Voting with your fork -- Review of "Righteous Porkchop" by Nicolette Hahn Niman

"Are you trying to convert us?" asked one of my daughters after reading my recent posts on vegetarianism. Not to vegetarianism, I emailed back - just to mindful eating.

I like Michael Pollan's creed : "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

I also like Nicolette Hahn Niman's advice at the end of her 2009 book, Righteous Porkchop:

Do not thoughtlessly eat foods from animals. Know the source. Question the methods. There is great power in posing the following simple question to grocery stores, restaurants and farmers: “How was this raised?” Then shift your buying toward those meats, fish, eggs, and dairy products that come from animals raised in a way that you like.... It’s voting with your fork.

Voting with your fork seems like such a pathetically tiny response to the worldwide scourge of factory farms, which Niman describes in heartbreaking detail : Ecological devastation, such as the 1995 lagoon break that spilled “more than twenty-five million gallons of liquefied hog manure into the New River (more than twice the volume of oil spilled by the Exxon Valdez).” Increased poverty in areas where agribusiness, with the help of public subsidies, tax exemptions, and favored treatment, has driven small farmers off the land. Endangered public health from antiobiotic-resistant infections and poisoned air and water. And, of course, unspeakable cruelty to animals who never see the sun, eat manure-rich feed, and are dismembered while still alive.

Model farms

Fortunately, in Righteous Porkchop Niman goes well beyond exposing the evils of factory farming. As her delightful title suggests, a small but rapidly growing movement is challenging industrial food production - not only by throwing well-deserved stones, but also by modeling animal husbandry as it should be practiced. Just as Pollan praises Joel Salatin's Virginia chicken farm in The Omnivore's Dilemma and Jonathan Safran Foer extols Frank Reese's Kansas turkey farm in Eating Animals, Niman writes glowingly about farmers who treat their animals and the environment with respect: the Klessig family, who own a Wisconsin dairy farm, for example, and Rob and Michelle Stokes, who raise goats in Oregon.

Niman herself is now a rancher. Formerly a senior attorney with Robert Kennedy Jr.'s environmental group Waterkeeper Alliance, she married Niman Ranch founder Bill Niman in 2003 and got personally involved with raising cattle, an odd vocation for a woman who has been a vegetarian since college. Ms. Niman, however, is by no means opposed to righteous porkchops. Having learned that milk cows and egg-laying hens are kept in conditions as abysmal as their meat-animal cousins, she "simply couldn't continue consuming eggs and dairy products and maintain any sense of moral superiority." All foods of animal origin can be farmed cruelly or responsibly. Those who eat such foods can ignore the problems - or they can vote for change with their forks.

But does voting with my fork do any good? What is one person against the Goliath agribusiness?

Change in the air
The thing is, it isn't just one person. It isn't even just a few activists or extremists. Michael Pollan's books regularly hit the best-seller lists. David Kirby's new book, Animal Factory, is getting rave reviews (watch this interview on the Fox Business channel). Movies like King Corn and Food Inc. are making the rounds. Farmers' markets have never been more popular.

Businesses are listening. Trader Joe's and Whole Foods markets are springing up everywhere, and major supermarkets are adding an abundance of organic products.

Policies are changing, too. “To qualify as ‘organic,’ dairies have not been required by USDA to truly keep their cows on pasture,” Niman wrote last year. Beginning next month, this will no longer be true. According to a February 12 New York Times article, Department of Agriculture rules go into effect in June requiring that dairy cows be allowed to "graze on pasture for the full length of the local grazing season. The season will be determined by local conditions and agriculture authorities, like organic certifiers or county conservation officials, not by the dairy alone. While the grazing season must last at least 120 days, in many areas it will be much longer."

In the meantime
Meanwhile, of course, factory farms flourish, and their public relations and marketing departments work overtime to persuade the public that their approach is ethical, healthful, and necessary. One of Niman's best chapters, "Answering Obstacles to Reform," no doubt has its roots in the legal battles she waged - and won - against industrial agriculturalists when she worked for Waterkeeper. Read it whenever you're tempted to believe that large operations are more efficient than small ones, or that industrially raised meat is necessary in order to feed the world.

And whenever you think it's just too hard to save the world one fork at a time, read the preceding chapter, "Finding the Right Foods." Even though interest in responsibly farmed food is growing, it can still be difficult to find 100% grass-fed beef, or milk from cows who graze in pastures, or eggs from hens who breathe fresh air. Niman offer many pointers and websites to make the search less daunting.

Righteous Porkchop covers a lot of ground. It's a memoir and an exposé, a call to action and a buying guide, a good read packed with information. If I'd been Niman's editor, I might have tried to get her to narrow her focus and smooth out her style  - but I might have been wrong. She's not as well-organized as Pollan or as literary as Safran Foer, but she makes an excellent case. She's going to convert a lot of us.

Review of "Eating Animals" - Jonathan Safran Foer on factory farms

"On average," writes Jonathan Safran Foer, "Americans eat the equivalent of 21,000 animals in a lifetime." Alas, most of these animals came from factory farms, now the source of "99.9 percent of chickens raised for meat, 97 percent of laying hens, 99 percent of turkeys, 95 percent of pigs, and 78 percent of cattle.”

Is this a problem? Safran Foer, best known for his novels Everything Is Illuminated  and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, thinks so. American factory farms, sometimes called CAFOs (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations), have made meat readily available and cheaper than ever before or anywhere else. In his 2009 exposé, Eating Animals, Safran Foer argues that our cheap meat has come with huge hidden costs to public health and to the environment.

Here are 10 reasons you might not want to buy factory-farmed meat, poultry, or fish. The quotations are from Eating Animals:

Factory farms
1. use antibiotics to raise sick genetic mutants in crowded, filthy conditions

In the typical cage for egg-laying hens, each bird has 67 square inches of [floor] space [or less than ¾ the size of a sheet of typing paper]. Nearly all cage-free birds have approximately the same amount of space. 79

2. send animals to slaughterhouses where cruelty and even sadism are routine

Animals are bled, skinned, and dismembered while conscious. It happens all the time, and the industry and the government know it. Several plants cited for bleeding or skinning or dismembering live animals have defended their actions as common in the industry and asked, perhaps rightly, why they were being singled out. 230

3. produce highly infected animals

Scientific studies and government records suggest that virtually all (upwards of 95 percent of) chickens become infected with E. coli (an indicator of fecal contamination) and between 39 and 75 percent of chickens in retail stores are still infected. Around 8 percent of birds become infected with salmonella.... Seventy to 90 percent are infected with another potentially deadly pathogen, campylobacter. Chlorine baths are commonly used to remove slime, odor, and bacteria. 131

4. contribute to the creation and spread of new viruses (think influenza)

Breeding genetically uniform and sickness-prone birds in the overcrowded, stressful, feces-infested, and artificially lit conditions of factory farms promotes the growth and mutation of pathogens. The “cost of increased efficiency,” the report [by the Council for Agricultural Science and Technology, which brought together industry experts and experts from the WHO, OIE, and USDA] concludes, is increased global risk for diseases.142

5. contribute to antibiotic resistance (think MRSA)

In the United States, about 3 million pounds of antibiotics are given to humans each year, but a whopping 17.8 million pounds are fed to livestock—at least that is what the industry claims. The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) has shown that the industry underreported its antibiotic use by at least 40 percent.... Study after study has shown that antimicrobial resistance follows quickly on the heels of the introduction of new drugs on factory farms.140

6. destroy species

For every ten tuna, sharks, and other large predatory fish that were in our oceans fifty to a hundred years ago, only one is left.33

[Shrimp] trawlers sweep up fish, sharks, rays, crabs, squid, scallops—typically about a hundred different fish and other species. Virtually all die.... The average trawling operation throws 80 to 90 percent of the sea animals it captures as bycatch overboard.191

7. pollute

Farmed animals in the United States produce 130 times as much waste as the human population—roughly 87,000 pounds of shit per second. The polluting strength of this shit is 160 times greater than raw municipal sewage. And yet there is almost no waste-treatment infrastructure for farmed animals. 174

Conservative estimates by the EPA indicate that chicken, hog, and cattle excrement has already polluted 35,000 miles of rivers in twenty-two states.179

8. contribute to climate change

According to the UN, the livestock sector is responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, around 40 percent more than the entire transport sector—cars, trucks, planes, trains, and ships—combined. 58

9. violate the human rights of their employees

Illegal aliens are often preferred, but poor recent immigrants who do not speak English are also desirable employees. By the standards of the international human rights community, the typical working conditions in America’s slaughterhouses constitute human rights violations. 131-32

10. change or ignore regulations in order to make more money

High-speed machines commonly rip open intestines, releasing feces into the birds’ body cavities. Once upon a time, USDA inspectors had to condemn any bird with such fecal contamination. But about thirty years ago, the poultry industry convinced the USDA to reclassify feces so that it could continue to use these automatic eviscerators. Once a dangerous contaminant, feces are now classified as a “cosmetic blemish.” As a result inspectors condemn half the number of birds. 134

 Though Safran Foer is a vegetarian, he does not argue that everyone should quit eating meat. His complaint is not with omnivores per se but with the way nearly all U.S. meat is produced. "Farming is shaped not only by food choices, but by political ones," he writes. Factory farms are profitable, and agribusiness spends a lot of money in Washington to keep them that way. Individual vegetarians are not, by themselves, going to clean up rivers, diminish greenhouse gases, prevent epidemics, or open the barn doors and let calves frolic in sunlit pastures. Only strict government regulations, seriously enforced, could do that, and the certain result would be a dramatic increase in meat prices.

But is this any reason to let things continue as they are? "Just how destructive does a culinary preference have to be before we decide to eat something else?" Safran Foer asks - or, I would add, before we demand that our meat producers adhere to high standards?

If contributing to the suffering of billions of animals that live miserable lives and (quite often) die in horrific ways isn’t motivating, what would be? If being the number one contributor to the most serious threat facing the planet (global warming) isn’t enough, what is? And if you are tempted to put off these questions of conscience, to say not now, then when?

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For more information by one of Safran Foer's sources, see Nicolette Hahn Niman, "Avoiding Factory Farm Foods: An Eater's Guide."

Scarpetta and the God's-eye view

I have now listened to 12 of Patricia D. Cornwell's 16 Scarpetta mysteries. Though my two worst high-school classes were home ec and driver ed, I spend much of my life in the kitchen or behind the wheel. Keeping a long series going is a great way to keep myself going as well. But I'm done with Scarpetta for now.

I had been warned that the Scarpetta series is graphic and gruesome. "Oh well," I thought, "I'm a big girl. I can deal with it." And it really wasn't all that hard to deal with--the bloodiness was mostly in the forensics lab where Scarpetta, chief medical examiner of Virginia, explored the body cavities of the dead. Not lunchtime material, maybe, but technically interesting. Besides, the plots moved right along, and the characters--feisty Scarpetta; her conflicted niece, Lucy; bigoted, vulgar, but good-hearted Pete Marino; enigmatic Benton Wesley--quickly became my friends.

In The Last Precinct (book 11), however, Cornwell made a big change: she switched from the previous books' past-tense narration to a breathless present tense. Essentially a retrospective on Black Notice (book 10), The Last Precinct deals more with Scarpetta's inner turmoil than with outside events, and present-tense narration can be an effective way to get into a character's mind. Still, I thought, the story suffered--but maybe Cornwell would find her footing in the next book.

And then in Blow Fly (book 12), the tone changed entirely. Still using present tense, Cornwell began writing in the third person with an omniscient narrator. For me, that was the coup de grâce. This book, though dealing with the same characters as the two previous books, had become almost unlistenable. I listened anyway, feeling sick. Why, I wondered, should the narrative shift make such a difference?

And then I understood: from the God's-eye view, everything is visible and everything is present. I could see Scarpetta (though not as often as I wished), but I could also see murder, kidnapping, torture, and dismemberment taking place on stage, from the viewpoints of the people committing these acts. I could enter into the minds of several sociopathic, narcissistic, thoroughly evil characters as they plotted new crimes. I did not feel terror--I knew Scarpetta would emerge relatively unscathed to star in the next books--but I felt extreme revulsion.

Nevertheless, I went to the library and checked out book 13, Trace. It too uses present tense and an omniscient narrator. Soon I was in the mind of yet another psychotic criminal, one described by a reviewer as "one of the creepiest villains to come along since Silence of the Lambs." Enough! I said, and pulled the cassette out of the player (our car is very old).

The God's-eye view is not for the faint of heart. Even God got tired when he looked down and "saw that the wickedness of humankind was great in the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually" (Gen 6.5). According to the biblical tale, that's when he decided to drown nearly the whole lot of us.

I'm going to return Trace to the library in a few minutes. I'm thinking I'll trade it in on an audiobook by Lisa Scottoline. I'm hoping her point of view is restricted. Sometimes one should avert one's eyes.

Torturing cows

According to a story by Rick Weiss in today's Washington Post, "Video footage being released today shows workers at a California slaughterhouse delivering repeated electric shocks to cows too sick or weak to stand on their own; drivers using forklifts to roll the 'downer' cows on the ground in efforts to get them to stand up for inspection; and even a veterinary version of waterboarding in which high-intensity water sprays are shot up animals' noses -- all violations of state and federal laws designed to prevent animal cruelty and to keep unhealthy animals, such as those with mad cow disease, out of the food supply. Moreover, the companies where these practices allegedly occurred are major suppliers of meat for the nation's school lunch programs."

Weiss points out that letting weak, sick cows into the food supply puts consumers at increased risk of mad cow disease and e coli infections. His article also points out the cruelty depicted in the video. Temple Grandin, author of the magnificent Animals in Translation, characterized it as "one of the worst animal-abuse videos I have ever viewed."

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