Jane Zhang is the host of the food sustainability podcast Farm to Future. As a researcher, Jane studied urban agriculture and tomato farming at McGill University, before writing a children's book about acorns and foraging for her Masters thesis at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. In her own food journey, Jane went plant-based for four years before returning to her omnivore roots and discovering the importance of plants and animals in a regenerative food system. Her mission is to bring expert perspectives — from farmers, foragers, chefs, and tastemakers — to everyday foodies, so we can all feel empowered to nourish our land and bodies. In this episode we’ll discuss what sustainability means for the average person, Jane’s journey through veganism, and how if at all the U.S. can adopt foraging as a mainstream concept. Links: Farm to Future: https://pod.link/farmtofuture Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/farm.to.future/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/farmtofuture LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/1janezhang/ Ep #7: Foraging, Veganism & Entrepreneurship with Jane Z. from Farm to Future Amy: [00:00:00] All right. Welcome back everyone to the backyard RD podcast. I am so excited today because I have my first guest on the podcast. Um, and it's somebody that I've been so excited about. Her podcasts has been a new favorite of mine. So today we have Jane Z from Farm to Future, on the backyard RD podcast. Welcome Jane. Jane: Thank you so much, Amy, for having me, I'm so excited to chat today and I feel like I'm in the presence of a celebrity with Amy Adams. Amy: Thank you. Yeah, I get that at the grocery store all the time, everywhere I go out. Um, and Jane and I actually, we met on Instagram, which is so funny. Um, but I think you had posted the Joel Salatin, podcast episode, which if you guys haven't listened to that episode. Definitely go listen to it. So amazing. Um, so I liked something of yours and then we just started chatting [00:01:00] back and forth and it was totally like just became best friends instantly. Jane: Love it organically. No pun intended. Amy: Okay, so let's dive right into it. I know our listeners are probably super excited to hear about you, um, especially if they've listened to your podcast before. So, um, tell us a little bit about your background and then specifically, how did you get into sustainability? Jane: Yeah. Um, so I, I'm not a big noun person, but if you want to put kind of labels on my career in terms of sustainability, um, I guess you could call me a sustainability researcher or design researcher by training. Um, but I'll take it back to my childhood because I think that's where the roots of some of these values come from. So I grew up in Vancouver, British Columbia and Canada. And, um, growing up weekends were all about hiking and the mountains and the forest, or [00:02:00] going to the ocean. Uh, we spent summers camping and doing road trips. So I was very lucky to have so much access to the outdoors and just to be close to wildlife and so many different flora and fauna. Around me. So I always felt that connection to nature. Um, and then in our household, so my parents and I actually immigrated from China when I was four. And, um, what that meant was we didn't have a lot of means as an immigrant family. And so we would thrift shop for clothes, which is now like such a hip thing. But back then, Because we had to, and we would grow little herbs in like old buckets. And we took public transit everywhere. We walked everywhere, um, all because we had to, but I realized later on that, you know, those little actions really add up and in university I studied [00:03:00] sustainability and I remember our first week in, you know, in the program, they had us take. The ecological footprint assessment, which is something that came out in the two thousands and was, uh, it's a great tool for anyone out there who wants to take the quiz and, see basically like how many, if everyone on the earth live, like the way you, that you do, how many earths would it take to sustain everyone? Um, so that's the idea of the footprint test and it was there that I was shocked to learn two things. One is that your income is the biggest correlator to your carbon footprint. So the more money and wealth that you have and you earn, um, the more likely you are to consume more materially, um, You know, kinda makes sense. And then the other big shocker for me at the time was that flying and air travel is a huge part of our carbon footprint. [00:04:00] Um, and at the time I was flying back and forth between Vancouver and Montreal, where I did my studies and then. You know, flying across the continent, it's like quite a, quite a big, um, carbon footprint. So, um, yeah, it's a really good tool to just kind of visualize, you know, uh, how does my lifestyle impact the planet? And so in college I studied sustainability. I was part of this new and exciting interdisciplinary program ...
