Meat + Health with Kate Kavanaugh

About the Episode

What if meat actually made us healthy? What if meat and animals play a massive role in keeping our environment healthy? What if healing our fear of death—including the death of animals and our own eventual death—is intimately connected to the healing of our guts and nervous systems and also our connection to nature?

I spent nearly 10 years as a vegetarian, so I know exactly how upsetting even hearing these conversations can feel. I know what it takes to wrestle with them, and I’m hoping you’ll stick around to hear why doing that wrestling is so damn important.

Episode Details

About Kate (she/her)
Kate Kavanaugh is trying to figure out what it means to lay the groundwork. For herself, for human health and ecosystem health alike, for farmers, for the next generation, and beyond. After many years as a vegetarian, Kate’s health began to decline precipitously. She turned to meat for answers and found an entire world of curiosity before her. She noticed that through holistic management, farmers were working to restore ecosystems and grasslands with the help of ruminants. This seemed intimately connected to her own health journey and—curious to help restore the Western grasslands she called home through regeneratively raised meat—she opened a whole-animal butcher shop, Western Daughters, with her now-husband in 2013. As customers poured in seeking nutrient-dense foods to heal their bodies, Kate began to deepen her own journey toward health outside of the allopathic medical model and went back to school for nutrition therapy.

Blending her knowledge of regenerative agriculture, nutrition, anthropology, health, and biology, Kate is now in the midst of yet another life change spurred on by meat. She moved to a farm where she grows almost all of her own food, lives with the rhythms of nature, and explores the question of what it means to lay the groundwork through her podcast—the Ground Work Podcast. When she’s not exploring the intersections of human and ecosystem health, you can find her playing with goats in the sunshine.

What We Discuss

• Life and death as a paradox—one can't exist without the other.

• How ecology attracts us to things that are more beautiful and that taste better. [47:21] Kate’s view on agriculture vs. conventional agriculture.

• Why contradiction doesn’t exist in the universe.

• How life thrives within an ecosystem's "edge zones."

• Why replacing fat with sugar has caused so many health issues. [01:37:04] Our shared love of complexity and nuance, but how it sometimes exhausts even us.

• Death as part of a larger ecosystem, strengthening soil and our bodies.

• Why Kate’s community and her new podcast, Ground Work, fill her up.

  Sources Mentioned

• Underland: A Deep Time Journey by Robert Macfarlane

• Love + Death with Dr. Andreas Weber

• Quantum Interconnections with Carrie Bennett

• Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer

• Farming with Intention with Alicia Brown

• Nourishment: What Animals Can Teach Us about Rediscovering Our Nutritional Wisdom by Fred Provenza

• Quantum Logic + Exclusive Truth with Lincoln Carr

• The Overstory by Richard Powers

• Laying the Ground Work with Kate Kavanaugh

• Painting + Prayer with Emily McIlroy

• How to Find Ecological Literacy in an Age of Disconnection with Bobby Gill

• Diana Rodgers: Sustainable Dish

• Purpose + Illness with Charles Eisenstein & Lauren Buckley

• The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet by Nina Teicholz

• The Case Against Sugar by Gary Taubes

• Deep Nutrition: Why Your Genes Need Traditional Food by Catherine Shanahan

• Trauma + Cancel Culture with Clementine Morrigan

• Africa Brooke on self-censorship
  

Episode Transcript

Coming soon, hopefully! Would you be willing to help? Email me at brandi@thisplusthat.com!

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Find Kate Online
Ground Work Podcast
Ground Work Collective
Western Daughters
Personal Instagram
Ground Work Instagram
Western Daughters Instagram

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Ground Work on Near Home
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Credits
Podcast management and production by The Podcast Babes. All of my music is provided by the in-house musicians at Slip.stream.

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