Correction to “Raising Steaks”

by Betty Fussell

I’ve just heard from my friends Nicolette and Bill Niman that I’ve  made an inadvertent but egregious error in my text of Raising Steaks that I want to correct immediately because it raises an important issue in the raising of livestock.

After visiting Bill’s breathtakingly beautiful ranch in Bolinas, CA, a a few years ago, I’d gone on to visit the small Purple Sage Feedlot he’d used for his cattle in Caldwell, ID.  This was run by a knowledgeable and caring couple, Rob and Michelle Stokes, who now work with the many kinds of livestock the Nimans now raise exclusively on the pastures at Bolinas.

Back then, Rob had explained to me that the two common feeds standard in the cattle industry were feather meal and distiller grains. But I made a big mistake when I quoted Rob as saying “The two common feeds we use …”(page 114).

I’d never heard of feather meal, so Rob explained that it is made from hydrolyzed chicken feathers and is used because this protein content degrades slowly in a cow’s rumen and thereby helps utilize the animal’s entire gastrointestinal tract. What’s wrong with feather meal is that chicken feathers are an animal byproduct and at that time I didn’t realize the importance of this issue in matters of beef safety, not to mention matters of animal welfare in general.

After I learned a lot more in the course of writing this book about the relation of cattle feed to cattle diseases like E.coli and Mad Cow, I should have realized something was wrong with my notes if I had Rob saying he used this byproduct as a common feed. I quoted him wrongly and I’m particularly sorry because the Nimans, and the Stokes, have always strongly opposed feeding feather meal to animals.

Bill Niman first created his company out of concern for the health and wellbeing of livestock raised for meat and as an alternative to the increasingly scary methods used by the meat industry. Nicolette Hahn spent her lawyer’s career working on the impact of industrial food systems on our environment, as you can read in her new book,  Righteous Porkchop: Finding a Life and Good Food Beyond Factory Farms (see my earlier post).

That they are living that life as a married couple, with the Stokes living nearby, well — even though Bill has recently lost his own corporatized company, it still seems like a Technicolor ending with goats romping in the grass and Heidi running to her grandpa with some fresh cheese. We count on the Nimans and Stokes of this world to provide alternatives to that buffalo stampede of the entire industrialized food chain over the cliff.

“Righteous Porkchop”: Good Food, Good Farming = Good Life

by Betty Fussell

It was pigs, of all things, that brought them together, the cowboy and the lady. Some romances are so unlikely they have to come true, and that’s what happened when cattle rancher and pork producer Bill Niman met the vegetarian environmentalist lawyer Nicolette Hahn.

They both cared about animal welfare, but came at it from different angles. Robert Kennedy Jr. had hired Hahn several years ago to head his “hog campaign” to help remedy the abuses of factory pig farms. Niman had already made his brand of pork products synonymous with raising pigs humanely.

They had a common concern and a common enemy. And what could be more natural, organic and sustainable than a wedding at the ranch Niman built himself in Bolinas California, near Bodega Bay?

On the ranch today they raise goats as well as cows and sheep and share a love of animals in the field if not on the plate. While Niman told his story in “The Niman Ranch Cookbook” a couple of years ago, Hahn has now told hers in Righteous Porkchop, published this week.

The subtitle, “Finding a Life and Good Food Beyond Factory Farms,” speaks for all of us who have waged war against the industrialization of livestock and who believe in the integration of good food with good farming to produce a good life.

Earlier, I endorsed the book this way: “To tell her story, Nicolette Hahn-Niman has created a unique genre — half romance, half expose, narrated through her personal experience of the horrors of factory farms,  mitigated by the human face of farmers and ranchers she’s met in her travels across the land. With a lawyer’s mind she dissects the extremes of industrial farming, with a woman’s heart she learns to mitigate her own extremes to create greener pastures for the animals, her husband and herself on the ranch she loves.”

Marion Nestle, who also blurbed Niman’s book (as well as my own), wrote last week on her blog that Righteous Porkchop is “a thoughtful and affecting memoir of her version of the events–her background as an activist lawyer, her romance with Bill, and their work together.”

Go read more on the history of Niman Ranch at the San Francisco Chronicle.