How Regenerative Farming Can Heal Our Children & Save the World || Pia Crofton

Foreign.

Hello everybody and welcome to the Real Life Real Kitchen podcast with me, your host, Zoe Willis.

This week I've got Pia Crofton of Ireland Fresh, who has come on Now.

Pia describes herself as a middle woman, I would say very much the bridge between Irish producers of good quality food, the Irish farming community, and buyers and manufacturers of food who really are looking for quality products.

So the reason I've asked Pia on, I am personally really quite interested in the whole network and connection between food, family, community that's a big part of this podcast.

So it's just been such a pleasure to have Pia come on and is going to be here to answer my questions about the system that, that most mums are subject to.

I think that's probably a good way to put it.

So welcome Pia, thank you for coming on.

Thank you so much for having me.

I'm excited for this conversation.

Yes, I think it's going to be, it's going to be a good one.

We're going to go deep, we're going.

To go deep, we're going to go deep.

So everybody buckle up, get your teacups ready.

So Island Fresh, talk to me about that.

How did you get into food manufacturing, food marketing?

What's your sort of journey into this, into this world?

So I've been working in the Irish food industry for the last 20 years.

And so that started with very basic jobs.

Just, I was a pot washer, I really wanted to be in food, I worked in kitchens and then I ended up working with Irish food producers to develop their export markets.

And I spent four years living over in Germany and I was helping small scale family run food producers to develop markets in the German market.

Um, and during that time, you know, I like in the space of, of 10 years, I have seen how drastically the system has changed.

Like really, really it has.

So I, what's happened?

What have we, what were we 10 years ago or 15 years ago?

Fifteen years ago, I'd say.

Yeah.

So 15 years ago even, even back then I was dealing with, I was connecting family producers with family businesses over in Europe.

And so the restaurants were owned, they were run by chefs, people who understood food, they knew food and the transport link.

So the distributor who was delivering food to those restaurants, that was another family business.

And we would sit down over the food and the, you know, the last question was price.

You know, they were trying the food, tasting the food.

There was a real experience around it.

And in the last, I would say it's really accelerated since COVID where there has been a mass consolidation of the market.

The restaurant that was one location or two locations, if it did well, it became a chain.

And the ones that didn't do well, they just closed their doors.

And the distributor that I dealt with is now, it used to be a family run and now it's owned by a Bidvest Foods or a Trans Gourmet or it's owned by these massive distribution giants or a Cisco.

And so they, they basically own our entire supply chain.

And because of that, it's so hard for me now to get business for what I mean is viable business for my food producers.

Because these, these wholesalers, they, they want everything at a knockdown price.

So they just want a mass produce something or to buy something that is mass produced and it's giving them the maximum profit margin.

Because these middlemen who own the market, their entire business model is based on how cheap can I buy this and how much can I sell it for?

That's their business.

That profit that exists in the middle is their business.

But they're not actually doing anything.

They are not manufacturing the food, they're not growing the food, they are plating the food.

They're all consolidating it in one place and then they're distributing it out.

But they're not actually the food producer in any way yet they take the highest bulk of the profit margin.

Wow.

Okay, so this is, and a lot of these companies, I mean, Cisco for example, that, that isn't just food distribution, they do that, that's like a huge international conglomeration that does a whole heap of stuff.

So.

Okay, no, that, that, that is, that is a massive thing.

And then obviously with COVID because there were so many blooming rules and regulations about health and safety, really was only the bigger companies that were going to be able to survive that.

Exactly.

So we saw a massive amount of family restaurants and family food businesses go out of business during COVID And so then when they went out of the business, their premises was bought then or rented by the big conglomerate.

And what I'm seeing now is that supply chains have gotten longer and longer and longer.

I'll give you an example in Ireland.

We don't produce enough chicken in Ireland to supply outside of retail.

So if you go into food service, if you go into a restaurant, say if you go into a, your local spa and you get a chicken salad roll, that chicken comes from Southeast Asia and it is, they're produced by these massive chicken processors over in Thailand and, and China.

And it is, you know, it's.

Everything is just mass produced the chickens.

Are kept in horrific conditions.

And yeah, I was going to say they're not going to have the same kind of free range and.

No, no, no.

They never see the light of day.

These chickens never see the light of day.

They're eating GMO feed wowed with glyphosate.

They are.

They're.

If you go into these places, they, you know, a lot of them will have injuries.

They won't be able to walk because they're kept in such.

They have less than a.

A four piece of paper to themselves.

Yeah.

You know, and.

And that's the thing that people just aren't seeing.

And then that all that chicken then is sent over to Ireland.

It's cooked, it's.

It's diced, it's sliced.

And then they call it Irish chicken.

Because it's been processed.

It's been processed in Ireland.

But it'll have to say on the label that it's using non EU origin chicken.

It will have to say that.

But still, people just see the Irish chicken on the label and then they think that that's what it is.

Wow.

So there's a whole.

Sorry, I was going to.

Big word here, but that's lying.

It's completely misleading the customer.

That's more diplomatic.

It's more diplomatic.

They're not technically lying because they say that it's the origin is exit and they have to put the country of.

Origin in like tiny writing.

Yeah.

People don't see that and they don't understand that.

So people go in and they get their chicken salad roll.

But they don't realize that this is all coming from Southeast East Asia, Brazil.

It's these places where they have just specialized in intensively raising chicken for food production.

And is this something particular to the European Union or is this something that.

No, no, no.

This is across the global supply chain.

We have created a global supply chain.

And like, one thing I'd get your listeners to just think about is we used to have very distinct cuisines across nations.

And now if you go into any Lidl or Aldi in any European country, you've got hummus, you've got your same vegetables, you've got your same, Your same types of foods everywhere.

We're all eating this global.

This global Western diet.

And it's not seasonal, it's.

And it's made using monocultures.

So all of these things to be produced at scale because all of these buyers want everything at scale because then they get a better price.

So it's all being heavily sprayed with glyphosate because nature does not exist in a monoculture.

So in order to control all these things, they, they, they're using these herbicides and, and these fungicides.

And what we're getting is nutritionally depleted food.

Okay, I want to come back to the glyco.

Glycophosa.

Glyphosate.

Glyphosate.

Thank you.

That's Roundup, isn't it?

That's Roundup, yeah.

Yeah.

Glyphosate is the, is the main ingredient in Roundup.

Okay.

So that is something that I knew was very much the case in the US where it seems to be very much kind of the wild west in terms of throwing all kinds of nonsense on onto the food in the farming context.

I thought there were more restrictions, again, within the European Union, British context, or.

Yeah, there are.

I mean, there's a lot of herbicides permitted in the US that are not permitted in the eu, but we still permit a huge amount of them.

There's over 80 different chemicals that we, we allow.

And we can still get products coming in from other countries that are going to be using it.

Oh, absolutely.

And what we.

And this is what people don't realize, that animals are all fed a diet, a GMO diet.

So we're clearing huge, vast areas of, around the Amazon and in Brazil to just to grow food for animals.

And this is he.

These are GMOs, which are more resistant to pests, they're more resistant to glyphosate, so they spray them more heavily there.

It's absolutely toxic, what these animals are eating.

That's creating so much inflammation in their bodies.

And then we are eating that inflammation our, ourselves.

And so what you can see, like, we can see this through all the testing.

There's this incredible woman.

She, she's created moms across America.

And they're testing urine, they're testing breast milk, they're testing all of these different areas, they're testing school lunches, and all of them coming back with positive results of glyphosate.

So it's, it's in everything.

What, excuse my language listeners and Pierre, what a shit show.

What a shit it is.

Absolutely.

That's a great description of what's going on.

It's a shit show.

It's absolutely a shit show.

But what I would say is that awareness is the first step in changing.

Yeah.

And actually, I want people to know I'm going to come here and I'm going to terrify you, but I'm also going to make you feel very hopeful because it's simple changes because when these people had glyphosate in their urine, when they switched to an organic diet, within two weeks, the glyphosate residues were out of their urine.

Yep.

And I think this is the.

Actually the quite important thing to talk about.

And this is something on various aspects on this journey called life that I'm on.

But I have been constantly astounded by how our bodies are able to heal themselves.

We actually have this incredibly complex.

I don't like the word machine, but it's incredibly complex system which has a system.

Yeah.

And the power to really heal.

I mean, you just look as a woman, as a mother, literally what happens, you know, being pregnant and then giving birth and then the healing that happens, it's just.

It's amazing.

It's the healing that happens if you.

If, if you can allow it.

And society does not allow a woman to heal.

That is.

That was my experience.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Crack on.

Crack on, love.

You're back to work.

Economic unit, my darling.

Exactly you are.

We can get tax revenue from you when you're working.

Get back to work.

So I've.

I mean, I've had a thought for a good few years now, ever since I started doing my own kind of sourdough cultures and making my own sauerkraut.

But one of the thoughts that struck me, women have always worked.

We're going off on a bit of segue and then we'll come back.

But women have always worked within kind of a household.

Okay.

And particularly within farming communities.

They've contributed economically in a way that meant they could kind of pick up and drop off depending on children so the child doesn't die heading into the fire and things.

And it's the men with the plows and doing the kind of the hard things.

But the women were also.

Because we were cooking, we were the ones who looked after the health of the family.

Because we are out and working.

We do not have the time and often the knowledge.

And as a result, health not just within a family unit, but kind of societally, is deeply compromised.

It's breaking down because.

Absolutely.

And I always say that the biggest barrier to cooking from scratch and healing your children with food is the nine to five.

Yeah.

Literally pulling.

Because women can't work that way.

And, you know, my own story with my son and his health challenges was driven by my burnout from years and years and years of trying to be a man, a little man, and.

And berating my body for not being able to keep up with that 24, seven constantly on sort of way of living.

Just doesn't work for a woman.

Doesn't.

We're not.

We.

We have circadian rhythms.

We have monthly cycles.

We are just.

We're complimentary to the men.

Yeah.

But we have very, very different rhythms.

And very different rhythms.

Yeah, yeah.

So what is.

Because.

So your story.

I found it really interesting, the preamble just beforehand you said that you are shifting now rather than from working with the small producers in Ireland and connecting with the buyers, because it's increasingly difficult.

But you are getting approached by a lot of mothers now who are start.

Who are keen to find to be connected with these producers.

They want the quality stuff.

So what's.

What's.

I like the fact as well on your website, I'll put all the details in the show notes, but it's the fact that you are very much.

This is a Island Fresh is a company set up by mothers who would only work with producers.

The food of which you would feed to your own children.

Yeah, exactly.

That is the thing.

I would know most producers in the Irish food industry.

It's not very, very big.

And I would be known as well.

And I would have people coming to me because they all want to get into the German market.

So they would come to me and say, you know, could you sell my products?

I remember it was when I was.

After my son was born and we were both on the floor, our health was just completely on the floor.

And a producer who wanted.

They made these like ultra processed mozzarella sticks.

And he said, could you help me sell these into the German market?

And I remember I just had a visceral reaction against it.

I was just like, I'm done.

I'm not doing this anymore.

I just can't.

I have this child who is.

I'm trying to bring him back to health because I could see he was just completely malnourished because I had been in such a state of malnourishment.

And I was just like, I cannot contribute to this problem anymore.

And see, that's the thing.

For so long I'd sat in the boardrooms, I'd seen how decisions are made in the food industry.

And none of it is tied to nutrient density.

Absolutely none.

And actually, all the factors for making decisions of how a product gets to market, it's.

It actually, it goes against nutrient defi and nutrient density.

So I kind of, as a mother, I just reached that point of like, I can't do this anymore.

Um, and so that's why I then set up Arden Fresh, which was all about helping to connect family run producers with family businesses over in Europe.

But I can see even now, it's, I mean, I'm not gonna, it's not easy and it's, it's very hard to find these family businesses because so many of them have disappeared and, and the margins within the food industry just make it so impossible.

So what I'm trying to do with Arlen Fresh is to connect people directly with the producer.

And we don't take a commission where what I say is connection, not commission.

And we work with our producers, we sell their stories and we talk about their stories.

We get that out there and then we attract people that way, and then we connect them directly and then we step out of the way.

That's kind of been our business model.

But, you know, when I was working in the food industry, I believed everything that I was told.

I was believed that, you know, we need GMOs to feed the world.

We, we cannot feed the world without chemical agriculture.

This is what's saving the world.

And that we need to have these, this globalized food system.

You know, this is what's creating food security for the world.

And that house of cards came crashing down after the birth of my second son because I had just been working.

I didn't listen to my body basically my entire life.

And I'd say a lot of your listeners had the same thing.

I had anxiety, I had chronic IBS, I had 10 years of insomnia.

Just literally my body was screaming at me to slow down.

And I just kept going, kept going, and I kept berating myself, feeling like I was failing.

But actually the reality is the systems that I was trying to live my life in were never built for people like me and not for people like you.

You know, they're just not.

And then, so when my son, my son was six months old, he was, he'd never thrived, not the way my first son had.

My body just didn't have it in me.

And I got a hair tissue mineral analysis and it showed that I was below the minimum threshold on pretty much every micronutrient.

So I was.

And, and, and my, my functional health practitioner, she said, I'm not gonna say you're gonna break down tomorrow, but she said, you're not far off it.

You, you're, you're near, near complete burnout here.

And so this is after pregnancy, I'm gonna presume breastfeeding for six months.

Yeah.

After four months, my body just gave up.

There was nothing left in my body.

And then I Moved him on to formula.

And he, he started to get like, a few little eczema patches.

But then at six months of age, his immune system collapsed.

It just completely collapsed.

And it was quite a dramatic thing.

He.

He was kind of fine one day, and then he was covered head to toe in eczema.

And he, he developed.

He got the common.

He.

He got the common cold.

And he ended up for three nights in the high dependency unit.

And I remember the consultant came in to me and I was like.

Cause we, we were like, this is pneumonia.

This is rsb.

Like, there's something crazy here because he'd been so ill. And he said, no, don't, don't worry.

We got the test back.

It's just rhino and terror virus.

I was like, what's that?

And he was like, it's the common cold.

And he's like, it's nothing to worry about.

And he left.

But your kids in three nights in the high dependency unit with the common cold.

Thank you.

Thank you.

I was like, sorry, what?

Like, my so nerdy died because he had got the common cold.

And I was like, oh, my God, this is a problem here.

And I, I could tell.

I. I just.

I felt in my heart that he just needed nourishment.

You.

My granny was German.

She was a German lady.

She came over as refugee from Germany during, after World War II.

And she was so knowledgeable.

She's way ahead of her time.

She's so knowledgeable about, you know, food, you know, your, you know, this grandmother's knowledge.

She had all of us.

And she used to always say something, you can't get it into them later.

And what she meant by that is you need to get the nourishment into them as kids because their bodies can't absorb it in the same way when they're older.

So that was always in my head.

And I could just see that he wasn't thriving.

And I started to do a lot of research into, like, okay, how can I get food as nutrient dense as I possibly could?

And that led me to regenerative agriculture.

And I learned that regeneratively farmed meat, you know, with cows out on pasture eating grass that isn't sprayed, because we need to remember that grass is sprayed with glyphosate.

It's up to 85% more nutrient dense.

It's got higher levels of zinc, it's got high level levels of vitamin D, it's got higher omega threes.

The omega 3 to omega 6 ratio, it's way healthier.

So I was like, okay, I'm going to do that.

I'm going to get that.

And I. Luckily I got connected with a regenerative farmer through my work, and I started to buy from him.

And I will never forget the first time we ate the food because I had made a curry and I'd given everyone their usual portion.

And my son Rafi had been quite a picky eater.

He just was quite disinterested in food, which is actually quite common for depleted children.

He was struggling with so much toxicity and everything in his body that he just couldn't even think about food.

And I remember that day, my husband and I and my older son could only eat a third of our portion.

Cause the meat is quite very rich.

It's marbled.

It's absolutely beautiful.

And Rafi ate three bowls.

Oh, my goodness.

His little bottle.

First time I.

His body knew.

His body knew that this was different.

Yeah.

And I remember just thinking at the time, okay, I think that my gut is right about this being food.

Food is the cause and food is the solution.

Yeah.

I mean, the whole regenerative farming.

I'm going to come back to the fresh show.

That's the problem.

There isn't enough manure.

Local manure being used.

Yeah, yeah.

So it's.

I mean, and this is the powerful thing when you've got your cows going through.

And obviously it's not just the grass, but it's all the extra plants that.

That, that will change depending on the seasons.

And then they're followed by the sheep.

So the cows will have them in your.

That.

Yeah.

It's an ecosystem.

It's a whole ecosystem.

Absolutely.

And the conventional model is one way, it's one direction.

So they.

They take from the land, they take from the soil, they.

They spray it with chemicals, but they never put anything back in.

And so Brendan, the farmer that I've been working with, you know, see the soil on.

On his land, it's black and sticky.

And the.

The cows are not just eating grass, they're eating herbs and nettles and all these different things that are just there naturally throughout the year.

And I bet it's buzzing with insects.

It's.

Oh, my God.

And it's like, that's not just.

It's.

When you go down there, Zoe, it has a really special energy.

You immediately feel calm.

There is something magic about a properly functioning ecosystem.

And what he does is he's got bees, cows, pigs and chickens all living in this ecosystem on his farm.

And instead of having to use ivermectin and all These different anti parasitic and anti worm drugs.

He just sends in the chickens and the chickens eat all the parasites from, from the cow dung and then the cows don't get sick.

You know, it's just, it's all.

And it's like what I have learned through this, this me throwing myself into regenerative agriculture is these lies, like, we need these chemicals to feed the world.

We need to have globalized food systems.

They are lies that have created enormous wealth for an elite few at the top.

I mean, if you look at the CEO of Bayer, who they own Monsanto, who owns glyphsite, he's earning 22 million a year for.

And, and they have, they have court cases against their company right now of over 10 billion for people getting non Hodgkin's lymphoma for using glyphosate.

Yeah, yeah.

How is that, right, that he gets paid that and there's no accountability?

Yeah, yeah, It's.

I was going to say it's like the sort of the nestle of the world as well.

What, what happens there.

And it's just money, money, money.

And it's not about.

It's not about people.

There's no stewardship or responsibility.

Yeah, there is.

There's not.

There isn't.

There's an interesting organization I came across a few years ago called Shumei, which is a Japanese one, and they are, again, regenerative, don't have animals.

They're all like quite vegan, Vegetarian.

Yeah.

But we went to visit one of their communities.

They've got like these little, how to say, Model, model, model.

They're not gardens.

Halfway between a farm and a garden where you can go.

And again, it's like insects everywhere and it's a permaculture element to it.

But what I found so fascinating is when they first came to this little corner of Wiltshire, they got like biodynamic organic seeds, planted them and it's very much.

You pick up a weed and you drop it and you're creating your own compost.

What would happen after two or three years, let's say you've got your big chunky tomato.

It reverted back to being.

It's like original tomato and it was stronger and it didn't get any of the blight.

It didn't have problems with the cabbage white or, you know, whatever it was.

It was so much more resilient because it was specific, site specific.

And what they were doing was they were actually.

They had programs in parts of Africa, I think it was down south, Southeast Africa, where they were for a lot of these kind of local communities who've been told here have your annual seeds that are coming in and pay for them, pay for them.

So you are now stuck in a cycle of dependency.

They were saying this is how you can do this regenerative permaculture here.

And you are no longer dependent because you're gathering the seeds every year and it is site specific and will be more tolerant to the local bugs and pests and much more nutrient dense.

All of this.

And I just remember standing in this field and just going, this is like the end of this whole kind of business model.

Yeah, yeah, that's the threat because that's the threat.

That's the threat because it's people taking charge of their own health, their own food, their own um.

Yeah, just everything.

It's, it's their own food sovereignty, you know, and, and that it's, it's those lies that have kept this status quo and these systems working.

But the, the systems and I, the food system, you know, the medical system, all these things I can see through my own experience with my son is, is based on a lie.

And it's that we need them to exist.

And that's the thing that I have been saying a lot on my social media is that what I've learned is that we don't need to engage with these systems.

And when we do engage with these systems and we go to the supermarket and we buy the 40 veg, we are co creating a system that keeps farmers working basically slave labor and keeping these, these executives at the top, keeping them really, really wealthy.

And what we need to start doing collectively as, as just the normal people, we need to stop fighting with each other and we need to start stepping out of these systems and working together.

Yeah, that's.

That takes, takes a lot of courage though.

And coming back to the nine to five and the busyness, it's sometimes quite a frightening thing to step off.

Yeah, it is, yeah.

It's very, it's very difficult to step up.

But what I would say is that when my, my son was, when he was a year old, he was at his absolute worst and we were in and out of A and E all the time.

He had chronic asthma and he would get overcome with these respiratory attacks and we would have to rush into A and E because he wasn't able to breathe.

And I was so severely depleted myself.

You know, a year post parliament, you are not there yet.

And I was living in this constant state of fight or flight.

I was constantly near a panic attack.

But the feeling of a panic attack never actually left me.

And then at night, I couldn't sleep because I was so wired.

And I was checking on Rafi.

At least I'd wake up three times in the night and just check on him to see that he was still breathing.

He was covered head to toe in eczema.

He just looked absolutely awful.

I needed all of these food scratching, blood all over his clothes, and he had all of these food intolerances.

And he would just like, blow up after eating certain foods.

We didn't know what was going on.

And at that point, we were going to the dermatologist here in the children's hospital, and they were like, we want to treat his eczema aggressively with steroids.

And I was like, that seems a bit crazy to be covering a child, a baby of one, in so many steroids.

And she said, I want you to cover him head to toe.

Even the parts that don't have eczema, I want you to cover him.

And I said, okay, I will do it your way for two weeks.

But I want.

I don't want to just chase symptoms here.

I want to get to the root cause of what's going on.

And she said, well, you know, the root cause of eczema is eczema.

It's genetic.

And I just said, well, I don't agree, because there's no eczema in my family.

There's no food allergies, there's no asthma.

Like, how is this genetic?

And I said, I think it's his gut.

Because.

And this was just my mother's intuition, because he flares when he eats.

There's something happening in that process that is creating inflammation in his body.

She kind of looked at me like I was nuts.

And I was doing so much reading at this point on this.

And I realized in that moment, Zoe, that I knew more about my son than she did.

She was the expert, but I was the expert on my son.

And that was a huge moment.

I remember feeling really dysregulated, like I'm on my own here.

But also, there was this huge moment of freedom in that I was like, you are going to figure this out.

She is not going to figure this out.

You are.

And we treated it with the steroids and he started to seizure.

So it just.

My son was so nutritionally depleted.

This is how I look at it.

He was nutritionally depleted, and he was completely overexposed to toxic chemicals.

And his ability to process or detoxify his body was massively diminished.

So when we Covered him in steroids.

He started to display all of these really scary neurological issues.

And he would, his, he would hold his breath for so long and then he wouldn't be able to breathe and he'd turn blue and his arms would spasm behind his back and he'd pass out.

It was absolutely awful.

And this was happening three times a day.

And I remember he started to regress at that point and he started avoiding eye contact.

We would try and say, you know, he'd been trying to talk and walk before that point and just stopped doing all of that.

And when we were like, say mama.

Say mama.

And he'd just look at you for a minute and he'd look away.

We were losing him.

Like, I could see that we were losing him.

And I just, I remember he'd had a really bad seizure.

And I said to my husband, we need to, we need to really have a conversation here about the fact that we might have an autistic child.

And he said, I know, I've been thinking it too.

And I said, I am putting him.

I had been thankfully through the regenerative farmers.

And this is the thing, this is why I'm so excited about community based food systems reconnecting with farmers.

Because what it did, Zoe, was it connected me with mothers in my local community who were also healing their children through food.

They had found these farmers for the same reason that I had found the farmer.

And so they put me onto this.

This doctor called Dr. Natasha Campbell McBride, she created something called GAPS, gut and physiology Syndrome and Gut and Psychology Syndrome.

She had developed this protocol because she, she was a neurosurgeon and she saw all of these children present in her office who had everything from allergies and eczema to full blown autism spectrum.

And she noticed that all of them had gut issues.

They all had chronic constipation or chronic diarrhea or massively picky eating.

And so she was like, there is a gut connection, just like I felt, you know.

And then when she had her son, she was also massively depleted.

She ended up was nonverbal, diagnosed non verbal autistic at 3.

And she said, I just, I was on a call with her recently and she said, I just didn't accept that.

I just didn't accept that that was what he was going to have for the rest of his life.

And they said to her, he is so bad that you will need to find a care home for him because in a few years time you won't be able to handle him.

And so she And a group of other mothers set about trying to heal their children.

And she went on, and she studied nutrition, and she.

Her son is not in a care home today.

He is a doctor.

She completely reversed his autism.

And she's gone on to do that for thousands of children, actually.

Sorry.

Their mothers have.

And Dr. Natasha always says, mothers are my heroes.

So when Rafi had had that really bad seizure, I had been practicing all the elements of the diet, the meat stocks and the fermented foods and all these kind of things.

And I remember I just said, no more.

We're taking him off these bloody steroids, and I'm gonna put him on this diet.

And within three days, the seizure stopped.

Yeah.

And then he started to come back to us.

It's the miracles that I have had.

I mean, with my kind of time.

Fifteen years of motherhood.

I have had many conversations with women in toddler groups and cafes, or you just.

People talk.

People talk.

And your story is not unusual.

Of.

I was losing my child.

And for those who are listening on the podcast, I'm using the quotations.

I was losing my child.

It's.

It's just heartbreaking.

It is absolutely heartbreaking.

And you feel like there's nothing you can do.

You can feel them slipping away from you.

And what I would say is that it was actually, we were lucky.

We got Raffi at the exact right time.

I had the right information at the right time.

I had the source of meat.

I had all those things at the right time.

And.

But the speed at which his body started to heal when I removed all of the toxic.

And, like, I went through my house with a fine tooth comb.

My chin got rid of the Teflon pans.

I got rid of all the chemicals in our cleaning supplies.

Like, everything just got.

My husband came home one day.

I was throwing out all the Teflon pans.

He thought I'd lost my mind.

I was like, we can't have this in the house anymore.

So, like, I literally was.

I was like a crazy person.

Yeah, but you have to be.

You would do anything for your child.

And when you start to see and you start to pull the thread on all of these things, and then you realize what's in Teflon.

And you realize all of these chemicals have a warning saying, not safe for aquatic life.

Okay, well, why am I washing our family's dishes with this stuff if it's not safe for aquatic life?

You know, and it's.

And the thing that's really hard.

And I know a lot of mothers listening to this will feel this.

The house of cards falls down around you and you start to realize that the systems built around you are not there to support you and protect you.

Love the podcast and want to help keep the kettle on.

You can support the show.

Think of it like buy me a cup of tea or helping cover the cost of the biscuits.

You'll find the link in the show notes.

Thank you for keeping this kitchen conversation going.

They're there to profit from you.

And that's why I keep saying, and this is why, you know, Ireland Fresh is moving more towards helping mothers to connect with this type of food.

Because I want to make it easy for people to step out of the systems that are keeping all of us sick, tired and stuck.

There is something I would like to bring up.

So I'm English, so obviously class, class, darling, is going to be an element that I will bring up.

And I, I mean, I hope this is a hopeful, a hopeful comment.

Because.

It is what's been quite interesting.

I think there have been probably like 40 or so odd years ago you would have had the mums at home who were cooking and just doing their thing and would be dismissed because they were just at home.

Now you are getting educated middle class mums who've been out in the world and then have come in to the motherhood, to the home, looking after their children, healing their children who are saying, well, this, we need to change this.

So you're getting these kind of, these sorts of healing and changes happening within sort of middle class households.

As we know it is the poor and the working class who are bearing the brunt of this, really bearing the brunt of this.

In terms of budgeting food, what am I, you know, the knowledge even of how to cook, there is brokenness there.

My hope is that you are having this kind of little vanguard and that within time that's going to have a ripple effect throughout society.

That change will happen.

Do you have any thoughts on how we can make, how we can make these changes affect all of society?

So my belief, first of all, what I would say is we need to remove the middlemen.

There's too many middlemen and they're all getting a cut inside these things.

So I did a post recently on baby pouches in the retailer.

These retailers on branded food products are taking up to 60% profit margin.

So in this particular example that I showed, the manufacturer's getting 40 cent and the retailer's getting 60 cent profit margin now.

So why is the retailer taking the bulk of the profits?

And when you go down to farm level, the farmer's getting 10 cent, you know, so the whole triangle is upside down in terms of the effort versus the distribution of wealth.

So we need to shorten supply chains as much as we can.

But also, I have lost a lot of faith in governments.

I really, really have that.

I think that they're so we don't have democracy.

We have a lobbyist and we have these big companies that lobby governments and they're the ones that are really making the rules.

But we do need to like every child is entitled to have a nutritious, chemical free, nutrient dense meal in school.

And right now, like we've, we've introduced the hot meal program in Ireland and it's an absolute resounding disaster.

It has literally become a vehicle for getting more ultra processed foods into our children.

And as a society we can do so much better, but we're not.

And so many mothers are up in arms over it.

Rightly so, because it's not good enough what our kids are getting and the amount of food waste that's coming out of it.

So there does absolutely have to be policy change.

But that policy change, I'm convinced will not happen until the overarching voter base, it's so unpopular for the governments to do nothing and stay the same that they have to change.

But they will not do it out of pure goodwill.

No, no, it's.

And right now, sorry, Zoe, it's right now such an inefficient system that there's food has been made so artificially cheap by the retailers to accommodate all the layers of profit margin that needs to be added.

And if we could just create smarter supply chains, we can actually, we can get good food to people for a viable price.

Yeah.

So those changes need to, need to happen.

Which is hopeful.

Which is hopeful because I mean politics that we are living in interesting times, Pierre, aren't we?

This is.

But I think we, I think all of us who are here right now, who are waking up to this up, we chose this, we chose this, this life because I can really, I feel like the systems around us are breaking, they are collapsing in front of us.

And what we're seeing now with wars and hyper control, you know, all of these like the fuel shutdowns and everything, it's like it's the patriarchy, that toxic patriarchy that is just trying to stay relevant and, and, and our.

Who, why we are here.

We are to help navigate this systems collapse.

Yeah, yeah.

And I think also it is going to be much more of a system of introduction when I say sort of who, you know, I mean, again, sort of sounds a bit nepotistic, but it will be kind of a case of how can I get this, how can I get that?

And, and community.

I mean, it was the case to case in Eastern Europe during communism.

That was how people survived.

Yeah, by coming together.

Yeah, coming together.

And one of the things that I'm, I'm looking at doing is right now I do cowshares for women in my community.

I.

Sorry, sorry, cow shares.

Pull this.

Let me tell you what a cow.

Share, My goodness, yes, please.

So, so buying regeneratively farm meat, yes, it is expensive, but if you create smarter supply chains, you can make it cheaper.

And so that's because I know what the food system works.

I was like, right, we can do this better.

And so what I do is I go to regenerative farmers across the country and we.

I bring women together.

So a group of 10, they get 25 kilos of beef each for €15 a kilo, which is a really good price.

That's cheaper than, I know, cheaper than the supermarket.

And I mean, that's like all the.

Bits just, that's what you get a mix of.

You get your rib roast, you get your, like your roasting joints, you get your mince, you get your burgers, you get your.

Are you getting the awful?

Are we getting the awful?

Oh, you are.

After.

You get.

Everybody gets awful.

They get Liverpool, they get someone, you know, we get the heart.

It's absolutely amazing.

And these women, then what I do is I bring them together, the meat gets delivered, the farmer gets paid up front.

I.

My company doesn't take any cut.

This is literally just an introduction thing and he gets all of the money he can then pay his butcher and women get the best quality possible meat for the best possible price.

I need to do this,.

I want to create a movement of people doing this because anyone can do this.

Anyone.

And I.

Right, it's just a cow share and you just reach out to people, you just reach out to a farmer and say, like, could you, you know, what can you sell your meat for?

You know, if we were to take the entire cow.

So for, for the farm, he's not left with cuts, he just knows the entire cow is gone.

Yeah, yeah, because you can use everything.

I mean, the bones obviously can cut down.

Throw that.

If you're doing like a slow cook stew, you throw in some, you know, some of these bones, add it all.

If anyone's listening from Ireland, tell them to contact me because if they're Interested?

Yes.

Yes, definitely.

To get in touch.

I mean, this is just.

Oh, I love this.

I love this.

Cow shares, I think.

Okay, we'll be talking after this, because I need to sort something out like this over here.

Can I come back to your wee boy?

GAPS diet bone broth 3, 4 days.

Seizures had stopped.

What's happening now?

What.

I mean, that must have been so encouraging for you.

Hopeful for you, and then moving forward.

What happened?

It was.

And what was amazing was on the third day.

So my husband, after one day, was like, I think he has a temperature.

My son had always been really cold.

His immune system was so low, we had to wrap him and wrap him in so many clothes at night.

And I felt him, and I said, no, he's just a normal temperature.

Like, his temperature started to elevate.

And by day three, my mother happened to visit, and Raffi, who just didn't engage with anyone, he started to play peekaboo with us.

And my mother was just like, oh, my God.

She was like, I thought he had autism.

And I said, she's like, I didn't want to say it to you.

And I was like, no, don't worry, Mom.

Like, we thought it too.

And she's like, whatever you're doing, keep doing it.

And actually, my mother was a huge support because everybody else was like, you're being too fussy.

You're being up.

Why can't he have a slice of bread?

Why can't he have this?

My mom was the only one who was like, whatever you.

I don't know what you're doing, but just keep doing it because he's coming back.

So that was really, really encouraging.

And what we saw over the next couple of months was my son's entire personality just start to blossom.

So he had been this really clingy, whiny, sad little boy, you know, and we just.

We didn't.

My husband didn't really connect with him because he just wanted his mother.

And he just.

Like, today he's two and a half, and he's really funny.

Like, you know, he really.

He gets, like.

He gets playing jokes on people.

Like, what has come out of him in terms of his personality?

That has been the greatest gift.

In terms of his asthma.

We were told he would need inhalers for most of his childhood, and they were like, he might grow out of this.

He might not.

He doesn't have any sign or any trace of asthma at all.

If he gets.

He could.

He got croup there a couple months ago.

He sailed through it within three Days, you know, no A and E, no nothing.

And a lot of people don't realize that asthma, again, that is inflammation.

That's what's, that's what it's, it's, it's problems with the immune system with.

There, there are so many of them are.

Yep, yep, yep.

It's all right.

And the gut, you know, I mean, the gut and the immune system are so intimately tight.

Like your immune system basically is held in your gut.

So, like what I could see from my son, he just had this completely leaky gut.

And when he was eating food, it didn't matter what he was eating, it would create this, it would leak through his gut and then it would create an inflammation response in his body.

And he, what was really he like?

He was my guinea pig.

You know, he was the study of one that I was studying and I would give him chicken from supermarket and he would break out in hives and I couldn't understand.

And then I would get chicken from a regenerative farm and he wouldn't.

And it was all to do with the GMO feed.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So it's this whole.

These chemicals are ubiquitous across our food system and that's why they're so difficult to avoid.

But one thing I would say to people is we need to protect our children from these herbicides.

They are incredibly toxic.

And I will tell people why, because I've done so much research into this and we were told that this is as safe as table salt.

You could literally sprinkle glyphosate on your food.

It's so safe because basically there are enzyme pathways in the plant that humans don't have.

We don't have that pathway.

And it, so it blow.

The way that it kills the pests is it blocks that, it blocks that pathway in the plant.

But what they didn't realize and what we now know is that it blocks the enzyme pathways in the plant.

The plant then cannot absorb the nutrients from the soil.

So what you have is a nutrient, a nutrient depleted plant can't absorb the magnesium, can't absorb the zinc.

And then what it does in our bodies is the microbes in our gut have that pathway.

And so it blocks the.

Your microbes in the gut, it blocks their ability to absorb nutrients from the food and from your gut.

But what we have is this herbicide that is creating a chemical burden on people's in, in their bodies, and it's also stopping them from absorbing the nutrients from their food.

So you've got a double whammy and.

You've also got the fact that your body is expending energy just digesting this stuff and not getting the, the, and.

Not getting exactly the return.

And then it has all of this chemical burden that it needs to deal with and it doesn't have the tools to deal with it.

And then we've got.

I mean, something that I've found very interesting has been the whole kind of obesity problems.

And what is so interesting about that is if you look into small intestinal bacterial overload, I think overgrowth, that's it, where you've got the bugs that are meant to be lower down in the gut are now sort of shifting up, which.

Yeah.

And that means that you are putting on weight.

It's just everything is just getting messed up.

And so much of that as well.

You've got antibiotics that's been giving out by like sweets.

So again, destroying all these bacteria in our bodies plus the food, that's ah, pia, pia.

So this is the really interesting thing about it is just our bodies are really complex, beautiful systems that can heal at the same time.

The barrage upon us is also very complex and different people will be triggered in different ways depending on genetics or whatever the sort of particular inclination is.

So it's, it's finding the, the kind of, the tailored response to each, each person.

Yeah, there is a tail, there absolutely is a tailored response.

And there are, there are individual triggers and individual inflammation responses.

Absolutely.

But what I would say, and I want to make this simple for people to break down at home, is there are steps.

No matter what your symptoms are, the steps are the same, you know, in healing the gut.

So we, first of all, you need to remove, you need to move to organic and you need to know your food is coming from, you need to actually know that producer, know what their values are, know what they're putting on the food.

Eating seasonally and eating locally grown food is going to have a much better nutrient profile than something that is mass produced in a greenhouse over in, you know, the Spanish coast and then flown over here or, you know, Chile or, you know, all these places where we're getting foods sent in from.

So moving to an organic diet.

Absolutely.

And then filtering your water.

People don't realize that the amount of the chemicals in the water here in Ireland, I mean, I have seen farmers, literally, they're like, you wouldn't feed it to, you wouldn't feed it to rats.

It's that bad.

You know, it's, it's full of pharmaceutical drugs, it's full of parasites, it's full Of.

So we got a reverse osmosis water filter in our house.

And my son's healing took a massive step up when that happened.

Yeah, gosh, I've only got, I've only got a Berkey.

You've upload, You've, you've, you've upped me there.

So reverse osmosis adding back in, remineralizing it because we just have to do it with Rafi because he was so bad.

But it's, it's, it's filtering your water, going organic where you can, like, you know where you can.

And then the big.

This was a big one for us was we started to move my son away from processed carbohydrates.

And we, what we did was we focused on fat.

Fat first.

And, and we really moved.

I, I got really comfortable with giving him high amounts of saturated fat from animal sources.

And Dr.

He was, he was, I was spoon ghee, like actually that I would make myself.

I would spoon that into his mouth.

And Dr. Natasha, she says, the more fat you eat, the quicker you heal because it pushes all the toxins out of your liver.

And I, and I, I found that to be true when I actually did was true.

I was reading with one of my daughter's Little Hats on the Prairie and it's so interesting.

There is so much about food in there.

And Obviously we're talking 19th century America, subsistence farming.

What were they eating?

Oh, my gosh, it was like buckwheat pancakes that was cooked in lard with blackstrap molasses and all of this.

And I'm just going, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick.

But yeah, I know lard was a big, A big part of it.

And you know, when they would get the hog and how they would cut it and just the process.

And they would save everything, every bit would be saved and that.

See, that is the thing.

And I've done it with a lot of women here in Ireland.

I.

Sometimes when they come to me and they're like, just so overwhelmed, I don't.

Know what to do.

And I'm like, just start here.

Start buying organic.

And I was like, you need to.

And they're like, it's expensive.

I'm like, you need to look at this as medicine.

If I said to you, you need to spend €100 on steroids for your child, you would go and do it.

So you just need to think of food in that same way.

And then I'd say, start to cook in saturated fat and only serve your olive oil cold, you know, in your salad.

Dressings and things like that.

And I said, remove all seed oils.

I was like, just do those things and come back to me in a month and see where you're at.

And one woman, her daughter was covered in eczema.

The eczema was pretty much all gone.

That's one of the eczema.

I'm amazed by the number of people and children who really struggle with it.

But it is quite, I said relatively easy fixes.

But the eczema.

That is so healable.

That is so healable.

It really is.

It's just phenomenal.

It's an expression of inflammation and it's getting to the root cause of what that inflammation is.

And one thing I'd say to people is that we have a perfect blueprint for how children need to eat that has been created by nature and it's in the profile of breast milk.

And Breast milk is 48% saturated fat.

And what I see with kids nowadays, they are starving of fat because they're being given so many crackers and grains and processed carbohydrates.

So they're getting all of this sugar, but they're, they're not getting those very stabilizing fats.

And when I start to move people from that high carbohydrate diet to a high fat diet, their sleep improves, their behavior improves, their skin improves.

Like, it's just, it's, it's just mind blowing how this works.

I have one question.

I'm going to come back to the picky eaters because there will be women who are listening to this and they're like, my child will only eat chicken nuggets or my child will only eat hummus, whatever it is, beige.

How do I introduce all this wonderful stuff?

How do I get them all of a sudden eating, you know, scrambled eggs made with beef dripping, for example.

How, how does one shift that?

And particularly because you're talking about sort of, you know, they're already nutritionally deficient and you know, kids who are on the spectrum, that's one of the things.

It's all kind of texture and real food is a real issue there.

How do you change that?

What are the steps there?

First of all, the first thing I would want people to know is that the lining of the gut changes.

It completely replaces itself every four days.

So people think that this is going to take months.

But actually if you are really, really like, you go nuclear on it and you completely shift what they're eating, within four days, they are going to start accepting.

And I saw that with my son, my Son was totally addicted to sugar.

And.

And, like, he only got sugar from fruit, but he just.

He would eat banana after banana after banana.

And I had to accept that he had some kind of dysbiosis in his gut.

The microbes in his gut were craving sugar, and I had to cut the bananas out.

And he screamed.

He.

And he cried and he cried.

And I remember holding him putting a baby, and he just wanted a banana.

And I held fast for two days.

And within two days, he started to eat the meat, you know, And I really did.

And I just.

I just said, he.

Like he was so bad.

And I just said, I don't care if he starves for two days.

I am sticking with this.

So I did.

I did do that.

When he was hungry enough, he did eat it.

Now, one thing I'd say is, if they're only eating chicken nuggets, what I would do is I would get chicken, and I would coat it in coconut flour or almond flour or something like that.

You know, something that they're not.

And I would start to do it that way.

And what I do is, like, I have these pieces of chicken, and I will bread them, and I'll put them in the freezer, and I can take them out.

And so you do have to be organized.

And I don't want to put more of a burden on women who are already juggling too much.

But unfortunately, the secret is, you know, you need to be organized.

We have to make choices.

We have to make choices, and I have it all.

We can't.

And when my son got really, really sick, I really do believe that this was meant to happen because I was operating on such a level of burnout that.

And I had it all upside down in my family.

I had my work first and my family second, you know?

And when Raffi got really sick, I had to take my business from 80% of my time to 20% of my time.

I had to get rid of lots of clients.

And I basically had to put my ego aside, because it was all tied to ego, you know, how my business was performing was how, you know, I was performing as a person, which is absolute bullshit.

But we had to make that choice, and we had to take him out of Crash, and I had to just heal him, and I had to heal myself.

And I was so dysregulated when we did that, that I.

Even going down to the beach, I felt unproductive all the time.

And my husband came home one day, and I was reading a book, and he just burst out laughing.

He was Like, I've never seen you rest during the day like this, but that took me months to get to that point where I could do that.

I was so, like, I was just wired.

So, like, with, like, it's.

It is choices.

And what I'd say is that there is no downside to really focusing on nourishing your child because the benefits that are downstream of that are.

Are worth every bit of effort.

Yeah.

It's sacrifice.

And service is love.

And it's.

It's.

It's hard putting ourselves aside, but, my goodness, the rewards.

It's hard putting ourselves first.

See, that's the thing.

When we are dragging ourselves out of bed every day and we're getting ourselves into an office job to sit there and make some CEO wealthy, we're not putting ourselves first, and we're not putting our children first.

And actually, myself and my husband had to sit down and have a really.

A big conversation about.

I thought us being equal in the house was me going out and me earning as much money as him, but he hadn't.

I wasn't.

I wasn't taking into account that I had birthed our children, that I was doing the bulk of the cooking, that I was doing all of the health management of the family.

Like, I was taking on all of these jobs.

Now my husband does all the laundry.

He's absolutely amazing at that.

Mine pairs the socks.

I'm like, oh, my God.

My husband folds.

Just like, he can fold that.

I can't fold.

He's just amazing at us.

Oh, my goodness.

I'm so glad I'm not alone, Honestly.

I go.

I'm like, you're like Barry a Kondo.

You're like a Japanese lady trapped in an Australian male who can fold.

It's.

It's just.

I feel so blessed.

Yes, it is.

But we weren't comparing like with like, and I had to unprogram, and I'm still unprogramming that.

That, you know, my value isn't tied to my career.

My value is tied to all of these other things that society says is not important and does not pay a woman for.

But so he had to step up in terms of being the breadwinner, and I had to step up in terms of being, you know, the person who was healing the family and nurturing the family.

And I know there will be a time when I step up more into my business and my kids don't need me as much.

It's just right now isn't that time.

And this is it.

I think this is.

This is the Thing with women, we are learning.

Women of our generation, we're going, huh?

We cannot have it all at the same time, but it will be at different seasons and different stages, and as a result of sacrifices, suffering, love, given all of these things, seasons of kind of being quiet and resting and being small, the flourishing that is going to happen, you know, it's going to be amazing.

I mean, there are.

It's interesting.

I was talking to a friend of mine, and we were talking about women we admire, and these are women, like, there's a British, former British MP called Anne Widdicombe who is a rather formidable spinster who does not give a shit.

She's been on already.

She's amazing.

She's just brilliant.

And she's been on various podcasts with chaps in their 30s and 40s, and they think she's wonderful.

She doesn't give a shit.

And there's sort of ladies here, usually in the church, who are just kind of, you know, kind of the rosary warriors, who will just say the truth, who just like, boom, this is it.

This is it.

And they do not care.

And I've gone, yes, please.

One day, one day I'm aiming for.

That, but you're already there.

You're already doing that, and I'm already doing that.

You know, I have woken up and gone.

I spent my entire life trying to make the world happy.

I got, I was so, I got so many messages as a teenager that, you know, being overweight to a, to the male eye is, is like disgusting, you know, And I, I, I forced myself to be so skinny.

And then when I went on to have children, my body did not have the capacity to actually nourish them from the inside.

And, and, and I'm still picking up the pieces of that, and that's what I want.

Every, especially women in their 20s is like, eat real food.

Like, I, I thought having a salad was a lunch.

It's not a lunch.

You need a proper, warm, fatty, lovely meal.

If I go back and do it again, I do it very different.

We need more Italian grandmothers who are like, manja, Manja, you're too skinny.

Too skinny.

Eat.

We need more Greek, Greek yayas, all of this.

We need more Jewish grandmothers.

Each are looking, looking undernourished.

But that's okay.

We're going to come back.

We'll be back.

Okay, so the picky eaters.

I'm just going to come up with one story about you going in and going strong for a couple of days.

I remember talking about to a lady or she must now be in her 50s.

She was the youngest of six children growing up in rural Derbyshire.

And her mother had just like, this is the food on the table and you're not stupid.

When you're hungry, you shall eat.

And would just leave them.

And sometimes there'd be a child who would hold out for a day or two, but ultimately they will always cave.

And one thing I would stupid.

They're.

They're.

Exactly.

And this is the thing that I've seen in the food industry.

We have created this entire sector called snacking.

It did not exist two generations ago.

This whole snack thing is very, very new.

And it's just a revenue driver in the food industry.

And I see kids, they are being stuffed with snacks all throughout the day.

If you could say that.

There's the biggest pet hate of mine at snacks because they eat nutrient poor food in between their meals and then they don't eat their meals.

And when I'm out at play dates, I find it really, really stressful that my kids want the snacks that are being dished out.

And I'm constantly saying, well, we don't eat snacks.

And then when they don't have snacks, they go and they eat their lunch or they eat their dinner when they're snacking.

They do not.

So we need to really start to look at these, these very recent habits and question, are they the right thing?

Yeah, just need to eat like our grandmas did.

Honestly, eat like.

The funny thing is this is what I'd love people to do when they go home.

It's like, go home and ask your parents, how did Granny cook for you guys?

Because when I look at it like I was vegan for a couple years and I cannot tell you how I was that messed up my health.

I was going to bring that up.

I'll do that in a minute.

But.

Yeah, go on, we'll do that in a minute.

But when I asked my mother, because veganism is a very, very recent thing, veganism was used as a form of fasting, temporary fasting in traditional cultures.

But it was never the main part of the diet.

I said, how often did you eat meat?

And she was like, oh, every day.

Every day we ate meat.

Except for Fridays, we ate fish.

Yeah.

And.

And you know, my granny would buy parts of a cow from her farmer.

She did the cow share, you know, and it was.

They eat everything, you know, they'd eat, even eat the brains, they'd eat all the offal, they would eat all the, you know, bone broth.

Everything was enriched in Bone broth.

And it's interesting because you look at sort of the Eastern Orthodox churches and they do like the big fasts during Lent and that is like full on vegan.

Yeah.

But what is so interesting about that is, again, I'm going to come back to the permaculture.

Things were grown locally so often would have a lot of the nutritional benefits that you needed for that time.

But if you look at, for example, Lent, this is happening towards the end of winter.

You're coming into the springtime before you're starting to get the lamb and the fresh meat coming.

It's part of a cycle.

It's all part of a cycle.

The timing of when you're having, you know, there's no meat and things like that.

And even if you look again, sort of within Catholicism, yes, it's meat all the time.

Fridays is when you will have fish and vegetables.

It's not quite a respite, but it's still nutritionally good for you.

Although I was talking to my mother about it and she's so funny.

She comes from.

She comes from the Netherlands in the Catholic part.

And fish isn't really a thing.

So they would have fish, fish or foul.

So chicken is technically white meat.

Interesting.

So that was on the religious days.

So that was on the Fridays religious days.

And it was so funny because I'll sort of say, you know, Friday's coming.

Fasting, remember the fasting.

And I'm like, it's chicken, Chicken's meat.

Chickens are meat.

Just bear that in mind.

So, yeah, just interesting.

These kind of sides to it.

The veganism I always found interesting because a lot of people would do it because of environmental reasons and we've got hummus and everything is fine.

But I'm going, where are your lentils coming from?

And your avocados aren't exactly native to Kent or Ireland.

So again, supply chain.

The ethics of the supply chain.

Exactly.

You know, and I. I just wanted to be as healthy and as, you know, as good as possible.

I was just such a good girl.

God, when I look back, I just wanted to do everything the right way.

And I read about veganism and this is good for the planet and this is good for your body and it can fight cancer, all this kind of stuff.

And I went vegan and I was living over in Germany and I was working really, really hard.

I was totally burnt out.

And I'd come home every couple of months and my mother would be like, you need a steak.

Look at the dark circles under your eyes.

This is not working.

For you.

And my IBS was at its absolute worst.

And it's like when we think about it, oh yes, you're right.

These legumes, they're all grown in other parts of the world.

A lot of the times are very heavily sprayed.

And now if you look at the vegan industry, because see, I was working in the meat industry back then.

I think becoming vegan was my little rebellion against the systems that I was working in.

But my period stopped for two years, I had no period, you know, and I mean, I just didn't listen to these signs from my body, but my body was just screaming at me.

But if you look at the vegan supply chain now a lot of the meat processors are the ones who own the vegan meat analog companies because they have all the same machinery, slicers, the dicers they own, they don't want a vegan company to come in and take part of their market share so they bought up the market share.

So, and it's, you know, there's huge parts of forests that are being cleared to grow these, these monocultures.

It's far more sustainable to have a cow in local community that's on pasture.

They're eating the grass, they're trampling their cow pats back into the soil.

It's this whole regenerative system, you know.

And the farmer who I work with, Brendan from Ferbia Farm, he has a lot of vegans, reformed vegans, who now buy from them because they're, it's so funny because they're like, you have solved every problem that I had against meat.

This is like different denominations, you know, they are reformed vegans and these are, yes, amazing.

But yes, they've come back and things are cleared.

I'd also, you know, one of the other anecdotes I come across with veganism is, you know, quite high levels of depression.

Yeah, very, very high.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, it's because a vegan diet, it's quite low fat, you need fat and we need saturated fat.

The reason why we need saturated fat is because that we can then absorb our fat soluble vitamins A, D, E and K, you know, and you.

I was completely deficient in all of these things after being vegan for only two years.

Gods.

But change is happening.

Change is happening and it's beginning here in this quiet corner of the Internet.

Pierre.

Yeah, it is and I really believe it's beginning with mothers because I really believe there is no greater catalyst for change than a mother with a sick child.

Yeah, yeah.

I remember reading, I'm Going to make this slightly dark, but essentially I think it was in Argentina or Chile, but the military juntas finally went down when all the mothers of the vanished people started stepping up and saying, enough, really.

Enough, no more thing.

And I think that that's what we need at a global scale for mothers to say, not another one of our children sent out to war getting bombed.

Because I mean, I do not accept that we have young men dying because older men are creating these wars.

Money, money, money, money, money, money.

Yep, yep.

And that's been the way of it since the dawn of patriarchy for a jolly long time.

No, very true.

It's.

Yeah, interesting times.

But it's all right.

The mothers will step up, but we need to connect.

That's the thing.

We mustn't be in our little silos because otherwise we think we're on our own.

And that's been the danger.

That's been the.

And that has been the.

That has been the one of the objectives of the cowshare.

It's not just about sourcing meat.

It's about connecting people locally in your community.

You know, I bring people together locally and it's.

There is huge power in that because when I connected with that farmer and then Brendan connected me with this mother who was healing her children using food, she then connected me to this whole GAPS community of women who are healing their children.

And there's so much power in the sharing of information, the sharing of recipes, the sharing of support.

Yeah.

And just expressing it.

Speaking of the GAPS diet, you were saying that you are going to be a bit of a conduit between Natasha Campbell McBride and Ireland.

You're going to be helping bring over her program and support your mothers.

Are you able?

I mean, are you still beginning stage?

I'm at the beginning stage, but basically what we.

Dr. Natasha is trying to get.

We had a call there recently, basically, and she said people don't realize how close the whole system is to collapsing.

And she's right on that.

We've only got about 60 harvests left before all the topsoil is gone.

Now, Dr. Natasha bought 28 acres in, in the UK and she said it was in industrial estate.

There was no topsoil, you couldn't grow anything there.

Now 10 years later, they are completely self sufficient on food.

More in the gizangi she's brought.

Yeah, you know, that's where she lives.

Her husband was from Scotland.

He died a few years ago, unfortunately.

But she's American herself, isn't she?

No, she is Russian.

Okay.

So I. Oh Right, yeah.

Okay.

She's a Russian lady, but she trained and her practice was over in the uk.

She has been in the UK for most of her career.

And so she said, you know, the whole.

We are going to jeopardize the future of the human race just because few.

A few men at the top want to become wealthy, you know, and they're.

Once this collapses, we can't get it back.

Like, once ecosystems collapse, we can't get them back.

But she said what she learned about regenerative agriculture over the 10 years of returning that ecosystem to a vibrant ecosystem of life.

She's like, she said, the world is going to be saved.

Not from governments, not from some big, massive thing.

It's going to be normal people like you and me returning to the land, growing food in our backyard, having a few chickens.

She said that is going to return biodiversity.

It's going to return the topsoil, and it really is that simple.

And so.

But her work is being kept out of conventional medicine.

Like, I did not hear about this from my doctor.

I had to fight my doctor when I brought up the gut.

I heard about this from my farmer.

Yeah.

So what I'm trying to do is we have really high levels of chronic disease.

We have among the highest levels of chronic disease in all of Europe here.

In Ireland and Ireland as well, there's a really interesting.

I remember reading is an interesting genetic component, which means that gluten is.

Is kind of a real problem.

We have a big problem with celiac disease in this country.

Yes.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

So I have been posting a lot on the levels of chronic disease in this country and then tying that in with the increase in glyphosate usage.

You know, and to be honest, it's only one factor.

I think lifestyle is one factor, but the reality is our children are undernourished.

And overexposed to toxic chemicals.

That's what I believe.

And I'm trying to get Natasha's work into more of the mainstream so that we'll have somewhere to turn.

Because when my son was seizuring, I was doing everything the doctors said.

You know, the doctors were trying desperately to help, but they just weren't getting to the root cause.

And they were trying to suppress symptoms, which doesn't work.

I didn't know where to turn.

And I was just lucky that I was given the right information at the right time and I was able to intervene and bring my son back.

Now I want other women to have access to the information that I got.

So that's why I'm working with Dr. Natasha to, to basically give them access to the information and she's going to jump on calls, she's going to do Q and A's and then people can, can pay for her course or not, whatever they decide.

But what I'm trying to do then is once they start to learn about gaps, that I can connect them with the producers and with the cooking methods.

Amazing.

Amazing.

Well, Pierre, I mean, what, what, what is so beautiful about this?

I'm sorry for the hardships and the tragedies you've gone through with your son.

However, you listening to your soul and your heart saying, I need to work with food.

The struggles you've gone through, the struggles you've gone through with your son and how that is going to be serving and helping other families.

Thank you.

It's really, it happened for a reason and I will do.

And it's become my mission now that no mother has to go through what I went through in the face of very little support from the system around them.

Yeah, it's beautiful.

Right, so most people will be able to find you.

I'll put all the details in the show notes, but irelandfresh.com and where else could we, could we.

Yeah.

So Ireland fresh is my B2B business that is for me connecting food businesses across the UK and Europe with producers here from Ireland.

We still are an export focused country.

I still think we need to move away from how much we're exporting and we need to start nourishing the people of Ireland.

But that is where my other business.

So I am developing, in the process of developing a B2B version of what I'm doing.

But I'm, as you know, I'm building a business in the margins of healing my childhood, running a motherhood.

So I get very little time to actually build all this stuff.

But that is what I'm doing in the meantime.

But in the meantime, they can find me on Instagram and they connect, can connect with me there.

If anybody's interested in a cowshare, just send me a DM on Instagram and I can add you to our group.

Fantastic.

Okay, bless you.

Thank you so much.

Pia.

That has.

That was just brilliant.

Thank you so much.

It was such a great conversation.

You're a very good interviewer.

Oh, thank you, thank you.

I just very blessed that I enjoy chatting with interesting people.

Yeah.

So here we are.

There we are.

So for those of you who are listening, if you've got this far, please like, share, subscribe, share, share.

I think the sharing is the really important thing.

It is.

Yeah.

Us mothers need to share the knowledge that we have gained.

Very much so.

Very much so.

Okay.

Bless you Pia and thank you.

So if you found that conversation with Pia Crofton about the dramatic healing of autoimmune problems and chronic illness in children a helpful episode, I'm so pleased.

However, if the prospect of a full on cow share locating your own regenerative farmer seems a little bit overwhelming at the moment, but you're loving, loving, loving this possible transformation of your family's health through food, I suggest some smaller steps.

Have a look at the interview I had with Naomi Marry a natural health expert on the role of family meals in health and well being.

Pop a link somewhere, somewhere, somewhere to the video.

But there are some super easy steps in there for even the most overwhelmed mama to take on and start making some dramatic changes.

Thanks for being here.