Think Differently. Solve the Impossible.

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About the Host

Daniel Stih (danielstih.com) is an aerospace engineer, software engineer, indoor environmental consultant, and author of 12 books. For more than 30 years, he has investigated complex problems spanning engineering, technology, the built environment, and human decision-making. His work explores how evidence, assumptions, and systems shape the conclusions we draw—and whether we're solving the right problem. Learn more about his approach in Why I Think This Way.

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Show Notes

Pluck: https://eatpluck.com

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Transcript

Welcome to The Daniel Stih Podcast. My guest today is James Barry. James is the founder of Pluck, an all-purpose seasoning that contains organ meats, liver, kidney, spleen, heart, pancreas.

They grow stuff, right? But it's all made from beef fed a 100% grass diet, pasture raised, with no GMOs or hormones. James didn't grow up eating organic organ meats.

He ate fast food, microwave meals, and for 20 years, then he was a professional chef. He cooked for celebrities, Tom Cruise, George Clooney, Barbra Streisand, making the food they ate healthy.

But he was really becoming a father that deepened his exploration of functional food. When his daughter was two, she suffered a life-threatening disease.

He struggled to find a way to get nutrients into her, and discovered how hard it can be to get nutrition to people who are either sick or pickly eaters.

Myself, I had no idea that organ meats are packed with nutrients and vitamins and minerals that muscle meats can't match. And of course, many don't want to eat liver or especially kidneys, pancreas, heart. That's where pluck, the seasoning comes in.

You just sprinkle it in, sprinkle it on like salt and pepper. James Barry.

How are you?

Good. How are you?

Good.

Yeah.

Nice to meet you.

I was wondering if you might be in your kitchen.

I know, right? I wish. We rent a house, and I used to love, I used to live in Portland, Oregon, and we had built like an ADU.

It had the most gorgeous kitchen, and I used to do all of my interviews from there. Loved it. But now we live on the East Coast.

Do you have some spice handy?

Oh, like a jar.

Yeah, I can show that.

Kind of curious how these bits of organ meat. You can't, it's not clear. It's got a wrapper on it.

Picture of a cow.

You're thinking what they look like. Yeah, hold on. I'll go grab it.

Okay.

Yeah.

So we always say it looks like, let's see if you can see it. So it just looks like a normal seasoning.

Yeah, kind of flaky, maybe. A few different colors. Yeah.

Like coarse. Like coarse salt.

Yeah, that's one of them. I'll show you another one.

Kind of looks like coarse salt, crystals, and that's even finer. Almost like powder, powdery-ish.

Yeah, it's got a lot of herbs in it. This is our zesty garlic.

But it's just, I mean, it doesn't look bloody. Like I picture organ meat. So I'm going to talk to you about what these organ meats are, because we're really talking, not just liver, which I grew up on.

Kidneys, spleens, heart. I don't know, very few Americans know. Well, there are lots of Americans out there that eat heart.

I'm a typical white middle class, your average, I don't know, engineer. I don't eat heart or pancreas. You harvest these from beef fed or 100 percent organic grass diet, no hormones or anything, right?

Yeah, so the whole process, I mean, I started out with the idea from as a chef wanting to support my kids with the most nutrient dense foods out there.

And so just, I've been a professional chef for over 20 years. And so I already knew about orgametes, but I, like you, I didn't grow up eating them. I mean, like most people, I didn't have a flavor for it, but I knew they were important for our diet.

So, when I had kids, I was imagining like, what could I sprinkle on their food that wouldn't require that they have to step out of a comfort zone or something like, you know, make the force them to eat a pate or something like that, like just, or

Even look at a heart or the organs themselves, some people in other cultures, they just put the heart on the plate, right?

Totally, yeah.

Oh, some people, even hunters sometimes will take the raw heart after they've made the kill and take a bite of it, you know what I mean? So, yeah, I mean, organs show up all over the world, but here we're a bit squeamish about it, you know?

So, I, initially it was all about how do I get this in my kids? How do I get into my diet without a struggle? Then started the research.

And the only thing I could find out there was liver powder. That's all I could find at the time that was actually not in a capsule. Most of the capsules, they have other organs in them.

But basically, what they're all doing is they're taking the raw organ, they're freeze drying it, and at that point, it just looks like a brownish, light, kind of light brown powder.

Some of them are darker than others, but it's all brown, the different shades of brown. Lung is particularly dark. But then at that point, it has very little moisture.

It's completely shelf stable, and it's no different than any dried powder. You know?

Yours is different than that.

5:32

No, we're freeze drying ours as well.

So, yeah. And so then, so now we knew how to preserve it. You know, now we, you know, when it's, when it's preserved as a freeze dried product and powdered, it's about a two-year shelf life.

So it's a pretty good preservation technique, and very little nutrition is lost. You know, it's even less nutrition is lost than dehydrating. So it's slightly better than dehydrating.

But then the issue is, okay, where do I source? And I tried, man. I tried for nearly a year to source from the US.

And the, the, the supply chain here is just not set up for the, the nose to tell, you know.

So, yes. So speaking of which, when I did the research on why don't we eat organ meats, it seemed like the after World War II, people forgot how to cook.

And then it was considered poor people, these organs, because they started pushing lean cuts of steak and stuff is, hey, if you're really moving up in the world, you need to have a steak and not an organ meat, to which, is this true?

Now, I'm wondering if this is why you can't source in America. They give the organ meats to pet food and sausages and byproduct categories, the stuff nobody wants in America.

Yeah, to a degree, yes. But I've gone to some slaughterhouses. I went to this one in Wyoming.

I straight up asked them because I had heard that too. I had heard that, you know, about... Because when you break down the animal, you have the meat and the bone and then everything else.

And it's about a 50-50 split, maybe like 49-51. And so I was asking them, I'm like, so what do you guys do with it? And they straight up said, we throw it out.

And so the idea that it goes to pet food, yes, that's true sometimes, but it all depends on the slaughterhouse. And many slaughterhouses are very antiquated. They're just not set up to upcycle them or whatever word you want to use.

Like they're not set up within us with a supply chain. And they have to pay to get rid of this stuff. So it's not like they can just throw it in the back trash bin.

Like they have to actually pay to get rid of it. So sometimes the system is such.

What's interesting about this, James, is I used AI, chat TV to help me prepare. And this is what it told me. So this is one thing on my show is about disinformation.

Oh, so much.

That's just another piece that I had no idea that they just literally throw it away.

Yeah, I know.

I was shocked. And I asked him, I said, so how much of that is the animal? And he said about 49%.

And it's crazy in that sense, because you think about it, what industry would ever get rid of about 50% of its resource?

Yeah, so let's talk about, I wonder how much of this is true, misinformation, disinformation, you get it from the internet.

8:37

Well, I think this part is factual, because this is why you do what you do. Oregon meats contain minerals and vitamins that you can't find with the regular muscle meats, meaning the steak and the hamburger, right?

So give me an example of an Oregon and the nutrients it contains that you were looking for the solution for your daughter, for people who are trying to be healthy, that the slaughterhouses are thrown away early.

Yeah, I wouldn't say you can't get it from muscle meat. There is crossover, but Oregon meats just have it in abundance and they sometimes have certain things that the muscle doesn't have.

So it's like if it was a Venn diagram, it would be like the circles would be, you know, over kind of crossing over each other. But really, like if you think about what organs have, so they have, I don't know, I'll just use an example.

Like they have, well, I actually always like to say, okay, everything that science tells you that we need to create life that's in a prenatal, that's basically what's in organs. It's all there.

But I'll break it down like, so you do have B12, but so does muscle meat, but you just have it in more abundance. And I even talked to someone who said, they ate meat, but their B12 was low.

And when they switched over to eating liver, their B12 went up. They both have B12. So why is that?

Right? If you think about it, the way I look at it is like, when you put a piece of steak on the counter, and you put a liver on the counter, and you just let them get room temperature, the steak basically holds its structure.

The liver starts to melt on the counter. So their structure is a lot more permeable, if you will. It's like...

You can assimilate it in your body better.

Yeah, exactly.

It's easier to digest. So all the minerals and vitamins in it, and you got all the B vitamins. You've got...

So A, D, E, K. K2 is what they call the activator vitamin, and so that one's unique.

You also have, in some organs, you even have some vitamin D, and one of the tricks when you're cooking liver is to actually cook it in lard, because the lard has vitamin D, which is from pork fat, and then the liver has a lot of vitamin A, and the

two help you absorb the other. So the vitamin D makes the vitamin A more absorbable. So there's this synergistic quality to them as well, and that's why I love that it's mother nature. It's not like I'm creating an organ in a laboratory.

It's as mother nature created, but it's in its most absorbable form, and it's paired with the vitamins and minerals that are needed for the body to assimilate it. Like iron is not something you can just absorb. You need it with another nutrient.

Like they used to give iron pills back in the 60s, I think, and then they later realized no one could absorb it because it was missing that synergistic property. So that's why I love organs.

I see that on my short list from the liver, the B12 has B12 and the highly bioavailable iron, and so does the heart and the kidney. We have to get down to the spleen and the pancreas before it looks like, oh, spleen has iron too.

Yeah, spleen actually has five times more iron than liver. So, and you know what heart has? That's really cool.

And this kind of speaks to another part of why I love organ meats, is this idea of like supports like. It's an ancestral concept. Native Americans used to believe it.

Chinese believe it. It's like the idea is the part that you're eating supports that part in you. So if you're building muscle, eating muscle helps.

If you're eating heart, it's going to support your heart. And one of the things that we compare that to is how heart has CoQ10, which is Coenzyme Q10. That is almost guaranteed.

If you're taking a cardiovascular supplement, it's going to have CoQ10 in it. And isn't that interesting that it's already in heart? So it's a cardiovascular nutrient that's supporting your heart, and it's coming from heart.

So I love that. And the idea, too, is like, well, if you're eating lung, it's going to support your lung. If you're eating brain, it's going to support your brain.

And I'll say this as well. I was just speaking as someone recently who had low testosterone, and he said he started eating testicles. No joke, he started eating testicles.

No, I believe you.

I'm just picturing it, and I'm sure you can source any organ out there that the slaughterhouse would love to give you there instead of throw it away, just pull up.

If you can talk to your local farmer, do you know what they call them? They call them rocky mountain oysters, testicles. That's what they're called.

Rocky mountain oysters. I just think that name is so funny, personally.

And so with the heart, there's, on my list, there's something that calms neurotransmitters. It says taurine.

Taurine, yep. Taurine. So if you get any cat food ever, for cats, it always has taurine in it.

Well, that's in heart. So they're basically admitting like, yeah, cats to survive need taurine. They need heart.

But we as well do. I mean, taurine is important for any living thing. And it's interesting too.

So one of our products is called Pure, and it's just the orgamines. And we're always telling people like, yeah, it's good for you, but it's also good for your pets.

And what we find is like anyone that's giving their kibble to their dog or a cat, a lot of cats and dogs won't eat it all the way. They get very picky around it because it's not their natural food. We're basically giving them grains.

We're giving them cheap product because we don't want to spend so much money. Well, if you just sprinkle a little bit of this pure organ meats on their food, they gobble it up.

So it's just an indicator that even animals in the wild know what food is good for them and what they want.

And I even get reports from people telling me that if their pluck arrives in the mail and it goes through a mail chute into their house, if they don't grab it before their pet smells it, their pet will come in and tear it open and try to get to it

because they go crazy for it. We're the only ones. It's like every other animal out there, every other species in the world knows what to eat except us. We're one of nine million species that seems to have forgotten what to eat.

Yeah.

15:16

From what I heard, it was marketing.

After World War II, they started promoting these organ meats as low-class food associated with like, if you want to be associated with prosperity, then you eat steak and boneless chicken meat and pork chops instead.

And then, of course, I'm sure the grocery stores and the whole machine in terms of processing food, processing and delivering grocery stores and freezing and shipping and everything.

What actually, a real quick history of it is it actually goes even further back. So when they centralized meat production, this is early or I guess late 1800s, they centralized meat production somewhere around Chicago area.

And that's where that book, the, oh, what's it called? Upton Sinclair's book, The Jungle. It's a really fascinating book, and it takes place in a meat packing industry somewhere.

And it basically revealed how disgusting it was. And so it was a very big book at the time, kind of like a kitchen confidential, or it's uncovering the behind the scenes.

But basically, when they started shipping meat to the coast on rail, the carts, the shipping carts could only get so cold, and you need them to get, for organ meats, they need to get very cold, or the organ meats will spoil, whereas muscle meat

doesn't have to get as cold. So right then and there, when they started doing that, they stopped shipping organ meats to the coast because they couldn't do it without them spoiling.

So right away, you had people now not eating them because they didn't receive them. Then World War II happened, and they were worried about that meat shortage.

And so the US government actually started a campaign to promote organ meats, to try to get people to eat organ meats because they were like, all the muscle meat was going abroad to the soldiers.

And they were like, we're going to run out, people are going to be upset. And so they started calling them like variety meats, and it's American to eat organ meats. They were all this propaganda, and it worked.

And that's why a lot of us, like my parents, my mom grew up eating liver and onions. And that's because her parents were part of that, you know, that generation that were told to eat it.

But then you had people return from the war, and now you had women who started working while the man was away. So now you had two people working. And to your point, they were like, well, we can afford better.

Why would we buy the peasant food? Let's purchase the roast beef. And so now people didn't buy it as much.

And then you just see that that kind of happens in and out throughout history. And it's even happening in other countries to a degree. Whenever organ meats are seen as poor people's food, suddenly no one wants to buy it.

But then what happens is when people don't buy it, obviously, the butcher shop's not going to carry it. And when they don't carry it, a couple of things happen. We start to build it in our head that we think they're gross.

Whether we've had them or not, people just think they're gross. Two, you lose the art of cooking them. Now suddenly, instead of it being a mainstay food in your home, like if you're in Mexican culture, they make menudo soup regularly, right?

So for them, using organ meats is very regular. They don't think twice about it. They have tongue all the time.

You know, there's just certain organ meats they're constantly using. But when you don't have it at the butcher shop, you stop cooking it, and then you start to lose the ability.

If I go to Safeway or Fry's or Costco, wherever I get my food, I don't see it there.

So I'm trying to be simple. You would have to go to the freezer aisle, first of all, and it might not even be there.

But if it's there, there will be probably some liver, and maybe, depending on where you are in the US., like some chitlins, which is pig intestines. So it's very rare to find it in those stores.

Which would be good if I was having intestinal testin problems, right? Back to eat the part that you need help with?

Yeah, actually, I know a bunch of people have Crohn's, which is, you know, intestine issues, who have had parts of their colon removed.

And they tell me that the pluck or even eating organ meats is the one way that they can get their nutrients, because when you have parts of your intestine or your colon removed, you have issues absorbing nutrients.

So you need food that is easily absorbed. You need real food. You need these things that are not hard to get these vitamins.

So absolutely, it's an amazing tool for anyone that has those kind of issues.

Why do you suppose? Because I'm guilty of it. I see a fish head, a heart, a pancreas.

I think it's gross. How did I get that way to think that's the worst food? Like I shouldn't, that has to be bad for you.

Even I thought liver, I thought some of the stuff would be toxic, like cold, be an air filter, you know, say the lungs, I would think there'd be an air filter and contain the bad stuff that the animal was breathing or eating them.

How did I get that way? How did people get that way?

It's a great question. Really, really great question. I would say it's a couple of things.

So it's just lack of familiarity. Whenever anything's unfamiliar, it gets a little kind of scary, right? It's just different.

But I would also say that there is an element, kind of a philosophical element of like when we see the insides of something, it makes, it reminds us of our own vulnerabilities, our own insides.

And so seeing a heart kind of makes you feel like, think about your own heart. So I think there's-

It wants me to become a vegetarian almost.

Yeah, right? I mean, it's kind of, yeah, it's kind of gross. Unless you're a doctor who likes going inside of people, it's like most of us don't have any interest in opening up our skin and looking inside.

It's like, we like what's on the outside. So I think it's that. But I also think, I think that, I think it's fascinating because, you know, we have this idea that, well, we have this idea that these foods are so kind of different.

But if you go anywhere else in the world, they are part of the cuisine. And they used to be a part of our cuisine to a degree, particularly in the south, like I mentioned chitlins, which is the pig intestines.

That was a southern dish, and it came about due to slavery. So the slave owners used to keep the hog, you know, hog meat, and then they would give the intestines and all the innards that they thought were, you know, poor people's food to the slaves.

But the slaves turned it out, and they made it into cuisine. So then now you see that throughout the south.

So there's a lot of kind of questions of why, why, so one of the things I don't understand is why are we killing an animal, getting rid of the most nutrient dense parts of that animal, as we talked about earlier, that 50% nearly, that we're just

getting rid of, or we're giving to pets, or whatever it is, right? And then what do we do? We turn around and then we're eating the food we're eating. We're still nutrient deficient.

It's something like 96% of Americans are nutrient deficient, but we're not calorie deficient, which is key, right? So we're overweight, but we're nutrient deficient.

And then what do we do is we turn around and we invest our money in a supplement industry. So we're throwing out the parts that-

Take your vitamins. You know, back to the logical part of me, the engineer parts, like, why do I think it's gross? Probably because it's shelving.

I see the steak and the lean meats and the lean fish at the top, you know, in the display case, and the heads and the intestines are in little corners, if they should be on sale, like nobody wants. A shame to be here kind of thing. Maybe that's-

Well, maybe also because there's only one head, right?

And then, but there's a lot of muscle, you know, and I always joke, like, there's only one tongue, there's only one heart, and then that there's the majority-

Well, it should be special, then. It should be at the front of the class.

I agree.

And more expensive, in theory.

In theory?

Well, you know, if you were to go to another region, there's certain regions where if you go and there's tribes there, they'll kill a goat, and if you're visiting, you'll get an eye, and it's considered, like, high, high praise, because usually the

eyes go to the leader of the group. So to your point, they're very prized possessions.

And yet, you know, so I think other cultures see it the way you're describing it, where they're like, hey, this is like the most nutrient-dense part of the animal should be the most expensive, but that's just not the world we live in.

How did you figure out which ones you want to put, which organ meats into your seasonings? It seems like you have at least two packages, varieties of this. Were they based on nutrition, or taste, or spice?

You know, for me, I built it, I first focused on five.

So our products have liver, heart, kidney, spleen, and pancreas in it. We're going to be adding lung, so we're going to have six. So I'm trying to get as much of the animal into you that I can get.

But then I did shape the flavor, because if I were just to give you equal amounts of each organ, it wouldn't taste good. Some of the organs are really strong, and freeze-drying them doesn't change it.

If anything, it makes the flavor even more intense. So I kind of finessed it like a recipe, and I made it as neutral as I could make it. But the goal, though, is to try to get as much of the animal into you as possible.

And I mentioned that guy who is low in testosterone, who started eating testicles, and his testosterone has gone up. So I hope to eventually have a men's virility product where we have testicles in it.

That's what I was thinking, like the multivitamins.

Yes.

For specific health issues or whatever you're trying to work on health-wise.

Totally. And it exists right now in capsules. Like you can buy, you can go to like Heart and Soul, you can go to Ancestral Supplements, you can buy very specific.

I'm just trying to get people to eat it versus swallow it in a capsule. I really do believe that one of the reasons why we outsource our health is because we're swallowing things in capsules.

When you eat a product, like if I were to put salt on your tongue, your body is going to tell you when to stop.

But if I give you a salt tablet, you swallow it, there's no communication, delayed response, and then you're like maybe 30 minutes later, like why am I bloated? Oh, I got too much of something.

Whereas your body, if you were eating the salt, would never have let you eat more than it needed or wanted.

Plus, the sourcing, it sounds like you try to get yours from grass-fed beef. It isn't given hormones and such. And I kind of wonder about some of the pills as so much.

Most of the pills, I don't know about all of them, but a lot of them are sourcing from the same.

So I have to, I've been sourcing from New Zealand. And one of the reasons why most of us go to New Zealand is because, as I mentioned earlier, I was struggling to get access to the whole animal here. The supply chain wasn't set up.

And when I factored in all the different touch points and all the different freighting that was going to have to happen, it cost me more here, and it cost me less just to buy it from New Zealand. And in New Zealand, New Zealand is an island.

It's grass-fed. They do have some industrial, but most of their stuff is grass-fed, grass-finished. It's coming from green grass, because they're able to have green grass year round.

And they've set up their whole industry. It's one of their top exports, is meat or cow.

And they're probably happier beef, because although there's some nice grazing prairies in America, some of them are pretty dry and barren, and New Zealand sounds like a great place to live.

It's very green.

As a cow before you're killed.

You're very right. It's hard to find. I mean, I don't think you can even find it here in the US, like a true, true green grass-fed animal.

Most of them are raised on pasture for as long as the season will allow. And then they're given hay inside of building during when the weather is no good.

And a lot of times they'll ferment the hay to try to make it more nutritional and or easier digested by the cows. But it's not a true green grass.

Also that some people are sick from mold, toxic mold. The stocky botrys, that black mold, loves to grow on that hay.

That's a very good point. Yeah, mold and limes, I feel like, are the two things you're just hearing left and right about.

People, they go get blood tested by their doctors for toxins, aflatoxins, mycotoxins, and they think there's mold in the air in their house from a flood, and it's actually can be the, not the meat itself, but the hay that the animal ate in the beef

Of course, there's glyphosates as well, sprayed on some of these things.

So yeah, I mean, finding, you know, Joel Salatin, he has a farm called Polyface in Virginia, and he likes to say, you know, my cows have one bad day.

And that's kind of, that's the situation you're looking for is, you're looking for a ranch or a farm where the animals are treated humanely. They're allowed to pasture freely. They're brought to different pastures.

They're not kept on one, you know, but they're allowed to really like fatten naturally and grow naturally. And then they get slaughtered one, so one bad day.

One bad day. I love that tagline. It almost makes it sound not as bad a day, because I think you lived a good life.

You got to die some way. I'm an organ donor on my driver's license.

Nice, yeah. I mean, that's the thing too, is a lot of people think, well, if you're a meat eater, that means you're taking life, and if you're a plant-based eater, then you're not taking any lives. And that's actually very false.

I've talked to lots of farmers, and they will tell you, and their faces show it, like they'll be like, yeah, when I plow those soy fields or those corn fields, the amount of animals that are getting killed from the ground squirrels all the way to the

dough, because dough will hide in there. I mean, like crazy. They say it's a bloodbath. That's how they describe it.

So this idea, to your point, there is no world where something doesn't die to feed something else. So for us to eat, something has to die. It just depends on where you classify the life.

So do you classify the cow's life is more important or the rabbit's life is less important or the insect's life is less important? But something is dying for us to eat.

So to me, I would rather just make sure that whatever we're eating is the most nutrient-dense product we can get, and then two, that we're honoring it by eating the whole part of it, you know, the whole animal, if it is an animal that we're killing.

To me, that is honoring the animal.

Thank you. So whether listeners or you or me believe in global warming or not, the fact is that there's this thing called the cow tax now, because some feel like having animals, cows, they produce methane, which is helping global warming.

So to stop it, we'll put a tax on our food, specifically beef. How might that affect this, your industry?

Well, I mean, just like just like anything, there is a lot of propaganda out there. And there's and I would offer that there is someone who has an agenda, someone who's who's going to profit.

And they are helping to write the propaganda to convince us to do whatever it is that's going to best serve them. And I'm not saying I'm not saying that that only happens on carnivore or plant-based.

That's a good philosophy overall. It's a way to question what's true and not true, disinformation, who has to benefit from whatever it is.

Exactly. And it's everything. I mean, I'm saying that we should look at everything with that lens is who paid for the study, who's going to benefit.

And so even like these Impossible Burgers and stuff like that, it's finally now coming out. I mean, I don't remember exactly when this started.

And you're speaking of the non-meat, the alternative, because if we have this cow tax to save the world from global warming, what are we going to eat? What are we going to eat this? What did you just call it?

The burger?

There's a brand called Impossible Burger. Yeah, it's fake. Fake meat.

And they're still trying to come up with stuff. They're trying to create laboratory-made meat, but all of it is BS, all of it, because the reality is...

Which is going to make us sicker.

Yeah.

So either we'll die from global warming. No, we won't. Or we'll die from eating these fake hamburgers because we're going to go nutritionally defective, deficient.

They try to act like they're better than a cow, but, you know, it's so not true.

I mean, the reality is, is when you go to a polyface farm, you have the cows, the chickens, you even have pigs. They're all working together.

When you have a farm that's regenerative, like where it's actually cyclical, like each organism there from the wild grasses to the living animals where they're all serving each other, like basically you like just to give you a little glimpse.

It's like, so you have the cows, they have their cow patties dropped in the field. Well, then what happens is the chickens come on and they start pecking at them to eat the worms that are in the cow patties.

And then their chicken poop goes in the ground and it's naturally fertilizing the ground. So you don't have to add synthetic fertilizers. You don't have to do these things that are going to deplete the soils or ruin our health.

Right.

Beautiful cycle of life.

When it's done humanely and properly, the problem is, is we have these humongous farms, these humongous agricultural operations that are not, they're not proper.

They're niched for a pacific task. Do this or that, grow this or that.

Yeah, growing soy or growing corn, and it's just like, or...

Or to go into your gasoline.

Yeah, exactly. I was just going to say, ethylene, right? It's like those things are, that's what's not normal.

You should not have farms that are as big as a city. That's just, that's not humane. It's not proper.

And that's where we have the issue.

33:53

So bringing it back to your spices, you were on the Shark Tank?

Yeah, just recently.

Tell me about that.

Well, that was wild.

I didn't know this, but so about 20% of the businesses that are on Shark Tank, they find. So I didn't actually apply. They came to me.

Oh, they find them, okay.

Some, some, only about 20%.

80%, it's legit, they apply and all that, but about 20%, they find it. So they found me. They saw one of our ads and they said, hey, we think you'd be good TV and you want to apply.

And so I still had to do the work. It wasn't a guarantee, but we got on and it was pretty intense. I mean, I won't lie.

Like I was blown away at how intense the process was and how the Shark Tank is not the way it's shown.

You know, like you're you film about 45 minutes and they only show six or seven minutes of it, you know, if that so there's a lot of editing around it. But I got to say, I'm just, I'm so grateful we got on there. We did not get a deal.

I'm not spoiling. It's aired now twice. So I hope I'm not spoiling it for anyone.

But it's like, we didn't get a deal, but that's okay. I didn't go on to get a deal. I really went on to amplify the message of eating nose to tail.

It's not even just about pluck. I just want people to eat more organ meats. Like I can help people eat organ meats in their diet more.

Why do you think you didn't get a deal?

You know, there's a couple reasons.

So one is I think that I was up against ego. Like there were a couple of sharks on the panel that they think they know health. And so here I was saying, well, animal organ meats are one of the healthiest products on the planet.

And I don't think they believe that. Cause even one of them was like, well, what about frozen vegetables?

They didn't do their homework. It's the bottom line at all.

Exactly. They don't know.

Cause even chat GBT, which gives me a lot of misinformation, I was amazed when chats like, no, Daniel, it's good for you. I'm like, really? So it's out there.

Yeah, it's out there.

They're just not as progressive as I thought. I think they're a lot more representative of kind of just like common.

Oh, but maybe they worried they couldn't sell it to the rest of the public.

Well, I don't think I could. I don't think I could take, I don't think the seasoning is ready for some of the stores you mentioned earlier. I don't think everyone is ready for it.

I think to you, like, I've done, I've been at fairs, right? I've been at food, food fairs.

And I put it on popcorn, because you could put on anything, anything you could salt, you could put on, and I put it on popcorn, the people would walk by, they would grab some of the popcorn without knowing what it is.

They would eat it and go, this is delicious. They would literally tell me that.

And then I think that's because not just the taste, but your body, at least mine does. It will tell me like when I've had too much of something because it just it needs something it wants.

And then if it has something too much, it's not just the taste. It's some reaction of some kind.

Yeah. And the reaction too is when your body needs, wants something it's not getting, it wants more of it, right? Yeah.

Absolutely. I see that play out with kids particularly. But I would see people eat it.

They would say, this is amazing. This is so good. They're like, what's on it?

And I'd be like, oh, well, you just ate organ meats. And they go, and they run away. They would literally run away.

So I was like, okay, yeah, not everyone's ready for this. Yeah.

You know, I might have done the same thing. If I hadn't tried to do my homework for today and go, wow, it is good for you, you might feel better.

Maybe what comes to mind for you, what might work, you're on to it is, in the health food industry, there's that bulletproof guy who has a bulletproof coffee.

And I'm not convinced on some of those, that some of that coffee is as pure as he says, because the mycotoxin testing is kind of not perfect.

Maybe if you got it, maybe if you started to get people well again, people that are desperate to try and to try new stuff, that would be the backdoor way to bring it into awareness more for the general public.

I wholeheartedly agree. I think most of us treat each other the way we feel. And so if you get people feeling better in their body, we have a better world.

They start treating each other better. But what I love about, and I said this earlier, but I want to reinforce it, which is, you know, pluck is not, we're not, this is not a laboratory made food.

Like we're not adding any ingredients to, like we're not fortifying it with other laboratory made vitamins and minerals. We're just taking what mother nature has already created, and we're making it accessible to people.

Because to your point, not everyone wants to eat liver and onions. Not everyone wants to touch it, cook it, look at it. Like when you sprinkle it on as a seasoning, as we showed at the top of the video, it's like, it looks like garlic salt.

So you can have your cake and eat it too, is what you're saying.

I want my steak. I don't want to eat to heart like a hunter. Hey, I'll put the seasoning on it so I get the benefit of it.

Exactly.

And we say, if you can salt it, you can pluck it. And we also say it looks like garlic salt, but it works like Mother Nature's multivitamin. It's basically bringing back the functionality of food.

It's like saying, like, look, here is the most nutrient-sense food on the planet. You're not eating it, but what if we make it into a salt that you can season anything with? Will you eat it now if we make it taste good?

I'm curious.

Normally, my show is not an advertisement plug, but I know, right? But yeah, I'm curious. Show me what you have so far.

You have two.

Yeah, so this is so we have this one here. This is our original original. And that's kind of closest to like like Old Bay.

Kind of a general purpose.

I don't have everything.

Yeah, exactly. It's like an all purpose. I don't have all of them in front of me, but this one is our zesty garlic.

Which was the powdery one is that this is that one. I showed you earlier. They're kind of whitish one.

That's this one. And that one's kind of cool.

What does it have in an organ? Okay, go ahead. Organ needs.

I was going to say, so it's got liver.

They all have liver, heart, kidney, spleen, pancreas, five organs. But what's cool about the zesty garlic one is some people are sensitive to nightshades and to seeds. And so we call that AIP, autoimmune protocol.

So this one has no nightshades, no seeds. So it has no peppers. It has no paprika, no peppercorn, no eggplant is another one that's like a nightshade.

So nightshades are like things that grow at night, basically. But they also have some, just people have some sensitivities to them. But this one even has some carrot in it.

It's got some herbs. It's got that garlic zestiness to it.

And then we got to make it taste good too, or you're the chef.

Oh yeah. No, everything, I made everything very flavor forward, because I'm all about flavor. But then we also have, so then we have one other flavor we call Southwest.

I don't have that to show you in front, but then we have these. I mentioned this.

Pure originals.

So this is just the organ meats.

Oh, okay.

This one you could give to your pets. You can mix into smoothies, anything that has flavor. You can put it in brownies.

Or if I'm going to be the tough guy, like I'm the tough guy, I go for the pure, pure plucks.

I don't need to hide it.

You're the man. So you would want these ones. And what's cool about this one is one teaspoon of this is equal to two ounces of organs.

So it's incredibly concentrated. Now check this out. This is the new flavor coming out soon.

Pure pluck, pure brain.

Yep, it is.

It's literally a freeze-dried powdered brain.

Well, so I like to think I'm a smart guy. How might...

You'll be smarter if you eat brain.

And why is that? What's in the brain organ, vitamin-wise, nutrients-wise, chemical-wise that does that?

You know, because I haven't started selling it, I don't have all the touch points on it. Even though I know it has them, I just haven't memorized them, but it has some good cholesterol on it. It has like selenium.

I know it has that. There's a lot that is unique to the brain. And I can't say that I've tested this beyond just giving it to some people, but I did have some people say that they felt a difference.

So we have it as the pure brain, and then we put it in some cinnamon. And the person I sent it to was the cinnamon one, and she usually has her coffee with cinnamon in it, but she switched it out, and she said she felt more focused.

There was just something about the nutrients in the brain that were really helping her focus. And then she's like, well, how is this possible?

So then she pulled it out, went back to just straight cinnamon, and then went back, and she said she felt it. There was a clear difference.

So I wish I had it right at my fingertips right now to tell you, oh, this is exactly what's in it, but I will be memorizing it. But I will say that it does have unique properties, though.

I'm really going out there now. I'm thinking of energetically or high-woo-woo stuff. Well, from an engineering logical point of view, there's a reason for the metaphysical.

I'm thinking of what do they call the pressure points in acupuncture, your zones, your chakras.

Yeah.

And maybe if the brain, the heart, and liver, kidney, there's something else that besides the vitamin associated with it, maybe some.

There's definitely energetic properties. I mean, I mean, you know, back in the day, you know, a hunter would probably fast when they went hunting. And when they did kill that animal, one of the ways of honoring that animal was to eat its heart.

And because you're basically, that's the life force of the energy of that animal.

And basically you were taking on that life force of that animal that you had just killed as a sign of reverence, but also of like, I took a life, but then it's giving me life, that kind of concept. So I do believe there is an exchange of energy.

I mean, you know, if you think about it, we are what we eat, but we're also what we eat, right? So the quality of what we eat matters.

And so every, I think of that as very cyclical, of like everything that's eating something is creating the nutrients that are in that thing. And so if you're eating that thing, you're getting the nutrients of whatever it eats, eats.

So like, if you think about it from a cow's perspective, so the sun has energy and the grass takes in that energy, but we can't eat the grass. We can't digest it properly, right? But the cow with four stomachs can.

So the sun's energy goes into the grass. Then the grass gets eaten by the cow, but the four stomachs in the cow help it to actually digest and to go into its meat.

I can eat sunlight. Yes, we're eating sunlight. I like that.

We are absolutely eating the power of the sun when we eat an animal that has a four chamber stomach.

45:12

Is it possible to get too many nutrients from organ meats if you were to just love the spice so much that you put it on your breakfast cereal and your coffee and everything else?

For some people, too much of a certain thing might be too much.

I'm glad you just reminded me, because there's something you asked earlier that I didn't answer, and I wanted to answer, and I was trying to remember what it was.

So you had talked about how you had this idea that the organ that you're eating is almost like it's collecting all the toxins, right? And this kind of answers the question you just answered as well.

So when we think of the organ as a place that's storing toxins, what we're really imagining is a sponge.

So we're imagining that the organ is a sponge, and similar to when you're in your sink, it's absorbing things, but it only gets it out if you squeeze it, right?

But what you're imagining is that nothing can squeeze the organ, and then it just has toxins in it. And so then when you kill the animal, you're getting all those toxins. But if you think about it, if that were true, we would all be dead.

We wouldn't all live as long as we are.

We wouldn't detoxify. Our liver would get saturated and we'd die.

Exactly.

That's the twist of it is like the liver, for example, doesn't store the toxins.

Exactly.

It filters them, and then that goes out in your urine or your fecal matter.

Or your sweat even. Absolutely. And so if you think about what it does is it's converting the toxins into water-soluble form so that they can then leave your body.

And then if they don't leave your body, yeah, they will get stored in the fat. But they don't get stored in the organ, because if it got stored in the organ, the organ wouldn't do its job and you would be dead.

So that's also kind of answers that the other question, which is, I'm sorry, you might have to ask.

Is it possible to get too many of the nutrients from the organ?

Right. So one is, in a sense, not if you're eating it. So if you're eating it, your body will give you feedback of whether you want more or less.

And you see that all the time play out. Like if someone is not cra... Like let's say you normally eat organ meals.

Oh, yeah, I get it.

Like you'll just say, and I reject it.

You just won't. You won't want it. You won't crave it.

Yeah, it's the same thing as with water or anything, right? Your body gives you communication feedback. But if you were swallowing the capsules, then yes, you could, because you're not getting that feedback.

You're just swallowing it.

What about the spices then? Will they, will you, because you're eating the spices really slowly, you have to sprinkle and sprinkle more or less versus a capsule. You'll have some regulation, you're saying, using the spice.

Well, it's eating.

To me, it's eating versus swallowing. So if you're using the spices, then you are actually eating it, and it will, your body will say, do I want this more of this or do I not want it?

But when you swallow capsules, that delayed response, you get zero communication until after the fact. So I would get word sometimes from people that swallow the capsules, and they would say, I get nauseous when I swallow capsules.

I'd be like, well, yeah, that's because you're getting too much. You need less. But how do you know you need less unless you're eating it?

So I always tell people, if you have the capsules, no problem, but open them up and put it, either put it in your, chew it, chew the capsule so you're eating it, or open the capsule up and just put it on your food too.

It's no different than our Pluck Pure. But either way, get it so that you're... Because this process of eating and the flavors, that's called the neural-lingual response.

It's a communication pathway, and it's been developed for... We're in a homo sapien body, and if you believe science, that's over a 250,000-year-old body. So this communication pathway has been developed for hundreds of thousands of years.

The Franken foods we're eating and the swollen capsules, that's only within like the last 100 years.

I mean, we haven't been doing capsules for very long, but the taste, the flavor, chewing things, the communication pathway, that's been hundreds of thousands of years. So if you think about it, ancestrally, flavor equaled nutrition.

So if something had flavor and tasted good, then that meant it had nutrition in it.

And so that's why we're getting so thrown off, because you're eating things that have, let's say, strawberry flavor, but they don't have any strawberry nutrition in it. So you're constantly getting bombarded with flavor but no nutrition.

And so it's very confusing for our bodies and our brains, because we're wired to think flavor equals nutrition. So I really believe you have to eat your food.

Yeah, I think the question comes up, you know, came up for me because there's always too much of a good thing, or try to look at the other viewpoint, like what if I get too much of this?

It seems to me, if anything, American, most Americans probably have a deficiency in this stuff.

Yeah, you'd have to do a lot, a lot.

And then if they were having that kind of issue, they're probably seeing their doctor, to which I wonder if some doctors, doctors are usually a bit closed minded unless they're functional medicine though.

I wonder if some doctors might almost could prescribe this, will suggest it to some people who have health problems.

We have some, like if you're anemic, organ meats are fantastic for you. So if you're low in iron, anemic.

I got a little fact on that, fun fact. Early explorers, don't remember where I got this, carried liver and heart to prevent fatigue and anemia.

Yep. Yeah. Because it's, you know, in Alaska in some areas where they don't have, they'll have six months of not having any ability to have like vegetables and fruits because of the season.

They, in their nutritional facts, they actually, they count organ meats as fruits and vegetables because they're like, look, if we have seasons where you can't grow vegetables and fruit, you should be eating the organ meats because you're getting at

the nutrients that you would have gotten from the other things that are going to be supporting your health. And so I think around the world, they really are seen as a mother nature's multivitamin.

They're seen as something that's not only just helpful but as necessary.

Nice. Is there anything we haven't talked about that you'd like to add?

Well, I just love your curiosity about it, and I love the fact that you went into this conversation thinking one thing, and we're just open to having me on and to have a discussion.

I think that if there's anything any of us could do for our own health is to stay curious, to just be open to the fact that maybe what you think you know might not be accurate, and that could be across the board.

So even I stay curious, even with my knowledge of orgamates. But then the other thing is just listen to your body.

If you eat something and your body breaks out, or you get nauseous, or you have skin issues, anything like that, or sleep issues, then that's a sign that whatever you're eating is not working.

But if you suddenly eat something, you feel better, that's also a good sign. So listen to your body's reaction to the food you eat, because it is communicating to you. We just have to listen to it.

And where can listeners or viewers actually learn more about the Pluck stuff or order some?

Yeah, you can go to Amazon.

First of all, we are sold on there. You just look up organ seasoning or organ meat seasoning or Pluck. But then you can also find us on our website at eatpluck.com, and then we're on socials at eatpluck, and then I'm at Chef James Barry.

And you also have a YouTube channel yourself, right?

Yeah, we have a podcast called Everyday Ancestral, and it's our we've we're almost like we're just a year old, I think.

And we started in November 24. So now we're a little over a year.

And Everyday Ancestral for us is about looking at the past for and just kind of looking for the best of the past, the things that we don't want to let go of that or that we think are going to support us in the present.

So I'm not one of those people that believes we need to all become cave people again and walk around no shirts.

I really do believe that we have to be true to our modern society, but I do believe there's lots of things from the past that we that are important to take with us, like to not forget, whether it's smelling a flower to just community, to the foods we

eat, to natural remedies, all that kind of stuff. I think it's really important just not to forget that stuff. So that's what that podcast is about.

Awesome. James Barry, thanks so much for being on my show.

Yeah, thanks for having me.