A former vegan chef is living a very different life today. Once the force behind a string of vegan restaurants in Southern California, Mollie Engelhart now lives on a ranch in Texas, raising livestock and serving as co-executive chef at The Barn, a restaurant at her family's Sovereignty Ranch.Engelhart told Fox News Digital she's best known as being a "vegan chef in Los Angeles with five large vegan restaurants and transitioning to being a cattle rancher in Texas."She added, "It's not a transition that a lot of people go through."AMERICA'S 'CAST IRON COWBOY' REVEALS WHY TRADITIONAL SKILLETS REMAIN THE ULTIMATE COOKING TOOLThe shift began more than a decade ago, when "cracks" started forming in her food philosophy, she said."I started my vegan restaurants with a full-throated endorsement," Engelhart said. "I was an environmentalist. I believed this was the pathway forward for humanity."But a TED Talk in 2013 changed everything."I heard something that made sense for the future, for agriculture," she said. "It just clicked in my mind that cows were not the problem … but it also clicked that food waste was a big problem. So I decided to get my own farm to try to deal with the food waste from my restaurants."LAB-GROWN MEAT BAN GOES INTO EFFECT IN RED STATE, FACES LEGAL CHALLENGEShe soon realized "there was no vegan food" — and that "my whole life was kind of a lie," Engelhart admitted."All organic food is fertilized by blood meal, bone meal, feather meal and chicken poop. And that's all coming out of the consolidated feedlot system that the vegans hate," she said. "You grow avocado trees, you kill ground squirrels. … There's no plate without death. Life and death are two sides of the same coin."When COVID-19 lockdowns shuttered restaurants across California, Engelhart tried pivoting."I tried to switch my restaurants from vegan to regenerative, which did not work. … The vegans went completely crazy, throwing blood on the restaurant, coming in with loud horns, screaming, drums," she said.Finally, during the wildfires in January of this year, the 47-year-old mother of four closed her last restaurants in Los Angeles and moved with her family to Texas."I wasn't interested in my kids growing up in California," Engelhart said.BEEF INDUSTRY SLAMS LAB-GROWN HYBRID MEAT AS SCIENTISTS PROMISE GREENER STEAKSShe called the level of bureaucracy in the Golden State "intolerable," citing the many barriers to operating a business."I just felt like that level of government involvement in every single interaction that we have to have was not something I was interested in, and that's why I chose Texas," Engelhart said.These days, Engelhart and her husband raise cattle, pigs, lambs and a small dairy herd while advocating for regenerative agriculture — a system she says rebuilds both the land and the human body."Regenerative agriculture uses six principles," she said. She ticked them off: context (farming for the environment you're in); minimizing soil disturbance; biodiversity; more living roots; fewer chemicals; and animal integration.She said the foundation of those principles is to build healthy soil, because there's "a huge overlap between healthy soil and healthy humans."Her belief that "food is medicine" runs deep.CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP FOR OUR LIFESTYLE NEWSLETTER"The food that we eat in our grocery stores today largely didn't exist 100 years ago," she said. "And many of the metabolic conditions that we have today largely didn't exist 100 years ago."To Engelhart, "food is medicine" isn't just a "wellness catchphrase.""I think we've moved far away from the way God intended food to be, and I think we need to move back to eating foods in their whole form," she said.CLICK HERE FOR MORE LIFESTYLE STORIESHer advice for other American families? "Trade a little bit of our convenience for a little bit more resilience."She noted doing so "is hard when there's Instacart, Uber Eats and Amazon — and you can get whatever you want delivered to your door."Engelhart said she recommends buying from local producers at small farms."If we want there to be other options, then we have to support those other options," she said.In her new book, "Debunked by Nature," Engelhart asserts that "Mother Nature is conservative."TEST YOURSELF WITH OUR LATEST LIFESTYLE QUIZ"The constructs of the world that the liberal sphere is trying to make us lie about all the time — if you look into nature, they don't exist," she said. "Largely, they're made up."She said she "take[s] 19 constructs from our world today and I look at them through the lens of nature … and I basically prove that they don't exist."