The Remembering, Vol 85: A Tick Bite Can End Red Meat for You?
How a rainstorm tells you whether a farm is real, the tick bite that can end red meat for good, and the 1958 rule nobody was required to follow.
Written by
The Lineage Team
Written by
The Lineage Team
The fastest way to judge a farm is to watch it rain
Most people assume you need soil tests and lab reports to know if a farm is doing things right. However, you could also assess from a rainstorm.
Cory Carman is a fourth generation rancher in Oregon and one of our sourcing partners. She tracks water infiltration as part of her regular monitoring, and here is why: soil that is alive, full of carbon and fungal networks, drinks rain in and holds it. Soil that has been compacted and stripped sheds it. The water sits on top in puddles for days because there is nowhere for it to go. Same rain, completely different result.
Here's our tip: the next time you drive past pasture after a storm, or you are standing at a farmers market talking to someone who actually works the land, ask them how their ground handles rain. It turns “regenerative” from a word on a package into something with a physical signature you can go look at yourself.
Cory has a lot more to say about what the term actually means, why she thinks cheap food is the most expensive thing we buy, and what most people get wrong about how their food gets grown.
It starts with a bite, usually from a lone star tick. The tick's saliva carries a sugar called alpha-gal that most mammals produce and people don't. Some immune systems learn to read it as a threat, and after that beef, pork, lamb, and sometimes dairy can set off a reaction. The reaction is typically delayed by a few hours, so dinner goes down fine and the trouble starts in the middle of the night. That delay is exactly why it gets written off as IBS.
Paul sat down with Bella Ma, a Lineage customer and affiliate, on the Steak and Butter Gal podcast alongside her guest Aviva, who was diagnosed after a tick bite in Arkansas and spent months assuming her symptoms were something else.
What Paul covers:
Why the tick's saliva is the trigger, and why the meat was never the problem
Which states carry the most risk, and why the range keeps moving north
Why reactions hit hours later and get mistaken for IBS
How to check yourself properly, including the spots you can't see
The ear acupuncture case series he reviewed, and the real limits of that data
The FDA admitted it doesn’t know what’s in your food
Since 1958, a carve-out called GRAS has let companies declare a new food chemical “generally recognized as safe” without ever telling a regulator. It was written for vinegar and baking soda. It got used for at least a thousand other substances, according to reporting on the rule, with little evidence any of them were safe. On August 10, 2026 the FDA proposed making that notification mandatory, which is a good step. A regulator who does not know what is in the food cannot tell you whether it is safe.
However, the FDA's acting commissioner said companies will still decide for themselves that an ingredient is safe, and still put it in your food before the FDA finishes looking at it. The agency is asking to be told the conclusion, not to make it. Marion Nestle at NYU put it plainly: they closed the loophole, they did not solve the problem. And former FDA commissioner David Kessler noted the proposal does not touch high fructose corn syrup, maltodextrin, or dextrose.
While this is still a small step forward, we don't need to wait until the end of the comment period to know what's in our food. We third party test all of our products.
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Real food on the go
Madison Montpellier · Sudbury, Ontario
As a college student, Madison is proving that eating real food doesn't have to disappear when life gets busy. She keeps things simple with strength training, daily walks, morning sunlight, quality sleep, and meals built around real ingredients.
One of her go-to recipes is a 25g protein brownie.
Most peanut butter bars are not built with peanut butter
Look at a protein bar label and you can see exactly what that 1958 loophole built. Polydextrose. Erythritol. Sucralose. Peanut flavor systems standing in for actual peanuts.
Our Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip bar gets its flavor and its fat from real peanut butter, made with hi-oleic peanuts grown on small farms and tested free of agrochemicals. Hi-oleic peanuts carry more monounsaturated fat, the same family as olive oil, which is how we hold our no seed oil standard down to the ingredient. Organic chocolate chips sweetened with coconut sugar. 20g of protein from grass-fed whey and 100% grass-fed and finished bovine collagen. Every lot third-party tested.
Quote of the week
“When you pursue great flavor, you also pursue great ecology.”
Dan Barber
This article is educational and is not medical advice. Talk to your doctor before starting any supplement, especially if you are pregnant, nursing, taking medication, or managing a health condition. Statements on this page have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. Lineage products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. The studies cited test specific preparations and doses, and individual results may vary.
