S6. E11: Derek Sarno: Wicked Healthy
“It's funny, because at Tesco, half of the people didn't believe it. [They were] like, "why do we need to sell vegan food? It's never sold before.” And my whole theory was, well, you've never had any, no wonder it has never sold before. And as a vegan myself, there was nothing for me to eat, ever, anywhere. That was only six or five years ago when there was nothing but a falafel wrap or a salad. I didn't want to compromise being a chef… I didn't want to be a hippie vegan.”
- Derek Sarno
Derek is a chef and a rockstar in the vegan world and he’s on a mission to inspire you to cook and eat more plants.
He’s the Director of Plant-Based Innovation for Tesco PLC and the Developer/Co-Founder of Wicked Kitchen. He helps lead Tesco’s plant-based team and the initiative to bring delicious, unpretentious plant-based foods to the mainstream market.
Derek and his brother Chad are the founders of Wicked Healthy, LLC., Wicked Foods inc. and Good Catch Foods.
Prior to Tesco, Derek served as the Senior Global Executive Chef for Whole Foods Market, where he oversaw global recipe development for the company’s healthy eating initiative, worked with suppliers and leadership to develop and promote plant-based foods across the organization, and served as Culinary Director for the Whole Foods Academy for Conscious Leadership.
Derek is a serial entrepreneur, founding several award-winning restaurants and foodservice companies in the United States.
Derek is the co-author of the Whole Foods cookbook and the Wicked Healthy Cookbook.
His journey has been fueled by curiosity and compassion, some of which he gained while living in a Buddhist monastery in Upstate New York, where he served as resident Chef & Gardener.
Derek’s story is all about expansion. His life is an example of what it means to never stop evolving.
Watch Wicked Foods on YouTube
Learn More About Wicked Healthy
Download the Free E-book: The Wicked Mushroom Manifesto
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Transcript:
Derek: [00:00:15] It's funny because in Tesco, half the people didn't believe it, like why do we need to sell vegan food? It's never sold before. My whole theory is, well, you've never you don't have any. No wonder why it's never sold before. As a vegan myself, there was nothing for me to eat, ever, anywhere. That was only six, five years ago, when there's nothing but a falafel wrap to eat or a salad. I didn't want to compromise being a chef, my tastes. I didn't want to be a hippie vegan.
Elizabeth: [00:00:47] Hi, I'm Elizabeth Novogratz, this is Species Unite. For the months of May, June and July, Species Unite is celebrating plant based eating with vegan nights. All that really means, as we would love for you to cook dinner for your friends or your family or your neighbor and make it vegan. On our website, we have downloadable post packs with recipes, tips, information to make your vegan night all the more fun and better. So go to our website SpeciesUnite.com and download a host pack and you'll be entered to win one of six, two hundred and seventy five dollars vegan gift baskets that are filled with all sorts of incredible plant based products. This conversation is with Derek Sarno. Derek is a chef and a rock star in the vegan world. He is on a mission to inspire you to cook and eat more plants. He's the developer and co-founder of Wicked Kitchen. The plant based brand that he and his brother, Chad, developed in collaboration with Tesco, the UK grocery chain. His recipes are mind blowingly delicious, and some of the things that he does with mushrooms will change your life. His journey has been fueled by creativity and compassion, some of which he gained while living in a Buddhist monastery. Derek, hi, thank you so much for being here today.
Derek: [00:02:30] Nice to be here, thank you for having me.
Elizabeth: [00:02:32] Let's just go back and kind of go back to where all this started, this life of what seems like just constant expansion. So you grew up in New England?
Derek: [00:02:48] I did.
Elizabeth: [00:02:49] And when did restaurants and being a chef and cooking come into your life?
Derek: [00:02:53] Since I was a kid, I've always cooked. It's one of those things I just naturally gravitated towards. My grandmother was a big influence on my life, my mom. At my grandmother's because it was an Italian household like she just cooked a lot. There was always food. I mean, you got there, you sat down and you were fed. So I just kind of grew up with that and just being me kind of being a busybody and antsy, I like to do things all the time. So I always got jobs in the kitchen helping.
Elizabeth: [00:03:22] What happened that you decided, Hey, this is going to be my life, a life around food?
Derek: [00:03:27] Oh, jeez, you know, I didn't know that until my mid-20s, probably because I just figured I would cook because I could. You can actually go anywhere in the world with it, right? But I didn't know it was going to be my lifelong goal. In your twenties, I don't know a lot of people that know exactly what they're going to do. So for me, it was just an avenue to travel a little bit to go and work in some cool places, like I was out in Jackson Hole for a while up in Maine and different Bar Harbor up there. So it was just a good opportunity for me, and I just knew how to do it.
Elizabeth: [00:04:03] And did you just learn from place to place? You just kept kind of adding your skill set?
Derek: [00:04:07] Yeah. I always try to find good shifts that I can learn from because I'm much better at learning from somebody than working in a classroom setting. I'm not a very good student that way.
Elizabeth: [00:04:21] But you are a good one on one student.
Derek: [00:04:23] Yeah one on one, I like the mentoring. I really do believe like that's how I know. That's how I learn better is just by watching somebody following somebody, you know, doing what they ask. If it's wrong, you learn quickly if it's wrong, but if it's right, then you can really master it.
Elizabeth: [00:04:39] And so what happens, you start your first restaurant?
Derek: [00:04:43] That was in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. I think I was twenty six or twenty seven at the time and I just got tired of being, you know, I don't always agree with owners of their own places. So I just remember not agreeing with this one and then just leaving and then getting a job at a produce company because my next step was from being a sous chef. I had been a sous chef and a chef in different restaurants. But the last restaurant that I had left was a sous chef. When I left I just got a job at a produce company. What I did was I learned all about the produce that they would sell in the restaurants, but it also got me in the door, so I delivered that produce, so it got me in the door to all these restaurants in the community. So I got to see everything in the back of the house at everybody's establishment. So that really helped me decide what I wanted to do, where I wanted to go, how I wanted to shape and craft that business. I make it sound easy now, 30 years later. It was rough then, you know, and I actually worked like two or three jobs at a time all the time because I just wanted to continually learn. I always wanted to have money and I wasn't the guy who went out and partied a lot all the time. I just kind of worked. When I left, I started a personal chef service, so I was cooking for people and bringing food to their home or in their home if they preferred that. That lasted a short amount of time because what happened was they started having me catering small events and then those small events turned to bigger. It was just really like a snowball rolling downhill. It just got bigger and bigger and bigger, and I got my own spot. I ended up hiring one or two guys and then more and then just over the years, it just grew and grew, which is, yeah, that's pretty much how it happened.
Elizabeth: [00:06:22] It's kind of the theme of your life, right? You start something and it just blows up.
Derek: [00:06:28] Yeah, exactly.
Elizabeth: [00:06:28] Yeah. So none of this was plant based or vegan. Was that even in your wheelhouse at this point or like, were you thinking about it?
Derek: [00:06:37] Only my brother, Chad being vegan, you know, and me making fun of him and him pushing all that onto me. There was something to be said about it. It didn't apply to me with cooking at that time. I was very bullheaded and went forward and just wanted to be the best chef that I could be and learn all the skills without limiting anything. Whereas Chad, he was always about being vegan. He was really into the raw food vegan at the time, and I was just like, You hippie freak, you know? I just couldn't get on board with it until later on in my life.
Elizabeth: [00:07:12] At one point, you were doing a farm, right?
Derek: [00:07:14] Yeah, me and a friend got some property, and I ended up just rotating the whole thing and just really planting everything I could possibly think of growing that I might have cooked or just wanted to know. I studied it, and I studied all the summer and winter before, and I'd read every book I could. Then I asked one farmer that I knew if I could mentor him one day a week, I would go and do whatever he asked me to do on the farm.
Elizabeth: [00:07:40] Like what?
Derek: [00:07:41] Whether I was weeding or throwing hay or seeding or whatever there was, I would just constantly ask him questions and do what he asked me whether I was digging holes. It didn't matter. You know, it was all the garden work that got me in with a farmer and just chatting with them and then also at the farmer's market, talking to all of them all the time. I'm just one that if I really want to know something, I'll go and ask everybody that has to do with that kind of particular thing to learn about it.
Elizabeth: [00:08:08] From there you ended up at the monastery.
Derek: [00:08:11] Yeah, because during that time when we were on the farm, I ended up meeting my fiancee and that was Amanda. We were together for like three years, and I had started another restaurant during that time. That was when I transitioned out of the farm, had another restaurant, so that was Missouna. But how I got to the monastery was because Amanda was killed in a car accident one morning, and that really just kind of made me rethink everything I needed to do and why I was doing it.
Elizabeth: [00:08:39] When you went, did you even think like how you're going to be there for a long time or was it?
Derek: [00:08:44] I was only thinking I needed to stay alive, to be honest with you, because after Amanda was killed, it was really rough for me. It was a real blow, you know, it was like it sucked. I didn't know what I was doing anymore. I was very ego driven before and then I just kind of realized that I didn't know why I did anything anymore, and I needed to find that reason again. So other than being alive for my son. The monastery, I've always been into Buddhism, but I never had the opportunity to learn, and this was just like an opportunity that I really couldn't say no to because it was either that or go down a very dark road of doing all kinds of drugs and just probably spiraling out of control.
Elizabeth: [00:09:29] So when you showed up, were you just ready to surrender to it?
Derek: [00:09:33] I don't think I thought like that. I was just so hurt. You know, when you're in that stage of grief, when you lose a lover, your love, we were going to be married. It wasn't like we were married for years and years. It was still in that throes of excitement and wanting to be together, and it was very difficult. So I didn't think of anything other than I didn't want anybody else to feel as much pain as I felt at the time.
Elizabeth: [00:10:00] You were there three years.
Derek: [00:10:01] I was there for three years, yeah.
Elizabeth: [00:10:03] It's a long time.
Derek: [00:10:02] It was just an interesting scenario where I ended up at this Tibetan Buddhist monastery and I had never even heard of Tibetan Buddhism. You know, I always knew there was Buddhism and one Buddha. But when you go to Tibetan Buddhist monastery or that kind of there's so much Buddhism, there's so much to learn and it's got an antidote for every single thing. It took me three years just to even be able to digest some of it over and over and just learning and learning. It just became, you know, I love it and I'm still part of it now.
Elizabeth: [00:10:33] Did you feel at home there?
Derek: [00:10:35] Yeah, I felt I finally found my calling, I guess, or whatever, however you say it.
Elizabeth: [00:10:42] What was the meditation practice there like?
Derek: [00:10:45] It's called the nun drill. I don't know how much you might know about Tibetan Buddhism, but so it's the nun drew. I mean, the monasteries in upstate New York, it's near Oneonta. You know where that is, not too far. It was a five hour drive from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, so it wasn't too bad. So I would go home once a month to see my son and then also defend the boy that killed Amanda because she was in that car accident. So we didn't want him to go to jail and ruin another family's life, so we kind of took that time to defend him from going to jail. That was a long time ago.
Elizabeth: [00:11:19] Three years in the monastery is a very long time because I've been on two week meditation retreats where re-entry afterward is always kind of rough. I can’t imagine after three years what that would be like.
Derek: [00:11:35] Yeah, I’m one of two minds. Part of me really just wants to be back there. But you know, part of the teachings is also all about post meditation, so you sit to calm down, but it's all about when you get up. That's why you sit down. So it's that whole, everything you do needs to be a reflection of what you do when you sit, so that's what I'm trying to work on right now.
Elizabeth: [00:12:04] Do you meditate now? Still?
Derek: [00:12:05] I do, yeah.
Elizabeth: [00:12:06] Every day?
Derek: [00:12:08] I try every day. I can't say I do every single day because some days I don't. But I try to. I'm up at 5:00 every morning between five and nine as my time to sit and read and just be quiet and drink my coffee and I just love that time of day. It's the best.
Elizabeth: [00:12:23] So do I. So why did you leave the monastery?
Derek: [00:12:28] Because this is when my brother started applying for jobs for me in Whole Foods. So he had just got back from London from Open and Saff, the vegan restaurants that are over here and he got hired by John Mackey at Whole Foods to help run the whole healthy eating program that they were doing. He was like, Derek, you've got to come work with me, you've got to come work with me, or at least come and work for the company because it's a great company. I'm like, I'm just not interested. But he would send my resume out to different positions. So I got a couple of calls, one being in Florida where I guess I applied for a prepared foods coordinator position. So I ended up going down there and being like me and one other person. The other person got the job. Then on my flight back, I had stopped to see my brother, and he was one of the first healthy eating emerging with Joel Furman. I went there and I met Chad's boss, Margaret Wittenberg and everybody and what they were doing and started learning all about what they were doing with the food and things just kind of rolled into where I ended up applying and working with Chad's boss. So she ended up interviewing me, hired me going through the whole process, and that's how I got the job on the global team.
Elizabeth: [00:13:40] What were you doing?
Derek: [00:13:41] My position was to be a healthy eating chef and ended up turning into the global executive chef. So I developed recipes. I work with suppliers to create healthier food, include more vegetables into their food and then also train team members on how to cook this but how to get meat distributed like people who are working with animals to take animals out and put vegetables in their place. You know, it sounds really easy, but it's not as easy as it sounds on a big commercial level.
Elizabeth: [00:14:13] How so?
Derek: [00:14:15] You can't just take something out and then not put something back in. So a lot of the manufacturing built to date is based on an animal based and animal system. So that poses problems. It's not just an easy fix. People wonder why vegan food can sometimes be more expensive if it's prepared, you know, if you're just going to buy beans and greens and grains in the store, it is not more expensive. But if you want something that's already made for you, it might slightly be more expensive because there are no dedicated vegan or plant based facilities that are just mastering that, you know. For centuries, we've been just killing animals and doing that manufacturing to the point where it's a broken system where it's not even like a lot of people don't make any margins on killing animals. It's just too many resources. It's unsustainable. It's reaching its peak, right? And it has to transition. So in order to do that, you need new kits, new machines, new cookery gear to work with these veggies and mushrooms and stuff that we do.
Elizabeth: [00:15:18] You weren't vegan at this point, though, right?
Derek: [00:15:20] I wasn't vegan when I worked at Whole Foods no, and I wasn't vegan when I went to the monastery. Regrettably, I was cooking lots of animals back then. I started to not cook animals when I was at the monastery, and then when I got the job at Whole Foods, ninety five percent of it was vegan, and some of it was used in animal products as a condiment so much less than having animal products as a main. We made it more of a side. So in that particular program that I had to train team members and chefs on was taking the animal protein and moving that to the side and moving, you know, much more of the greens, beans and grains to the front of the plate.
Elizabeth: [00:15:59] And how are the chefs reacting to that?
Derek: [00:16:01] I always talk about me and my brother being different. So he was vegan, I wasn't. They wouldn't listen to him, they would listen to me because I wasn't vegan. So if I was just like out with the boys or whoever I was working with, I would go out, have a burger and drink beer or do whatever you're going to do, hang out, just network. Next day in the shop, I might cook something vegan, and because I wasn't vegan, I could just say, Look, I made this with no animal proteins in it. Let's just try it. It's more like bringing them along the journey rather than forcing it down their throat. They are much more apt to enjoy what I made. They weren't apprehensive towards me, as they were my brother.
Elizabeth: [00:16:41] That's amazing, the psychology in that.
Derek: [00:16:43] It's interesting because even sitting, you know, I've learned so much from just sitting. From meditating you just learn, you learn how your own mind works, and you see how many things can distract you and what can’t, if you do it long enough you get really much better, and that gap between thoughts starts to widen and you can really be aware of it a lot more. If it happens in me, it happens in everybody, right? Everybody has a mind and it's just where they're at. So you have to try to meet people where they're at.
Elizabeth: [00:17:13] When and why did you become vegan?
Derek: [00:17:17] So when I was at the monastery, you know, all the teachings are on compassion and just having compassion for all beings. When Amanda passed, that feeling in that grief was so strong that I wish nobody would feel that pain, and it included animals, it included everything. If I looked a bird in the eye you know, it sounds weird, but any animal I saw, you knew that they had feelings. I know that they have thoughts and senses, and they might not be as advanced as human beings or whatever if you want to think we're advanced or not. But we don't have any right to be overpowering them like it really hit me, where I didn't want anybody to feel that pain. If an animal is being killed, that means you've lost a mother, father, daughter, anything. The whole conscious stream is a level playing field with any sentient being as far as I'm concerned.
Elizabeth: [00:18:15] But you weren't vegan yet at the monastery. When did that happen?
Derek: [00:18:19] After Whole Foods, I took a year off. I went vegan the next day, literally. I was in Portland, Oregon. I was planning to take the year off. What I did right after Whole Foods was I went and I did another 30 day silent retreat, I went back to the monastery. So because I do try to go there at least once a year, except for this past year because of COVID.
Elizabeth: [00:18:39] So now you're vegan, you're taking a year off. How does Tesco happen?
Derek: [00:18:43] They ended up calling me a headhunter, and it just was like a fluke, not a fluke, but they called me, I didn't even really know who they were until I googled them. Then just conversation after conversation, now they wanted me to come and help invigorate their innovation for food and my thing was like, Look, I could come and do it, but I'm not going to do animals anymore because I could tell you what's going to happen is that everything's changing. All the companies and everything, I knew what I was doing, working for Whole Foods. I could kind of see the writing on the wall, whether people wanted to admit it or not, things were going to start shifting to be a lot more plant based. So I just told them, I came over, they came over to see me. It was a long process, It took about a year. You know, that was twenty fifteen to twenty sixteen. I ended up going over there. Twenty seventeen, I moved over there. Twenty eighteen of January, when we launched the wicked products, the twenty initial products and now it's twenty twenty one.
Elizabeth: [00:19:46] So not that long. I mean, since you launched. So you launched with how many products?
Derek: [00:19:49] 20.
Elizabeth: [00:19:50] And how many are there now?
Derek: [00:19:55] It's between ninety five and a hundred or something products and in a couple of months we'll have well over 100.
Elizabeth: [00:20:03] It's incredible.
Derek: [00:19:55] Yeah, and then we also started another brand called Plant Chefs, so Tesco's plant chef, which is a more of a core brand, whereas Wicked is seen as much more premium. So to do those products I head up and help develop all those with a lot of help and a big team.
Elizabeth: [00:20:23] It just took off right away for people were just waiting for it, right?
Derek: [00:20:27] It's funny because in Tesco, half the people didn't believe it. Like, Why do we need to sell vegan food? It's never sold before. My whole theory is, well, you've never you don't have any. No wonder why it's never sold before. As a vegan myself, there was nothing for me to eat, ever, anywhere. That was only six, five years ago, when there's nothing but a falafel wrap to eat or a salad. I didn't want to compromise being a chef, my taste. I didn't want to be a hippie vegan. Although now I'm growing my hair to be hippy.
Elizabeth: [00:20:58] People are kind of anti it or against it. Were they shocked? I mean, what happened when you first launched? Like, how did it go down?
Derek: [00:21:06] Well, it was awesome. It was huge. We sold out in a few weeks and just people ramped up production. It was great. I mean, it was super exciting. You know, a lot of people supported me and wanted it to happen because that's why I was over here doing it. The CEO team is amazing. They were very forward thinking, they’re very forward thinking. They're the ones who support me the most and it's just like any corporation, if you're in it, there's people who just work and they do their job and they go home. Whereas this is a much more of a mission based on what we're trying to do. What I'm trying to do and what Wicked is trying to do is just to really change the system.
Elizabeth: [00:21:44] Right and you are.
Derek: [00:21:46] I mean, I hope so. Or else inspiring people to.
Elizabeth: [00:21:49] Talk about what you're doing with mushrooms, too, because mushrooms are so exciting.
Derek: [00:21:53] They are so exciting. So I was just cooking some actually before we got on the phone, I made a couple of different recipes. So mushrooms, when I was at Whole Foods, I used to have to go into slaughterhouses and I got to see a lot of manufacturing in chicken factories and turkey factories and abattoirs, and I got to see all that stuff.
Elizabeth: [00:22:14] Why were you going into slaughterhouses?
Derek: [00:22:16] Because I worked across meat, seafood, produce, grocery. I worked as a cross category chef. So in order to be the global chef I had to see everything. So how everything was produced, I really did get a bird's eye view into seeing how the food system works. First hand, you know, not just sitting behind a desk like I was always traveling like I said and going to suppliers and going and manufacturers like how ingredients are grown and picked and then brought to a factory and what happens to them there and then how it gets onto a shelf like the whole process. A lot of its animal products. So to see the eggs from the egg hatcheries to chick factories to grown chickens in six weeks, you know, it's kind of a shit show if you ask me. If everybody could see and can make that connection to their food because you know, everything's in a package, you have no idea that that was before that, you know what I mean? It's very hard to look an animal in the eye and kill it and eat it if you don't need to and you don't need to. We're in twenty twenty one. There's no hunter-gatherers anymore, you know, and if you live in that situation, then all for it. I understand. But right now in our cities that I've ever lived in, you don't need to eat meat.
Elizabeth: [00:23:36] No, no and how does this connect to mushrooms?
Derek: [00:23:40] I really started playing with mushrooms towards the end of my Whole Foods career and just seeing a couple of mushroom growers and then in Portland, Oregon and the Pacific Northwest there are really amazing mushrooms up there. The farmers market I went to, I made friends with some of the people who sold mushrooms there and I would be the first person in line every Saturday morning, at 8:30. They ring the bell. I would buy up every kind of mushroom they had, bring them home, play with it and just practice cooking them. As a new vegan, you know, because now I was like, All right, no more meat before I used to go out and only eat animal products when I went out with people for a while. But at home, I would always cook this way. But so if I was going to give that up, I needed to understand and not just understand for myself, but I'm a chef. It's the only thing I know how to do, so I needed to really absorb it, how to do it and develop my own methods. So I started working with a lot of mushrooms and developed the whole pressing press and sear technique which repressed the mushrooms between two cast iron pans. It's pretty game changing as far as how it really does transform a mushroom into a steak and gives it that fibrous texture and the char and everything I ever liked about eating animal products without the death.
Elizabeth: [00:24:59] You can do it with mushrooms.
Derek: [00:25:00] I can do that with mushrooms, yes. Then if you look at certain things, if you go into a chicken factory and see the way that caged hens are kept, it's the same way as a mushroom. So I've shown footage before, like photos side by side, and you can tell. So it's a very similar process, except mushrooms are way more sustainable and much kinder to the Earth than growing chickens and faster. It's just an all around better food system to have just the mushrooms and plant based side of things.
Elizabeth: [00:25:34] So you see the chicken farms versus the mushrooms, and then you get this idea.
Derek: [00:25:40] Yeah, so that idea I'm working on right now actually, trying to. So we are introduced to a chicken farmer here who's got a few failing factories or farms, and we're transitioning them to grow mushrooms. We're in the beginning stages of outfitting the barns and the sheds to grow mushrooms. So over the next few months, this is going to start happening and I've been working on this for years, though. But in order to do it, you need to entice people why.
Elizabeth: [00:26:09] What about the chicken farmers? When you've first brought this to any chicken farmers, the ones you're working with, are they kind of like what? Like mushrooms?
Derek: [00:26:19] No, I bet you if you ask any chicken farmer, I don't think they're making a ton of money and they're probably in debt.
Elizabeth: [00:26:24] Definitely not here.
Derek: [00:26:25] Yeah, they're probably in debt and they probably want to get out, but they're probably stuck to the companies that they have invested in them. So I see that whole pain transition side. But this if you just started and you wanted to grow mushrooms instead, I think this is a much better solution.
Elizabeth: [00:26:43] And a much kinder one.
Derek: [00:26:44] Much kinder, yeah, it's just a matter of, you know, we're in this really unique point in the world where things are starting to transition over, you know. Animal agriculture, it's a broken system and right now people are trying to match the cost of plant based products to the animal products so people can easily switch over, which I agree with. But the animal agriculture business, the whole selling animal products, is so freakin cheap and subsidized by the government that we're at a very big disadvantage as plant based. So we're matching prices to a broken system, which is just going to lead to another broken system, so things need to be rethought. I'm not that expert. I just want to cook food and show you how to do it.
Elizabeth: [00:27:29] But it's got to change here and there.
Derek: [00:27:32] It has to change. It has to change. But it's up to people and us in what we decide to buy. You know, you can't go buy a fully roasted chicken for five dollars. It's just not how you know, I mean, the way you grew up and it was fed so much, it's like the poor farmers don't get any money. The poor chicken has no life whatsoever. So mushrooms to me are much simpler. There's no death. There's no raising a life and killing it. Because for me, I do this for the animals. People can choose to be healthy or not. I get a lot of shit. Sometimes they go, you used oil in this, but you learned how not to. And I'm like, Yes, I did learn how not to, and I know how to cook healthy if I want to eat healthy. But most people want the wow factor in everything. I can do both. But you know what sells? I just want people to come over the line, eat more plant based. Then once you're eating more plant based, then there's a whole spectrum of health you can get behind. I support all spectrums, but first of all, let's just get people over the line to eat plant based.
Elizabeth: [00:28:40] For Wicked Healthy, it's not just vegans buying that. It's a lot of meat eaters, right?
Derek: [00:28:44] I mean I think so. That's what they say. You know, vegan food for meat eaters is what I like to say about it, it's very flavor-forward, you know, very colorful. If you look at any products with a lot of meat in it, it's just beige and brown and no color, no life to it. So we have a lot of color in Wicked.
Elizabeth: [00:29:06] I like mushrooms way better than like a plant based meat type food. But what is it about mushrooms that makes them meaty and so good?
Derek: [00:29:16] You know, technically they're not a plant, so it's like in between they breathe in oxygen and carbon dioxide, which is the same as animals do. Plants are the opposite of that, but I think it's the way they grow, and there's so many unique varieties of mushrooms that you can take any single one of them, aside from the button mushrooms, you know, I do cook those, but they're not my go to. I like the brown oyster mushrooms, king oyster mushrooms, maitake, shimejis and enokis, like all the really cool, weird sounding ones. They're just amazing and if you pull them apart, just the fibers, the way they grow and the way they peel apart, it's very much like muscle tendons. So if you treat them like that, you'll get good results. You know, it's just a matter of really thinking outside the box and thinking like a mushroom.
Elizabeth: [00:30:06] To watch the world slowly shift toward, I mean, in my world, it feels like it's going more than slowly, but I know it's going slowly in the bigger world, towards being plant-based is remarkable.
Derek: [00:30:18] I wouldn't be able to do it unless we were at where we are now, because I get mad. If there's not an option, I'm just like, You want me to come back and show you how to do it. And now you don't have to do that, you know. That's kind of like, you know, I don't want to go from a cocky animal meat cooking chef to a cocky vegan chef, I just want people to kill less animals or no animals and just eat more plant based. If all the chefs would just get on board and focus their attention on the millions of varieties of vegetables and mushrooms, it'd be a lot faster.
Elizabeth: [00:30:57] Well, Derek, thank you so much for this.
Derek: [00:30:59] Anytime.
Elizabeth: [00:31:00] It's really good to meet you.
Derek: [00:31:01] Yeah, you too.
Elizabeth: [00:31:13] To learn more about Derek, about Wicked Kitchen, Wicked Healthy, Wicked Foods and Good Catch Foods, go to our website we will have links to everything SpeciesUnite.com. We are on Facebook and Instagram, @SpeciesUnite. If you have a spare minute and could do us a favor, please subscribe, rate and review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. It really helps people find the show. If you would like to support the podcast, we would greatly appreciate it. Go to our website SpeciesUnite.com and click Donate. I'd like to thank everyone at Species Unite, including Gary Knudsen, Natalie Martin, Caitlin Pierce, Amy Jones, Paul Healey, Santana Polky and Anna Conner, who wrote and performed today's music. Thank you for listening. Have a wonderful day!
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