They've insinuated themselves in every aspect of our lives and they've done it Deliberately on purpose. And Michael Moss talks about this in his book Salt, Sugar and Fag about how General Mills aggregated all the food companies back in the late 50s and 60s because there was a movement to eat better and healthier food. And there was a woman named Betty who was a home EC teacher, was trying to teach, you know, families how to cook and do all these things. And they invented Betty Crocker. Now, I don't know if you know what Betty Crocker is in the uk, but it's basically a cookbook that everybody had in the 60s and 70s. And Betty Crocker was a fantasy. She was an imaginary character that they made up. And then they put the recipes. Add one can of Campbell's Cream of Mushroom soup to your casserole, or add one roll of Fritz Crackers to your broccoli casserole. All the crap they had in the recipes, they were all industrial food. And so they basically created a whole paradigm where, you know, if women's lib and you gotta liberate yourself from the kitchen and cooking's drudgery and all this was a deliberate attempt to disrupt the American home, to get women out of the kitchen, to stop having home cooked meals and to insinuate their products. I mean, everyday life and I mean, I grew up on TV dinners. Swanson's TV dinners was a big fancy thing. You have a TV dinner and heat it up and then you'd kind of open it up and it was like Salisbury steak and these boiled green beans and it was awful. And yet that's sort of got even worse and worse over the last 50 years.