Canning, Compost, and Chickens: How to Stop Relying on Others for Food | Special Episode

[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 The Epoch Times.

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.

John Miller:

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. 

Mr. Jekielek:

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?

Mr. Miller:

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.

Mr. Jekielek:

Define homesteading for me.

Mr. Miller:

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?

Mr. Jekielek:

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

Mr. Miller:

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.

Mr. Jekielek:

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

Mr. Miller:

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.

Mr. Jekielek:

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

Sarah Thrush:

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. 

Mr. Jekielek:

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

Ms. Thrush:

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.

Mr. Jekielek:

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?

Ms. Thrush:

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. 

Mr. Jekielek:

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

Ms. Thrush:

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. 

Mr. Jekielek:

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.

Ms. Thrush:

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.

Mr. Jekielek:

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.

Ms. Thrush:

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. 

Mr. Jekielek:

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. 

Ms. Thrush:

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. 

Mr. Jekielek:

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.

Ms. Thrush:

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. 

Mr. Jekielek:

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

Ms. Thrush:

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.

Mr. Jekielek:

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. 

Ms. Thrush:

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

Mr. Jekielek:

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? 

Ms. Thrush:

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. 

Mr. Jekielek:

That’s astonishing. Sarah, thanks so much. 

Mr. Jekielek:

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. 

Jeff Louderback:

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.

Mr. Jekielek:

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

Melissa Renee:

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.

Mr. Jekielek:

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

Ms. Renee:

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. 

Mr. Louderback:

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.

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, thank you very much. This has been wonderful. So what a beautiful little calf we’ve got here.

Mr. Miller:

Yes. They have a few calves and a cow in the trailer. They brought them here just to show people what it’s like to have a cow. And then these other folks, they have what they call the one cow. What does it take to have one cow in order to have a supply of milk and then also beef? 

Then over here we’ve got a sawmill where you can cut your own log. This is classic homesteading. He’s running a bandsaw. As you can see, it’s improvised. You have two tires, and you’re running a bandsaw. And he’s cutting up logs. So if you want to be really self-sufficient, this is an example of what you can do.

Dr. Julian Douwes:

My name is Julian Douwes, and I come from St. George Hospital in Germany, where we treat chronic Lyme disease and other chronic infections and also cancer.

Mr. Jekielek:

So what are you doing here at a food independence summit? 

Dr. Douwes:

One of my patients, John Miller, invited me. He’s one of the co-founders of this event, and he told me, Julian, you have to come. You actually cured me of Lyme. He came to our clinic very sick. He passed out several times, and  basically, he couldn’t take part in life. Then he came to us for three weeks, and now he’s cured. My father is the one who detected the treatment and established the first thing. Now I’m one of the main people for the new research.

Mr. Jekielek:

Hold the presses. You cured him of Lyme disease. It’s not generally understood that Lyme disease can be cured. 

Dr. Douwes:

Yes. We’re also the only known place where that is possible, because we mechanically kill off the spirochetes. We heat the body to 106.8 Fahrenheit, so that’s 41.6 degrees Celsius, and it has been shown that the spirochetes, the bacteria behind Lyme disease, actually die off at that temperature. 

Mr. Jekielek:

And you somehow managed to get the person to survive this.

Dr. Douwes:

Yes. My father was one of the pioneers of this treatment for cancer treatment. We researched this treatment for stage 4 cancer patients that actually receive chemotherapy while being under that heat. Everybody can withstand this high fever. That’s the maximum our body can fever spike to without taking damage. 

The main foundation behind this treatment actually comes from the year 1927. There was a guy, Professor Julius Wagner-Jauregg, who treated syphilis patients who came back from war. Syphilis is actually a very simple bacteria from the same family as Lyme disease. It’s also a spirochetal disease, and back then, we have to remember there were no antibiotics. 

He wanted to treat that, and he actually decided to take the blood of malaria patients, injected the syphilis patients with the blood of malaria patients so they got severe fever spikes, and they were cured. In that study, he received a Nobel Prize for his malaria therapy. He had 18 patients, and 16 of them came out of a wheelchair. 

Nowadays, we don’t need that treatment anymore because we have antibiotics, but the thing is, in chronic Lyme disease, we can’t actually affect it anymore because it’s in the brain. It’s intracellular, and they have a lot of immune evading mechanisms. The only known way to actually get rid of it, and not just put it in a state of remission, is by killing it mechanically.

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, I’m absolutely going to have to invite you back on the show to talk about this, because this is groundbreaking. And I actually have, having talked to John, looked at some of the research related to your work, and it’s frankly astonishing. Super briefly, as we finish up, what has been the reaction of the crowd here? As I understand it, there are a lot of ticks in the area; people get Lyme disease. What was the reaction? 

Dr. Douwes:

I felt like a superstar. I couldn’t walk two seconds without someone approaching me telling me, oh, I have Lyme, or someone in my family has Lyme. This community is severely infected. Basically, from my subjective reality here, I feel that almost everyone has Lyme disease. And it’s super sad because these people struggle. 

They don’t have any answers. And the problem is they’re ignored and tossed away. They actually have a positive lab test, and people still tell them, your symptoms are not valid. Your symptoms do not exist. Chronic Lyme doesn’t exist. And this is very sad.

Mr. Jekielek:

So bottom line, are there a whole bunch of people flying to Germany tomorrow? Because I understand that this is only available at your clinic, and it’s not a treatment that can be done in the United States.

Dr. Douwes:

So what you can do is put Lyme into a state of remission, also with a lot of home therapies, herbal treatments, but you will always have a Damocles sword over your head. Any new infection, even if it’s a common cold, can put you over the edge again. So the only known way to basically be done forever is to do the treatment, and if you’re severely sick, you don’t even have to try any of the home options because you’ll probably not succeed. 

But if you’re asymptomatic or have slight symptoms, there’s a lot you can do about that and basically keep yourself healthier for longer. But you have to keep a close eye on it, and as soon as your health starts to deteriorate, you know where to find us. 

Mr. Jekielek:

Okay, well, Dr. Douwes, it’s great to speak with you. Thank you for joining me here briefly. It was a pleasure to meet you. 

Dr. Douwes:

It was a pleasure to meet you, too. 

Mr. Jekielek:

You’re here keynoting at this event here, the Food Independence Summit. A lot of people seem to know you. 

Joel Salatin:

Yes, so I’ve written 16 books; 17 is coming out, and they’re essentially—there are some broad cultural books, but most of them are very practical. How do we make a living on the farm? We see it in our apprentice and stewardship program. I think there is no lack of people who would like to farm, but they don’t believe they can make a living at it. 

And so I’ve drilled into that; let’s make a living on a farm. How do we do that? It’s very inspiring to people who would love to have a piece of property, make a full-time living with their family, and serve their community with good stuff.

Mr. Jekielek:

So is there any aspect of what you’ve covered in your 17 books that you haven’t seen here? Anything new that has appeared as you’ve kind of wandered around here at the summit? 

Mr. Salatin:

The thing that is new, I think, in this movement, more than one big thing, is bioferts, biofertilizers. So we’re talking about compost tea, foliars, and algae. The problem is, some of it’s good, and some of it’s not. And we don’t have any good testing mechanism that’s actually pitting these against each other. What we did, because we have all these chickens in shelters, we are perfectly set up to run side-by-side audits. And we found that there was some really good stuff and some really nothing stuff. And that’s how we arrived at what we use today. 

Mr. Jekielek:

Let me see if I just got this straight. You basically ran an experiment. You said, okay, I’ve got the same sort of setup here, but we’ll use this different bio-additive, right? 

Mr. Salatin:

Exactly right.

Mr. Jekielek:

And you saw these ones worked spectacularly.

Mr. Salatin:

Yes, we used ImmunoBoost here, we used Willard’s Water here, we used Fur Trail here, and then over here, nothing. It’s a control, all right? 

Mr. Jekielek:

Because you’re mid-size, so you can do that, right? 

Mr. Salatin:

Yes, exactly. We’re raising thousands of chickens, not hundreds of thousands. So we can actually run comparisons of 400 to 400 to 400 to 400 and actually have a statistically credentialed deal. The problem is nobody’s doing that with all of these bioferts because they don’t want to compare to the competitor. They want to compare to nothing. I do believe that there have been some pretty dramatic developments in what we call bioferts. That’s one of the new frontiers that we see that we want to play with.

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, it’s great to speak with you again, Joel. 

Mr. Salatin:

Thank you, Jan. 

Mr. Jekielek:

There’s this amazing diorama that I’ve been hearing about the kind of origins of the Anabaptists and then leading all the way up to the beginning of the Amish and the Mennonites and then finally into the present day.

Mr. Miller:

You’re talking about Behalt, the cyclorama. You should go and see that because when people come to visit me, and I have people from Europe and Mexico come and visit our company, I always take them there because in the space of about 20 minutes, you get a visual of the history of this beautiful painting. And they’ve got some very good tour guides that are going to be able to narrate through the history and give you a context for understanding some things here.

Mr. Jekielek:

Wonderful, thank you.

Speaker A:

Yes, so a lot of people wonder where the Amish came from. Their origins are in the Reformation. During the Reformation, people all throughout Europe, educated individuals, were reading the scriptures. There was a renewed interest in it. And a group of bright young men apprenticed themselves to one reformer, Zwingli, in Switzerland. But they differed from their reformer in one particular way. They wanted to put reforms into place immediately, and he wanted to wait on the approval of the city government. 

Eventually, their relationship became so strained that on one night, January 21,1525, which is 500 years ago this year, they met in Zurich, Switzerland, to discuss what their next move should be. The issue that they differed from their leader was that they wanted to be baptized as adults to show voluntary commitment to the church. They felt like Jesus was a person of invitation. Christians should be nonviolent. So they decided one night by themselves to be rebaptized. When authorities found out what they’d done, they called them Anabaptists. Today, Anabaptists is the umbrella term for Amish and Mennonites.

Mr. Jekielek:

That’s just absolutely fascinating. This is such a powerful moment standing here.

Speaker A:

It is. To us, it’s very special to celebrate the 500th anniversary because this night was followed up with not a century but about a half century of intense persecution. Within four years, all three leaders died, and 2,000 followers were martyred, but the movement also spread rapidly. One of their beliefs is that we are all brothers and sisters together; therefore, anybody can be a priest, and that ended up creating a lot of missionaries. They spread throughout Europe rapidly, despite the persecution. 

I’m a Mennonite. My roots are Amish, and that describes nearly everybody in Holmes County that isn’t an Amish person. We all come from the Amish. One of our three core beliefs is in community. The Amish, for the most part, interpret community as local. Mennonites see a broader community, and so we integrate more into the surroundings and into the surrounding society. So we adopt a lot more technology. Our faith is the same. 

Mr. Jekielek:

It’s just this sort of intersection of community and freedom that fascinates me. It’s often through community that people are able to maintain their freedom. 

Speaker A:

Yes, that is exactly right. 

Mr. Jekielek:

John Miller, this has been an unbelievable event for me. I’ve learned so many things. I learned how to can. I actually think I’m going to do a bit of it for a whole bunch of reasons. I’ve learned about cures for Lyme disease, which I didn’t even know existed, but it’s very real. I’ve actually looked into the background of it now. I mean just such a breadth of knowledge that I gained here as well. So what have you seen here that’s been unique this year? 

Mr. Miller:

I’d like to address the why. I mean this has been organic. We don’t have a huge team to put this all together, and there are just so many people coming together. And I think this year was a pivot point. A lot of times you say, okay, you can start something and then do it another year and another year. So this was where the people all came from—we literally have people here from sea to shining sea, obviously a heavier concentration here and from Germany, and we sold a ticket to Saudi Arabia. 

I need to check that data, but so the takeaway for me—and we’re not done yet—is we had—I don’t have the numbers yet, but the tent was full this morning, and what really surprised me, we just stepped outside for a moment, the tent is still full, mostly full tonight. So we’ve got a whole day of exciting things to do tomorrow. But we’re here to celebrate our fifth Food Independence Summit next year.

Mr. Jekielek:

And what is the vision for the future now that you’ve seen what can happen this year?

Mr. Miller:

So the vision hasn’t changed. Just a question of whether we want to help people become more independent or sustainable all the way from seed to spoon, and to be able to do even on a fractional basis. I live on a 1.5-acre lot, and yet I’ve got pear trees and plum trees and apple trees, and my wife has a garden. You don’t have to go and buy 10 cows and seven sheep and all of that. You can do what you can with what you have and where you’re at.  

Mr. Jekielek:

This has been absolutely fantastic. Thank you so much for arranging everything for us to be able to kind of insert into every part of the event. 

Mr. Miller:

It’s our pleasure. The fact that you came out here means so much. 

 

This interview has been partially edited for clarity and brevity.