This is the final episode of The Enlightened Omnivore Podcast — Season Two.

I’m taking a short break, but I’ll be back later this year with Season Three. In the meantime, there are more than 25 episodes waiting for you wherever you listen—so if you’ve been enjoying the show, please follow, subscribe, and leave a quick review wherever you download your podcasts. It would truly mean a lot.

Now, the real reason this episode matters.

My guest is Kurt Beardsley—one of my closest friends of more than three decades. And I don’t say that lightly. Kurt is the kind of friend who doesn’t just know my stories… he helped shape many of them.

Kurt is a photographer, an artist, a maker. He’s spent decades in music and entertainment—technical theater, production work, building sets, solving problems, getting impossible things done on impossible timelines. He has that rugged competence a lot of men quietly envy.

And somehow, alongside all that, he’s also one of the most emotionally grounded men I’ve ever known.

That combination—capable and tender—might be the most “sustainable” form of masculinity out there.

I keep hearing this phrase: clean alcohol.

It shows up in product descriptions, social captions, and I hear it from the soccer moms as I wait in line for my decaf Americano.

I wasn’t even sure what people meant by it. Was it a health claim? A vibe? Just a marketing buzzword?

So I brought the question to someone who lives right at the center of that conversation: Jennie Ripps, founder and CEO of Owl’s Brew, a ready-to-drink alcoholic beverage company built around tea, botanicals, and transparency.

Enlightened Omnivore is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Jennie and I have known each other for… an almost comical amount of time (depending on which of us is doing the math). We studied abroad together in Athens, Greece, in the late 1990s. We’ve only seen each other in person one other time — randomly, on a street corner in New York City

Then one day I saw her picture in an article in Inc. magazine. Jennie had made it. She was CEO of one of the fastest-growing beverage companies.

So this episode felt like both a reunion and a crash course in how the modern alcohol industry actually works.

And the biggest surprise?

A lot of what consumers think they’re buying… they can’t easily verify.

What “clean alcohol” is reacting to

Jennie’s definition starts simple:

Clean alcohol means no preservatives, no additives, no weird ingredients.

But the why matters more than the what. Jennie points out something most of us don’t realize: alcohol doesn’t operate under the same regulatory expectations we’re used to with food.

You might be someone who avoids high-fructose corn syrup, potassium sorbate, or caramel coloring in your food… and then one night you settle in to watch a show with your main squeeze and pour a cocktail — without realizing you may be drinking those exact same ingredients. That’s because alcohol producers generally aren’t required to disclose them.

I’m not trying to be alarmist. I don’t think alcohol is secretly packed with highly toxic ingredients (other than, of course, the alcohol itself). But it is remarkable how many of the most popular beverages we ingest live inside a black box.

“Label lookers” and the new trust economy

Jennie told me Owl’s Brew aspires to be “the most trusted beverage brand in the world.”

Yes, it’s a bold statement. (And yes, I told her it was great marketing.)

But her point was serious. Consumers are increasingly trained to turn the bottle around and ask:

What’s in this?What does “natural flavors” actually mean?How much sugar is in it? How many calories?Why isn’t there a nutritional panel?

She calls these people label lookers — and once you hear the term, you realize: that’s a lot of us now.

And that’s when it clicked for me. Jennie isn’t trying to sell a wellness brand. We all know alcohol, even on its best day, isn’t exactly health food. Instead, “clean” has become shorthand for something deeper.

Jennie’s selling accountability, and I’m buying.

Drinking habits are changing — and visibility is part of it

When I asked Jennie about shifting drinking habits — especially among younger people — she shared the explosion of choice these days. You used to have beer, wine, and spirits. Now theres a ready-to-drink (RTD) category, cocktails with THC, Non-Alcoholic, and low-ABV.

She also shared how social media might be reducing demand, but not in the way you might expect. Or maybe you’re smarter than I am and you’re spot on. You’ll just have to listen to the podcast to know.

Tea as ritual, tea as alchemy

Somehow we almost forgot to talk about tea — which is kind of the whole point for Jennie. Probably the second beverage humans imbibed after water, tea is a most ancient beverage.

You put leaves in water.The water changes.Something beneficial appears.

Alchemy, in the most literal sense.

It was nice to hear her passion and expertise on the subject. I’m going to get some genmaicha tea this weekend.

As for me? I’m still more likely to pour a finger of bourbon or open a bottle of wine than to drink one of these RTD “clean” alternatives.

But I’m definitely paying closer attention to the labels these days.

Hope you’ll give this one a listen.

Links & References

* Owl’s Brew

* Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB)

* Wine & Spirits Ingredient Disclosure

* Potassium Sorbate & Sodium Benzoate (FDA Fact Sheet)

* Genmaicha (Japanese Green Tea with Toasted Rice)

Stay Connected

* Follow along on YouTube, Instagram and TikTok for video content, reels, and behind-the-scenes thoughts. I’m also on Facebook and LinkedIn.

* Say hi on Substack Notes—I’m posting almost every day about my random reflections on life.

* Join me in Chat. It’s a space just for subscribers, kind of like a group text but less embarrassing. Download the app, tap the Chat icon (it looks like two speech bubbles at the bottom), and find the latest “Enlightened Omnivore” thread.

Enlightened Omnivore is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

In this episode of Enlightened Omnivore, I sit back down with my good friend and butcher doppelganger, Heather Thomason.

The first few minutes with Heather are always the same: a quick audio check, a little screen glare, the shared relief that yes—this sounds good, we’re here.

Then the real catch-up begins.

Heather’s been on the podcast a few times now, and each time feels like a different chapter of a fulfilling life. The butcher chapter. The non-profit chapter. And now, something new.

This time, Heather doesn’t arrive with a new title or a big announcement. She arrives with warmth on a cold day. With the quiet honesty of someone who’s stopped forcing clarity.

“I’m wintering,” she says. Cocooning. Not hiding—just listening.

And I know exactly what she means.

It’s that season when you stop “doing” long enough to feel yourself again.

Heather shares about stepping away from her nonprofit role—less as an exit, more as a clearing. She loved the people. She cared about the impact. But somewhere along the way she noticed the simplest truth:

This isn’t my life’s work.

Saying that out loud takes a specific kind of courage. The kind that doesn’t come from certainty. The kind that comes from finally trusting your own temperature gauge.

Putting Down the Pen, Picking Up the Brush

Heather and I first connected through writing. Her HUNGRY HEART Substack was my first introduction to the platform. If you haven’t read it, it’s worth your time. Her early posts felt eerily parallel to my own feelings after closing—like someone else had already written the thing I was circling. Her work inspired me to start Enlightened Omnivore.

For Heather, writing felt like the obvious container for her creativity.

Until it didn’t.

She describes the feeling without drama: the page started to feel like a job. The discipline didn’t feel like devotion—it felt like pressure. The words weren’t flowing. The identity didn’t fit.

And then, almost accidentally, she returned to an older self.

A class. A paintbrush. The smell of oil on canvas. That sensation of your hands remembering something your mind forgot.

Within weeks, she was walking outside and seeing differently—light on bark, shadow on snow, the way trees hold their posture through winter. She started taking photos on hikes the way painters do: not documenting a moment, but collecting a future one.

There’s a particular kind of happiness that shows up when you’re back in the right medium.

The rest of the episode meanders around two friends with such busy lives that they need a podcast to catch up.

At some point, the conversation drifted—like it always does—from craft to emotion.

I tell her about my sad movie experiment. She tells me about the books she’s reading and what’s coming up in her garden this year. This episode is as close to a conversation at my kitchen counter as I’ve gotten all season. I loved it. I think you will too.

This week on the Enlightened Omnivore Podcast, I sit down with Jack Bobo of the Rothman Family Institute for Food Studies at UCLA to tackle one of the most polarizing questions in modern food culture:

Can agriculture actually be part of the climate solution—or are we arguing ourselves into a corner?

We start with regenerative agriculture, but the conversation quickly zooms out to something bigger: why food debates feel so toxic, and why progress keeps stalling.

Jack offers a simple but powerful reframe:

“Most food fights aren’t about values. They’re about metrics.”

Most of us want the same things—healthy people, a livable planet, farmers who can stay in business. But we measure success differently: carbon, water, biodiversity, labor, price. Cue the shouting.

Here’s the surprising part: Jack argues that many U.S. agricultural sustainability metrics have improved dramatically since the 1980s. Less land. Less water. Fewer emissions per unit of food.

The real problem? We’re producing more food than ever—and not improving fast enough to keep up with demand.

We dig into why doom-and-gloom narratives backfire, how policy can accidentally export environmental damage, and why the next 25 years may be the most important food transition in human history.

The takeaway is simple—and radical:

You don’t fix the food system by creating more villains.

You fix it by choosing better ones.

This week on Enlightened Omnivore, I sit down with Shannon Ninburg, an artist and salmon educator whose work lives right at the intersection of ecology, attention, and awe.

If you’ve ever watched a salmon run, really watched it, you know it’s not just a biology lesson. It’s a story about endurance, memory, return… and the strange beauty of an ending that becomes a beginning all over again.

Shannon teaches that story through Salmon in the Schools, a Seattle-area program where kids raise salmon from eggs in classroom tanks and release them into local creeks and streams.

But Shannon doesn’t only teach these cycles.

She sculpts them.

Enlightened Omnivore is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Her recent work features endangered animals carved in salt, and then shared with goats who lick away sections of the sculpture—leaving behind voids, absences, and a kind of visual grief that is hard to unsee.

Shannon admits that constructing the body of a disappearing creature felt unexpectedly powerful. And then she put that body into the world.

She let the goats do what goats do, making the sculpture a collaboration—equal parts beautiful, grotesque, and devastating.

What’s left isn’t just an image of an animal.

It’s the experience of absence.

The emotional lesson underneath the science

What I loved about this week’s conversation is how seamlessly it moves between the literal and the metaphorical

The salmon story is already a masterclass in keystone species: the fish return, lay their eggs, break down, become food and fertilizer. Teachers of reciprocity.

Shannon’s art echoes the same truth—just in a form our modern brains can’t scroll past. We can know species are disappearing. We hear it constantly. But feeling it, really feeling it, is something else entirely.

Both are reminders that our modern culture loves beginnings… tolerates middles… and struggles mightily with endings.

And I guess that’s what this episode kept circling for me:

Life moves in seasons.

Things arrive, take form, dissolve, and become nourishment for what comes next.

And when children learn that rhythm early, they grow up understanding not just how the world works—but how a livable future is made.

Links and Resources

* Shannon Ninburg — Artist, sculptor, salmon educator

* Salmon in the Schools – Seattle (SIS-Seattle)

* Fauntleroy Watershed Council / Fauntleroy Creek salmon info

* Elwha River dam removal + ecosystem restoration (National Park Service)

* NOAA Fisheries: Elwha River restoration case study

* Salmon carcasses and tree growth (Quinn et al., Ecology, 2018)

* Salmon olfactory imprinting and natal homing (Bandoh et al., 2011)

* Robin Wall Kimmerer — Braiding Sweetgrass

Substack Live! February 1st: Food Memories

Don’t forget, I’m hosting an Ask Me Anything Substack Live on Saturday, February 1st at 8am PT/11am ET. I’ll be sharing some behind the scenes Podcast conversations, talking a little more about how I pick my topics, what I’ve been reading, and what I’m working on for the month.

Stay Connected

* Follow along on YouTube, Instagram and TikTok for video content, reels, and behind-the-scenes thoughts. I’m also on Facebook and LinkedIn.

* Say hi on Substack Notes—I’m posting almost every day about my random reflections on life.

* Join me in Chat. It’s a space just for subscribers, kind of like a group text but less embarrassing. Download the app, tap the Chat icon (it looks like two speech bubbles at the bottom), and find the latest “Enlightened Omnivore” thread.

Enlightened Omnivore is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

This week on Enlightened Omnivore, I sit down with Nurit Katz, the Chief Sustainability Officer of the University of California, Los Angeles, for a conversation that stretched far beyond campus boundaries.

UCLA isn’t just a university. On any given day, it functions like a small city, serving nearly 90,000 people. It has its own power systems, water demands, food operations, transportation networks, and emergency infrastructure. It’s no wonder that it’s a fascinating test case for sustainability—not just in theory, but in practice.

UCLA is a “living laboratory,” a place where research doesn’t sit on a shelf, or only get pondered in the classroom. It gets translated into real, shovel-ready projects.

One of the most compelling examples we discuss is a recent solar microgrid project. The campus used electric cars like mobile batteries, borrowing electricity from student, staff, and faculty vehicles during evening hours when solar isn’t available. In simple terms: your car can charge during off-peak hours and then send energy back to the grid when demand spikes—earning you money in the process.

Enlightened Omnivore is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

That idea—science moving into action—comes up repeatedly in our conversation. Nurit’s work is about bridging worlds: academic research and operational reality, climate ambition and institutional constraints, idealism and pragmatism.

And none of these ideas are small in scale. The university’s transition to renewable sources of energy requires enormous shifts that cost billions of dollars. Yes, I used the b-word.

But this conversation isn’t just about energy and infrastructure. It’s also about food—something every student, staff member, and listener can immediately relate to.

UCLA Dining is consistently ranked among the best in the country, serving thousands of meals a day. That scale brings unique challenges: sourcing responsibly, reducing waste, balancing nutrition, and responding to student demand for more plant-forward menus. We talk about why “eating sustainably” gets complicated fast when you’re feeding a campus of this size, and how some of the solutions might sound familiar to former customers of Electric City Butcher—ideas rooted in sourcing, scale, and transparency.

Nurit also shares something more personal: why she’s no longer 100 percent vegan.

She became vegetarian as a child out of concern for animal welfare and the harms of industrial agriculture. But over time, the rigid, all-or-nothing food ideologies seemed more divisive than constructive in her work as an environmental leader. She talks about how moderation—eating less meat, sourcing it better, and making plants the center of the plate—often reaches more people and creates greater impact than excluding items from her diet ever could.

Our conversation continued to mirror that perspective again and again. Not defending the status quo, but also not pretending there’s a single perfect solution. Progress, as Nurit puts it, comes from approaches that people can actually adopt.

Beyond campus, Nurit also serves as a commissioner for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, the largest public utility in the United States. There, she’s helping guide ambitious goals like 100% clean energy by 2035, and major investments in water recycling, stormwater capture, and nature-based solutions.

One of the most unexpected—and inspiring—threads in our conversation centers on birds of prey. Nurit is a co-director of the Los Angeles Raptor Study, a community-science project that tracks hawks, owls, and falcons nesting throughout the city. Raptors, she explains, are powerful indicators of ecosystem health—and powerful connectors between people and the natural world.

When neighbors discover a hawk nesting outside their window, something changes. People pay attention. They care. They start asking questions about pesticides, rodenticides, tree trimming, and habitat. Conservation stops being abstract and becomes personal.

Late in the conversation, I get personal and share a lesson I learned the hard way with rodenticide.

If you like this episode, there are a few events coming up soon that you might want to consider attending. You might even see me at them:

* Show Up and Count 30X30 Webinar: Jan. 22, 2026 10am PT; Webinar; An overview of California’s progress toward the global 30×30 Goal to conserve 30% of land and ocean by 2030.

* California Nature-Based Solutions Summit: January 29, 9:00am – 4:00pm; Sacramento; The first ever summit featuring nature-based solutions in California to address climate change. Learn more about what California’s doing in this space.

The overarching theme of today’s conversation was connection. It runs through the entire episode. Whether we’re talking about energy grids, food systems, biodiversity, or urban wildlife, Nurit keeps returning to the same idea: we are not separate from nature. Even in cities. Especially in cities.

We don’t uncover any easy answers in the hour we spoke, but what it offers instead is something far more valuable: a grounded look at how change actually happens, by someone working at the intersection of policy, science, community, and daily life.

If you’ve ever wondered what sustainability looks like when ideals meet reality, or how big institutions can still move the needle, this is a conversation you won’t want to miss.

Links and Resources

* Nurit Katz – Chief Sustainability Officer, UCLA; Commissioner, LADWP

* Pasturebird - Regenerative poultry ranch

* Los Angeles Raptor Study - Citizen science bird of prey organization

* Robin Wall Kimmerer – Author of Braiding Sweetgrass

* Power in Pollinators – Habitat along power transmission corridors

* iNaturalist – Community science app for identifying plants and animals

* RATS (Raptors Are The Solution) – Non-toxic rodent control education

Substack Live! February 1st: Food Memories

Don’t forget, I’m hosting an Ask Me Anything Substack Live on Saturday, February 1st at 8am PT/11am ET. I’ll be sharing some behind the scenes Podcast conversations, talking a little more about how I pick my topics, what I’ve been reading, and what I’m working on for the month.

Stay Connected

* Follow along on YouTube, Instagram and TikTok for video content, reels, and behind-the-scenes thoughts. I’m also on Facebook and LinkedIn.

* Say hi on Substack Notes—I’m posting almost every day about my random reflections on life.

* Join me in Chat. It’s a space just for subscribers, kind of like a group text but less embarrassing. Download the app, tap the Chat icon (it looks like two speech bubbles at the bottom), and find the latest “Enlightened Omnivore” thread.

Enlightened Omnivore is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

There’s a specific moment that happens in a lot of homes—usually somewhere around 5:30 p.m.—when the day collapses into the kitchen.

You walk in carrying all the half-finished thoughts of the day. Someone needs help with something. Someone is hungry. You’re hungry. And even if you love cooking, there’s that split second where dinner stops feeling like nourishment and starts feeling like one more demand.

This week on Enlightened Omnivore, I sit down with chef, multi-cookbook author, Nicki Sizemore to talk about that moment—the real one, not the curated one. The one where your nervous system is still running on adrenaline and you’re expected to transform “what’s in the fridge” into a meal that magically brings everyone together.

Nicki’s newest book of the same name as her Substack, Mind, Body, Spirit, FOOD, is technically a cookbook. But it reads more like a self-help companion for anyone who has ever loved cooking… and then, somewhere along the way, started dreading it.

When dinner becomes the breaking point

Nicki has achieved what so many of us are told to do: build something successful, keep producing, keep growing. She built website, From Scratch Fast into a thriving business and went on to write four successful cookbooks. For a while, it was working exactly the way it was “supposed” to work.

Until it wasn’t.

Nicki soon found herself caught in a cycle familiar to any content creator trying to keep up with the algorithms. Always optimizing instead of creating. Working harder while feeling less alive inside.

Then her body started sending signals she couldn’t ignore: chronic indigestion, daily medication, stress rising in a way that didn’t feel sustainable.

But the real wake-up came as a simple, sharp realization:

She didn’t want to make dinner anymore.

Here was someone trained as a classical chef, with decades of experience teaching other people how to get meals on the table… and the thought of doing it for her own family felt impossible.

Finding Her Way Back

In our conversation, Nicki explains how she found her way back to the kitchen through one word: intention.

Not the overused kind.Not a productivity hack.Not a manifestation trick.

More like a direction your nervous system can follow when everything else feels chaotic.

A guidepost.

Not an outcome.Not a goal.

Presence, Ease, Balance, Fun!

For me, the conversation reinforced a belief shared with me early in my cooking that feels true every time I’m in a kitchen. The most important ingredient in cooking is love. When you don’t have it for the food you’re making, others can taste it.

Yes, we also talk food

Don’t worry, although we spent plenty of time on Mind, Body and Spirit in this conversation, we didn’t forget the FOOD. There was chicken cooked in a pot; creamy, spicy noodles; a clean-out-the-fridge build-a-bowl; and a behind-the-scenes recipe Nicki tested over and over, never quite getting right—until giving up led to something even better.

This whole conversation blew by for me because it spoke directly to my values, concerns, and lived reality. I suspect it will resonate with many of you in much the same way.

If you’ve ever stood in your kitchen feeling tired, resentful, and confused about why dinner feels so emotionally charged, this episode will feel like someone turning on a light.

Because Nicki’s message is simple—but it’s not small:

It’s not only what you cook.It’s how you show up to cook.

And that “how” might be the missing ingredient you didn’t know you needed.

Thank you to everyone who joined me live for yesterday’s Ask Me Anything—and to those of you catching up now, I’m sharing the recording . This was the first AMA of 2026, and it felt like a really good way to start the year.

We covered a lot of ground yesterday. First, I shared a quick holiday recap (including how my “Prime Fib” turned out), talked through what I’m excited to cook more of this year—venison for one—and gave a preview of what’s ahead for Enlightened Omnivore in 2026.

Enlightened Omnivore is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

That includes the weekly Saturday newsletter, monthly AMAs, and wrapping up Season 2 of the podcast, a summer pause, and a even better Season 3 return in the fall with new formats and guests.

We also zoomed out a bit. I shared some of the bigger ideas I’ll be exploring this year—omnivores as a model for resilience, regenerative agriculture, nutrition, and flavor.

I’ve also been wrestling with a topic that I’ve been reticent to talk about on Substack but means so much to me as a man in the 21st century and father of a teenage boy. I’m beginning to explore and unpack healthy masculinity, and how it intersects with nature, food, and responsibility in the modern world. We’ll see how that shows up in my writing.

Yeah, lots of lofty topics in 2026. But don’t worry. There will still be plenty of posts about food, food history, and how food intersects with ecology. Plus all the travels I have in store.

As always, the best part of these Substack Live sessions is hearing from you—what you’ve loved, what stuck with you, and what you’d like more of in the year ahead.

I really want our times together on Substack Live to feel like sitting around the kitchen table—coffee in hand, a little wandering, lots of good questions, and room to think out loud together. So let me know how I can make them even better.

Remember, if you missed it live, you can watch the video above, or listen to it as a podcast wherever you download your episodes. And if you have thoughts, questions, or ideas for future AMAs, put it in the comments below!

Here’s to a thoughtful, curious, and delicious start to 2026.

-Steve

Next Substack Live! February 1st 2026

The next Substack Live will be the first day of February. Put it on your calendar and don’t forget to send topic suggestions in the comments below!

Let’s Stay Connected

* Follow along on Instagram and TikTok for video content, reels, and behind-the-scenes thoughts. I’m also on Facebook and LinkedIn.

* Like the podcast? Please consider leaving a review wherever you listen. It helps so much.

* Say hi on Substack Notes—I’m posting almost every day about my random reflections on life.

* Join me in Chat. It’s a space just for subscribers, kind of like a group text but less embarrassing. Download the app, tap the Chat icon (it looks like two speech bubbles at the bottom), and find the latest “Enlightened Omnivore” thread.

Enlightened Omnivore is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Alright—this week’s episode might be outside your comfort zone. But I encourage you to lean in.

My guest is Maria Rodale: writer, publisher, gardener, and lifelong explorer of humanity’s relationship with nature. Maria comes from organic agriculture royalty. Her grandfather popularized the term “Organics,” in the 1940s, and her father launched one of the longest-running side-by-side studies comparing organic and chemical farming—still underway at the Rodale Institute today. Maria herself has spent decades carrying that legacy forward, both as the CEO of the family publishing company, Rodale, Inc. and as a prolific author in her own right of books like The Organic Manifesto, Scratch, and half a dozen Organic Gardening works.

But today’s conversation isn’t really about Maria’s accolades in the regenerative agriculture movement. It’s more about how describes herself on her website:

An explorer in search of the mysteries of the universe.

In this podcast, we get down to some cosmic business discussing Maria’s newest book, Love, Nature, Magic, and delving into her personal practice of drum-based shamanistic journeying—a meditative, imaginative way of communicating with the natural world. No drugs. No dogma. Just a drum, an intention, and a willingness to listen.

Yeah, this episode gets a little woo-woo.But I like woo. And if I think there’s something to learn from it, I like sharing other people’s woo.

What I loved most about our conversation is how Maria never preaches. She isn’t asking anyone to believe what she believes. In fact, she probably doesn’t even care if you are curious about her drumming journeys. Instead, what comes across in our conversation—and in her book—is an invitation to reconsider how we relate to the living world.

Not only the cute plants and animals.Not just the life-giving soil.But even the “pests” and “weeds” we're so quick to wage war against in our gardens.

From there, we move seamlessly into the grounded realities she knows so well:

* What “organic” really means, and why it still matters

* Why farmers often feel trapped in industrial systems they didn’t design

* And why reconnecting kids with nature and food may be the most important work of all

A theme that keeps resurfacing is healing—not just of land and ecosystems, but of fear, disconnection, and the stories we tell ourselves about control. Maria makes a compelling case that when we stop treating nature as something to dominate, we become better collaborators. both with the planet and with one another.

This is a conversation that moves between science, policy, culture, and mystery—and somehow makes all of it feel practical, human, and hopeful.

Step outside if you can for this one. Maybe start imagining what you might plant in your garden this spring.

And if you’re feeling adventurous, find a drum, a coffee can to bang on, or an app on your phone. It’s time to expand our palates and our minds, one beat at a time.

Alright—this week’s episode is a fun one.

Peter Giuliano is the Executive Director of the Coffee Science Foundation, and he’s one of those rare people who can talk about coffee in a way that makes you more curious, not more intimidated. He’s been in coffee since he was 18 (barista to shop owner to roaster to buyer to industry leader), but he’s also a serious food-history nerd—and the writer behind one of my favorite Substack newsletters Pax Culinaria., which is basically a weekly rabbit hole into culinary culture, trade, and the stories we tell ourselves about food.

We start with a deceptively simple question: what is “specialty coffee,” really? From there, we get into coffee science, why I no longer feel the need to apologize for drinking decaf, and how caffeine actually gets removed from those tiny beans in the first place.

Enlightened Omnivore is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

If you’ve ever wanted to learn how to taste coffee like a pro, Peter walks me through how professional coffee tasters do their jobs—cupping, calibration, and the shared vocabulary of fragrance versus aroma, flavor versus aftertaste, acidity, sweetness, and mouthfeel. And if you’ve ever heard someone describe coffee like a poem and thought, I don’t have that gene, you’ll like Peter’s take. Most great tasters aren’t born “super tasters.” They’re trained.

We both agree that when you start tasting anything consciously, the world gets richer. Cooking gets better. Eating gets more fun. Even smelling onions in a pan becomes its own little miracle. And that curiosity carries over into what Peter’s newest fascination with what he calls “low foods”: the everyday, unglamorous dishes people actually survive on.

Spam.Fish sticks.Cream of mushroom soup.Ketchup cuisine.

Peter isn’t romanticizing junk. He’s interrogating status—why we revere certain foods when they’re served on trendy platters in well-reviewed restaurants, but turn others into cultural punchlines when they show up on paper plates in our own kitchens. Comfort food is cuisine. And it matters.

No conversation on Enlightened Omnivore would be complete without a stroll through the world of regenerative agriculture. And for once, I have a guest who doesn’t see it entirely through my green-tinted glasses.

Peter and I have already gone back and forth in comments on our articles about the topics of sustainability, fair trade, and regenerative farming so our diverse opinions were nothing new. What I appreciate most about our podcast conversation was our ability to disagree while still respecting each other’s perspective. In a world where hyperbole and shouting seem to get the most attention, it felt refreshing to slow down, listen, and find common ground.

We don’t solve all the world’s problems in a little over an hour—but we do something rarer: we model how to talk about complicated food and agriculture issues without turning them into tribal warfare.

At its core, this episode is a conversation about curiosity—two people geeking out over flavor, farming, and why food is endlessly interesting. Peter is the kind of person I could happily listen to all day over a great cup of coffee, so I encourage you to brew up a pot, sit back and enjoy this hour with him as much as I did.

Happy Holidays and if you could, please share today’s episode with someone you know will enjoy it!

Links and Resources:

* Coffee Science Foundation and Pax Culinaria

* My nitrates articles mentioned in the podcast: You Say Nitrate, I Say Nitrite

* If you or someone you know suffers from Anosmia, check out these resources

* Smell Retraining Therapy

* How to Regain Your Sense of Smell

* Savorista Decaf Coffee

* World Brewer’s Cup

I Could Use Your Help

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