Kate Kavanaugh (she/her) 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.
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.
In this episode, on the intersections of Meat + Health, we talk about:
[08:02] The paradox of life and death: they can coexist together and one is required for the other.
[22:39] The brilliant thing about ecology is that we are attracted to things that are more beautiful and taste better.
[47:21] The difference between Kate’s view on agriculture and conventional agriculture.
[57:29] Why contradiction doesn’t exist in the universe.
[01:21:45] Life thrives in edge zones within an ecosystem.
[01:30:48] Is the reason why so many people have health issues that we’ve replaced fat with sugar?
[01:37:04] Kate and I both like complexity and nuance, which sometimes makes us exhausted people.
[01:50:03] Death is not bad in nature. It strengthens the soil and our bodies. It’s all part of a bigger ecosystem.
[01:55:51] Why Kate’s community and her new podcast, Ground Work, fill her up.
Prefer to see this conversation instead? Watch the full episode on YouTube. You can also find more on our conversation and links to everything we discussed by checking out this episode’s show notes.
Listeners can find Kate online, at:
Ground Work Podcast
Ground Work Collective
Western Daughters
Personal Instagram
Ground Work Instagram
Western Daughters Instagram
You can also find meat from a regenerative farmer near you by going here—a search engine of more than 2,000 regenerative farms with a robust set of filters in order to find exactly what you want.
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Podcast Production Credits:
The Podcast Babes
Related Reading & Listening
Find most references mentioned in our conversation by checking out the episode's show notes. But, here are a few bonus resources related to our chat—
If you'd like to see the beautiful and often devastating reality of life, death, and every creature playing a symbiotic role together in a thriving ecosystem, please watch The Biggest Little Farm.
Kate's podcast episode with Sarah Kleiner on "Finding Fertility Through an Ancestral Diet + Practices" was so fantastic that, at one point, I just put my hands to my head and shouted, “THIS IS SO GOOD” out loud while listening in bed one night. If you can hang on through what will possibly feel like really upsetting ideas about v@ccines and meat eating (which are still valid and important topics to consider), I promise you might learn some health stuff that will blow your mind.
The Vegetarian Myth, though the title felt wildly provocative and upsetting to me at the time, is the book I credit with finally breaking my several-year allegiance to vegetarianism, as mentioned above. If you don’t trust me on it but love Alice Walker, here’s a quote from her on the book: “[It’s] is one of the most important books people, masses of them, can read, as we try with all our might, intelligence, skill, hope, dream, and memory, to turn the disastrous course the planet is on."
The "What’s Your Beef with Beef" episode on the Petty Herbalist podcast, along with the rest of the Meat + Medicine series. Also, I mean, just listen to everything else, too. It’s incredible.
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