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Kate Kavanaugh is a butcher, farmer, and holistic nutritionist. After several years as a vegetarian, 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.
This is the second half of a two-part interview. You can go back and listen to the first episode here.
In this episode, Kate continues her story of connection with my co-host James Connolly.
Her journey to better connect with her food led to Upstate New York, where she and her husband have a farm where they raise low-PUFA pork, chicken, duck, and goose, and some grass-fed beef. Kate also started Western Daughters Kitchen, a restaurant that serves all regenerative meats and no seed oils.
Listen in to part 2 of James and Kate’s conversation where they chat about:
- Quantifying when we should be qualifying
- Why you can’t have awe without horror
- Why Kate doesn’t want to “fit in”
- Kate’e experience with farming
- The problems with current farming practices
- The books Kate and James are reading now
- The industry around death
Rather watch this episode on YouTube? Check it out here: Episode 247: Kate Kavanaugh [Part 2]
Resources:
The Value of a Whale by Adrienne Buller
Mind Body Soil Interview: Cate Havstad-Casad
Documentary: The End of Poverty
Mind Body & Soil Interview: Caroline Nelson
The Secret Life of Groceries by Benjamin Lorr
Born to Run by Christopher McDougall
The Systems View of Life and The Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra
The Biology of Wonder by Andreas Weber
Mind Body & Soil Interview: Stefan van Vliet
Mind Body & Soil Interview: Nicolette Hahn Niman
Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner? by Katrine Marcal
Lies My Teacher Told Me by James Loewen
Mind Body & Soil: Bringing Death Home with Heidi Boucher
Documentary: In the Parlor
The American Way of Death Revisited by Jessica Mitford
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.
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.
Emily Soape
Hey, everybody, this is Emily Soape, producer for the Sustainable Dish Podcast. And this is the second part of a two part episode. So if you haven’t heard the first part of James’s interview with Kate, go back and listen to the first part now. In the last episode, James and Kate are continuing their conversation about the education system and the benefits of being generalists. So here’s the rest of their conversation. Enjoy the show.
Kate Kavanaugh
Have you read any of the Land Institute’s Sunshine Studies?
James Connolly
No, tell me
Kate Kavanaugh
So Wes Jackson, who is a part of the Land Institute and is kind of a contemporary of Wendell Berry, and has written several books. But he also was a biogeneticists that made a perennial cereal grain called Kernza. Very fascinating man. But the Land Institute underwent a couple of studies that they called Sunshine Studies, and it was looking at the energy inputs at a very granular level of every part of their farm. And the thing about searching for the end of something is that there really isn’t an end. And so once you imagine the energy inputs of what it took to make all the component pieces of a tractor, then you have to think about all the energy inputs that went into mining those materials for that tractor and the materials that made up those tractors and the gasoline from the steel lobbyist that you know, was stuck in traffic in DC. And so you just, in many ways, I think we’ve siloed information, because the more you try to tease something apart, the more you find that it’s completely stuck together. And I think this makes us uncomfortable. There is no understanding and I think that that initial curiosity, whatever it is, in me that wants to understand things a little bit better. I think some of that interest is in the idea that I can’t.
James Connolly
Yeah, there was a book that came out last year called The Value of a Whale. And part of the reason why she wrote it as such was, they were trying to quantify all aspects of the world that we live in. And one of the things that was outstanding to her was the they had to put a value on the whale in order to save. And most of it is like ecotourism. It’ll go watch the whale, it’s not talking about it’s bringing bounty and, you know, fertilizing the ocean or anything like that. It’s really just human value. But one of the things that she… that I thought was really interesting that I thought you would think is really interesting, was when they were trying to quantify some of the aspects of the way that we’re going to deal with sustainability, right, whether that’s the IPCC reports, or the original sort of progenitors of that, they only really wanted to quantify everything that happens out of doors. And so it’s really how you measure it, right? So they wanted to quantify everything that was going to happen out of doors, because everything that happened indoors can be climate controlled and controlled in a certain way, right. So your air conditioning, your heating, all of that stuff. We don’t necessarily have to care that much about that because it is controllable by human beings. So when you’re looking at the way that they’re like qualifying and quantifying what is sustainable, in a global perspective, part of the reason and logic behind the fact that they went after agriculture in the way that they have is because it primarily happens out of doors, which is so strange to me.
Kate Kavanaugh
And then you quantify it, right? Instead of qualifying right? There’s quantification and qualification. There’s measuring but there’s also mapping. When you go to quantify it, you are siloing all parts of the system. Oh, it’s just carbon. Oh, it’s just cows. And you’re not seeing relationships.
James Connolly
Yeah, and you know, you get all of that stuff. And I think it’s hard for a generalist to kind of like waiting to some of the aspects of this because sometimes they’ll see the absurdity of it. And sometimes I kind of want to engage with the statistics. I want to, you know, they’ll say that That was a… is an animal agriculture only brings about 18% of the world’s protein. And I’m like, maybe that’s the problem. You know what I mean? I’m like, Yeah, you can equally say that it is, you know, like 75% of the American diet is processed foods or plant based foods or like monoculture in some sort of way. But the 25% of the diet that is meat based or dairy, then becomes the problem. And I just think that the way that we think about this stuff is just so strange to me, I’m like, so bad, you know? Yeah, but it’s it… but I also understand, like, you know, I want to understand the way that they’re viewing things. I really do.
Kate Kavanaugh
You know, you said something, and I’ve been thinking about this a lot, you said that the, you know, using odd following ah, and I’ve been thinking a lot about the desire for awe, and to look at relationships, but also the sort of fascination that I think you and I both have with statistics also. And I think that there is this relationship. And I’m… I haven’t fully thought this out between awe and sort of horror, right? It’s the sort of reverse awe, you know, they’re coming from the same space. And I think the seek out, oh, my gosh, this is the most incredible cyclical relationship happens in tandem with like, oh, my gosh, this is horrible. And it’s going to cause the end of humanity when you’re up at night reading a book about phosphorus. And there’s sort of two sides of the same coin. That’s awe and also horror, and I think that I’m still thinking about it. But I think that’s a driving factor in the way that I’ve explored a lot of the podcasts that you’re looking at a lot of I think you called it evil and soil at the same time. And I think you’re doing this too. And I just wonder if it’s on horror, and if they’re one in the same?
James Connolly
That’s a great question. Are you interviewing me now?
Kate Kavanaugh
Yes.
James Connolly
Yeah, I look, I mean, I. So for me, horror is the end of end justifies the means. For me horror is that this idea that we’re going to move into this place for work that can will no longer bother us, right? The longevity idea that we can live now for 150 years – let’s ignore the fact that for most people, they’re not living in awe. And that is like keeping that life going for another 50 years. Maybe it’s just a fear of death. And it has nothing to do with like actually having a life that’s worth living, longtermism, which is a philosophical idea that is getting… was getting a lot of sort of play with enormous amount of capital behind it, which is, how do you quantify a life that compared to the billions of other lives if we sort of panspermia ourselves across the universe, we have to spread the light of consciousness to the rest of the universe. This is a scientific philosophy that is verging or is in so many different ways, like unintelligible to me into like some sort of weird religion, right? They moved into the space that has become a religious aspect. Elon Musk grandfather, believed in the sort of techno utopian future that I think is horrible to me.
Kate Kavanaugh
Me too. Yeah. But I look at it with a sort of awe of how horrible I find it. You know, and I think that that drive to explore it is, wow, this is very nefarious, this is very detrimental to the lens through which I see the world. And I’ll say that, right, like, through whatever my bias is. And so I… where is this coming from? And how is it permeating culture in almost every single way?
James Connolly
Yeah, I mean, just every aspect of it, the aluminum future where we all walk around in lab coats, and they all look the same, or, you know, there’s no greenery around. You know, they have sort of modeled it slightly differently now. So they sort of see these as the future, actually look like garden zones. But I think somebody told him like that this looks really horrible. He believes… it’s like a cage. Right? Well, we see it all the time. I mean, even just like Star Wars has a short series called Endor, where they had a prison planet, and they had this planet that was hauled off where they use electrification for people to hold them in place. And all they were supposed to do was build tools for Empire, jet engines and all this other stuff, but just completely sterile landscape, not an inch of green around it.
Kate Kavanaugh
Battery cages for humans.
James Connolly
Yeah.
Kate Kavanaugh
You know, I think some of this is, we forget that our biology is in a large part governed by our relationship with our environment. And so humans are a direct reflection of that relationship. And you see this birdsong will activate your parasympathetic nervous system, because it’s indicative of no predators being by when we focus our eyes and really close in a foliated vision, we’re in a more sympathetic response. But when we look out at a vista where we can see everything and feel safe, then we go into a more parasympathetic response. And light governs this cascade of hormones inside of our bodies. When we go out in the morning, at bright light, that cortisol response begins to blunt. And so our biology is intimately interacting with our environment. And one of the questions I have, as we look at some of these techno utopias is what does it say about what is a human? When you have removed human from every piece of its environment? That has been a part of that for millennia. What do we become then?
James Connolly
There was a there was an old study that talked about recovery rates among people who had been hospitalized for surgery and the amount of plants that they had in there. Yeah, correct me if I’m wrong, but there’s a certain element by which if you bring in more and more plants, the recovery rate goes down again. I don’t know if this is true, I just made it up. It’s like in my head.
Kate Kavanaugh
That greenery outside the window. I haven’t read one about plants inside.
James Connolly
In my imagination, they were like, well, yeah, we brought in now it’s at 80% plants in the recovery room. And people are dying like crazy. We’re just seeing lions everywhere. I don’t know.
Kate Kavanaugh
We’re gonna have to find that out after this.
James Connolly
But, I mean, there’s a Japanese term, it’s called forest bathing. And I remember they kind of talked about this in terms of like, you know, and I don’t think either one of these parasympathetic or sympathetic are inherently like, detrimental to us. I think they’re heightened, you know, awareness, or the body sort of relaxing. I had a friend of mine who did breathwork. And she talked a lot about Wim Hof. And she said, Yes, you can stress your body out in the way that he is doing in order to save yourself. But there is a long term effects of doing this on a regular basis. And you’re bringing up a lot of emotion you’re bringing up a lot of there is breathwork that brings so many of the same elements that Wim Hof is doing without putting yourself into that sort of fight or flight in order to sort of activate all of these, you know, that hyper oxygenate the blood.
Kate Kavanaugh
But more is better, right? More is better, more is definitely better. You always want to make an extreme. And I think that this is also baked into a lot of these ideas is this strange human desire to take things to the absolute limit? Right, like if city is good, then this techno… this brutalist techno utopia, maybe it’s better. If breathwork is good, then let’s take it to the very, very edges of physiology. That’s gotta be better.
James Connolly
Yeah, like, you want to hear one of my favorite people? He was probably… I don’t think there was ever any… I don’t think veganism really could have existed prior to the invention of vegetable and seed oils. But by all intents and purposes, this guy was a vegan. He was they went by the name of Benjamin Lay. And he was a little person in and around the American Revolution. And he was a preacher. He was a lay preacher, him and his wife go from place to place. And you really actually shamed the Quakers into many aspects of their change and stance into moving away from to being abolitionists for slavery, because he recognized that the entire economy was dependent upon that. So even if you didn’t own slaves, he was like, you’re still, you know, gathering the rewards of all of their labor. He was the one who convinced Benjamin Franklin to go vegetarian for a short period of time until he walked away from it. But Benjamin Lay’s a really interesting character. So he did this thing where he kind of, he gets up on the preachers pulpit, and he had carved out in the middle of a Bible, and he had put up the bladder of a pig that he had filled with blood into the middle of the Bible, and he stabs it with a knife and blood comes out of it. This is a great… in character. But what he actually did was he walked away. He walked away from all of it. So he lived in the forest and just made his life because he didn’t want to be part of the entire system that was so dependent upon slavery, and he’s a genuine hero of mine. There are people I think within literature that you will find – Herman Melville did the same. He wrote a book about, and I can’t remember the name of book right now, but it was about a guy who just like said, I would prefer not to – to everything. And sort of walked away from it. Yeah.
Kate Kavanaugh
Ted Kaczynski is the only person that comes to mind. I…
James Connolly
Who is that?
Kate Kavanaugh
Ted Kaczynski.
James Connolly
Oh, right. Oh…
Kate Kavanaugh
Paul Kingsnorth has an amazing essay about Ted Kaczynski. That is very much in this vein.
James Connolly
Yeah, Ted, he did the same thing that you did. He got into… he emancipated himself from his high school education. He went to Harvard, I think, at 15. And he was in no way prepared for that adult world. He… I think, and I don’t know if this is necessarily true, I think the Hebrew friend of the psychologists who was the head of Psychology at Harvard, and that guy tortured him. They absolutely tortured him. And so do like trying to understand his worldview, as being a child during the sort of formative years, when he’s trying to understand what the world is, and what civilization is, I think it’s just incumbent upon us to kind of try to understand where he’s coming from on that, you know.
Kate Kavanaugh
Always, always, I mean, if we’re talking about the lenses through which we see the world, right like this computer screen lens, then all of us are going to have these different lenses that are constantly interacting and refracting in ways that we might not have anticipated.
James Connolly
There’s an Ethiopian proverb that says, if a child doesn’t feel love from the village, he’ll burn it down to feel warm, yeah. I always have to pause when I say that, because it really just fills me. Yeah, and I think in so many different ways, I think it’s the, like, the part of the reason why, like the exploration of yours, and my childhood is trying to understand, like how we learned to sort of coexist with the world that we were brought into our hardware, I think didn’t allow for the software to upload.
Kate Kavanaugh
That’s perfect. That’s a perfect statement. But then you’re sort of this lost being in this space, unable to relate in the same way asking questions where questions aren’t welcome. Always trying to peek behind the curtain. Always, you know, if somebody says, don’t look at this, or don’t look over here, that’s exactly where I want to look. Death is something that’s hidden, great. I want it. That’s what I want to unearth. And it’s not easy. And I think that people like you and I have lost spaces to get outside of our own brains. And we’re constantly just kind of rattling and cycling. What did you call it? The Chuck Palahniuk – Marla: the little cut inside my mouth that would heal over if had just stopped tonguing it? Right? We’re constantly in our heads about this. And I think that one of these mediums for people like us, people like Jake and Maren and others is this form of long form conversation, where some of these ideas good or bad, if there is such a polarity, get to… get to play out and get to… we get to get out of ourselves. Because you know, I didn’t meet people in which some of this discourse was possible until maybe just this last year.
James Connolly
When I was teaching in schools, a lot of the nutrition and dietetics students – lot of them actually had really horrible relationships with food. They were young, right? So they probably didn’t cook at home all that much. They touched meat as if it was like contaminated, radioactive, yes. But the best teachers I had were the people who had a journey and experience where they transformed their health through food. And one of the things I often think about is part of the thing that kind of happens with say, Brett, or yourself or me or even Diana, was you see who you were as a person before you started eating for nutrient density, right, started eating for foods that would fill up the space of your head to allow you to really think about the world in a very different way. It’s like Diana actually kind of talks about it. And one of my nutrition and dietetics students talked about it, because they’re both celiac, right? Celiac is just a cloud. Your whole life is a cloud and then somebody says, and pulls that cloud away from you, through nutrition and through like removal of something that is built this, you know, it’s like that Linus character like Charlie Brown, just raining on him all the time or whatever. Um, you never want to go back to that, right? You become a devotee of this idea of like, well, let’s see where this can go in my brain. And you don’t ever want to go back to that. And you were talking about this with Brandy as well. I don’t want to live in those relationships, either with people who are, you said it, both of you said in the perfect way, I don’t want to cut off my limbs… I don’t want to cut myself in all these different ways just to try to exist.
Kate Kavanaugh
Yeah, I don’t want to amputate parts of myself in order to fit in. And I think that so many of us feel that way and have undergone this process of making ourselves smaller, cutting off pieces of ourselves to be a part of the group, which is a natural animal drive. We don’t want to be a part of the out group, we want to be a part of the in group. And yet, you want to feel alive as an individual. And to truncate those parts of yourselves that are maybe the most rich, the ones that stick out the most, that make you the most strange, the most weird, are the ones that make yourself feel the most alive. And I think within that same idea of what it means to come to a nutrient dense way of eating and experience health. Like it is an experience of aliveness, oh my gosh, for the first time, I feel right. I feel all of these different things. I feel my place in the world and these relationships and joy and sadness and grief, and just this whole cascade of things that I didn’t feel before. And I’m thinking about all of these different things. And it gives me a sense of passion. And maybe it gives me a sense of purpose. And so you don’t want to go back. And you also don’t want to go back and cut off those weird spaces of yourself that like to have these rambling deep conversations that make most of the population uncomfortable, which is maybe why when people like you and I collide, just never ending conversation.
James Connolly
Yeah, I mean, I do think that there’s just a word sedated through all of this stuff. And it creates a neuropathy that happens in the body. That is, it’s hard for us to recognize. Sometimes I think about it is… we were talking about it’s like that, that trapped in syndrome, where people wake up during surgery, and they’re completely trapped within their bodies. It is a feeling you feel in so many parts of this. And for me, it was like, I felt like it’s a continuous life’s goal to be able to go out and try to find – one, why this seems to work within civilization. Right? And I’d love for you to explore this. Like,
Kate Kavanaugh
why, why… go ahead.
James Connolly
How does disconnection from the body, the mind and your experience of the world, create the landscape of the world that we live in today? Like, you know what I mean? It produces consumerism, it produces the need for perpetual growth, it produces a mythology that we’re moving towards something, you know, that there is some sort of like utopia, just around the corner, produces all of this stuff. And when it’s not working, the pain that you experience of the world, then becomes… like pain could be a driver for change. But if you can chop off that pain, then you can just continue doing what you’re doing. Yeah. Go.
Kate Kavanaugh
For me, it’s cycles of this connection, right, is that I think that a lot of that experience of emptiness, of dissatisfaction of literal, being without nutrients, and those nutrients can look a lot of different ways. Maybe they’re minerals, maybe they’re zinc and iron or whatever. But maybe these are the nutrients of community and the nutrients of feeling a sense of purpose. And those are also important nutrients. And so when we are nutrient deprived as a culture, at the level of our food, but also at the level of our society, at the level of culture, then the emptiness sets in, and then we are given tools, and I think that this is where some of these bigger questions come into play. Right? How much of this is by design? And how much of it is just what Anthony Gustin calls the corporate organism that has… is sort of an emergent property of humanity that is just rolling on in service to greater yields, greater profit. It’s more growth in perpetuity. And so those things trickle down as a phone that every time we have an emotion that we don’t want to feel, that makes us uncomfortable, we have this that we can just scroll through, and it just numbs it, or we have Netflix at night to numb these emotions that we don’t want to feel. But I think within that, too, I have this question of what happens when we take away the bad emotions. What happens when we take away death, when we take away grief and when we hide that because I think that we exist on this sort of universal seesaw, right, where grief is the perigee to the apogee of joy. And one cannot exist without the other. This is, you know, it’s just like the cycle of transformation and a nutrient cycle of death goes into the rebirth of life again, throughout this space. And so we need these harder emotions that have also been taken from us, in order to find a sense of wholeness, and we need connection. But instead, we’re being sold disconnection – disconnect with your phone, disconnect with your TV, disconnect with this news and that news, instead of seeking out that space of what it means to interact with another human being or to sit still in a forest or to find yourself in another? I don’t know. Does that make sense?
James Connolly
Yeah, I mean, it totally makes sense. I think it’s… so tell us about your farm, because I think that that is… that seeking is that. It’s like the final sort of piece, and maybe it’s not the final. It’s the period of time that you’re in right now, that is creating this sort of super circular moment where like, all of those things are in front of you, right.
Kate Kavanaugh
I mean, I think that this was driven by connection. And I think to go back to this idea of connection, it’s what’s driven most of my story was either my inability to connect or my desire to find a greater connection. And so as I traversed, becoming a butcher, and opening a butcher shop and getting closer to my food in that way, because that felt like the path that was going to yield the most connection for me – the most aliveness, and maybe that’s because of that intimacy that we have with food, where it represents this sort of diaphanous boundary of self and other. And so after running the butcher shop in Denver, just called Western Daughters, for seven years, I wanted more. And so my husband and I moved to a farm, and we raised all of our own food, at least all of our own meat. We trade for some vegetables, because I don’t have to weed a goat, but I do have to weed a carrot. But this was a part of seeking of, well, I want to experience that entire cycle of life and to bear witness to it. And I think that this is another desire to be observer to be witness to just see, to see these relationships, in play. And so we have, we raise low polyunsaturated fatty acid, pork and chicken and duck and goose and we also raise goats and cows and for are… mostly for our own consumption, and get to witness these relationships, and all of them to be a part of… to feel a part of a lifecycle, to steward that part of a lifecycle. And you know, just this week, we had three baby goats born. And a couple of weeks ago, we had two baby goats die. And you get to see these big swings, these big pendulations of just how brutal nature is and how beautiful nature is. And you get to experience both the awe and the horror, right. And I think that brings us closer to our own humanity in some way and then to participate in the very interesting space that is killing your own food. And every year going through the season where these animals that have been a part of your life, and that you care for become a part of you as you consume them. And then to go back with that energy that they have given you through their flesh and to steward the land hopefully in a way that you are building topsoil and building communities underground that allow for better mineral richness to get into that soil and plant life and then the animals and to participate in that full cycle. And to take a breath and to be out of the city as somebody who had a lot of troubles connecting to that space,
James Connolly
Do you have people reach out to you? Who are… because I found when we did, Sacred Cow, we reached out to a number of savory affiliates to see if there would be people who wanted to kind of talk about their experience is ranchers and farmers. And we have people from Kenya, people from all over Western Europe and the Americas, South America as well. We’ve kind of like just told their individual stories, we did a sort of montage at the end. I always try to sort of imagine in my head, like talking to, you know, these kids in their 20, like, some of them are 25 years, or so young, they want to be part of a new relationship with their food. They want to be part of, like, some sort of experience that doesn’t put them into a cubicle. You know, they want to interact with the world in a way that feels tactile and representative of the way that they want to save the planet in their own, like individual way. Yeah, I just wonder if you like, could talk to that a little bit. Because I think it’s just so important. You know, I think a lot of people are coming into this sort of new 21st century with like, not a good vision of what to do. But like you building this thing that is so wonderful.
Kate Kavanaugh
I think it’s really important that we build spaces for generalists. And I think that in some ways, agriculture, and I know that this is often cited as the 10,000 year old problem, but I think that there is a relationship that we can have with agriculture, that is good. And I think that it offers a space for generalists that enjoy problem solving, that enjoy connection, that enjoy complexity, that enjoy hard work even and want to feel a sense of purpose. I think that this gives them that however, and I think that this is really important within this conversation, is that I do think that we have this whole generation that is becoming more interested. And I think it is very much a symptom of wanting to be back in connection, back in relationship. But it is a tough space. And one of the things that I’ve talked a lot about with like Cate Havstad is, how do we get first generation farmers into these positions when there are so many hurdles. And so I have a lot of people reach out to me and want to do this. But there are some financial realities that make it incredibly difficult. And I think that part of our job moving forward should be to consider how we turn over farming in this country, which is kind of taking us down a tangent that you didn’t ask, but…
James Connolly
No. I think it’s important.
Kate Kavanaugh
I think it’s a really important one, because I think there’s so much interest and there’s so much desire. But the reality is that land prices are prohibitively expensive. The startup costs for farm are incredibly expensive. The average farmers profit is one and a half percent. And that’s an average. And so these systems that we talked about when we talk about sustainability and wanting to go into whether it’s a market garden that is no-till and has cover cropping or it’s a regenerative farm, but you know, in this holistic model, there are some financial sustainability realities that must be addressed in order for this generation to find a connection point with this because it is not easy. I don’t know of a single farmer that is accounting for their labor in the cost of their goods. And then there’s the one and a half percent. And so that’s not even including your labor. And so we have what is an incredibly broken model at the very base level of our food system, and incredibly fragile model. At the same time that we have the average age of farmers in America is something like 68. And we’re about to experience this massive land turnover where there are no resources for people to purchase and finance that land in a way that they can then pay it back producing goods off that land.
James Connolly
Yeah, and it is, for me, it’s a huge worry. It’s the thing that I think I’ve spent at least part of… a third of Sustainable Dish trying to explore certain elements of it. I think you have, like you said the labor and the product. And what ends up happening I think was, the way I kind of want to explore this is, the more you make a monoculture of that product, the more ubiquitous that product becomes, the more you can have hands in that system that are stealing the real value and sort of wealth that can be generated by that land. And so I remember the CEO of Monsanto before it was bought out by Bayer, who said, you know, really, the… our farming system isn’t consolidated enough. He said would… they wanted to create a model by which it’s almost a subscription space, right, like you’re a tenant farmer, at that point, they will tell you when to plant. They’ll tell you how, what to plant. They tell you how to… how much pesticides to put on it, what is the water consumption, and it’s all based on this statistical model. It’s built upon information gathering that is set up at this, you know, hub, by which they can just extract everything down to its individual parts. Once that is grown, then you have the millers, the commodities brokers, the you know, every single aspect of that system, then you have what ended up happening after 2008, which was we had the housing and mortgage crisis, that then took that same mentality and converted it into farming. They said that this is the new gold rush, which is the… is we’re going to take all of this land, and we’re going to itemize it, according to its wealth, and we’re going to distribute that wealth amongst people, shareholders so that they can build a relationship with our farming system that has it be completely extractive, right? Like you’re in Switzerland, a commodities broker who’s now dealing with, you know, 5000 miles away, you don’t care whether or not the water quality is fine. You don’t care whether you’re creating a proper product or anything like that. You’re just maximizing production. And so like, for me, when I look at all of the costs of that, like, you know, and then you have Vilsack, who is the head of the Secretary of Agriculture, Secretary of Agriculture, who says we’re going to allow the market to determine what is sustainable. So we’re just going to feed into this system. We’re just going to allow this the system, because the market is key, right? The market is always right. The market is the infallible…
Kate Kavanaugh
What other metric would we judge? Would we judge anything by? I remember another Secretary of Agriculture, Earl Butz, that said get bigger get out. Doesn’t sound too much different to me.
James Connolly
Yeah. And a lot of it. I mean, I think if you look into that history, a lot of it was because you had an agricultural system of farmers were not people that you could push around. And so that the political cost of having what was a unruly group of people who didn’t fall in line was a cost. We saw this actually happen. We can go into some of the history of it, because it’s absolutely fascinating. But there was a small increase in price because of a number of different factors. And then Nixon and Butz decided that the only way to control this was to consolidate and then control the people who had consolidated. And you get the CEO of ADM at the time, he has a quote that I was thinking about today. He said, If you think – and this is my bugbear – he said if you think the US is a capitalist system, you haven’t looked at farming. And what he was talking about was the level to which we had, we were using all of these subsidies in order to create a financial system that was so extractive of all of this wealth and bounty, to these financial systems that were like ADM, and Cargill, and commodities brokers and Phillips and all of that stuff. And so when you look at it… I’m like, It’s not unaffordable to be a farmer. But you got to get these people out of the way. I mean, they’re really not producing what they say they’re producing, which is, you know, like a transportation costs. They are filling a niche, they created the niche in order to extract all of this wealth from farmers.
Kate Kavanaugh
Yes, well, artificially suppressing the cost of goods through subsidies. And then grain feedin of animals that causes those prices to be artificially low. And so any farmers that exist outside of this centralized system, then have troubles competing because customers have this idea that the price of food is x, when in reality, if you look at the externalities, the price of food is going to be much higher and we’re not even accounting for what it’s costing us in terms of our ecosystem and everything else. And then you have farmers that can no longer make ends meet that sell their land to Swiss banker over here, that doesn’t care, sometimes, even if animals get on that. I mean, look at the… look at Bill Gates buying up farmland, and then we’re losing our fertility, which we’re then importing from Morocco. And there’s 70 to 80% share of the world’s phosphorus.
James Connolly
Yeah and you don’t want that ever, you don’t want a single commodity product being… because the whole world is going to fight over that. We’re going to go to Morocco at some point. And say that this is for, you know, for the global crisis that we’ve exacerbated.
Kate Kavanaugh
And I think you highlight something really important that I don’t think I… I am going to need some more time to understand which is how tied together our agriculture and financial systems are.
James Connolly
Yeah, in weird ways, too. I mean, I think that there’s a documentary that Diana and I were watching over and over again, when we were making Sacred Cow. It was called The End of Poverty. It’s a really interesting documentary, because it kind of looks into the way that we utilized… you’re interviewing me again.
Kate Kavanaugh
I’m sorry. I can’t help myself.
James Connolly
But we utilize charity as a mechanism all over the world to force people into to a false promise of progress. And so you have a country like Kenya, which actually had a robust agricultural system, towards fiber and cotton and making their own clothes, who are then just inundated by Western made junk, right, you know, T shirts, and all this other stuff. So we destroyed entire sectors of an agricultural system. And what happens when you’re flooding all of these different places with agricultural products like rice, and cheap grains, any economic system that was viable before, is artificially thrown out of business, because the US taxpayer is funding this. And it’s a tool of control and Empire. And so we would go through all of this stuff, in order to kind of extract minerals. And, I mean, the Sub Saharan Africa is one of the most mineral rich places on the entire planet, even if you just study the history of the Congo. And so you just look at all of that stuff in, you know, even just… I don’t want to get into all of that stuff. But I do think our agricultural products is a tool that is sort of outside of the realm of what farmers are doing, which is, in essence, the story that’s been told since the 50s, to feed the world. And they have been doing it, you know.
Kate Kavanaugh
I have so many places I want to take this and I think I mean, I was struck too…
James Connolly
You can’t interview me,
Kate Kavanaugh
I know, I know, I’m sorry, I don’t mean to I just really like your brain. I’ll try to stop interviewing. I was just struck by using progress. And I think that progress is another way that we view evolution, like progress is how we view evolution. That is evolution is progress, right? Like we are the… we are the apex of what we have ever been as humans right now in this moment is our view of that evolutionary process. And I think that progress is teased out of that. And, you know, around the same time of Earl Butz and Nixon, you also have Henry Kissinger, who says control the food and you control the people. And I think that this has become incredibly true. But you also have this group of farmers and ranchers that can be a little bit unruly, right? We kind of talked about that. But I’ve also taken on and I talked about this with Caroline Nelson in my interview with her. And I think she said this more beautifully than I’ll be able to – have taken on this almost martyr complex of feeding the world. And it has come at the expense of their health and at the expense of their bottom line. And at the expense of multi generation farms that we’re seeing go down pretty consistently. We see some of the highest suicide rates in farming. We see some of the worst health outcomes in farming. This is not a healthy population of people. We see really high rates of alcoholism. And I think that a lot of that has to do with the roll that we’ve put on the farmer, that the farmer has then sort of internalized and perpetuated for themselves. And to break out of this cycle, this particular cycle, I think that we have to look again at relationships. We have to look at what it means to be a consumer of farmer goods and what it means to spend money on food, again, and I that’s not an easy thing to do when everything is tight for everyone. But you know, here in the United States, and I’m sure you know the exact figure, but we spend seven to 11% of our income on food, which is greatly reduced from most of the world. And so I think that the goal, right, and I don’t, again, this isn’t a panacea, this isn’t a utopia is that we want to build a food system that is based on relationships, it is based on the relationship that you have with your farmer when you seek out their product, and maybe you’re even able to go in to visit them and to see that land because then you have a better relationship with the ecosystem, in the region that you occupy occupy, that you are a part of, and you have a relationship with that economy. And the way that currency is flowing through that space. And you have an investment, right? Like you have invested in your food you have invested in your local farmer or rancher, your local ecosystem. And I think you’re investing in your health too. You’re investing in not just your health right now, but your health down the road, and not alone in that is just in building community. When you have a world in which isolation is the equivalent of… what is it? Smoking two packs of cigarettes a day? That if we are building a food system that is based on an economy of relationships, then we are building connections that we also need. And so again, you have that nutrient density, that transcends just the vitamins and minerals and goes into the other nutrients that we need to be both a part of the whole.
Kate Kavanaugh
Yeah. So do you have awe and horror when you walk through a supermarket?
Kate Kavanaugh
Yes, yeah. Both. Both. Look at what we have built. Look at the world girdling power of humans. It is incredible. You know, and I know I told you about Adam. It’s not Adam Grant, it’s gonna escape me, you know, light of the stars, looking at alien worlds. And he’s a biophysicist, and he remarks that we, theoretically, you know, all civilizations anywhere throughout the universe reach this point of world girdling. And I think it’s what you said that we begin to terraform our own planet. And it is an awe inspiring space to like, we are literally changing the atmosphere and all of the relationships of planet Earth, with our endeavors and desires to build. And there is art in that. And then there is also like abject horror. And his idea in this is that this moment, when we recognize, oh, my gosh, we have shifted the trajectory of our planet of this rock that we reside on, is the tipping point for whether or not we either succeed as a civilization or end up in the cosmic trash heap. And I want to say to that, that cosmic trash heap is just a transformation of everything that’s been as we sit in the middle of the sixth mass extinction event here on planet earth. It is also ripe with biodiversity. And when humans exit stage left, there will be a flourishing of biodiversity that we can’t imagine. And just like the dinosaurs could not have imagined a skyscraper, we cannot imagine what would happen next. I was just reading last night that in the 90s, the scientists went and they took one ounce of soil from somewhere in Yellowstone National Park. And they found more biodiversity in that one ounce of silt than they thought existed in the entire biosphere. And I think that some of my awe at the horror is that sort of Shakespearean idea that you know, there are more than has been dreamt of in your philosophies, Horatio. I always get that quote wrong, but I think about it a lot. Like there’s so much more than we could have ever dreamt of. And I think walking down the supermarket aisles, it feels like more than I could ever imagine – more choice, more illusion of choice more… tracing it back, you know, looking at a single jar of salsa and imagining all the hands that touched it and how that glass came to be and that lid and the manufacturing and every and the mining and the miners and all the all the different ways that that single jar of salsa can be traced back all the way through.
James Connolly
Yeah, Benjamin Lorre did a book called The Secret Life of Grocery Stores. And he just like adds more and more on to that. But it’s like, you know the – where your eyesight is like they have robots that track people and their movements now, you know, or you pay for the ends of the market aisles, you pay for like all of this stuff. It’s just haggled. Like, every single ounce of that real estate is controlled and manipulated in a way to get you to consume. And it reminds me of a casino. Like, I’m surprised they don’t like close the whole thing off so that you get lost in there for hours.
Kate Kavanaugh
Make it dark. Give you cocktails. Yeah. Or do an Ikea – pump apple pie smell into it. You know, I’m sure there’s an ideal temperature for a grocery store that keeps people hungry. We’re being constantly manipulated.
James Connolly
Yeah. Oh, my God, it’s so it’s just so strange to me. I did a photographic series a long time ago that was called Drowned World. And it was… it’s really centered around that, like people living in spaces where everything was just literally covered, like you see those like newspaper kiosks that have like everything that ever imagined to kind of take a little bit of the pain away. Plus all of the information you could ever have, like the newspapers from like, 30 different newspapers telling you everybody’s point of view on all of these different things. And just the newspaper, like the TV playing in the background, and then you have this like one head of a guy who’s been sitting there 30 years.
Kate Kavanaugh
That’s what we’re gonna do to each other with books.
James Connolly
Buried, buried.
Kate Kavanaugh
It’s an interesting paradox that at the same time that we have more than we have ever had before, more choice more stuff, you know, that we’re literally drowning that we have never had less. We have less connection, less… I mean, our soil health outcomes are declining. There’s so much that we are seeking, right, we keep thinking that we want more – more disconnection.
James Connolly
Yeah, I don’t know. I think it’s kind of amazing that you look at it, and you’re just like, I could drive an hour from now get onto an airplane and get halfway across the globe within a myriad, like just a small bit of time. Completely wake up, you know, go down there, go to the supermarket and get a can of Coke. Fly right back. Right? It’s so weird to me.
Kate Kavanaugh
Yeah, it’s awe inspiring.
James Connolly
I get the best croissants probably on the planet, like two blocks away. Like, even if I went to Paris, and just got a fresh baked croissant. And like, I don’t know, there’s something so weird to me about that. You know.
Kate Kavanaugh
I think it’s, I think it feels foreign. Because I think that, again, we are meant to be our relationship with the place that we’re in, because our biology is informed by this conversation that it’s having with our environment. And so there’s something pretty stunning to be able to jump from one environment to the next. And not have I mean, there is an effect but to have this capability.
James Connolly
There’s an old story in Born to Run, where they had discovered, I think it was in Colorado, a Tarahumara Runner, these are the best runners in the world, they can’t win a marathon because it’s too short for them. It’s like they don’t get really running until the 50th mile or so. And there they live in the Copper Canyon and Mexico. And they’re a really interesting tribe, very shy, they don’t like outsiders all that much. But they discovered this one Tarahumara in Colorado and like the early part of the 19th century. And they didn’t… they couldn’t understand his language. So they just thought he was insane. So they put him in an institution for a long time until somebody discovered that they like… he even just ambling, was just walking the earth. You know, like he just went out, when they just like, went to Colorado in the 19th century. And of course, our relationship to it was like, yeah, he’s got to be nuts because we don’t understand why somebody would do that. So I do think that there were people who went you know what, they were looking for a can of Coke 18 hours away off of a plane, right?
Kate Kavanaugh
No, no. See, I like to interview you because stories like that come out. I love that you’re full of those stories.
James Connolly
Oh, god. Yeah, it’s just stuck in there. Right? Like I can remember weird stuff from like 20 years ago. It just gets stuck. I can’t access it unless like somebody I bounce it off of somebody else. That we should Strange, never understood how that works.
Kate Kavanaugh
I find interesting. Yeah. I’m sitting here staring at a quote from Verner Heisenberg, who’s a famous physicist. And he says this partition has penetrated deeply into the human mind during the three centuries following Decarte, and it will take a long time for it to be replaced by a really different attitude toward the problem of reality.
James Connolly
Hmm, interesting. Yeah. What’s next? Let’s dive a little bit into who you’ve really like, been studying a lot. Like who is giving you awe in what you’re reading? Because I know you have a whole book list that I have to dive into – that I had never even heard of a lot of these people. So I would love for you to kind of talk a little bit more about like, who is blowing your mind these days?
Kate Kavanaugh
Yeah, I mean, I think the feeling is mutual. I think we’re kind of trading book lists. And this has been one of the greatest gifts of the podcast is getting to read all these books and having a an impetus for my desire to be a lifelong student. And I think one of the biggest ones has been free Fritjof Capra, who I used his textbook, the system’s… what is it? Usually, I have it, Systems of Life by Fritjof Capra, but he also wrote The Tao of Physics, and really looking at some of the mathematical principles that might actually underlie the paradox of we’re both part of a whole and a whole ourselves. And I think that he does a really good job outlining this and exploring what it would take to take some of these mathematics that were found around the time of Newton and Descartes and transform them into something that is able to look at and maybe even integrate into a complex system that in many ways, we can’t even have the hubris to try to model and that is, to me what ecology is, is it’s it’s so far beyond being able to be modeled. And so to sort of look at it through that lens, is systems view of life, that’s the name of the book, to look at it through that viewpoint is fascinating. And to have somebody integrate that space of that is at once science and mystery and awe and sort of mysticism too and the ways that all of that gets rolled into one. And I think that’s actually been a theme throughout what I’ve lately been reading, and I… and you know this, but I’m having a real Andreas Weber phase. He’s a German who works in bio semiotics and philosophy. But he wrote this book called The Biology of Wonder that I am obsessed with and I can’t seem to put down and it’s this idea of what it would mean to put feeling back into, to put relationship back into science. And to find this space of what he calls a poetic ecology that we need exactly what you were talking about, we need this sense of romanticism, to be married with our sense of searching for answers, and that’s part of integrating some of these silos within science, where it’s biology, and it’s ecology, and it’s physics and it’s chemistry, and never will these things meet, is to re-infuse it with some of our human capabilities of feeling and awe that aren’t even all that human, but really universal to organisms. And so those two have been big ones lately. Fred Provenza, his work and not for the reasons that everybody cites Fred, and Fred and I are in the middle of building an interview, and have been going back and forth for about six weeks on building so Fred Provenza, did work at Utah State University that is really interesting, looking at the sort of bodily wisdom of animals as they know exactly what they need to eat, and can pick nutrients almost perfectly. And then he started working with Stefan VanVleet, who’s looking at the dark matter of nutrition and metabolomics and all of these things that exist beyond macros, and micronutrients and vitamins and these sort of polyphenols and terpenes and different compounds that he calls the dark matter which is fascinating, and I think it finally gives language to some of what you and I I have experienced in terms of eating like older grass-fed meats. And there is something here that is different. And that’s really describing that thing. But I think that one of the most underestimated parts of Fred’s work and this is something I’m really seeking out of these three people together in this kind of triad is the transformation of matter and energy as it cycles through the food system. And so how are we looking at these cycles at the way that rocks, the minerals from rocks from the singularity become embedded in the soil foodweb and are brought up by mycelium and exchanged at the plant root and then become us and just like really looking at this, but also Robert McFarlane, forever.
James Connolly
I went to one of my favorite bookstores in New York – used bookstore and asked him if they had any Fritjof Capra books, and he said, Well, he’s either in spiritualism and mysticism, or he’s in the science section.
Kate Kavanaugh
That’s what I’m looking for. I want to find the people that are trying to find the Venn diagram, like the space and the Venn diagram of those two things.
James Connolly
Yeah. Yeah. And so I looked in the spiritualism and mysticism, I couldn’t find it. I was just looking for serendipity, I’ll eventually get it, you know, this waiting for that moment that it kind of happens. Yes, your interviews with Stefan Van Vleet, I would recommend everybody listened to it’s absolutely wonderful. You just bring out the joy that he has in the work that he’s doing. The Nicolette Niman one interview, like, I’ve heard her so many different times that she is some of the best people or one of the… some of the best writers and thinkers that I’ve ever seen, who can distill very complex subjects down to, like very small, you know, like sound bites, because we use during the film, but she has a tendency to give people what she thinks that they’re looking for. And so if you listen to a lot of interviews, you get a very sort of like admixture of the same kind of story. You just bring out a whole other side of her that is just absolutely wonderful to listen to. Yeah, I mean,
Kate Kavanaugh
I love that interview.
James Connolly
Yes. Yeah, I think the nutritional Dark Matter thing is one of those things that I think should be kind of, in psychology, there’s a psychology professor, by the name of James Davies, who wrote a book, he said, he always starts out with the same story about when psychology went wrong. It’s called the thud experiment where he, this psychologist in the 70s, had sent out like 14 of his students, plus himself to all of these medical institutions. And they had to, in essence, kind of tell the story. They said, I’m starting to hear voices. And the only thing they were allowed to say was, it tells me thud, and that’s it, nothing harmful, nothing, anything like that. All of them were institutionalized. They all said it was part of an experiment, they couldn’t get out. But he starts that story as a narrative tale, this kind of like, gets you into the space that gets you to understand that psychology is not a perfect mechanism for the way that we see mental illness of the mind. I think nutrition education should start out with nutritional dark matter. I think it should be seminal to the way that we think about these things. Because, you know, whether we’re talking about celiac disease, or gluten intolerance, or, you know, anaphylactic shock due to peanuts, or we’re talking about cholesterol, or we’re talking about saturated fats, when we take all of this stuff outside of the realm of it’s in, you know, how it interacts with everything. What do we do? I think it should be taught.
Kate Kavanaugh
Yes. And I think it’s, there’s an idea in there about starting more with what we know less about, right? We start with what we don’t know, we start with how vast the spaces instead of this idea that we have already learned 99% of what we’re going to learn about this. But when we start with the idea that maybe maybe we just know, 1%, that changes everything.
James Connolly
Yeah, and it allows for, it allows for people to move into spaces where they can study things that don’t become hampered by the idea that we figured out 99% of it, and you only have 1% to figure out, you know, and it’s a hard way to educate people, right, like, I don’t know anything.
Kate Kavanaugh
I think that is the kind of education that would have really resonated with me as a child. No, I think that… I think that there… it is one way to do it. It is one way to look at this and I think that if we were to drop the ego that has become almost the human ego, has almost superseded the organism of human itself, right? Like, I think if we were to drop that, and to enter into everything with, wow, I probably don’t know anything about this. And so there’s a lot more to find out. And then you’re leveraging curiosity. But I think, and you and I have talked about this, curiosity is not what they’re driving home, in school.
James Connolly
Yeah. And, you know, like, the things that I would love for people to kind of talk about is the myth of the individual hero, the lone genius. You’re gonna get stopped getting talking about that stuff. You know, I am the type of person to lionize like long-dead people as well. But like weird ones. It was possible Benjamin Lay was an asshole. You know, but I do think that this… the individualistic character, the way that we talk about people, whether it’s arts or Rembrandt, or Leonardo da Vinci, really extracts the idea that these people like they that they lived in some sort of weird, like echo chamber have their own minds. I think one of the only people that, you know… there’s a book called Who Made Adam Smith’s Lunch, right? And it goes very deeply into this, right? This man is the invisible hand of the market, you know, creating this ideal idea of what you know how markets move. Oh, somebody who’s making that guy’s lunch when he’s thinking the deep thoughts, feeding him some nutritional dark matter.
Kate Kavanaugh
Exactly. And not to harp on a theme, but we are our relationships. But that’s just not how we write history or science.
James Connolly
Yeah, it’s the Capra book sounds just absolutely stunning. Trying to think of other people who kind of tried to work at… Alfred North Whitehead, who was a mathematician, I think, tried to kind of, like build a worldview that was somewhat around that he specifically talked about education. He said, All of the mathematics that we would learn, probably go by the wayside, because they would be figured out by computers. But that knowledge of statistics would be absolutely integral to our understanding of the world going forward. And I think that’s kind of interesting, because I think what he was saying was, a lot of us both, you know, a lot of the way that we talk about statistics is both. But a knowledge of the way that’s dissected is really interesting.
Kate Kavanaugh
Well, I mean, statistics, I feel like by definition, are something happening in isolation, that if you were to put relationships in statistics, statistics fail to continue to work, you know, if you have this idea of the statistic of how much carbon you know, the livestock are responsible for. If you suddenly look at all of the relationships within that system, that statistic is irrelevant.
James Connolly
Yeah. And explore it – that you and I both explored live stock’s long shadow, in a myriad different ways. But it is very interesting that Henning Steinfeld was one, he made an error that he tried to correct, that he only looked at tailpipe emissions for transportation, and not the training for the pilot, the cotton that was produced for the pilot shirts.
Kate Kavanaugh
Yeah. Exactly.
James Connolly
Where he tried to do some sort of soup to nuts for meat production? Right. And he really as much as he possibly could, right? We see this again with Joseph Pour’s data on the oil of animals and livestock in terms of agriculture, in terms of land use, and everything like that. It’s really hard to dissect through all of this stuff to see where the prejudices lie.
Kate Kavanaugh
But and let me make this argument. I don’t know if we need to dissect it. We just need a population of people that understands that it’s more complex than what meets the eye. And I think so much of exploring the framework that we’ve been exploring within this podcast is maybe laying the groundwork for some curiosity for people to say, okay, maybe there’s more out there that goes into each one of those statistics or any relationship that I see in isolation. What might it be attached to?
James Connolly
Yeah, I love Emma Goldman, anarchists, socialists, like, you know, she emigrated to the states and immediately started getting into a lot of the workers, strikes and all of that stuff. So she ended up… she started on the lecture series just going out and her whole thing was like, working for I think it was specifically owns, like some degree of freedom for people, and, you know, workers education and any number of different things. She ended up talking to somebody afterwards, after one of her fiery lectures, and he was like, listen, I would love to educate myself. I would love to be able to go out there and like, read a book at night. I work 14 hours a day. I work, I get a half a day on Sunday. I don’t have time for that. And I do think that their modern society, especially in the States, where we have the lowest vacation time in the Western world, means that people can only take things in bites. And I don’t know, I wouldn’t say, conspiratorially. It’s like that, you know, like, they don’t want people to think, you know, and it’s possible COVID kind of proved? A little bit too much.
Kate Kavanaugh
Yes, time to think is a luxury. And I think a lot about this issue of how we engage people in various concepts. I’ve thought about a lot about this through the lens of the butcher shop, right? That here we have this butcher shop where we support local regenerative agriculture, and it’s all grass-fed meat. And I want people to become interested in some of those ideas. Not that what I’m interested in, everybody should be interested in. But how can I explain this in a way that isn’t me getting on a soapbox, which I’ve been known to do? Or me proselytizing everybody that comes through those doors with the good gospel of good meat? And so the question then becomes how do we engage people into a space where they are driving that conversation of learning and curiosity and education. And I think that one of the biggest levers that we’ve had is actually flavor, that people are so curious when they eat a steak that tastes like nothing they’ve ever had before, something that they haven’t had since they were children, that oftentimes people come back to the butcher shop, and they say, this is the best steak I’ve ever had. Why? And so all of a sudden, you’ve opened up a door for passive education to happen. And as we exist in this world of 90 second TikTok sound bites and being a long form human that has a lot of trouble distilling concepts. I think a lot about what it means to draw people into an unfurling conversation or curiosity that gives them at least a little bit more than a soundbite without it being forced.
James Connolly
Yeah, absolutely. And I yeah, I believe it takes time. It takes trust. And I think taste is I think, a massive lever. You know, my mom was… the first time I ever fed my mom risotto was like, the first time in her life where she came back for thirds. She was like, what? Right? Yeah, it’s, it’s a really interesting experience, to kind of go through the, all of the myriad aspects of food, cuz I think you can spend your life on it in every… you can pull it off and, you know, but at the end of the day, it’s like, the community aspect of it. The gratitude, you know, I still love the Catholic way of saying, Grace. You know, that’s one of the few things I took from Catholicism that I was kind of cool.
Kate Kavanaugh
I’ve been thinking a lot about whether or not there’s a center of this interconnected web, or if there’s just an illusion of a center. But I think that if there is a center, then food is close to the center of it. And it’s one of those topics, when you start diving into it, you find everything else is connected to it. And I think it’s really beautiful in that way that it leads into a myriad of possibilities and curiosities to explore that this has been what has led me into depth into education and the history into ecology into all of these different and maybe seemingly disparate spaces. And so I wonder if food is somewhere near the heart of that thing?
James Connolly
Yeah, I mean, when I was in school fat equals flavor was the mantra right. But I think that is so integral to our understanding of the some of the aspects of the way that culture treats hedonism, because we we brought flavor into that by like, by butter and full fat cheese. And now, so much of our culture says that that is the hedonistic way to shorten your life.
Kate Kavanaugh
So that’s interesting, because when you said that about flavor I was like, Well, what are the other things that that kind of tug and really pull us in and I think they’re all hedonistic things, right? Like it’s touch and sensation and sex as much as its flavor.
James Connolly
Yeah. And narcotics and vise drugs and the way that we, you know, equated transitions of mind through psychedelics or anything like that is as hedonistic and, you know, civilization ending, right? Yeah, it’s very, very interesting. And the Reefer Madness book that I just picked up the other day talks a lot about the amount of money that’s made in the underground economy. And as our civilization has moved into the 21st century, the underground economy has expanded tremendously. There’s something we keep on denying it. We’ve tried to kind of legalize it in a way, right, the marijuana and stuff like that. But we still have this sort of tendency to think of ourselves as the only way civilization drives forward is to, you know, is to remove the hedonistic elements of humanity. Evolution, progress, progress and evolution. I wonder if when people do talk about that, whether they realize like our hunter gatherers were taller, brains were bigger. Or all have all of the metrics and qualities grip strength, any number of things, all of the measures of strength and everything like that have all gone precipitously downhill. I wonder if that like causes a degree of cognitive dissonance.
Kate Kavanaugh
But this is the apex, this is the best that it’s ever been. We’re at the height of humanity. And I’m convinced of it. You can’t convince me otherwise. No, I think that that… I think that there’s actually a lot of cognitive dissonance I think a lot of what we ignore, are those places where we come up against like, oh, that doesn’t fit with my worldview, I just need to push that to the side because it represents unknown or trouble. And I think that a lot of the things that you and I tend to explore and push against are those places where a lot of cognitive dissonance happens.
James Connolly
Yeah. But it’s also what a strange place once you started going there.
Kate Kavanaugh
Earth is really a strange place. I really don’t understand that. The more we talk about it, the more… the less I understand that.
James Connolly
Yeah. James Loewen’s book, Lies My Teacher Told Me goes into this very deeply. And he said that history is like one of those, it’s the most hated subject. And he tries to sort of figure out why. And he thinks it’s because it’s so vanilla. You know, it’s like we take in all of the edginess out of it. And we take in all of this sex, drugs and rock and roll out of it. And so we try to teach teach this thing is if it’s an inevitable, like, march towards us, and these people who did that all sacrificed themselves and as some sort of martyr to get us to where we were, you know, to build a better world.
Kate Kavanaugh
Yeah, that sounds about right. And I hated history. That was my weakest subject, you know, least curious about it. And that resonates. And it’s dry, bland.
James Connolly
Yeah. Then by design, right. It’s like, yeah, you know, I remember when Texas textbook, tried to rename slaves as uncompensated workers, you know, like, it’s like a sixth or seventh grade textbook. But they’re like, you build into our, like, some parts of our world that kind of talk about this stuff. Like, it was a comedian who kind of tried to talk about in World War One, it was called shell shock. And now it’s called PTSD, right? So we’d like we demonstrate through the passage of time, our ability to take all of the punch out of words.
Kate Kavanaugh
Yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, I just did this episode with this woman who had a documentary called In the Parlor about home funerals. And I was reading this… I was reading this book by this journalist. She actually wrote it in the 60s and then she revised it in the 90s – The American Way of Death, Revisited by Jessica Mitford. And in it she explores the way the funeral industry has exchanged language and I think that this illustrates a really important that our dead then became our loved ones, then just became Mr. Jones. Right Mr. Jones? Who’s dead – we don’t we just refer to him as Mr. Jones. Coffins became caskets and you know, death be came passing on, just passed on. And so I think that there are a lot of efforts within language to sugarcoat and to reorganize the way that we view and think about things. And with this being, not our only way of communicating, but our favored way of communicating, that changes our viewpoint. And I think history is shaped through the lens with which we view modernity. And we’re always looking backwards through some screen, some sort of glass, and it colors it.
James Connolly
Yeah, there’s Chris Ryan talked about this was the hermetically sealed coffins. Have you heard of these?
Kate Kavanaugh
Oh, yeah. Yeah, there was a really interesting, this is a really sad story. In this book, it details this gentleman who was really interested in knowing that his mother would be preserved forever by the embalming process, and by this hermetically sealed casket. And he was really firm with the funeral director that, okay, this is going to preserve her body in perpetuity. And he put her in a vault, and full embalming and casket and all of these things, and he’d go three to four days a week, and he would sit with his mother and he would have lunch. And he suddenly realized that there was this string of ants that was crawling around the vault. And he demanded that her body be exhumed so that he could ensure that this wasn’t a sign that she was she was rotting away and being eaten. And he actually ended up suing the funeral directors for her body not being preserved in perpetuity, the way that they had said that she would be. And I think that it’s kind of a funny story, but I think it highlights that desire to be preserved in perpetuity. Side story.
James Connolly
I think a lot of the coffins ended up a few of them have actually blown up, because they off gas in a way that they take that phosphorus and nitrogen and all of those things, they will literally blow up – the exact opposite of what you like you’re doing.
Kate Kavanaugh
And if alien life lands on Earth, you know, long after we’re gone, right? And I think about this, the last chapter of Underland, where Robert McFarland talks about trying to find language to deter people from nuclear waste sites, and how do you create signage or language that is universal, that this is dangerous, and I lost where I was going with this. Nope, it’s gone. It’s gone.
James Connolly
No, really? Language the…
Kate Kavanaugh
Oh, if aliens landed on Earth, you know, 1000s of years from now? Are they going to see all these pipes that were the handles of caskets and think that it was intricate plumbing systems? Like what will they think of these strange places where we have what are dead. Every time I drive into New York City? I mean, you just these rolling insane cemetery?
James Connolly
Yeah. Churches in England, the level of ground displacement is absolutely insane. It’s almost three feet full of people just in and around these churches, if you could get as close to church as you possibly could.
Kate Kavanaugh
These are interesting places to explore, right? Like some of what the food system has led me into his exploration of things like death of things, like the funeral industrial complex, and how much it actually mirrors the rise of the agricultural industrial complex.
James Connolly
Yeah. Oh, absolutely. Yeah, the embalming and caskets and all of that stuff is a product of civil war, bringing soldiers home.
Kate Kavanaugh
Yeah. And the Lincoln’s body was taken on tour by train embalmed and was considered very in vogue.
James Connolly
Yeah, I have seen a lot of this 19th century like death photos those sort of like semi-morbid Victorian obsession with death that was in a way. Like, you know, the Wake was designed around because everybody was just so high on like laudanum and it’s so much… I don’t remember what it was. There’s a… what was it? Lead exposure? So much lead exposure that they would go into these catatonic states and people would like bury them, you know, and then they would wake up. Wakes to give you enough time to wake up.
Kate Kavanaugh
I have no idea.
James Connolly
Oh, yeah. The pipes with the bells that people the gravesites would have to listen out for in case they woke up. You know, there’s just all of this stuff and then 18th century people were just passing out, their heart rate is slow. And then people are like, alright, you’re dead.
Kate Kavanaugh
Just bury them. I mean, you could wait, I guess with everybody, right? Yeah, okay.
James Connolly
Yeah, a couple of days. Yeah, I studied a little bit about the control that oppressive regimes have on death, and how they outlaw Burial Rites for people when they want to control their relationship with the people who are dying. And I always found that really interesting, the way that that is outlawed, especially control of women, because women were the ones who would clean the body prepare the sights and everything like that. Usually one of the first things that will be outlawed, which is interesting measure of control.
Kate Kavanaugh
It is. And I think the question is, does that disconnect us again, to bring it back? Does that disconnect us from the very heart of it? That’s the place where the circle is bonded together. And so it becomes a line if you take that away.
James Connolly
Yeah. That’s such a great quote, break the circle and make it a line.
Kate Kavanaugh
Yeah, that’s gonna stick with me.
James Connolly
Yeah. Just like 10,000 years of agriculture was that. We told the same story, break the circle, make it a line.
Kate Kavanaugh
Make it a line. I think that’s the story. And I think that’s a big part of the story that both you and I are telling.
James Connolly
Yeah. So I think that’s good. Right. The beginning.
Kate Kavanaugh
The beginning. Part 1.
James Connolly
The beginning of multiple conversations. So how can people reach you? You know, let ‘s do that.
Kate Kavanaugh
Whoever is still here? Um, yeah, absolutely. So I think I’m best reach out. But I mean, listen to the podcast. This is what I have poured all of my work and my heart into it’s called Mind Body and Soil. And you can find it wherever you listen to podcasts. We have a butcher shop in Denver, Colorado called Western Daughters and a restaurant as well called Western Daughters Kitchen, where we do all no seed oil, all regenerative meat, cooking, and very small farm. But you can also find me on Instagram at Kate underscore Kavanaugh. I’m sure there’ll be links to these things.
James Connolly
Cool. Cool. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming on.
Kate Kavanaugh
Thank you so much for sharing your time with me. It’s just one of my favorite things. And so this was just the greatest pleasure.
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.
