Neil Dudley: I just want to welcome the listeners, the PNFers out there, the people who pay attention to this conversation, this podcast, this YouTube channel. I’m excited to share a guy named Joe Koran with you. Now, Joe, did I pronounce that last name right?

Joe Koran: You did. Absolutely.

Neil Dudley: I got acquainted with Joe at a conference. So it’s another reason to go to conferences. It’s another reason to be involved in your industry. You bump into people. Joe’s one of those guys. He was speaking, he’s talking about his experience, his thoughts around where food comes from, what’s important about your diet, and how it’s turned out to be really a lifesaver for him. And I want to share that story with you guys and gals who listen. And I guess I should say, let them have it, Joe. Who are you? Why do you do what you do? Tell us a little bit about yourself. And then I’ve got some other questions along the way. But I think just your quick five minute introduction is going to be valuable.

Joe Koran: Sure, absolutely. I appreciate it, Neil. And yeah, it was really, it was a great conference. Meeting people like yourself was really, truly what made that whole conference so worthwhile for us. And I enjoyed that. And I was asked to give my perspectives on the plant based world. Plant based food is what they had asked me to do with this, which was the talk that I gave, and it came at a very personal level for me because I’ve been in the food industry since 1985. I started, I was going to go to school to become a teacher. And I took a job with a little family owned seafood company. And I walked in the market that they had, I said, “Hey, do you have any part time jobs because school starts in three weeks, and I need a part time job.” And they said, “Well come back tomorrow morning at 5am. We got stuff for you to do.” I said, “Great.” So, I came back and 6pm I finished my first day. And I’m like that’s an interesting part time job with 13 hours. So, I said, “Okay, see you guys.” They’re like “Hey, can you come in tomorrow at five?” I said, “Sure.” So, I came in the next day. And then same thing happened, the next day I came in. After the third day, I had about a little over 40 hours’ worth of work in three days. And I said, “Just out of curiosity,” I said, “I don’t really know your industry. But I came in asking for a part time job, and I’ve already got 40 hours of work in in three days. What’s full time look like?” They said, “Oh, you come in at 3am instead of 5am.” I’m like, “Oh, okay, cool.” So I actually didn’t end up going for the graduate degree to become a teacher. I ended up getting obsessed with the seafood industry. I’m like, wow, look at this. We’re hunters and gatherers. This is the last frontier, wild food that we can go and we’re hunting and gathering. And we go out and it’s wild caught and we do all these things. And it’s so cool to be able to be around it. But back in 1985, we didn’t have the internet, we didn’t have a lot of these things. Where did you get your information? You went to the library. You called people on the phone. You went and visited people. So I found myself at the library after work almost every day reading things or checking books out and trying to understand things and became a real student of the industry. And it just evolved. And here I am, a little over 37 years later, I’m still in the industry, still learning every day, still looking at it, I haven’t had the same day twice. But something happened with me through life that, as we do, as we get older, you start to have maybe there’s a health challenge that comes along. And I really have always been healthy, happy, and very, very active, three little kids at the time, I’m running around. But I had some problems. I ended up having my first heart attack at age 46. And in an 11 year period, or just under an 11 year period, I had three heart attacks, triple bypass surgery, and 12 stents done. And I’m sitting in a hospital at Vanderbilt University in Nashville when I was living there, and the doctor says, “I got good news and bad news. The good news is you have the heart of a 25 year old.” I said, “That’s great.” And he said, “Now the bad news is you have the arteries of an 85 year old and if you continue to do what you’re doing, you’re probably not going to be here in a year or two.” And I said, “Well, that doesn’t sound very optimistic.” So I want to do it my way, Frank Sinatra. I’m going to take my approach and see what I can do because for all these years, I’ve been listening to you and you telling me how to do it, and these are the results that I have. So I’m going to try something different. So I went 100% plant based, dairy free, started walking five to seven miles every day, doing meditation, taking the time for myself. And in a seven month period, I reversed heart disease and type two diabetes. I became- I had more energy, I felt better, and over an 18 month period, I ended up losing almost 60 pounds. And it was amazing to me by doing this. But here’s the thing, I am in the seafood industry, I love different meats as well and that kind of thing. But here, I’ve a cut everything out. So I slowly started to bring things back in. What I realized out of it was that there’s different ways that you can appreciate things, and you understand that. With the ingredients that you put into something and you bring out the nuances, the essence, but we also put energy into it, good energy, and good energy can come out. And so, I tried to modify things accordingly and was able to modify my diet. And here I am years later, and I’m healthier than I’ve ever been in my life. And my kid, when I turned 60 last year, my kid said, “Dad, you look younger than you did when you turned 40.” And I said, “Well, I feel better too.” I’m actually healthier than that. So that’s kind of a very quick synopsis of it. But there’s a lot more details that we can get into. 

Neil Dudley: Well, I like that plant based perspective. It’s not one I have. I can’t speak from it. I’ve never done it. I don’t know how that reflects on me personally. I just- it’s my life. It’s the truth. I’ve never had a reason to, an inclination to, outside of the idea that you know what, I’m uneducated in a particular way around food that would probably be valuable to me if I would get educated. I mean, we’re in the bacon, sausage, ham, meat business, animal protein business. Why would it- it’d probably be pretty smart for me to know the opposite of that. And this is another thing I think we could explore, I’m interested – in the marketplace, it feels like this real, I don’t know, kind of head bashing thing, you’re either vegan or you’re carnivore. And I think that’s not true. It’s what- I even play it on the podcast a little bit. We’ve had some carnivores. That’s why it’s so super important for you to come on. I so appreciate you for doing it. So we can get that other side of the coin. And yours isn’t even necessarily the extreme side. It is just more like, hey, guys, I was in big trouble with my health and going plant based really helped me. So did you have any- Okay, so now kind of more pointed. Once you did that, were you telling people in your business and that you bumped into what you were up to? And did that affect your ability in your- in the seafood realm?

Joe Koran: So the only people that really knew that I was doing this were the people in my life. And if I went out to lunch or dinner with somebody, I found a way to just say, I think I’m just going to do a salad today or whatever, because a lot of the restaurants didn’t have a lot of options per se. And I went that route. But realistically, I mean, I think that what it has done for me is it’s made me appreciate how food is grown, how food is processed. And using that word is a very tricky word. And we’ll touch on that in a second. And then ultimately, the way things have- the overall of the food, where it comes from and the story, the energy that goes into it. And I keep mentioning this energy because here’s an example of something that happened. I had not had any meat or dairy or anything like that for seven months. And my boys were living with me, and they’re good carnivore kids, and they’re doing their thing, and they’re growing teenagers. And we were cooking two separate lifestyles. My wife, just to give you a perspective, her family, her father, they run, they have a fifth generation meat market. They had their own slaughterhouse, they had their own farm, everything like that. They’ve narrowed it down now to a meat market in southwest Ohio that’s been there for five generations. So, when I came and said, when it was like, hey, Joe’s, primarily- and it’s like, what’s the matter with you? What happened to you? Have you hit your head? But at the same time, out of respect, when I go there, obviously, her father, 84 years old still cutting meat six days a week and he’s a wizard with a knife, I respect it greatly, I eat what he prepares because that’s respect. But it goes into the energy side of it. So here’s an example. I made this pizza for my kids, and I had bought some shredded cheese, commodity shredded cheese that I dusted over the top, and I made these pizzas. I got this nice dough and everything. I put it all together. And I take a little wedge of it. I hadn’t had anything like this in seven months. So I eat this. And about a half hour later, my heart’s racing. I’m like, whoa, this is really- it was like an adrenaline rush. And then that night, I had these really bizarre dreams. And it’s so strange. I went to bed, I had these dreams of powers and stuff like that. And like they were talking to me, like what were you doing? And I’m like, this is weird. Well, what I find out the next day, I start reading a little bit, and I realize that energy is transferred through food very easily. The Greeks knew this 3500 years ago. They discovered this, this has been when people say, what’s your secret ingredient? It’s love. It’s real. That’s real. That’s not mystery- that is not- oh, yeah, no, that’s real. You can transfer energy. And a great example of how it’s the other side of it, have you ever gone through a fast food drive thru and grabbed something and ate it and you’re like, oh, I’ve got the worst indigestion in my life. There’s not a lot of positive energy going on in that building, unfortunately. And you’ve got underpaid workers that are working too much, and you got angry people coming through a drive thru. There’s a lot of negative energy. You’re eating it. It’s not going to help you. So what I ended up doing is I looked at this, this is amazing to me. So I started to look at the more something gets processed, the more it has the opportunity to have things put into it. And you know that. When you’re cutting the meat and when you break the animal down, like for me, when you’re cutting fish, the less that you’re handling it, the more people are able to appreciate what it has as an entity of its own. For me, I started to look at it and said, food that is prepared with the proper energy and love is no different. For me, it’s all positive then. You’re taking in and you’re nourishing yourself properly. And over the last year or so, I have started to integrate- seafoods I started a few years ago integrating in. But now I’ve integrated meat back into my diet on different times where I really appreciate it from that standpoint. People are like, what about all this plant based, you’ve got all these different companies doing these things. It’s fantastic that there are people doing this. But remember one thing, processed food is processed food. So if you have a processed plant based something, it may have no more nutritional benefit than a plant based- meat based product that really has not a lot of great nutrition in it. And you look at them side by side, and neither one of them are doing you any favors. Your body will break down what it can break down. So feed the temple properly, and put the clean ingredients in, and you get the right energy and you get the right- out of it. So, that’s where I went with this. And I’ve had conversations with my father in law who is an amazing man and I respect greatly because he’ll have these conversations with me. What has happened with this world, this word vegan, and all these other things in that, it’s like a lot of other things in our world right now, they want to create a divide. And people don’t want- we don’t need a divide. I choose different things. And my wife and I don’t really tell a lot of people how we eat because we don’t want it to be, oh, you’re one of those. We’re not one of those. We just recognize what we eat. And I find when I go to different restaurants, I try to get a feel for the vibe of the place before I order because I want to know there’s a good energy here. I know that stuff is coming out, there’s a great energy. I have a little restaurant that we go to all the time here in St. Pete Beach, that all the time is not- It’s just one of those things that is a great little product, a great little place. But you go by their kitchen in the middle of a rush, and it’s all Zen. It’s all relaxed, and it’s like, wow. And the food, you feel good, no matter what you eat, you feel great. I had a Reuben there one day and I was happy as can be.

Neil Dudley: That’s so- I mean, I want to put a yeehaw on that. I mean, not even from the food perspective or where food comes from perspective, but from the human perspective. Like, everybody, wake up, life will not be the same for you as it is the next person and that is kind of the most beautiful thing. It is kind of what is so great about it. I just killed a deer the other day. Me and my daughters went out there into the pasture, harvested some meat, took it, cut it up myself, skinned it myself. They helped, all this stuff, and we just ate sausage made with that deer. And I just- it was such a good feeling. Like, I’m really proud of that. It’s like, wow, cool, we can go get food for ourselves. That’s important. I mean, I don’t know what the world’s going to look like in another 20 years. I want them to have that ability. You were talking about it a little bit with fish. And fish is another kind of thing that never- I mean, in this kind of debate, fish kind of always is good. Fish is good. It’s always good. I’ve been watching this show called, oh, what is it? Alone, it’s where they drop off kind of survivalists in the Arctic up in Canada, around a lake or around a river or something. And they just survive for who can survive the longest. Well, they eat fish, mice, porcupines, deer, birds. I mean, there’s not a single one of them that is surviving by planting a kernel of corn and waiting for it to grow and make up- so they’re eating berries and roots and those kinds of things and bark on occasion. It just makes me say like this is where we came from. When we had to survive as a race, as a Homo Sapien, we were just eating those bioavailable animal proteins. And I’m also listening to this book about the Indians, Native Americans, and how that life went. Man, that was crazy and how they lived and survived. Anyways, just I don’t even know where I’m going with all that. It is really a point to say there’s a lot of ways to do it, find what works for you.

Joe Koran: Right. And in the seafood world, what’s interesting about that, as compared to the meat industry, is the meat industry is regulated by the USDA. The seafood industry is still regulated by the industry in many, many ways. Now, we have NGOs that actually are the police, if you will, to look at things to make sure that standards are done for wholesomeness to make sure that like for aquaculture, farm raised products, people are like I don’t want farm raised fish because it’s bad. Well, there are things, like in any industry, you have extremists on one end and the other that are doing it right, and people that are doing it so well that you can’t even afford to buy it. It’s that kind of thing. So it’s one of those situations with the seafood industry is they’ve created these NGOs that kind of police it in its own entity. And that’s great. And I think it’s fantastic. There are so many bad stories that come around it, but the bottom line is this, farming fish is a healthy way to raise fish done properly. Land based aquaculture where water is pulled in, filtered, put into the system for the fish to grow on land so you can manage it, and then the water is filtered again, it goes back to the ocean cleaner than it came out is a system that is recirculating aquaculture, RAS system. Those systems are real, and they are the future. Flow through systems where the water comes in from the ocean, again to a land based and goes right out, again filtered the same way. It happens that way. It’s sustainable. So that word actually makes sense in that way. What happens is, a lot of people hide behind labels. And unfortunately, like any industry, you have things where people have a pay to play. You can get this certification for the right amount of money. But does it really make it a better product? Not necessarily. But what happens is people that are growing fish properly, growing meat properly, growing produce properly, if you’re doing things properly and wholesome, you’re putting the proper energy in to get the proper nutrients out. We get caught up in putting things in. But the interesting thing, the pirates as we call ourselves at times in the seafood industry, they police the industry and we try to look out for each other. Which is a real big dynamic that’s different for the meat industry. Is it right or wrong? It doesn’t- it’s not right or wrong. It doesn’t make- it’s not anything that way. It’s just the way things have been set up. What it allows us to do is it gives us a little bit more flexibility in being able to bring in, and people say well, I want a salmon fillet. It’s like if you say to somebody I want a strip steak, you can go to the nap book, you open the nap book up and you see what the number is associated with a strip steak. And you know that if you’re in Maine, Montana or Missouri, you’re going to get the same steak. Well, if you’re in any of those three states and you say, I want a salmon fillet, you could get Chilean, you can get Norwegian, you can get Canadian, you could get wild, you can get the farm, you can get whatever, you can get any different- a number of different things, which is a blessing and a curse at times. But the good news is that it allows you to have different options for the protein. It’s a lean protein. It’s a great protein. 75% of the Earth’s surface is covered in water. And we haven’t really harvested the ability to do things with that. They’re looking at the algal oil that’s being used now in land based protein that’s using to keep methane levels down, apparently, in feed with the algal oil, which is a big thing. So people will say, well, you can’t have the meat because of the greenhouse gas. No, I mean, there’s ways that- everything that we need is on earth here. We just have to stop trying to invent things that aren’t indigenous to our planet. Why did the Native Americans, why were they as healthy as they were, and they didn’t have- the bison that they ate, which they celebrated their food, again, energy in, energy out. But bison, and you probably can tell me this more, I was told by some people that the bison in the wild are the only mammal, and some of the farm ways now because of their diet, are the only mammals that don’t develop cancer cells. And apparently, it’s based on stress and their diet.

Neil Dudley: I don’t know. I mean, I’ve never heard that. But it could make sense to me. I mean, what almost drove the bison to extinction was humans killing them all and just selling their hides, just greed, capitalism. So, you can find ugliness in almost anything, you can find beauty in almost anything. How are you going to choose to look at it? How are you going to choose to accept this conversation? I did want you to touch on this, for somebody who is- we’ve got a lot of people listening and watching, somebody that might be thinking, man, I kind of have that same heart deal that Joe experienced, I don’t know, my arteries, I’ve had some issues. What was your process? Did you just like snap a finger, say, okay, I’m taking all this animal protein stuff out? What did you eat? Somebody that just says, Joe, how could I do what you did, what’s the first month or seven days or thought process they need to take?

Joe Koran: Yeah, it’s interesting because like I’ve said before, I’m a student of the food industry. And as I was eating different things, I was saying, if this tastes this good and has these many attributes, you start to be aware of the things that are being made and you’re maybe I should slow down a little bit on how much I eat of this or that. But what I started to look at is where did it come from, how processed was it, and I started to go to closer to the actual source of what it was is what I would have. So, I would start to find different things in that way. When it came time that I flipped the switch, my cholesterol wasn’t extremely high. It turned out that a lot of what I had issue-wise was stress. But because I was eating things that had a lot of processed and then things that were higher cholesterol items, that kind of thing, that my body wasn’t processing properly, I needed to clean the pipes. I needed to clean things out. I went for about two weeks, I was doing juicing twice a day and then eating a small meal at the end of the day. And it was good. It really purged my system. What it did was with a lot of the greens that went in there, that put all this chlorophyll and this oxygen in my bloodstream and really helped get things pumping. And I believe in supplements. Niacin was early in on this as well, doing the non- this is the stuff that flushes you, not the stuff that’s non flushing. This is where you’re beet red. And I was doing 2 and 3000 milligrams a day, which 100 to 200 milligrams for a lot of people is like that’s hot, and I’m doing 1000 to 3000 a day depending on what it was to flush my system. It’s almost like a natural statin in many ways because it opens your bloodstream up and allows it to flush, and it’s a great thing to do. So, I was doing that kind of thing in conjunction with really kind of doing that initial purge. And then I started just really focusing on complex, like grains that were sprouted grains for breads and my- there are certain things that you just miss eating, but you go around it and you start to have other things. I’m an oatmeal and peanut butter guy in the morning. I love oatmeal with natural peanut butter and so I do now the organic rolled oats with an organic peanut butter, and you get all this energy for the day, and it carries you till a late lunch if you want. And I mean, people are like, you eat a lot of salads. I do. But there’s a lot of- I could take- my wife, what’s lovely about it is my wife grew up in the meat industry. She started, she used to take naps in a bacon box with ag aprons in it in the kitchen of the meat market when she was a kid, and at 14, she’s coming home from school working the meat counter kind of thing. So, she has taken a lot of our favorites from the meat side and converted them into comfort foods that are leaner, if you will. And by doing that with mushrooms and other vegetable ingredients that we’re doing like a cauliflower steak that you actually sit and eat that you’re like really, a steak? And you’d actually be surprised at how fulfilling it can be seasoned properly, that kind of thing. But there’s a lot of little foods that I didn’t have to give up. Cheese was one of those things, that was a hard thing for me to- I will tell you that. Cheese has the same- apparently there’s a- in the dairy ingredient, there is something that triggers this dopamine type of thing in your brain that makes you just so happy and warm and cozy. And you got to have it. And who doesn’t love it? But so I do it in moderation. But what I found is I don’t go with the commodity farmed items, I go with artisanal over industrial. And so, for me on the cheese side, I don’t have reaction then, and I don’t have this heart racing or anything like that anymore because I’m doing this. Because you think about it, the milking machines in a factory farm, pretty aggressive. And that energy transfers, and it’s just the reality of how things are done. I get that. And I don’t get offended. That’s the one thing when you say, oh, you’re a vegan, that’s an extremism. I am aware of what I’m eating, and the plant base, I’m a flexitarian, whatever you want to call it. I don’t even put a label on it. I just am a guy who knows that I limit some things. And when I eat them, I appreciate them, and I celebrate them. And I think that that’s what we’ve gotten away from. And I think really, at the end of the day, Neil, what’s really cool is sitting around the table. You probably sit around the table with your family and have a meal every day. It’s the greatest time you can have is that time around the table, no technology, just conversation. It’s priceless. And if you think about it, in our society today, if people sat around the table and broke bread, no matter what’s on the table, and the energy and everything, and you’re grateful for what you’re having, it changes the dynamic on everything.

Neil Dudley: It forces you to build a relationship. I’m almost wanting to cry because the truth is, like the most honest truth is, we don’t do that nearly enough. Occasionally, we’ll slow down. And like we’ve let ourselves, I’ve let my family into this rat race of life. It is just kids in junior high. They’re all doing sports, they’re all doing school, they’re all doing UIL, they’re all doing church, they all want to go ride horses. It is like every minute accounted for with something to do. And if that’s not- so you’re eating a lot of the times just not the best stuff. The processed stuff is easier to fix. I think a thing I’d like to highlight is close to the source, perishable food really is a good way to eat anyway you think about it. Also, we’ve talked, we said the word commodity, I say we, you, I say it. I’m going to- Pederson’s is just trying to be a part of these conversations. We do this live stream Q&A where we have kind of industry experts. Well, one of the guys coming on takes a pretty big issue like why are we in agriculture fighting each other? Like why is Pederson’s saying our way is better and the commodity guys are bad? I’m having to really roll that one around a little bit. Partly is energy. Partly is we, as a company, see consumers that want a thing and we’re trying to provide that for them. And sometimes it comes out as like maybe an internal industry throwing shade on somebody. Look, I’m not here to throw shade on somebody. We do what we do. I want you to know what it is. So if you like that, you align with that, you can work with us. And this in a Pederson’s commercial. I think that’s what all companies should truly transparently say, this is how we do it. We raise a million cattle in this feed lot. This is what it looks like. This is how it happens. Now you know if that is the thing, whatever. The transparency piece is part of what we’re really trying to do too.

Joe Koran: Right. And I think it’s phenomenal to do that. And I think that that’s where, we look at this, there’s the us versus them thing with the seafood industry has had a real issue with the plant based industry and plant based saying plant based seafood. And they’ve felt threatened. And I said, what are you threatened about? Are you threatened that they are going to take a piece of a pie that should be yours? Or are you threatened at the fact that they have a marketing campaign that’s not necessarily focused on one particular thing, and it’s pushing you to the side? I think where I find things is, like the meat industry, what I like about their marketing campaigns is you’ve got beef, it’s what’s for dinner, pork, the other white meat, that kind of thing, all these things, got milk, all these types of the agricultural items that have been done with universal marketing plans. What does it tell you? It tells you that that particular product is something that we want you to focus on. Where you buy it is the personal choice because we’re all about making choices. Ego in industries gets in the way of allowing people to make choices and it’s like, well, I don’t want to promote this, I want them to just buy mine. Well, in the seafood industry, if people were buying more fish, everybody would benefit in the seafood industry. But because there are egos in larger companies that say, if you’re not doing it, if I’m not going to be the guy controlling the message, then I’m not going to be the guy that does- I’m not going to get behind this. And what happens? You got less people eating it than they should. And you look at seafood consumption over the past 20 years, it’s almost been flatlined for the amount of pounds per person. I try to explain to people, seafood, it’s so much harder to cook. I said, let me ask you a question. If you take a piece of fish, and you cook it, and you undercook it slightly, it’s probably going to be okay and may actually be cooked properly. 

Neil Dudley: We eat fresh sushi, raw fish all the time.

Joe Koran: Right. But if you take a piece of chicken and you under cook it, what’s going to happen? You might get sick to your stomach. So why is it harder to cook fish than it is to cook chicken? Chicken to me is more difficult. I mean, I find more of a challenge around it because the simplicity of cooking seafood really is there. Whatever you can do to meat you can do to fish. But people have made this overcomplicated. And oh, it’s so expensive. It really isn’t. Break it down to portion costs, like anything,  you break it down to these portion costs. You eat the elephant a bite at a time, you got to eat the product, its portion at a time. You’re not eating, oh, that’s $15 a pound. You’re going to have three ounces of it. Okay, how much is it now?

Neil Dudley: Totally, I think this is a great thing for you to think about. If you’re listening and you’ve made it this far, don’t trade down on your food, like your nutrition, the fuel you’re putting in your body. I would just encourage you, it’s in my life a truth that we tried to do the- we will spend a little more to have the better stuff and just eat less well. You need less ultimately. It’s just the nutrition you need. When you’re eating Takis or, I mean, that’s just the first thing that comes to my mind in Texas, these rolled chips that my kids love. And they sell great and that company is doing well selling them. But it’s like that’s not really the best nutrition you can be feeding- It’s kind of an enjoyable snack. And yeah, it has some value in that way. But otherwise, what are you doing to put in good nutrition and those dollars are super important, so make smart decisions with them.

Joe Koran: Yeah, I found that myself, my wife and I, we’ve actually, what’s ended up happening is we are actually eating less by eating better quality ingredients. So for example, with like organic vegetables that we can- where we can source, that kind of thing, a salad, you eat a smaller salad and have more nutritional- you feel more satisfied than you do eating this big heaping iceberg bowl that is who knows how it was made and how it was grown or whatever. And not that- but I mean, I’m not saying you don’t eat the iceberg bowl. That’s great. But the difference for me is that, in today’s world, you have to watch your dollars and cents. You have to do that. But exactly what you said, the quality is worth- is the juice worth the squeeze, as some people say. It is if you spend the right- you’re doing it right. And people who take the time, like what Pederson’s does with bacon, your products that you’re making, you’re taking the time to do things right. And that’s the thing that separates you. And that’s why people gravitate towards your products because they feel enriched by that. And that’s what you have to just do is find those ingredients that do that. And we’ve changed our relationship with food. It became a real focal point. It was like, what are we doing? It’s that question of the day, what’s for dinner? Well, you know what, it doesn’t have to be that way. Let’s just figure out what’s in season, what do we have, what are we doing, and let’s eat accordingly and do that. And that’s how we’ve managed our diet over time. And we don’t- I mean, diet as in what we eat, not that we have a regimented plan per se.

Neil Dudley: Everybody, I mean, this flew by. We could probably talk for another hour because there’s a lot of information, interesting conversation to be had. Although, I hope what this did is inspire you as a listener, it inspired me. Joe has inspired me. I’m paying attention. I pay attention to him. I’m interested in what he’s up to because I value his experience and his perspective. So, take this, if it spurs you in some way, go learn a little bit more about your food. There’s fasting out there. I find when I get out of eating food as a comfort thing or in a stress mode, whatever, I’m just eating, eating, eating, well, I’m never full almost, if I’ll do a Whole 30 or get off of- do some fasting, my stomach shrinks, and a small amount of food fuels my body just fine. Probably even better than these piles of food I’m eating under stress. And listen, it’s no secret, America is under stress right now, probably the globe, everybody in the world’s under stress. What are you using to kind of mitigate those stresses? I do food. I mean, I do. So I’ve tried to really go the other way, work out, fast, do some of these other things. And then guess what, now then the food’s not as big a problem.

Joe Koran: Yeah, and make sure you’re drinking a lot of water. I mean, that’s the one thing I noticed a lot of people- hydration is so critical. And especially if you’re eating anything that is processed, your sodium levels are off the chart, and you’re drinking water and it’s just not hydrating your body. I do warm water with a little bit of fresh lemon juice every morning, and it starts your metabolism and it gets your hydration system working so as you’re drinking water throughout the day, you’re actually benefiting from it. And it just becomes a part of it. So, it hasn’t helped me grow my hair back, Neil, that’s the thing.

Neil Dudley: Me neither. I’ve still got some missing hair up top. But Joe, I really appreciate you. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for giving everybody access to your story, to your thought processes. Everybody, if you’ve listened this far, we appreciate you so much. Your time is your most valuable asset. I mean, it is. You don’t get it back. What you do with it means something. The idea that you’re listening to us and engaging in this industry, this conversation is super appreciated. So come back next time. We’ll get somebody else on here to tell us how they feel about where food comes from and we’ll see if we can’t learn something else or give you another perspective to kind of add to your knowledge. Joe, thank you so much.

Joe Koran: Thank you, Neil. Happy holidays, and anytime, I’m here for you.