Epoch Times - From Vegan Star Chef to Regenerative Rancher

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Oct. 14, 2025 - Epoch Times

22:51

From Vegan Star Chef to Regenerative Rancher | Mollie Engelhart

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	We're in an existential crisis with chemical farming and with ultra processed foods, and all the statistics show that we're getting sicker and sicker and sicker.
	So we must have an awakening around that.
	Molly Engelhart is a regenerative farmer and rancher at Sovereignty Ranch.
	She's changing the conversation around health and sustainability with her new book, Debunked by Nature.
	And so to be an environmentalist is not to avoid nature, but to interact with her.
	In this episode, we dive into Molly's journey from being a star chef and media darling.
	I had been a darling of like a oh, let me do another piece.
	To stepping away from veganism, a move that sparked controversy.
	And all of a sudden, like regenerative agriculture is a lie.
	We are constantly treating the symptoms.
	And what I'm saying is moving closer to the soil, moving closer to an agrarian society, being more related to God's design is gonna have us be healthier.
	This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Yanya Kelleck.
	Molly Engelhart, so good to have you back on American Thought Leaders.
	So happy to be back.
	I've been on this little bit of a journey with you over the last several years.
	You know, we first encountered each other in California where you had vegan restaurant chain and the farm that that fed those restaurants, and then you had to move out to Texas where we visited as well.
	But along the way, you actually switched from vegan to involving meat in these restaurants.
	And so, like what I what actually happened when you did that.
	I was prepared for the vegans to be upset.
	I lived in that ethos for so many years.
	I had been a darling, like a, oh, let me do another piece, let me do another, we'll do a piece about this, and all of a sudden, like regenerative agriculture is a lie.
	We must stick with wind and solar and the New York Post did a full-page article in the physical magazine.
	I was like, wow, slow news day, that this is like really that interesting.
	But I think that it was the drama.
	I don't know that the media really cares.
	Media is all about selling ad space, and so I think that the drama of the vegans being upset had that it float to the top for a little while.
	And it but it did cause a lot of upset and it caused people to not go to my restaurant to doubt my commitment to the environment, and you know, I'm deeply committed to our earth uh, but not in a superficial way.
	And so it wasn't ideal.
	It didn't go well for my restaurants in California, and the the end result is we have eventually closed all of them.
	Just you know, before I continue, just a couple of ways that that manifested.
	Like what what are the elements that forced those closures ultimately?
	In full disclosure, to be totally honest, we didn't have that much runway when I made the switch because of the California policy of no indoor dining for almost two and a half years.
	And then once they reopened for indoor dining, we had to bring back all the staff, but our sales were still pretty dismal.
	And I thought, well, if I bring in the whole healthy meats, and that would bring in a new audience, and it was what I deeply believed for myself.
	And so I knew that there would be the upset, but I I figured that the people that were really into tallow fries and grass-fed burgers would make up for that.
	And ultimately, there was a lot of not great press, and then there was a lot of protesting, and so that people don't want to go somewhere where they think someone's gonna be yelling or talking on a microphone.
	And then all of the information on the internet is crowdsourced.
	You go to a restaurant and you're like, oh my gosh, it's closed.
	You can go to Yelp and be like, it's closed, and this information is wrong.
	And I understand why these websites do it.
	They can't be everywhere and know everything.
	But there was a targeted campaign against me to continuously have my Yelp and my Google and my Apple maps to say permanently closed.
	And they would go to the stand outside the restaurant, and six, seven, eight people would in a cluster, and then it would take me days to get it re put back up as open, and I'd have to prove that I was open, show that sales, show my bank account, da-da-da-da-da, and then they would do it again.
	Um this hurt my business because if you're Looking to go out to eat and it says sage is permanently closed, you don't go back next week to check if it's not permanently closed, that permanently is the first word.
	Ultimately, why do you think these people were doing this?
	Well, I think that the people on the ground level that were doing it believe that climate change is an existential threat and abuse of animals is a is the worst thing that you can do.
	I think on a bigger scale, veganism is another way that they use to divide us and to create chaos.
	And I think that veganism probably started with good intentions, and but I do think that there's powers that be above that, and that there was funded coordinated efforts.
	These were not spontaneous protests, and they had professionally printed signs and people out there with cases of water, and there there was there was some coordinated effort that was funded, and I believe that there's powers that be that want us to go to printed 3D printed meat, and I just seen a thing this morning about how we can make butter out of carbon, just we're gonna take carbon and make butter, it's gonna be awesome.
	And I think that Maha, the paleo, the keto, like all of these things moving towards tallow and animal-based products is hurting billions of dollars of investment.
	And so I'm positive that there is people that have financial interests in the vegan world that want to keep veganism important and on top.
	Fascinating.
	You know, you mentioned earlier that you are very, you know, pro-environment, but not in a superficial way.
	And I went when you said that I was thinking, yeah, this is you're talking about debunked by nature here.
	Of course, uh, your new book that's come out, which I think is fantastic.
	As you obviously know I've endorsed the book because I think it's so wonderful.
	How were you debunked by nature?
	And how did you under come to understand that what you had been thinking was pro-environment was maybe more superficial than you realized.
	So I didn't set out to like write a book called Debunked by Nature.
	Um, and you know, I thought of calling it like nature never lies, something like that, but it debunked by nature was like just like it it debunked everything that I believed, and so environmentalism is just one of the many, many um ideas.
	But I was this adamant militant environmentalist.
	If you take me in 2001, I'm this militant environmentalist, I am running vegan restaurants, I'm driving a hybrid, I'm drinking out of a paper straw that's deteriorating my mouth every time I drink a smoothie, and I'm bringing my reusable cup and I'm having an oat milk latte, and I think, and I'm bringing bags to the grocery store, and I think I'm doing everything I can for the environment.
	And ultimately, underneath all that, I felt very apathetic and that we were gonna burn in hell and there was nothing we could do about it.
	That was like the underneath of all that drive a hybrid, bring your things to the grocery store, all that stuff.
	That was underneath it.
	And I heard a TED talk that my brother sent me by Gram Sate, and this started this journey.
	And where that journey started was okay, I food waste is actually way bigger of a problem than cow farts or cow burps, as people are concerned about.
	And I realized that every one of us is a contributor to food waste.
	Like every one of us throws food away, we don't eat everything at the restaurant, we buy groceries, it goes bad in our fridge.
	But as a vegan restaurant owner, I mean, I was throwing away massive amounts of food waste, and I knew after this talk I could turn that into healthy soil.
	So I set out to get a farm.
	When I get on land, I have all these ideas of how it's gonna go.
	I have all these ideas about veganism.
	I have all these ideas about the environment, and nature taught me that my ideas were ridiculous.
	Like that my cow was bad for the environment, and my Lexus H250 hybrid or whatever I drove at that time was good for the environment.
	It was so obvious to me in just being in nature and seeing something Die and see it decompose, going to nothing, and then having to replace the batteries in my hybrid car, and they're having to be like a hazmat removal and pay for blah blah blah blah blah.
	Like how that can't possibly be better for the environment than my cow that will just disappear into the field.
	And then it just went to like I realized we're constantly fighting against death.
	The entire vegan concept is afraid to die.
	And I thought death is just the the flip side of the corn of life.
	And for the first time in years, I looked up from my phone on the farm.
	I looked up and I was present to God.
	I was present to the presence of something so much larger than my own ego.
	And I everything I understood that we should be doing for the environment, which is essentially we are bad and wrong, we're a plague, we're a scourge, we should just gather in cities and leave nature to do its thing without us.
	It was put on my heart so clearly that that's not true.
	We're meant to interface with nature and we've forgotten our role.
	And so to be an environmentalist is not to avoid nature, but to invent to interact with her, not to try to outscience her, but to remember her wisdom.
	Absolutely fascinating.
	Well, so and how has that manifested in your you know kind of newest endeavor now in Texas where we visited most recently.
	I mean, it's manifested in so many ways because it's like changed everything, I believe it's changed every like so everything is different.
	If you drive out 45 minutes to the country and you drive on uh a whole mile and a half once you get on to my ranch, and then you come to a restaurant and you can see cows, holistic plant grazing moving every day in the field, you can see chickens and people are collecting eggs, you can see greedhouses and your food being grown.
	My hope is that the ripple effect of that inside of the guest is a remembrance of what food once was and a coherence of eating food of the land that you're sitting on, that there is a coherence there.
	That's what happens when you come and you be in nature, and then you eat of nature, and there's a remembering that we belong to the soil, that we belong to this earth.
	Molly, one quick sec, we're gonna take a break, and folks, we're gonna be right back.
	And we're back with the author of Debunked by Nature, Molly Engelhart.
	Uh, this morning I actually saw a clip of Bobby Kennedy visiting a regenerative farm.
	Want to go out and check the titus.
	Hi, I'm Robert F. Kennedy Jr., your HHS secretary.
	So there is an interest, even at the you know, kind of upper echelons of the government in this type of agriculture, which you're doing, regenerative agriculture.
	The typical mantra that you hear about it is that in order to be able to deliver enough food for everybody, uh, it has to be done at uh economically.
	It has to be done at this much larger scale.
	That that regenerative agriculture is a soul can only work at a smaller scale, and and and that's a problem.
	This is one of the things I've heard again and again, as I've mentioned, my growing interest in regenerative agriculture.
	First, I did see that clip, Steve Jarvis's farm in um Idaho, uh potato farm.
	So that was awesome to see uh the secretary uh showing interest, and Steve is a friend of mine, so I'm super happy uh that that is getting attention.
	He's just building that microbiology in the soil.
	And he says, My livestock is that microbiology in the soil.
	And there is no soil that doesn't have enough MPK or or um inputs inside of it already.
	There's only soil that's not alive enough to make it available to the plants.
	So when our focus is to have our soil alive, which is profoundly important, and so we were made of the soil, we belong to the soil.
	And when we I think so many of us feel like we don't belong on this earth anymore, or we don't fit in our bodies, or we don't feel comfortable in our own skin, and then we're drinking or drugs or watching things that we shouldn't be.
	I think that that all comes from a disconnectedness from the soil.
	So I believe that regenerative agriculture is the way to meet farmers where they're at and bring life back to the land.
	And we're in an existential crisis with chemical farming, and we are and with ultra processed foods.
	It is a battle that if we do not wake up to, we could cause, and this is not hyperbole, a massive die-off of human beings.
	Like we are just treating the soil, the microbiology in our gut and our immune systems like we can outsmart it.
	And all the statistics show that we can't.
	Like we're getting sicker and sicker and sicker, worse and worse and worse outcomes.
	So we must have an awakening around that.
	But we're not gonna just write a bill tomorrow.
	And the other thing I want to say is I think that people think of chemical farming as something that's been happening forever.
	But the first genetically modified plant in the mainstream was a soybean, and I think it's in 1996.
	Someone said 1997 yesterday at the event, but I'm pretty sure it was 1996.
	But 1996 or 1997 is when we started this pathway of highly chemicalized spraying glycophate directly, and then using glycophate as a desiccant, which if your audience doesn't know what that means, is prior to the late 90s or 2000s, we used to let wheat or barley dry in the sun and we would check the humidity in it, and then we would harvest it at the right humidity between this and this.
	Now we can spray it with Roundup or glycophate and have it dry out, and then we can harvest it right away in two weeks.
	You must wait 14 days.
	But all testing for a glycophate is 14 days with harvest what had to do with spraying it around the bottom of trees, avocados, or oranges or something, and then picking the fruit up here.
	So we haven't we don't know the impact of spraying this chemical directly on our oats that we're feeding our children or our wheat and then eating it.
	And it and so that is something that's happened even more recent than 1996.
	So we have not been doing this forever.
	We have been eating a many of these foods forever, and they weren't making us sick, and now they are.
	Molly, you've been telling me that you get some very positive reactions to your columns in the Epoch Times.
	Yeah, I write for other outlets as well, and I have a large social media presence and all of that, and I do not get more people reaching out, the most loving people reaching out.
	I get emails 30 plus emails a week from Epoch Times readers that are interested in what I'm doing, asking me questions, thanking me for an article.
	People come into my restaurant with the physical one and show me that they read it, ask me to sign it.
	People text me pictures like you made it into the physical one this week.
	I'm always happy when you're there.
	And I had some readers come in while we were doing all the flood relief in Texas, and they helped us.
	They drove two and a half hours to distribute burritos to Leander, Texas, and brought it brought back our hot boxes and everything.
	Um there's a woman that brings me cheesecakes and cookies, oh, and she likes my articles.
	And I just think people drive an hour and a half.
	They'll say, I Googled you after reading your article, and I saw you were only an hour and a half away in Texas, and I wanted to come and have lunch.
	I've never had a group of readers in any other space that's so enthusiastic, and I don't have my email like on the header in Epoch Times.
	They're doing some research, they're Googling me, they're finding my website, and then they're emailing the info at and and emailing me.
	And I just think that says something about how engaged your guys' readers are, and I think it's an extraordinary testament to what has been built here at Epoch Times because people are not just like passively reading and on to the next, on to the next, on to the next information, but they're taking it in, they're thinking about it, and then they're taking the effort to email me or come and see me and want to discuss what I'm talking about.
	Well, that's absolutely wonderful.
	Thank you.
	Thank you.
	Can you build on that uh aspect?
	You were actually helping in the Texas flood relief, I think by providing food.
	Just tell me a little bit more about that and how you engaged with some of our readers.
	Um, yeah, so we were in we live in Kerr County, Texas, which was where Camp Mystic is, and we've had uh over a hundred deaths um from these floods on July 4th.
	And so just starting on July 5th, we jumped into action and we Started feeding people, housing people, because we have 40 beds on the ranch.
	And so people started like sending money.
	And this one woman, she sent money, and then she was reading her Epoch Times, and I had an article in it about the flood relief.
	And so she texts me a picture of the article and she says, This is you, and she's like, I love you, Pac.
	I've read your articles.
	And then her son, a couple minutes later, texts me the water article, and he took taken a picture of it in the physical one, and he was like, You're the same lady that is taking me the burritos in the because he was doing the looking for bodies and everything.
	And these other people that were driving the burritos all the way to Leander and people sending money to help feed and help us house these flood relief victims, really just speaks to the heart of the reader that you have, that they want to make a difference, that they want to help and how important community is to them.
	So a couple of things.
	Um I'm reminded of actually two columns that you've recently uh written for us in and what you're talking about.
	I want to touch on those in a moment.
	But before we go there, you raised this alarm earlier.
	Too many chemicals coming into the human body might lead to a mass dive.
	It just it reminded me of w what would you say if uh someone said, Well, that what you just said when it comes to this, you know, mass die-off of humans potentially that that sounds like you know the other side of the coin of this climate alarmism that you hear that from everything I've learned is isn't might well be happening, but isn't quite as alarmist as as we hear.
	That it sounds like that.
	We're looking at statistics that say that at the current rate that men's sperm is dying, we will be at zero sperm in the modernized world by 2040.
	I have a five-year-old.
	That means that he possibly will not be able to reproduce.
	I think we need to be screaming about reproductive rights.
	The right for my son to make love with a wife and have a child in the normal way.
	And women are infertile at higher and higher rates.
	And it's not one thing.
	I'm not blaming agrochemicals.
	It's the pharmaceuticals that are in our water that's getting recycled back into our drinking water, and so people are getting high levels of birth control without meaning to because they're drinking other women's birth control.
	But we're having a human health crisis.
	Look at your own family or ask the viewers to look at their own family.
	How many people are sick in your family?
	How many people are on how many medications?
	I'm 47 years old.
	I'm still breastfeeding a time a baby that I had two years ago.
	Um I had a baby at 45.
	I'm on zero medications.
	But that is not the norm.
	We are constantly treating the symptoms.
	And what I'm saying is moving closer to the soil, moving closer to an agrarian society, being more related to God's design is gonna have us be healthier.
	Final thought as we finish.
	We don't ever know where life is going to take us.
	And I certainly never thought that I would be a pig and cattle farmer in Texas.
	Like I was so deeply rooted in being a vegan restaurateur.
	And I never would have thought that I would my politics would shift either.
	But being willing to listen to the whispers and see what was happening around me.
	I think that that's true wisdom.
	And I want to invite humans to bring wisdom back and not be so tribal to be willing to hear ideas and take them in, try them on like a jacket, say, does that fit me, or does that not?
	It doesn't, it does, and be willing to change our minds, even publicly, even if it costs us financially, but really be the truth and be authentic.
	And someone said at dinner last night, I think only one in fifty people do the right thing when it's gonna harm them financially or um like their um person, like their brand or whatever, not necessarily financially, but like they would be shamed for it.
	I want it to be one in one person that does the right thing no matter what.
	And so I just want to invite people to be in the listening, hear the whispers, and remember you're part of the whole, you're part of something much bigger.
	Well, Molly Engelhart, it's such a pleasure to have had you on again.
	Thank you so much for inviting me.
	Thank you all for joining Molly Engelhard and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders.

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