For The Wild - May 14, 2026


FAT OF THE LAND - PRIMI： on Hunger and Desire S1：E2


Episode Stats


Length

23 minutes

Words per minute

150.73

Word count

3,604

Sentence count

81


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 hi for the wild community Ayanna here I am so excited to share our new series with you
00:00:09.600 fat of the land before we begin I'm just gonna put the kettle on and if you can I'd invite you
00:00:16.080 to do the same make a cup of something warm settle in a little I've been trying to start
00:00:21.360 my days like this lately just slowing things down enough to actually arrive right now I'm
00:00:27.180 drinking Ritchie, which I'm honestly very grateful to have found. I'm not someone who does well with
00:00:32.600 coffee. My friends and collaborators know this all too well. But Ritchie was made from roasted
00:00:38.000 chicory root and cacao and other delicious plants, so it has that dark, full-bodied feeling, but lands
00:00:44.960 a lot more gently. It actually feels grounding, like it settles into my body instead of speeding
00:00:51.120 me past it. And it's become a bit of a ritual, just having something warm in my hands and taking
00:00:57.420 a breath, giving myself a moment before moving into the day. So wherever you are, if you can,
00:01:04.060 take a sip with me. If you're curious, you can learn more at drinkrichu.com.
00:01:09.520 And thank you to Richu for supporting this series.
00:01:14.380 We're also grateful to Terra Elia, a retreat space in southern Italy rooted in enchantment
00:01:19.920 and renewal and sacred transformation. It's the kind of place that invites you to step out of
00:01:25.320 urgency and into a different rhythm entirely. And in some ways, that question of rhythm,
00:01:35.680 of how we live, how we spend our time, it's what brought me here in the first place.
00:01:42.240 I came to Italy because I wanted to immerse myself in a certain kind of life,
00:01:46.140 the one we imagine, where food matters, where meals take time, where there's a sense of
00:01:52.560 continuity between land and people, a life that feels well-lived. And I was curious about what
00:01:59.020 would happen if I followed that desire all the way through, whether it would actually
00:02:03.120 satisfy something or just sharpen the appetite. In this episode, we stay with Jesse and Carlo,
00:02:13.480 and then later on meet Mila at her nature school. The conversation begins to open up into something
00:02:20.340 much wider, into deep time, into the origins of the Western mind, and into questions of hunger
00:02:27.820 and desire. What started for me as a search for slow food and a life that feels well-lived starts
00:02:35.060 to turn into unanswerable questions about the roots of our humanness and what drives us to do
00:02:42.120 the things we do. For me, because I grew up with an awareness, thanks to my family, about
00:02:54.800 the destruction that was happening to the environment. And in my early years, I really
00:03:02.980 felt a sense of overwhelm and depression and and just hopelessness and i really can say coming to
00:03:12.820 sicily and seeing its resilience and you know three years ago there was a massive fire that
00:03:19.060 swept through this within 300 you know bare lava every step along the way to dense forest
00:03:28.200 and it's so it's it's it's like 350 years and for me this is or 300 years you have forest and
00:03:35.340 and for me this is just giving me such a sense of um you know i just wanted to share a little
00:03:42.480 bit about this land so this plateau is um is here has been shaped by water so like these rocks
00:03:51.180 it's limestone so it's the the seabed that all the living organisms are settled down to this
00:03:58.240 to the to the bottom of the sea and uh they say between nine and six million years ago an earth
00:04:05.380 a crack formed in underneath the mediterranean sea um water went down inside and um uh it started
00:04:15.160 it created volcanic activity and an earthquake um sorry a volcano started to erupt underwater
00:04:22.160 and the land continued to rise as the technonic plate rose over the european plate and this
00:04:29.980 volcano emerged from the sea around three three million years ago and continued to rise bringing
00:04:38.680 up with it the seabed and at the very top of this plateau there's an extinct volcano called
00:04:43.400 and she is surrounded by these boulders of of lava lava rock that that are round because they
00:04:52.460 formed underwater and from her flowing rivers of fresh water that is not connected to rainfall
00:05:00.560 and these are the rivers that cut through this through this plateau and it's like the land the
00:05:06.300 rivers the water's cut down as the land has risen up and it's thanks to this volcano that that
00:05:13.320 this side of Sicily has been so important
00:05:16.160 and so rich and full of life throughout history,
00:05:19.360 calling people to come and live here
00:05:20.720 because there's this source of water
00:05:22.400 that continuously flows,
00:05:24.540 no matter, you know, how much rain comes.
00:05:27.120 And, yeah, and...
00:05:30.120 And it's a map of time.
00:05:39.760 After spending time with Jessie,
00:05:41.300 it's hard not to feel the scale of things shift. The land holds destruction and regrowth at once,
00:05:48.320 life continuing with or without us. And then the conversation moves back to Carlo and into
00:05:55.320 something more human, about this tendency we have to always be reaching, to become better,
00:06:01.760 do better, have more. And what he names in his own way is this constant movement towards the next
00:06:08.420 thing and the feeling that it's never quite enough and then there's that question of can
00:06:17.600 humans even really be independent and do we is independence has that desire for independence led
00:06:24.060 us to be disconnected from each other or not in a caring communal sense and we need to be communal
00:06:32.780 and and so therefore we need to be interdependent absolutely interdependency but i also like love
00:06:39.540 the idea of independence like that's also what has drawn me to the land is i i want to feel free
00:06:47.240 and to me a feeling of freedom is being independent i think what i'm getting at is that
00:06:52.400 every time i turn and i think about a new philosophy or a way of being like this is the
00:06:57.320 way or no though this is the way it gets complicated all those these questions are how did we get here
00:07:04.100 or maybe we've always been here on in some way or another as humans and maybe the problem is for me
00:07:09.580 is that i try to find like a blanket statement or i try to find like the thing you know capital t
00:07:16.380 the like this is the way or this is the way for humans to be and what i'm realizing is every time
00:07:23.200 i try to stamp the way on any of these questions i find myself feeling more and more lost yeah i
00:07:29.340 mean we can't hide that we live in a dualistic world so there is light and there is darkness
00:07:35.040 and in all of us myself i mean and i think when i achieve something i can see myself that i always
00:07:43.340 want more this thing is never enough and okay we now i collect rainwater what next you know and
00:07:51.560 now we have solar panel and oh we spend most of money on diesel and now we're going electric car
00:07:57.480 and then what next and so i think at the roots of everything that is happening it's this
00:08:03.620 unstoppable anger that humans has to to never be satisfied with what there is now that we always
00:08:12.680 want get better we want to always be better and um and i think you know this comes at the core of
00:08:20.080 you know i mean i had the luck to travel in asia and see in india and meet people there and you
00:08:25.720 know really put people with beautiful smiles and i was asking why how can be you have nothing
00:08:31.160 and you're happy and the man i know i have everything and they say because i don't want
00:08:35.420 to be i am so at the base of the west civilization is we need to become something we need to become
00:08:43.840 independent we need to become rich we need to become doctors and in the in the east i see they
00:08:52.120 all they want to be is themselves when i was researching this it came from the greek roots
00:08:57.000 you know this olympics to be the best and so often what we are living it's coming from the past
00:09:05.200 and it's nice that's why we travel to go and see other culture and we see the other culture
00:09:10.120 live life differently and they have the same problem we have it's interesting to think about
00:09:15.420 eastern cultures and maybe there has been that undercurrent of not trying to become but being
00:09:23.980 like i really liked what you said there but what i've heard is that globalization or the dominant
00:09:30.260 western mind has reach every house reach every corner reach yeah yeah no i mean it is happening
00:09:37.220 And there is less people that are not influenced by this way of life.
00:09:43.980 And I haven't been there for 12 years.
00:09:47.520 But I had people that had gone back a few years ago.
00:09:49.840 Everything has changed.
00:09:50.960 Motorway everywhere.
00:09:52.200 Coca-Cola in the remote village and jeans.
00:09:58.380 But, you know, we can't stop that.
00:10:00.360 i've been thinking a lot while making this series about how long things actually take
00:10:10.980 and i'm not referring to just growing food or learning a place but building trust staying in
00:10:17.800 conversation letting something unfold instead of rushing it into a conclusion most of what
00:10:24.780 you're hearing in this series didn't come from a single interview it came from time spent walking
00:10:29.440 and returning and asking the same question in different ways and being willing to sit inside
00:10:35.620 the parts that don't resolve quickly. And that's also how we approach the work at For the Wild
00:10:41.160 more broadly. Over the years, we've started to move away from one-off conversations and towards
00:10:46.700 longer, more intentional storytelling. Projects that are built in collaboration over time and
00:10:53.500 with the people and places they're actually about. That's what the studio side of the work is.
00:10:59.440 We partner with organizations, brands, and initiatives who want to tell more complex stories, and we build those stories together.
00:11:07.460 If you're working on something like that, something that asks for depth, nuance, and care in how it's told, email us at connectforthewild.world.
00:11:19.380 And now back to it.
00:11:20.820 i'm imagining for people who hadn't been touched by the western mind
00:11:30.200 what is so attractive about it let's just you know speak in these kind of metaphorical
00:11:37.100 ways i'm not trying to say any one culture but let's just say there's a culture out there in
00:11:40.800 the world and they were being they weren't trying to become something they weren't trying to be
00:11:45.160 better, richer, whatever. But then that, some people call it a mind virus a week to go. Some
00:11:51.880 people call it Western domination or colonization, but whatever that thing is, it came into their
00:11:58.240 culture and then they say, oh, well, what's that? And now we want it. But why? Why do you think
00:12:03.720 that people who didn't have it before would want that? Then if you're this person and like you're
00:12:09.300 more spiritually evolved and you feel more at peace with yourself and with the earth and with
00:12:14.100 your community and having less but then this thing comes in and then all of a sudden that
00:12:18.540 spiritually evolved person now wants more why if there's there i think because of the state of
00:12:24.900 human um being there is this feel of of always need something to to be happy rather than be happy
00:12:33.580 without nothing i mean i mean that's buddhism and religions and you know jesus said you have
00:12:40.060 to leave everything you know it's like more you have more think you need to think more you forget
00:12:45.240 about yourself i mean it's in every religion so but why they do that i mean i just think about
00:12:53.780 there has been a part of our history here where the greeks arrived you know this is not you know
00:13:00.440 there was already people here when the greeks arrived and and then the people start to copy
00:13:06.200 the greeks so these things you know because we see maybe in the others from the appearance from
00:13:14.240 the look from the clothes from the way they behave that they are happier than us and then maybe if we
00:13:19.620 do like them maybe we can gain what they have and we don't have so it's always looking on the other
00:13:26.220 side and see that the other side the grass is greener and uh and it's it's so easy no to fall
00:13:34.960 on that but then there is the structural way of society you know like most of the world has
00:13:41.320 elites you know advantage and disadvantage and and it's kept like that because that's where they
00:13:48.060 can have power on us and control i mean slavery is still here you know we see that our food is
00:13:53.600 cheap here in italy because we are black african working in the fields so you know you know this
00:13:59.500 is all you know pasture land and wheat it's not much of needs of hand pickers if you go in the
00:14:07.060 mainland of sicily you'll find thousands of black men picking the potatoes picking the artichoke
00:14:13.400 picking and nothing so we feel that sometimes we are far away from that kind of stuff but we're
00:14:18.860 still here it's all here there is slavery there is there is all this uh problem that humanity
00:14:25.420 all this whole head younger I was much more judgmental I was like this activist we have
00:14:39.420 to change and we need to have a consciousness shift we need to all go back to the land and
00:14:43.720 connect with the trees and then we'll figure it out and we'll we'll be at peace again and at this
00:14:49.440 point judgments aside I don't understand us as animals but I want to try to look at things more
00:14:57.320 in an objective well I can never be objective it's still subjective but I'd like to just look
00:15:02.000 at things for what they are and say if I'm not saying it's good or bad and I'm just trying to
00:15:06.320 understand us as these human animals that have been making choices for a long time and why we
00:15:14.340 make certain choices and maybe that you know what and it's interesting when you said hunger
00:15:19.140 because that is a word that's come up for me so much in this traveling for this series is the
00:15:24.540 human hunger and not just for food but that for everything that hunger drives us to do
00:15:31.380 beautiful things crazy things horrible things but almost to me like that is the most human
00:15:38.720 thing i can point to that is at our base of our humanity is that we're very hungry species
00:15:45.340 and that hunger moves us the desire it's like kill the desire or or confine the desire is the
00:15:53.240 root of all evil the fasting the yeah asceticism yeah yeah it is there no yeah they work a lot
00:16:01.140 with desire don't feed the desire you know as a liberated woman i was like this is horrible like
00:16:06.520 desire is beautiful but now i'm like oh well maybe i don't want to call it evil but yeah the root
00:16:12.340 of that desire is what the desire and hunger almost one in the same
00:16:18.300 listening back to this conversation i can also hear how easy it is to romanticize the east
00:16:26.860 to imagine cultures outside the west as somehow more connected less fractured more rooted in being
00:16:35.240 instead of constantly becoming. And maybe that impulse says as much about us as it does about
00:16:41.140 anywhere else. I don't think any culture escapes desire or contradiction, ambition, or change.
00:16:49.140 Humans seem to carry those tensions wherever we go. But I do think Carlo is pointing towards
00:16:54.180 something real. This pressure inside modern life to always be moving toward the next thing.
00:16:59.140 to improve, to optimize, to achieve, to become someone. And being in Sicily surrounded by so
00:17:08.000 many layers of history, Greek, Roman, Arab, Norman, you can feel how old some of these ideas really
00:17:15.200 are, how long humans have been wrestling with desire and power, longing, and the search for
00:17:21.820 the good life. From there, I spend some time with Mila, and the conversation moves towards children,
00:17:28.360 education, and community. Because eventually these questions land somewhere practical
00:17:33.300 in how people live together, how they raise children, what gets carried forward into the
00:17:39.120 next generation. Mila came to Sicily searching for a different rhythm of life and eventually
00:17:45.160 helped build a school community rooted in creativity, land connection, and collective care.
00:17:51.400 And with her, the conversation starts to move out of philosophy and into daily practice,
00:17:56.400 into the ongoing work of trying to live differently.
00:18:02.840 I started to be interested on pedagogy
00:18:05.780 and the way of accompanying children in their growth.
00:18:11.060 So I started to be interested in that
00:18:12.720 and I started studying and reading about
00:18:14.720 and I studied about all of the different methods.
00:18:18.100 So Steiner's, Waldorf's schools or Montessori
00:18:22.000 or, you know, different possibilities.
00:18:23.820 and while my child was going attending normal school standard school it was growing in me the
00:18:33.280 desire of creating something different it's beautiful to see the pomegranate trees bushes
00:18:39.900 and walnuts and olives and it's so wonderful to see so much this has been so lovely to speak with
00:18:48.740 you and um yeah thank you for me it's a pleasure oh i'm learning so much and i'm also just taking
00:18:57.200 so much in being in place and feeling all the energies of the land and the trees and the
00:19:03.920 children and the creativity and the energy yeah it's really i can see why this is a dream job
00:19:10.600 yes yes yes yeah absolutely we we feel happy what does that mean for you slow times no just to
00:19:18.740 to live connected with our nature, so having the time to really experience and understand
00:19:29.980 what we are living, having the time to process what we are living, not just going from one
00:19:36.400 thing to the other, not having the time to realize what is happening, which is, like
00:19:41.420 nowadays even if we are in sicily also here people are i don't know maybe the digital
00:19:47.920 and smartphones and the web and everything yeah um is is running so fast yeah that also that gave
00:19:57.880 a great speed also on our life yes no so you're already in the next thing and you're um writing
00:20:07.140 a message to, I don't know, 300 people in the same moment.
00:20:11.580 This also, of course, contributes to a speed which is not natural and it's not human.
00:20:19.760 So we try here with our children to breathe and try to live in a slower way.
00:20:30.560 and that's why this is also another very important element
00:20:36.580 to be in contact with nature because nature needs time.
00:20:41.040 Yes.
00:20:41.400 Nature teaches you patience, teaches also to trust the process,
00:20:49.940 teaches to have faith on what the future will bring,
00:20:54.680 just to have faith that at the end, for example,
00:20:58.140 what comes to a fruit, no? The entire year, it takes an entire year to the tree to create
00:21:06.620 a fruit, no? And the tree or the plant faces the cold, the winter, the falling of the leaves,
00:21:16.660 so many stresses and traumas for the plant. But at the end, spring comes, summer comes
00:21:23.940 and the plant reaches to bloom and to produce also an offspring.
00:21:32.160 So this is also a great learning, a great teaching for us to have faith
00:21:40.720 and just to give some time and everything will happen, will arrive.
00:21:45.760 what stayed with me from this conversation was how much modern life is shaped by constant movement
00:21:56.560 this hunger this drive to become has shaped so much of what we've gained and what we've lost
00:22:04.260 and one of the places you can feel that most clearly is around care who feeds people who
00:22:11.200 holds the daily work of keeping life going. As roles have shifted and women have stepped out of
00:22:16.740 what was once expected of them, culture has shifted significantly. In the next episode,
00:22:23.240 we move more directly into that tension between empowerment and responsibility,
00:22:27.500 and wrestle with questions surrounding women's labor, caregiving, family, and what it takes to
00:22:34.460 sustained life.
00:22:39.900 Thank you for listening to this episode of For the Wild's series, Fat of the Land.
00:22:46.180 We would like to thank the sponsors of the series, Ritchu and Tara Elaya.
00:22:51.100 You can find more information about them in our show notes, as well as a special For
00:22:55.760 the Wild link to order yourself some Ritchu.
00:22:58.200 Fall of the Wild is produced by Ayana Young, Victoria Pham, Erica Ekrem, Julia Jackson and
00:23:06.680 Auri Bittle. This series features music and sound design created by the Fall of the Wild
00:23:11.820 studio. You can join us on Patreon for exclusive Fight of the Land spotlight episodes spanning
00:23:18.640 from Mateo, a truffle hunter, with his dog Wendy, through to a visit to a cheese cave.
00:23:24.240 There's so much more of the Fat of the Land world to explore,
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00:23:30.760 and our full archive and publishing library.
00:23:34.400 As For the Wild continues its transformation into the For the Wild studio,
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00:23:49.960 Thank you for being with us, and as always, thank you for listening.
00:23:53.580 Amen.