Manda: Hey people, welcome to Accidental Gods, to the podcast and the membership program that believe another world is still possible. That if we each commit ourselves in service to life, every moment of every day, it is still possible that we might all lay the foundations for a future we would be proud to leave to the generations that come after us. As I'm sure you'll have gathered, if you listen to the podcast at all, we think this is urgent now. That it will take inner work and outer work. The inner work is all about healing our relationships with ourselves, each other, and the web of life. And that's what the membership program is for. Doing our best to help our 21st century traumatised and traumatising culture move towards a different set of values. If we each committed to prioritising clean water, clean air, clean soil and clean, clear, open hearted, full hearted, strong hearted connections with each other and the web, our world would be a different place overnight. So that's the inner work. The podcast is here to support the outer work, to give us examples of people who are working in the world to make things happen the way that we need them to. Offering templates of the outer work that we each might commit to, depending on our means and our circumstances, and where we are and who we are and what's ours to do as Conscious nodes in the wider complex system of the web.
Manda: And this week's guest is one of those people. As you'll hear, Erin Martin comes from a family that was deeply connected to what we might now call social activism. She was going to be a lawyer, thinking that that was a good way of helping the people around her. And then she ended up working in a retirement community, which led in turn to her studying gerontology. She founded Conscious Ageing Solutions, which was a company dedicated to helping older adults navigate health and social systems, so they could age with grace. And then she went on a short program with Kiss the Ground and learned about regenerative agriculture, and was moved to return to Oklahoma, where she set up a program called FreshRx Oklahoma, which brings healthy, regeneratively grown food to the people in her community that need it most. Specifically, she brings this food to people with very advanced diabetes. And one of the things I am most impressed about are the indices that change when people have been on proper food for really quite a short length of time.
Manda: You will hear all of the details in the podcast, and I promise you, from a medical point of view, it is completely mind blowing. What's possible, when people stop eating rubbish and start eating stuff that has actual proper nutrient qualities. So we're going to be talking about food as medicine, what it is, how it works, how we can fend off Big Pharma and Big Ag and all of the predatory capital monsters. And because we recorded this as Trump's inauguration was actually happening in the US, on the same day as Martin Luther King Day, we talk a little bit about the possibilities of the new administration and what might come of it that might help people to live healthier, more meaningful lives. So at this tumultuous time when everything is changing, people of the podcast please welcome a shining star in the firmament of our world, Erin Martin of FreshRx Oklahoma.
Manda: Erin, welcome to the Accidental Gods podcast. How are you and where are you on this day of the inauguration? It's the 20th of January as we record, and as I understand it, the inauguration is happening as we're recording.
Erin: It is. How wild is that? It's an interesting feeling. There's lots of different feelings, I think, for a lot of people. And I have conflicting feelings within myself about it. But I'm feeling pretty good today, actually. We're off work. My team is off work for Martin Luther King Day, but I'm still really happy to be with you today. And I am in Tulsa, Oklahoma in the United States and it's the morning time where I am, and evening where you are.
Manda: It is. Yes, it's dark outside. We were just putting the chickens to bed before we started, and I hadn't realised it was Martin Luther King Day, again until I was looking through my only remaining social media, actually two of them, blue Sky and Mastodon now, because there seemed to be a reducing number of things that one can be on without actively supporting people that one might not otherwise wish to be supporting. So I'm very grateful that you made it here today. So we are here to talk about food and health and the interaction between the two, and how we could perhaps still create a generative food system that was healing the earth and healing the people who ate from that earth. But given the day that it is, what is most alive for you in that context or any other at this moment. You did say you had conflicting feelings and we can't ignore what's happening. The world is turning over today. So what is most alive for you at the moment?
Erin: I am surprisingly hopeful in some ways which I didn't think I would be. I think that a lot of people are starting to understand how poisonous the food system is. There are a lot of conversations happening politically, there's a lot of other conversations happening politically that are not as hopeful. But surprisingly, I'm hopeful for the transition and some of the people involved in the transition. And it's been really exciting because I've actually been getting a lot of calls from DC. I was put on a green light list for senior level directors for Health and Human Services. So I've been getting calls with vetting questions. And just the fact that I'm on that list just means I'm being recognised as a leader and that it opens other doors, whether I decide to go to DC or not. It's just very interesting to get calls and be asked: do you have a criminal record? Do you have any scandals that are newsworthy? Some really interesting questions. And there's nothing wrong with the saying Making America Healthy again. I think there's nothing wrong with that. I think that there's a lot of confusing narratives. I think when people try to improve things and call things out, that they're often discredited and I really am hopeful for a lot of the things that Robert Kennedy is promoting as far as food is medicine and regenerative agriculture. And you don't have to agree with everything somebody stands for to agree with that. And I'm just really glad that that's becoming more of a mainstream topic of conversation. And also the fact that it's MLK day. He's one of my biggest teachers and inspirations for the work that I do, because I do believe that the food system and the health care system has violated human rights on an extreme level, and that's what really deeply disturbed me when I started on this work and wanted to solve some problems.
Manda: Thank you. My goodness, there's probably about three different podcasts just in what you said. Let's stay with food because this is how I met you, was the freshRx in Oklahoma. So you were going to be a lawyer in the beginning. Let's have a little bit of positioning who you were and how you got to be a person that the incoming administration might call up to ask if you have a criminal record. I think that's hilarious, given the records of some of the people they're actually putting into power, why they would care about that is beyond me. But anyway, they're asking. Maybe they're asking to check that you do have a criminal record, because then you'll fit in just fine. But tell us a little bit about how you got to be where you are today. I think that would be useful to give people a kind of overview.
Erin: Yeah. My parents were in mental health. My mom was a psychotherapist, my father was a child psychologist, and my parents were social rights activists in the 70s. And they always taught me to love everyone. And they particularly served very underserved people; so very low income kiddos and adults. And my father actually won the Most Giving Doctor in Tulsa, Oklahoma, because he had the most kids on state Medicaid, which just means low income kiddos on his roster, and who he was treating. And so my father used to tear up at night and talk to me about the suffering of the world and people that are underserved. And that really inspired me to stand up for people that couldn't speak for themselves or advocate for themselves and to use my voice to do that. My mother always said, if there's something wrong and you're the only one to stand up and say it, you'd better stand up and say it. And so that started as a young girl in high school seeing gay kids getting bullied. I started the first gay straight alliance at my high school, and we had a lot of trouble getting that formed, and we did. So I was I was a grand marshal of the gay pride parade when I was 15 years old.
Manda: Well done.
Erin: So I've been doing activism for a really long time, and I really saw inequities deeply in the healthcare health care and long term care space when I started working in a retirement community when I was 15 years old. And that was my first entry into what it looks like at the very end of life. And by the time I was 25 years old, I had worked in all levels of long term care. I thought I wanted to be a lawyer because of advocating for other people and using my voice. But when I studied sociology of law, I realised that the world of law is very tedious, and it comes down to semantics of sentence structure. And the part of being a lawyer that I wanted to be was going to be a smaller fraction of that job. And I also wanted quality of life, to spend more time with friends and family. And I knew being a lawyer, I'd be working long, long hours. And so the only thing that ever excited me and inspired me to go to work every day was working with those older adults. And so I decided to get my master's in gerontology, the study of ageing. And I had moved out to Los Angeles at the time just to get out in the world and experience new things.
Erin: And I ended up going to the number one school of gerontology in the world and studying ageing services management and studying the physiological changes of ageing, the psychological changes of ageing and the social and cultural impacts of ageing in the United States. And in other countries. And I was able to start studying the blue zones of the world where people aged the longest in the world. And I went to Italy and I studied death and dying. And I started really putting together that we are not ageing very well in the US. And why was that? I was seeing people on 15 to 32 prescription drugs at a time. I was seeing what people had access to, what they didn't have access to, what services we could refer people to. What the insurance paid for, what the insurance didn't pay for, the quality of care, the lack of quality of care, and how things just really slipped through the cracks and were really a death sentence to people, and creating what I call a lot of unnecessary suffering. There's a lot of suffering that is necessary or part of the lifespan that just goes with living life, but there was so much unnecessary suffering. That deeply angered me and disturbed me as a young woman.
Erin: And when I went to Italy and I started really noticing how people aged so much better in other countries, that deeply disturbed me further and made me want to follow and find where's the root of this problem? I connected it to food as medicine. I started realising that diet had a huge impact on ageing. But it wasn't until I entered into this very short eight week soil advocacy program through Kiss the Ground, a non-profit in Los Angeles, without knowing or understanding it had anything to do with my work, I was just curious. And I started studying the science of regenerative agriculture, and that is when I fully connected it to the root of the problem, and that was how the food was being grown. And I had hope, for the first time in a really long time, that there was a way to regenerate our food and the nutrient density that we've destroyed. That we could regenerate that and regenerate ourselves and maybe our souls along with it. So that is how I got to food as medicine.
Manda: Brilliant. Thank you. That's such an interesting span of ideas. So the only thing I know about Blue zones is that in Sardinia particularly, people live a lot longer and they live a lot better. And partly it's what they eat and also there are 4 or 5 generations of a family living all together. We don't silo our kids and then send our adults out to work somewhere where they never see their kids, and then the old people get put in a care home and fed a whole lot of pharmaceuticals that they don't need. Is that enough, do you think, to make a blue zone, or were there other aspects that you saw when you were there that you thought also would be folded in to a longer quality of life?
Erin: Those are really good points. The socialisation and the community. What I have seen, even in there was like a quasi blue zone that was studied in Philadelphia, where people drank and smoked, but they had this really close connection to community, and I think that's at the heart of it. But obviously eating more local, fresh food, more predominantly a plant based diet, eating meat just more rarely, like once a week or once a month and living intergenerationally. This connection to each other is something that has a huge impact. It's harder to measure, but people were more active, they had more walkable cities and things of that nature. But they also had different herbal medicines they used. And what was interesting is blue zones are all over the world in different places of the world, but they all have these things in common. And even in Loma Linda, California, where their religion, seventh day Adventist, they're predominantly vegetarian, eat more whole food, plant based foods, but have a closer connection with community and a spiritual connection. And I think that is underneath it all. You can eat a really healthy diet, you can look physically great, you can go to the gym, but if you also have emotional things; that you're not connected to community, you don't have purpose, you have trauma that's unresolved; that can also manifest into disease in the body. And so you can do all the physical outward things to be healthy. But really the magic happens when you connect all that together inside and with other people. And I think food is just this entry point to deeper healing, that culturally we do not prioritise. And especially we don't talk about death in the United States. And what I noticed in Italy was that they really display death, it's open, they don't hide ageing or hide death. And I think the more you can accept and talk about death, the more free and beautiful that you can live. And that that's deeply connected to my work. I just think that's just a really important thing, that our communities could be more vulnerable, more connected to each other. And then that also just ripples into the way that you live, and you treat your body, and you treat your mind and you treat your soul.
Manda: Yes. I was listening to Nate Hagens podcast a couple of weeks ago. He was talking to John Vervaeke about the meaning crisis, it was very interesting. But towards the end, Nate said he'd been at a conference recently, and the person who followed him on the platform was someone from Silicon Valley who said, look, you just need to stay healthy for the next five years, because within five years we are going to work out how to keep you alive forever. Basically, he said 200 years, but by 200 years from now, then we'll know how to keep you alive forever. And Nate said he rolled his eyes. John said, yeah, they're probably going to do that and then the meaning crisis will really hit because you can skate along for 80 years, having no sense of being and belonging, but you can't do that for 200 years. In every culture that I have studied other than ours, death is a rite of passage. It's like leaving primary school and you want to lock yourselves in primary school. Or you want to be on the boat going across the Atlantic, but never get off. You just want the boat to go in circles, right? Why? And we've pathologized death to the point where the guys who think they can do everything actually don't ever want it to happen.
Manda: Which strikes me as a little short term. Besides which, we've already gotten half a billion people on the planet. Are you going to make all of those live forever? And the next generation? The generation after? And nobody's ever going to inherit anything. And how exactly do you think this is going to work? I think there's quite a lot of holes in the thinking, but I am also assuming that they don't mean everybody's going to live forever. They mean they're going to live forever. The rich and the people at the conferences who listen to these people might get to live forever, but I don't think they mean everybody. We could down the avenue of death and dying and I think that would be really interesting, but let's come back to we could live in Sardinia and we're eating food that is grown, I am guessing, on land that has not been industrially farmed. That might be my projection, maybe Monsanto has got to Sardinia, but I doubt it.
Erin: Probably true, yeah.
Manda: Let's hypothesise that there are places where that that is the case. And I was just listening to John Lofthouse, who's up in Utah. His land is at 5000ft up and the mountains are at 9000ft, and the cold just basically rolls off down the mountains. And he is growing the most amazing array of things because he's committed to no chemicals and he's working on landrace. So if 95% of a crop dies in the first year, he'll keep the 5% that survived, and next year, maybe only 50% dies off. But by year three, he's got the things that are adapted to his land. And he says he's got tastes and arrays of landrace varieties that are explicitly adapted to his place. And because he used to be an agricultural chemist, and he left when they moved him to the Biological Warfare Department. He knows the damage that is done, and most people don't. We've got, in our culture, a really strange set of propaganda and paradigms that arose after the Second World War, that's basically, as far as I can tell, said: you need chemicals or we will all starve. And we know this not to be the case. And we also know that the companies that came out of the Second World War turned their explosives into fertilisers and their nerve gases into pesticides, and they needed a new market so they targeted the farmers. But this isn't yet widely known. So tell us a little bit more about Kiss the Ground and what you learned, and then tell us what happened when you brought it back to Oklahoma and what you're doing with it now?
Erin: Yeah, there's a lot of myths about food and agriculture. And there was this narrative that we needed to grow a lot more food and that told the farmers, you need to grow food for the world. And we expanded how many calories we were growing and quantity that we were growing. But we really sacrificed the quality of the food that we were growing. And we really stopped growing for the community. And there were some really inherent problems with that. What we realised is we used to be able to eat a certain amount of vitamin A and vitamin C in one orange, that now we have to eat eight oranges to get. And that presents a lot of problems for health. And what was really exciting to me was that we could regenerate that orange, but in a much shorter time than it than it took for us to destroy that orange. And that it was really coming from the soil. And realising that nutrients don't just go from the soil to the plant to the food, that there's something called fungi that facilitate that transition and are the translator, the language translator from the nutrients in the soil to the plant to the food. And a lot of the practices, like over tilling and heavy pesticide and herbicide use, were destroying that brilliant connection of fungi. Which really is a beautiful metaphor for connection through humans and how all these plants work together and transfer nutrients to other plants through the fungi to support each other.
Erin: If there's a plant not doing well, certain plants take up certain nutrients, certain other plants put it back. And so when we grow things in a monocropping fashion, where it's not being grown in any way it would naturally in nature, we're also breaking down that process at the same time. And so I really learned the principles of regenerative agriculture and how that really connects to human health. So fast forward, I was really called spiritually to move back to Oklahoma. For those that don't know, in the United States Oklahoma has some of the worst health outcomes in the nation. We have some of the worst education outcomes, we have the worst nursing home care in the nation. We have really, really poor outcomes, which is why I wanted to leave Oklahoma in the beginning. California was very saturated with really great things, lots of great services, lots of healthy food, lots of farmers markets. And I was really told that I needed to come to Oklahoma and blast Oklahoma with the things that it really needed. And that it needed some of my fire and passion. And so I moved back to Oklahoma. The pandemic hit, and there was a lot of focus on the food insecurity issues and the lack of local food and the supply chain issues. And that really highlighted the need, and a lot of people started asking questions and wanting to grow food.
Erin: So we were meeting on Land and farms and talking about food, and we were giving out food to the community. But the food we were giving out was just really terrible food. And I thought we could be doing so much better than this. And eventually I got connected with a doctor named Doctor Kent Farris in North Tulsa. And for context, North Tulsa has been a food desert for a really long time. There wasn't a grocery store there for 14 years. We have the highest mortality rates of diabetes in this area, and it's predominantly a black community there. We had a race Massacre in the 1920s, and a lot of the black community, which was the richest black community in the nation at that time, black Wall Street. When we had a race massacre there, a lot of these people were displaced in the north Tulsa area, across the railroad tracks and then across from the highway, which is how a lot of these communities get displaced. And so there's nowhere for them to get healthy food. And so diabetes was horrible. And this doctor said, Erin, my patients are compliant in their medications, they're compliant in their doctor's visits, but they're getting worse. And it's the food. And I would like to prescribe food. And I said, I would like to help you do that. And at first he said, well, we'll just source the food from Amazon or Walmart.
Erin: And I said, well, well, well. I had had this little stint with Kiss the Ground and understood regenerative agriculture and also the impact that sourcing local food has as well on maintaining nutrients. So if it's grown well, but also local, particularly fruits and vegetables lose 30 to 50% of their nutrients within 72 hours. So if it's not grown well and then it's shipped long distances by the time you get it, who knows what's left in it? And other people from the community were sceptical. You're not going to be able to do that, Erin. You're not going to be able to source it year round or enough of it. It can't scale. It's not scalable, blah, blah, blah. And I really like a challenge and proving people wrong. So I did. And we started this really beautiful food as medicine program, with a combination of food, cooking and nutrition education, along with fruits and vegetables every other week, for an entire 12 months for those who had uncontrolled type two diabetes. So for a lot of people who don't know, the measurement is HbA1C that they measure diabetes On. And if you're over an eight on that scale, it kind of goes up to 14 and then you're basically dead out of 14. So very short scale. People who were over an eight or at a catastrophic risk of having kidney failure, stroke, amputation, heart disease, death.
Manda: And blindness I would think at about eight?
Erin: Of course. Yep. Because it causes neuropathy, an inflammation in the in the eyes and the blood vessels. So that does cause the blindness as well. And so we started with 52 patients in July of 2021 and we saw incredible outcomes from that. Our largest weight loss was 72lbs. We had someone go from like a 14 to a 6.9 A1C in a very short amount of time.
Manda: Just tell us a little bit more about that, because when I heard that when I was listening to you before, and we need to understand this. So it went from a 14? Say it again, tell us about that.
Erin: Yeah. So there was a study that we based this program on, and they say if you reduce someone's A1C level by 1 to 2 points in a year, that is a huge difference. And so our goal was to reduce people's A1C by 1 to 2% in the year. But we had someone go from a 14 to a 6.9.
Manda: And so 6.9 is not healthy, but it's not in catastrophe.
Erin: It's more controlled. It's a controlled diabetic, yep. When you get to lower in the six, that's in the range of pre-diabetic. And then when you're under six then you don't have diabetes at all. So you can actually reverse your type two diabetes from being totally uncontrolled to being controlled which is a lot better. And then you can totally get into pre-diabetic and we've even had people fully reverse their type two diabetes on our program. The third year we had someone lose 132lbs and fully reverse her type two diabetes in eight months and come off of all her prescription drugs. And what's significant about that is these are people who had diabetes for a decade, but they're in our program for a matter of weeks or months, and we're seeing this happen. And it's just by changing their diet, maybe they're doing some exercise, but predominantly changing their diet. And so we know this can happen. It's been studied, it's well documented. And then you think, well, what have we been doing with these people for decades? And how much has this been costing us? And what was really cool is that in the study that we based this program off, the Geisinger Food Pharmacy study, was that they showed if we reduce someone's A1C just by 1 to 2% in the year, that was equated to saving 16 to $24,000 per person per year in health care cost savings.
Erin: And so we've served about 311 people in the last three years. And we've probably saved the state of Oklahoma almost $4 million in health care costs, by just reducing someone's A1C level. And so it's the difference between life and death. It's also the difference between a bankrupt health care system or sick care system and not. It's something we could easily be doing. The ROI, the return on investment is very clear. It's five times. I mean, it costs us maybe $3000 to $4000 to put someone fully through the program for a year. We have about 80% of the people have some type of reduction in their A1C. And among those people who have a reduction our average reduction has been about anywhere between like 1.7 and 2.2% reduction average.
Manda: Points of the scale, or percent?
Erin: Points. But they also say percentage. It's kind of confusing because the percentage is not really correct.
Manda: No. Because two out of 14 is one seventh, it's closer to 20%.
Erin: Right. Exactly. Yeah.
Manda: So loads of questions. Because of course you live in a system of paid healthcare, we live in the NHS. But there's a point at which your state is paying for the healthcare, presumably because these people do not have 16 to 24,000 that they could spend on their own health. Park that one for a second, let's go there. But I'm really interested in they're not only no longer diabetic, they're no longer clinically obese. If someone has £132 to lose, I'm guessing they are clinically very big. And presumably they're having more meaningful lives, better connections, more likely to be working. I don't really enjoy what we make people do in terms of jobs, I think the whole system is broken, but presumably they're not just costing less, they're actually participating in the economy more. Is that fair?
Erin: That's right. That's why I have argued that for a very long time, that healthy people help the bottom line. They're more engaged in the economy and then there's the economic impact of the food, the money we're spending on food for the farmers and the labour that they're able to pay for. And so that's a huge economic impact. But yes, the patients are able to keep up with their grandkids more, they're not depressed, they're not suicidal anymore, they're not as anxious. They enjoy their life more. People are elated because they are not as much in pain anymore, which means they can socialise more, which means they can be with their family more. And we hear these stories every day from the people participating in this program. And that's the beautiful gift is yeah, we've helped with their chronic disease, but we've helped with their overall quality of life. And that's the most important thing to me.
Manda: And and what it opens the lid on is the fact that what they were eating before was adding the pain and the distress and the suicidal ideation and the inability to create a social life and the inability to connect with the people around you and the inability to participate in the economy. And so, at some level, I am hoping, first of all, that every other state is looking in and seeing this happening and that this then ripples out to, okay, we need to stop with the ultra processed food. It's killing us, and people are making a profit out of selling us poisons, that are quite clearly poisonous. Because if what you're doing is feeding people decent, healthy food, and I really want to come in to look at the farming in a minute. But basically you've said, okay, you're not going to eat the shit, you're going to eat actual proper food. And lo, you stopped basically having somebody dripping arsenic into your tea every morning. Are you seeing the ripples out to a shutting down of the ultra processed food, massive industry at all?
Erin: We're seeing that nationally. And that's part of the transition today. In the inauguration, there's a lot of people kind of surrounding this transition. That finally, the FDA is now going to make Red 40 illegal in the United States. I think there's been a lot of protests around the Kellogg cereal and other products that are different in the US. This is the same product, but the ingredients are different in the US than they are in the UK and in Europe. Europe has done a really good job at making sure certain things are illegal, and United States is very far behind that. So that's a transition that's happening now. And so as Food is Medicine is taking a rise, and a lot of these other processed foods and harmful chemicals are being called out and the FDA is unfortunately having to be forced to enforce those things. We're seeing a big shift. So processed foods, if you're going to eat processed foods, might be not as toxic. At the same time as we're really increasing people's consumption and knowledge of fruits and vegetables and local procurement of food.
Manda: I listened to Nick Tannhauser, I think, on Pitchfork Economics once. He was interviewing somebody and the guy said, how many economists do you think the FDA has? I don't know. And the answer was half. They share their economist half time with with another department, I don't remember which. How many economists do you think the corn sugar lobby has? Corn syrup. I don't know. 150! They take up three floors. And this poor half time person has 150 full time paid economists feeding into them. And therefore, I think somehow those 150 have to find jobs elsewhere, because I can't see how the system can work if the corruption is that blatant and that scaled. And that's just the way the system works. And lobbying is a thing. So it would be really interesting to see. Does the FDA get more economists or does the corn lobby get rid of their economists? One or the other is going to have to happen. It's going to be fascinating. This was probably 2 or 3 years ago, but I don't imagine it's changed much. Alrighty. So I'm really interested in the fact that you haven't become a target of assassination, frankly, by the big people.
Erin: People have asked me that. They said, are you are you getting a lot of pushback from the FDA and I think I'm not big enough yet.
Manda: Washington knows you exist. You're quite big now.
Erin: Yeah. I always say that there's a lot of hills you could die on. This is one I would be happy to die on. I'm not afraid to die and I'm not going to keep my mouth shut out of fear. And hopefully if I got assassinated, that it would further the movement.
Manda: I'm not not calling this out. I don't think it's a good idea. I'm just very interested that you're able to make the changes you're making. Because it's spectacular.
Erin: I think we know that we have to make changes. We don't really have a choice. I think the government knows that we've got to do that, because we're we're not able to solve these problems anymore. And I think we're at a crisis point. So we had a whole government food as medicine convening with the USDA, with the FDA, with the Health and Human Services, all these governmental agencies that have said they're going to support this food as medicine movement. And that happened last year. So I don't think that there is going to be a lot of pushback from the government. There may be people worried about, or even entities that want to try to make money off the movement. And that's one of the things that I get worried about the most, is that the food is medicine movement will be co-opted, which it is in some respects. So mostly food is medicine programs are still sourcing from large scale operations that are conventionally grown. And there's there's a few of us that are saying, no, if you are going to prescribe medicine, it ought to be medicine and it should be regeneratively grown. And that's why I'm really hoping and why I've been helping bridge together the regenerative ag movement and the food is medicine movement, to say, hey, let's get these movements together because we might get more traction together. And so that's happening already. So there's pushback from within.
Manda: The nutrient quality of industrially grown food is nowhere near the nutrient quality of regenerative food. It isn't a medicine. It's just another carrot shaped bag of water. Not actually got the right stuff in it. So let's talk a little bit about the farming, because when I heard you before, it sounded like people were saying, no, you can't do exactly this, get it from Walmart. And you went: no, local farmers. Organic, regenerative. Tell us a little bit about how that worked out and how it's scaling.
Erin: Yes. So I started by just going to the farmer's market and talking to the farmers. I found about 3 or 4 growers who were using regenerative practices, and actually some young people who had quit their 9 to 5 corporate jobs to become regenerative farmers in my community. Which I'm really lucky, because there's really no local food system or local food hub in Tulsa, Oklahoma. And at the time, there wasn't a food hub at all in Oklahoma. So the farmers market was it. And so I found farmers that used those practices, then I turned over stones to find more farmers that maybe didn't know they were using regenerative practices, but absolutely were. And I would go and do farm visits. I would talk to those farmers. I really built intimate relationships with those farmers. And I slowly grew, probably a coalition of 10 to 15 growers at that time. And when we only had 52 people in the program, they would sell at the farmer's market, and then I would just buy whatever they had left over. And that was what the scale was at that time. And over the course of the following couple years, the farmers scaled alongside me, because they knew that they could sell in bulk fashion, but also be valued for the quality of their food. That they could grow more. And so that excited them. So they actually outgrew me, which is a really great problem to have. And we realised we needed to get them access to other markets as well; that they needed to diversify. So we've helped them get high tunnels through the NRCS, which is our natural resource conservation service in the US, and other services and grants and loans through the USDA.
Erin: So they were able to not only expand their operations, diversify their operations, but grow longer seasons as well. And so I helped connect them to all these services, have great agricultural partners. And we've actually bought from 27 small scale growers in the last three and a half years and have spent over half a million dollars on local food in Tulsa, Oklahoma. And so we say every dollar that's spent locally is like spending $3. And so maybe we've had an impact of economy $1.5 million in the last three years. And we've really built a local food system on the back of this program. It has been a lot of work. It's logistically challenging, but that's why nobody else does it. But I know that this is what makes the impact and what matters, and that I wanted not only the food available for our program participants, but I wanted more healthy food available for the wider community. And so it's really taken on a life of its own. We formed something called the Tulsa Urban Ag Coalition that helps these farmers more broadly. And a lot of these farmers have received a lot of grant dollars. They've received a lot of support. They've had support entering other markets, selling to restaurants and to schools, and to other food hubs that were formed later on through this process. And we're trying to form our own food hub in Tulsa as well. And that's in process. But the farmers were very reinvigorated to keep growing, and they loved the fact that their food was going to people that were sick, that really needed it.
Erin: So we've had graduation ceremonies where we have the farmers give testimony alongside the graduates of the program. And so the participants meet the people that I call Farmercists, the Farmers who had grown for them. And like my healthcare consultant, Ellen Brown always says, we really want to see the farmers get a check for healing people, right? And we want to see them be seen as healthcare providers, as they are. And we really want to fully, financially align this model all the way back to the grower. And so we treat them as important as the patients that we're serving, because we would not have the medicine without them. And so ensuring that they're able to scale, that they're getting the support they need, is really the most important part of my job. I never realised I would go from long term health care all the way to working with farmers every day. But I always say farmers are the longevity heroes and they should be respected as such.
Manda: Brilliant. And so if I were in a local university, I would be throwing postgrads at you to look at is there a difference between your regeneratively farmed food as medicine and industrially farmed food as medicine? What is happening on the farms? Are you getting carbon sequestration and increased soil depth, increased water, increased biodiversity? All the things that we think regenerative farming creates, is that happening? And what's happening to the welfare of the farmers? And can they expand? Because farming is the only industry, and I don't even like calling it an industry, but within the predatory capital model, where you make something and you have no idea what you're going to be able to sell it for. And you have no real say over what it costs, or what you're going to get for it, unless you take it directly and sell at the farm gate, which has its own limitations. And you have provided a direct link between farmers and people who desperately need what they're producing. So presumably they're getting considerably more than they'd get if they sold it to a supermarket or Wal-Mart or whatever. And presumably someone who loses £132 is going to want to go and see the farm where it's grown. I imagine that you're building community. Is that the case?
Erin: Yeah. We're very much healing our community through food and through food that connects us. It heals us, it connects us, we bond over it. That's why I always say I love going out to eat, but it's really the connection over the meal that I love so much. And you said a really good thing just now about how the farmers don't really have any control over what they're producing, how it's valued, and that it's just whatever the market is. And that was another thing that we did, was we let the farmers dictate the price. That they could do that, and we just get as much as we can for the amount of money we have budgeted. But we let them dictate the price and we let them have agency. And that we vet these farms, that they're using these practices and that they're really respected for that.
Manda: And have you had more people come into farming in the area because this is available? And also I'm wondering, are your farmers choosing to grow different scales and different types of crops? Because presumably there are things that your patients want to eat or your people want to eat more than others. Do you get that feedback loop happening?
Erin: Yeah, I started really seeing last year, I think the word got out to a lot of other farmers or backyard gardeners who heard about us, and it seemed like farmers were coming out of the woodwork to want to sell to us and work with us. And that was another great problem to have, to try to include all these other growers, but also support the growers that have been with us a long time as well, from the beginning. And yes, we have had a feedback loop with the participants to the farmers on what kind of food they want. Especially culturally appropriate foods or connected foods that people wanted to see. So I mentioned earlier, we predominantly serve a lot of black folks, and they really wanted collard greens and nobody was growing collard greens, because the white people who go to the farmers market, really don't eat collard greens predominantly. And so we commissioned farmers to just start growing things like collard greens and turnip greens and mustard greens. And we started doing sweet potato greens, which no one really asked for, but we tried it and people loved it. And now we have more collard greens than we can even imagine. And so yes, they've diversified production. We have talked about more indigenous varieties of produce because those seeds remember, and they grow incredibly more nutritious food.
Erin: Just for example, today corn is maybe 3 to 5% protein, but it used to be in these indigenous varieties like 15 to 18% protein. And so the food that we're getting, even from the seed, is extremely important. And so we last year started working with the Muskogee Creek Nation. So for a lot of people don't know, Oklahoma is home to 39 Native American nations, that were all kind of corralled into Oklahoma back when Native Americans were being massacred. And so we have a lot of healing as well going on there. And so one of our native nations here in Oklahoma, Muskogee Creek Nation, also got some federal funding through the Indian Health Services for Produce prescription program. And so we started doing the food sourcing for them. Because food box food and food bank food in boxes is pretty triggering to Native American nations, because they were given these rations a long time ago, which really started this horrible rate of diabetes. Native Americans have diabetes three times more likely as other minority groups, and they are not built for this processed sugar. Even less because they had such a beautiful diet for so long.
Erin: And so the Muskogee Creek Nation reached out to us. They didn't want food bank food for this program. They knew how we sourced food. And so what we're trying to move towards is getting more indigenous varieties or indigenous farmers, but what we found is the history has been so destroyed that mostly there's indigenous farmers doing ranching, but not a lot growing fruits and vegetables. And so that's another thing we're trying to revive. But it's the long game. It's like we don't even have farmers who know. And so we're looking at training new indigenous farmers to grow more medicinal food, that could go to those in the tribe that are receiving these food as medicine programs, which would really create more food sovereignty for the tribes on the back of these programs. And I'm just really grateful to be able to be called in by the Native Americans to help them kind of connect the dots there, so that they can do this for themselves. And it's really exciting to see how many people are inviting me in now. It took several years to be invited, and it takes a lot of time to time to build trust. And so it's just really exciting that I could just give back and help with those things too.
Manda: That is so glorious. And I'm just thinking, I remember again, listening to John on the podcast, it was only a couple of days ago I listened to it. And he's connected to a local academic institution and his corn and his tomatoes have got nitrogen fixing bacteria all around them, hence why they have higher protein, whereas the ones that the seed companies produce have been deliberately selected for a number of features, one of which is not not being able to create those commensal relationships. So the more we can get back to a landrace variety. The other thing he said I thought was really interesting was that when tomatoes were domesticated, we lost 95% of the variety, and he had found some seeds people had collected from wild, growing tomatoes in the Andes and brought those in. And then he was able to develop his landrace because he'd got enough genetic diversity. And it just seems if everybody was growing landrace, saving their own seed, growing the local things, then your local biome begins to redevelop. And again with your First Nations people, their epigenetics and their biome is organised towards the diet that is so completely not what we're feeding. And getting back to that feels like it would be a really good thing.
Erin: So good.
Manda: I'm interested in scale. Because you said somewhere along the line, I've lost my bit of paper, but it was you've got 300 and something people, and I'm wondering why the whole of Oklahoma isn't eating this now, because it's so obviously better. What are your rate limiting steps?
Erin: Well, I think there's challenges with a funding stream, a consistent funding stream. If we had enough dollars in a way to actually bill and be paid to do this. Right now, we've been predominantly grant funded through local philanthropy, and that's not a sustainable model really. But there are dollars that can be spent and be integrated into the financial health care model that we're already using, which is something that we're working on. So last year, I won a team of lawyers from Harvard University to convene the Oklahoma Food is Medicine Policy Coalition, which now we have 100 members on that coalition. We've been working with our state Medicaid - state Medicaid is each state pays for low income people to have insurance and to have medical care. And so we've been in talks with them for over a year, and we've been in talks with the insurance companies that partner with the state to provide health care to those people on state insurance. Many of which are very, very interested and in talks with us about doing that. And we actually landed our first health insurance contract for 2025, where we'll actually be able to bill for regenerative food and cooking and nutrition education. And it's actually a value based care model, so for a lot of people that might not know, health care predominantly historically has been fee for service. Just meaning every time you go in to the doctor, they get paid. Well, we've seen that that doesn't work, because people aren't getting better. Instead of just being paid for whatever service is provided, we need to be switching to something called value based care, which is really being paid based on outcomes. So the doctor can't get paid if they're not fixing anything. And so that's a switch that we've been going through for the last five years that we'll be going through for a lot longer. But it's also my argument that food is medicine program should be aligned that way as well.
Erin: And so we were able to execute a contract for value based care that also pays bonus payments based on outcomes. So we get paid if we reduce someone's A1C, we get paid if we reduce someone's blood pressure. And it's my hope and dream that we succeed in doing that and get bonus payments and that the farmers will get a kickback for that.
Manda: Yes. Oh my goodness. This opens the whole health service versus sickness service door, which is clearly something you know about.
Erin: Yes. And if we can bill for these services, but bill in a way that we can recoup some of those savings, then we can continue to scale and everybody can have access to it that needs it.
Manda: Okay. So this is going to be some of my projection. But it seems to me that we live in the predatory capital model. And pharmaceutical companies are right up there with manufacturers of explosives and weapons as the nastiest people on the planet. I'm sure there are some nice ones out there, but most of them are basically rapacious, and they make money out of keeping people on their drugs. And leaving aside the fact that they're going to be terribly unhappy that simply by feeding people proper food, they don't need 32 separate medicines, how would you, if you ended up in DC and they said, okay, fix the health service for us. We need a whole different value system. We need a whole different paradigm. We need to move away from a reductive, linear, complicated view of human health, to something that's more complex and system related and understands that we are a whole set of interrelations, not just a body where you tweak one bit and it fixes things. This is changing the value set for the whole of our culture. And I would say if we don't build into it a kincentric, we are an integral part of the web of life, then we're sunk. How would you get that value shift in to the system? If you think that it's a useful thing to do?
Erin: Yeah, it's a whole paradigm shift and it's got to be financially aligned properly. And that's why we've designed this value based care type contract that we think food as medicine should be aligned in. And to me, instead of trying to rebuild a whole new system, my view is let's infiltrate the system and realign it and just shift those dollars. And it's just through shifting that alignment, these contracts, how things are valued. It's by doing that through the systems that we have, that we can really shift the system. And so that's why instead of trying to create a whole new system, I'm trying to infiltrate the system that we have and just shift the value and the dollars. Because the resources are there; it's all about allocation. And so if we just reallocate them, there's a lot of money, there's plenty of resources, that these programs are scalable.
Manda: Yeah. Clearly.
Erin: And like we said, it's going to save us a ton of money and have a more vibrant economy.
Manda: It would save the State a ton of money, which the pharmaceutical companies are then not earning.
Erin: Right. But the pharmaceutical companies are investing in food as medicine. So they're going to find a way to be doing it.
Manda: Oh are they.
Erin: They're involved. Yeah.
Manda: This is where I get back to we need total systemic change. Okay. Because we need them not to be, because they will twist it and they will turn it into a way of extracting value rather than a way of keeping people healthy. Unless you can create enough of a paradigm shift that pharmaceutical companies exist to maintain - I have a bottom line, which is clean water, clean soil, clean air. Or if we do it the other way: clean water, clean air, clean soil, which means healthy food because your soil is not full of industrial chemicals and microplastics. And from that clean generative connections between self, other and the web of life. If that was the baseline everybody worked from, then you could trust the pharmaceutical companies to be working from that base. Absent that base and given a profit motive, I would be very scared of what the pharmaceutical companies were going to do. If they if they took over food as medicine and decided that they were just going to harvest the profit out of it. Can you see a way to keep the integrity of food as medicine?
Erin: I think it comes down to making sure that in the laws and policies surrounding food as medicine, that we are very specific around the food procurement side of food as medicine. And that's how we keep the money where it needs to be going. So, for example, Hawaii has a local food procurement in a requirement around their food is medicine programs. We have Alaska that's included indigenous food specifically into the law of their state, and so making sure that this is a prioritisation of local food. There's a National Food as Medicine Act that has been entered into legislation to be discussed, that would literally specifically state that soil health, organic practices and regenerative practices have to happen within these food as medicine programs. And so I think it comes down to making sure that we're thinking through all these things and not leaving any loopholes, so that big corporations and big pharma and big ag don't benefit off the backs of these grass roots movements. And so it's by holding those boundaries and being very specific in policies and law and in creating quality standards around these programs. And there's a lot of great groups that are working on that. And it's my hope that that happens in Oklahoma and that happens across the US.
Manda: Brilliant. Okay. Yes. Because if you can keep the definitions of organic, so they don't decide to redefine organic so that it basically doesn't count anymore. Or like over here regenerative hasn't been defined and so there are some people for whom regenerative is the ultimate and it's organic and it's no till and it's let's build the land. And for others it's min till and glyphosate counts as regenerative, which it isn't. We need a new word. So keeping on top of the legal definitions would seem to be key. Alrighty. So we've solved the problem of health. Let's just before the end, because there's so many bits of this I want to look at, but I'm really curious on the people who are receiving the food. They get it once every other week, which is quite a big gap. Do they get enough to feed them for two whole weeks? Can you talk us through what arrives at their door and and what help they're given? Because I don't even know what collared greens are and if you handed them to me, I probably wouldn't know what to do with them. I would probably just eat them raw because that seems quite a good default but it's probably not what you're meant to do with them. So tell us a little bit about how this is received at the patient end.
Erin: Yeah, we have a hybrid model where people get delivery or they come in person. We have a cooking class or a nutrition class before they get the food. They have correlating recipes that come along with their food. And really, I say the food is not meant to feed them three meals a day for two weeks. It's a teaching tool. It's so that they can try new fruits and vegetables without putting their own money on the line. But then they're also further educated on where they can access this food. They have food benefits through the government, and they also have benefits that double that amount of money for fruit and vegetable purchasing as well. And so we educate them on try this food, this is free. But then if you need more or want more or want to try more, this is how you can use your benefits through the government to do that. And so we do a lot of patient monitoring and support along the way. They can call someone, ask questions. They can have one on one nutrition coaching. And then we also have 4 to 6 cooking classes and nutrition classes per month. We have them online, we have a YouTube channel, FreshRx Oklahoma, that people can rewatch. So there's tons of support throughout the program, even though we're only seeing them maybe every other week. It's a much more involved 12 month program than that. And then they come every quarter and get their weight, blood pressure and A1C measured. And that's fully reinvigorating for them when they start seeing those numbers drop. So they have a community on Facebook where they can talk amongst participants. What are you doing? What are you cooking with this? And that's really beneficial. So there's a lot of connection. There's a lot of people that are spouses or aunts and uncles, nieces and nephews, sisters, brothers that are in the program together and so they're supporting one another in that process as well.
Manda: Brilliant. And we know that ultra processed foods are massively addictive. Are they able to begin to bring themselves off those at the same time as, as increasing their consumption of food that is medicine?
Erin: Yes. I think that's naturally happening, because they have other options, because they know they have to take these prescriptions, eat all of their prescriptions. They are eating more of this food, they're more satiated because it's nutrient dense and they're not still hungry and wanting to go to McDonald's. So I think that's naturally happening. We've seen a statistical significant decrease in the consumption of soda through the program. So some people will be drinking 15 cans a week and then they completely quit. We have about half of the people that have already quit because they've been forced to quit. But then we see people in the program that have significantly decreased their consumption of soda and that they've significantly increased their consumption of vegetable soup and garden salads. And as a result, that directly connects to their improvement of their health. And that's what we've seen from the evaluation of our programs, alongside weight loss, blood pressure decreasing and the A1C decreasing. So yes, I think that they're increasing their consumption of fruits and vegetables and that means also decreasing ultra processed food. And they have more food. We also teach them how to stretch that food longer. And that's the other problem is we think processed foods are cheaper, but it's just because we don't really know how to stretch the life of fruits and vegetables, because they do go bad quicker. But how do you preserve those? How do you can them, pickle them, whatever? We teach those things as well.
Manda: And are you seeing ripples? I'm imagining a woman of middle age in the family. And then her parents, her aunts and uncles, and then her kids and her nieces and her nephews and her neighbours. Do you see it ripple out to people who are not actually on your program?
Erin: Yes we do. We've actually heard of family members who are living in the home that have had an A1C decrease in their own diabetes, that were not directly enrolled in the program. I'd love to be able to capture every single bit of that, but we do hear those stories. We see their grandkids are watching their grandparents or their parents eat better, and I know that's rippling out into their lives. And in our most recently elected mayor of Tulsa, even connected that to increasing or decreasing absenteeism in school. That the kids may be getting to school because their parents are eating better and feeling better. So they're feeling better and they're able to make it to school and be better educated, which means they may not go to prison and they may get jobs and they may have a better life. And I was amazed that he connected all those dots for me. But he's so right. So I think that we are seeing a lot of ripple. I don't know if we could capture it all or have the capacity to capture it all, but we know it's happening.
Manda: Yeah. And then you get the growers to come in and teach the kids how to grow properly and get the schools to develop a growing program, then the schools can feed themselves. And then you've got a full circle.
Erin: Absolutely. Yep. We have some farmers doing that in the schools too. Yeah. So it's happening. Yeah.
Manda: So I want to come back in about five years time and find out where this has gone. Because you started this in lockdown, which was, you know, five years ago this year. So it's really in its infancy. It'd be so interesting to see where it goes and how it's grown and what works and what doesn't, i guess.
Erin: We'll have to do a follow up podcast.
Manda: Yeah in 2030. My goodness! All right, Erin, thank you. Is there anything else you wanted to say that we haven't talked about? Because this has been absolutely so inspiring and I'm so grateful to you for coming to talk to us. But was there any last thing you wanted to say to people?
Erin: Yeah, I wanted to share that there is a food pharmacy in the Netherlands that really designed their program off of our program. And if you're interested in forming your own program, no matter where you are in the world, I get calls from all over the world, you can go to my website: erinwmartin.com. I have a food is medicine guide that's free to download and then I also have options to book one on one consultations. And I can help you design and implement a program from anywhere in the world. And I'd love to see you do that. I'm helping start other pilot programs across the nation, as well as the one in the Netherlands. So let's spread this like wildfire.
Manda: Yes, brilliant. I will put links in the show notes, people. You can go and find Erin's website and go and talk. Yes. Let's get this all around the world. That would be a good thing for 2025. Alrighty. Erin Martin, thank you for coming on to the Accidental Gods podcast. It's been such a delight.
Erin: You're welcome. Thank you for having me.
Manda: Well, there we go. That's it for another week. On this momentous day, huge thanks to Erin for pointing out that not everything is absolutely catastrophic about the incoming administration. I really look forward to what might happen if they were able to spread regenerative agriculture right across the US. That would be seriously impressive. But that apart, I hope you are as impressed as I am with what Erin is doing. Truly, the medical outcomes. Shifting someone up near 14 down to 6.9; 132 lbs weight loss. All of this in such a short space of time is genuinely outstanding. I have put links to Erin's website, to FreshRx Oklahoma and the YouTube channel in the show notes, and please do go and check them out. This is not something that needs to be limited to Oklahoma or to the US. As Erin said, there's an outpost in the Netherlands and there is absolutely no reason at all why all of us could not be promoting regeneratively farmed food, proper high density nutrient food, in our own communities as ways of everybody being healthier, as ways of connecting us to the land. As well as of us understanding that local food is the single most healthy thing that we can possibly be eating, and that prioritising this is one of the ways we are going to move through the catastrophe that's on its way. We can't keep supporting Big Ag, Big Pharma, the whole of the predatory capital model. If we can buy directly from the people who grow the food, it will begin to change the way things are done.
Manda: So if you do nothing else, have a look at how you source what you eat and if you have the means at all, please find somebody local. A farmer's market, a community supported agriculture business, a hub of the Open Food Network that we met at the end of last year. Whatever it is, please start eating locally. It's one of the biggest changes that we can make. If your money goes directly to the growers, we cut out the middleman, we begin to change the system and the system does need to change. That concept is integral to this podcast. So let's make 2025 the year where total systemic change begins. That would be really good.
Manda: All right people, that's it for this week. We will be back next week with another conversation. In the meantime, thanks to Caro C for the music at the Head and Foot, to Alan Lowells of Airtight Studios, for some lightning fast production. To Lou Mayor for the YouTube, Anne Thomas for the transcripts, Faith Tilleray for the website and all the tech behind the scenes, and more importantly, for the conversations that keep us moving forward. And as ever, an enormous thanks to you for listening. If you know of anybody else who wants to understand how our food systems can transform our lives, then please do send them this link. And that's it for now. See you next week. Thank you and goodbye.