The Keri Croft Show
The Keri Croft Show
Benji from Yellowbird Foodshed on Conscious Food, Big Energy & the Truth About Grocery Stores
What do you get when you mix a rebellious heart, a deep-rooted love for real food, and a personality bigger than life itself? You get Benji—and if you don’t know him yet, buckle up.
In this episode, I sit down with the founder of Yellowbird Food Shed, a man on a mission to radically rethink the way we eat. From slinging chickens out of his garage to building a full-blown grocery revolution, Benji’s story is wild, inspiring, and refreshingly honest.
We talk about why most grocery store food is an illusion, how he raised his kids inside the business (literally), and what it really takes to build a family-first, food-conscious life from scratch.
We get into:
- The wild story of how Yellowbird started
- Homeschooling, screen time, and raising kids inside a business
- How Benji’s wife Sarah is the real MVP of their food-first lifestyle
- What it actually looks like to build a home around intention, not convenience
This conversation will have you laughing, thinking, and maybe even questioning everything in your fridge.
🔗 Learn more and shop Yellowbird: https://yellowbirdfs.com
Hey there you beautiful badass. Welcome to the Keri Croft Show. I'm your host, keri Croft, delivering you stories that get you pumped up and feeling like the unstoppable savage that you are. So grab your coffee, put on your game face and let's do this thing. Baby, ready to elevate your self-care game? Bosco Beauty Bar is a modern med spa offering everything from cosmetic injectables, lasers and microneedling to medical grade facials and skincare. Conveniently located in Clintonville, grandview, powell and Easton. Making self-care a priority has never been easier. Use code croft for 25 off your first visit.
Speaker 1:Summer's coming in hot, but is your skin summer ready? Fine lines, sun damage, melasma if these are cramping your vibe, the moxie laser at donaldson will leave you glowing, nervous about lasering your face. I tried moxie and it was quick and gentle, perfect for first timers and all skin types. And my results 10 out of 10. And if you're a first timer at Donaldson, mention the Keri Croft Show for $100 off your Moxie treatment. Don't say I've never done anything for you. You are such a Benji. If ever anyone was a Benji, you're a Benji.
Speaker 2:Yep, always have been. I mean my full name's Benjamin. But my mom always said ever since she was a kid she wanted a Benji. And I was her first son and she was never a doubt.
Speaker 1:Well welcome to the Cary Croft Show.
Speaker 2:Glad to be here, Cary Croft.
Speaker 1:So we went to the Yellowbird Puked. Yeah, we went to the Yellowbird Puked. Yeah, we went to Yellowbird.
Speaker 2:It was a whole thing.
Speaker 1:And then we saw you and your environment and then we pulled you back. We brought the country mouse into the city and brought you into our environment.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:How did you feel about us when we first pulled up? I mean, we have to set the scene, though, because we pull up to Mount Vernon. Kate is puking on the way there. I thought we were out of the woods. I'm going to introduce myself to you, basically walking up to you to give you a hug and Kate is in the bushes puking.
Speaker 2:Oh, stark white. I knew it was over because of the way she looked, but then she came back full of color and it was like you know. I've got a daughter who is 19 who has had a whole life of since she was in the car seat in the back puking up oatmeal. I know motion sickness and so when I see it it's easy to see and it goes away quickly If you can puke.
Speaker 2:you know there's times when she can't and then it's like another hour before she kind of calms down. But yeah, that was the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Yes, it was, and yeah, then you got to see our place.
Speaker 1:I loved it. Yeah, and tell the folks at home, like, tell in an elevator pitch, yellowbird.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we are a food company that carries a whole line of groceries, but imagine that you could know the producer, the person who milked the cow or grew the zucchini. Those are the people that we've gone to directly and figured out, in my opinion, where the best products in Ohio are and in the Midwest, and we buy it from them and then we make it available through an online store, just like you're shopping for a sweater from J Crew Mostly central Ohio, but also I'm from Finley. So once every two weeks we shoot up to the northwest corner of Ohio, to Finley Lima Bluff in that area, and deliver up there, just because we still have a. It's like a. You know we're a band that started in Finley and you know if we go there we still sell out our show.
Speaker 1:So uh, well, because when you got Benji, how do you not? Yeah?
Speaker 2:right, yeah, headliner, you know and your son, his.
Speaker 1:You know you no one can see this, but his son's here too, sitting here absorbing it all. I'd love to know how cool you really are in his eyes. He just turned 17.
Speaker 2:Imagine this. Not cool at all, but here's what we've done, um, over the course of our of our life. We decided, my wife and I, early on that we were whatever we were going to build. We were going to do it with the kids. And so we homeschool and I've sat in the highest level boardroom of the biggest companies in Columbus for a meeting to pitch Yellowbird in some way, shape or fashion and, from the beginning, dance. My daughter or AC or Wes or Moses now my nine-year-old have always been with me. I've never gone partially out of my own squirminess and like I need somebody with me, like my binky. But also they've now grown up and seen the inside workings of it all from day one and it's fascinating to just watch that experiment unfold as they turn 13, 16, 19, and what they do and how they're doing their life. It's incredible. So, if anything you know, the greatest achievement so far has been, you know, head and shoulders, the kids and they're watching them do life with us.
Speaker 1:AC. Have you ever been on a podcast? I have an extra microphone. If you want to come, Okay, cool, I'm just making sure I didn't want to. You know, pass up. Do you want to pass up the opportunity I get that? You're too cool. When I was 17, man, I remember thinking I was like the coolest thing ever.
Speaker 2:Well, I don't know if I thought I was cool, but I definitely thought I knew something.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And I was like well that you know, the older you get, the more you know that you know nothing, that you know nothing.
Speaker 2:Right, where's your passion for food come from? Um, it started with having kids. We, um you know my wife is very intuitive, uh and um, very connected to the universe, and there was something that was nagging at her that was telling her when I stop breastfeeding this child, I'm going to need to feed it food, and the food that we're eating something isn't right. And so we just started looking into stuff. Well, the very first thing was raw milk. In Ohio, which is an illegal product, you can't sell raw milk and there's reasons for that. But we figured out that we thought that was the best thing for this child, and so we started drinking it, we started getting it, we started feeding it to dance, we started building a diet around raw dairy. We were making our own yogurt, our own cheese or you know all that stuff that comes in that vein.
Speaker 2:And then we went to sourdough and sourdough starter for bread. And then we went to getting some chickens and having our own eggs and then growing our own veggies, and then finding out that we wanted to find pasture raised or grass fed animals. Eventually, that then turned into other people mostly because I wouldn't stop talking about it wanting to eat that way as well, or at least try that. And so when we would go out to a farm to get, let's say, pasture raised chickens chickens that were eating grass and pecking through, you know, dirt and scratching, and that's not the conventional way to raise chickens, because it's not, it's expensive we started bringing back chicken for other people and selling it out of our garage. Hey, we got a whole cooler of whole chickens here. There's 15 of them. We're going to take eight of them for our family. But then somebody wanted two, so we got them two, and you know, you start slinging food around and then pretty soon you're like well, I mean, I'm going to need a refrigerator or a freezer or whatever. And then that then morphs into the next thing, to the next thing, to the thing that you saw, which was the Bedouin tent of thousands of square feet of refrigerated space and freezer space, because we're now feeding hundreds, if not thousands, of families that way that also want that and are also figuring out how to get it but can't get to the farm. Who in their right mind and schedule has the time to go to six farms every week to pick up their groceries? Not many. That was a very old school way of doing food. And then when the new supermarket came in Piggly Wiggly was actually the first supermarket it was like, oh, all of that food can come into one central location. And in the beginning it probably was a lot of farmers bringing their food to a central hub in the middle of a city or a town that they could say, well, here's Gary's milk. Instead of going out to Gary's place to get your milk, you can just come here and get it. It's right here because he's bringing it here and now it's closer to home.
Speaker 2:Jump ahead 50 years and you've got, of course, big corporate, big ag, big pharma, big, everything that's just out for that capture of the market and the food integrity along the way has been sacrificed and sliced and paper cut 8,000 times to be able to get to millions of people in supermarkets all across the country. And along the way, I think the thing that has been. Well, there's many things that have been sacrificed, but one of them is nutrition and health the health of the land, health of the animal, ultimately the health of the human. Because of it, you can't divorce all those things. It's a trickle up or down effect and so, knowing that, it's a little bit of a veil.
Speaker 2:You know, over our eyes it's a little bit of a catch. Or you know kind of ignore the. You know snapping fingers over here because I'm doing a little something shady over here. You know snapping fingers over here because I'm doing a little something shady over here, and if I know that that's happening in anything in life, I'm going to be, I'm going to point my finger at the thing and be like no, everybody, look at the thing. And that's what happened with food. It was the thing that I just went so deep on that I got to the point of well, there's no turning back, this is the thing, and I'm going to shout it from the rooftops and I guess I probably better figure out how to get people the food that I'm talking about, because that's going to be the next step.
Speaker 1:Yeah, walk the walk. Something tells me you're a pretty influential guy, though. So just your energy in general, I feel like you have a believability about you and you're a charisma. Have you always kind of been like that where, like if you got on to something, yeah, I trace it back.
Speaker 2:The only thing I can remember is one time in eighth grade I was going on a trip with a youth group or something and we had those little cards that have the stickers inside of them that if you buy a Domino's pizza you get a free Domino's pizza, and you sell the card for $5 bucks and there's like $50 worth of value in there. I don't remember the trip, but I remember that I was relentless with those cards. My friends, my friends, families, my friends, whatever it was like the thing, and I don't even know now that I even cared about the trip as much as I cared about like, can I sell these cards? And that was the buzz. And so I've always been that way.
Speaker 2:My mom says you know, if I get something in my head, I'm relentless, and until I get it or achieve it or find it or whatever it is, there's no, you know, and my daughter and I wouldn't have believed her, or I kind of would have believed her, except that now that you raise a kid that does that, my daughter's that way and my son's that way too, but dance especially. And I'm like, oh, that must be me. And my mom telling me, I'm telling now that to dance and she's like, no, I'm not. And I'm like, oh, that's me. That definitely is me.
Speaker 1:I have such the reason why we went to you in the first place. Besides that, you were just charismatic. I'm like this guy.
Speaker 2:I'm going to love this guy.
Speaker 1:But aside from that, I'm always curious about the food that we eat and I'm just I'm a busy person, so I don't cook, and so I'm always like am I just that person? That just kind of doesn't. I push it aside. But even when I go into Whole Foods or Giant Eagle or whatever and I'm like the produce is like meh, where is this coming from? If I'm getting the salmon it says like farm raised. You know, I just almost feel like shackled to the food system.
Speaker 1:What would you do if you went into Giant Eagle and you had to shop there right now? Like, would you just be like.
Speaker 2:So how would you?
Speaker 1:even go through the produce section.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's. It's really really hard, really hard. I mean when we travel we take all of our own food because I can't trust being somewhere else and being able to find what I know is clean somewhere else. I mean it's nearly impossible. You know there are. It's really a marketing game in the supermarket, right? You're looking at signs, labels, ingredient lists and people know the food manufacturers know they know how to get you addicted to food through crunch and flavor, and a lot of it's fake flavor and these are scientific studies that have been done that target addictive, you know, whatever it might be, because they want to sell that product.
Speaker 2:Now let's just skip the whole inside of the grocery store and pretend like we're not going to go down those aisles. We're just going to stick to the outside and look at produce, look at meat or fish or whatever it might be. The problem is is that once you know something about any of it, it automatically in my mind is going to be a well, there's, no, there's. If that's corrupt, then it's all corrupt, like if the if you know if they're cutting corners and I know what they're doing to put those eggs in that carton to make it seem like those chickens are living the life that I, that life that I know they should be living, and they're not. Which they're not? Because I've seen it with my own eyes.
Speaker 2:Then I can't trust any of this because it's all the same companies. I mean, you've seen the charts where there's like 8,000 brands and they all flow up into five companies. It's Pepsi and Unilever and Johnson Johnson, whatever it is. It's all these big giant whatevers and they buy all of the. You know, pepsi just bought Siete, which was a great brand that was started by a family that was like we're going to start an avocado oil, cassava flour, you know, gluten free chip.
Speaker 2:Well, they got huge and they created a great line of product. And of course, pepsi buys them for a billion dollars. And listen, if somebody offered you a billion dollars, would you not sell your company as well, no matter how you started, with whatever mission you started? So I don't blame them. But you know, now Pepsi owns Siete and it's like well, am I still getting the same product? Because I know that Pepsi is not great. So I don't go into the grocery store to answer your question. But if I do, I'm there for bananas and I just get organic because I'm like well, I don't trust it, but I still want bananas for muffins or smoothies or whatever we're making Avocados.
Speaker 1:Isn't it helpful that they have like the hard exterior? Isn't it kind of helpful? Yeah, maybe, at least mentally.
Speaker 2:Yeah, maybe that could be it, but you know, I don't ever buy meat. I don't ever buy salmon. I don't eat meat from anywhere If I, if it isn't from one of my farms. If I go to a restaurant, I don't eat meat. Haven't for years. If I go to the grocery store, I don't buy meat there. I really don't care what the label says. I know what's behind that label and that's the hardest part. So, to answer your question in a in a full fledged way, you are. If you are not as as I don't know if what the word is um, sold out or sold to, as I am or somebody like me is to that process, you're going to find it incredibly difficult to eat. You can eat healthy. It's not like you're. It's not like everything in there is like complete garbage. But I don't trust it. It's like it's kind of a, just like you said, you're always going to have that feeling in the pit of your stomach. That's like I don't know about this. It's just something just doesn't seem right about this.
Speaker 1:How do you manage, though, like just the day-to-day life of having kids Like AC if you guys wanted to get a pizza, or let's say he's like, I really want some Skittles.
Speaker 2:They don't eat Skittles.
Speaker 1:They don't no Ever.
Speaker 2:No, never. I mean. I have a nine-year-old who, during soccer season, won't touch anything that has sugar in it white sugar or like added sugar and he'll look at, he'll know. And he'll look at, he'll know and he'll. Whatever he eats, a whole food diet, it's his choice, it's not, I'm like listen, moses, take a break.
Speaker 2:Bud Like there's. This is bare, like you know, this has barely sugar in it and he's in and he won't eat it. Now I'm like, okay, you know, whatever they, they've never been to fast food restaurants. The first time that AC went to get fast food with a friend from Wendy's he was probably 13. And he's describing the experience to me like I wasn't raised on fast food and it began like this Dad, we pull up to this building and there's a, there's a, a faceless voice coming out of a box asking us what we want. We tell it what we want and then we pull up to a window and an arm reaches out and takes our money. And then there's another window and immediately when we pull up to the next window, it's almost like the food was already made. It's in there, ready to go, and they just handed it to us and I said, well, was it any good? And he's like, no, it was disgusting.
Speaker 1:See, this is fascinating and like also makes me feel like I'm such a failure. No, you're not. You're just not crazy.
Speaker 2:I'm such a failure? No, you're not. You're just not crazy.
Speaker 1:So can you walk me through a typical day of eating at your house? How does that go?
Speaker 2:You know, the morning looks like this we get up, we go do. We get up early and we do whoever you know, ac and I do yoga and then do a workout or go run in the woods or something before everybody gets up in the dark Usually in the summer it's nicer because it's light earlier Get home, we start doing chores. Chores are not crazy. It's like now it's go out and let the chickens out or feed the chickens, put water in the and I'm not talking about hundreds of chickens, I'm talking about five chickens, just our family's worth of eggs, really, although we eat way more than that. We have to get sweet grass, dairy eggs, but everybody else starts to get up and starts to get around and get their stuff in order and then we make eggs. So it's going to be full fat butter on a pan and we all know how everybody likes their eggs different. We have a couple.
Speaker 2:My wife at the same time is making gluten-free oatmeal-based muffins and also scones for a coffee shop in town. Three or four days a week she's doing this, so we're also now eating her oatmeal-based gluten-free muffins, maybe with it. If we like those, which we do, of course, they're the best. We're having coffee, then we're done and breakfast is over. And you know, sometimes I mean on a weekend we'll make oat flour waffles or you know, by taking oats and putting them in a grinder and grinding oats and making oat flour and then using that to make a gluten-free waffle. A couple of people in our house are gluten-free they have to be and so we make most everything gluten-free.
Speaker 2:If we're thinking about pizza, let me just pretend like we're having pizza for dinner. If we're thinking about pizza, my wife the day before has fed the sourdough starter that's on the counter so that it will grow and be ready to rock and roll. So that looks like giving a living bacteria culture, flour and water and it starts to grow and bubble and create science. That she then has ready and kind of multiplies it out, depending on how many crusts we're going to make. And, um, that's kind of sitting on the counter percolating.
Speaker 2:We go through the morning lunches, leftovers from the night before, the night before. Our kids have a joke where we were every night. They say what's for dinner and we say it's something new tonight. Guys, listen, here's what we're going to do. We're going to get a pan out and we're going to chop up veggies. We're going to make veggies, we're going to make rice, we're going to make eggs. Maybe we're going to put that. We're going to like fry that kind of stir it and fry it, add some sauce to it. We're Ooh, something new stir fry veggies cook veggies and meat and rice.
Speaker 2:So you know we've got some version of leftovers for the next day because we've made enough that we can eat lunch the next day. So we get all that out. I go home every single day for lunch. We get all that out and we reheat it and we make it. And you know, at the same time somebody might be getting creative and they're like oh, I'm going to throw a tortilla which we buy there's good tortillas. We don't make our own tortillas.
Speaker 2:There are ways to cut corners in a good way and I'm going to make a cheese quesadilla or a chicken and cheese quesadilla with chicken leftover from the night before. Or you know, we do all kinds of stuff with leftovers. I've made the craziest mashups of an, you know, emptying the fridge out, essentially into a pan, warming it up and then eating that on a chip or a quesadilla or whatever. So that's lunch. It's always leftovers. Then through the afternoon, you know whatever. And then into the evening. At this point you've got to get started at four o'clock. Let's say, if you want to eat at five 30, you need to, really. And we're going to make pizzas that night. Sarah probably gets started at about four starts to get the dough out and work the crusts out, and roll and stretch and whatever you know, somebody is going to need this version and somebody is going to need this version. I don't eat nightshades, which is tomatoes, peppers, whatever. So I'm not going to have a red sauce pizza, I'm going to need garlic butter.
Speaker 1:Okay, hold on a minute. I love you. So that's the Tom Brady thing.
Speaker 2:Well, for me it was a heart thing I had for two years I had an irregular heartbeat that I could feel. I could feel the irregularity of it and I went in and got tested. I wore monitors, I did all kinds of stuff and I was having 10,000 occurrences a day. To put that in perspective, you have a hundred thousand heartbeats a day on average. So one out of every 10 heartbeat for me was like boom, boom, boom, real hard delay. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.
Speaker 2:They did the test and they're like listen with your heart, it's either plumbing or electrical. That's what they, that's what my guy said. He's like if it's electrical or if it's plumbing, it's dangerous. If it's electrical, it's usually not. For me it was an electrical thing.
Speaker 2:I tried everything. I mean I'll, I'll, you know, if you tell me that I'm going to feel my best if I stand on my right foot and rub my tummy and, you know, recite verses from the Bible, I will. I tried everything food, wise, you know, exercise wise, breathing treatments, all like you know, breath work. Nothing worked. And so I kind of just was like well, I'm just going to live with this because you could. The next stage would be like surgery, like get an ablation and they can do things which I'm sure help a lot of people. I really wasn't ready to go that down that path.
Speaker 2:Somebody started telling me about histamine intolerance. I began to do a deep dive on that and what I found in some medical journals late one night, just up reading, was there was a correlation between with a patient, between nightshades which is plants that basically grow at night, so think tomatoes, potatoes, peppers, eggplant and histamine reactions. And so I thought you know what? I have a bunch of customers that can't eat nightshades. They put it on their like when they sign up. I'm allergic to nightshades, which I never one, I never gave any credence to. I'm like, well, that's kind of crap.
Speaker 1:It's a vegetable right.
Speaker 2:It's fine, that's crap, they just don't like them. But number two oh well, I've never tried that, let's try that. And within two weeks I went from 10,000. I could feel it every single time to nothing, yeah, and I was like, well, I don't know if this is real or whatever they call it. Like you know the placebo effect or whatever. I don't really care. I'm going to stop eating nightshades. And you know, there's times when something will be in something or it's not. Like I have. You know I die if I have them, but for two years I've lived without the. I mean, it's torture. If you have a heart situation like you know, it's bad, it's not fun, and so I'll do anything to avoid that. And if it means I can't have nightshades, then I can't have nightshades so that's the no sauce thing on the pizza.
Speaker 1:Alright, so keep going back to the pizza.
Speaker 2:So you got no nightshades. You got a lot of shit going on in the house gluten free, nightshade free.
Speaker 1:Okay, so your wife's name is Sarah.
Speaker 2:Yep, god bless her. She's serving it up. She is absolutely a saint.
Speaker 1:Stress and inflammation take a toll on your body and your wellness. Relax, restore and rejuvenate at Panacea Luxury Spa Boutique. Book any service of $100 or more and enjoy two hours in our luxury amenities. Unwind in our Himalayan salt saunas, recharge in our wet retreat space with a eucalyptus steam room, hot hydrotherapy pool and cold plunge, then drift into deep relaxation with our hanging loungers. What's your panacea? We'll help you find it.
Speaker 1:Listen, nobody loves Laundry Day, but thanks to the fluff, laundry is officially off your to-do list. Just schedule your pickup on the fluff app, toss your dirty clothes in any bag you've got and leave it on your front porch. The fluff handles the rest. Returning your laundry fresh folded and in our reusable vinyl bag in just 24 to 48 hours. Flat rate pricing means you stuff the bag full and, yes, pickup and delivery are totally free. In Central Ohio, use promo code KERRY for 20% off your first order. Ps, ask about our monthly subscription to keep life simple and your laundry done.
Speaker 1:Who says you need a special occasion to feel like a celeb? I mean, stress is real, life is busy and your scalp, yeah. It deserves some love too. That's where Headspace by Mia Santiago comes in. Treat yourself or someone who deserves it to a luxurious scalp treatment and a killer blowout or cut. Because nothing says main character energy. Honey like a fresh style from celebrity stylist Mia and her team. Honey like a fresh style from celebrity stylist Mia and her team. And because we love a good deal, mention the Keri Croft Show and get 20% off your service or any gift card for somebody in your life that you love. Headspace by Mia Santiago. Because great hair days shouldn't be rare.
Speaker 2:So my son Moses is nine and he has this little sore under his eye. So my son Moses is nine and he has this little sore under his eye and kind of like he's breaking out. You know, and Sarah tells me this is over the last couple of weeks, this is how new this is. She's like, she's like I think it's viral because he gets it on his mouth too. And she's like, but she's like, babe, he gets it every July and I'm like, well, I do recognize it, but that's weird that you had correlated that specifically to a month. So she starts going through her phone and goes back he's nine, goes back to when he was two. Last night we're literally sitting in bed, I'm reading and she's looking through her phone and she starts showing me July, june, july of 2000,. You know, when he's eight, whatever year, that would be 2015, let's say 2016, 2017. He's growing same sore every July under his eye and gets it in his mouth a little bit and it goes away. She's convinced it's viral. It may or may not be, I don't know what it is, but that type of thing, how does a woman, or her in particular, maybe men do it too, but I notice it more and seems like in women, have that intuition and that recall and that gut, whatever to connect the dots in a way that brings it back to. She can show me on her phone, every year but one, that that exact same thing pops up on Moses's eyelid. So she's dialed into every human in the house just like that, including me. So, um one, a tremendous burden to carry. Um, I wouldn't wish it on anyone. Number two she steps up underneath of it and carries it like a fricking rock star, of course, and is figuring out through herbs and sleep and exercise and sunlight and food and allergies and whatever, to coordinate this thing that we call a home. Right, it's unbelievable, but that's to give a little insight into Sarah. So, as I'm talking about breakfast, lunch and dinner. Imagine, though, that it's an ongoing process that is never closed. There's never a closed like well, now we start from scratch. There is no scratch. We started from scratch 15 years ago, and this is an ongoing, perpetual thing that feeds into the next day, the next week. We know that if we want something I can't think of an example off the top of my head, but let's say sauerkraut, and we want sauerkraut, in which we have a great producer for sauerkraut. So we don't do this anymore, but we've done it before to know.
Speaker 2:Sauerkraut doesn't happen overnight. It's a long process of fermenting cabbage in salt underneath a brine that is created. The cabbage creates it on its own when you put salt on it and smash it and that's then what ferments and the bacteria happens and you get sauerkraut. So if you want sauerkraut and you don't know who to get it from Wholesome Valley Yellowbird Food Shed, then you've got to make it yourself. And in doing that you better have started that weeks ago, right? Because it takes weeks to make. So it's these ancient crafts, these ancient arts that actually give the food its nutrient value that you can't duplicate just because you want sauerkraut in an hour and you thought about it five minutes ago. It doesn't happen like that. People have made it into a jar that you can get it like that. But if we were 50 years ago, that isn't how it worked. So that's happening, right.
Speaker 2:Stuff's always brewing, bubbling, growing. It's all over the place and we're harnessing it and we're creating product from it, whether it's cottage cheese or and I don't mean the balmer family, I mean somebody cottage cheese, sauerkraut, anything that's fermented. You know, uh, every version of butter, buttermilk, heavy cream. It's all coming from a product called milk out of a cow. A mom has to have a baby to produce milk. Same in cows. So a misnomer would be in my mind. I would think it's like thinking that the pig is all bacon. The bacon is just the belly of the pig. A cow giving milk all year, every day. No, a cow has to have a baby to produce milk. And then, in order for us to drink that milk, what are we doing? We're taking that baby away from the cow to take some of that milk that would be going to the baby to put it in a gallon, to take it home to drink it, to whatever. All of those things. I'm not saying any of it's right or wrong or ethically. You should be deciding. I mean you can decide for yourself. What I'm saying is let's just know. Let's just know where it's all coming from.
Speaker 2:Because then when we do sit down now for dinner, we've chopped onions, we've cooked sausage or bacon or whatever we're going to put on the pizza, we've, we've grated cheese, literally, you know, hand grated. The kids take a grater and sit in. Great, you know, we buy cheese and horns six pound horns that we go through weekly. So that's how much cheese we're going through, that's on the pizza, whatever else it might be, any veggie that's in season, anything you know, cooked raw. We like it every way, we've tried it every way.
Speaker 2:But when you sit down after starting at, let's say, four o'clock, at five, thirty or six, and you're eating that pizza that you just made, that you know what's gone into every single cell of that thing. Now you're honoring something. When you sit down, you would never eat that on the fly in a fast-moving scenario, and disregard it, and disregard your relationship to it, because you've put so—and nature has put so much into it to just bring you to that table. Like the miracle of the fact that there's six people around a table, that all are presenting consciousness and are aware that they're sitting there and that they're interacting with all of these things that have had to happen to get that food to the table. At that moment, all of a sudden, you're in. What are you in? You're in worship, you're in reverence, you're in awe, you're in wonder. And we call it pizza and we call it dinner right, we call it family and each other. But what's really happening there? And so doing that a couple times in a row, a couple times in a row you begin to sacrifice everything in order to have it. Because now time doesn't mean anything, because it's like, well, what would we be sacrificing so that we can get somewhere else other than this, other than right here doing this with this food? Now, I'm not saying, you know, we're monks, we still go to soccer practice right after, and then from 630 to 930, you know, crank at the fields with soccer and Sarah coaches two of the boys and now AC's a varsity player. You know, you can be a homeschool kid and still play for your varsity high school team. I didn't know that when we started homeschooling, but it's part of the system. So he plays for the Mount Vernon High School Yellow Jackets varsity soccer team. So he's there five nights a week doing that most of the year, on and on and on. We live a regular life.
Speaker 2:I think in the beginning people, and even me, with homeschooling, we're like well, are you going to socialize your kids? Like that was the big thing when I went 20 years ago and probably still is for people who don't know what homeschooling means. And I'm like, first of all, if you call sending kids to public school socializing them and that that's a good idea. Take a look at the public schools and those children and tell me that that's a good idea. The result speaks for itself. Um, you know, and I'm not the smartest one in the room to talk about it, but there are psychologists out there who have written the books called dopamine nation or whatever it is, and it's like, what are we really doing? And as a society, and that's the question that I continue to ask. It started with food, it went on to family, it went on to school, it went on to whatever. It won't ever stop, it will be the next thing and the next thing.
Speaker 2:I wish that I could not burn fossil fuels and not wear clothes that probably were involved with child labor. It just really is really hard to be that conscious and still function right, and so there are places where I've tried to change my clothing and, like you know, to first of all, just to all fiber, so no plastic, so 100 percent cotton or wool or whatever it might be. You know we're wearing plastic every day and I don't want to get down that tangent, but it's like that's just another layer of when you know, you know, and once you, once you know, and people are like hey, by the way, everything that's polyester, spandex, any of the material that's in any of the sporting, anything that you wear, is plastic. It's fossil fuels, it's oil that got turned into a material that got made because it's soft and easy and doesn't stink when you sweat, it's easy to wash, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 2:But then you listen to a podcast where there's a doctor on there that's like hey, by the way, we're finding microplastics in our hearts and in our brains. Like I'm not going to make the direct correlation that it's the clothing we're wearing, but I'm wearing this 24 hours a day, directly with the biggest organ on my body which is permeable in my skin. You, directly with the biggest organ on my body which is permeable in my skin. You know it doesn't take a rocket scientist, and so all of those things are happening all the time. Now, do I have to turn some of that off and just ignore it Sometimes? Yes, I don't do it with food. Usually, 99.9% of the time, I don't do that with food, but there's just too much, it's too overwhelming, it's too you know what's the 0.001%?
Speaker 2:that I ignore clothing. No, when you say, oh for food. Um, if I'm in a pinch like the, the most desperate I could be where I'm like, oh, I'm um, like I'm my blood sugar's out of whack and I've gotten access to nothing, I'm going to walk into a gas station and find sunflower seeds.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And I'm like. I know those sunflower seeds are genetically modified, I know they're grown with pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, et cetera, but I'm in a desperate situation and everything else in this space is worse. Yeah, so I'll take it.
Speaker 1:What about screen time for the kids? Do you guys have TV?
Speaker 2:Yeah, oh yeah, we screen time for the kids. Do you guys have tv? Yeah, oh yeah, um, we watch a lot of soccer, um. So ac has a phone. Uh, ac has a phone that he never uses, never picks up, never takes in anywhere that we would ever want him to be accessible. Like, hey, we need you to be accessible. Here's a phone. The joke in our house is well, don't call ac because he won't answer. So. But listen, ac's grown up on andrew huberman and on, I mean he knows that answer. So. But listen, ac's grown up on Andrew Huberman and on, I mean he knows that he knows what's happening.
Speaker 2:You know, he's listened to the, to the, the rich roles, the Hubermans, the Peter Attias, the the guys that we trust and um and gals, and knows what it's going to do to his brain and for him he's not willing to make the sacrifice. Now Wesley, who's 13, just almost 14, just got his first phone. There's nothing on it other than texting and you can call. Now he'll walk in the door and he'll look. He'll pick his phone up and take a quick look to see if he's got any messages. He likes to be dialed into the group chat and to the whatever. But he also will tell us hey, you know, I'm averaging 32 minutes a day screen time and most of it's brawl stars or something that's like. I don't know what it is, but whatever it is, ac's approved it, which for me, ac's the gatekeeper.
Speaker 2:Now AC's already proved his mettle. He's the one that now will then go to the boys lower than him and talk about like, hey, this is what we're going to do and what we're not going to do. I believe this, knowing who I was and I didn't have a phone because it wasn't part of my generation, but I was going to tell my parents anything that they wanted to hear so that I could do whatever I wanted to do. I'm not going to regulate their phones, anything that I figure out how to do search, find and whatever. They've got the next step ahead of me or they're already five steps ahead. I don't have the margin in my own life to try to figure out how to track their phone usage. So forget about it. You're not going to have it in your room. That's a rule. You're not going to have it anywhere. You're going to have it in a public setting, which is our. We have a big open living room, dining room, so all the screens are going to live in that space and you're going to. If you're going to be on them, that's fine, but you're going to be on them with the rest of us. You're not going into seclusion to do whatever you want to do with them and there's no objection to that.
Speaker 2:My daughter maybe would have been the one to object to that, but I wasn't going to pick that fight with her. I was already fighting with her in eight other places. I'm not going to also try to regulate all of this stuff on a screen. So her screen time would be worse than the rest of us, but at the same time she also carried a full I mean near full-time jobs and she's 16, at a coffee shop and has more money saved than I've ever had saved in my life at any one time, including right now, and lives in her own apartment at 19 with a roommate and is a nanny, and you know she's killing it and it, and so I'm like, well, if all the things you could be doing, all the things I was doing, and you have a four hour average screen time, like the rest of your life is pretty regulated, I'm, you know, you, I was doing a lot worse and I didn't have a screen. Yeah, so you know, you just kind of got to pick and choose all those different things and and really it's.
Speaker 2:You know, in the beginning of homeschooling I was, I was reading and studying about like Jeffersonian learning, which is like you know, thomas Jefferson, these guys that were brilliant. You know what were they doing. They were teaching themselves how to learn anything. I'm not going to teach, I mean AC, and he's an exception and he's very special in this way not going to teach, I mean AC, and he's an exception and he's very special in this way.
Speaker 2:But you know we had, we had a curriculum. You know we had online programs and books and we would change it every year. We would get this, we'd get this, you'd try this, you'd do this. I mean, he's going to go into the last two years of his high school. He'll do a college career plus thing at our like our career center in Mount Vernon and he'll graduate high school with his high school degree and an associates in like a college degree in business, because that's the program and it's free and it's available and anybody could do it. You have to apply to do it but, like you know, he's going to come out with two years of paid college for for nothing. I mean, you know, pick a, even the average price of a school. Let's say it's $30,000 a year. That's like he's making 30 grand a year to go to junior and senior year of high school, and so he's taught himself how to learn anything. So if it's algebra, it's algebra If it's reading and critical thinking based upon questions being asked about what you read, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. He didn't sit in a classroom and learn that from a teacher. He taught himself how to do that and so if they needed help and came to us, we would do that and of course, you have to teach them how to read and all that kind of stuff in the beginning, but ultimately I think that most kids are ready, but you can't force them.
Speaker 2:What do you remember from high school? Most people would say almost nothing, and there are certain skills that you get and whatever. There's all kinds of arguments to be made, but what I'm saying is that you remember the thing that you're passionate about. And so if they were passionate about World War II, we went and got every book and every movie and every model and everything that you could get on World War II and we went crazy on World War II until they were done with that and decided they wanted to move on to the next thing, and that included full regalia and costumes and carving stuff and building stuff and going outside and having wars and whatever it might be, however deep they wanted to go.
Speaker 2:All I really was here to do and am here to do, is to say whatever you're excited about, I'm going to go so deep on that with you that you're going to not even think that there's anything odd about this, when in fact, there is something really odd about this. Nobody, next to nobody's doing this, and this is what we're going to call school. It it's weird and it's crazy and it's fun and sometimes it works and lots of times it doesn't work. We're the same as anybody else. We fight and argue and, you know, get on each other's nerves and push each other's buttons.
Speaker 2:Especially, imagine living. You know, most kids leave for the day and go and go and you're only with them in the evenings. Imagine all of us being all together every day, all day, on and on. But what? I look back now and I didn't even do it on purpose, but looking back now at the way you study ancient cultures or, like you know, you think about other parts of the world where grandma and grandpa live with you. You know, and you watch your family die.
Speaker 2:Back in the day when you had a house, there was a funeral parlor, there was a room in your home that you had that was for your family, when they died, to be able to put them there, to have everybody over, to do the ritualistic things that you do when somebody dies.
Speaker 2:You weren't separated from it, they didn't go somewhere else, they didn't die somewhere else, they died in their home and then they were buried on their land and et cetera, et cetera, all these different things. Now, again, you're like hey, you're living in the 1600s, are you saying we should go backwards? I'm not saying we should go backwards. I'm saying, though, that there are things that we've lost. Maybe for not the better things that we've lost, maybe for not the better that we can harken back to and then build our lives now around rituals and things that, for since a million years ago, have meant something to the way that we developed as humans. And maybe it wasn't good that. I just look around and I'm like we're not doing so hot, and so you know why don't you have a podcast?
Speaker 1:I don't like like a hand who needs me. You really should have a microphone in your office. I'm sorry that I'm just and I don't remember where we started.
Speaker 2:It's so good, but I'll circle the whole thing back and I'll, I'll, I'll tie up all those bows back to the pizza at the dinner table and ultimately it's an absolute, radical lifestyle change.
Speaker 2:I'm not saying everybody should do what we're doing. It would be nearly impossible. There would be lots of things that don't get done functionally, that probably need to get done in society, I'm guessing. But at the same time, all we've really done and to kind of then jump back to Sarah with her instincts and her intuition and the things that she feels like are super important. We've tried to listen to that and I do too. I have that same thing the gut feeling or the whatever. We've tried to listen to that and and I do too, I have that same thing the gut feeling or the whatever. We've tried to listen to that and to respond in obedience to whatever that would mean.
Speaker 2:Because I think what we're doing as a society is we're responding how we feel like society wants us to respond, in terms of the speed at which we live, the tasks that we take on, the things that we do day in and day out, without thinking about it, when it's like, well, no, we should be thinking about it, and when you think about it, you might change your mind about something. And then, when you change your mind about it. That's not even the hardest part. Changing your mind is not the hardest part. The hardest part is, once you've changed your mind, is changing your actions. Because we are people of habit, we are part of the. You know an object at rest, unless acted upon by an outside influence, will stay at rest. It's not easy. It's not easy Everything that I just described to you. It might sound like I'm describing it like it's easy. It is. It doesn't get easier. You get little tricks and tips along the way that make it so that you can continue to do it and not be completely consumed with making food every day, but it is still a commitment to that food and that process.
Speaker 2:And we slip. We're Costco members. I walk into Costco and get bags of snacks that are they're fairly clean, but it's like I got three teenage boys. I mean, moses isn't a teenager, but he might as well be. That's like locusts on fields, biblically. I mean they are devouring calories at a speed at which no human could ever imagine and you can't keep up with it. And so you got to go get a bag of heavenly hunks to be like listen, we didn't make our own granola bars today, which we do lots of times, but sometimes we don't or we're behind on it because we did something else and like open this bag of heavenly hunks. That's the point. Yeah, one percent, or whatever, of like we need a break to like mom needs a break, mom needs a breather. You know, she just cleaned up the kitchen for the 90th time this week. Stop asking for another thing. Stop asking for more granola or whatever it is that you think that you want in this moment.
Speaker 1:Well, I think, personally people that are meeting you for the first time on this platform they're going to want to buy from Yellowbird just because of you. Like, I mean so. So I, I know I do, but how, let's talk through that, like speaking of getting new people through the door, because it's a very complicated ecosystem. I witnessed it. I figured before I came in I'm like this is going to be a complex scenario. You've got farmers, who are the opposite of tech savvy, probably, if I'm going to guess. You've got weather. You've got logistics. There's a whole thing that you're doing for the greater good of decentralizing the food system. So for that alone, I feel like people that are listening to this show should like get their little fingers to Yellowbird and start subscribing. What does that look like for someone? So if they're interested, we want to get them through the door. What are we doing here?
Speaker 2:It's just like Netflix. You're going to go on to our website, yellowbirdfscom, and you're going to click shop now and then from there you're going to pick what you want. You're going to put your credit card information in. We have a. You know, we use a giant multi-billion dollar security system that everybody uses like you know, nike uses it so that nobody's information gets compromised, and then you just start ordering. So here's the most complicated part of it. We're buying your food with your money. We're grocery shopping for you, and so if you're going to do that and you want a bunch of produce and some eggs and some meat and some milk, you're going to put it in your shopping, your virtual shopping cart, and you're going to leave it there and then Sunday night at midnight, every single week, like clockwork, we stop that, that shopping window, we cut it off. So you're not checking out, you're not clicking pay now and you know a receipt shoots to you. You're just leaving your cart full of your groceries and if you come back tomorrow and it's not Sunday yet and you want to take eggs out, because you don't need eggs anymore, but you want to add strawberries, because we just added them, because we just found out that they're strawberries, great. Keep changing your cart through the week. Sunday night at midnight that cart gets cut off and that's what you're going to get the next week as a delivery. At the same time, simultaneously, the new cart opens for the following week, so you can begin to fill up your shopping cart for the next week. Let's say, you get your delivery on Wednesday and you'll know there's a thing that you choose, and you can choose a home delivery, which we bring it to you on our own refrigerated vehicles, or a truck pickup, which is our refrigerated trucks in and throughout the city of Columbus. So we're sitting at Flanagan's. We're sitting at Hills parking lot up on 315. We're sitting at the Universalist Unitarian Church in Clintonville. It's all scheduled. You see it, when you're picking your account information, you can go to those trucks, your food's on them, because you picked it, and so you go. Timotheus is our driver. You go meet Timotheus, you tell him your name, he hands you your order If you ordered all those things I just said.
Speaker 2:What had happened, though, between Sunday, when your order got cut off, and Wednesday when you came to pick it up, is that we had reached out to the milk producer and the meat producer and the egg producer and the produce producer, and we had said hey, by the way, carrie, although we don't say it individually, we've collected you with the hundreds of others of people who have ordered once milk, eggs, cheese, all these different things. Here's our order to you we want 150 dozen eggs, or we want 200 gallons of milk, or we want whatever it is, because that's how many people ordered those things. And then on Tuesday, our drivers go out to all those places and they get it all. We're going to grab the milk, the eggs, the meat, the cheese, whatever. Whatever. We're not storing in-house as inventory. We're going to bring it back to the warehouse that you were at and then we're going to put those orders together.
Speaker 2:So your specific order you didn't order 200 gallons of milk, you only ordered one gallon of milk, but 199 other people ordered milk as well. So we're going to pull your milk, put it in with your order, pick and pack, put a sticker on it. Your name's on it. You've already been charged. That week, on Monday, we ran the credit cards and your information was all up to date and good to go. You paid for it. It was anywhere between $20 and $220, depending on how much groceries you bought, and then you show up or we bring it to your door and there it all is. All that food that we've just spent an hour describing metaphorically, physically, actually, spiritually, all the different things that we've said, is in that box, ready to go, and it's to you. And now you've got your groceries.
Speaker 1:So why would we want to do anything else?
Speaker 2:That's the question I keep asking myself. And what I do know is is that we've got to make it so seamless and flawless and reliably quick to some degree because, including myself, everyone no matter how much like me or how much like anybody else you are we are programmed to think that if I want that computer over there, that's on that desk, or if I need it and I click right now on that little screen that's sitting on that table over there, that by tomorrow, at this time, that should be arriving. That's magic, that's voodoo. And so, unfortunately, we also translate that to food and we think well, I don't have to think about food, it's, it's everywhere, it's sitting in every brick and mortar place that's within five miles of where we're sitting right now, and if I want food I can go get it. I don't have to worry about starving, it's right there. And so until we begin to think about every single thing that we've talked about that gets that food to that point, to think about every single thing that we've talked about that gets that food to that point, we'll make the same decision with our food that we make with that computer, which is I'm going to click right here and know that perhaps, within hours or minutes, I'm going to have the thing that my body's telling me that I need, which is nutrients.
Speaker 2:And so I'm just asking number one so I'm just asking number one rethink it. Number two allow us to be a little bit slower than that, not archaically slow, but a little bit slower than that. And number three, we're going to do our best to bring you marketing in a way that isn't a hard, gross sell, but is also I need you to buy that food. I don't exist, we don't exist If you're not buying and eating this way to some degree, whatever that commitment level is in your own life.
Speaker 2:And so I'm going to try to put it into 30 second chunks or five second chunks or cute little things that pop up on your screen, cause I know you're scrolling and you're going to see it, or whatever it might be. I'm not saying, like you know, put a handwritten order and mail it to me. I'm just saying we're trying to balance. This level of food is slow and we live in an instant society. How do we marry the two? Cause there, there is a way, I think, but it isn't quite Amazon, we don't have the ability to do that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, I mean, listen, I feel the same way I felt when I was with you before. I feel like you're all about the right things. You make me feel a little like I need to be, like I'm feeling some I need to do better. Yeah, but that I think that's what's important.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:So I think, for the people out there listening, if, if it's tugging on you a little bit, like yeah, I do want to do better, maybe I will like take a step back and plan my meals a little bit more and like get in a rhythm where, like, I can order from Yellowbird and get a lot of my good stuff from locally sourced farmers.
Speaker 2:Yes, yes, I mean, you're talking about being and in some degree the ugliest way to say it is to be offended. And I've said for 20 years, ever since somebody else said it to me, if you're not offended, you'll make no lifestyle change, and we need to make lifestyle changes. And so please offend me, Please show me where I can do better. And that has been what I've tried to do in my own personal life.
Speaker 2:I think it gets harder, I think as you get older. The more you try to identify and detach from ego, the harder it swings and the sharper the claws and it's the ultimate enemy in some regards. Ego is good in some ways, but in other ways it's detrimental, because you know I'm holding on to my own identity and it's like, well, what if somebody showed you a better way, and would you be willing to make a change? And so I've just tried to stay personally in the space of when we know something new. Even if it's difficult, even if it's challenging, at least try to figure out what that could look like in your own life.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think Yellowbird would be a great next step for people from a food perspective. Yes, absolutely.
Speaker 2:It's a tool, and that is all that we want to be. We want you to trust us with your grocery money, some of it, and let us go find those things, because once you eat a carrot or a tomato, if you ask somebody what's the best tomato you've ever had, they're going to say, well, my grandma used to grow tomatoes in the backyard. Eat you've ever had. They're going to say, well, my grandma used to grow tomatoes in the backyard. Or I grow tomatoes, I grow the best tomatoes and they're right outside my door. And the answer to that is absolutely, and please do that as much as possible. Also, if you can't or don't or don't know how and you want that best tomato, that's the tomato we're finding. And so when you've eaten the carrots that were grown the way our growers are growing carrots, you're going to, your brain and body are going to taste that carrot for the first time, potentially, and be like, oh, this is carrot.
Speaker 2:The thing that I'm eating in the grocery store is an impersonation of a carrot. It's an imposter, it's an imposter, it's an imposter. And so, once that happens, we've had hundreds, literally hundreds, of customers say this exact line we can no longer eat the carrots at a grocery store because we've eaten the carrots that were grown by Three Creeks or Creekside or that one farmer guy Literally, that's the name of the guy. His farm is called that one farmer guy, and we will settle for nothing less, because we now know what a carrot tastes like. And then to me then it's well, that's it, the job is done. You've already made the transition. Let us keep bringing you everything that is this carrot, because it all is like that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, All right. I mean listen, if he hasn't convinced you, I don't know what will. Benji, you are the best.
Speaker 2:Thank you. Like beyond the best, this is great. And ACU too, it's so fun. Yeah, thank you, it's so great. I just like to sit here with you and do this. You can come back.
Speaker 1:I feel like, All right, If you're still out there following your girl, follow me on YouTube, Spotify, Apple or wherever you get your podcasts. And until next time, go check out Yellowbird and keep moving baby, Keep moving baby.
