Podcast (sustainable-dish-podcast): Play in new window | Download
After several years as a vegetarian, Kate Kavanaugh realized her health was declining, and determined meat might be the missing element. Now, Kate is a butcher, farmer, and holistic nutritionist. She also runs Ground Work Collective, a farm-finding search engine to help you connect to local farmers.
Kate is on the podcast today with my co-host James Connolly to share her transformation from overmedicated child to a passionate entrepreneur. This is the first episode in this two-part interview with Kate.
Kate’s story is one of connection: from a childhood where all she wanted was to disconnect to an adult where she wanted a deeper connection to her food. Kate began visiting farms and ranches to learn about her food and where it came from.
In 2013 Kate opened Western Daughters Butcher Shoppe, a whole animal butcher shop specializing in 100% grass-fed and grass-finished beef and lamb and pasture-raised pork and chicken. All of their meat comes from within 200 miles of their location in Denver, Colorado.
Now Kate and her husband have moved to Upstate New York, where they raise low-PUFA pork, chicken, duck, and goose, and some grass-fed beef.
Listen in to part 1 of James and Kate’s conversation where they chat about:
- Their thoughts on the education system and letting kids express themselves
- How eating is one of the most intimate things we do
- Why talking about life means talking about death
- How food has changed and how it’s changed us
- The benefits of being a generalist
Rather watch this episode on YouTube? Check it out here: Episode 246: Kate Kavanaugh [Part 1]
Resources:
“Bambi” is Even Bleaker Than You Thought by Kathryn Shultz
Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain
How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan
Strangers to Ourselves by Rachel Aviv
Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau
Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom
Death in the Garden with Jake Marquez and Maren Morgan
The Dorito Effect by Mark Schatzker
The Devil’s Element by Dan Egan
Arrival – Film
The Systems View of Life & The Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra
The Bigger Picture: Perfect Soldiers by Gabriel
The Power of 10 – Film
Where the Water Goes by David Owen
Sustainable Dish Episode 170: Sean B. Carroll
Connect with Kate:
Website: Western Daughters Butcher Shoppe
Instagram: @kate_kavanaugh
Podcast: Mind, Body & Soil
YouTube: Kate Kavanaugh
Episode Credits:
Thank you to all who’ve made this show possible. Our hosts are Diana Rodgers and James Connolly. Our producer is Emily Soape. And, of course, we are grateful for our sponsors, Global Food Justice Alliance members, and listeners.
If you believe in making sure that people all over the world should have access to nutritious food, please join my mission through my non-profit, the Global Food Justice Alliance. All sustaining members get early access to ad-free podcasts plus free downloads, and you’ll be helping get healthy protein like meat, fish, and eggs to food-insecure kids. That’s sustainabledish.com/join.
A big thanks to the sponsor of today’s show, Paleovalley, maker of one of my favorite supplements, the Organ Complex. It contains all of the benefits of liver, heart, and kidney – without the taste. You can get 15% off by clicking here: sustainabledish.com/pv15.
Transcript:
Diana Rodgers, RD
Welcome to the Sustainable Dish Podcast. I’m Diana Rodgers, a real food registered dietitian, author, and sustainability advocate. I co-host this podcast with James Connolly, who was a producer on my film Sacred Cow. I also founded the Global Food Justice Alliance, an initiative advocating for the inclusion of animal-source foods like meat, dairy, and eggs for a more nutritious, sustainable, and equitable worldwide food system. You can check it out and join me at global food justice.org. Thanks again for listening. And now, on to our show.
Diana Rodgers, RD (Paleovalley Ad)
Today’s podcast is sponsored by Paleovalley, makers of one of my favorite supplements, the Organ Complex. It contains all of the benefits of liver, heart, and kidney to those of us who don’t really love eating those ancestral foods because of the taste. The nutrients are helpful for brain health, hair, skin, and nails, and also for energy. Get 15% off with my link, sustainabledish.com/pv15. That’s sustainabledish.com/pv15.
Emily Soape
Hello, everyone; this is Emily Soape, producer of the Sustainable Dish podcast. And on today’s episode, James is interviewing Kate Kavanaugh, who is a farmer, a butcher, and lifelong learner. And this interview is so packed with so much information and interesting stories that we’re breaking it into two episodes. So be sure to tune in next week for the conclusion of their conversation. Now on to the show,
James Connolly
This is James Connolly for Sustainable Dish’s podcast. First of all, I want to really send a heartfelt thank you to Brett for introducing us. That was really really cool. Every time I have a conversation with Brett, I always get that pause where he’s like, What is like, this guy is just strange.
Kate Kavanaugh
I think he thinks the same thing about me.
James Connolly
Yeah, right
Kate Kavanaugh
In the best way
James Connolly
I can Yeah, in the best way, sending love out to Brett. I really struggled with like how to kind of start this. Because I think the thing that is interesting to me about trying to have a conversation of podcasts with you is that I kind of want the audience to see you in the way that I am seeing you. And so the struggle for me is real, it’s like, we are just passing back notes like in the classroom all day long, since we’ve met and just like bouncing different ideas, and just complaints about the world or any number of different things kind of associated with like, just finding like a kindred spirit.
Kate Kavanaugh
Drowning one another in reading materials.
James Connolly
Drowning, drowning, in the deep end and throwing more water on each other. And so I do think it’s really, really interesting. And part of the… So, Diana asked me to be on to co-host the podcast, because she knew I was kind of starving for like genuine conversations about the things that I really, genuinely care about. And so it was very difficult for me to even begin. But it is such a joy, to be able to go and do this on a regular basis. It’s such a joy to be able to reach out to people. And we were kind of talking before the podcast starts like there is an element to when I interview somebody, when I read a book about a certain subject, I get that time with that person to talk about the subject that I’ve dived into, which I think is the reason why somebody writes a book, right? It’s like, you want to put it down an argument or a thesis into the world, and you want to commune with people who are thinking about things, or you’ve changed minds or you want to sort of like bounce ideas off from each other and communicating across time and space with these conversations, and like Kate is like, I always forget, like there’s an audience. So Kate, you know, like, we got to remember there’s an audience.
Kate Kavanaugh
They’ll be fine. They’ll catch on. They always do.
James Connolly
Yeah. So I think it’s like really incumbent. I’m just trying to get to know your mind. And the way that you think about things because you are taking a lot of information. You are taking a lot of things that I fundamentally care about poetry, and the way of communicating the physics and science and the history of the way that we tell ourselves civilizational struggles, how do we thrive in the modern world, all of these different things, and you’re sort of whirling them around into this sort of melting pot, and sort of communing with people who are doing many of the same things. And your podcast is brilliant. I think I’ve listened to 90% of everything that you’ve put out since you sort of rebranded the podcast. It’s absolutely brilliant, long-form conversations two and a half hours. And I’m always wanting for more. This is the weirdest introduction, but I want to introduce everybody to Kate Kavanaugh, and just kind of like I want to start out with like, I do want you to kind of like push into your health journey a little bit and your childhood and your upbringing. I think you can find a lot of it on Kate’s podcast. She has a solo podcast where she kind of talks a lot about this very deeply. But it’s just so important to get to know you in the way that I’ve gotten to know you by sort of listening to your sort of your journey. So go!
Kate Kavanaugh
Well, shoot I’m not a sure what to say. That was a… that was quite the introduction. Thank you for… thank you for just talking with me, you know, we’ve kind of had this whirlwind situation of getting to know one another since we were introduced and exploring one another’s brains. And so the feeling is so mutual. Where to start? I think I want to start with connection. I thought a little bit about this prior to the podcast. And I think much of my childhood was really marked by the ways in which I could and could not connect with the world. And starting at a very young age, I had a… I had a difficult home life. I don’t think it was a special difficult home life, it was just hard. I had a father that was older and chronically ill, that would eventually be in the process of dying. I had a mother with mental health issues that was constantly bringing up death. And they were both alcoholics. And in my home life, what I wanted the most was to disconnect. I wanted to disconnect from that space. And I didn’t have another space to connect into. And the only space that came close was being outside in my backyard playing in mud. That was the only place where I had that experience of connection. And then when I started school, I was also sort of strange little kid, I was very obsessed with death. And I know you’ve heard this, but I would watch that scene where Bambi mother gets shot over and over and over again, you just sent me an article about the original Bambi story that adds a lot of layers into that. But I struggled to connect with the other kids and I was the kid that was told during recess that I needed to go play with the other children that I couldn’t just sit there and read the entire time. And I didn’t know how. And so I was in that situation where I went from place to place where I didn’t know how to connect, or I didn’t want to connect. And I think that there was a space that felt almost out of control in that. And so I made this huge decision when I was five years old, that I wanted to be a vegetarian. And I think that like anyone, oftentimes, when we are afraid, or when we don’t understand something, or when we’re facing the abyss of the unknown, there is this element of wanting to pull back and find any anything to hang on to any point of just being able to grab a handle and hang on in life. And for me, I think that was that handle, maybe I can avoid death. Maybe I can avoid pain and suffering that I inflict. And this was, you know, this was from a five-year-olds perspective. And this kind of carried through and over the years as I went on in school, as my father’s health deteriorated, I became more and more disconnected. And that manifested as deep, almost existential anxiety. And I entered into what I think is and you and I have talked about becoming far less common, a very overmedicated childhood. I think by the time I was 13 or 14, I had been on a dozen different antidepressants, anti psychotics trying to medicate, the way that I connect. This is how I kind of reframe it now is that I was disconnected. And I had these symptoms of disconnection. And instead of instead of looking at the constellation of my environment, and my school system, they pathologized and medicalized me and I think that this isn’t an uncommon story where we medicalized the individual for what is happening at a societal level. So I went on in this way, and you know, there are bumps along the road. But in my teen years, I got really involved in the punk rock scene I went even harder into the environmentalism aspect of vegetarianism into some of the more vegetarian ideology. And around the age of 18, I decided I wanted to off of all the medications, and really pulled myself off of them rather abruptly. And these are things that need to be tapered off. And this was a pretty wild time. And about two years later, realized that my health problems really hadn’t changed since I was a kid. Still plagued with anxiety, still plagued with gastrointestinal issues, still plagued with just debilitating fatigue. And I started thinking about eating meat again. And I think that just like in that first instance, when I was five years old, that desire came from a place of wanting to connect with my body. And that’s where it started. And so I started seeking out, how can I connect with my food, because if I’m going to do this, I want to understand exactly the system that I’m participating in. And this was 14 years ago. And so I started visiting farms and ranches, and really getting to understand a little bit about agriculture. I think at the time, it was not really regenerative agriculture so much as it was holistic grazing or rotational grazing, right. That word wasn’t really in our lexicon yet. And that’s when I really dove into the meat world. And I’ll pause there.
James Connolly
So, yeah, I mean, I think that there is, there’s such a wide body of literature out there on some of the aspects of how food is in many ways a system of control for people who do feel when they’re young, that it’s the world is is totally out of control. You know, we send kids to school, we send them by age, we do expect them to connect. I struggled as a parent to get to find connection with other parents just because we decided to have children or in and around the same time. Hard enough to make friends as it is. I do think it’s, you know, there is so many aspects of this idea of socialization that kind of happens with that I have found, there is so much literature out there from people who experienced this. The Power of Introverts that Susan Cain’s book, you know, she said that even just modern schooling, the way that they designed the classroom now, so that, like four desks are facing each other, is so important to the way that she wanted to learn, because now you’re supposed to commune like you have this very American… is an American driven idea that we all want to work communally and sort of like, and focus on these focus groups. And so now you’re staring at your students as you’re trying to learn as well. And so, one of the strangest parts about like, say Michael Pollan’s book where he talks about how to change your mind, he was interviewing one scientist, and he was saying, he said, you know, kids are tripping all the time, their brain structure is completely different to ours. And some of it is like in an open source, like computer system that just allowing so much information. And because you’re not thinking of things as one thing or another differentiating things, making connections, based on definitions that you don’t understand yet, you really start to think of things in a very different way, until you start your brain starts to develop in forming it in in a way that starts to meld to the world that’s around you.
Kate Kavanaugh
To add to that, there’s a really thin line between reality and fantasy until age seven, I forget what your brainwaves progressed from, but I think it’s delta theta, and it progresses upwards. And so that’s a very tenuous place, and a really magical place in childhood, where all of our subconscious beliefs get set, or the way that we believe that we see the world and that the world sees us. But in it, there is just this space of imagination like that time that is ripe for an imaginary friend, for example.
James Connolly
Yeah. And so like some of the aspects of it, the book that I just finished strangers to ourselves, she kind of talks about, she was institutionalized for anorexia. And I wouldn’t, in any way try to tell the story of that. But it’s a really interesting story, in that, once the diagnosis sort of happened to her, then she grew up in a world where that became an identity and a diagnosis for herself. And where she learned many of the systems and control that happened with food was when she was put into a place that was supposed to deal with those problems. And so, you know, kids would like, learn the calories, the number of calories in this and that type of food. They would learn how to, like, any number of different processes, like of you know, weight control, or anything like that. But I do think it’s a really interesting aspect is the food aspect of it is something that you take, you can take three days, three times a day, and you can have that control over it in a way that can start to define an identity.
Kate Kavanaugh
I think too, in that and I want to tease this out a little bit with you is that… and I think that eating is one of the most intimate things we do. Right, you know, two to three times a day, we put something inside of our bodies, and it passes through this boundary that we consider self, right? This outer meatsuit that we identify as being Kate as being James. And it goes into our bodies on what is technically the outside, right from our mouth to our anus is technically outside of our body continuous with our skin. And in the process of digestion, those nutrients, those minerals, those things that were other, suddenly become self. And so I think that the intimacy, right, and one definition of intimacy is a union of particles. The intimacy that we have with food can’t be underestimated. And so I think it’s no wonder that oftentimes, our identities come up around food that that control comes up around food that group dynamics come up around food.
James Connolly
Yeah, I mean, I remember, I have very distinct memories from, you know, my mother growing up being a ballet dancer, you know, she would make us our meat and potatoes, we always had a meal that was dedicated to my father’s tastes. And then there was the meal that she had for herself, which was always a salad. And she in some ways believed in sort of Better Living Through Chemistry. We have a lot of powdered milk growing up, we grew up with margarine, and grew up with a lot of sort of like foods like that. Yeah, this sort of, you know, the New Age health foods. NASA derived Tang and all this other stuff. But my mom was very health conscious, but she was health conscious in the way that like, health conscious people were in the 80s.
Kate Kavanaugh
My mom too. Yeah, we had whole wheat pancakes and margarine. And that was it in the 80s. I eat a lot of Campbell’s Soup.
James Connolly
Yeah, it is sort of interesting how much like you and I are so devoted to food in so many different ways. Now, having grown up with the plastic and the cardboard that we used to eat.
Kate Kavanaugh
You have to wonder if there’s some just pushback in culture, right? Like, it is the you know, the working, really structured businessman, his kids grew up to be artists, right. And you know, I was that same like, we kind of push against and rebel. And so I was wondering if that’s a piece of it anyway.
James Connolly
So did you know to use, you have this moment where you’re like, alright, well, if I’m going to understand the consumption of meat, I need to understand it in its totality. Had you always had sort of had the personality where you, like, dive that deeply into something, because I do want you to tell the story, because I think the rubber hits the road for you in the way that it took me 15 years of being in the food system before I started to even look at farming and soil. Because that’s what a city kid does. Right? They discover food, they become a chef and they just think that they know everything.
Kate Kavanaugh
I’ve met enough chefs to know that.
James Connolly
Yeah, so dive into that it’s, I just find it so fascinating.
Kate Kavanaugh
You know, as a kid, one of the things I loved the most was research, I went to a school where that was one of the few things that I really attached into I loved deep dives. I loved getting to know a topic inside about an hour. And I would pick really strange topics for a kid. But I was really interested in… I left high school really young because it wasn’t… there wasn’t enough depth. In the beginning of my sophomore year of high school, I declared it was like September sophomore year of high school. And I was like, I can’t do this anymore. I’m going to college. This is too much busy work. I want to go deeper. And so I made this announcement. I did it, you know, two months later in college. And there I was doing all of these deep dives. I just suddenly I had this smorgasbord in front of me. And all I wanted to do was learn. I was absolutely lost, absolutely rudderless on what it was that I wanted to do. But I knew that I wanted to understand everything. And I think that this too is that drive for connection that in seeking to understand even that which we can’t understand. We have this act of connecting to these source materials. And I think that was probably what set me up to really dive deep into wanting to understand what it was that I hadn’t wanted to participate in. That if I’m going to be a part of this then I want to understand as much of it as I can. I want to connect with it in every way possible. And I was… I just started going to farms and ranches. I went to the farmers market and I just asked people, and during this time, I had begun to eat meat again. And I was seeing a really big change in my body a really big change in my anxiety and depression starting to starting to go away a little bit. And in my gastrointestinal health, an uptick in my energy levels. And I was seeing that this food was having a healing effect on my body. And as I was visiting more and more farms and ranches, and I couldn’t get enough, I started to see that that impact from those animals was having a direct impact on healing soil. And, you know, I know this is maybe a tired trope and in the regenerative ag community, but there is something absolutely stunning about standing on a piece of property where a stream or a creek has been long gone for many years. And suddenly you apply ruminants and the right practices, and that stream comes back. And I wouldn’t, I’ve witnessed this four or five, six times in the last 15 years of doing this work. And every time I am just struck at how powerful these levers are to heal both land and bodies, and to see the mirrors between those two spaces. And the more I saw those little mirrors, and I see them all the time now and they’re not mirrors. And I do want to say that at the outside, it’s not a mirror, because we are continuous with our environment, because we are connected inextricably, to the interconnected web of this biosphere. And I think within that, and starting to notice that it just became more and more interesting. And it drove my desire to understand it at more granular and more fundamental levels will if I’m eating meat, then I also want to make sure that I’ve killed some meat. And so we raised some chickens in Arizona, and I killed some chickens. And well, if I’m doing this, and I’m cooking, I’m learning how to cook all of this meat, then I also want to know how to butcher this meat. And I want to understand the physiology and how these practices are being made manifest in carcass composition, and sought that out. So there just was this driving force have I want to know more, I want to connect more, I want to understand more. And diving deep.
James Connolly
Yeah, I don’t want to go… we’re gonna get to that. But I want to kind of like drive you back a little bit to the educational aspect of it, right. So I think, I don’t know, if you have a story, or you have this like moments where you start to realize, like, maybe the grown-ups don’t really have control, or they don’t really understand what they’re talking about. I’ll give you an example. So when I was in fourth grade, the space shuttle Challenger, and I was walking through the hallways, and I was pulled into a classroom. And we were watching the launch of the space shuttle Challenger. And I saw it live blow up. And it was devastating to America, in the US. It was a very devastating thing to see. It was, you know, you have those moments like JFK assassination, or the Challenger, 9/11, or any number of different things that becomes sort of like honed into your, you know, like where you were at that moment. But we had the head of the parish come and talk to us about death. And he said he was trying to he was saying that, in essence, like bad things do happen and that humans do die. But God has control over that. But God is say, like a man who is at the top of the Empire State Building, and he’s watching a car crash on the ground floor. And so he has no control over that. And I’m like, wait a second. Wow. I’m like, Really, cuz I’ve been told for most of my young life, up until that point that he’s omniscient and omnipotent. But now you’re saying he has no control. And it’s certainly put a little chink in the armor of my worldview of the way they adults kind of talking about depth, right. And I don’t know if you have one of those stories. But I’m interested to sort of see if whether there was like this sort of moment where you’re just like, wait a second,
Kate Kavanaugh
For the way that adults talk about death in particular or the way that adults exert control?
James Connolly
Yeah, a little bit of both. I think, you know, there’s always that sort of, like, seminal childhood moment where you’re like, huh, Hmm.
Kate Kavanaugh
I think this recurred a lot for me that I was, uh, I really tried to fit in when I was younger. I really wanted to fit in and I studied people and how they, how they were fitting in to try to fit in and response. And somewhere along the line right about when they started medicating me, I realized that maybe I just wasn’t going to fit in, and that in trying and continually failing it that wasn’t serving me. And I think I realized this. It was fourth grade. And I had a teacher come out and was talking to my mother in the hallway about how broken I was and how much I was failing to thrive. And this was around the time that they were putting me on medication and that they were telling me right, I was sitting in these doctors offices, and they were telling me like you’re irreparably broken. It’s going to be this way for the rest of your life. You know, your parents are on medication. This is your fate. And I had this really salient moment of like, okay, well, then I’m just going to push back in every way imaginable. And I did… I at my eighth grade graduation, I was gifted a copy of Civil Disobedience and told that I was one of the most difficult kids that had ever gone through that private school. I really pushed back on any kind of authority. And I got some of that from my dad really disliked authority figures. And so there was kind of that baked into the soup too. And it continued, right, you end up in the punk rock scene. And that’s a lot about pushing back against authority. And so all of these things kind of dovetail. I think for death, like this moment with death, I was exposed to a lot of death as a kid, my dad was on dialysis. And I would go in there with him. And you’d see you’d see people come and go pretty quickly. And I talked to everybody because I got along with adults, like where… I couldn’t connect with children, I could often connect with adults. And my mom read me Tuesdays with Morrie when I was I think seven years old, which was I… wrecked me. I mean, it absolutely destroyed me it was too adult of a view of death. I mean, it’s about this man who’s sitting with his mentor, as he’s dying. And they’re exchanging this conversation about mortality and the death process. And so, death was kind of cooked into the system really early on, and how the myriad of ways in which adults dealt and avoided it completely would not discuss it with me, would not discuss why I wanted to watch that scene in Bambi over and over, were just horrified that it was the case.
James Connolly
Yeah, there’s a there’s a story about Martha Graham, who was a choreographer and dancer, constant disruption in the classroom, and she got pulled into the principal’s office, parents were sitting. And she was just in the lobby outside. And they were saying it very much the same thing like unruly child who just can’t sit in a desk all day. And the principal looks and he said, Well, look at what she’s doing. She’s dancing into, like, there’s, you know, like, send her into the direction that she would want to go. And I do think that there… it’s incumbent upon adults to think of their children as not, you know, like, look at who they are, when they are themselves. And to sort of mold them in a way that doesn’t imply ownership of their lives. And so we’ve been talking about that a lot on the podcast that you introduced to lift Liz, you know, it’s very, very interesting experience to parent in a way that you’re just like, Well, I’m not going to do what my parents told me to do. And then you kind of it starts to eke in anyway.
Kate Kavanaugh
Right, but that’s the thing. And you know, I’m not a parent, but I think it’s easy to project onto our children either what we got and enjoyed or what we didn’t get and don’t want to project onto them. And I think it’s hard to see them as individuals.
James Connolly
Yeah. So now we can kind of move into the thing I kind of find really interesting about the way that you kind of the spark that I also think Jake and Maren are having in the development of their documentary film, is what they’re dealing with is death, right? It’s a civilizational story, this idea of immortality. Many religions will kind of give you the idea that there is an afterlife and everlasting life afterwards. And there is… you end up with this sort of weird place where your your imagination goes, like what would that even look like? But the sort of Denial of Death, that aspect of our world that doesn’t like to see decay? doesn’t like to see the processes of decay is so integral to it’s like where the struggle is, you know, you should spend time within that framework. And it’s not really taught in schools in any meaningful way. And so I think it’s really interesting, because the way that you kind of talk about this, it seems like it’s the overarching sort of circle of your life. And I think it’s endlessly fascinating. And it kind of moves into everything, right? Philosophy, religion, science, thriving, like when you talk about death, you’re talking about thriving as well, you know, and that’s…
Kate Kavanaugh
We can’t talk about life without death. We can’t talk about death without life, right, those two are… those two are perigee and apogee. And so to talk about aliveness, we also have to talk about the inevitability of death.
James Connolly
Yeah. And, you know, it’s so much in Quinn’s work, Daniel Quinn’s work. It is the separating space by which he describes the world. And so it’s interesting, it’s so interesting to me how you saw this take place, you saw that sort of that, the reaction to being in that space, it’s seeing animals ground for food, to turn that into nourishment. And the way that you describe it is so it’s so wonderful. It’s so beautiful. So continue, I think it’s, you know, you’re visiting farms, you’re doing what most people do, don’t do. You’re asking questions, you’re really exploring this from a multicellular level. So continue, please.
Kate Kavanaugh
Yeah, let me say this at the outset, too, I think sometimes when I look at all these different threads that we’re talking about, when we’re talking about philosophy, or history, or the rise of industrial agriculture, compulsory education, whatever it is, somewhere along the line, our avoidance of death actually kind of trickles into a lot of these, the, the narrative about meat right now, I think, is very much about avoidance of death. And I think I ended up very accidentally embracing this as a concept because it was so not talked about. And in that rebellious way of whenever somebody tells me not to, that’s the first thing I’m gonna go do. There was this implied, hidden nature of death that made me want to explore it and understand it a little bit better, because it felt omnipresent in my childhood. And yet, and yet, nobody was talking to me about it in any meaningful way. And so when I started visiting these farms and ranches, and eating meat, I was participating in a system with death. And you know, like Diana says, right, there is no bloodless diet. And I started to see that this was just a part of the cycle, that it was just a part of the prerequisite for life – that decay is that transformative process that turns what was once perceived as one into many in the course of the soil food web. And I got a little bit more curious, I wanted to go to slaughterhouses and see what that process looked like, what that actual space of killing that we have so much in our society outsourced to very few people, right, what once might have been the job shared, we now have people that work in three shifts that kill 15 to 20,000 animals in a single day. And I wanted to see like, what are these processes when they’re big? What are these processes when they’re small? And I wanted to look at bodies, essentially, I mean, as a butcher, maybe that sounds a little bit funny. But I think that there’s this understanding that comes from this ability to see an animal’s life, from the inside out, that you can see all of the practices and all of the ways that they were in relationship with the land, through the way that their muscles are colored, and their fat changes color throughout the seasons. And the amount of carotenoids in the grasses, for example, or how that animal relates to place an age and how much movement it underwent throughout its life. And you can see this and you can almost touch it in that space of tangibly taking it apart, and then making it ready for people to eat and in this very intimate process. And maybe you have insight into that because I’m not the only butcher in this conversation.
James Connolly
Yeah, I mean, the way that I always described it, I had the opportunity to work at 14 became a butcher. And I did that all the way up until I joined the military at 18. I did not go back to it until I was in my late 30s, early 40s. And spent a lot of time in London with a bunch of Irish butchers. And they were, they were just great. I mean, they’re Irish butchers – really, really interesting guys who traveled the world. They were butchers for Saudi princes. And just a really, really interesting guys. For me, it was the connection that I felt with them was paramount. They had, obviously, they had spent their entire lives within a bunch of the grandfathers were butchers or their sons were butchers. Do all this stuff they would do… They would eat on the same place that they’re carving. Hop down the sandwich.
Kate Kavanaugh
I do that around the farm when it’s just for us. Yeah.
James Connolly
You know, and chorizo is the thing, they would just kind of just pop it down and then just like pick it up again. So I had gone through French Culinary Institute, where everything is about temperature control. Everything is about separation. You know, the Old Testament has over 100 different specs, you know, rules surrounding food and cleanliness and all this other stuff. But they were just like, whatever.
Kate Kavanaugh
Yeah, that’s how I am on the farm. I figured that’s part of making a strong microbiome.
James Connolly
Yeah. And really, the thing that I loved most about it was that they lived within two different worlds. Right? So one, they’re feeding princes, billionaires, multimillionaires, and then two, they’re also bringing in these old women who would come in who would ask for all of the offal – all of the stuff that nobody ever wanted. They were the only people still eating liver, the only people who were… they would get laying hens. And they would cook laying hens, they would just get, you know, for $1 a pound or something like that. Did you ever have you ever read Mark Schatzker? His book? The Dorito effect?
Kate Kavanaugh
Yes. Yeah.
James Connolly
Yeah, there’s just this one story of the Barred Rock chicken that he tells that I just find really interesting and kept on thinking about when I was listening to podcasts here on, you know, it was a heritage breed of chicken. They had friends who had stopped over, and they offered them dinner. But this chicken was not meant to feed four people when they looked at it, but it was highly satisfying and satiating. And I do think that there’s something weird about how much we’ve lost that when we’re talking about taste, and we’ll talk about flavor. And we’re talking about all of the things that like, say Julia Child with how did she prepare chicken? Salt and pepper. That was it, right? And you just like, you walk to the supermarket now. And chicken is just drowned in ingredients.
Kate Kavanaugh
No, it’s interesting, too, you know, and we haven’t gotten to this part. But after all of this, looking at animals from the inside out, I was really curious to try my hand at raising animals because I felt like I had glimpsed something that was relevant. And I think that flavor, right, we’re talking about flavor, which is a really interesting sort of cathexis of all of these different things. Flavor is at once what the animal was eating their diet, it is the amount of work that a muscle is doing. And that is why a beef shank is always going to be more flavorful than a tenderloin. But with work comes not just flavor, but also toughness. So beef shank is also going to be very tough. And it’s also going to have some to do with the breed and how adapted it is to that area where the animal was, you know, in Fred Provenza’s work he looks at where the animal was in utero, and the way that influences the calf’s or whatever it is ability to select nutrients out of that regional ecosystem. And so flavor is a complex piece of this. But I also think that that is our initial point of connection, we eat with our eyes, and then we taste practices, we taste lives, we taste our environment, through this act of eating, it’s this intimate conversation between our environment and our biology, and it’s this sort of go between, and flavor is the vehicle for that.
James Connolly
Yeah, I mean, do you think that will like with even just within this subset of people who are I think really fighting and struggling to, to build a food system that is nourishing? Do you think we’ll get to the point where it’s like, you know, Italians argue over olive oil, but like… my family’s olive oil is the best in the world. Do you think we’ll ever get to that point where it’s like, oh, Because I am finding some aspects of it within our food system, I am finding there are people who are really advocating for this in a way that I feel is just so beautifully, like Wendell Berry-esque. As they’re sort of moving through these spaces, even Michael Pollan’s evolution, you know, from what I consider his initial discovery of the food system, he had sort of, he had written the Botany of Desire before, but it almost feels sort of removed. He’s almost an objective journalist at that point. So objective that he’s not really dived into it. Then Omnivore’s Dilemma, and then now he’s like, he’s moved into this space where I feel like he’s, I mean, he’s like, trying mushrooms. It’s like the evolution of your, you know, the gastronomic evolution is you eventually get to a space where you’re like, let’s see what all of these plants can really do.
Kate Kavanaugh
Yeah, I mean, it’s flavor too, you know, what is life? And I think sort of a pipeline, you know, from food to existential crisis? What’s the question?
James Connolly
I don’t know what the question is. No, I mean, so part of me is like, because I’m such a, I think of myself as a very romantic person, the outward appearance of what I do is I dive very deeply into the problems within the system, only because I have an idea in my head, which is something that is this, right? It’s a nourishing, like bountiful system that doesn’t see us all as consumers; that sees us, that sees ecosystem as like a system of our economy, that should be valued, as much as everything else. Sort of a living biology. And so like, when I’m talking about this stuff, I want to sort of build like an enthusiasm around the good parts. But what I end up doing mostly is focusing on where it’s going wrong. But really, like, I actually genuinely believe that there’s a way to build this in a way that is so spectacular, that we were just like, you know, like, what does that look like to me? You know,
Kate Kavanaugh
You know, you asked about the olive oil, right? That’s that are we going to have this argument about olive oil. And I hope in many ways that we don’t, because I hope that what we gain an understanding of is that everything is just a reflection of the place it was in and the relationships that it had within that place. And so when we are eating food, we are eating from a place from an ecosystem. And all of the players that are in that, whether we’re talking about 1 billion microorganisms in a single teaspoon of soil, or we’re talking about the insect population, and how that played a role in feeding that place, or we’re talking about humans that were stewarding or attending whatever word you want to use those animals, and we’re talking about what that soil looks like, and the history of that soil and how it’s influencing that flavor. And so within that, my hope is that we understand that we are an intimate part of this place, and everything is reflecting its place and all of the relationships in it. And there are so many of them that we could never tease this out. And I think one of my questions is, how do we make that ideal, not a utopia, but a real and imperfect place? Because I think in your and my romanticism, which I think is important, right? Like, it’s important for us to have this sense of feeling. One of the things that I think we remove when we talk about this switch from cyclical to linear thinking around the time of Descartes or Newton, these things that you and I have talked about – Jake and Maren talk about is that we lose our own subjectivity, within a sense of place and the feelings and sensations with which we experience a place. And I think that romanticism of that is a part of that experience, and our desire for to be a part of the whole to be an interconnected part of the whole and I think it’s reflective of that, and so I don’t want to lose it. And at the same time, I want to hold space for like, these are imperfect systems. regenerative agriculture is not a panacea there is no panacea. We are trying to navigate incredibly complex issues of how humans are threads woven into this earth, and there’s not going to be this linear solution and I think too, right? This brings up you know, I’ve been harping on Andreas Weber. And this idea of erotic ecology that our experience of touching and syncing these places is, it’s required. It’s required. We need it.
James Connolly
Yeah, there’s a line in the, we both just finished the book on phosphorus. So NPK, the fertilizers we’ve used to sort of build the Borlaug in Green Revolution. He has a line in there because he said that, because he’s actually talking about ruminants. He’s talking about animals on the landscape. But he says, in the individualistic parts that we’ve made, we’ve broken that circle and created a line. Yeah. And I’ve been thinking about that a lot.
Kate Kavanaugh
Yeah, we’ve broken that in every way. And I think that, in some ways, to me, the part that marries that line, again, is our relationship to death. Because if you take death out of it, if you believe in, you know, this life that goes on forever, you’re searching for the fountain of youth, or you’re trying to avoid death, then you’re trying to avoid the very point of the biggest transformation of energy and matter within a food system. And you know that I mean that I could talk about that book for forever. But when we’re talking about fertilizer, we’re initially talking about nature’s desire to spread blood, which has nitrogen, and bones, which has phosphorus, and fleshy tissue, which has potassium, back in to nourish the soil. And at that point, and you know, any farmer, any rancher, any observant hiker, knows that when you come across a place that has manure on it, or that has a dead body on it, you’ll see this proliferation of life, you’ll see greener grass, you’ll see it taller than everything else. And that is the point that those bodies are going back to nourish the system once again and become a part of it. And then some animal comes along and eats that grass and those minerals and nutrients that were once a part of another animal that were a part of rocks that just sort of rot out of deep time. And the singularity-like thrust force, stardust is part of us. And there’s this cyclicality to that that I think when we return to this, this point of depth that we maybe we can make that line into a circle again.
James Connolly
Can we dive into that book a little bit? Because I think it’s right, it’s exact subject we’re talking about. I think it’s really interesting. Yeah, it was fascinating. I’d love to get your first thoughts.
Kate Kavanaugh
Well, my first thought is that you told me to read it, and I picked it up at 7pm. And I think I finally went to bed at 10:30, which is very late for me. And I woke up at four, and it was done by 6:30. And so in the span of less than 12 hours, I had consumed this entire book. And I think it’s fascinating to look at the complexity of everything that we do. And then the simple problems that like these spaces where all of that complexity gets distilled down into the single element, and how we are interacting with it. And I think that it’s the perfect thing to explore because it’s so paradoxical. Like at once we are running out of phosphorus. And on the other side, we have way too much phosphorus. That Absolutely changing our environment.
James Connolly
Right. So yeah, so for the sake of our audience, so the book is called The Devil’s Element.
Kate Kavanaugh
The Devil’s Element by Dan Egan.
James Connolly
Yeah. And it’s great. I’m trying to get him on the podcast. It’s a historical journey. It’s a scientific journal of this one element that is so integral to life to this circularity of life. Like for me, the thing that like if I was going to distill it down to like, a single story, was the amount to which every single battle and war, the pledges that these armies would make, who is that the dead would be carried back to their homeland so that they can grind them for their bones? Yes. So the British had actually this wasn’t in the book, but the British part of the reason why they had earned the title perfidious Albion, which is just means for their liars – perfidious Albion was because after a seminal battle where the English and French had gone to war, the English people had taken the French corpses and brought them back. And so it was so integral to the development of the way that they tried to create a circularity within their agricultural system through population growth was to recycle those nutrients back into the soil. And it didn’t matter if it was ground up bones, if it was cemeteries, if it was animals, it was all of that stuff. And they understood they had to bring nutrients and nutrition back to that. And really, you’re importing…
Kate Kavanaugh
They’re importing that fertility, right? Like they’re going all the way to South America to bring back the massive amounts of bird poop, and they’re grinding bones from Egypt.
James Connolly
Yeah, yeah. Isn’t it insane?
Kate Kavanaugh
It’s crazy. It’s really crazy. But they’re… They’re importing their fertility.
James Connolly
That’s not Indiana Jones.
Kate Kavanaugh
I want to see that one, though. Maybe that one’s next. They’re importing this fertility and failing to change any practices or to integrate anything back into the system.
James Connolly
Yeah, and you know, when they’re talking about these, these phosphorus deposits in Florida, that 85% of US agricultural development and fertility is dependent upon, they’re talking about bones. They’re talking about teeth. They’re talking about, you know, the sort of recycling of nutrients within this ecosystem, this within this world. And then, the city elements of it is sort of monoculture that is a city. What ends up happening with that, I just find it absolutely fascinating as well. That’s a great book. It’s just a, but you could do the same with nitrogen. You could do the same thing with the way that we have mechanized all aspects of it. And I kind of want to go back because I do think that there is some element to the way that you talk about that sort of Cartesian mechanistic system that I just find absolutely interesting for to go over.
Kate Kavanaugh
Oh, gosh, how do I talk about it? Well,
James Connolly
Yeah, you can get… you got it. Yeah.
Kate Kavanaugh
Yeah. Yeah. But I’m curious what which part you’re looking for? I think that a lot of us are asking this question of when did the mentality shift, and we see all these changes that it has wrought, right? And I think that you and I are searching for a lot of the same puzzle pieces within that. We’re looking at the rise of industrial agriculture, or the rise of sterility, or the rise of compulsory education. And so much of this, for me is when do we we stop feeling like a part of that whole? When do we stop feeling like cycles are relevant, and we enter this space where growth can happen in perpetuity. And we see that in many ways, refrigeration breaks and air conditioning break the seasonal cycle, medicine breaks the rest and repair cycle. And artificial lights break our circadian cycle. There are so many ways in which these cycles that nature functions on have been truncated, I mean, you could even point at birth control and talking about the ways in which it’s disrupted the menstrual cycle. And that these cycles are incredibly important, because there is no waste in nature. And what Dan Egan’s book is highlighting is that there is this cycle of phosphorus that nature is naturally undergoing, and we’ve gotten so far away from that. And I think I want to understand how we can get back in a lot of ways or how we can reach a new place of understanding our place in nature, our place in the environment are placing these cycles without it being that the human is a blight on this earth, which I think is the narrative we so often get when we look at the media and put ourselves firmly back in the interconnected web of life without utopianizing it
James Connolly
Right to going to go one direction and pull us back in the other. So I was reading this morning, Alan Lightman because I was listening to one of your podcasts. Brandi was talking about I love Alan Lightman. I was reading it this morning, and he was talking about theoretical physics. He’s a theoretical… he’s a physicist. So he’s talking about time travel. And he said that if it… I also watched Arrival last night, by the way,
Kate Kavanaugh
Oh good. Yeah, we should talk about that.
James Connolly
So he was he is saying that if you could travel in time, it would break all the physics because physics is dependent upon linear linearity. It’s absolutely dependent upon that. And so if you turn that into a circle, you would actually break physics, which I was like, what?! I was like, I don’t even understand it. But it just kind of goes with what we were talking about.
Kate Kavanaugh
And so much of the, you know, I’m not, I’m not a physicist. So that needs to be said at the outset here. But when you look at like the work of Fritjof Capra, who wrote Systems View of Life, he wrote The Tao of Physics. And it has done a lot of work at looking at how you model ecosystems, and how you model emergent properties, how you model the pattern of a flight of starlings as it, you know, undulates across the sky, you need physics to model that. And so much of what we are just beginning to understand about that mathematical modeling is that it is almost impossible to do, because the systems are so integrated. And I wonder if that would also break time travel, if we don’t even understand how that could happen? Because maybe it’s like Arrival and it’s just this loop.
James Connolly
Right? It’s a language, it’s a language that needs to be given to us. Because I think we’re telling… our language doesn’t allow for circularity in some way. Or the way that we’ve defined the way that we talk about science doesn’t allow for this singularity,
Kate Kavanaugh
We have this singular view of science, and we have this language that has been built around it, right? And one of the things I’m constantly teasing apart on the podcast is language. How are we defining these words that we use in our everyday language? Do we even know what they mean? And are we even looking for words outside of them to describe these experiences we’re having as humans here on this earth? And I think that there’s a really interesting thought experiment that if we were to build a culture around more cyclical nature and integrate that into modern science, what would the end result be? How would it change everything? Like we approach science, from the viewpoint that we have inherited from our parents from our education system? That is linear?
James Connolly
Yeah. And I… shoot! There are so many different tangents I want to go. Alright, let’s get… let’s do Daniel Quinn. Daniel Quinn’s got a great story. And it’s, he said, he went back to the sort of early dawn of life the diploblastic, tripoblastic skins, right – jellyfish. And if you… if there is an anthropologist there, because there’s always an anthropologist everywhere. So he describes it, and he starts to interview the jellyfish. And he says, you know, tell me the story of life. And the story of life through the jellyfish in his eyes is evolution through the jellyfish, his eyes to the jellyfish. And he said that is the story the jellyfish will tell. It is not the story. Right? So you know, the more I think about the nothing, nothing is understood, except through the light of evolution. I don’t necessarily know how much I believe that anymore. Because for us, evolution means the story of us. Yeah. And I think that is also breaking the cycle. It means that we’ve built in a linearity to this idea of everything as being sort of a playground for evolution to get to us. And I think that is, it’s a dangerous idea. And science has it, in many ways at the core of its being. And I think Descartes had that as well, right? You had even just the way that Linnaeus kind of classified things we know the more that we study nature, we know that a lot of these definitions are completely made up, right herbivores and mean we’ve seen over and over again. Deer eating baby chicks or like, you know, squirrels like chewing on skulls to get calcium or redwoods with salmon DNA. And like, we don’t we want the world to sort of coexist within these narrow definitions. And every single time we go out and study nature, we’re like, oh, wait, it doesn’t really operate that way, does it?
Kate Kavanaugh
Two things. The first of which is one of the most difficult things I find about podcasting is when you have a moment and you can see all the paths that bifurcate from that one moment, you have to choose a path and you know that once you’ve gone down that path, you can’t go back to that moment.
James Connolly
Okay, well, you can go back. Go, go!
Kate Kavanaugh
No, no, no, just what you said where you were like, there’s so many places this can go, but as you were talking, I wondered, you know, if we were to define evolution as motion over time, and not forwards or backwards, right, what would a river or say about evolution as it carves a canyon. And I think it would be something wildly different than our idea of things.
James Connolly
Yeah, continue on that.
Kate Kavanaugh
I don’t know. I hadn’t thought about it much until this moment. But I think that if we’re taking this very human perspective, then maybe for a moment, we can step outside of that human perspective and play a game, right? Where we could imagine evolution through a different lens. And I’ve been doing this since I was a little kid, right, I would see something. And I would try to imagine what it felt like to be that thing. And so what would it feel like to have to have deer hooves? What would it feel like to be that branch on a tree right now? Not even the whole tree sometimes, but like that branch on a tree? What does that feel like? And putting myself in these felt experiences of other things that obviously can’t happen. And I think that there are many pitfalls to anthropomorphizing our experience onto other beings. And without doing that, then we can’t try to gain some perspective and also employee empathy and curiosity. So one of the thought experiments I love to run through as well, what would it be like to be that thing and in relationship with the things that it’s in relationship with. And so if you’re thinking about evolution, which arguably is just motion over time, I think we associate it with something that is gaining function, but I think that you can maybe make an argument about that. And I think that in many ways, who, in many ways evolution is just the consumption of other organisms into other organisms in this stacked function way, right? You have this archaic bacteria that is taken up by a singular cellular organism, and suddenly you have a mitochondria inside of something. And then you have these growing and stacked functions and this experience that our liver is almost an organism unto itself, you know, all of the symbiotic relationships that we have, within our microbiome on our skin, on our gut are these organisms unto themselves nested in one another throughout time. And I always go back to this idea of, did you see the Powers of 10 movie in high school biology? I think this is like the most… this movie made the biggest impression on me, it’s maybe 20 minutes. And it’s this couple, and they’re sitting on a picnic blanket. And it zooms out from Earth in powers of 10, until you reach these sort of outer edges of space. And then it comes just like careening back into their skin and then back into electrons. And I think through this lens, you see just how integrated everything is and how continuous it is. And to go… so to go back to this idea of evolution, if it’s just motion occurring over time, not necessarily with direction, then what you experience when you look at a river in its relationship with rock on Earth, is that over time, they influence one another, that river is going to carve a canyon into the earth. And that rock is going to change the direction and the feel of that river. And in some ways, that’s some sort of evolution that we can’t understand.
James Connolly
Yeah, and through that process to bring in nutrients from those rocks and draw them together. There’s a book that I read on water years ago, and he was talking about IBM up in Connecticut has a division that in order to etch onto microchips – to get into smaller and smaller, the water that they use has to be purified goes through 23 processes, I think of purification. Instead, if you drank that water, you would slowly die – leach all the minerals out of your body. And I just thought it was so profound. Because we think of water as h2o, but it’s a myriad of different ingredients and leached that it because really water is just like killer, right? Just brings everything in pulls it all apart. And you know, it can eat away at anything over time in so many different ways. But really what it’s doing is bringing stuff trapped within that system. them to the surface bringing it in cycling it around. And in the atmosphere as well, right we have these atmospheric rivers that are carrying bacteria and particles and Western Sahara Sand that springing, you know, that’s we’re finding halfway around the world, just really stunning stuff.
Kate Kavanaugh
But you touched on something that I think is at the core, of one of my biggest curiosities, which is what we think of as one is almost always, maybe always, always many. Nothing exists in isolation. And so that’s important to recognize as we explore everything, our food system, you know, just one of those things.
James Connolly
Yeah. And one of the things I find kind of… one of the paradoxes of modern society, especially since the dawn of civilization, is the way that it thinks about water. So like, if you walk through the mechanism that is New York City, everything is about shuttling water out of it. Right? And so when you’re talking about like regenerative agriculture, it’s about holding water on the landscape, right? It’s like, how do you bring that creek? How do you bring that creek back? How do you like… how do you build it up from nothingness, right? You hold water on the land and allow it to move in places? Is it a, there’s a brilliant book that kind of talks about this, but we have an army corps of engineers, we have taken all of our rivers, our creeks, we’ve gotten rid of beavers, everything that we drained all of our swamps. We moved water out of all of these different surfaces so it can’t exist on the land anymore. So it shuttles in a way that’s almost turbocharged away from the landscape. And we’ve sort of done that. That’s what cities are. So these are deathly afraid of water, New Orleans, New York, all that stuff. And it’s like, it’s just such a weird landscape to kind of walk through studying what I study and like loving the things that I love to like, the way that people treat just this elemental, like thing that is…
Kate Kavanaugh
70% us
James Connolly
Absolutely dependent on water.
Kate Kavanaugh
Yeah, yeah. 70% us. I don’t know if the book was David Owen’s Where the Water Goes, which is a really excellent one exploring mostly water in the West. And Heather Huntsman’s Down River is another one that explores how the Army Corps of Engineers has created these savings accounts of water throughout the Colorado River system. But I think that Dan Egan touches this in The Devil’s Element he talks about in Florida, they’ve created these dams, or these man-made lakes, and let go of the wetlands which serve as one of our most important sources of remediating those intense relationships at the edges zones of these environments are some of the best remediators for phosphorus for nitrogen before it goes into greater waterways.
James Connolly
Yeah, and you know, Charles Eisenstein talks about even just the basis of carbon sequestration that happens within wetlands, we completely Terraformed every aspect of that, so that they can’t do what they have done for eons.
Kate Kavanaugh
You said something in a podcast, not that I was preparing for this, but not that I over-prepared. But you said something about our human search for calories has TerraForm to the earth. And that really, that really struck me, you know, go to go back to this idea of arrival or of alien life, like we have completely Terraform to this planet in our search for food.
James Connolly
Yeah. And for Daniel Quinn, it was the Tree of Life. Right? That is the story in the book of Genesis that He, his contention was that it was actually as a warning story from hunter-gatherers, about what is the tree of life? What is that secret knowledge. And so when the gods understood, they understood that in order for life to be, sometimes the fox would get, you know, his kill, he would get the rabbit, and sometimes the rabbit would get away. And so what was good for the fox may not be good for the rabbit. What was good for the rabbit was not good for the fox. And so what we did was we up under that we took away the God’s knowledge of how to live so that we can consume and feed ourselves. And that required a story. If you read the book of Genesis, it actually makes no sense that that would because it would be considered the Garden of Eden would have been that what we had, but he says it would have we would have labeled it the ascent to civilization. Right? This would have been the story that we tell ourselves is when we grasped to the knowledge of the gods is when we became human. And so he says that these were warning signs that were coming from this sort of Cain and Abel story as well, was that we had developed pastoralism and trans humans work. And we were working with pasture we that Abel was the pastoralists community. And Cain was the people from the caucuses who had come down who created agriculture. And so the sacrifice that was to God was the sacrifice of the Lamb, which he accepted that the sacrifice of the grain and the fruits and vegetables was rejected, and then made Cain jealous of Abel. And so he killed the pastoralists. And as far as I know, he’s nobody else has looked at it this way. So you’d imagine all of all of human history, people have been reading this book, nobody really thought about it until Quinn came along. And so it is sort of a warning that the way that we were terraforming and changing things, was going to, in essence, eventually have a cost. And I think that that sort of plays out in all aspects of the way that we think about civilization. Now we’ve gotten our like playing off the ground, and we’re flying through the air. And we got to keep this thing going. Yeah, and the way that I was trying to think of it lately, there’s brilliant, brilliant spoken word poet, who has a YouTube spoken word like it less… it’s like five minutes long. But he the way he kind of talks about the way the way that this has moved into the 20th century, especially after World War Two, was we moved into industrialized agriculture as the next level of that. But his perspective of it being an immigrant, his grandfather was an immigrant to this country. And he’s talking specifically about imperialism in a very different way. He talks about it in terms of like Coca-Cola, and, you know, these products like McDonald’s, and how they’ve colonized our bodies. So the new form of colonization is colonizing us. Oh, my God, it’s so great. I’ll have to send it to you. We’ll put it in the show notes.
Kate Kavanaugh
Yeah. Yeah, that kind of blew my mind. Just there a little bit. Yeah, sorry. When all of our consumption, we are being consumed. Yeah. And you know, the one thing that I and I don’t know, I need to think about this a little bit more. But the one thing that the fox and the rabbit have to offer one another, is a trend towards homeostasis, and anybody who lives out in the sticks, you’ll know that their Fox years and their rabbit years, and they sort of ebb and flow that when rabbit populations are down for read for whatever reason, you will then see a dip in the fox population the following year, because their food source isn’t as present. And then once those dip, you’ll see a boom in the rabbit population because there isn’t as much predation for foxes. And so these two things exist in relationship to one another and a million other things.
James Connolly
I’ve led you exactly where I wanted to take you.
Kate Kavanaugh
I’m glad I played right into your hand, right.
James Connolly
So I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. I was thinking about Serengeti Rules. In Serengeti rules and it was a book that came out in a documentary. You can watch them both. They’re both brilliant, both beautiful documentaries.
Kate Kavanaugh
You can listen to your interview with Sean, yeah.
James Connolly
Yeah, it’s really, really good. So what they did was this one experiment that all kind of tell that that is independent of the rinderpest one, which we can kind of go into. But they took these tidal pools. And in these tidal pools in the Pacific Northwest, you would have these ecosystems that had developed that lived in some degree of harmony. And so they were fed nutrients from waves coming in, and the tides coming in and out. But they were these sort of semi harmonious ecosystems. And what they did was they took the Alpha sort of, sorry, not alpha, the predator that was within that system. And they excised it, they threw it away. And it was it was starfish. And so what ended up developing it within that was then it became a monoculture. Because the one thing that propagated most that reproduce the most no longer had something that was predating it, right eating it. And so it took over that ecosystem, and it did what it would normally do because it’s trying to build some degree of harmony with the predator-prey relationships. So then I started thinking about it, and I was like, alright, so who’s the actual predator here? Because I’m like, if this other thing, it can take over an entire ecosystem, it’s the predator, the prey. I mean, the actual one, the starfish itself, is kind of like the ecosystem here in a way, yes. And it’s the one who’s kind of like holding back The tide of this thing that can kind of just take over. Wait, so then I started thinking about this; I spent way too much time in my own head. So then I started thinking about other aspects is this paradox. So this has nothing to do with that. But this is the way my mind works. So then I started thinking about cows, right? So cows as ecosystem engineers, which you kind of talked about, then I started thinking about whales, because whales are cows that went back into the water. And so the way that whales cycle nutrients is they eat a ton of stuff, they come to the surface, and they poop it out. That brings all this fertility to the landscape, which can be grasslands, or water. So they’re these like crazy ecosystem engineers. But we don’t think of whales as cows. We don’t think cows are whales, but they’re like, super cool. I don’t know why I started thinking about that.
Kate Kavanaugh
Yes, they’re analogous.
James Connolly
I thought Kate’s gonna live that.
Kate Kavanaugh
Yeah. They’re analogous. No, I love that. I love that. And we see these little ripples because I think that these cycles are so baked into nature that it can’t help but just like, reproduce, here’s, here’s a cow in the ocean, here’s a, a, here’s a whale on land. Because it’s a really functional relationships. And I think when you distill some of these ecosystems down to relationships, that’s when we find more common threads. The relationship of a whale to the ocean is similar to the relationship of a cow, or to have a ruminant to the grasslands. And these two things, these two relationships are the same. They’re just perpetuated in different forms. And I think if we started looking, we’d see a lot of those. And when I think about all of these little mirrors that we find throughout nature, right, there’s, like a little funhouse. And there’s one funhouse mirror where a whale becomes a cow. But we also see it in the sort of negative, right, we see this massive loss of soil fertility, right, we’ve lost half of our soil endowment in the United States, over 200 years of agriculture. If you look at David Montgomery, we’re losing somewhere between 50 and 70 billion tons of soil per year, 1 billion microorganisms per teaspoon of soil like that biodiversity loss is incredible. And it is fertility. Well, at the same time, what do you have in the human population, you have declining testosterone levels at 1% per year, almost a 50% drop off since the 1960s. And so these are just are. They’re all these little relationships within nature and within ourselves that are incredibly the same.
James Connolly
Yeah. And I think the way that we have been able to kind of take things and divide them up within even just educational fields, right, the poetry is one class and sciences, another way that we’ve been able to kind of segment and classify everything as being sort of independent, when those relationships interact outside of that environment that we tried to put them into, whether it’s Glyphosphate or you know, any Monsanto seeds are, or even we were reading about… part of the reason why we have so much more lead exposure today is because one guy’s quest to get rid of engine knock, you know, seeded the whole world with like, 800 times more lead in our bodies than before.
Kate Kavanaugh
Damn you, Midgley
James Connolly
Yeah. Right. Like some of the aspects of it is you talked about this a lot like generalists, because we don’t fit within this paradigm. We’re like pinball machines with all of these different ideas. We’re trying to come up with a synthesis that works. It almost becomes incumbent upon somebody who has studied, say one thing for 30 years to see the world through that thing’s eyes. I just don’t know if it works.
Kate Kavanaugh
I think there’s a really simple analog in medicine too, right? There’s this idea that your gastroenterologist and your cardiologist have nothing to do with one another. Comes in your heart, right? They’re completely different. And I think that this is how we want to silo topics. And I wonder if that’s something within our human nature or whether that’s something that’s been born out of this sort of mechanistic worldview, where we want to silo each thing, when really what we need, like you said, are generalists that are exploring the relationship between all these different things, and while we need specialists to maybe communicate certain components of that system, we also need people that are putting this together. And I think that when we’re talking about what a podcast is, or what it is that you and I are doing when we’re texting back and forth, as we’re trying to put these, these different thoughts together, because we’re generalists, and we’re interested in all of these different parts, and I often liken this in this sort of curious journey of running the podcast in that I feel like I’m putting together a puzzle and I can’t see the picture, I don’t know what the puzzle is of, but I can feel when I find pieces that go in it. And so I’m just sort of reaching for these pieces to put together this whole that I don’t even understand.
James Connolly
Yeah, and I think a lot of that comes down to, for me, it’s chasing awe, and we’ve talked about this before, it’s like, our capacity to learn is, I think, highly dependent upon our own self interest. And our self interest, I think, is governed by any number of different factors that are extrinsic to us. So we will take all of this sort of bounty of I think our educational system wants us to specialize. It has to have a specialization. It tries to divide the world in the same way that you would take apart an engine, right? We, you’ve talked about this before, right? We talked about, with the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, we started to think of the human body as a mechanic would an engine. With the dawn of the information age, we started to think of the mind as a computer. And so you know, the computer can be taken apart in many different ways. But what we’re not really seeing, and I think what, what I try to get at when I have conversations with with people about this stuff is what you and I are seeing on this computer right now is a lens to the world. That lens is built up of ones and zeros. It’s built up of all of these different sort of mechanistic structures that we pulled from the world industrialization, mining, the thoughts, ideas, imagination of people, and all that stuff. The way that we actually see the world is somewhat dependent, that is our filter is that interface. And I feel like the interface is kind of wrong. Because of the way that we’re learning about this stuff in so that we’ve created this interface with the world. It doesn’t allow for a huge amount of communication between those things, we have to separate the world. And that’s what I mean by Cartesian like, that’s what I mean by the people who were highly defend… They were defending this mechanistic view of the world that has been around for centuries now. We’re playing out this game. That is, you know, the enlightenment, right? We call it the enlightenment.
Kate Kavanaugh
I think we might be mistaken there. That might be another folly of language.
Emily Soape
Hey everyone, Emily again. This concludes the first half of the conversation between James and Kate. So be sure to join us again next week where they get into even more interesting and nuanced discussion topics. Have a great week.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Thanks so much for listening today and for following my work. If you believe in making sure that people all over the world should have access to nutritious food, please join my mission through my non-profit, the Global Food Justice Alliance. Visit sustainabledish.com/join and become a sustaining member today. All sustaining members get early access to ad-free podcasts plus free downloads, and you’ll be helping get healthy protein like meat, fish, and eggs to food-insecure kids. That’s sustainabledish.com/join. And thank you.
