| Main Feature Story - Friday, July 10, 2009
Feature: Here's the beef
Nicolette Hahn Niman says that to effect change, the herbivores and the carnivores must be friends...
by Samantha Campos
We are a nation of voracious meat-eaters.
We eat filet mignon when we go out and enjoy pot roast at home. We eat fried chicken at the company picnic and grilled chicken when we're on a diet. We've deemed bacon as the latest hip accoutrement on nearly every gourmet restaurant menu—and certainly not just for breakfast. We even have the San Francisco-based magazine Meatpaper, a literary and artistic ode to our carnivorous culture, going so far as to herald this particular meat-loving period as a kind of "fleischgeist." And without a doubt, most barbecues we attend this summer will feature more than a few links and patties on the grill.
In some places in America, the eating of meat is practically patriotic.
In fact, according to the recently released documentary Food, Inc., the average American eats the meat equivalent of four hot dogs or two quarter-pound hamburgers a day. That basically amounts to 200 pounds of meat per year.
And it shows.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, obesity in American adults has increased by 60 percent in the past 20 years. Not only is our health waning but our planet, too, is suffering the consequences of our massive meat consumption. In 2006, the United Nations reported that livestock was contributing to 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions—more than that caused by transportation.
For some, the answer is to forgo the consumption of meat entirely; vegetarians and vegans abstain from meat or animal byproducts for a variety of reasons, from health and religion to ethics and environmentalism. And those who do eat meat are increasingly losing their appetites over the ecological and animal abuses involved in putting that medium-well rib-eye on the dinner table.
But do we have to stop eating meat entirely? Or, more important, is there a way to eat meat without holding the fate of our earth's untimely demise in our bloodied hands?
As Food, Inc. shows, the industrialization of our food system in the post-WWII years—when fast food and supermarket convenience food came of age right along with the baby boomers' advances in entitlement and marketing—produces what we eat today with supposedly greater efficiency. Production aimed at "faster, tastier, bigger, cheaper" has generated food that is, according to the film, "a marriage of science and technology." Instead of the tradition of farmers growing our produce in the fields and ranchers raising our meat on pastureland, we have succumbed to "a culture of technicians," many of whom suffer inhumane working conditions, low pay and a plethora of health ailments themselves, as they pack hordes of animals into dark, dismal, lifeless holding pens. And somewhere along the way, we've lost the integrity and accountability of the source of our nourishment, if we ever had it at all.
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IN OTHER WORDS, we have no idea what we're actually eating anymore.
Fast-food burgers, asserts the documentary, are composed of about 70 percent meat—the remainder filled with ammonia and other chemicals to preserve the meat and kill potential E. coli bacteria. (And it doesn't always work; earlier this month, Costco found itself recalling 4,300 pounds of E. coli-contaminated beef in the Midwest.) As Carole Morison, a 23-year poultry operator in Maryland (formerly on contract with Perdue Farms), said in the film, "This isn't farming. This is mass production like an assembly line in a factory."
It is issues like these that spurred Nicolette Hahn Niman to join forces with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. nine years ago in his bid to confront and reform the nation's factory-meat industry. In her new book, Righteous Porkchop: Finding a Life and Good Food Beyond Factory Farms, Hahn Niman describes her unlikely path from Manhattan environmental lawyer battling industrial hog operators in the country's heartland to marrying well-known traditional cattle rancher Bill Niman (founder of the natural meat company Niman Ranch—turned over to investors in August 2007) and settling on his 35-year-old, 1,000-acre, sustainable seaside ranch in Bolinas.
The book nimbly juxtaposes "the ills of industrial animal methods" with Hahn Niman's unsettling realization that the country's main meat providers were being largely left alone by federal and local government—in spite of overwhelming evidence of neglectful, inhumane husbandry practices and the harm factory farms were doing to the environment. It's an informative as well as entertaining read. Hahn Niman relates with wit and self-effacing humor the often precarious situations she found herself in along the way (at one point she was swooping down past forbidding security in a private Cessna piloted by maverick ex-military and water protection activists to capture photos of a North Carolina hog factory dumping manure into a stream).
But her agility with the written word doesn't necessarily make what she's writing about any easier to swallow.
"It's hard to read because it's troubling information and it's about your own food and so you kind of don't want to know about it," she said in a recent interview at her Bolinas home. "There have been a lot of anti-factory farming books written by vegans—and their solution is to condemn meat-eating or egg-eating and dairy-eating."
But Hahn Niman, a vegetarian herself, has come to believe that style of persuasion has hindered reform more than helped it.
"It's been nine years now that I've been working on these issues. The more I've worked on it the more I've realized why change hasn't happened is because you have these different groups that don't really have a way to work together," she says. "It's just really about focusing on the common ground. I'm trying to talk to [people] who actually are consuming meat and dairy, and trying to get them to think about their food."
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BUT SHE DOESN'T feel the need to preach. A longtime vegetarian, Hahn Niman made it clear that while she's not taking the pro-meat-eating position, she is adamant that the most effective advocacy against factory farms is not a matter of giving up animal products altogether.
"I've never been a person who believed it was wrong to eat meat," she explained. "I don't think humans have greater rights to eating other animals than animals do. But I think we have equal rights. The more time I've spent on this ranch, it's reinforced that belief because I'm literally witnessing, on a firsthand basis every day, how animals eating other animals is very normal." Hahn Niman believes that if you raise animals well and you're careful about their transport and slaughter, you can actually give an animal a good life—and a death that's probably better than it would encounter if it lived out in nature. "I'm speaking as someone who believes in and supports good farming and ranching."
And, she says, the key is not to shun meat entirely but to eat less of it—perhaps even paying more for better meat. She says she understands that many people are overwhelmed by the food issue and essentially "shut down," thinking there's nothing they can do—industrialized food is what's available and affordable. Baby steps are OK. "Don't beat yourself up with the idea that you can't become ethically, humanely, healthfully perfect in one step. It's going to be a gradual shift that you're going to try to make over time, if you embark on this path. Start looking for things that you can do to improve parts of your diet."
At the beginning of the century, for instance, the typical American was eating three pounds of cheese a year. By the end of the century, it was 31 pounds. "When you hear about the increase of heart disease, diabetes and other food-based illnesses, figures like that are really stark," adds Hahn Niman. "People are less physically active and they're eating really differently and a lot of it is about foods that were deep-fried and trans fats...we're eating foods with a lot more chemicals and drugs in them."
She says the "balance is off" in what most Americans are eating. "There needs to be this sort of massive transfer of awareness of information into the minds of the mainstream American consumer."
Hahn Niman says that we need to rethink our priorities about the way we spend our money. Whether it's clothes or shoes or books or CDs or whatever, food among all those things should really come first because it's so related to our own health.
"We're lucky being here in the Bay Area, we've got so much more access to really good food and food that was raised really well. And in Bolinas the farms that are really local here are farms that are following the best practices: totally organic, smaller scale—they do everything the way I would advocate and support."
Discuss animal byproducts with Samantha at scampos@pacificsun.com. | 
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