Season 2, Episode 2: A cow and a pig get into a volkswagen
LISTEN TO THE EPISODE:
On Today’s Episode:
My Tiguan can fit exactly one half of a cow and one whole pig, once they've been butchered and frozen. They fit best when they're kept in big plastic totes and are slid in one after another, in two rows of three. I know this is a weird level of specificity, but it's knowledge that was well earned. Because once you buy an entire half of a cow, there's actually a lot to be considered.
In this episode of Was Is Could Be: Surprising facts about meat.
With Special Guests:
Michael J. Lansing is Associate Professor of History at Augsburg University in Minneapolis, MN. A historian of the modern United States, his current book project is Enriched: Industrial Carbohydrates and the Rise of Nutrition Capitalism—a history of factory-processed grains and the hidden logic that drives contemporary food systems. He is the author of Insurgent Democracy: The Nonpartisan League in North American Politics (University of Chicago Press, 2015) as well as commentaries in MinnPost, BillMoyers.com, and Zócalo Public Square.
Eleanor Barnett is a food historian at the University of Cambridge (UK). She recently completed a PhD at Christ's College, Cambridge, which looks at the relationship between food and religion in the English Protestant and Italian Catholic Reformations (c. 1560 - c. 1640). She is interested more broadly in how food and eating reflects our identities, beliefs, and connects us to the past - and she shares the most fascinating food history facts, images, objects, and recipes that she finds on Instagram @historyeats! Check out her website at https://eleanorbarnett.com/.
Derrick Pratt is the Museum Educator and Interim Curator at the Erie Canal Museum in Syracuse, NY. A native of Chittenango, NY, Derrick received a B.A in Social Studies Education from SUNY Cortland and a M.A. in Museum Studies from Syracuse University. Prior to his job at the Erie Canal Museum, Derrick served as Director of Programs at Chittenango Landing Canal Boat Museum for 3 years. Check out the Erie Eats Exhibit at the Erie Canal Museum.
Chris and Sarah Ficken are the farmers behind New Moon Farm. Whether it is milking the cows, cutting hay, weeding the garden, or balancing the checkbook, you will find one of them behind each and every task. The day after their wedding, they put an offer in on the farm, and a few months later it was theirs. Since December of 2012, they’ve been working hard to rehabilitate the land and the buildings. Whether it is jacking up the old barn by hand, building their milking facility from bare ground, pounding posts and running fence for their cows, or reclaiming old fields with a chainsaw and some good friends, they strive to mold their farm to fit their dream of environmental, social, and financial sustainability. Check out NY Farm Basket to buy some amazing goods from Chris and Sarah!
The Was Is Could Be podcast is produced by Liz Russell at To Eat and To Love, LLC. Each episode is carefully edited by Joshua Rivers of Podcast Guy Media, LLC. Our theme music is made by Neil Cross and published by ImageCollect Publishing.
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Liz Russell Narration:
My Tiguan can fit exactly one half of a cow and one whole pig,once they've been butchered and frozen, they fit best when they're kept in big plastic totes and are slid in one after another, in two rows of three, I know this is a weird level of specificity, but it's knowledge that was well earned because when you buy an entire half of a cow, there's actually a lot to be considered.
[🎶Theme music🎶]
Michael Lansing (Historian):
The three kinds of food that fell into those kinds of first industrial food categories were canned goods, meat, and bread flour.
Liz Russell Narration:
You might remember this clip from episode one. And if you don't because you didn't listen to it, I'm going to stop you right there and say, you should probably go back and do that first. It's an odd place to start in the middle of a list, but this is where our local food journey actually started. We bought our first half cow through happenstance before we ever thought about doing a local food diet or even doing this project. My cousin had wanted to buy a half cow for her family and wanted to know if we wanted the other half. So we said, yes, even though it's second on Michael Lansing's list here. It's kind of first on mine, so let's roll with it.
Michael Lansing (Historian):
So the second type of industrial food where you see or a category of industrial food is meat, and this is a form of, well, one historian has called it the disassembly line, the emergence of these large meat packing plants in Chicago. In particular, Chicago is the locus for this because Chicago is a kind of center of commerce by the middle of the 19th century. It's a place where all the railroads from many different parts of the country come together. And of course, Chicago also has a rural…
Liz Russell Narration:
In episode one, we focused on the birth of the Erie Canal, but during the Canal’s peak in the mid 1800s, railroads were quickly emerging as well. By 1870, the U.S. had roughly 45,000 miles of railroad track. In the following 30 years an additional 170,000 miles of track were laid. The Erie Canal remained relevant in upstate New York, but the competition was fierce. I asked Derrick Pratt of the Erie Canal Museum to explain why. You're going to hear some talk of canning at the beginning, just as a heads up, because that's really how we got started on this convo. Don't worry. We're going to get back to canning more in another episode.
Derrick Pratt (Erie Canal):
The Erie Canal always offered a good way to move products. That was the benefit. That's why the canal actually kept existing well after railroads had become the dominant form of transportation. The Erie Canal, while it was slower, was still much cheaper than the railroads. So you could still, if you have goods like canned products, which can last for a very long time, you don't need to get to market right away. You could ship your cans of corn down the canal. It would take a few more days to get to New York City or whatnot, but it would cost you significantly less. So that I think is why canning - I’m speculating here - but I think why canning is sort of prominent along the canal, especially in its later days.
Liz Russell:
Why was it cheaper than railroads?
Derrick Pratt (Erie Canal):
Railroads knew they moved faster. So also because the canal was operated by the state, the state could regulate what the tolls were. They recognized that railroads were much more efficient. So to compete with the railroads, they kept prices for using the canal down and and boat owners, they recognized that you're moving your goods, slower. If we're going to charge the same price as a railroad, you would send your goods on the railroad because why not more bang for your buck? Ultimately, was losing the state money more or less. It wasn't generating a ton of revenue, but people, especially grain shippers, wanted the canal to remain open so the railroads would not have a monopoly on transporting things across the state. So it would keep the prices of the railroads down. And ultimately that's kind of ironic, New York City and Buffalo, New York having not wanted the canal originally, they were the ones who pushed for the barge canal. Pretty much after it became obsolete and expanded it even further. Just so it would have cheap ways to ship goods, and also compete with the railroad interests.
Liz Russell Narration:
According to an article written in Scientific American in May of 1850, after the Erie Canal was enlarged in the mid 1800s, a boat was able to carry 240 tons of wheat from Buffalo to New York City. In five days, a railroad car could do the same. In two days for meat and live animals. You can understand why speed would be an important factor when considering transportation. Anyways, back to Michael.
Michael Lansing (Historian):
Chicago also has a rural hinterland that is very amenable to the production of beef and pork on farms. And then you can put that stuff, those live animals on the rails and ship them to Chicago. And there are these elaborate meat-packing plants that emerge where an animal is literally taken apart piece by piece, as it moves down a line. And the crucial shift that made it possible for meat packers in Chicago to become famous companies like Swift and Armor, things that are even household names today. Those companies are able to make that transition work because of the refrigerated train car. So artificial refrigeration is a really crucial piece in particular of the meat story. Because industrial meat depends on refrigerated train cars because they're not always salting or smoking those meats. And what ends up happening is that these companies that are working in a large scale and therefore buying live animals like pigs and cows and cattle, buying them on a large scale can move in terms of volume. That's the business model. And then with these refrigerated cars, there's this initial kind of outlay of investment that has to be made, but once you've got them, you can basically ship finished meat products all over the country, and you can undercut price-wise the local purveyor, your local butcher and your local small town. And many of those local purveyors actually go out of business by the early 1900s because of the kind of rise and spread of…
Liz Russell:
I think it's very intuitive for people to understand, you know, how farmers raise an animal and butchered it, you know, that season or that understanding of seasonality. But before meat became a heavily industrialized or industrialized, don't know if heavily is appropriate. But before that time, if I lived in a city, I did not live on a farm. How did I get my meat pre refrigeration? Did I just go to a butcher? And it would have been killed within the last day or so, or how did that work?
Michael Lansing (Historian):
So urban people in the United States in the 19th century lived in cities that were filled with animals and they were not just filled with cats and dogs. There were dairies in urban spaces, in many cities around the country, even larger cities, there were pigs that roamed the streets. We live in a world today, we live in cities that are often almost animal free, at least when we're outside our homes, when we're not talking about our dog or our cat, but this was a very different experience of urban places that most Americans had. If you were in Boston in the 1830s or Charleston in the 1870s or New York City in the 1850s, where there are these great debates about whether or not pigs should be roaming the streets, and if so, where they should be. So there were supplies of animals that could become meat.
And so you would just go down the street to your local butcher, and that's where you would secure your meat. And you would have this kind of local relationship because you would know that butcher because you would live in that same neighborhood, or maybe that butcher was trained in a very important way that was related to your religion or was trained in a way to butcher an animal like you knew in the place that you had emigrated from. So that's an example of local food. Now, sometimes that meat that was sold in urban spaces was not seen as nutritious or as safe as the meat you might be able to get in a rural space because what are those pigs that are wandering the streets eating? Well, they're eating all the trash, all the garbage, which is great for the municipality because they're just starting in the middle of the 19th century in American cities to figure out that you need to provide certain services like public trash pickup.
In the meantime, private pigs are taking care of that by eating all kinds of trash. But then what's the quality of the meat? If you're walking down the street in New York City in 1845 and you see a pig eating trash, and then when you walk into a butcher shop to buy a pig that, you know, came from that same group of pigs, you're wondering like, wait, what am I really eating? The same is true of dairy products. And a number of historians who've been doing work on this as well, looking at the ways in which these urban dairies often were producing substandard milk, that milk produced in rural areas was often deemed superior and a purveyor could sell it at a higher price, but there's just a host of animals. American cities in the 19th century, especially the early 19th century, are teeming with animals. Not only the ones that I've just described, but also horses because of course horsepower drives everything. So just imagine the kind of the smells and the noises, the filth, the excrement, the waste, the kind of cacophony, not just of people on the street, but also of animals on the street and American cities in the early and mid 19th century.
Liz Russell:
I do have a sort of silly followup question, and maybe it gets into semantics, but you know, if someone is in an urban area raising a pig, is that person, are we talking about urban farmers? Are we talking about some other kind of industrialized version of animal husbandry? Or is it like individuals who own a pig and then take it to a butcher?
Michael Lansing (Historian):
Another great question. What historians are telling us right now is that it's kind of a small-scale ownership in most cases, and pigs are often associated, at least in the experiences of a place like New York City, with poor people, with immigrants, with African-Americans, with people who have been marginalized by the power structures in that moment. And there's actually a lot of work by well off white elites in the instance of New York City, a lot of work in which pigs as a dirty filthy animal, not only threatened rich white women as they're walking down the street in their fancy clothes, because of course a pig can knock a child over right? A large pig, a full grown adult pig, is quite a formidable beast, but they're actually also in the same newspaper article complaining about the pigs. They're using that to complain about, say, Irish immigrants. So there's this conflation of people and animals, and it's largely built around the kind of power structures amongst the people in the city.
Liz Russell Narration:
What Michael was sharing with me was amazing. I've always known that food is a critical part of cultural identity, but I never considered animals being used as a proxy for the cultures that ate them. Interestingly, meat and identity also came up in my call with Eleanor.
Liz Russell:
Let's talk about meat quickly. So meat was a staple because of availability. Talk a little bit about why people ate meat. There wasn’t such a thing as veganism at that point in time, as far as I'm aware. Animal rights, it wasn't a big thing. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Eleanor Barnett (History Eats historian):
So you’re right, there wasn't such a thing as veganism. Meat, again, was seen as a foundational kind of food. I mean, especially in England, very early on, actually. 16th century. There's a sense that English identity is entwined with specifically beef eating. And they think of that as a kind of sign of the honesty of English people compared to what they saw as kind of more perhaps pretentious salad eating and green eating, fish eating of people in the hotter countries, again, mainly Italy and Spain. So yes, it's very foundational, however, or perhaps because of that, you do have these religious fast days. And so the first thing that they think you should kind of avoid as a way of penance, or as a religious tool to focus your mind is to avoid meat. So that's why you get fish days on Fridays. And sometimes Saturdays and sometimes Wednesdays. So the fact that that was what they thought was important to avoid shows you kind of their hierarchy of food a little bit, and fish was certainly lower down on the scale than meat. It's also because the way they thought that meat was the healthiest type of food you could have, because essentially what you wanted to eat was the stuff that transformed easiest into human flesh, because the way that that's kind of what they thought was happening when you ate, it was in certain ways, it replaced your spent flesh. So you actually literally needed to eat. So that's why wine as well is seen as very healthy or nutritious sometimes, so much so that it becomes negative, and you could become drunk on wine because wine is like the blood, essentially it transforms into your body. So meat is also very healthy whereas fish is seen as unhealthy because it creates, well, they thought it created kind of slimy cold humans, all these kinds of fluids that were in the body.
Liz Russell:
That's incredible. I didn't realize that that was a thing at all. I thought it was kind of purely agricultural, but this idea that there was a vision and that flesh equaled flesh, I mean, I guess it makes total sense, but I did not know that at all.
Eleanor Barnett (History Eats historian):
That's something that is important to understand in food history, that thinking about the body itself and what they thought the body was and how it functioned. Because obviously the impacts on what you eat is what food do you think is healthy? It depends on what you think your body does with that food. And so in the early modern period, they have this system, which goes back to the ancient times, which is four humors. So blood, color, melancholy, and phlegm, and they, these humans, these kinds of fluids in the body each have a quality. So blood, for example, is seen as warm and moist, and then color is warm and dry, et cetera, et cetera, and food fits into those categories. So for example, you know, the famous one is cucumber is a cold and a moist food. She's got why we get the phrase cold as a cucumber.
And that's why we'd still say that spice is hot. It's not literally hot, it's not warm, but it's hot humorly. The idea is that you need to keep your body in this balance of these four humors. So if you were particularly, you know, particularly dry and warm, then you could use a cucumber for example, to kind of balance your body out. And so a lot of the dietary advice is kind of reliant on their system and that's how they constructed lots of their dishes. So especially in the medieval period, it's very common to have sweet and savory together, like sweet and sour. Like today, we think of it as a kind of Chinese food in other parts of Asia, but in the medieval period and into the early modern period, that was very healthy food because it was balanced in terms of these humors.
Liz Russell Narration:
Here's the thing about 444 pounds of beef that might seem obvious to you. It's a lot of meat. Seriously. We knew cows were big, but it wasn't until we saw it packed into cardboard boxes and plastic totes, that we really understood what we had just paid for. We had bought a huge freezer and while we were in the store, I had insisted that it was too small and it turns out it was. So while we kept all of the meat on ice, we defrosted a small freezer. We took it back to the hardware and we bought an even larger one. We had to wait for that to come to temperature. And then, only then, were we finally in business. We stored marrow bones from the cow in any of the cracks we could, but otherwise the full 15 cubic yards of the appliance was meat.
The house we were living in at the time was built in the 1850s. The basement was small river rock foundation. Half of it had once acted as a cistern for the house. So it had oddly sloped walls and small steps that actually went to nowhere. The freezer took up a quarter of the usable space, honestly, maybe even more than that. And even though we got everything in, I worried about what came next. What about all of the other things we needed to freeze and store? A second freezer really couldn't fit, at least not comfortably. So I felt very much like we had already maxed out on our ability to store food. Two other things also bothered me. First, we didn't get to meet the farmer at all. The meat was bought at auction by a connection to my cousin. I knew it was a county fair winner in Steuben county, which is south of us.
But once it was bought at auction, the cow was taken directly to the butcher. My only job was to call and tell the butcher the cuts of meat I wanted and then pick it up when it was done, which was sort of labor intensive, and pay. Of course, we paid a fee for the auction. We paid for the meat by the pound, once it was disassembled. And we paid for the processing labor, which brings me to the next thing that bothered me, the cost of this whole adventure. It wasn't terrible. Our cow did cost us more per pound than supermarket beef, but it was hard to tell by how much we had guessed about a buck 20 to a buck, 50 per pound, which in total was about $600 more. If we were going to buy that equivalent poundage at the market, we didn't care a ton. The beef tasted amazing, and we were glad to have supported a farmer, even if it was one we didn't really know. More notably, though, is that this cost was all at once. We had to pay the cost of the cow and the cost of the freezer, plus all the time and transport. We're privileged to be able to pull it off, especially on such a whim, but it got me wondering what else is out there? How might someone else be able to enjoy local meat through less extremes?
Sarah Ficken (dairy farmer):
Our farm is New Moon Farms, and we're located in Monroeville, New York. On our farm we are predominantly a dairy farm. We're part of the Agri-Mark Cooperative. So if you buy Cabot cheese, that is one of the brands that Agri-Mark owns. And so as a co-op member where we're part of that, but we've always believed that diversifying is key to being a successful small farm. So in addition to raising dairy cows and milking dairy cows, we also sell some of our own beef and I run a farm business called New York Farm Basket, which allows, you know, any consumer in the northeast, midwest, mid-Atlantic to go online and order, you know, farm raised food delivered directly to their door.
Liz Russell Narration:
That's Sarah talking with her husband, Chris. You'll hear more from both of them in a few episodes this season, but what you need to know right now is that I first connected with New Moon farms over Instagram. I think Sarah had reached out to me first, or maybe I found them. Either way, I was totally smitten with the charm of their property and their growing family. And once I realized they had a model to sell their food online, I had 4,000 questions that I wanted to ask them. So they kindly jumped on a call despite regularly pulling 12 hour days and raising three children at the same time. One of whom you will hear a little bit on this call.
Liz Russell:
One of the things that most interests me about you guys is your model. I am a CSA member, where I obviously get vegetables. I am pretty new to that. I'm gonna say four years in. And when I got introduced on Instagram, I was like, this is really interesting because it's like the CSA concept, but you guys use this word subscription box and you've got a lot more variety than I'm used to seeing in a CSA. And I just thought that was like really with the times that was very like in keeping with this idea of subscription boxes, of flooding the internet. And I just think it's a fascinating model and a really smart, smart model, frankly. Can you talk a little bit about this idea that you came up with? What, what you do typically, like how you ship food? I don't understand that at all. And just, yeah. Give us a run down of your model.
Sarah Ficken (dairy farmer):
In a lot of ways we sort of happened into New York Farm Basket, sort of happenstance. So we started with the traditional CSA model. I was working at Colgate at the time and we just bought the farm. It was our first real winter here. And I ran into a professor who mistook me for a college student. I got a little bit sassy with him because he had mistaken me for a college student and we wound up talking about the farm and he was like, oh, my wife really likes buying stuff from a farm. Would you sell us things? And so I said, sure. And so for the first year we had a one person CSA and we offered vegetables and I raised chickens for them. I raised eggs for them, and I also raised beef for them.
And we sort of slowly grew. And I think at our peak, we maybe have like a 15 member CSA, but vegetables are not my jam. I'm really, really bad at weeding them. And I also frequently forget to water, but we really enjoy raising animals. And so you're trying to figure out like, how do we keep feeding our community? And so for a while, it was just word of mouth. I'd send out a really clunky email and people would be like, oh yeah, you know, I want this, this and this, you know, I'd send out like paper order forms that they'd have to print, fill out and then scan back to me, you know, like really, I'm not going to say beginning stages of the internet, because it was like 2015, but really not smooth.
And then in 2019 I had just quit my job. And in talking with some of our neighbors, we decided that it was worth it to just move forward. You know, we all had similar beliefs in terms of how food should be raised. And so we just decided to move forward and get a nice website that you could do things online. And as opportunities have presented themselves, we've been flexible. So originally, you know, we started with one box and it was a standard box. You couldn't get anything else. You know, it was my first box, I think it was four pounds of ground beef, one package of short ribs, one package of stew meat, one steak and one chuck roast. And after that initial email I sent to my email list and we have a lot of people who've been really supportive of us. And the email got back to me and it was like, well, we'd love to buy meat from you, but we'd like to be able to choose.
And so we just started curating boxes and noticed that people were buying with an either monthly or quarterly frequency. And that was when we started offering subscription boxes on either a monthly or quarterly frequency. And in terms of how we actually ship the food, that's actually fairly straightforward. So meat is frozen when we get our beef or our chicken or pork back from the processor, it is frozen. And so we keep it frozen and we basically get a box, put an insulated liner in it. And we did all sorts of experiments with insulated liners. We spent, I don't know, the better part of a month ordering different liners and putting them in a box, filling it with meat and leaving them out on the front porch and checking the temperature every 12 hours to see how it was doing. But basically we found a liner that worked really well for about 48 hours, keeps everything frozen.
And so we'd put, we put the liner in the box, we put whatever meat in the box. I typically add dry ice. We don't need to use the dry ice necessarily, especially in the winter, but I like it because it provides us a little extra cushion with time, you know, and then I add honey or maple syrup or spices or lip balm whatever, you know, people have added to their box. Then I taped the box up and I bring it to UPS at the very last minute. So basically right before the truck comes, I'm dropping the boxes off and it's going straight onto the truck. And then the truck’s going straight to the warehouse and typically our meat gets delivered the next day. Although there are some slightly further a field or more rural customers who might have to wait like 36 hours, but the meat arrives fully frozen and it works really well.
Liz Russell:
I know it sounds really straightforward, but at the same time it feels like, you know, you think of ordering meat on the internet. It just doesn't seem like that should work. I'm grateful. I mean, talking about sending things, I have stuff I ordered at Christmas I still haven't gotten - how did COVID impact this type of thing?
Sarah Ficken (dairy farmer):
So COVID made it a little bit more difficult to get things through the mail. Well, I will rephrase that. COVID made it a little bit more difficult to ship packages. I really love the U.S. Postal Service, to the point where going to the post office and buying stamps is one of my favorite things, but they were basically not able to offer the level of service that we needed to ensure that our product got where it was going safely and timely. So we do use UPS and there are definitely busy times. So right before Thanksgiving, we do fresh turkeys. Oh my gosh, it was crazy doing turkeys this year because UPS was so absolutely swamped. We knew that we wouldn't be able to ship our turkeys and ensure that they arrived on time because people need their turkeys on Thanksgiving. Which means the turkeys needed to arrive on Wednesday so that people had time to do whatever you do to a turkey.
And so we ended up delivering all throughout central New York on, I think, the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, which also happened to be my daughter's sixth birthday. So I loaded her and the baby in the car with like 35 turkeys. And we just, you know, went house to house to house delivering. And then we also have a fairly sizable customer base down on Long Island and up through the Hudson Valley. And so I got home from delivering turkeys in central New York, loaded up the car left at, I want to say, three in the morning so that I could get to Bridgehampton by nine o'clock and started slowly working my way back home, you know, delivering turkeys.
Liz Russell:
Oh my gosh. That is dedication right there.
Sarah Ficken (dairy farmer):
It was a little bit… it was a lot, I will definitely say that, but it was also really the nice thing about delivering. I feel like I have a relationship with so many of my customers. You know, we send out a weekly email and typically I'll get 10 customers responding in one form or another, either asking a question, sharing something that's going on with their life. And so I feel like I have these relationships with all of these people. And so it was really nice to be able to put a house number to the email address, you know, and just see where these people lived or, you know, drop the Turkey and have a conversation from 15 feet away, you know, because not only are we sharing food with our customers, but we're sharing a little bit of our life with them too. So it was rewarding for sure.
Liz Russell Narration:
I loved all of this, but I also wanted to recognize this larger phenomenon of big businesses, shipping food and meals. I asked Sarah and Chris to comment on that.
Liz Russell:
And I really want to get to this, this idea of these farmers who, you know, they're really big businesses, but they're sort of trying to sell you that they're this very small farm or a very family oriented farm when they're kind of, not.
Sarah Ficken (dairy farmer):
As we think about creating the type of food system that both encourages sustainable farming, doesn't rely on exploiting externalities and is also just genuinely there and accessible. I think authenticity is a really big part of it. I don't think that there's anything wrong with big food conglomerates necessarily so long as they are authentically who they are. And I don't think there's anything wrong with large food subscription services saying, Hey, we consolidate meat from an entire food shed's worth of farms. And then we ship it to you. What's challenging is when, as an individual farmer, you're swimming in this current of people with really big marketing budgets that aren't necessarily committed to the same level of transparency. And so when you have a big conglomerate or a food aggregator, pretending to be a small farm or pretending like they treat the farms that they source from fairly, it makes it really difficult to differentiate yourself in the marketplace. I don't know, did that answer your question? Yeah,
Liz Russell:
Yeah, I think it does. So, what you're saying is they just really need to be honest about the fact that they are acting as a big business.
Sarah Ficken (dairy farmer):
Which… yeah. And there's nothing wrong with big business. There's absolutely nothing wrong with it. Just don't pretend to be a little business.
Liz Russell:
Yeah. Right. And I think that makes total sense.
Chris Ficken (dairy farmer):
Can we just simplify it and say, just be honest?
Liz Russell:
Be honest. I like it. I like it a lot.
[🎶Theme music🎶]
Liz Russell Narration:
Next time on Was Is Could Be: $1.38 in tomato seeds and a morbid fascination with canning. If you want to learn more about my food journey, follow me at @itslizrussell on Instagram, or check out https://www.itslizrussell.com/podcast-blog-transcripts/. If you want to learn more about Chris and Sarah's farm, New Moon Farms, go to www.newmoondairy.com. And if you want to get in on their very cool and super affordable subscription boxes go to www.NYfarmbasket.com. And I'm not being paid to say that.