“Food is power. Food is activism. Food is life. Food is medicine. Food is politics. Every time you eat, you're making a political decision not just yourself but for the world.” – Josh Tickell
Josh Tickell: Kiss The Ground
“50% of our calories should be coming from fruits and vegetables. So, tell me why we use our land to produce less than 5% of fruits and vegetables in the United States? It's because it's 95% profit for big brands. Rather than growing the food here, they import food from cheap labor countries, but all that food has been sprayed a tremendous amount of chemical. As a customer, you're not saving money with their method anyway; you're going to spend money later on a kidney dialysis, a heart transplant, on diazepam or whatever hundred drugs pharmaceutical companies are going to shove down your throat.” – Josh Tickell
Wellness + Wisdom Podcast Interview | Josh Tickell
How can healing ourselves through growing and eating more natural, nutritious foods also help heal the environment?
On Wellness + Wisdom 179, Film Director and Producer of documentaries such as FUEL and the upcoming Kiss The Ground film with Big Picture Ranch, Author of the book, Kiss the Ground, and Blogger of The Veggie Van Voyage, Josh Tickell joins us to share how we can reverse the effects of CO2 in the air by making changes on both a micro and macro level with our soil.
From composting to voting with your wallet, you'll be equipped with the knowledge and tools to improve your carbon footprint on this planet.
Tweet ThisKiss the Ground
As you read, Kiss the Ground: How the Food You Eat Can Reverse Climate Change, Heal Your Body & Ultimately Save Our World, discover the hidden power soil has to reverse climate change, and how a regenerative farming diet not only delivers us better health and wellness but also rebuilds our most precious resource—the very ground that feeds us.
Josh Tickell, one of America’s most celebrated documentary filmmakers and director of Fuel, has dedicated most of his life to saving the environment. Now, in Kiss the Ground, he explains an incredible truth: by changing our diets to a soil-nourishing, regenerative agriculture diet, we can reverse global warming, harvest healthy, abundant food, and eliminate the poisonous substances that are harming our children, pets, bodies, and ultimately our planet.
Through fascinating and accessible interviews with celebrity chefs, ranchers, farmers, and top scientists, this remarkable book, soon to be a full-length documentary film narrated by Woody Harrelson, will teach you how to become an agent in humanity’s single most important and time-sensitive mission. Reverse climate change and effectively save the world—all through the choices you make in how and what to eat.
Official Kiss the Ground Film Trailer
Listen To Episode 179 As Josh Tickell Uncovers:
- His experience working on organic farms as a WWOOfer.
- Where he got the idea of using a natural source instead of gas to fuel his van for the Veggie Van Voyage.
- What it was like to live next to an oil field growing up and the illness that his family was experiencing from all of the pollution.
- The large number of cancer cases in Louisiana because of the oil production and witnessing his family members dying prematurely.
- His process of writing the book, Kiss the Ground, and what information is included in it.
- The reality of what the world looks like now as far as available land and fresh water.
- Why there's so much carbon dioxide in the air rather than in the ground and how we can reverse it.
- Why we don't look at measuring the environment by Parts per Million (PPM) anymore, but by gigatons or the measurement of mass.
- The problem with modern farming including pesticides, bees dying off, and the degradation of our soil.
- The fact that our agriculture industry got its start from the technology and science that came out of WW1.
- Why the health of the soil and our natural environment is so important for our own wellness.
- A basic test to see whether or not the soil in your city is healthy or not.
- How we can both heal ourselves and the soil on macro and micro levels.
- Why biology is the real answer to sustaining human life as the population continues to grow.
- The importance of composting and how people who live in big cities, apartments, or don't have much space can participate with vermicomposting.
- How we can be more proactive with growing our vegetables and restoring the soil on our properties.
- How the changes we make to help the soil can lead to improving the climate overall and restoring the ecosystem.
- Why we have the power in our own communities to get rid of pesticides usage.
- The fact that glyphosate is everywhere – in water, in the food, and in our bodies.
- Organic vs. Regenerative foods and what new food policies we could put in place.
Power Quotes From The Show
“The new conversation is not about solar panels and wind; those things are happening, but they need to happen faster and we need more of that kind of green technology. The new conversation needs to focus on the fact that we have a 2,000 gigaton mass of carbon floating in the atmosphere. Where are we going to put that? It has to go somewhere.” – Josh Tickell
“We're basically dirt on legs. Roughly 50% of our cells are not human cells, but microbial cells and the same microbes that also live in soil. A handful of healthy soil has more living organisms than all humans who have ever lived.” – Josh Tickell
“If you are experiencing problems, one of the first things that this new wave of medical science will tell you is to increase your gut bacteria. So, how do you do that? The real gut bacteria actually comes from the soil. If that good gut bacteria is not in the soil, then it's not in your food and if it's not in your food, then it's not going in your gut.” – Josh Tickell
“Every time you eat, you make a political decision. So, we vote 3 times a day and what we're voting for is an entire system. This is a chain reaction that begins with a calorie that we consume, but it ends with a farmer or a rancher and a plant or an animal. If that plant or animal is building soil, then you're voting for a future of plenty of food for all people.” – Josh Tickell
“Food is politics Food is power. Food is activism. Food is life. Food is medicine. Food is nutrition. Food is reversing global warming. Food is your access right now. You go into a grocery store and you have access to buy all that food!” – Josh Tickell
Links From Today's Show
The Compost Story by Kiss The Ground
- Josh Tickell
- Kiss The Ground
- Big Picture Ranch
- Kiss The Ground by Josh Tickell
- The Soil Story by Kiss The Ground
- The Compost Story by Kiss The Ground
- How to Compost at Home
- WWOOF -Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms
- What is Organics? by Paul Chek
- Vegetarianism Inside & Out by Paul Chek
- Joel Salatin: Polyface Farms
- The Two Secrets to Weight Loss The Nobody Knows by Josh Tickell
- Hell's Cartel by Diarmuid Jeffreys
- Paul Hawken's Project Drawdown
- Harvard's Healthy Eating Plate & Healthy Eating Pyramid
- WFR 167 Michelle Norris
- WFR 121 Dr. David Minkoff
About Josh Tickell
According to Inc Magazine, Josh Tickell is “America’s #1 Strategist” for Connecting with the Millennial Generation (a.k.a. “Generation Y”). He is also a film director who specializes in movies geared toward Millennials.
Tickell grew up in Louisiana where he lived next to waterways polluted by petroleum refineries. In 1997 he captured national attention by driving a van powered by used French Fry oil across the United States. “The Veggie Van” as it was called was a viral sensation. Only four years after the first web browser was introduced (and AOL was still a novelty), Tickell’s Veggie Van Web Site with its early “blog” received over 1 million unique visitors (continuously crashing its server due to overwhelming traffic). The Veggie Van Voyage spurred an international wave of media coverage pushing Tickell into the spotlight as a voice of change for the young generation.
His journey culminated in 2008 with the release of his first feature film, FUEL (a.k.a. ‘Fields of Fuel’).
FUEL won the Sundance Audience Award for Best Documentary and was released theatrically in the United States. FUEL became a global sensation gaining millions of viewers on Netflix, iTunes, Hulu and CNBC, Russia TV, TeleSur and beyond. The movie was screened in the White House for energy and environment staff working in the Obama Administration and was shortlisted for an Oscar.
Josh Tickell directed the Cannes Film Festival movie, The Big Fix (2011). The film explores the corporate and political malfeasance that led to the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill. His third film, Freedom (2011), focuses on alcohol fuel and aired on the SuperChannel in Canada. His latest documentary PUMP (2014) exposes a conspiracy to block fuel choice at the gas pump and is being theatrically released by Submarine Entertainment. He is currently in production on Good Fortune (2015), The Official Biography of John Paul DeJoria, Co-Founder of Patrón Tequila and Paul Mitchell Systems.
Today Tickell spends much of his time working for companies on strategies that engage members of the millennial generation. He achieves breakthrough results by modifying internal and external corporate practices to meet the desires and needs of Generation Y. By combining aspects of Corporate Social Value, Participation, Emotional Response and Product Design and Functionality, Tickell provides a wide variety of organizations with unprecedented success in connecting with members of Generation Y.
