The vegetarian and ‘the carnivore’s dilemma’

Pink slime is making headlines, obesity has become epidemic and mass-produced meat is blamed for contributing to rising greenhouse gas emissions.

What’s a lover of burgers to do?

“People should eat less meat, but better meat,” says Nicolette Hahn Niman, a woman of many talents whose email signature reads: Rancher Lawyer Author Mother.

That makes a lot of sense to me.

I met Nicolette Hahn Niman last week in Houston at an “Energy Summit” put together by Shell to talk about the interdependence of energy, food and water. Business people, academics, entrepreneurs and environmentalists talked about what needs to be done make the world more sustainable by 2050. [Disclosure: I was paid by Shell to moderate.]

Nicolette had quite a story to share. It begins in 2000 when she was an environmental lawyer and a vegetarian living in Manhattan and working for Robert Kennedy Jr., the president of the Waterkeeper Alliance. He asked her to investigate pollution problems caused by the Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) where most cows, pigs and chickens are raised. Then, as now, most of the water pollution in the U.S. is caused by agriculture. But she resisted at first. “It didn’t sound very appealing, to spend all my time working on manure,” she recalls.

But as she dug into the problem (not literally), Hahn was revolted by what she found on so-called factory farms. Crowding animals together, feeding them antiobiotics so they don’t get sick, storing their waste in giant lagoons, cutting down forests to grow crops to feed them, creating stenches that bother neighbors, making workers sick — none of it make sense to her. Industrial farms, she thought, bore no resemblance to the farms near where she grew up in western Michigan.

But what was the alternative? She went looking and found a better way — as well as, unexpectedly, romance.

Today, Nicolette and her hippie-turned-rancher husband, Bill Niman, raise cattle and heritage turkeys at BN Ranch in Bolinas, CA. (Bill Niman is no longer associated with Niman Ranch, a well known network of ranches that sold humanely raised cattle and beef to customers ranging from Alice Waters’ Chez Panisse to Chipotle.) They were married in 2003, and they have a three-year-old son.

Nicolette is the author of Righteous Porkchop: Finding a Life and Good Food Beyond Factory Farms, a book about her crusade against factory farms and life with Niman. (You can read the opening chapter here.) And, yes, she remains a vegetarian, although she hastens to tell me that she has no “philosophical opposition” to meat, which is probably good for marital harmony.

“By the time I married Bill, I’d been a vegetarian for almost 20 years,” she says, and so she’s lost her desire for meat.

Vegetarian, Raw and Vegan with Bill & Sheila

____________________________________________________________________
If you require a high quality printout of this article, just click on the printer symbol next to ’Share and enjoy’, and we will do the rest. This site is hosted by (click on the graphic for more information)

Return from vegetarian to Home Page

If you want to increase your site popularity and gain thousands of visitors – check out these sites THEY ARE FREE. Spanishchef more than doubled its ‘New Visitors’ last month simply by signing up to these sites:

Follow spanishchef.net on TWITTER