Product Description:
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.
Summary: eye opening
Rating: 5
This book provides the links from what many Americans consider farming to the ugly truth of factory farms. I like that she included the history as well as present day reality. She's not preachy, just tells it like it is.
Summary: Insightful necessity for any consumer
Rating: 5
This book exudes ethical, personal, and factual wisdom that inspired me to take daily action and teach others. The matter of industrial meat practices is not publicized enough. I am so glad I came upon this!
Summary: Loved the Book
Rating: 5
As someone who has read about every book there is on factory farming and the ills of our current food production I'm happy to say this book was really enjoyable and I couldn't put it down. I found the information to be fresh and timely.
If you want to know more about the dangers that factory farming of animals is having on our environment, small farmers and the pigs this is a great book. It is a very intelligent, but easy read that will keep your attention.
Buy it, you will not be sorry!
Summary: Great book!
Rating: 5
A great book: interesting and smart. Highly recommended for people who want to see the world move beyond factory farming.
Summary: "...it is immoral to bring animals into the world and then keep them in a way that they know only suffering."
Rating: 5
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)
# Hardcover: 336 pages
# Publisher: Collins Living (Mar 2009)
# Language English
# ISBN-10: 0061466492
# ISBN-13: 978-0061466496
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| http://rapidshare.com/files/251450371/0061466492_Righteous_Porkchop.rar | |
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