Create Your Food Treasure Map

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July 8, 2025

Create Your Food Treasure Map

A friend recently asked me "what brings you peace these days?" and without blinking an eye, I answered "feeling rested, healthy and strong."

As I pondered my answer that evening while fixing dinner, I took a memory trip back to summer 2023 when I visited Polyface Farm for the first time. I'd attended the Two Days of Truth Summit that June. I remembered chuckling to myself then about how I'd bagged a planned beach trip for a weekend of learning! I could feel something shifting in me then, I just didn't know exactly what or why yet. I sat on the edge of my seat listening to the speakers, filling my notebook with mind-spinning ideas and inspiration. It was the impetus for me making it a priority to understand my health choices; mind, body & spirit.

It's hard to believe that was over two years ago now, and somewhere along the way since then - be it in a book, interview or podcast - Joel introduced to me the concept of creating a "Food Treasure Map," with the big idea being to take one year (that's right, a year!) and invest a good chunk of free time into mapping out the best choices and sources for my (and my family's) food.

"There is peace of mind when you know exactly what is in the food you are eating and feeding your family" Joel writes in the book Beyond Labels: A Doctor and a Farmer Conquer Food Confusion One Bite at a Time, which he co-wrote with Dr. Sina McCullough. I bought this book at the Summit and it has been an indispensable resource for me as I navigate through all the noise out there, and feel empowered instead to listen to my body and "finally figure out the diet my body needs to be happy, healthy & free."

Reading the book feels like having two friends at your kitchen table gently sharing ideas, or "Practical Bites" as they call them, for small shifts toward knowing "what to eat, how to procure it (they list resources and websites to help folks find their local farmers), how to prepare it, how to eat it" and how to save time in the kitchen to boot! Building community and and being mindful in the moment finds a place in the book as well.

Embarking on a year-long adventure to create a Food Treasure Map goes hand-in-hand with endeavoring to feel your best (on all levels) and being empowered by your choices. Practical Bite #1 reads: "You have the power to shape your food supply into what you want it to be." How exciting!

Where to start, you might ask? I'd encourage you to write down all the questions you can think of to help you know what it is that you are looking for and why. What is my body telling me it needs? (Dr. Sina is a big fan of this question!) Is the restless mind craving more quiet and routine? How much time do I wish to spend procuring my food? What will it feel like to trust my food sources? And so on. Paint the picture and ask yourself "what's my why?"!

When I consider the "why" behind my answer to the question of what brings me peace, I know it's because it's the way I want to show up for all the life I am given - rested, healthy and strong.

Food and community play a big part in that. I absolutely relish the time spent investigating this market or that food grower, visiting a farm, sharing tips with friends and strangers alike. It's all part of it!

I hope you have fun with some of these ideas, please share any you might have for creating the Food Treasure Map of your dreams!

Blessings & Happy Hunting!

Kristi

Food Shortages

I'm in Oregon today speaking at the Azure Harvest Festival and a question from the audience during a Q&A stimulated a lot of discussion: "What do you think about the possibility and preparation surrounding food shortages?" David Stelzer, founder of Azure Standard, answered that the issue is not food volume, it's food nutrition. That was an interesting answer that has a lot of merit. As a nation, we are overfed and undernourished. This is the crux of the MAHA movement and the epidemic diseases we see in our country. At Polyface, we know the pastured meat and poultry we produce is far superior in essential phytochemicals and other nutrients due to the carotenes, exercise, and stress-free habitat we offer. You can taste the difference, feel the difference in texture, and measure it empirically. Perhaps my most poignant affirmation was our cat test. We purchased meat from the supermarket and offered our own for the four cats. They wouldn't touch the conventional meat (ground beef). Even though two plates and four cats would be much easier to accommodate if they spread out, all four crowded around the plate with our meat, eating it all and licking it up, before later sniffing and gingerly eating the supermarket counterpart. Since cats don't understand TV ads or USDA propaganda, they know what's good and what's not. We encourage anyone dismissive of food differences to ask their pets: you can trust them far more than doctors and experts. Yes, I get the nutrient deficiency angle on the shortage question. But I'd like to explore it a bit further. Right now, the world throws away more human-edible food, as a percentage of production, than at any time in human history. The planet is awash in food. Some 40 percent gets thrown away because it has a slight blemish, exceeds the sell-by date, or is tainted in some way. We have a fundamentally segregated food supply rather than an integrated one, and that creates a lot of unusable waste. The vulnerabilities of our food system, I think, are much more subtle. When I was in Uruguay two years ago, speaking at a conference, one of the other presenters was from Germany and showed a soil map of the globe. Not a single commercial agricultural region had a stable or positive soil trajectory. Every single area on the planet is losing soil; some faster than others, but globally our soil depletion continues without any sign of abatement. This is not a good trajectory. As much as the technocrats promise food without soil, that's not the way to bet. Soil is the skin of the earth. When it goes, famine results. The main difference now compared to centuries ago is that we have the capacity to move food around. Nobody starves due to a lack of food on the planet; they starve due to socio-political unrest and dysfunction. But what happens when massive areas can't grow anything anymore? Even being able to move food around doesn't help when there isn't enough. The soil trajectory does not look good. But at Polyface, we're building soil. Areas covered with shale (layered rocks) half a century ago now have a foot of soil on them. That's not the 3-5 feet that 150 years of inappropriate tillage eroded, but it's a build-back start. In addition to soil loss, as a planet we're seeing hydrologic decreases. The Oglala aquifer, which undergirds the irrigated agriculture in five states, has dropped more than 100 feet in the last half-century. At its current rate, it will be unpumpable in about 50 more years. Imagine if all those circular irrigation pivots in Nebraska and Kansas shut down. What then? At Polyface, we keep building ponds to inventory surface runoff. By definition, surface runoff occurs when rains come too fast at once or too much at one time for the soil to absorb it. Holding that and using it strategically in a drought is a way to reduce flooding during rain events and grow grass when it gets dry. This is one of the most landscape resilient techniques we can implement. Finally, major animal and plant diseases threaten the world's food systems like never before. African swine fever, hoof and mouth disease in cattle, and bird flu in poultry appear to be getting worse and covering larger areas. Why? We believe it's because chemicals and factory farming compromise the immunological systems in both plants and animals. Monocrops and chemical fertilizers wreak havoc on immune systems, opening the planet's food systems to new levels of fragility. In contrast, at Polyface, we believe happy animals and biodiversity offer the best antidote to immunological deficiency. Stress from unsanitary conditions, mono-species density, or dietary deficiency (rations or fertilizer) invites disease. Nature uses disease to cull the weak. Predators pick off the stragglers. This is the way biology works. But at Polyface, we keep these vulnerabilities at bay with compost fertilization, pasture rotations, and lots of species diversity, including pollinators and wildlife. Here's the point: the basic long-term vulnerabilities in the planet's food systems could all be reversed with practices Polyface uses every day. Looked at another way, the entire food shortage question could be answered if eaters and farmers implemented these ecological and immunological protocols, working together to rather than completely separated. We don't need to fall into an abyss of starvation. If we all simply began eating food from farms that build soil, increase water, and stimulate immunity, we could deliver a hospitable, abundant planet to our children. Reversing these trajectories wouldn't take much time or money. It takes intentionally-minded folks who connect the chain of sustenance from their plate to the planet. Polyface patrons do that. Thank you. Let's heal the land together. Joel

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