From Vegetarian to "Defending Beef"
How Nicolette Hahn Niman Went From Being a Vegetarian College Student, to Environmental Lawyer, to Authoring “Defending Beef: A Nutritional and Ecological Argument for Sustainable Meat Production."
How Attorney, Author and Rancher Nicolette Hahn Niman Went From Being a Vegetarian College Student, to Environmental Lawyer, to Authoring “Defending Beef: A Nutritional and Ecological Argument for Sustainable Meat Production.”
HART: My guest is Nicollette Hahn Niman, author of “Defending Beef, The Ecological and Nutritional Case for Meat.” It was originally published in 2014 and is now available in a Revised and Expanded Edition.
Nicolette, how are you today?
NICOLETTE: I'm good. Thank you.
HART: Great. Tell us how you went from being a vegetarian college student to an environmental lawyer to writing a book about Defending Beef.
NICOLETTE: Well, it's an unusual story, as you can imagine. I grew up in Michigan. I did not grow up on a farm. My parents were both professors. My father was a tenured history professor at the local university. My mom also taught there in the languages department.
They were really interested in good food. My mom had a big garden. We used to go to a lot of local farms to pick fruit and buy things--vegetables and stuff--directly from the farms, eggs and that sort of thing. I was not raised a vegetarian, but when I went to college, I was majoring in biology and I had this sort of interest for my whole life.
My parents and I used to spend a lot of time outdoors. So we used to go on a lot of nature walks as a family. My dad especially used to go out every day on long walks in the nearby woods near our home growing up. I always had this interest in nature and the environment, but I didn't have any interest in being a vegetarian.
Then I went to college and I was a biology major involved in environmental causes and there just seemed to be this idea that was everywhere that if you really cared about the environment, you shouldn't be eating meat and especially beef. Definitely not.
The deforestation in the Amazon was being blamed--very directly--on beef. I actually remember walking into a meeting that I was attending at my college.
There was a sign outside at a table by the Sierra Club. It said, “The leading cause of the deforestation in the Amazon is beef. Are you eating hamburgers?”
That really grabbed me. It was one of those really effective pieces of propaganda. And by the end of freshman year in college, I decided to stop eating meat.
I stopped eating beef first, because I actually thought that was the biggest problem. And there was also this idea from my parents, who were very healthy. They were meat eaters, but they had this idea that they had adopted from mainstream media, that fat was inherently bad for you, especially animal fat and especially from red meat.
So, I had this idea already that it would be a healthier diet, but I started to believe that to be a good environmental citizen, you shouldn't be eating meat. It didn't think too much more about it.
I had been a vegetarian for about 10 years, and then I was working as an environmental lawyer for the National Wildlife Federation when I was hired by Bobby Kennedy Jr. to be the senior attorney for Waterkeeper Alliance in New York.
Originally, he was just asking me to work on water quality issues throughout the country, but I had only been there a couple of weeks when he approached me about working specifically on pollution-related issues from concentrated livestock production and poultry production. Initially I thought that didn’t sound very appealing to me, because I knew it was all about manure and urine, especially manure.
And then he encouraged me to go and to visit some communities that were really affected by large concentrated hog operations in Missouri, and then in North Carolina and it was a really life-changing experience for me because I hadn't seen this for myself--until that moment--the way modern pork production was functioning. And I had a lot of opportunities to talk to people and see what was happening in terms of the water and the odor. It was all very apparent and it was really appealing to me to jump into this project because nobody was really doing anything about the problems that these people were facing.
It seemed like some help was urgently needed. I felt like it was really important work. So I was working full-time at Waterkeepers on meat related issues, and it reinforced my vegetarian thinking through that job.
I also began to meet a lot of really good farmers and ranchers, including people associated with the Niman Ranch Network of farmers and ranchers and ultimately--to make a really long story really short--I married the founder of Niman Ranch, Bill Niman, and I moved from New York to a ranch in California.
I continued being a vegetarian for many years as the wife of Bill Niman, not just living on the ranch, but actively working on the ranch. I worked full time for seven years on the ranch.
HART: You were even a vegetarian when you wrote the first edition of “Defending Beef.” Right?
NICOLETTE: That's right. Exactly. One of the things I was doing when I picked the book back up again, was that I readjusted that whole discussion. I was no longer vegetarian but you know my thinking had further evolved on that whole question.
I had been married to Bill Niman working on the ranch--living on the ranch for many years--and to his credit Bill has never tried to push me towards meat-eating.
What happened was that I was approaching my 50th birthday several years ago and I started thinking I really didn't want to go down this very typical pathway that so many Americans including myself was starting to go down of being told, “Okay, you're getting to this age, you know, you're getting a little heavier in your weight. Your blood pressure is going up a little bit. We want to put you on these medications.
Also there was a history of osteoporosis in my family. So I decided I'm going to test my bone density. I want to make sure that in addition to all these other metrics that we use to test our health, our weight, our blood pressure, cholesterol levels, etc. I want to make sure I'm doing everything I can with my diet and lifestyle to make sure that I'm staying healthy.
I'm not going to accept that this is the normal trajectory that you take a cocktail of drugs every day when you get up in the morning.
So I decided that in order to optimize my diet, I really needed to reincorporate meat in it. That was largely because I had done so much reading over the years.
I was well aware of all of the benefits that meat provides in the diet. And I had really come to not believe this mainstream narrative that meat and especially saturated fat from red meat is bad for you which has been so popularly accepted for so long. That was no longer a concern for me.
I really came to believe that I needed to have meat back in my diet just to be the healthiest possible person because as we get older our dietary needs are different. We need more nourishment. We're no longer just kind of coasting along.
So I decided several years ago to reincorporate meat into my diet. When I did it, I was worried I would regret it. But it didn't turn out like that at all. I took a bite of a hamburger that my husband had prepared for me from our own ranch. My only thought was, “Wow, this is so delicious. Why was I not eating this food?”
Even though I really understand and respect the reasons why people choose not to eat meat, I also think it's important that people who decide they do want to eat meat should feel free to do that.
There shouldn't be any societal pressure, or any internal feeling of guilt or shame if you're eating meat. In fact I think meat is extremely valuable and delicious and culturally important.
And so that's why I'm on this passionate crusade in the last decade to make sure that we are defending good meat.