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industries’ darkest practices after she took a job with Waterkeeper Alliance, a water-preservation organization led by Robert Kennedy, Jr., who also penned the foreword to her book. Hahn Niman joined Waterkeeper’s legal team as senior attorney in 2000 and for the next two years became totally enveloped in the organization’s fight against factory meat farms — particularly hog farms whose waste-management practices create huge amounts of pollution, posing significant harm to water, animals, people and communities in the surrounding areas. In “Righteous Porkchop,” Hahn Niman brings readers on tours of North Carolina communities that are home to factory farms, which keep pigs crowded together and confined for their entire lives. She describes “barracks” in which pigs stand indoors at all times over slatted floors where their manure and urine collects until it’s combined with water and pushed out into large, open-air storage ponds known as manure lagoons. The waste is pumped into surrounding farmland, and evaporated pollutants get into local rivers and water sources.
Cattle graze at the ranch owned by Bill Niman and Nicolette Hahn Niman on April 18.
The practice creates a permanent smell that not only permeates houses and laundry hanging outdoors, but has dangerous health impacts. She cites Environmental Protection Agency documents that show nationwide, 1.5 billion pounds of nitrogen from manure lagoons and another 880 million pounds of nitrogen from liquefied manure
spread on land and ends up in surface water after first evaporating into the air. Hog operations also emit 70,000 tons of hydrogen sulfide gas, 296,000 tons of methane and 127,000 tons of carbon dioxide every year. “I’d now had my first up-close glimpse of our modern, industrial food system, and I didn’t like what I was seeing,” Hahn
Niman writes. “I was witnessing how corporations have been quietly but radically altering how our food is produced.” Since then, she has committed herself to reversing this massive industry shift. “My raison d’etre became remaking the modern food system,” she writes. During her time with Water-
keeper, she filed numerous major lawsuits against big agribusiness companies that were violating anti-pollution laws and organized national “hog summits” to raise awareness about best practices and reform in the meat and farming industries. She said she wrote “Righteous Porkchop” in part because she, like many Americans, was previously blissfully unaware of the way the food she ate was being produced. She did, however, make the decision to cut out meat from her diet well before her first-hand exposure to factory farming, while a biology major in college. “When I started working on it, I was always so shocked by the situation, and then I was also shocked that I didn’t know about it,” she said. “And then I was continually reminded of that by my conversations I was having with ordinary people that weren’t involved in that field — whether it was my family or friends or whatever, I would describe what I was working on and they just kept saying, ‘What? That doesn’t seem possible. All of my bacon is raised that way?’ So that’s when I decided I had to write that book because I just really realized that a big part of the problem was that people didn’t understand how
Dinner by the movies
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■ Mountain View Voice ■ MountainViewOnline.com ■ April 25, 2014
LIVE MUSIC The Duet of Kenya Baker & Codany Holiday
Cucina Venti is proud to feature the award winning Kenya Baker Live every Wednesday - Thursday from 5:30-8:30 Kenya has toured as lead guitarist for Grammy winner Joss Stone for four years, performing for celebrities and dignitaries all over the world.