Michael Hunter, chef and hunter, recounts the aggressive vegan protests at his Toronto restaurant Antler—sparked by a "Venison is the new kale" sign—where activists demanded he display their slogan or face weekly disruptions. He contrasts ethical wild game hunting with factory farming, noting $3B+ in conservation funding from hunting fees and superior nutrient density in organ meats like deer heart. Hunter’s foraging roots, including morels and indigenous techniques like cedar-infused dishes, clash with urban vegan ideology, while Joe Rogan critiques extremism, urging opposition to industrial meat over sustainable wild sources. Their debate highlights a cultural divide between tradition and activism, where middle-ground solutions—like hunter-sourced restaurants—remain under attack despite aligning with conservation and humane practices. [Automatically generated summary]
If people don't know the story, we'll give them the brief synopsis.
I found out about your story online because there was this viral thing that was going on about a chef who was getting protested by a bunch of animal rights activists and vegans who decided to camp out in front of your business and tried a restaurant called Antler in Toronto.
I don't know what the fuck they were trying to do, but you decided to butcher a leg of deer in front of them, and it became this horrific thing.
Like, how could you do that?
In a place that serves meat, how could you prepare the meat right in front of them?
How did this all get started?
How did it become such a crazy, viral story?
And why were they mad at you when there's a million other restaurants around you?
I have one business partner who's my best friend and family friend.
And we had a little chalkboard sign up front that said, Venison is the new kale.
And, you know, we get cute with our sign.
We tease other restaurants around us.
Like, we have fun with the sign.
And it's fun.
And this cyclist vegan rode by and took huge offense to our sign.
And all of a sudden, one day, these protesters just showed up.
So...
Originally, I was just kind of frustrated because they're totally misguided because we take a lot of pride in where our food comes from.
We have vegan and vegetarian dishes on the menu, and I really respect that type of diet.
So we were just totally floored with why this was happening.
So this started to go on.
They started to come every week.
They went from like two or three people being kind of peaceful to being like 10, 15 people not so peaceful.
So it's when it turned not so peaceful, they were shouting at our guests and shouting in our door and really trying to harm our business that I just kind of got fed up last resort.
We get a whole deer a couple times a month and we butchered ourselves and I just said, screw it, screw it.
I'm like, I'm going to get these people to get out of here.
I think they're mad because their thing is that we're promoting ethical farming.
And their belief is there is no such thing as ethical farming, that all meat is murder.
And if you look at murder in the dictionary, it has to do with humans.
It has nothing to do with animals.
There is such a thing as ethical farming and sustainable farming, and we work really hard to make sure that where we get our meat from is from the best possible place we can, and it's local, so it's supporting our local farmers that are within hours of our restaurant.
Part of the problem with these kind of things is it becomes a contest.
It becomes a battle, you know, trying to see who's going to win.
And they're absolutely on a team.
I mean, that's one of the things that happens with veganism.
And I think it happens with hunters, too.
People become very tribal.
And it's us versus them.
They want to win and then it becomes this thing where you know look the reality is a Lot of people are idiots and they don't have a lot going on in their life And so when something comes up where it becomes a primary focus of their life one restaurant as illogical as it might be That becomes the battleground and it's an ideological battleground for you know don't eat meat ever Versus sustainable farming.
Look, I'm sure...
I know you're a hunter.
I'm sure you feel a certain amount of remorse when an animal dies.
And that's a big part of sort of my beliefs and my philosophy and why I'm working on this cookbook right now is because I think that if you do eat meat, you should be able to kill an animal and experience that.
And I think that if people were to actually kill an animal...
They would see, you know, what goes into that.
And I don't think people would consume as much meat and I don't think people would definitely, you know, they certainly wouldn't waste as much meat as they do.
And it's just really upsetting and I think it's totally misguided, you know, why we were targeted.
Well, I mean, like I said, I think it just becomes a game.
It becomes the big tribal game.
You know, there's a real argument, a real argument that I support against factory farming.
And factory farming is the way most people are getting their meat, in terms of like...
In terms of like cheeseburgers and fast food and stuff along those lines, I mean, you're not getting it from the most ethical sources.
It's just, it's not financially sustainable to do it that way.
Everything would cost more money.
And that's a real problem that we, as a society, it's not obviously not you or I that has set up this system, but that this system is a system that we find ourselves a part of.
It's a real problem.
I've removed myself from it for the most part.
But occasionally I'm on the road and I'm hungry and I'll eat some meat that's just whatever.
Yeah, no, and I don't have a lot of experience with that because where I am, we don't have that wild boar problem, but I hunt with these guys from Mossy Oak, and I've gone down there and done one of these.
Pig hunts and they've shown me their fields and like one third of their cornfield is just destroyed.
Destroyed.
And they have to hunt them at night or they hunt them with dogs and it's a huge problem for farmers trying to make a living.
And it just says Lyme disease is one of the hashtags.
Yeah, he's got it really bad.
And I mean, what's crazy is the guy could not be healthier, works out constantly, eats right.
He's not boozing.
His body's just falling apart because of fucking Lyme disease.
And it's being carried by these deer.
Overpopulation of wild animals is handled in one of two ways.
Either you introduce predators or you manage them with hunting.
There's a place in Maui Maui has no predators, but they also have a bunch of wild game that was brought in for King Kamehameha.
I think it was in the 1800s they brought it in.
I'm not sure when, but there's tons of Axis deer on Maui and on Lanai and on Molokai, a couple of different islands.
And one of the things they've started doing is they were trying to figure out how to eradicate them from this area.
So a bunch of hunters got together and they're hunting these Axis deer and then giving the meat to poor people, like making it free for them.
And it's a really cool program, but that's another...
Sort of situation where you kind of have to hunt.
Unless you're just going to poison them or you're going to somehow or another capture them all and neuter and spay a certain amount of them every month, there's really no other way to handle it.
Like, people that don't educate themselves about hunting, they're just like, hunting is bad, killing animals is bad, and they get on this bandwagon, but they don't have enough information about it.
Yeah.
And I think people confuse trophy hunting, you know, with like, they see Cecil the lion, and everyone goes after, okay, it's hunting is the problem, but...
You know, trophy hunting is the problem, but hunters that hunt for food and that hunt to, you know, help the sort of environmental impacts that they're having.
Well, large-scale agriculture is also responsible for the boom in the population of deer.
Deer in America, particularly in the Midwest, where all the farms are, what is it, a fucking coincidence that there's all the deer where all the farms are?
No, it's not.
My good friend Doug Duren, he has a big-ass farm in Wisconsin, beautiful place, in the Driftless area.
The idealistic view of someone who lives in a city street in Toronto and is driving around on their bike looking for signs that are criticizing kale or whatever the fuck they're doing, they're not in the real natural world that these animals exist in.
Like, when I see a deer come out, I hunt with a bow, a crossbow, and I see a deer come out, I'm trembling, the hair on my back is standing up, they're these beautiful, majestic creatures, and I'm gonna kill it.
And it's really, really difficult, and I don't think that people understand that, that don't hunt and that haven't killed an animal, they don't understand the respect and the amount of effort that goes into that.
Well, we can shoot afterwards, but we have to fucking practice.
You have to be able to make an ethical shot.
But now, when I sit down and I cook something for my family, I know where that came from.
If we have vegetables that we grew in our garden, there's a great satisfaction for serving up some cucumbers or some kale or whatever it is that we grew in our garden.
When you go out there and you cut that cucumber off the plant and you cut that kale down, it is like half an hour old.
Nothing compares to that freshness that you go to the grocery store that may be a couple days, a week, a month old.
You have no idea.
And for me as a chef, that's why I love hunting and foraging and having a garden in my backyard because when you go and pick something, nothing tastes as good as that.
It's very unfortunate that I think these ideological groups get tainted by the most extreme members.
And I think that's true on the hunting side, too.
And you got guys like fucking Ted Nugent, you know, and all the people that I think that they distort the real sort of Fascinating and mystical qualities of wildlife and harvesting wildlife and being out there and experiencing nature.
It's an almost psychedelic experience to hunt and be in the wild.
That sounds so counterintuitive to someone who's never experienced it.
The world of these animals, when you're away from your cell phone, when you're away from television and all the bullshit and the computer, when you're out there in the wild, you are almost in another dimension.
If you're in complete silence, in the forest, in your mind...
Goes into a completely different sort of mode that is familiar, but yet alien.
It's familiar in a way that your body's like, oh, this is hunting.
This is what humans have done for hundreds of thousands of years.
This is why we became human.
I mean, this is literally one of the reasons that scientists believe that our brains grew.
It's because we started eating meat, we started cooking meat, the nutrition became more accessible, and also we started thinking about how to hunt, developing tools to hunt with.
I mean, all of this is the reason why humans are humans today.
And I'm sure the vegan argument against that would be, well, that's then, and we're past that now.
Well, we're not.
No, we're not.
We're not because of controlling the population of animals.
We're certainly not because of controlling the population of predators.
And that's another thing that people need to accept and understand.
There's a reason why they eradicated all the wolves in North America before they reintroduced them to Yellowstone, and now they're thriving in many parts of the Northwest.
It's because they were fucking killing everything.
And they don't have any predators, and the only predators that they have are humans.
And if we don't keep the populations in check of them, and of grizzly bears, of black bears, and all the other predators, they start eating each other, they start tearing each other apart, they start coming after us, they start encroaching on people.
Well, we're in their territory.
We shouldn't be in their place.
Look, I'm on team people, so I don't know what the fuck you're saying here.
If you're saying that we should move out of San Francisco and give it to the wolves, you can go fuck yourself.
And this is literally what it boils down to.
Because you have to draw some line in the sand somewhere.
Because if someone doesn't control the population of animals...
Then what's going to happen?
Well, you can leave them to their own devices and they can sort of sort it out.
But you know how they sort it out through disease and starvation?
I mean, what happens is there's too many animals and not enough food, so they get horrific diseases.
That's where mange comes from.
That's where a lot of serious diseases that infect wildlife come from.
They come from a lack of food or overpopulation.
That's how nature sorts it out.
You know, and that's how nature sorts it out with people, too.
And I think it comes with a certain responsibility, and that responsibility is really...
We're really doing a disservice to that responsibility with factory farming.
And that's one of the main arguments for veganism.
One of the main arguments is the horrific treatment of those animals.
Whether it's veganism, or whether it's rather factory farming, or whether it's...
Large-scale dairy farms where they mistreat their cows, or the chicken farms, or all these different factory farms where they treat these animals not as a living being but as a commodity.
Then it becomes a giant problem.
But if you look at guys like, do you know who Joel Salton is?
He runs a farm called Polyface Farms, and what he has essentially done is made large-scale animal agriculture possible in a humane and very natural way.
He has enormous electric fences that he uses for his pigs.
And he just moves them around.
Moves the fences around.
So the pigs wander around.
He has a huge rolling chicken coop.
I mean, it's fucking huge.
And he pushes that thing around.
He moves it to a new space.
The chickens go out.
They wander around.
They do their chicken thing and they go right back into the chicken house.
And this is where he gets the eggs from.
This is how they raise chickens.
This is how they raise cattle.
They do it with all these different animals.
And his perspective on all this is that If you do it right, it's not horrific.
It's not an evil thing.
And that these animals are living the way they're meant to live.
So the pigs that are in these factory farms or even regular pigs, there's many different breeds and a lot of them are hybrid.
hybrid breeds the the wild boar breed has long black hair and tusks that actually come out so I can buy whole pigs and they don't have those tusks and when I buy the wild boar breed the meat is darker the the hair is black but we're getting them you know there's no hair by the time we get them and they've got the tusks in the jaw right but my point is that a boar is a male right you're definitely eating females too that's true Yeah, so why do they call it a wild boar?
What's crazy about wild pigs is if you took a domestic pig, you know, like Babe, release Babe out into the forest, they morph in a very short amount of time.
Their snout extends, their hair becomes darker and thicker, their tusks lengthen.
William Randolph Hearst decided that when there was a cover of, I believe it was Popular Science Magazine that said, And they had invented a machine called a decorticator.
And what a decorticator does is it effectively processes hemp fiber much more efficiently.
And for the longest time, they used slaves to process hemp fiber.
But then Eli Whitney came around with the cotton gin, and they switched from hemp clothing to cotton.
Cotton is easier to produce with the cotton gin, but it's just an inferior cloth.
Hemp makes better paper.
Hemp makes cloth.
You can make houses with it.
Henry Ford made the first fenders for the first Model T out of hemp.
I mean, hemp's a crazy thing.
William Randolph Hearst read this article, saw what was coming, and realized that he was going to have to transition all of his paper mills, and he owned forests that they would cut down the trees and make paper with.
They would have to transition those to hemp if people were demanding hemp.
He undercut the entire industry by saying that there was a new drug that blacks and Mexicans were smoking and they were raping white women.
And he called this drug marijuana, which was really just the name of a Mexican slang for wild tobacco.
So we start printing these stories.
Congress made it illegal.
A lot of people that were voting on it didn't even know that they were making cannabis or like hemp, the textile and the commodity, hemp.
They didn't know they were making it illegal.
They thought they were stopping a drug scourge that was forcing blacks and Mexicans to rape white women.
It was all William Randolph Hearst, this one crazy asshole with Harry Anslinger in the fucking 1930s.
That's when it became illegal.
Well, this same crazy asshole let a bunch of wild pigs loose on his property so he can hunt them because he was a gentleman hunter.
So the pigs that I hunt in California when I go pig hunting probably are direct descendants from the pigs that were let loose by this asshole.
I think what a lot of people don't understand is how fast they breed.
My friends in Mississippi were telling me a pig can lay a litter three times a year, four times a year, up to 10, 12 piglets per litter, and they have no natural predators.
So what are these farmers going to do when they start decimating their crops?
I didn't actually start hunting until I was in my 20s.
And I had grown up cooking.
I was interested in becoming a chef and a family friend told me he was going turkey hunting and I said well What do you mean you're going turkey hunting?
Like I thought turkeys were I didn't know there was such thing as well turkey I thought they're you know a domesticated bird like a chicken so he takes me turkey hunting and I Actually, I couldn't believe it.
We you know, we shot a couple birds You know, we plucked them out and then the skin was yellow and then the meat is dark like Like the chicken leg meat is like the breast.
Like it's dark.
And I just thought like, wow, like this is incredible.
And then when I tasted it, I just couldn't believe that this is what turkey was supposed to taste like.
You know, the mountain lion thing is a weird thing with California because I see their point.
What they've essentially done is, and this is, one of the weird things about California is like, California is one of the places that doesn't have a fish and game department.
There's Rocky Mountain elk near Tejon Ranch, and then there's Thule elk that are natural on the coast.
There's a lot of different animals here.
But there's also a lot of motherfucking mountain lions.
And they still kill them.
But the way they kill them now is through government trackers.
It's really kind of crazy.
What they do is mountain lions start eating people's dogs and cats.
And they get scary.
And then people call...
One of the, you know, I don't know who you would call that would take care of it.
And they hire people.
Most of the time they use dogs.
They use dogs to tree the mountain lion and they shoot them.
And when they empty the contents of their stomachs, when they do an autopsy on them, they find it filled with dogs and cats, which is really kind of crazy.
And then whatever was there that claimed that territory is dead.
And then there's a new one that comes along and they take it.
It's a fucking constant battle.
This idea that like we're in their community, like they have an established gated community that we've entered and we start putting up houses and pissing off their neighbors.
No, that's not what it is.
It's just land.
And if you hate people and you don't like cities, well then go fucking live in the forest.
Until then, fuck off.
And stop saying like we're encroaching on their land.
Do you go to the supermarket?
Yes.
Do you buy your vegan food at a vegan deli?
Well, that's a place where a deer could have lived.
Well, one way I found out about it, a mouse got in the chicken coop and they fucked that thing up.
And I was like, wow, that's crazy.
But then another thing happened was my daughters found a hawk.
My wife decided in all of her...
You know, women are always trying to spruce things up.
She decided she was going to change some of these fences to a glass fence.
And the hawks didn't get the memo.
And they suck and...
They swan-dived into this glass wall.
And when we first put up the fence, there was like three hawks that got fucked up.
And one of them died.
And we found one of them that was just KO'd and had blood coming out of its nose.
Like literally, it was like a UFC fight.
It was down and fucked up.
So my daughters took this in and they put it in a large cardboard box and they had to figure out how to feed it because it was, I think it was on Saturday and the wildlife rescue place was not open on the weekend.
And so we had to bring it into a place on Monday.
So over the weekend, we went to this pet store that we go to, and they sell something called pinkies.
It's a very cute term for baby mice that you can't really see yet.
And they're separated from their mother, and they feed them to snakes.
It's mostly reptiles they feed them to.
But these hawks would fuck these pinkies up.
And so to try to give this hawk some food while it was there over the weekend so it didn't starve, my daughters brought them the pinkies.
And there was one pinky left.
That the hawk didn't eat when we brought the hawk to the wildlife rescue place.
So they fixed up the hawk and they told us the hawk was...
They took care of its wing and eventually they released it back in the wild.
So it was a nice story.
But there was this one pinky left over and the thing was going to die.
It wasn't with its mother.
It was too small to drink milk.
And they were like, we want to keep it.
We want to keep it as a pet.
I'm like, that doesn't make any sense.
You were just feeding its brothers and sisters to this fucking hawk and now you guys want to keep it.
So I said, listen, I think we should feed it to the chickens.
And they're like, no!
I was like, well, what are you going to do?
This is crazy.
You can't keep it.
It's going to die.
Do you understand that?
And they said, okay, okay, okay.
I go, well, listen, you don't have to watch.
I'll just go out and do it.
Dude, I put that fucking thing down, and I have never seen those chickens so voracious attack that mouse, and then they were all chasing the one chicken that had the mouse, trying to steal it from her.
Watch this.
Here's the chicken with a mouse right here.
Look, they get a mouse, and they fuck that mouse up, man, and they try to steal it from each other.
They want something that aligns with their ideology, and their ideology is love and compassion, except for people that eat meat, and then death.
Death threats.
I mean, that's really what it is.
It's an ideological battle, and in that sense, veganism becomes very much like a religion, because you support all the people that are on your side, and the people that are opposed to you are like apostates.
They're like the negative people that are trying to bring you to the dark side, to hell.
It gets really crazy.
And there's a lot of evidence on their side in terms of, like, factory farming and the horrors of factory farming.
And even the really incredibly poor modern American diet that they see.
A lot of people, when they go vegan, what they're doing, one of the best things that they're doing is they're eliminating all the bullshit.
They're eliminating all the trans fats and all the fucking...
All the terrible shit that a lot of people eat that isn't vegan.
The negative thing is, most of them are eating diets that are far too carbohydrate rich, and if they're not getting their blood checked, they don't even know how unhealthy they are.
They convince themselves they're doing much better and they're feeling much better.
But a lack of cholesterol can fuck with your hormone functions.
A lot of vegans have low hormones because of that.
I mean, that is an absolute fact that there are some people that can eat certain diets and be very healthy, and then other people eat them and they have a really hard time with them.
But the other thing is that most of these people that are talking about how healthy and how great they feel, there's a lot of it is sort of a placebo effect and they're not getting blood work done.
Everyone, regardless of what your diet is, you should get blood work done just to find out if you have any potential problems that are on the horizon.
Because there's a lot of times you'll feel okay and then you get your blood work done and the doctor will tell you, hey man, you're really low in vitamin B and D and A and you need this and that.
This is the health consequences of not having this stuff in your diet.
And if you are committed to a vegan diet, there's ways that you can supplement.
And this is my advice to people.
If you want to supplement, first of all, algae is a great one.
It tastes like shit, but it's very good for your body.
And you just add it to smoothies.
Just add it with coconut milk or a bunch of other things.
You can do it.
I mean, you definitely can eat a vegan diet and be healthy.
But you've got to be on the ball.
And the B12 one is a big one.
It's massive amounts.
I was reading some crazy article the other day that said something like 90% of all vegans are B12 deficient.
There's a guy named Chris Kresser that I've had on my podcast before who's a brilliant guy who is an expert in diet and nutrition who started out as a macrobiotic vegan and had massive health problems and then switched to eating meat eventually and then really became a connoisseur of organ meat.
Which is probably the most nutrient-dense food in the world.
I went hunting and I came back and I brought the heart into the restaurant for the guys because I wanted to share with them the experience of eating fresh, killed.
The heart was still warm when I brought it to work.
And the way I like to eat is either tartare, like just mince it up raw, or cook it like a steak.
So I cut it, you know, horizontally into like, it looks like a tenderloin steak.
And we all got like this like buzz, like we just like shot a double espresso or something.
It was just like, whoa.
And it's like, it's so nutrient rich, the organ meat.
Even when we're buying from these really cool game farms, it's different than the deer that I go and shoot because that deer I just shot could be six, seven years old versus at the farm it's maybe one or two.
But again, it's eating such a diverse diet and it's, you know, my belief is that that's how we're supposed to be eating.
Well, it's definitely how we were eating for the longest time.
And it is entirely possible that if humans, like, say if you got an isolated group of humans that stuck to a very, very rigid vegan diet for many, many, many generations, it's entirely possible that our genes would adapt to that diet and lifestyle.
It's totally possible.
The reality of your current physical form is it's most likely not designed for that.
And this is just based on genes and on genetics and epigenetics and all the various things that they've, methods that they've devised to try to study What makes you a person, and where your ancestors came from, and how did your ancestors develop?
Did they eat mostly fish?
Like, there's people that live, like, in the Northwest, like the extreme, like in Alaska, and Inuits, and people, they're...
Entire history, they've evolved from eating fish and whale and whale blubber and seal and seal fat.
And there's real changes to who they are as people.
First of all, one of the big ones is the people that live up there, their hands don't get cold like ours do.
I've heard that when the indigenous communities There was some program where they were trying to get them to stop hunting whales or stop killing seals, and the government was supplementing them with beef and cattle.
And their argument was, this is not what we're supposed to eat.
This is not what we're designed to eat.
We need the fat in the whale blubber to stay warm.
Well, it's also, you're looking at what we were talking about before, like white meat from turkey, domestic turkey versus the turkey that's a wild turkey.
When you see cows, you get these corn-fed cows, you have this pale meat.
That meat is pale because it's not as good for you.
It's more filled with fat, which tastes good, but it's not as nutrient-dense.
When you have a moose steak, you've seen a moose steak before, right?
If you thought about taking an athlete like LeBron James, who's just this super athlete...
And compare, like, the composition of his body to some fucking slob who just drinks soda all day and is tired, is on antidepressants and antibiotics because his body is fucking deteriorating rapidly.
He's got arthritis in all of his joints because he's too fat.
That literally is a cow.
That's literally one of these fucking farm-raised, overstuffed, corn-fed cows, and they grind that fat fuck into a hamburger.
And it's just not the same.
I'm not...
I'm not endorsing eating LeBron James, but I'm saying there's a difference in what the composition of their body is.
I think a lot of it's in Oregon and up the coast of California down in New Mexico, but they're professional foragers that then go and sell these mushrooms.
But they track these foragers, and it's such a cool movie.
My first experience in foraging for mushrooms, I was like an apprentice chef at this restaurant and the chef comes in and was like, hey, check these out.
And I was like, whoa, what the hell are these?
And he's like, oh, they're morels.
I found them mountain biking.
And there's this stigma.
As a kid, your parents are like, don't eat those.
Don't touch those.
They're poisonous.
They'll kill you.
And it's like, okay, well, then you just have this idea.
Well, mushrooms come from the grocery store.
Well, it's like, no, they come in the wild.
You know, that's like my thing with meat is I teach my kids, like meat doesn't come from the grocery store.
It's not a styrofoam package.
That's not where it comes from.
It's an animal.
Yeah.
And yeah, and it's just like, you know, mushrooms that grow in the wild and they're just, they're crazy.
That is the subject of a book by a guy named John Marco Allegro.
Who was one of the head scholars for deciphering the Dead Sea Scrolls.
He deciphered the Dead Sea Scrolls for 14 years.
He was an ordained minister, but he was also, in his study of theology, became agnostic when he started realizing that there was all these different religions that had similar stories, and he found all these different connections, and he was trying to figure out what the origins of all these stories were.
Well, after studying the Dead Sea Scrolls for, I think it was 14 years before he wrote this book, He decided that all of Christianity was a massive misunderstanding.
And what it was originally about was these stories, this collection of stories that were about fertility rituals and psychedelic mushroom use.
And he traced the word Jesus back to an ancient Sumerian word that was a mushroom covered in God's semen.
And that when God would come on the earth, that's what rain was.
Rain was God coming on the earth.
And that these mushrooms would rise up out of the ground, they would eat them and trip their fucking balls off, right?
People that were foraging for food, especially back when there was no agriculture, right?
I mean, it was touch and go.
You could easily starve to death.
A bad winter, a drought, people would starve to death.
It was very, very common.
So they would take...
Foraging extremely serious and they knew what they could eat and they knew what they couldn't eat.
Well, they knew that there was a relationship between carnivorous trees and coniferous trees would grow these weird looking shiny red and white mushrooms under them.
That's what Coniferous trees is pine trees.
That's what we use for Christmas trees.
Those red and white packages, they are like the shiny packages underneath the Christmas tree.
They are the color of Santa Claus.
They're common in Siberia.
They're eaten constantly by caribou.
Caribou are reindeer.
Reindeer are addicted to these to the point where when people are having psychedelic mushroom rituals and they go outside to take a leek, The caribou will knock them over to get to the Amanita muscaria piss in the sand, because they smell the Amanita muscaria in the piss.
And one of the ways these guys trip their balls off is they eat the mushroom and then they drink their own urine.
They have a second process of this.
Here's where it gets even crazier.
In the times in Siberia where it would become extremely snowy, when the shaman would visit, the way they would get into the house is through the fucking chimney.
Because the door would be snowed in.
So they would climb in through the chimney.
I mean, there's so many parallels to Santa Claus and to Christianity, to this one mushroom that they think was a massive part of shamanistic rituals.
So he wrote this book called The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross that was bought out by the Catholic Church.
This I have to verify.
But I do know that they stopped production of it.
I don't know if it was bought out by the Catholic Church.
That's always been what's been told to me.
But I do know that they stopped production of it forever.
He came out with another book called The Dead Sea Scrolls and The Christian Myth, which is still available.
Then, more recently, like really recently, within the last decade, a guy named Jan Irvin republished the John Marco Allegro books with permission from his family.
I think it might have actually been one of those things where when a book is over 25 years old, it becomes like public domain or something like that, too.
But this book and this story behind it is incredibly fascinating.
And what he's basically saying is that, and it makes sense, if you were living thousands of years ago and you stumbled upon these psychedelic mushrooms and you took them, you would experience God.
You literally would think that that psychedelic state was you communicating with God.
They would want to hide those from the Romans.
So they hid them in parables and stories, and he explains what the original meaning of all these parables and stories are.
are because, of course, you're going from ancient Hebrew, which is an extremely complicated language that also involves numbers.
The letters are also numbers.
And then that's translated to Latin and to Greek and then eventually to English.
So a lot is lost in that translation.
So it really takes a linguist and a biblical scholar to kind of understand whether or not what this guy is saying is correct.
I'm obviously not one of those.
So I'm just talking shit.
But there's so many parallels, it's almost like, how could it be just coincidental that Santa Claus is red and white, that Santa Claus likes reindeers, that the Christmas tree is something that we use and the presents are under the Christmas tree, that Santa Claus lives in the fucking North Pole, which is Siberia, which is where caribou live, and which is where these mushrooms are very common.
I was walking with the kids in a park downtown Toronto and I look over and there's this massive, it's on my Instagram, massive yellow kind of looks like goo growing on this tree and it was a premature chicken of the woods and it just looked like this blob and then if I were to leave it, it would start to kind of shelf out into like shelf kind of mushrooms.
And so I left it for like a week and went back and harvested it.
Well, I was reading that, like, the philocybin is linked to curing depression and things like that, which I don't know a lot about, but it's fascinating, the effects they have on people.
The most fascinating of all the mushroom theories is by the late, great Terence McKenna.
And his brother, Dennis McKenna, who's still alive and a scientist, Explained it on my first podcast with him.
So if anybody's interested, find that and download it.
Dennis is a brilliant guy.
And the theory is called the stoned ape theory.
And this coincides with what we're talking about, about hunting and consumption of meat leading to us becoming humans.
There's a doubling of the human brain size over a period of two million years.
It's like apparently one of the biggest mysteries in the fossil record.
They do not understand why something so important like the thing that actually created the theory of I mean that of evolution explained evolution like this very organ Doubled over a period of two million years.
I don't know why Terence believes that the reason coincided with climate change and that as the climate changed These rainforests receded into grasslands and these lower hominids, like our ancestors, came down from the trees and started experimenting with new food sources.
And one of the things they experimented with was psychedelic mushrooms.
And that through psilocybin, which they found by flipping over cow patties, a couple things happened.
One, it increased visual acuity.
Mushrooms, especially in low doses, increased visual acuity, which would make them better hunters.
They could see better, made them more intuitive, made them more creative.
And also, the way Dennis explains the effect of psilocybin on the brain, he was saying that it could have possibly led to the development of language, and that all of this could have come out of The consumption of psychedelic mushrooms.
I was a 13-year-old kid, and I wanted a part-time job, you know, like a newspaper route or something like that.
And I went to, I lived in a little town on this horse farm in the country, and I rode my bike down to this gas station, and I applied to pump gas.
And this guy had a diner on the corner and was like, hey, man, I don't need anyone to pump gas, but can you cook?
And I grew up cooking at home with my mom because she would work late and she would call me on her way home and tell me how to start dinner.
So she'd be like, turn on the oven, get the chicken out of the fridge, get the shake and bake, and she'd walk me through it.
And I'd start dinner and she'd get home and finish it.
So I told her, yeah, I can cook or whatever.
And he had me in there dropping the fry baskets and flipping eggs and doing the brunch shift on the weekend.
And it just stuck.
It's one of those things that you just kind of grow up doing.
I wanted money to buy skateboards and pot and stupid shit.
And yeah, it just kind of stuck.
And then all through high school, I had a job cooking.
And I really started to struggle with it because I was taking all these world issues courses and learning about the environment and watching these documentaries about food.
And I didn't know how being a chef could help change the world.
And how am I going to make a difference as a chef?
And then I had my daughter when I was 19, and I had all this experience cooking, and I thought, well, you know, I'm just going to go to chef school and make a go of this.
Like, I've got all this experience.
I'm already this far ahead.
And it was having kids at such a young age that really made me focus and was like, okay, like, I have a job to do.
And I fell in love with food.
I was a 17-year-old kid with a vegetable garden.
Like, who does that?
And then I got into hunting and foraging and learning about food, and I totally just fell in love with it.
You know, I definitely want to do some more kind of studying about native and indigenous cooking.
You know, traveling across the country is something I want to do and learning from the indigenous communities.
But sort of my take on it is, you know, if there wasn't these farmed animals, what would we eat?
And for me, it's morels, it's maple syrup, it's the wild leeks in this photo, it's deer and turkey and rabbit and these things we serve at Antler because that's what's growing around us in Canada.
One of the things we do that's kind of cool is I know the indigenous cultures would make cedar tea and it's full of vitamin C and minerals and nutrients.
But we do a cedar sorbet.
So we boil cedar leaves and then I just add sugar and make it into like an ice.
So, it's interesting that when you go to the woods to forage for plant life, it's totally legal.
You could sell it.
But if you forage for animal life, you can't do that.
I think that is because of market hunting that really decimated most of the population of North American game animals in the 1800s, early into the 1900s.
I do think that, you know, I think it's people's right to be able to eat wild meat.
I think that as a human being, you have the right to try that.
And if you're not a hunter, if you don't know how to go do it, you have the right to at least try it.
And I do know, actually, in Newfoundland, they're allowed to serve wild game, and the hunter has to go and get a permit to sell, and then he has to bring it to a butcher that has a permit to process it and expect it, and then that butcher can then sell it to a restaurant.
I think just staying alive, being a human is very complex.
And I think we have very simplistic ways of looking at it.
I also think that it's entirely possible that plants are communicating with each other and they have a level of intelligence that we don't totally understand.
And that's supported by data.
That's supported by more and more research every day.
They're finding out that plants have some interconnected network of communication with each other and that they recognize when they're being eaten and they change their flavor profile to make themselves taste terrible to animals that are eating them.
There's some communication between them, and they're some sort of a primitive life form that many argue are far more complex than things that vegans won't eat, like mollusks.
Like mollusks, although we think of them as animals, they're the simplest, dumbest fucking things on earth.
And you vote with your dollars that you're spending.
If you go to the store and you buy organic eggs and you buy the healthier version, yes, you're paying an extra buck or two bucks or whatever it is, but crack open an egg from the mass-produced place and you crack open an egg from the organic place.
The organic ones are bright orange and super dark and even the yolk is really thick.
And then the other one, it's pale and runny and yellow and you crack them and the yolks break sometimes and they're just like, it's garbage.
And who knows what's in them and what conditions those chickens are living in.
And you give people the option to make the most amount of money and not have to account for ethics or cruelty standards or whatever issues were in place that allowed factory farms to materialize.
That's one of the worst...
Worst pieces of evidence about the cruelty of human beings.
It's one of the worst.
It's horrific.
I mean, and it's something that I think we should really collectively do something about.
And I think it's one of the things that really ramps up I get it.
I get it.
But to go after someone like you is, in my opinion, so incredibly misguided.
And it's why I asked you to come on, because I thought it was so frustrating.
And watching you carve that venison up in front of those people, what were they screaming at you?
Like a lot of like what you're dealing with with these animal rights activists, they're so engrossed in this struggle.
And it's the part of their daily existence.
And they're angry and sad.
There's one crazy video where this lady goes into this restaurant and she starts yelling in front of everybody about her friend and this beautiful creature that just wants to live.
And it's a chicken.
She's talking about a chicken.
And they're like, my friend the chicken was killed.
And it's like, what?
And everybody in the restaurant is like, what the fuck?
You know, I get that there's protesting, and it's our fundamental right to protest and have freedom of speech and have these things, but that's not protesting.
Yeah, and the funny thing was, like, we've had vegan and vegetarian items on our menu since 2015 when we opened.
And so I think it was like the second or third week they came, we thought, okay, we're going to feature one of our vegan dishes on the sign, and hopefully, like, that makes them happy.
And so we feature one of our vegan dishes on the sign.
And then we saw from their online post that they thought that we made their posts where we made them change a meat dish to a vegan dish.
Um, and yeah, and I use all the bones to make a stock.
And then when I, you know, a lot of the cuts, uh, and one of the reasons I want to write this book is to teach hunters how to use those tough cuts.
One of my favorite parts of, uh, of the deer and different animals is the neck and the neck has got all this really super flavorful kind of gelatinous meat kind of in between the cartilage and stuff like that.
Uh, and you make a stew with that stuff and it is unbelievably tasty.
Um, and And a lot of guys, when they go hunting, they kind of breast out the birds and they leave their little legs and they don't really know how to cook the legs of a turkey or a duck.
So that's one of the reasons why I want to write this book and to really educate people how to use those tougher cuts that can be kind of tricky to cook.
Well, it's one of the reasons why it's so kind of crazy that you're the guy that they picked on and not the butcher shop across the street or not some burger joint down the street that's getting factory farmed meat.
You do have a respect and appreciation for the wildlife.
But this ideological battleground on their side, it doesn't leave any room for giving in.
There's no room for reasons.
You're either an animal murderer or you're the most amazing person ever because you're vegan.
Go vegan.
It's a new thing in terms of first world problems and first world countries.
I mean, people have been eating vegetarian dishes forever.
But in terms of being ideologically rabid about your You know, your position.
It's unfortunate because we've had a lot of support from our community and Canada and the international community.
And we're actually getting support from other vegans and vegetarian people writing to us and saying, hey, these aren't our beliefs.
We're really sorry what you're going through.
You know, you have our support.
And some of our customers are actually vegan.
And they come for, like, vegetarian risotto and, like, mushroom risotto that they know are, like, you know, really cool wild mushrooms that you can't buy in the store.
So, you know, it is unfortunate.
It's kind of sad.
But, you know, we're just going to continue, you know, being who we are.
And hopefully that, you know, like, none of them have actually come in for dinner, you know?