Jan Jekielek is a senior editor with The Epoch Times, host of the show “American Thought Leaders” and co-host of “FALLOUT” with Dr. Robert Malone and “Kash’s Corner” with Kash Patel. Jan’s career has spanned academia, international human rights work, and now for almost two decades, media. He has interviewed nearly a thousand thought leaders on camera, and specializes in long-form discussions challenging the grand narratives of our time. He’s also an award-winning documentary filmmaker, producing “The Unseen Crisis: Vaccine Stories You Were Never Told,” “DeSantis: Florida vs. Lockdowns,” and “Finding Manny.”

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[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW] In this special episode of American Thought Leaders, I visited the Food Independence Summit, an annual event dedicated to homesteading, sustainable living, and reclaiming food autonomy, in Walnut Creek, Ohio. The 2025 summit, with a theme of “Seed to Spoon,” took place in mid-June earlier this year in the heart of Ohio’s Amish country.

Homesteaders, farmers, gardeners, educators, and healthy food advocates spent two days together participating in hands-on workshops, listening to keynote presentations, and networking with like-minded people.

For many Americans, the COVID-19 pandemic exposed the fragility of supply chains, including the food supply chain. The summit’s focus was on learning how to grow, preserve, and prepare homegrown food.

While at the summit, I spoke with organizer John Miller to learn about the philosophy behind this growing homesteading and self-sufficiency movement. I also spoke with renowned farmer Joel Salatin about what new trends he’s seeing.

I even got some hands-on practice pressure-canning beef tacos with the help of Sarah Thrush, a canning expert and social media influencer.

“There’s a lot of reasons people can, but one of them is so they can decide what goes in the jar, like if you have health concerns, or if you want to know what your food is sourced from, or you just like your chili recipe and you want it in bulk,” Thrush said. “It’s like the ultimate meal prep.”

I also spoke to physician Julian Douwes, who flew to Ohio all the way from Germany. Dr. Douwes is the director at Clinicum St. Georg in Bad Aibling, Germany, where they developed the first known cure for Lyme disease. Many people in the Ohio Amish community suffer from Lyme disease. Miller himself was cured from an awful case of the disease through this therapy, called whole-body hyperthermia.

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest and do not necessarily reflect the views of NTD.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT
Jan Jekielek:

We’re here at the Food Independence Summit in Walnut Creek, Ohio. I interviewed my increasingly good friend, John Miller. John came on the show a little while back and was excited about this event. We talked about manufacturing. We talked about food freedom. He said, you have to come to our summit, so here we are in Walnut Creek. Thank you for having us, John.

Thank you for coming. It’s really an honor. We’ve been blessed with pretty decent weather, actually. The weather forecast was questionable as we approached it, but we’ve had just enough rain to not be too hot. I don’t have an exact count yet, but we’re somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000 people we’re expecting today.

That’s fantastic. Well, so what would you say is going to be the big highlight of the day? Like, what is the thing that people really come here for, if you had to pick one point?

The people come here to learn how to be less dependent on other people, particularly for food. And we showed them a whole, everything from seed to spoon—that’s kind of our motto on how to do that, whether you’re planting gardens or whether you’re conserving food, you can find out how to do it here. We’ve got 48 concurrent workshops this afternoon. When we do something, we do it with all our might. We were really intentional about bringing people from outside the community here because homesteading is part of our culture here.

When we say our community, it’s not just Amish. I mean, there are other people in the community that basically have the same values as well. Joel Salatin talks about a homesteading tsunami that has come about particularly since Covid when people realized that the supply chain is very fragile. And if it gets interrupted, you can be out of food very quickly. That has also helped make us successful. Because a generation ago people raised a garden and grew up that way, some of that has gotten lost. So we hope to bring that back for people that are interested.

Define homesteading for me.

Homesteading is one of those things that can mean a lot of things to a lot of people. What it means in this community is that I’ve got a home and I have maybe two or three acres and have a garden, a couple of fruit trees, and maybe some chickens. So you have a homestead where you are to a greater or lesser degree self-sufficient. So what are these magazines?

You know, we were walking through one of the tents and you pointed these out to me, plain values. What are these about?

So that’s a local publishing company. It covers everything from some of the philosophical underpinnings of the whys—why do we do different things—and what are the principles. And then there’s just a lot of practical stuff in the magazine about how to live life.

So what are the principles? What are the plain values?

I ascribe to the fact that organizations should be modeled around the tree. So if you go to my company and the different organizations that I have, we don’t have a pyramidal top-down chart like most organizations. We have a bottom-up chart where the leaders are at the bottom supporting the people. And I think it’s consistent with this thing of the difficulty to scale.

So a tree teaches us, and you might have noticed this, that aside from the sequoias out west, most trees are only a couple hundred feet high. So there is, whatever you do, there is a level beyond which if you try to scale it, you almost have to have a tyrannical corporate structure to keep it from completely getting out of hand. So I think what the tree teaches us is that you have smaller units. If you’re going to be a natural organic organization, there is a size beyond which it can’t grow. So what you do, instead of building a tower, you plant trees and you create a forest that collaborates. I think nature teaches us a lot of different things.

For example, the Amish, their church districts that are governed by a bishop and two ministers typically are no bigger than, say, 30 families. And if it grows larger than that, they divide it in half, separate. And it’s probably a practical thing because if you get beyond that, you’re not able to have church services in a home. The Walnut Creek Mennonite Church, which we still have here just down the road, separated over the issue of whether you have church services in your home or whether you create a church house where you meet on a regular basis. And that was the dividing factor back in the 19th century.

Give me a picture of what we’re going to do here.

So we’re pressure canning. There’s two different types of canning: water bath canning and pressure canning. So today we’re doing pressure canning of beef tacos. And this is actually really super simple. My family has been doing this for hundreds of years. You just fill the jars, you put them in the canner, and you put the lid on, and then you run the canner and you put the lid on and then you run the canner. And so what that does is it creates an environment inside the jar where you don’t need any refrigeration.

How long does this last? I mean, can anything go in these jars?

Practically anything. I mean, there are a few caveats and a few things that you need to be aware of when it comes to food preservation, but your fruits, your vegetables, all of your meats, your game. I love the canned meats and the meals in the jar because then what I do is I batch can everything. So I’ll do up to 40 pounds of taco beef. I’ll do all of that all in one day. And then I don’t cook tacos for like an entire year.

Well, you’re inspiring me here because let’s say, you know, if you’re someone who likes to try to do the keto diet from time to time, which I do, right, you actually, it’s like to do it, you know, sort of piece by piece can be troublesome, but here you can make food for a month almost or something like that if you’re alone, right?

I call it the ultimate food prep. I mean, that’s really what it is, especially, there’s a lot of reasons people can, but one of them is just so they can decide what goes in the jar.

Simplicity, you can do it at home. All you need is a device like this.

You can actually start with a pot. So you don’t need any special equipment. You can actually start with any large pot that you have as long as it’s tall enough to submerge the jars. The most important part, though, is to actually have a good canning book because the canning books will tell you what you can put in a large water bath canner and what needs to go in a pressure canner. So the food dictates which process is needed.

Oh, so there are things that can go in here, but can’t go in here. And there are things that can go in here, but can’t go in here.

Right. All of our food falls on an acidity level. So things that are more acidic, like apples and oranges and fruits and fruit juices, jams, jellies, they only need to be heated to 212 degrees. So that can go in this large pot because we can boil water in here at 212 degrees. But our low-acid foods like meat, meals in a jar, beans, fish, and vegetables even. If you don’t want your vegetables pickled, like say you just want them in water, then you put them in here, that temperature is 240 degrees. So it allows us to cook it at a higher heat, making it safe for no refrigeration.

You know, it’s incredible. I’m thinking about, you know, your life trajectory here, learning a little bit about you, right? You taught in the past—in the space of, you know, surgical techniques and this kind of thing, and then you, of course, had the canning from, you know, your—as you described, a multi-generational canner, so it was almost in your blood to do this kind of stuff, it wasn’t a big leap, and then Covid comes and you go viral about canning, because, you know, all sorts of people are worried about their realities being locked down, being isolated, and so forth, and watching videos. So, and here you are with millions of people learning how to can from you, including me.

It’s wild because I retired from medicine with the intent of bulking up on our homestead, like getting more food on our food plots, hunting more, fishing, doing more things that were self-sustainable for us. And in that process, somebody just asked for a video, and I was like, let me show you what I’m doing, and boy, has my life changed ever since. I thought I was retiring, and now I think I work more.

Yes, well, no, it’s funny. I mean, even my own kind of journey—I never thought I’d be doing anything remotely on camera in my life, but it turned out that people wanted it. It turned out I was helping people understand the madness of our times. I was just trying to figure out myself, and I ended up doing it on camera, but there’s such an appetite for people to learn. And I understand a lot of young people who didn’t even know that this is even possible were watching.

I often say it’s like we’re waking up from a grocery store coma. It’s like we, over generations, over time, we have just come to rely on a grocery store that’s the easiest thing. The food’s right there, you know, you work, you pay for the groceries to take them home, they’re done. But this, what this isn’t the norm, this isn’t how we have lived in this country for the existence of the country, right? Grocery stores are actually a relatively new thing if you look at our history.

So my family, while we’ve always canned and we’ve always preserved our food, there were generations of people in between there that didn’t get to experience that. And so I don’t think it was ever lost; it just became less popular. And I think now that people are starting to look at their foods and our fragile food systems, you know, like during Covid, and they’re starting to go, oh my gosh,

What happens if I go to the grocery store and I can’t get my whatever? What am I going to do then? They start to say, oh, I could do this myself. So it’s making a comeback, but I don’t want to say it was dead. I don’t think it was dead; I think it just became unpopular for a little bit.

Well, I mean, it’s very popular among the Amish, right? It’s not a surprise that it’s kind of the Amish who came to John Miller and asked him, hey, can you make some lids that work for us? So can we see the next step? I know, I know it’s super simple.

It is. I’m going to get some lids and some rings. So here in North America, in canning, now canning is done globally. This isn’t just something that just Americans do; it’s done globally. But here in America, we use a two-piece lid system on the average. And here’s your Superb lids and your Superb rings. So the flat part of the lid is called a flat. That’s pretty easy. And then it has this sealant on the bottom of it that creates a seal onto the jar. And then you have your rings. And this is a placeholder for the lid while we’re processing.

So what we do in canning is, the next step would be we put the lid and the ring on. And the flies have just really come out in full force today. But we just put that lid and that ring on. And then once it goes into the canner, the lid will actually kind of bounce up and down and it will push all the air out of the jar. It will push all the oxygen out of the jar, because we’re heating it under pressure.

Because I noticed you didn’t do it particularly tightly.

No, it doesn’t need to be. This is just a placeholder. So once this jar comes out and this lid is sealed, this comes off and you just put it on your shelf like this. Oh, the lid is what holds the suction to the jar, not the ring. So, yep, I would just wipe these down. I would just use a rag with a little bit of vinegar or water, and I would just wipe these down, make sure that I’ve got a good clean rim.

Here is a great fun fact. This is a sterilizer. So you can also use this to sterilize things. That’s how hot it gets. So these have been cleaned with hot soapy water. Touching them is okay. They’re going to go in the sterilizer.

You know, the thing about this which is so amazing is like I often would make a lot of, basically something very similar to this actually, you know, basically ground beef with some, but I often end up eating it really quickly because I didn’t actually keep it. I didn’t set it up to keep it, right? It just lasts a few days, but you end up kind of consuming it. But this also kind of keeps it away from you a little bit for a while if you need that.

Yes, for sure. We save on average about $10,000 to $12,000 a year in groceries by canning.

That’s astonishing. I have friends that have herds of cattle and so forth, and it’s hard, but I don’t, it’s just my wife and myself, right? It’s hard for me to buy the side of a cow. How quickly can you consume that? But maybe when you’re doing it this kind of way, you can really do some things in bulk and have them kind of sitting there and they’ll last, you say, a couple of years?

Yes, so we like to rotate everything in one to three years. So I always like to have enough to take us from harvest to harvest. If it’s corn, I want at least 52 quarts, because I know we’re going to eat one jar of corn a week. That 52 quarts takes me to the next harvest year. They will last on the shelves as long as they’re in a good environment; away from the sun, cool, and dry. They will last for years on your shelves.

That’s astonishing. Sarah, thanks so much.

You guys have been coming here for years. So tell me about the evolution of this place, and frankly, Jeff, actually, your own evolution as an Epoch Times reporter covering this event.

I’ve been with Epoch Times for about three-and-a-half years, but I just started to develop an interest in a more sustainable lifestyle. And I didn’t even know anything about that because I grew up in cities and suburbs. And suddenly that changed. A lot of things changed starting towards Covid. Instead of purely politics, I was starting to cover more sustainable living, homesteading type features, and that’s how I learned about this.

Oh, fantastic. Well, Melissa, tell me about the background here.

I grew up in part city, part country. We lived in the city because that’s where our family owned a business, but we had a large farm, and we spent many hours hunting and fishing. My grandmother passed on like five generations of canning skills and baking from scratch and really full food. I really didn’t understand at a young age the importance of that.

When Covid happened and the shelves began to go bare and food was hard to get, especially with a child that has multiple allergies, I went back to my old roots and said, I know how to fix this. And not only do you have a reliability of what you’re going to purchase and you know what’s in your food, but you also can save money by doing this because you’re not, every time you get ready and you’re a hectic mom and you’re running kids in every direction, and you don’t have to run through the nearest drive-thru because you already have something on the shelf ready to put into another recipe. And so you learn how to preserve food, whether it be in mylar with oxygen absorbers or canning like Sarah’s teaching here.

People ask, why do you do this? You could just go buy it for $2. Why do you spend two hours canning something when you could buy it for $2? Then I say, well, I enjoy it. I’m teaching generations of skills to my children, but we control the ingredients and we control the product that’s on our shelves when we are ready for that product. As a single mom coming here, there was a lot of fear and a lot of open doors that opened at once. But you have to be strong enough to walk through them and see a vision, and I had the vision, and we just decided to go.

Clearly, you’re a really important part of our reporting here because you opened the door for this gentleman.

Yes, it was exciting. I said, this is a collaboration you cannot miss. He said, I don’t know anything about this. Then I said, well, this is the best way to learn—just jump in.

It also coincided with April 2023 when RFK Jr. decided to enter the presidential race, talking about what’s in your food, removing chemicals and dyes, before the term Make America Healthy Again happened. So that really impacted me personally because it fostered my growth and my interest in, and now I get less from the grocery store. I’m trying to grow more, but I take more herbs. I know a lot about herbs now that I didn’t know before. I look at ingredients where I never used to look at ingredients, and I can’t even pronounce or spell half of them.

That’s what this does. It changes your perspective so you can make little steps. I’m still growing. I’m not at a level where Melissa is, because that’s been her lifestyle, but I’m able to incorporate positive changes. And I can’t say enough about how this event has impacted me. This is my favorite. I cover several homesteading events now, but this is my favorite.

What I love about the Amish lifestyle is that we’re getting back to a return to the basics, where you know where your food comes from, you know what’s in your food. It starts with the soil, and then having the right seeds is the second step, and knowing what to do with that. It doesn’t matter what you grow if you can’t preserve it. You’ve got to understand that everything starts from the soil, and it involves your clothing, it involves your food, it involves everything. It’s a lifestyle and a mindset that you take on as a whole.

Because when you realize the whole, the whole, you know, the conference and some of your seed to spoon—so seed to spoon is from all the way to that seed in the earth, all the way to what you wear, what you eat, how you experience your world. And when you realize that everything starts at seed and that soil affects all of your life, it’s really a cool concept to see how big that grows with your lifestyle, and then you change your lifestyle once you start to learn because education is powerful, right? So he’s bringing those stories to people and educating the masses. So that’s an exciting thing.

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