 | Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com | When Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., first asked Nicolette Hahn Niman to head up his environmental organization's "hog campaign," she balked. Investigating hog manure pollution was hardly the glamorous assignment she pictured when leaving everything to work for him in New York. But Kennedy, she discovered, is not a man who takes no for an answer. Thus began Niman's fascinating odyssey into the inner workings of the "factory farm" industry and her transformation into an intrepid environmental lawyer who goes up against the big business farming establishment and—unexpectedly—finds love along the way. Starting her work for Kennedy's organization in North Carolina, Niman uncovers the shocking practices of hog factory farms, including inhumane animal confinement and devastating water and air pollution. She organizes a national reform movement to fight these practices and shows again and again that livestock farming can be done in a better way—not only for hogs, but also for poultry, fish, and dairy cows. Through Niman's work, she also tours the best of farms, where traditional farmers and ranchers treat their animals humanely and have joined with other farmers to successfully market the foods they produce. She profiles the innovative and cost-effective methods these operations have incorporated to make a profit by ethical, sustainable means. Along the way, the story takes a surprising turn when Nicolette is swept off her feet by a high-profile cattle rancher. At first, they seem an unlikely pair: Nicolette, a thirty-something, urban, East Coast, vegetarian attorney, and Bill Niman, an older, West Coast, cowboy type. But they share a passion for raising animals with kindness, and she soon finds herself transitioning to ranching life at the famed Niman Ranch in Northern California. In telling her story, Niman details not only why to choose meat, poultry, dairy, eggs, and fish from traditionally farmed sources (and avoid products tainted by chemicals and antibiotic-resistant bacteria), but also how to do so. She reveals what to look for on labels, why to skip animal products from outside the United States, and what questions to ask when eating out. A searing account of an industry gone awry and one woman's passionate fight to remedy it, Righteous Porkchop is a must-read for anyone who cares about food sources or good eating. |
Average Customer Rating:  What an eye opener This is a book I could not put down. Some of the things that go on without our knowledge blows my mind. A few years ago when I decided to go organic I also made the decision to eat only free range or grass fed meat. I am an animal lover but not a vegetatarian. I work for the railroad in D.C. & we get crews coming up from the Carolinas. A couple years back a flyer was hung up in our crewbase pertaining to Smithfield farms about the massive amount of abuse going on with the animals & workers. I couldn't believe that kind of treatment was going on in our own "backyard". This is still going on because the government is turning a blind eye & is allowing it. Greed has once again trumped humane treatment of all involved inside these "tin prisons". The only way we can stop it is to choose wisely when shopping. Yes it's a little more costly at the checkout but the end result is better health for children & adults. Less visits to the doctor,less sick kids, less diesese trumps cheap meat by far. Open that door and take a long, hard look... For many years, I thought I had been doing the right thing, eating the right foods and watching out for my health. I thought I was an environmentalist, caring about the preservation and good stewardship of the natural world we live in.
Holy cow, was I wrong.
Some time ago, I was reading another good book about human behavior, and what is required for us to behave against our own values. Compartmentalization was a concept I came to understand is absolutely necessary for most of us to act in ways that are not in accordance to our own values. To do wrong, we must push out of our awareness the realization of consequences to our actions. We must stuff things into a locked away place and live in denial.
Picture the mind as a house with many rooms, each with a door. Well, there was this room in my mind ... and it had a door, and I had firmly closed it. Inside that room was a vague realization that animal abuse was happening in order to put food on my plate. Gee, I love that steak, that juicy burger, that slab of bacon! Did I really want to know how it got there?
Now I know. The door to that room is wide open, and I have no intention of closing it again. Once most of us are aware, most of us do change our behavior. Most of us, when you get down to it, are pretty nice people. Most of us want to do the right thing and we love our pets, we love the natural world around us, and we care to preserve it.
So how is it that our supermarkets are filled with food produced in food factories, by an industrialized form of agriculture that is fast ruining our environment and obliterating a type of lifestyle many of us find admirable? How is it that we tolerate the cruelest forms of animal abuse imaginable? And consider this: we don't have to. We can still enjoy that steak, sizzle that bacon, and chow down on that juicy burger. Yes, we can have our delicious porkchop and eat it, too.
The person breaking down my denial door is author Nicolette Hahn Niman. Assigned to write a story about food production and food activism for the Kalamazoo College alumni magazine, I introduced myself to Nicolette when she (an alumnae) visited the college campus. She was talking to a rapt audience about her new book, Righteous Porkchop. Slides illustrating her experiences as a food activist working for Bobby Kennedy, Jr. added images to her words, and I'm pretty sure I could hear doors flying open throughout that room.
Niman had grown up in Kalamazoo, Michigan, majored in biology at Kalamazoo College, and had been raised in a family that shopped for local foods before it was something of a fad (a good one) to do so. By the time she was an adult, she was a vegetarian, and she considered herself pretty safe in thinking she was not participating in livestock abuse. But wait. She was still enjoying dairy products. She was still eating eggs and cheese. She still had an occasional meal of fish.
And me? I've been eating skinless chicken breasts that I purchased at the supermarket in frozen bags, along with salmon fillets, and only the occasional chunk of red meat. That's good, right?
Wrong.
Niman's wake up call was when she heard Bobby Kennedy, Jr. speak in Kalamazoo. That talk led to a meeting that led to a job offer. Nicolette was offered a job to work for Kennedy as a food activist. She would have to know a lot about pigs and a lot about, well, pig poop. Dream job? Turns out, it was. Nicolette had some political savvy already, having served as a city commissioner in Kalamazoo, but now she was traveling the country investigating industrialized food production.
In his foreword to Niman's book, Kennedy writes: "The waste from hog factories is prodigious. A hog facility with 100,000 animals can produce the same amount of fecal waste as a city of one million people... Waste from these factories can contain a witch's brew of nearly 400 dangerous substances--including heavy metals, antibiotics, biocides, chemical disinfectants, pesticides and disease-causing viruses and microbes."
A necessary evil? You may be thinking ... jobs in a lousy economy, maybe?
Kennedy writes: "Each pig factory puts family farmers out of business, replacing high-quality agricultural jobs with hourly-wage workers in degrading positions that are among the lowest paid and most dangerous in the United States. Because the animals are fed and watered by computer and are given almost no husbandry, as few as two workers may tend an operation with ten thousand pigs. Conditions are so miserable that employees seldom endure these jobs for more than a few months. Major slaughterhouses, including those owned by Smithfield, typically have a 100 percent annual employee turnover rate."
But surely that nagging global problem of hunger?
Niman writes: "Global food production has actually outpaced population growth. Every year the world produces enough wheat, rice, and other grains to provide 4.3 pounds of food per person per day (including two and a half pounds of grain, beans, and nuts, a pound of fruits and vegetables, and nearly a pound of meat, milk, and eggs.) Moreover, in the last four decades, per capita food production has grown 16 percent faster than the world's population, meaning there is now more food per person available on the planet than ever before in history. Clearly, abundance is not an issue."
I'm hearing a chorus of belches at the buffet table by now, but it is coming from only one side of the table. Niman is right. We have only to look around at our epidemic of obesity to realize the table has a shorter leg on one side, all the food sliding into one set of mouths at one end of the table, while the other end is left high and dry. It is not about abundance; it is about distribution. Hunger is about poverty. If people have the resources and the means with which to purchase or grow their own food, they will not go hungry. This call is to focus our efforts where they belong--on eliminating poverty.
So let's get back to what are the real issues at hand: the ills of industrialized food production. And I choose the word "ill" with multiple purpose. To read Niman's account, the results of her nationwide research, in-person visits to food factories and feedlots and slaughterhouses is enough to make you ill. And it should. And it does. Because the abusive conditions of these great numbers of confined animals, purposefully (and don't doubt that purpose, just think "out of sight, out of mind") kept behind closed doors where most of us will never see what is really going on, is also making the animals ill. Living creatures, no matter what kind, need a few basics to survive and thrive: fresh air, exercise, good food. Subtract all of these, as industrialized food production does, and you have to substitute growth hormones, antibiotics, tranquilizers, steroids, and a host of other drugs just to keep these animals alive.
I stopped eating veal decades ago. All it took was seeing one photograph. That photograph appeared in Time magazine, and I can see it vividly in my mind still. It is a black and white photograph of a tiny newborn calf, standing wobbly and great-eyed in a wooden crate which prevented any and all movement. That crate prevents movement because people like tender meat. That is, meat without muscle. Get the picture? To prevent any movement that might develop muscle, that baby animal is crated for all its living days so that you can eat a tender piece of veal.
I was an easy convert. I already had one foot in the crate, or out of it. But Niman's book led me into the immense metal barracks that hold battery cages of thousands upon thousands of chickens, the cages that hold pigs until they start to wave their heads back and forth and chew the air in what are visible signs of an animal going mad. Niman took me into the feedlot and the slaughterhouse, to realize that a disturbing number of animals are actually dismembered and gutted while still alive and fully conscious. Niman made me understand that we so little value the life of the chicken that after one year of holding these hens, their beaks cut off to prevent pecking each other out of stress, in cages so small that they cannot even turn around, that once they are considered "layed out," they are sucked up into immense vacuums and dumped into bins with rotor blades to chop them up into mincemeat. Mind you, still alive. It's enough to make me put that drumstick down.
And this is necessary .... why?
Which is Niman's point. It is not only not necessary, it is, in fact, detrimental. This kind of food production is detrimental to animals, detrimental to human beings, detrimental to the environment. Wastes from confined animals end up in lagoons of liquefied manure that are often pumped into our water sources or allowed to seep into soil (the author writes about her helicopter adventures flying over these lagoons as food factory workers illegaly flush them into nearby rivers).
If you thought manure was a terrific fertilizer, you are right. But not in these incredible quantities. On traditional farms--those that we still try to sell to our children while singing ditties about Ol' MacDonald had a farm--manure happens naturally, in quantities that can be used in soil to grow crops, and with the addition of sunshine, killing harmful bacteria. There's a whole process there that works beautifully before we start super-sizing it and messing with it.
Instead, we have Mad Cow disease, and microbes flowing into streams and rivers and lakes. We have salmonella. We have noxious gasses that have been increasingly connected to a long list of ailments in anyone unlucky enough to live anywhere in the vicinity of modern agriculture. We have a growing mountain of evidence that industrialized farming is responsible for more climate-changing pollution than the auto industry and the cars we drive. Add to that statistics showing that Americans are throwing away more than half the food we produce in this country, and you can see that this is a recipe for disaster.
Just when I want to go screaming down that hall of suddenly open doors that have revealed to me the horrors of food factories, however, Niman lets some sunshine in the window. Yes, there is a better way. And we begin to understand that "progress" is not always foreword movement. Sometimes it is regression. Sometimes we have to go back to that place in the road where we took the wrong fork.
Traditional farming had it right all along. While there is always room for improvement, farming in a manner that raises animals in a humane and healthy manner produces better quality food. In other words, if you don't give a hoot about the pig, consider all that flavor and nutrition you and your family are missing. Niman takes us from the feedlot into the gourmet kitchen, where chefs across the country are discovering--or rediscovering, if you will--that foods coming from traditional farms taste a lot better.
Our palettes have become desensitized, but once you taste the difference between meat that comes from an animal that has been grazing on grass and eating healthy foods (you don't even want to know how much animal poop is being used as feed for other animals, but you should know, because you are the next animal in line), you won't want to go back. Ever tasted a greenhouse tomato and then taken a bite out of vine-ripened tomato? Then you have an idea what this food adventure is all about. It's a flavor explosion. (Yes, I've been on a food adventure of my own since reading this book, and it's been truly delicious. I had no idea what I was missing.)
Niman's book is unnerving. It pounds sense into our compartmentalized brains. Every lie we have come to believe about food is gutted. The author shows us what is going on behind all those closed doors and hidden-away buildings. She gives practical advice about how to shop organic, and what the labels mean and don't mean. "Natural" is often anything but. "Organic," well, usually. "Open-range" can mean the door is left open for a while on the food factory, or that a chicken foot may have touched cement for a moment, but not earth. This is an exposé, and she encourages voting with your fork.
Personally, I don't think I have ever encountered an easier crusade to join. It just tastes so darn good. The laws are mostly already in place, Niman writes. It is just a matter of insisting our legislators enforce them. Government subsidies are supporting food factories and helping to destroy traditional farms. Get the government out of the way, and organic food will be a lot more reasonable in price. It's a movement to reclaim our good health, live in a sustainable manner on our good earth, and simply to do the right thing with respect to all living beings.
Still not enough for you? Okay, fine. Niman also tells a terrific love story. Ever heard of a vegetarian who falls in love with a cattle rancher? Nicolette Hahn Niman is the wife of nationally respected cattle rancher Bill Niman, formerly of Niman Ranch (you may see that on your menu at quality restaurants). The two (plus young son Miles) are now living on a cattle ranch in California, raising beef cattle and heritage turkeys.
There you have it. A delicious cause that will make you feel good, and right with the world, when you sit down to dinner. A love story with a happy ending. A well-written and interesting read that has just enough facts and figures to put it on solid ground, but not so dry that you won't want to turn the page. My pages kept zipping by. A horror story that will keep you up nights, too, and should ... but it is one you can change. Start with this important book--and start voting with your fork.
~Zinta Aistars for The Smoking Poet Winter 2009-2010 Issue For Humanely Raised Food: This book is a MUST! This excellent book by Nicolette Hahn Niman is a must read for those interested in seeing that factory farms be replaced with farming as it should be, where chickens, turkeys, hogs, cows, and goats can all be raised in pastures and farms where they are meant to be, by caring, responsible ranchers. I am fortunate enough to live in an area where I can easily seek out such food. It is my hope that readers of this review and the book itself will do the same. Demand eggs that are actually from truly cage free chickens, and chickens and meat that are raised in a non-factory environment. For fish, you can get good information from the Monterey Bay Acquarium for seafood for human consumption.
Happy reading and eating! very readable, very enjoyable, very educational I found Righteous Porkchop to be very readable, very enjoyable, very educational. I was initially frustrated by the lack of footnotes, then saw the way things were referenced in the back after I finished reading the book. Thank you for providing sources! Geek that I am, I would have preferred double that number. Very easy to follow and understand everything. The autobiographical approach to writing the story made it much more interesting, personal.
Love, the title, great marketing! A must read for anyone concerned with what they eat This book is compelling on a number of levels. Very well written as a memoir it takes the reader on a personal journey of discovery with the author as she explores her life of environmental activism, work/life balance, joy of family and the outdoors, and ultimately finding love. Engaging as her personal story is the real 'meat' of the story lies with her detailed research and impassioned belief that there is a connection with the food we eat and the lives we lead - specifically outlining that the mass production, factory-farm meat industry is non-sustainable both individually and societally.
By exposing the direct and indirect costs of the mass industrialization of US agribusiness (pork, chicken, beef, and dairy)the author makes a reasoned, non-extremist argument for both the individual (reduced meat consumption, vote with your economic dollar, understand the real 'value' and source of food items) and society (enforce environmental laws on the books, stop subsidizing agribusiness, and allow free markets to operate with true costs embedded.)
A book everyone should have on their shopping list for loved ones! |  |
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