Randy Clemens and Forest Farming in Uruguay — The Back to The Earth Movement is Back!

Welcome back to Pizza Quest!

When I first met Randy Clemens he was a seventeen-year-old guy looking for a purpose in life, something to sink his teeth into, and volunteering to be my assistant for a bread class I was teaching at Sur la Table in Los Angeles. Fast forward 23 years and join me as I catch up with Randy who, after writing three books (including the famous “The Sriracha Cookbook“) and working in many aspects of the culinary world, seems to have found what he’s been looking for in, of all places, Uruguay, by founding the Las Bandurrias Food Forest and Homestead.  What, you may ask, is that? Well, as you’ll hear during our conversation, think back fifty years ago when the so-called “back to the earth movement” was happening and all sorts of folks, often called hippies (and way ahead of their time), were engaged in what we now call sustainability and regenerative agriculture. And now, even newer terms like bioconstruction, syntropic agriculture, food sovereignty, and agroecology are the fleshed-out current incarnations of that earlier movement. Bottom line, as Randy says, is “I just wanted to be able to make things from scratch.”  He is on his own version of a pizza quest, his quest for meaning and purpose, and is bringing along a lot of folks with him and teaching anyone who wants to learn how to do it. It’s all here in this episode of Pizza Quest.

NOTE: As promised during our conversation, here are some links for any of you who want to connect with Randy and Las Bandurrias. You’ll love these videos and postings, which beautifully show what’s going on way down there in South America: