Name: From Vegan Star Chef to Regenerative Rancher | Mollie Engelhart
Uploaded: 2025-11-04T17:30:58.000Z
Description: Mollie Engelhart was once a celebrated vegan farm-to-table restaurateur in California. When she decided to put meat back on the menu, a targeted campaign forced her to close her business.

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] Mollie Engelhart was once a celebrated vegan farm-to-table restaurateur in California. When she decided to put meat back on the menu, a targeted campaign forced her to close her business.

She ultimately decided to make the painful decision to uproot her entire life, sell her farm, and rebuild from scratch in Texas.

She’s the author of the new book “Debunked by Nature: How a Vegan-Chef-Turned-Regenerative-Farmer Discovered that Mother Nature Is a Conservative.”

“We’re treating the soil and our bodies like we can outsmart them, but we’re getting sicker,” she says.

Once an ardent believer in the vegan movement, Engelhart now questions much of what she once believed.

“Nature taught me my ideas were ridiculous. … My cow isn’t the enemy,” she says.

Real environmentalism is “not to avoid nature, but to interact with her; not to try to out-science her, but to remember her wisdom,” she says.

How does the health of our soil shape the health of our bodies? In this episode, we dive into the roots of our health crisis and why real change often starts small, with curious consumers and courageous farmers.

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:

Mollie Englehart, so good to have you back on American Thought Leaders.

So happy to be back.

I’ve been on this little bit of a journey with you over the last several years. You know, we first encountered each other in California, where you had a vegan restaurant chain and the farm that fed those restaurants. And then you had to move out to Texas, where we visited as well. But along the way, you actually switched from vegan to involving meat in these restaurants. So what actually happened when you did that?

Yes, I think that I was prepared for the vegans to be upset. I lived in that ethos for so many years. I had been a darling, like, oh, let me do another piece. Let me do it. We’ll do a piece about this. And all of a sudden, like, regenerative agriculture is a lie. We must stick with wind and solar. The New York Post did a full-page article in the physical magazine. I was like, wow, slow news day, that this is really that interesting.

But I think that it was a drama. I don’t know that the media really cares. Media is all about selling ad space. And so I think that the drama of the vegans being upset had it float to the top for a little while. But it did cause a lot of upset. It caused people to not go to my restaurant, to doubt my commitment to the environment. And, you know, I’m deeply committed to our earth, but not in a superficial way. And so it wasn’t ideal. It didn’t go well for my restaurants in California. And the end result is we eventually closed all of them.

Just, you know, before I continue, just a couple of ways that that manifested, like what are the elements that forced those closures ultimately?

In full disclosure, to be totally honest, we didn’t have that much runway when I made the switch because of the California policy of no indoor dining for almost two-and-a-half years. And then once they reopened for indoor dining, we had to bring back all the staff. But our sales were still pretty dismal, and it was still more than 50 percent to go. But you had to have a busboy and a bartender and all the regular service stuff. So we were struggling already because culture had shifted from bad bureaucratic decisions.

I thought, well, if I bring in the whole healthy meats, that would bring in a new audience. And it was what I deeply believed for myself. And so I knew that there would be upset. But I figured that the people that were really into tallow fries and grass-fed burgers would make up for that.

Ultimately, there was a lot of not great press, and then there was a lot of protesting, and so people don’t want to go somewhere where they think someone’s going to be yelling or talking on a microphone. All of the information on the Internet is crowdsourced. You go to a restaurant and you’re like, oh my gosh, it’s closed. You can go to Yelp and be like, it’s closed.

Update your information. This information is wrong. I understand why these websites do it. They can’t be everywhere and know everything. But there was a targeted campaign against me to continuously have my Yelp and my Google and my Apple Maps say permanently closed. They would go to the stand outside the restaurant and six, seven, eight people would cluster.

It would take me days to get it re-put back up as open. I’d have to prove that I was open, show my sales, show my bank account, and then they would do it again. This hurt my business because if you’re looking to go out to eat and it says Sage is permanently closed, you don’t go back next week to check if it’s not permanently closed. Permanently is the first word.

Ultimately, why do you think these people were doing this?

I think that the people on the ground level that were doing it believe that climate change is an existential threat and that the abuse of animals is the worst thing that you can do. I think they believe that on a level. I think on a bigger scale, veganism is another way that they use to divide us and to create chaos. I think that veganism probably started with good intentions. It’s just another thing that’s been co-opted into a way to divide and conquer humanity and to think you’re bad if you eat meat, and you’re good if you save bunnies, whatever it is.

But I do think that there are powers that are above that. There were funded, coordinated efforts. These were not spontaneous protests. They had professionally printed signs and people out there with cases of water. There was some coordinated effort that was funded. I believe that there are powers that be that want us to go to 3D-printed meat.

I just saw a thing this morning about how we can make butter out of carbon, just that we’re going to take carbon and make butter. It’s going to be awesome. All you need is hydrogen and carbon and no cows and no land, and you can have butter forever. I do think that there are a lot of people that are highly invested in these products.

I think that MAHA, the paleo, the keto, like all of these things moving towards tallow and animal-based products are hurting billions of dollars of investment. I’m positive that there are people with financial interests in the vegan world that want to keep veganism important and on top. So I think it’s a combination of all those things.

You mentioned earlier that you are very, you know, pro-environment, but not in a superficial way. When you said that, I was thinking, yes, you’re talking about Debunked by Nature here, of course, your new book that’s come out, which I think is fantastic. As you obviously know, I’ve endorsed the book because I think it’s so wonderful. But here’s the thing. How were you debunked by nature?

I thought of calling it like nature never lies, something like that. But debunked by nature was just like it debunked everything that I believed. Environmentalism is just one of the many, many ideas. But I was this adamant, militant environmentalist. If you take me in 2015, I’m this militant environmentalist.

I am running vegan restaurants. I’m driving a hybrid. I’m drinking out of a paper straw that’s deteriorating in my mouth every time I drink a smoothie. I’m bringing my reusable cup, and I’m having an oat milk latte. I’m bringing bags to the grocery store. I think I’m doing everything I can for the environment. Underneath all of that, I felt very apathetic and that we were going to burn in hell and there was nothing we could do about it. That was underneath all of that, drive a hybrid, and bring your things to the grocery store. All that stuff that was underneath it.

I heard a TED talk by [inaudible] that my brother had sent me, and this started this journey. Where that journey started was okay, food waste is actually a way bigger problem than cow farts or cow burps, as people are concerned about. I realized that every one of us is a contributor to food waste; every one of us throws food away. We don’t eat everything at the restaurant; we buy groceries, and it goes bad in our fridge. As a vegan restaurant owner, I was throwing away massive amounts of food waste, and I knew after this talk I could turn that into healthy soil.

So I set out to get a farm. When I got land, I had all these ideas about how it was going to go. I had all these ideas about veganism, and I had all these ideas about the environment, and nature taught me that my ideas were ridiculous; that my cow was bad for the environment and my Lexus H250 hybrid, or whatever I drove at that time, was good for the environment.

It was so obvious to me just being in nature, seeing something die, seeing it decompose, going to nothing, and then having to replace the batteries in my hybrid car and having to pay for hazmat removal and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. How that can’t possibly be better for the environment than my cow that will just disappear into the field. I realized we’re constantly fighting against death. The entire vegan concept is afraid to die. I thought death is just the flip side of the coin of life.

For the first time in years, I looked up from my phone on the farm. I looked up and I was present to God. I was present to the presence of something so much larger than my own ego. Everything I understood that we should be doing for the environment, which is essentially we are bad and wrong. We’re a plague. We’re a scourge.

We should just gather in cities and leave nature to do its thing without us. It was put on my heart so clearly that that’s not true. We’re meant to interface with nature, and we’ve forgotten our role. To be an environmentalist is not to avoid nature, but to interact with her, not to try to out-science her, but to remember her wisdom.

Absolutely fascinating. Well, so, how has that manifested in your, you know, kind of newest endeavor now in Texas, where we visited most recently?

It’s manifested in so many ways because it’s changed everything I believe. Everything is different. But in the business, our business is a farm with a restaurant on the farm. I am putting a burden on the customer to have to come out into the country. But that’s on purpose. Maybe it’s not going to make me as much money as a restaurant on Sunset Boulevard, but there’s a ripple effect.

If you drive out 45 minutes to the country and you drive a whole mile and a half once you get onto my ranch, then you come to a restaurant, and you can see cows, holistic planned grazing, moving every day in the field. You can see chickens, and people are collecting eggs. You can see greenhouses and your food being grown. My hope is that the ripple effect of that inside the guest is a remembrance of what food once was and a coherence of eating food from the land that you’re sitting on, that there is a coherence there and a remembering that sparks a ripple effect that I don’t know what it is.

But that’s my hope, that that’s what happens when you come and you are in nature and then you eat of nature. And there’s a remembering that we belong to the soil, that we belong to this earth. I’m filming right now. This morning, I actually saw a clip of Bobby Kennedy visiting a regenerative farm. I didn’t even have time to watch it because I was preparing for this.

But there is an interest even at the upper echelons of the government in this type of agriculture, which you’re doing, regenerative agriculture. The typical mantra that you hear about it is that in order to deliver enough food for everybody, it has to be done economically; it has to be done at this much larger scale, that regenerative agriculture can only work at a smaller scale, and that’s a problem. This is one of the things I’ve heard again and again as I’ve mentioned my growing interest in regenerative agriculture.

So I have a couple of things to say. First, I did see that clip of Steve Jarvis’s farm in Idaho, a potato farm. So that was awesome to see the secretary showing interest, and Steve is a friend of mine. So I’m super happy that this is getting attention. I think if you look at the Rick Clarks of the world or the Gabe Browns of the world who have brought thousands of acres into regenerative agriculture, Rick Clark is an example of someone who’s farming thousands of acres profitably with no inputs. So I think that that is not a true story, and I think that people have that idea.

Just to clarify, you mean the story that the traditional method at large scale is necessary in order to produce enough food.

Yes, that story. Because Rick Clark is doing 7,000 acres, and Gabe Brown is making money and doing 7,000 acres and making money and outperforming his neighbors while having zero inputs. Like he’s growing corn. He just said on the panel at the Heritage Foundation yesterday that he’s growing corn with zero inputs without putting any fertilizer down because he’s just building that microbiology in the soil. And he says, my livestock is that microbiology in the soil.

There is no soil that doesn’t have enough NPK [nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium] or inputs inside of it already. There’s only soil that’s not alive enough to make it available to the plants. So when our focus is to have our soil alive, which is profoundly important.

And so we were made of the soil; we belong to the soil. And when we, I think so many of us feel like we don’t belong on this earth anymore, or we don’t fit in our bodies, or we don’t feel comfortable in our own skin, and then we’re drinking or using drugs or watching things that we shouldn’t be, I think that that all comes from a disconnectedness from the soil. So I believe that regenerative agriculture is the way to meet farmers where they are at and bring life back to the land.

We’re in an existential crisis with chemical farming and with ultra-processed foods. It is a battle that if we do not wake up to, we could cause, and this is not hyperbole, a massive die-off of human beings. Like, we are just treating the soil, the microbiology in our gut, and our immune systems like we can outsmart it, and all the statistics show that we can’t. Like, we’re getting sicker and sicker with worse and worse outcomes.

So we must have an awakening around that, but we’re not going to just write a bill tomorrow. Trump is not going to write an executive order and say by 2030, everybody’s going to be organic. It’s not going to happen. But regenerative agriculture is our best pathway forward to meet the farmers where they are at.

And the other thing I want to say is I think that people think of chemical farming as something that’s been happening forever. But the first genetically modified plant in the mainstream was a soybean, and I think it was in 1996. Someone said 1997 at the event yesterday, but I’m pretty sure it was 1996. But 1996 or 1997 is when we started this pathway of highly chemicalized spraying of glyphosate directly.

And then using glyphosate as a desiccant, which if your audience doesn’t know what that means, is prior to the late 90s or 2000s, we used to let wheat or barley dry in the sun and we would check the humidity in it and then we would harvest it at the right humidity. Now we can spray it with Roundup or glyphosate and have it dry out, and then we can harvest it right away in two weeks. You must wait 14 days. But all testing for glyphosate is 14 days with harvest. What had to do with spraying it around the bottom of trees, avocados or oranges or something, and then picking the fruit up here.

So we don’t know the impact of spraying this chemical directly on our oats that we’re feeding our children or our wheat and then eating it. And so that is something that’s happened even more recently than 1996. So we have not been doing this forever. We have been eating many of these foods forever, and they weren’t making us sick. And now they are.

Mollie, you’ve been telling me that you get some very positive reactions to your columns in The Epoch Times.

Yes. I write for other outlets as well, and I have a large social media presence and all of that. And I do not get more people reaching out; the most loving people are reaching out. I get 30-plus emails a week from Epoch Times readers that are interested in what I’m doing, asking me questions, and thanking me for an article. People come into my restaurant, the physical one, and show me that they read it, asking me to sign it. People text me pictures saying, you made it into the physical one this week. I’m always happy when you’re there.

And I had some readers come in while we were doing all the flood relief in Texas, and they helped us. They drove two-and-a-half hours to distribute burritos to Leander, Texas, and brought back our hot boxes and everything. There’s a woman that brings me cheesecakes and cookies. Oh, and she likes my articles. And I just think people drive an hour-and-a-half. They’ll say, I Googled you after reading your article, and I saw you’re only an hour and a half away in Texas, and I wanted to come and have lunch.

I’ve never had a group of readers in any other space that’s so enthusiastic. And I don’t have my email like on the header in Epoch Times. They’re doing some research. They’re Googling me. They’re finding my website, and then they’re emailing the info at and emailing me.

That says something about how engaged your readers are. and I think it’s an extraordinary testament to what has been built here at Epoch Times because people are not just passively reading and moving on to the next piece of information, but they’re taking it in, they’re thinking about it, and then they’re taking the effort to email me or come and see me and want to discuss what I’m talking about.

Oh, that’s absolutely wonderful. Can you build on that aspect? You were actually helping in the Texas flood relief, I think, by providing food. Just tell me a little bit more about that and how you engaged with some of our readers.

Yes, so we live in Kerr County, Texas, where Camp Mystic is, and we’ve had over 100 deaths from these floods. On July 5th, we jumped into action, and we started feeding people, housing people because we have 40 beds on the ranch. And so people started sending money. And this one woman sent money, and then she was reading her Epoch Times, and I had an article in it about the flood relief. And so she texts me a picture of the article and she says, this is you? I love Epoch. I’ve read your articles.

Then her son, a couple of minutes later, texts me the water article, because he had taken the photo. And he was like, you’re the same lady that is bringing me the burritos, because he was looking for bodies and everything. These other people that were driving the burritos all the way to Leander and people sending money to help feed and help us house these flood relief victims really just speaks to the heart of the reader that you have, that they want to make a difference, that they want to help, and how important community is to them.

So a couple of things. I’m reminded of actually two columns that you’ve recently written for us in what you’re talking about. I want to touch on those in a moment. But before we go there, you raised this alarm earlier, too many chemicals coming into the human body might lead to a mass die-off. It just, it reminded me of, what would you say if someone said, well, what you just said, when it comes to this, you know, mass die-off of humans, potentially, that sounds like, you know, the other side of the coin of this climate alarmism that you hear, that from everything I’ve learned, it might well be happening, but isn’t quite as alarmist as we hear?

I do 100 percent agree that it sounds like that. We’re looking at statistics that say that at the current rate that men’s sperm is declining, we will be at zero sperm in the modernized world by 2040. I have a five-year-old. That means that he possibly will not be able to reproduce. I think we need to be screaming about reproductive rights, the right for my son to have a wife and have a child in the normal way. That’s the reproductive rights that I think we need to be screaming about.

Women are becoming infertile at higher rates. And it’s not one thing. I’m not blaming agrochemicals. It’s the pharmaceuticals that are in our water that are getting recycled back into our drinking water. And so people are getting high levels of birth control without meaning to because they’re drinking other women’s birth control. It’s the sewage waste that’s being used as fertilizer. It’s the desiccants and the fertilizers and the other agrochemicals, as well as pesticides and herbicides. Those are all happening in conjunction with overmedication and vaccines. And so it’s not one thing.

And I’m not trying to be alarmist about the environment, but we’re having a human health crisis. And if we can’t see it, the environmental crisis—every storm—they’re going to try to drum that up and make us feel that fear. But look at your own family or ask the viewers to look at their own family. How many people are sick in your family? How many people are on how many medications?

I’m 47-years-old. I’m still breastfeeding a baby that I had two years ago. I had a baby at age 45. I’m on zero medications. But that is not the norm. At 47, most people are on some medication. By 57, it’s a lot more. We are constantly treating the symptoms. And what I’m saying is moving closer to the soil, moving closer to an agrarian society, being more related to God’s design, is going to make us healthier.

And I don’t want to be alarmist, but at a certain point, I think that we are in a spiritual battle and we are also in a battle for humanity. But it has nothing to do with what everybody’s screaming about. Everybody’s screaming about these little fractions of this and that and specific concerns; we are all being poisoned. Nobody is exempt from what’s happening.

Another addition to that, you know, kind of complex of problems is, of course, this ultra-processed food being a common way that people nourish themselves. And yes, those things, of course, are connected within there. But I want to touch on this one column because you keep coming back to this and clearly it’s very much on your mind. And of course, you have this incredibly popular column with us. We’re very happy to have you. This one was, I think, titled, We Are the Soil.

Let’s talk about the soil a little bit more. You mentioned that there’s a very high percentage of DNA, of genetic material that’s similar in the soil and in our guts. That’s amazing, right? And we’ve known there’s been these studies that show that people who grew up in sterile environments have huge problems. But tell me more about how we are the soil.

So you could also look at the theological level, like if in the first beginning of the Bible, God takes the soil and makes Adam, and then before there’s any commandments, he puts Adam in the garden and says, tend to the garden. And then you could just look at societally. We were living in the soil. People were barefoot. People were cooking outside. People were cooking over a fire. They were picking carrots and rinsing them off in the river and eating them.

And we’ve gotten so disconnected from that, that we’re no longer replacing that microbiology that is the same. And therefore, we’re getting more and more disconnected. And I have a theory, and it’s not proven at all; I don’t even know that you could prove it. But they were always like, trust your gut, gut instinct, go with your gut.

Well, what if we can’t trust our gut anymore because that other brain, that microbiology that’s running many parts of our body, is disconnected? We’re not connected to the source; we can’t trust our gut. So then we need the government and other people in every single interaction because we can’t trust our gut; we can’t trust ourselves. And I believe that the more people spend time in nature, breathing in that air, touching the soil, swimming in natural water, we feel more connected to the whole and to God.

And I think that we’re desperate for connection to the whole, desperate for connection to God, and desperate for connection to community. And social media is a poor substitute for actual community. There’s a certain wealth that comes from living and being in community with people that you love and trust, and you’re building and working on something together. And it can’t be replaced by Instagram or TikTok.

You know, you’re just reminding me how Bobby Kennedy, the HHS secretary, has described the kind of phenomenon that you’ve been describing, this health crisis, as primarily, in its first position, a spiritual crisis.

I believe that we’re in a spiritual crisis.

When it comes to government, you know, and you’re talking about us being kind of more credulous or more needy of government. So how do you feel this current government, whether it’s the agriculture department or HHS or whatever, is kind of dealing with this issue?

I want to say first that I completely see the frustration of the MAHA movement and feeling like they didn’t want Bobby to be recommending measles vaccines. And so I completely recognize that frustration and feeling like Bobby’s not doing what they want him to do. But I want to take a moment, as a gratitude practice, to just look at that. We have an administration, for the first time, that is talking about the connection between soil health and food health and pharmaceuticals and nutrient density and these things that no other administration ever has talked about.

Secretary Brooke Rollins is talking about possibilities for regenerative agriculture. Do I want her to be doing more in that department? Yes. Am I disappointed that they cut a bunch of funding for farmers that grants were already promised to from Biden, and then they cut it with DOGE? Yes. And so I, of course, could cherry-pick a bunch of things that I’m mad about.

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