#95: Ancestral Eating in a Modern World with Alison Kay

Alison Kay is a food writer, teacher, and podcaster. She specializes in bringing the wisdom of ancestral food to modern kitchens in a joyful and practical way so that you can learn without overwhelm and make traditional foods part of your life.
In today's episode, we talk about Alison's journey from veganism to ancestral eating and how changing her diet helped her overcome struggles with fertility. Alison is a wealth of knowledge about traditional foods, ancestral eating, and prioritizing local foods in one's life. This is a great introduction to ancestral eating and traditional foods! Enjoy!

Connect with Alison:
https://ancestralkitchen.com/about/

Listen to Andrea's Interview on the PTE Pod here.

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Transcript

Roni: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Plan to Eat podcast, where I have conversations about meal planning, food, and wellness. To help you save time in the kitchen, reduce your grocery bill stress less about food. And delight in dinner time.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of the planty podcast. Today's episode is an interview with Alison Kay. She is a food writer, teacher, and podcaster who specializes in ancestral foods and bringing ancestral foods to a modern kitchen. a podcast called the ancestral kitchen podcast, which she co hosts with Andrea, who we had on the podcast earlier this, uh, I think at the end of the summer.

I will link in the show notes to that episode. If you want to learn more about Andrea as well. Today's episode, we talk about what ancestral food is. We talk about Alison's journey, and her struggle with fertility that brought her to an ancestral type [00:01:00] of eating. It is a really lovely story. I think you guys are gonna get a lot of.

Warm feelings and inspiration from that story. We also talk a little bit about some of the misconceptions with ancestral eating, uh, what a typical day of eating and cooking like looks like for Alison. So if you are curious at all about, uh, having a more ancestral style of eating or eating in a more traditional way, Alison is a great person to learn from.

And I think this episode is a great introduction to it. So without further ado, here is my interview with Alison.

Hi, Alison. Thanks so much for joining me on the podcast today.

Alison: Thank you very much for having me. I'm excited to have a chat.

Roni: Yeah, I am too. So why don't we just get started by having you say who you are and what you do.

Alison: Yeah. Okay. So my name is Alison and I, as you can probably hear, I'm English and I live in England. I spent a lot of the last 10 years in Italy, [00:02:00] but I'm back in England now and Online. I have a home, which is ancestral kitchen. com, which is where I talk about, ancestral foods, traditional foods. And I share recipes for fermenting for breads or cooking with traditional foods, saturated fats, meat, all kinds of things.

And I also am half of a podcast. Same name, ancestral kitchen podcast, which is available wherever you get your podcasts, where I chat with my co host, who is American and she has a small farm, whereas I live in a town. And we, um, every two weeks we go live and talk about, things that are happening in our kitchen, particular topics around food or around farming or around sourcing around fermentation, the whole kind of gamut of traditional ancestral food ways.

That's me.

Roni: That's great. Yeah, we had, Andrea on the podcast a little [00:03:00] earlier this year. And so she talked to us a lot about her small farm that she lives on sounds just really sounds like so much work. She is such a hardworking person. 

Alison: Absolutely.

Roni: well, even given the fact that we've had her on the podcast before, can you just explain what ancestral food is and how it differs from maybe what we consider a modern diet?

Alison: Yeah, of course. So I kind of consider ancestral food to be food before. Industrialization came along, which was when suddenly people moved from the town from the country to the town and needed to be fed, particularly in England when the, kind of industrial revolution happened. And so food was made for them by people rather than them growing their own food and processing their own food in the kitchen.

They were working in factories instead. And, um, Food was quick, cheap, and other people made money by selling them food. So before that happened to our food, which has left a whole kind of legacy, which we're [00:04:00] living through now, where now food is about profit rather than about sustenance, you know, food that you find in the stores.

Before that, Our ancestors used to grow food around them and raise food around them and they had to buy locally because there wasn't the massive infrastructure of shipping foods halfway across countries in the world. And then they were at home more. And so they process that food themselves, you know, they're cooking from scratch.

They were perhaps making their own cheese, making drinks, fermenting, canning, preserving, doing all sorts of things that would secure that food for them for the, for the whole season, not just, you know, when the harvest was happening. And from a kind of practical point of view, they were, you know, Eating what the land could provide and also eating, for example, animals, nose to tail using the fats from animals.

So instead of, whereas these days we have seed oils, a lot of the, [00:05:00] which are made as by products of other things or made in other parts of the world and shipped to us and have had a lot of them had nasty things done to them. They were instead using saturated fats, which they would render from their pigs or from their cows or.

That's when the chickens, they were eating all of the animals. They were eating awful as well as the flesh. And they were combining that with grains that they could, grow and process themselves and loads and loads of vegetables as well. So, like I said, before the industrial revolution happened, um, we ate that way because we had to, but also we ate that way because it nourished us.

Um, our bodies and gave us what we need, but also I think nourished our souls because we were actually compared to these days, we were in the kitchen and we were connected with the food that we were eating, which through my experience brings an awful [00:06:00] lot more consciousness and joy and value to those things.

And we were sustaining the land around us as we farmed and ate. Um, whereas. The way that we eat now, often our food comes from goodness knows where, and we don't see how the people or the land is treated, um, whilst it's being grown and harvested. So does that kind of explain,

Roni: Mm hmm.

I think that's a great explanation. And I really like the way that you talk about it. Just, you know, coming out of, the summer right now, I have, well, I mean, we just, started to get our first cold weather here, actually. So my garden is, is done. But, you know, I spent a lot of the early part of the fall processing our tomatoes and the different things that we had.

And it is amazing. Mm hmm. How much pride you have in the food when you actually, when you're actually the one who's doing the work for it. I know that maybe that's not, it is quite time consuming in [00:07:00] a lot of ways. So maybe not everybody has the time for it, but, you know, I made a really delicious tomato sauce and I was just, I couldn't stop talking about it and how amazing it was.

And

Alison: it tasted great, really much better than the stuff that you would have got from the store.

Roni: Yeah, absolutely. And, uh, so it is just amazing that connection with your food and even just the joy that it can bring you, uh, I think is really special and something that is missing when you just, go through the drive thru or something to pick up your food.

Alison: I, I agree that, you know, we all have different levels of time that we can spend doing things. You know, I haven't always had the time that I have now and I maybe won't in the future. And, you know, when my son was first born, it was hard to, to have that much time, but the little that we can or the degree to which we can connect with our food, like you said, Said it brings, it brings so much more value to what we're doing, you know, I don't throw away anything because I'm connected with it.

Those tomatoes that you were making your [00:08:00] sauce out of, you know, you, you wouldn't have thrown away any of them. And yet in our food culture, these days, you know, shopping at the store, it's kind of easier to just. You know, throw away the ends of the bread. Um, but you know, if you make that bread yourself, you make that sauce yourself, you're not wasting any of it.

It's so precious. And, and like you said, there's so much more joy in it. You know, you, you love it and you, you want to share it. And, and it's, it's, it's part of you, which is food kind of has always been for us, you know, because it's always been part of our community, our local environment. We've seen it.

We've touched it. We've smelled it. We've handled it. And that. makes us more human. I think more, more fully human when, when that happens.

Roni: That's a beautiful way to look at it. And I agree there is some kind of an obligation that I feel towards the food that I raise myself, that I really need to use as much of it as possible. We even have an apple tree in our backyard and I, I mean, I didn't plant the apple tree. It was just there when [00:09:00] we bought our house, but I, even that I feel, you know, we get so many apples on the years that there's a harvest and I'm, I make so much applesauce and apple butter and I make apple pies because I just, I really just feel like there's an obligation to it, to, to make the most out of it.

Alison: I bet your house smells amazing during that period.

Roni: It does. Yeah. So what sparked your journey towards, um, eating in this more ancestral way?

Alison: Yeah. I've always loved being in the kitchen. So I've always kind of had a curious spark around food. You know, when I was younger, I used to, to bake a lot and make cakes and that kind of thing. I grew up in a family that ate a very traditional. Sort of standard traditional diet, you know, just shopping in the supermarket and not really worrying about whether it was a packet of something.

And my mum had a set number of dishes that she could have just put on rote. And [00:10:00] unfortunately, cause my own kind of makeup, I ended up at 20 years of age, really very overweight, in that I was. 280 pounds over that. My scales only went up that far. Um, so I don't know how much heavier than that I was.

And. When I was 20, I thought I, I want to change this. I'm going into my twenties. I want to have fun. And I looked in the mirror and I saw who I was and I thought that's not me. That's not me. And so I decided I had to lose weight, which I did. I lost half my body weight in English. I lost just over 10 stone, which is 140 pounds.

And that. It was a journey that if I repeated it now with the knowledge that I have now, I would have done it a different way. It was the nineties and it was the low fat kind of thing. And I just cut fat out of my diet completely. I carried on eating sugar, cut fat out of my diet. I lost the weight, but then I spent probably [00:11:00] six, five, six, seven years kind of fighting with it up, up a few, you know, pounds.

Another couple of stones, so maybe 20 pounds down a bit, up a bit and restricting myself thinking that I couldn't have any sort of any form of fat at all. And I have an astounding amount of determination. So I was able to see that through, but it was hard work on me. You know, I feel like anything we apply determination to like that, there's a, there's a consequence to it.

And then I met my husband about 15 years ago and he was. kind of a health on a health journey because he'd struggled with some things health wise and he was vegan at the time. So I said, okay, let's both go vegan. And cause I love doing things in the kitchen, I started cooking all kinds of vegan things.

In the end we decided to eat raw vegan, which we did for two years and I was cooking up all kinds of more vegan things for us. And then at that point. I [00:12:00] hadn't had a menstrual cycle for five years. I have polycystic ovaries, which had been diagnosed when I was about 15. And I'd seen all the little cysts on a scan at the hospital.

And the doctor at the time had put me on the pill. I'd then come off it. When I was much older thinking this isn't a good thing for me. Um, but I hadn't had a cycle for five years and I was about 37 then. And I knew that I would really love to be blessed with a child. and you know, I felt very happy with my partner then who's now my husband.

And I thought, well, I can't have a child if I don't have a cycle. So I started investigating. Traditional fertility foods. You know, what were the foods that are known to be good for fertility and how could I change my diet to incorporate them? And what I learned was that traditional cultures have prized animal foods for fertility, so saturated fat [00:13:00] that comes from animals, eggs, cheese, that kind of And at the beginning I was, uh, frankly terrified.

Of the prospect of having to do that to my diet, because I'd spent the previous 10, almost 15 years, terrified of fat, you know, I cut out the fat to lose the weight. And my whole childhood had been kind of, you know, marred by the fact that I was the fat girl at school. And I did not want to start eating fat again, because I was convinced it was going to make me fat.

So. The more I read, the more I realized this kind of is what I need to be doing. I also was taking my body temperature and I could see that my temperature was really quite low. And I'd read that if I increase my saturated fat, it would probably affect my body temperature. And if my body temperature got back to more normal, then I would be more likely to ovulate. So. a lot more kind of thinking and reading and, [00:14:00] and some quite traumatic things in the kitchen. And I was like, right, I've, I've got to make this change. I, you know, I, I feel like I really want to have a child. And so slowly and kind of with the guidance of Western price at the time, because I was led to them by this research research that, you know, Sally has done and the nourishing traditions cookbook.

Through that, I learned to start eating, um, ferments. But also to start introducing fat again. And so slowly I went back to animal produce. I started with eggs and fish because those are the things I liked the most. And then I went back to meat and I started eating meat that was, that had the fat on. So, you know, I would have a roasted joint and I would have the fat from the chicken.

I'd have the red meat and I'd have the skin. We'd maybe roast some pork and I'd have the crackling on the pork. And. What happened basically is that my temperature became more normal and over a period of about [00:15:00] six, it was about six months from when I started that. Change reintroducing those things about six months later, I just randomly had a menstrual cycle and I had no warning that it was coming and I hadn't had a period for five years.

It was a complete shock. And I thought, Oh, okay, well maybe this is just going to be a one off because previous having had polycystic ovaries, one of the main things that Strong symptoms of that you can get is kind of amenorrhea or, um, absent or infrequent periods. And I'd used to in my teens and early twenties had periods like maybe once every I thought, Oh, maybe this is just one off and I'm not going to have another period.

And so I know what I waited. And, um, I said to my husband, Oh, well, let's just start trying for a baby. And then I never had another period and I thought, Oh, okay, well, maybe that was it. And then I [00:16:00] started getting hot legs. And my friend said to me, take a pregnancy test. And I did. And I was pregnant. Um, so within literally six weeks of, um, having a cycle, I, I realized I was pregnant and I'd got pregnant literally within probably my second ovulation.

And I really haven't looked back since then, uh, the pregnancy was, was really healthy. My son, Gabriel, who's 10 now, was born at home, and I've just continued upon the traditional kind of ancestral food lifestyle since then, learning more, introducing more things into my kitchen, playing, and all of us eating that way, and it has served us really well, and we love our food.

Roni: That's such a beautiful story and really warms my heart to, to just, you know, like you were struggling so much and then to have such a beautiful result. I really love that. I'm curious if there were other benefits as well that you [00:17:00] experienced. I just, I have heard. Are times when somebody who is, you know, very strictly raw vegan, and then if they start incorporating, you know, foods outside of that, they often are like, Oh, I didn't realize I had mental fog and suddenly I have a lot more energy.

Did you experience those things as well? Or was your focus just so on the fertility aspect that you didn't, that maybe you didn't have other benefits that were, that you realized.

Alison: Yeah. So at the same time as wanting a child, I remember towards the end of being all vegan that I was struggling to, feel like I had power to move around. So at the time I was living in Italy and teaching English and I had to stand up in a classroom and you know, write on the board and be the teacher.

And um, The last kind of four or five months of that raw vegan journey, I had to put a chair by the board because between, you know, times when I was teaching, when they were doing something in the books, I had to sit down because I was struggling to stand up and I was also struggling to hold my breath.[00:18:00] 

Back in an upright position when I was seated. So I had to have something to lean on. So during the end of that period, I mean, at the first kind of year, year and a half of all vegan, particularly at the very beginning, I felt very good, but as time went on, I didn't have mental fog, but I had this kind of feeling like I didn't have enough energy to power my muscles.

And as I swapped back to traditional food that completely went away. I am. I'm a quite a cold person. I've, I've, I experienced, kind of, you know, cold hands, cold feet, cold nose. And I really struggled with that when I was raw vegan that has improved since increasing, um, the saturated fat in my diet, I think because my body temperature is warmer, but also I feel like my circulation in general has increased since doing that as well.

So those two things that, were definite kind of side effects. They weren't the reason why I did it. But they were very welcome when they happened. Yeah.

Roni: I feel [00:19:00] like the idea, I mean, you even mentioned that in your own journey, uh, you started dieting in the nineties, the, you know, fat free that was like the height of fat free eating. And I, I think that that has still, it's still permeating our, you know, food culture now. I think it's getting a little bit better, but it still is definitely permeating our food culture.

Are there other misconceptions like I'm, I'm viewing saturated fat as, you know, it's always put on like the, don't eat. Don't eat this, don't eat it in, quantities bigger than a teaspoon or something, you know, ridiculously small. Are there other misconceptions that people have about ancestral eating, that you might be able to address?

Like if they're, you know, they're thinking about saturated fat and it's, it's scary because we've been told it's scary, but you know, it's really not for most people.

Alison: I think the fat is an absolutely huge one, you know, and I, I just, I really had to face that when. I decided that things had to change with my diet. I remember [00:20:00] sitting across the table from Rob, who's my husband now, with a bit of cheese in front of us. And I was like, I can't eat this cheese. I just, I can't, I can't do it.

It's going to, and I, and all of the trauma of all of this coming up, you know, I was kind of having a panic attack about this cheese and, and it, it's so, Those things are so ingrained in us. It's amazing how deep they go into us. I feel like the saturated fat is, is a big one. And that goes kind of alongside with red meat that a lot of people think the red meat is, is something that's going to be terrible for them.

And, you know, that's not the case. There've been many, many cultures. Eating red meat for many centuries and centuries and centuries and not dying of the diseases we're dying off now. Um, I, I also think that, fermented foods, which have been eaten by many of traditional cultures in, in lots of different ways, depending on where they were in the world.

A lot of people are very scared of fermented foods. Gonna, kill [00:21:00] themselves, basically the same is true of raw milk, which is something that, in the kind of ancestral food world, if you can get access to, um, I would say is, is better for you than pasteurized milk. A lot of people think that there are problems with raw milk.

In cases like that, obviously it's important to know who your farmer is. And that's a big part of the ancestral food kind of puzzle, the jigsaw of it. It's about like our ancestors knew the land, you know, they kept the cow, they kept the goat. So they knew what state that cow and that goat was in. Um, whereas now if we're going to farmers to access milk or other foods, it's really good to know those farmers.

So, you know, if you are drinking their milk, Raw milk, you are eating their meat. You know how they've looked after those animals and you know that you, you can trust the food that's coming to you. Um, so that was a bit of a tangent, but yeah, raw milk, red meat, fermented foods, offal as well. The other, yeah.

The reason why [00:22:00] I laughed when you asked this question originally is that I think everyone thinks that offal is just not very tasty at all. And since eating nose to tail and eating, you know, heart, liver, brains. Kidneys, everything, liver and other offal is, can be cooked really, really well. I think all of us have probably have that mindset, have had, you know, liver that's been overcooked, which is not very appealing.

And yet there are ways that you can cook these things and flavors that you can combine them with. That means that you can enjoy them. And also they're incredibly good for economy. You know, they're so much cheaper. than buying a steak. They are much more nutrient dense. You know, they've got more nutrients in per kind of pound than the flesh meat.

So you're winning on the nutrients. You're winning on the, um, the cost and you're doing a good thing because you're respecting the whole animal by eating all of it. And you can make it taste [00:23:00] really nice as well. You don't have to buy a steak. be suffering with some overcooked liver that, you know, your grandma used to feed you that you, you don't like.

Yeah, I'm sure if you gave me another week, I could think of a whole load more misconceptions, but is that enough now?

Roni: Yeah, I like, I mean, it's interesting because it's almost, almost every main tenant, I would say of ancestral eating has some pushback against it just because it is so it's in opposition of how a lot of people eat currently. And so. It's just, it's really interesting hearing you, I wasn't expecting you even to have so many answers, but then once you start saying those things, I'm like, Oh yeah, like, of course, that's something that people are going to push back against just because, like I said, it's so, it's so different.

It has so much opposition compared to how a lot of people eat nowadays. And it's unfortunate. I think that there is a lot of fear around. Food and food that's maybe less processed. But we put so much trust for [00:24:00] whatever reason in, in adding extra processes to our food, thinking that it's making it so much safer and better for us, when there's a lot of argument to be made that it's degrading the food more.

Alison: Yeah, completely. That's exactly what I was going to say. I feel like, you know, since taking this journey, I feel the complete opposite, you know, buying something in a packet that you just don't know where it's come from. You don't know what's been done with it. It, how can that be safer than something that you've, you know, you've done yourself or you you've seen growing or you've been to the farmer's house and had dinner with them.

You know, it, we're putting our trust into things that just don't make sense because we don't know what's happening, but you know, Before it gets into that packet, before it gets into that box, we don't know what's happened to it. Yeah,

Roni: I did like that you went on the little tangent about your, about the raw milk and being able to connect with the farmer and the person who's providing you with. The things that you're buying, uh, you mentioned that, you [00:25:00] know, in opposition to Andrea, who lives on her own farm and does, uh, you know, raise a lot of her own food.

You live in a more of a town situation and it still might be different from living in, you know, a big city somewhere, but I'm curious how you find, the ways to connect with the people who you're sourcing your food from not living, you know, out in the middle of the country.

Alison: Yeah, we've lived in kind of three main different areas in the last, decade, perhaps even four. And so I've kind of been through this four different times, reconnecting in different places to find different sources of food. And at the moment we're in a town which has an incredible farmer's market, which is part of the reason why we moved here, because food is that important to us.

Um, and every Saturday is the farmer's market. And so myself, my husband and my son go there every Saturday morning. It's kind of like a day, you know, morning out for us. We walk there, we [00:26:00] get our vegetables from the market. One of the stores, they're selling vegetables. We get our eggs from another store. We get our meat from a, a store there.

There's a wild game store. We get, um, game from there. There's cheese seller, there's a, a milk seller. We buy all of our food, virtually all of our food there on a Saturday, and my strong husband carts it all back to our house. Um, and that works really well. And it's kind of like a treat a bit for us because we go out together, you know, we have a walk together.

Sometimes we stop at a little cafe and have a drink before we come home. You know, it's, uh. It's an event and it's part of our Saturday. It's just, it's, non negotiable. We do that every Saturday morning. Occasionally we have to top up from other places and sometimes we have to use the supermarket. We've only been here three months and so we haven't quite got all of our supply exactly worked out.

I'm sure that will be fine. Um, but but not very often. When we were in [00:27:00] Italy, which is the place where we were before we came here, it took me a bit longer to find suppliers. We in the end we found a local farmer who did a drop. So he would go out every Saturday and he would Take his van and go to different places in the local towns and you ordered what you wanted and then you went there to pick it up so we would get our meat from him.

There was a local cooperative where we got our veg from which took us a couple of months to find. There it was more a case of just asking people. Who do you know? Who do you know? Who do you know? Because Italy has less of a kind of online world, more of a, people tell each other, you know, where things are.

Before that we lived in Cornwall in Southwest England, near Penzance. And again, there, there was a farmer's market, which was a Thursday morning. So because we both work from home and we've spent many years of our life. Making our life work like this. So we have time to be more flexible. We were able to go to that early in the morning on a Thursday.

We got most of our vegetables from there. Then there was a farmer who [00:28:00] was from the other side of Cornwall, the North coast. And we actually went to visit his farm. We went to the farmer's place in Italy as well. So we've been to both of those farms and we used to get meat and offal from him. And sometimes he would freeze stuff that he couldn't sell.

And we kind of had the relationship where I could. Get that from him and still frozen for slightly cheaper. We used to get fat from all of the farmers that we've been to. We've got fat from to render lard. So really it's. in each place. It's not been difficult, but it's been a matter of taking the time to find out where the farmers are.

So whether that be talking to people or going online and doing searching, or, you know, if in the States there's a big network of Western Price chapters, you could contact one nearest you and ask them because they keep records of them. There are websites that kind of list farmers that you can find if you go searching.

Um, it took me a while. To set those relationships up, but then once they were set up. And like they are [00:29:00] now, they just, they served me in every place we lived, just continue, continue, continue. And I'm building that relationship with those people and, you know, they become, they become friends and, you know, my son's gone to the farm and seen the animals and, and it becomes just part of our life.

So even though we don't have the farm. Which, which my podcast co host Andrea does, uh, it feels amazing to be able to actually support people who are caring for the animals and who are caring for the land and who want to make that the way that they make their living. We can help them, support them to do that and get great food back.

Roni: curious when you were in Italy, if when you sourced your food, did you have to maybe deviate from what you would normally cook if you were in England? Did you have to adapt things to be a little more local culture, a little more Italian because it was harder to find the things that you were used to finding, in England or is it, or was, or did you find there was a [00:30:00] more universality of it?

Alison: there's a certain universality. Um, the vegetables are slightly different. but there were vegetables there that I'd never saw in England before. Lots of bitter greens, which the Italians love. And there's just, you know, aubergines and tomatoes and courgettes and that kind of thing everywhere. Um, but the winter veg the same, you know, the cabbages and the cavolo nero and the kale and the Brussels sprouts, meat wise, the cuts were completely different.

And I mean, there is a difference between cuts. As they're described in the US and in England anyway, so something that you might call something I might call something else, even though it's from the same part of the animal. Um, so I had to get used to, Oh, what does that actually mean? You know, when you look it up in a dictionary, you don't necessarily get quite the right definition.

Translation, you might get an American translation. I'm like, well, that's not what I'd call that. So I kind of, sometimes I just go, Oh, I'll get some of that this week. I'm not quite sure what it is, but when it comes, I'm sure I'll figure out how to cook it. And, you [00:31:00] know, the slow cook was always there, which was, it's kind of always by my side.

I love my slow cooker. And there were other things that we could get from, um, our. Farmer in Italy, like for example, he has these little, things called fagatelli, which are, um, little balls of liver mixed with all different herbs wrapped in, um, call fat from a pig. And we have a thing in England called fagots, which is kind of similar and you put them in the oven and you know, the, the fat comes out.

And so if you're putting some, perhaps some root vegetables around it, those get nicely. kind of coated with the, with the fat and some herbs. And those were absolutely delicious. So I learned quite a lot there through things that they eat normally that I wouldn't necessarily have known in England. But I kind of just apply the same techniques to, to, Either set of foods that I'm just, I'm curious.

And I look up a few things if I don't understand it. And then I have a go in the kitchen [00:32:00] and sometimes it's not perfect, but invariably everyone eats it and enjoys it. So, um, and over time I learn. So it, it, it was actually nice to have that different, that different set of. Perspectives on things. I enjoyed it.

Roni: It's actually really interesting to me that pretty much no matter where you go, and I think this is what Weston A. Price learned in his travels as well, that the local culture has a way of using, you know, these organ meats and this nose to tail style of eating that, you know, while it may look different from the way that you eat it in England or the way that we eat it in the United States, you know, in Italy and in Slovakia and, you Pretty much every culture has a way of consuming these things, um, because it was a valuable process for people previously.

Mm.

Alison: about the comparison in offal eating, nose to tail in Italy and England [00:33:00] is that Italy is far closer to it still. So whereas in England, people are like, eh, offal, what's that? You know, maybe, you know, some posh restaurants are trying to bring it back. Um, and you know, the, the ancestral community is cooking it.

But most people are like, Oh, I don't want liver. Ooh, can't eat brains. You know, sweetbreads. What's that? You know, whereas in Italy, the older generation particularly is still very much connected to the nose to tail philosophy. And in most restaurants that you go to, you will find a liver dish and people still know how to cook liver.

And so when I went to buy offal in Italy, it wasn't as cheap as it was in England because here. Certainly in Penzance, people didn't necessarily want it, whereas in Italy, it was just a heart. For example, a beef heart was just as in demand as some other cut of beef. So I wasn't saving much money by buying a beef heart to buying some other form of meat.

So that felt that that's [00:34:00] part of kind of the Italian fact that they compared to England, they are maybe 30 or 40 years behind the kind of global push around food. And they still have that as part of their tradition, how long, whether that will continue now into the future. I don't know. Um, but it, it was nice to feel like, you know, I could look up some recipes in Italian for how to cook whatever I had, whatever offal I had.

And I would find more recipes than I would find in England for the same thing.

Roni: Well, that's a good tip for anybody who's looking for recipes. For your nose to tail or organ meats is maybe look up some Italian, uh, chefs who are still using those things because they might have more interesting ways of cooking them.

Alison: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Mm.

Roni: So one thing that you mentioned earlier that I just, I really love is you kind of mentioned that you and your husband both work from home and [00:35:00] you have. cultivated your life more around food than I think maybe a quote unquote average person might. I think that the way that, that the, modern average modern person thinks about it is like their, their life happens and food kind of happens separately. Or, you know, You know, whereas it sounds like you sort of make food a centerpiece in your life and you have adapted your life to work with your food rather than your food has adapted to work with your life.

Uh, which I think is really beautiful. Yeah. I think that's really beautiful and it's definitely what I would consider a more like ancestral way of living even. So give me just what like a typical day looks like for you and your family and how food is incorporated into it.

Alison: Yeah. Okay. Um, so no day is the same, but I will try. Most mornings we have oatmeal for breakfast, which we call porridge over here in the UK. And, at the moment we're [00:36:00] using naked oats, which are a variety of oats, which aren't processed before you get them. Most oats that we buy have been heat steamed to, stabilize them.

But with these naked oats, you don't have to. So they are raw and we roll them ourselves in batches with a manual roller. So then the night before we will soak them sometimes just with water, sometimes with a starter to make fermented oats. And then in the morning we will cook those oats up and I usually put an egg into mine because I like to have some more protein in the morning and then I will top it at the moment with ground linseed and cream that's coming from the farmer's market.

And that's my breakfast. My husband's son have different things on their porridges and, you know, we play around with different flavorings as well with them. So it doesn't get stale. That's what we have most weekdays. So the weekends we tend to have a. Different breakfast, maybe some cakes, which I make because I'm writing a book, writing, researching a book on oats at the moment, [00:37:00] um, or some pancakes or, you know, some sausage fried with eggs, something like that.

And, but during the week when we're focused on routine, my son's homeschooled and we're working from home, the oatmeal is quick and easy. Then lunchtime is our main meal, usually around 1230. And that is usually some form of meat. So maybe offal or perhaps some ground mince. So ground beef, you'd call it or ground pork, or chicken, or because I've got our game supplier at the market now, we had a, uh, we slow cooked a hare last week.

And then we'll have to either with, um, sourdough bread, which I make regularly, but obviously I'm only making it like once a week. So I don't have to do that every day. Um, spread with lard, which I render every six weeks or so from fat, um, or butter, which I buy, I don't make my own butter. And so we'll have some form of meat with some form of veg at the moment, because we're getting into winter, it's kind of [00:38:00] cabbages and darker greens, um, with the bread or with some rice or with some potato maybe instead.

And like I said, that's our main meal. Then later on in the afternoon, usually about five o'clock, we have our last meal for the day, which is lighter. And sometimes that's leftovers. Very often the next day's lunch is leftovers as well from that main meal that I've cooked. So in the evening, sometimes it's leftovers.

Often we have a salad. I make a salad like once a week, perhaps once every five days, leave it in the fridge. With, you know, whatever I can get locally and we'll just literally dish some of that out. So it's, it's quicker for us to do. And sometimes I'll have a boiled egg or a bit of cheese or some, maybe we'll have some fish.

We've got some nuts that my husband likes in the evening and we'll have that with the salad. And then maybe some leftover, um, root veg from lunchtime, maybe some oat cakes that I've made, or sometimes we cook up [00:39:00] millet, which is quick and easy, just takes 15 minutes. We'll have that on the side. And, and usually we finished our food by about five 30 ish.

We go to bed quite early as well. So that kind of fits in with our early supper, as it were, we tend to go to bed, be in bed by eight 30, for the night, and then we get up very, very early. Um, so that kind of fits in with our routine. But I still like to have that gap before we, go to bed to let that last meal, which is lighter digest, because I find that I sleep better that way.

Um, and then, you know, the weekends are slightly different. There's more time I'm cooking bread kind of in there in different days and routines when we can. We're both at home, so we can kind of swap things in and out. And because my son's home schooled, he'll often help with the bread. He'll often help by chopping some of the vegetables for lunchtime as part of his kind of homeschooling. And then I'm fermenting kind of in and out at the weekends as well. Or when there's time [00:40:00] preparing fermented foods for us to add into those meals. So yeah, every day is, is different, but we have a rhythm that we kind of follow during the week and, um, it serves us definitely.

Roni: So I'm curious how many times a week are you really cooking a full meal? Because I think that's one of the common, uh, push, you know, something that people have a pushback against with a more traditional type eating is they say, well, it's very time consuming, but it sounds like you make big enough meals that you're able to have leftovers, maybe multiple times.

So how often are you really setting aside a large chunk of time to do your cooking?

Alison: Yeah. So leftovers are very important part of trying to, have this kind of lifestyle and have a life as well, a busy life. Um, that's where the slow cooker comes in because, you know, in the slow cooker [00:41:00] I can make like four, five meals, even I've got a big slow cooker and then I could leave a couple of those out.

And also freeze some of them because it's not necessarily a good thing to have, you know, the same meal five, five days a week, get a bit bored by the third day. So often I will cook. Literally just once at the weekend and I will have five portions and I will keep one for that meal, one for the next day and then freeze three of them.

Sometimes I'll make a soup in the same way. I'll make the broth and then I'll make soup and I'll save it for that day and the next day and then I'll freeze three portions of it. So very often I'm pulling things out the freezer. Or I'm pulling things out of the fridge, or we've got, you know, leftover rice from one night and we're having that as part of the lunch.

So we definitely cook something other than breakfast every day. I would say, but some days that the entirety of our main meal is leftovers from the day before [00:42:00] and most days. I would say our supper is made up of stuff that I've done before. And, you know, I might have made the salad on a Monday, made the bread on the Tuesday, done the slow cooking on the Wednesday.

So I'm kind of cooking something every day, but I would say I'm probably cooking main meals, maybe every three days, you know, the, the, from scratch.

Roni: Yeah. Which when I, when I look at it like that, I don't think that that's any different than how a lot of people are actually, how much a lot of people are actually cooking and preparing food. I know a lot of people who cook an entire meal every single night. Um, so yeah, there's actually, uh, a lot, potentially a lot of less time that you're spending physically cooking, particularly if you're taking advantage of the slow cooker quite a bit at the time.

Alison: Yeah.

Roni: So your situation is maybe different than somebody who is listening, who would like to transition into this style of eating because your son grew up essentially eating the same way that you [00:43:00] have. But I'm curious if there's been anything. That has been a challenge to, um, to work around as far as like, maybe there were things that he really didn't like at first that he's had to grow to like, or things that you've maybe had to stop preparing because he just really doesn't like them.

You know, children can just have a different palate. And, uh, so I'm just curious, does your son

eat the exact same way that you guys eat?

Alison: No, he doesn't. There's been tons of challenges, tons of them. So my son had, um, surgery on his bowel emergency surgery when he was one and a half on his bowel and had, his bowel cut and sewn back together. And then after that he, had problems digesting and it took us a long time and a lot of work to figure out what.

Didn't work for him and what did work for him during that time. We did the gaps diet, the gut and psychology syndrome diet. For kind of two [00:44:00] years, we ate the AIP protocol, which is for autoimmunity for some time. We experimented with so many things and, now he's 10. And he's able to be healthy, um, which is an absolute win for us because age five, he would have had very much difficulty going out for the whole day because he wasn't able to have the bowel control that he needed. So that was an incredibly long journey. And now we have determined he can't eat potatoes or eggs. So that is a huge thing for me because I love eggs, and eggs are in everything, you know, every recipe that you see, every kind of, you know, enriched bread has got eggs in, all the cakes have got eggs in, all the, you know, patties and burgers, they put an egg in.

There's just so many eggs are in everything. So we've had to change. I've had to change what I'm cooking to accommodate him not eating eggs and also not in potatoes. So, you know, I can't just do [00:45:00] a pie and put mashed potatoes on the top. I can't use potatoes as a staple at all. Um, so again, we've had to, I've had to change the way that I'm cooking to not include potatoes.

And, and during that journey, I had to change the way I was cooking so much because we were testing out, always a day. Is it, you know, lectins in his diet? Is it this, is it that? So I'm, I've been kind of following constraints in many different ways for a very long time, you know, and. In a way, I mean, I always feel like on a creative journey that constraints are actually good things because they make you have to be more creative.

So for example, for his birthday, you know, as he got older, he wanted a birthday cake, but he can't have eggs. And so I literally, because I love sourdough so much, and we eat a lot of spelt sourdough, I came up with several cake recipes over the years, over the last few years that are made with sourdough.

And cook those for his birthday and, [00:46:00] you know, his friends come and eat them and the cake goes. They, they love it. They don't know that it hasn't got any eggs in, they love the cake anyway. Um, so that is an example of kind of me being constrained, but coming up with something new. And, and I have a spelt cookbook, which those recipes have been, and other people are cooking them now.

And so it feels like that's, you know, it's not only served. Us, but it's also served others as well. As Gable gets a bit older, he started to, um, decide he doesn't really want to eat liver. And so the last maybe nine months, I've had to come up with more creative ways of serving liver. Whereas if I ate it, I would just, you know, cut it finally.

So I slice it finely and put it in a pan for a few minutes and put it on my plate with some veggies. He won't eat it like that. So I've been, the last few months, I've been trying to develop other recipes and see other ways he would eat liver. And, um, just in the last maybe month, I've come up with a, with a way of eating it, which includes apples and [00:47:00] onions and mushrooms and cream that he really likes.

And so now he'll, he'll eat the liver, which is wonderful. Because I like us all eating liver and I like the dish too. And so does my husband. So, really most of the kind of constraints have been working with his, my son's food kind of, issues, but I, I was kind of used to that. Anyway, my, my husband can't eat gluten.

And so, I changed the way I cook for that. We don't have wheat in our house. I cook with spelt and I cook with rye. He loves rye, sourdough. So I make rye sourdough all the time. Um, and I, and I myself have been on and still I'm on a health journey at times, you know, where I've eaten differently and cut things out to see how it affects me, see how it affects my sleep or see how it affects how I feel certain symptoms I've had.

And I, I don't shy away from that, but also I feel like our food is, So good. You know, our, our raw ingredients are [00:48:00] so good because they've been grown with love and care that however, I have to kind of cut it and cut out. We always just seem to end up with. With good tasting food and everyone's happy. So it feels like a creative challenge, but also it's worked really well for us.

It has required me to put time in. Um, and that's why I like to share what I do, because if I can give someone a recipe so they don't have to put the time in, then that's a win for me too. You know,

Roni: Yeah, I, I really like also looking at the kitchen as a creative challenge. I know that that might, that's maybe a little intimidating for someone who's not as experienced in the kitchen, but I find cooking to be a very creative endeavor in my life and I enjoy that a lot.

Alison: I think that we're, um, we're often just, sometimes if our family don't. Don't appreciate the way that we perhaps want to cook that's harder, you know, because they want to eat [00:49:00] their certain way. And so that, that you've got to be kind of a bit more canny with and maybe try and take a recipe that they, are used to, but swap it up a bit, maybe putting in some ground organs into some ground beef as well, or making a version of something with a miso in it instead of some kind of source from the, from the supermarket.

But. Even, even if you're a beginning cook and you have a family that aren't so, um, receptive to it, I feel like you can just start small, you know, to start with a little experiment and to not expect it to necessarily go perfectly. I've had so many failures. Particularly with my breads, you know, teaching myself how to make sourdough over the years.

So many, so many failures, you know, breads that have just gone flat or just turn it into a pancake instead, you know, um, and, and things that just haven't worked. But if you just start slowly and don't bombard yourself with loads of failures, which will just drag anyone down or bombard your family with [00:50:00] the dishes that they don't like, then You can just take that creativity into one afternoon, you know, or one weekend every two weeks or something, you know, one, one Sunday a month where you just try something new.

And, and then if it works and you feel good about it, you can keep going. It's not necessarily, you know, I'm, I'm kind of, I've always been a kitchen creative and I've always just been a bit crazy in the kitchen, but, um, it's not something that isn't scalable. You know, you can just do it. As little as you want and still play with it and still have fun.

I think,

Roni: Well, that was, um, I was also going to ask you if you had any ideas for someone who was, who is looking to transition to a more ancestral style of eating. Do you think that you think that that's a, a good way for somebody to get started is just this tinkering or should it be a little more structured?

Alison: I think that the best advice that I would offer to that question is to do something that you enjoy. And that kind of fits in with [00:51:00] the creativity thing, you know, because if we do something that we're enthused about, it's much more likely to stick. Even if we make a mistake, we're going to try again.

And if it goes well, we're going to be over the moon because we love the thing that we've done. And so, you know, from the ancestral spectrum of foods, there's ferments, there's breads and sourdough. There's offal, there's preserving, there's making your own fat, there's making cheeses, there's tons of different things.

And, you know, to look at those things and go, you know what, I really want to try making some fermented drinks. So I've heard all about this kombucha or I I've heard about water kefir. I think I'm going to give that a go and, and to try that because it's something that you really feel like you want to do.

So that's going to keep motivating you to, to kind of, to carry on and you're going to enjoy it and love it. There's no point doing something. Just because you think you should do it or because someone else is doing it or because there's a wonderful picture of it on some website or on Instagram, because it was not you [00:52:00] is not going to work.

So yeah, my advice is, is to, to try and tap into what you love and, and start there.

Roni: Well, I think that's a great place to wrap up. Why don't you just, uh, remind everybody, um, about your podcast, maybe where they can connect with you online and anything else you want to share.

Alison: Thank you. Yeah, so the podcast is@ancestralkitchenpodcast.com, but also is available in all the podcast, um, apps called Ancestral Kitchen Podcast. My website is Ancestral Kitchen, which is ancestral kitchen.com, and on there there's tons of blog posts. I send a newsletter out every two weeks. So there's a banner at the top.

You can sign up for the newsletter there. I have a shop with my books and my video courses in, and yeah, loads of information to read. Um, I'm not on any social media at the moment. I'm taking a break because I'm trying to write a book and that's really hard homeschooling and cooking and doing a podcast.

So social media is kind of on, on hold, [00:53:00] but I'm, but I'm still on my website and I'm still on the podcast.

Roni: Perfect. Well, make sure we link to all of those things so that everybody can find you and learn more about what you do. Thank you so much for joining me today. This has been really lovely.

Alison: Thank you. And it was a great chat. Thank you.

Roni: As always, thank you for listening to the Plan to Eat podcast. There are links in the show notes to find more about Alison and to listen to the ancestral kitchen podcast.

If you are enjoying the Plan to Eat podcast, the best way to support us is to share the podcast with your friends and family so that the podcast apps know that people like listening to us. All right. Thanks again for listening and I will talk to you in two weeks.