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Righteous Porkchop: Finding a Life and Good Food Beyond Factory Farms

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After reading Nicolette Hahn Niman's reporting on conditions under which pigs, chickens, dairy cows and other cattle, and even farmed fish are kept before ending up on our dinner tables, one can hardly be other than in fervent accord with her statement above. Niman faithfully describes the artificial, often terribly cramped containment pens or cages that crowd thousands of pigs, cattle, or laying hens together. Often the animals never see the outdoors, never breathe anything but the stink of their own waste, never get to raise their own offspring, and never even get a meal that isn't laced heavily with harmful drugs and blood and excrement from other animals. And sometimes they die barbarically.

Raising stock this way is excused by agribusiness as necessary to maximize economies of scale and profits. But the author of Righteous Porkchop: Finding a Life and Good Food Beyond Factory Farms systematically shoots down these flimsy justifications. For example, she points to studies that show the high investments needed to undertake and maintain these huge confinement facilities generally lead to a revolving debt operation, whereas farmers with a more natural and smaller operation can outperform on a dollar in / dollar out basis. Also, the pollution produced per animal is far greater in confinement plants (and they are plants, rather than farms). Animal manure from thousands of head run off into water channels, liquefy, and pool into big lagoons. This form of animal waste gives off ammonia, methane, and other gases that shouldn't be in our air. Not to mention -- again -- the horrific odor that wafts for miles.

Niman furnishes as many facts as possible about the widespread conditions in industrial animal production. But RIGHTEOUS PORKCHOP isn't simply a dry recitation of statistics. Niman is telling her own story: how, as a fledgling lawyer, she worked for Bobby Kennedy Jr. to gather first-hand evidence for environmental lawsuits against confinement agriculture for polluting waterways with liquefied waste. How in the course of things, she met rancher and entrepreneur Bill Niman and in time married him. How she moved from New York to northern California and learned the ins and outs of ranching. How she and her husband do their utmost to let their cattle and other animals live as natural a life as possible. How she searches for outlets where she can buy food for the Niman table that is grown or raised on family farms where "organic" and "natural" aren't just buzzwords.

Niman presents a well-researched case for the pressing need to change the way our meat supply is managed from insemination to slaughter. She emphasizes that a failure to do so will endanger the future survival of these animals and the whole food chain including us. But she is realistic too and suggests that the best action each individual can take is to stop buying from these meat/poultry/dairy/fish producers. Perhaps her most practical chapter is "Finding the Right Foods," in which she gives specific advice and information about how to find healthful pork, beef, milk, cheese, fish, etc. from farms that treat their animals well.

RIGHTEOUS PORKCHOP (by the way, amusingly, the title doesn't merely refer to pigs) is a book everyone should read and then use as a springboard for concrete action. Domesticated animals are not people, but that doesn't excuse cruelty or soullessness toward them. (4.5 stars)

I've read many, if not most, of the major books about the industrialization of our food supply and I think Righteous Porkchop is the best one yet. It's well written and engaging but at the same time it's loaded with fascinating facts and information. With close to 300 notes at the end of the book, the research done for this book is unmatched. But what is especially unique about the book is that it is written as a memoir, so the story line propels the reader forward from start to finish. I consider Righteous Porkchop a book that everyone should read to learn about where their food comes from and how it's produced.

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

I read this book at a pivotal time for me personally. Last year, I was toying with the idea of joining a CSA, but didn't pull the trigger. I had a friend convince me to join this year. Once I joined the CSA (produce only), I kind of felt like I was done -- I did my part in supporting the local food supply, and there wasn't much more I could do. Well, then I read Niman's book.

The book was fascinating. I've always had kind of a vague awareness that agribusiness was not best for the environment and farm animals, but I figured the FDA monitored it, so I didn't worry too much. I tried to buy organic, and that's all I could do. This book has brought everything into focus for me. It was absolutely riveting. The information provided is so important for the average consumer, and it is presented in a manner and format that is easily accessible to anyone.

The factual information provided was interesting and complelling, but I also really enjoyed reading about Niman's personal journey through her research. Learning how Niman progressed from a vegetarian living in Manhattan to the wife of California rancher was fascinating.

The last couple chapters of how Niman's daily choices are supporting free range / organic / humane treatment of farm animals was very helpful to me. We recently bought two dozen eggs from Costco, and I am vowing those will be the last eggs I buy that do not come directly from a farm. I am now carefully exploring our options for buying chicken / beef / pork.

The information presented in this book is essential for anyone who purchases meat or dairy products.

I like this book very much and have been recommending it to many of my friends and family. It does an excellent job of taking a reader through the modern system of producing food from animals (meat, dairy, eggs and fish). It takes a historical approach, tracing the origins of the industrialization of each sector, explaining when and why the system became increasingly mechanized and impersonal. But what I especially liked about this book is that it does it all through a highly readable, personal narrative. I don't think that anyone could look at their food the same way after reading Righteous Porkchop. Fortunately, the author also offers a lot of helpful advice about finding foods that come from better sources. This book would be interesting and enjoyable for anyone who wants to learn more about their food.

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!

Many people are getting the uneasy feeling that something is amiss in our conventional food system and seeking alternatives. We see articles and news stories about food borne illnesses, antibiotic resistance, animal cruelty, global warming and pollution from our current food production methods. Righteous Porkchop is a unique examination of these issues. It makes a strong argument for not just the NEED but also the POTENTIAL for reform.

Hahn Niman takes the reader on something of a journey through the food system. She starts with some history, then weaves in the telling of her own personal narrative -- first as a child spending time on farms, then as an environmental lawyer working against concentrated animal feeding operations, then, finally, as a rancher herself. Other books have been written in this genre but several things separate this book: For one, the author is not merely an observor but an active participant in these issues, making the book much more readable and interesting than some exposes and giving the author important first hand knowledge to draw upon. Second, there is no rehashing of information from advocacy groups in this book -- the research is detailed, credible, and extensive, being based on primary sources such as historical books and government data, giving this book an almost academic quality. Nonetheless, the book remains readable and engaging throughout.

What I like best about this book is that you're learning an incredible amount about our food system, what's wrong with it, and how to fix it -- but you never feel like you are being preached to or being lectured at.

Righteous Porkchop: Finding a Life and Good Food Beyond Factory Farms

Righteous Porkchop is a disturbing, mind boggling exploration of the unrelenting, systematic cruelty and animal abuse that is at the heart of all farm animal based foods we eat. Framed around the personal journey of the author, Nicolette Hahn Niman, it reveals the almost unbelievable heart of darkness that envelops the way we raise our food. Whilst based on her US experiences the abuses she witnesses are clearly indicative of the appalling systems of factory farming being practiced in the U.K, Europe, and sadly, many of the developing countries who are following our lead.

What I particularly liked about Righteous Porkchop was that it covers all aspects of factory farming issues, from the widespread local and national environmental pollution resulting from the massive amounts of slurry being stored and dispersed on the land, to in-depth looks at chicken raising and egg production, pig/hog farming, cattle and milk cow production, and even a fascinating chapter on industrial fish farming. She not only looks at factory farming today but explores how we got to where we are today. She then caps it off with a brilliant chapter which challenges all the arguments used to defend the factory farming system of raising food. For example the oft used argument that more food production is needed to feed the world is categorically debunked. For active animal rights advocates I think this chapter is invaluable and possibly worth the price of the book alone as it provides compelling and powerful counter arguments to those that defend factory farming.

What is also great about this book, is that Nicolette shows that there are workable, profitable, high animal welfare alternatives to the factory farming system. Her romance and then marriage to Bill Niman, a rancher who is strongly committed to raising high quality, tasty meat in free range, pasture based systems opens up the sunnier side of food production to her and us. Through this relationship she meets and sees for herself the many passionately welfare orientated farmers who raise their animals with a respect of behavioral and welfare needs and a love and pride totally missing from the factory farm systems. Opposite extremes, but, just knowing there are a growing number of farmers out there championing a back to traditional animal husbandry values, gives you some hope for humanity and the future.

By the end of the book, we see Nicolle embracing a life raising happy well cared for farm animals and developing extensive plans to a more self sufficiency lifestyle. We also see a passionate anti factory farming advocate speaking with authority, intelligence and conviction in challenging the way we raise our food.

This book documents a remarkable life changing personal journey of hers, and if you read this book, there is no question it will change and strengthen your own outlook on the totally unacceptable way we allow our food to be produced. This book has received rave reviews elsewhere, and it's easy to understand why. This is just a superbly written book that packs a punch well above the 320+ pages. The book is impeccably researched, with the abundance of facts fully sourced and referenced in each chapter index, and, despite the depth and scale of the content, the book is really accessible, being both extremely well written and very readable. The horror story is framed by Nicolettes very human story of self discovery and life mission. It makes for riveting if at times highly disturbing reading. It will inform you, educate you, move you, and if like me, inspire you to want to get off your backside and do something to change the way we raise our food. Getting active supporting Compassion in World Farming campaigns is certainly an easy first step. Why not go to their website and see how you can help push for change? But not before you buy this book!

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.

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!