James Connolly is a film producer (most recently – Sacred Cow), co-host of the Sustainable Dish podcast, avid reader, and passionate about food. It’s hard to encapsulate this conversation in a description – we cover a lot of ground. At its core, it’s the broad strokes of just how we ended up in our current paradigm. We start about 150 years ago, where we follow threads of the move from rural to urban environments and how the idea of ‘cleanliness’ begins to take hold. We cover the Great Grain Robbery and the formation of commodities that would change the agricultural world and how technology has played a role in these early formation of food systems and how it’s playing a role now, leading into a conversation of techno-utopias. James covers school systems, as someone who has run a non-profit for schools in New York, and how we’re taught what to think, not how to think and the compulsory education experiment. We also dive into the history of medicalizing the human experience using some personal anecdotes around grief to explore the world of psychiatric medication and beyond. All of this leads into a discussion of the techno-utopia that we’re often being marketed and the shape of the current food system. It’s a big, rolling conversation filled with all the book recommendations you need to keep it going.