Industrial animal agriculture and meat production and consumption have become central issues of our time. Between 1950 and 2007, per capita meat consumption in the U.S. increased an astounding 78 pounds per person per year and world meat consumption is expected to double by 2050. The health consequences from the overconsumption of meat—obesity, coronary heart disease, and cancer—are now well documented.

The 2006 United Nation publication, Livestock’s Long Shadow articulated the environmental impact of industrial animal production—and a new study further estimates that livestock farming on its own—disregarding all other human activity—could negatively tip the balance for climate change and habitat destruction by mid-century.

Between the serious environmental and public health and food safety issues associated with Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs)—known for their disregard for animal welfare, misuse of pharmaceuticals, pollution and mismanagement of waste, and concentrated corporate ownership; the importance of alternatives such as sustainable ranching; and the debate as to whether we should eat meat at all, lies an important conversation worth having regarding our role in meat’s global and local impact.

Join us for the next Kitchen Table Talks in San Francisco on Tuesday, October 26, 2010 to discuss “The Meat of the Matter,” where we will engage our community in a thoughtful discussion about this personal and very political issue. We will talk about how our current food system is structured to support industrial meat production, share new data underscoring meat’s deleterious environmental effects, learn ways to creatively reduce our meat consumption, and offer some alternative solutions to the industrial food system.

Joining us in conversation will be Kari Hamerschlag, a Senior Agriculture Analyst working in the Environmental Working Group’s California office. Prior to working with EWG, Kari worked for many years as a sustainable food policy consultant in the Bay Area, including a year long stint running a Farm Bill campaign for the California Coalition for Food and Farming.

Also joining us will be Kim O’Donnel, a trained chef, longtime journalist, and the author of the new book, The Meat Lover’s Meatless Cookbook. Formerly of The Washington Post, Kim has also written for many other publications and will begin writing a regular column for USA Today in November. She’s also a regular contributor to Culinate, where she hosts a weekly chat. In her work, Kim combines reportage and analysis on where and how our food is raised and grown with practical tips and advice on the kitchen life. Kim is also the founder of Canning Across America, a collective dedicated to the revival of preserving food.

Marissa Guggiana is the author of Primal Cuts: Cooking with America’s Best Butchers ; president of Sonoma Direct, a family business providing sustainably raised meats; and the co-founder of The Butcher’s Guild, a new organization to promote the art and interests of America’s sustainable butchers. Marissa is an editor of Meatpaper, a fellow with Roots of Change , and also sits on the board of Ag Innovations Network, an NGO that facilitates communication for stakeholders in regional food systems.

Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Viracocha , 998 Valencia Street @ 21st Street, San Francisco

Food and drink at 6:30 p.m.; Discussion at 7 p.m.

Kitchen Table Talks is a joint venture of CivilEats and 18 Reasons , a non-profit that promotes conversation between its San Francisco Mission neighborhood and the people who feed them. Space is limited, so please RSVP. A $10 suggested donation is requested at the door, but no one will be turned away for lack of funds. Sustainable food and refreshments will be provided, courtesy of Bi-Rite Market and Shoe Shine Wine.

Photo: Martin Gommel

The Farm Bureau is none too happy with the EPA today for publishing a blog post urging Americans to give up meat.

The post in question was written by an EPA intern and recounts her decision to stop eating meat. The author, Nicole Reising, cites the “environmental effects of meat production” and urges readers to stop eating meat.

….

The American Farm Bureau Federation issued a statement today decrying the post as disrepectful to ranchers.

“While this is a position taken by an intern of the agency, EPA should control its blog space,” said AFBP President Bob Stallman. “What is written on its blog comes across as its official position toward farmers and ranchers that it regulates and shows a terrible disregard for them and the agriculture industry.”

To be clear, the American Farm Bureau Federation calles itself the “Voice of Agriculture,” but it’s really the voice of industrial agriculture–and the few companies that benefit from it. To say that the EPA “regulates” concentrated-animal feedlot operations (CAFOs) is a bit fanciful. As the Washington Post recently put it:

Despite its impact, manure has not been as strictly regulated as more familiar pollution problems, like human sewage, acid rain or industrial waste. The Obama administration has made moves to change that but already has found itself facing off with farm interests, entangled in the contentious politics of poop.

The brazen intern in question, Nicole Reising, had proposed–without considering the feelings of meat-industry execs or CAFO operators!–that “Regulations can be made to help prevent the effects of meat production, but the easiest way to lessen the environmental impacts is to become a vegetarian or vegan.”

Over on TNR, Brad Plumer quibbles with Reising: “if you’re trying to tamp down on the consequences of meat production, the ‘easiest’ approach may be to start small and just convince people to eat less meat, rather than swearing off it altogether.”

I would quibble with Reising and Plumer. Habits form and congeal over decades. Historically, meat has been dear; it’s now cheap largely due to specific government action and inaction over the past 30 years.

People aren’t going to cut back on meat because EPA interns and political bloggers want them to. Curbing the ruinous practices of the meat industry starts with enforcing the regulations already on the books; and that means a new commitment on the part of Reising’s bosses at the EPA, as well as leaders at FDA and USDA, to make the meat industry pay for the messes it creates.

When that happens, people will surely eat less meat–and the meat that they do eat will tend to come from ecologically robust agriculture, and not the dark, Satanic meat mills that now dominate. Check out my recent post on what it would take to expand human-scale, pasture-based meat production.

Originally published on Grist

Meat industry luminaries including Don Tyson, Jimmy Dean, and the late Frank Perdue were inducted that evening, along with litigious feedlot owner Paul Engler, who you might remember for suing Oprah Winfrey over mad cow disease and getting spanked in court. By all accounts, it was a truly magical evening, what with Kurtis’ gripping keynote address offering up a 30 minute history of the American meat industry.

Despite the glitz, an undercurrent of worry pervaded the event. See, the meat industry was in the midst of its most horrific year on record, being seemingly besieged by all sides. Robert “Bo” Manly, CFO of pork titan Smithfield Foods put it best: “Anything that breathed lost money.”

Most of the meat industry’s pain was from a faltering economy that was creating countless “recession era vegetarians.” An August USDA report showed that beef, pork, and chicken production had all dropped substantially. That month, meat giant Tyson Foods warned its investors that quarterly sales had dropped 3 percent from a year before.

The end of burgers and fries as the quintessential American meal may be at hand. In America, the furthest you can possibly get from a McDonald’s is just 107 miles. But it appears the industry has overbuilt, and franchises are closing up left and right. In a sign of the times, one failed KFC was converted to a marijuana dispensary.

Nowhere was animal agribusiness’ pain more keenly felt than in the milk industry. American dairies were failing at such a rate that one observer predicted that a third would go out of business in 2009. To deal with the glut of milk, government and industry combined to organize a mass slaughter of more than 100,000 cows. Dairies spent 2009 looking for every excuse to cut herd sizes, and keep only the most productive cows. Overall, it appeared likely that more than 1.5 million cows would be slaughtered in 2009. The dairy industry’s pain was borne disproportionately by organic farmers, as cash-strapped consumers switched back to cheaper factory farmed milk.

Happily for US dairies, the USDA once again came riding to the rescue, this time with a $290 million taxpayer-funded bailout. Imagine if that money had instead been spent to subsidize the production of healthful fruits and vegetables, instead of producing more unwanted milk and nasty government cheese. Adding to the industry’s woes, agribusiness giant Cargill announced an invention that could dramatically reduce demand for milk: a plant-based substance that can be used to produce gooey, stretchy, totally realistic cheese.

The chicken industry likewise tightened its belt in 2009, eliminating its national chicken recipe contest. The grand prize—which once stood at $100,000—had been slashed to $50,000 before the contest was cancelled outright.

The pork industry had a horrifying year. Smithfield Foods’ CEO, Larry Pope, said, “I sort of feel like the world has been against us for 12 months.” In November, America’s 22nd largest pork producer abruptly quit the business. The company had an inventory of more than 30,000 breeder sows. USA Today reported in November that, starting in late 2007, pig producers were losing about $23 on each animal they raised.

Business was comparably bad at feedlots, with nearly all hemorrhaging cash. Twenty percent of feedlots were up for sale in 2009, but, given the beef industry’s bleak prospects, there were no buyers. When National Beef attempted to raise $276 million through an IPO this year, they were forced to withdraw the offering for lack of interest. The future looked even worse for ranchers in the UK, where it turned out the minister put in charge of rescuing the beef industry is a vegetarian.

Excerpted from Vegan.com, Read the rest here

There are things we’ve been doing for almost all of human history almost everywhere that we don’t want to do now…we kept other humans as slaves and we treated women as second class citizens, and we don’t do it anymore. We overcame it, and when we look back at those things that we did, we look back with shame… and I think the farming system we have now… the dominant kind of farming system, the kind that produces 99% of the animals we eat, is something that we are going to look back on with shame.

He got some other factoids out to the masses, too, like that 50 billion animals are being raised for meat in the world every year, and that as China increases its meat-eating, that number could double. He added that 99% of these animals are raised in factory-farmed conditions. Though Foer is a vegetarian, he said he didn’t think that absolutes were a productive way to produce change.

Foer’s book has been the focus of a lot of media attention for his in depth research and for the ethical questions it raises about the way we treat the animals we raise for meat. Two weeks ago he was on the television program Ellen (Ellen DeGeneres is also a famous vegetarian), and ended up starting a debate on the New York Times Green Inc. blog after he linked H1N1 to concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) — the possibility of which the mainstream media has for the most part ignored.

Vegetarianism has even made a foray onto the op-ed pages of the New York Times of late. A couple weeks back, Nicolette Hahn Niman, a vegetarian, environmental lawyer, and rancher, penned an op-ed warning the food movement that condemning meat-eating could be overly simplistic, taking the view that asking people to decrease meat consumption would not be as effective as asking them to buy ethically raised meat. She promptly drew criticism at Treehugger and The Atlantic (to which she responded with a rebuttal). Another op-ed contributor this past Sunday in the Times focused in specifically on the politics of veganism. It seems this discussion, taken into such public forums, shows that the conversation around plant-based diets, and the ethics of eating meat — in an era when great trespasses in animal welfare are occuring — is coming into its own.

This piece caused a flap on Civil Eats a couple weeks back and it got people talking, which is what is supposed to happen here. Responsible and passionate meat wholesalers and processors like Marissa Guggiana, who believe animals should be raised humanely in ways that are healthy for eaters, the soil, the water, and ecosystems weighed in, as did many readers.

As many commenters pointed out, the study I cited didn’t compare grass-finished animals raised the way Dave Evans at Marin Sun Farms or Joel Salatin raise theirs. It’s true that beef raised on pasture and fertilized by the animals can sequester carbon, but the problem is with the animals themselves. Ruminant animals emit methane gas, no matter what you feed them or how they are raised and the producers who use integrated pasture management techniques instead of chemicals are a minority. Methane gas is said to be 21-23 times more effective at warming the planet than CO2. For a long time I thought grass-finished beef was much better for the environment because of how it’s raised.

But strictly from a global warming perspective, I no longer believe that is true. The piece I wrote was about my own struggle with the ethics of eating meat (as it relates to the animals themselves and the environment—especially global warming) and the progression of ideas from the people who have influenced me and many others. Coming to terms with ruminant animal’s contribution to climate change is the next phase in the progression of my personal meat-eating ethics.

There are several producers local to my area who do it right. I will gladly eat the meat they provide (once in awhile). I am not now and have never been a vegetarian. I know that many Civil Eats readers feel the same and are members of meat CSAs and farmers’ market shoppers, friends of ranchers, or ranchers themselves. And I commend them.

It’s the other people I worry about.

In the face of a very real globalized, industrial food system, what choices will they make at the meat counter? Case in point: my local grocery store in Berkeley carries 3 different brands of grass-finished beef. One is from Uruguay, and the other two from the US, at least one is from California. Consumers who have a vague knowledge that grass-finished beef is more sustainable and healthier for them, will likely choose based on cost or where the beef is from. Not only will they not know how this beef was raised, but it won’t really matter from a methane emissions standpoint. We don’t even have to get into the environmental issues around buying beef from Uruguay. It’s a complex issue promising to get even more muddled as demand for sustainably raised meat grows and grocery and super stores get into the game. There will be a race to produce grass-fed beef as cheaply as possible through the same market forces that make organic milk at Wal-Mart affordable and organic only to the letter of the law. The latest news on global warming has me convinced that we cannot afford to simply replace grain fed animals with grass-fed ones. We need to eat a lot less meat. Or figure out how to deal with the methane.

Not everyone who wants to join a meat CSA can, due to supply constraints, and then there are plenty of people who wouldn’t care to. It’s about the methane as well as the transportation issues and the inefficiency inherent in eating animals instead of plants. I don’t advocate slaughtering all farm animals and requiring that everyone live on plants, but I think that we need to talk about this, and bring it out in the open so we can step up our already considerable efforts to develop a food system that is more sustainable and does not contribute more than its fair share (whatever that means) to global warming. Since livestock activities are said to be responsible for 18% of all greenhouse gas emissions, cows seem like a good place to start.

Photo: Skinnyde

So we can just never eat meat again? Is that what all the science is telling us? Before you start gagging down fake bacon or eating your al pastor tacos behind a garbage bin on the other side of town out of sustainable food shame, let’s talk about the real problem.

Yes, beef is a hog when it comes to energy. And the Science News report correctly points out that it takes more energy input to output one pound of pasture-raised beef than it does a pound of feedlot CAFO Schwarzen-burger. Yes, the developing world is getting a taste for the cow, like blue jeans or Michael Jackson before, which could catapult the problem.

Don’t get hysterical! I just can’t blame those adorable sad-eyed critters. It isn’t the cow we need to nix. It is our centralized, monolithic, soulless food system. Sure, it takes a larger patch of earth and more calories to raise an animal on pasture. However, there are some benefits to many grass-fed operations that are more long-term, like biodiversity and sustainability. I know many ranchers that don’t fertilize with anything besides good old, nutrient rich poop.

The real energy suck in the beef industry is transportation, processing and packaging. If you want to save some carbon, help develop a local food system where animals travel relatively short distances to slaughter and then to butcher and then to consumer. Start a meat CSA! Buy a whole animal and start a garden and don’t drive to the grocery store so much, where you’ll be tempted to purchase other carbon-licious snacks.

And another thing: there ARE other animals to eat. As Science News mentioned, pigs are more efficient on feed and in breeding. They also yield more edible meat from the carcass. Eat some lardo, save the ozone. But there are also lambs and goats and chickens. According the USDA, Americans ate 28.1 billion pounds of beef in 2007.We eat about 100^th of that amount of lamb every year. If we diversify our meat choices, we would choose animals that are naturally less energy intensive and destructive than the Almighty Cow.

When I worry about the Third World being as gluttonous as us, it isn’t ribeyes that dance in my mind, it is factory farms and processing plants the size of small cities. The ‘blanding’ of our taste away from meat with any flavor is part of the institutionalization of a food system where everything comes from some other place. A place where styrofoam gently encases every machine-cut morsel.

Of course, it is crucial that everyone, from policy makers to home cooks, thinks about the implications of our food choices. That is a bedrock of the sustainability movement. And I encourage the discussion of whether, on a commercial scale, grass-fed beef is viable.

In the end, though, I think we tend to worry so much that a good idea isn’t perfect, in the meantime continuing to do something we know is bad. On my ethical calculator, I end up with the following equation: buy local from someone you trust who treats their animal with respect + cook all parts of the animal to value it’s contribution to your well-being = a hell of a lot better choice than anything from a feedlot.

Diversity is health, in living things and in solutions. Grass fed practices may not be the only right solution for a hungry world, but are one part of a better world.

The clamor is getting louder: Cows are bad news for the environment.

It’s astounding how far we’ve come in a few short years. It all started in spring 2006 with Michael Pollan telling us in The Omnivore’s Dilemma to think about how the animals we eat are raised. Because of the inherent cruelty, and human and environmental health problems associated with factory farming and CAFOs, thoughtful eaters like me, and many of the omnivorous people reading this, started eating pasture raised chickens and eggs, and grass-finished beef. It was more expensive, but I told myself I was facing up to the moral complexities of meat eating and it felt good knowing that the animals and the land were treated better in the production of my food. I embraced this more mindful way of eating and enjoyed treating meat as a special occasion food to be given my utmost respect and attention.

Later that same year, we learned that the food system is responsible for more greenhouse gasses (about one-third) than any other sector, including transportation, and that livestock is responsible for 18% of that. Michael Pollan published another book telling us to eat real food, not too much at that, and mostly plants. More recently Mark Bittman published Food Matters, which is essentially an environmental guide to eating, adopting some of the same principals we learned from Pollan (with recipes). Along the way, Bittman found that eating lower on the food chain more often and cutting out processed food, helped him lose 35 pounds, lower his cholesterol and blood sugar, and vastly improve his health. Then, back in December, here on Civil Eats, Paula Crossfield talked about eating less meat to lower our carbon emissions.

Now I’m going to reveal something that will make conscious, occasional, and passionate meat eaters very sad. While we’ve been enjoying our once or twice a month allotment of grass-finished beef in the form of a small burger, or modest portions of savory stew, or spicy chili, the climate scientists have been doing their work. They’ve recently discovered that, from a global warming perspective, so called sustainable and humanely raised pasture reared beef is no better. In fact, it’s worse.

This story in Science News details the findings revealed during a recent panel discussion at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Nathan Pelletier of Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia said that greenhouse gas emissions for grass-finished livestock are roughly 50% higher than for grain-finished livestock. Wait, really?

Apparently cows that are fed grass throughout their lives simply eat more. So when you raise cows on pasture, you’re adding more inputs into an already inefficient production system. Pelletier’s research also shows that intensive pasture management, fertilization and renovation cause emissions of their own. And of course, pasture requires more land area (and sometimes deforestation) than CAFOs. I think what we are seeing here is that grass-finished beef is now big business. Due, no doubt, to the demand caused by books like The Omnivore’s Dilemma, we’re seeing grass-finished beef that more closely resembles factory farming than either Pollan or the grass farming hero of his book, Joel Salatin, ever intended. Turns out the Sierra Club, in a prescient piece from 2004, asked if grass-fed beef was merely a diversion from the reality that beef production, no matter much we might want it to be different, is the most inefficient way to raise food.

So what’s a conscious eater to do? With this new information chipping away at my meat-eating philosophy, I think I’ll have to take these new thoughts and ponder them carefully over a lunch of lentils and rice (with lots of caramelized onions). For further reading on the subject check out this piece in Living Green Magazine.

Photo: TerData

Rain is pounding San Francisco when I visit Kate’s house. We connected online, through a neighborhood group, and I’m stopping by to check out her hens because perhaps foolishly I’m considering getting some of my own. I’ve been puzzling over whether urban hens are pets or part of a living pantry. I have no idea what to expect. But visiting real birds seems like a good enough start.

As a beginning, it’s not that auspicious. When we step into the backyard the clouds open up even further and we’re pelted with hail. Four hens, bobbing about the garden in a loose group, seem unfazed.

The entire lush and green backyard is on an upslope and looks out across the Castro district and a San Francisco panorama to Bernal Heights, a semi-suburban neighborhood in the city’s geographic center. As I stand in the yard, two hawks circle overhead. The lawn and the neat, framed garden beds are smattered with chicken poop.

Kate has four birds. Two planned, two unplanned. The first pair came to her last year, from a science program at the school her young kids attend. Families from the school often adopt a couple of birds once summer rolls around, she says. The second pair were adopted later. A family who’d also taken in a couple of chicks asked Kate to babysit their birds for a week. She agreed. But soon after, they called, hoping she would keep them — their deck, they realized, didn’t offer much space for growing chicks.

The hens now roost and lay eggs in a spacious, two-room coop Kate’s husband designed and built and have a free run in the garden during the day. Given that each hen typically lays at least an egg a day and that they’re not particularly expensive to feed and house, I’m not sure I’d have given up on young chicks so quickly. Of course, at this point I’m also no more than talk.

Later, when the rain has subsided, I wander back outside with a couple of slices of American cheese for the hens. I’m trying to take this seriously, because it’s my first unchaperoned encounter with hens, and so I suppress the urge to eat cheese and trudge through the light rain to the coop. The hens crowd me, wheezing and clucking and snapping up the torn-up slices, and then wander off when it’s clear I’m no longer useful.

Yet they’re more sociable than I’d expected. And expressive, too, as they flick their heads from side to side and wobble around the yard in search of food.

Kate agrees. If she’s working outside the hens come and sit near her. Hang out. Cluck. “They’re creatures of habit,” she says. “The easiest pets I’ve had.”

Uh-oh. Pets? She’s hit upon the very question that’s been nagging me.

***

Across the city, in Bernal Heights, Maureen’s three hens scratch in a low wire and molded plastic coop filled with paper scraps, carrot tops and a fair scattering of poop.

Sustaining the chickens and garden is full-time work, and Maureen’s full-time job. But this is no pastoral whimsy. Her urban garden also cuts her family’s food costs. In fact, she’s a little embarrassed at having paid for the coop, an ocean-blue Eglu, because virtually everything else in her yard is salvaged, reused, or donated. The birds muck about in torn-up phone books, gleaned from nearby streets. They eat kitchen scraps. And they aren’t coddled.

“They’re not pets,” Maureen says. She doesn’t name her hens, doesn’t let her son name them, and is adamant that the three birds will be processed.

Processed? For a second I’m thrown by the term and think of Foster Farms, Pilgrim’s Pride, Oscar Meyer… Like “harvest,” it’s one of those apt but elusive terms commonly used by people who spend a lot of time cheek-to-jowl with the food they eat. It’s a clever term, too — it masks the fact the hens will be slaughtered while also serving as a reminder that some hens aren’t pets, but rather animals walking a slow road toward the dinner table.

Maureen is calmly matter-of-fact about her birds. She’s clearly deeply committed to transforming her yard in to a self-sustaining garden, to transforming her young son’s understanding of the life cycle of food, upending her family’s entire pattern of consumption. Her small garden was little more than a concrete slab until she went at it with a cement buster a year-and-a-half ago. Now, blueberry stalks grow in wine barrels. Peas climb a small trellis in a corner of the yard. Broccoli, kale, carrots, garlic and leeks are patches of green amid old planks, torn-up newspaper and rabbit droppings, a garden-ready fertilizer.

Gutting the chickens isn’t easy, she says. It’s dark inside the bird and you’re in there with your hand feeling your way around, trying not to bust the gall bladder because the spilled bile spoils the flavor of the meat. You have to tug the organs to get them out.

Once I found a whole line of eggs inside a hen, she adds. “It was like one of those Russian dolls.”

Oh babushka! Could I do this — gut, drain and pluck a dead chicken? Would I have to? Can’t I just hang onto the birds until they’re doddering around and die of their own accord?

Maureen’s comments are a wake-up call. She is utterly practical and I’m realizing I’m not. I’d figured I could probably take a deep breath and kill a bird — if I had to. But in my fear of harvesting a hen I hadn’t thought beyond the chopping block. I remind myself that I don’t particularly like chicken meat. Part of me, I realize, is bothered by the thought of the work that goes into raising — and eventually processing — hens. But another part of me is bothered at being bothered about the responsibility of it all. I’d clearly been thinking of chickens as egg dispensers, not pets. Harvesting them was the elephant in the room.

Later that afternoon, I step outside alone to take another look at the Eglu. The hens scatter nervously as I approach. Maybe I’m imagining it, but these birds don’t seem like pets.

As I leave, I backtrack to a poster hanging on Maureen’s kitchen wall, an original and a gift from her husband. “Plant a Victory Garden. Our Food is Fighting. A Garden Will Make Your Rations Go Further,” it declares.

***

Over at Bernal Beast, a nearby pet supply store, I talk about the full monty hen kill scenario with Abe, a store coworker. “I think it’d be kind of tedious,” he remarks, of having to pluck and prepare a bird. He has a point. The chicken is likely to be tough. A soup bird. No more than a meal or two.

Tony, the store’s owner, is more circumspect. He doesn’t own chickens himself but calls his customers “forethinkers.” “They can see that not only nutritionally but economically it’s the way to go,” he says. “It also goes along with having a garden.”

He thinks he’s onto something too. Demand for hen supplies has been rising over the past one-and-half to two years, if his sales are anything to go by. He now stocks 50-pound bags of scratch and crumble chicken feed. Customers come in from all over San Francisco, he says.

He seems wistful when he remembers the hens his extended family raised when he was growing up. “They just have the whole world to themselves. They’re just hysterical.”

***

I’m getting the sense this sentiment is pretty widespread. Dana, a friend of a friend, raises hens on a small urban lot in Gardnerville, near Lake Tahoe.

Her two 11-month-old Rhode Island Reds and her dog hang out — supervised — in the backyard together.

“I let them in the yard as they enjoy eating grass and bugs and if they can’t get back into their coop, they come up onto my deck and come to the window and holler at me,” she writes in an email.

But processing them? She doesn’t see herself killing unproductive hens. She’s considering retiring older birds to a friend’s 2-acre property on the other side of town.

***

So am I back to square one? Can I get out of harvesting my hens? Or am I just lazy and reluctant to face up to what farming is really about? I call up the first person I’d spoken to about chickens.

“I can’t imagine killing them,” Jeannine says. Her young daughters helped raise the soft, fluffy pullets in their home this winter and while the hens, now outside, don’t have names, the family knows each one by the quirks of its personality.

Raising birds, she says, is a fantasy of living in a rustic setting that can’t ever be played out. But it’s practical too, she adds. After all there are the eggs. And raising hens has inspired her to think about making other things, like a victory garden.

We are old friends and it’s her three hens, a Wyandotte, a black sex-link and a Buff Orpington, that have inspired me to try raising my own. One afternoon we sit on an old, salvaged cast-iron bench at the top of her yard watching the chickens go about their business. We’re inside an enclosure that crosses into her next-door neighbor’s yard, and which is shared between six hens in all.

Eric, Jeannine’s husband, tells a story about his grandfather, who as a young man immigrated to the California from Germany by way of a sponsorship that attested he could farm chickens. He had no idea how to raise hens, Eric says. He was busy reading chicken farming books on the ship. The older generation, he adds, are not caught up in the new urban romance of chicken-rearing.

It occurs to me that raising hens is a different way of being “practical” about food. If picking up a dozen from the supermarket saves time and money, how practical is it to build a coop from scratch, to commit to cleaning birdshit from a coop, to be OK with slowing egg consumption as the hens get older or the weather colder? I’d probably be happy to build a coop, to clean it, to wait for eggs. But chickens as pets? Is that practical? If I get attached to the hens, harvesting them at a year old seems unlikely. So when egg production tapers off within a year or two, then what? I’d hate to see my new hens as broken egg machines. I realize I’m still pretty entrenched in the rigid efficiencies of food production. Keeping old hens as pets might not be going the whole urban egg hog, but it seems the most practical path for now, a cautious reality of this generation’s new urban farm.

Of course, that’s a primary theme of New York Times columnist Mark Bittman’s new book, Food Matters. He writes convincingly about the benefits of switching to a more plant-based diet, asserting, “By reducing the amount of meat we eat, we can grow and kill fewer animals. That means less environmental damage, including climate change; fewer antibiotics in the water and food supplies; fewer pesticides and herbicides; reduced cruelty; and so on. It also means better health for you.”

Bittman joins Michael Pollan in his crusade to get us to eat lower on the food chain. After all, Pollan’s In Defense of Food last year popularized among sustainable food advocates the slogan, “Eat Food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”

But it’s not just food icons urging that we lay off the animals a bit in favor of a saner, more humane and environmentally friendlier diet. Even local government officials, recognizing the importance of reducing the number of animals in our diets, are joining the chorus. In the land of half-smokes and hot dogs, Chicago’s health commissioner, Dr. Terry Mason, made headlines last month when he asked city residents to go vegetarian during January. Indeed, this is Mason’s fourth year trying to bring Chicago’s waistlines in shape and blood pressure and cholesterol levels down by urging a vegetarian start to the new near.

And in Ohio, the official Green Cincinnati Plan task force is asking that citizens reduce their global warming contribution by choosing to eat more plants and fewer animals. The city is reportedly contemplating making t-shirts to promote the initiative that read “Fight Global Warming, One Bite at a Time” and “Cooling the Earth …With My Fork!”

Of all the changes we generally think about in order to shrink our carbon footprint, cutting back on meat, eggs, and dairy may not be the first thing that comes to mind. But it should be.

The United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization found that the animal agriculture sector actually generates more greenhouse gases than the entire transportation sector, including cars, trucks, SUVs, airplanes and ships.

That’s to say that, of course, we should be concerned about whether we drive a gas guzzler or a gas sipper (if we drive at all), but at the same time we simply cannot ignore what we put in our mouths three—or more—times a day. Every time we sit down to eat, we can control how much we want to contribute to global warming, and by eating more plants and fewer animals, we can take a positive step in the right direction.

In addition to the clear environmental and public health benefits, choosing more vegetarian options is also helpful in preventing cruelty to animals. More than a million animals (nearly all chickens) are slaughtered for food every single hour in the United States alone. Most of them are raised in conditions so cruel and inhumane that few of us would even want to bear witness to their misery, let alone partake in it. So long as we’re raising animals in such vast numbers, extreme cruelty will continue to be the norm. As Mark Bittman writes, “If you hate factory farming (and you should), your primary concern should be reducing consumption.”

Very few issues have such clear connections among public health, animal welfare, environmental concern, and food sustainability. Whether we support one, some, or all of these movements, the time couldn’t be better to look down at our plates and recognize that we can simply live and let live—in so many ways—just by opting for the veggie burger.

Editor’s note: Listen to Mark Bittman speak about his new book Food Matters on yesterday’s Leonard Lopate Show on New York Public Radio:

Veteran cookbook author and New York Times columnist Mark Bittman knows his food — and what he dishes out is smart, contemporary and consistently delicious. For years, his books – including “How to Cook Everything” and “The Best Recipes in the World” (his “Chile Shrimp” is one of my husband’s all-time favorite dishes) have been permanent fixtures on my book shelves, and his kitchen savvy has informed my own style of cooking.

Naturally, I was excited to read his latest work, “Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating,” released just as 2008 came to a close. In keeping with so many of Bittman’s other books, the recipes are appealing, straightforward and relatively accessible for busy, health-minded home cooks. But this time around, Bittman gives us some food for thought in addition to his recipes.

The relatively small book (his “Everything” titles are encyclopedic tomes) is divided into two parts, with the first half focused on a complex, interrelated web that includes the state of our industrialized food system, our resulting eating habits over the past generation, our collective physical health and the health of the planet. “For our own sakes as well as for the sake of the earth, we need to change the way we eat,” Bittman asserts at the end of his intro.

The following 70 pages support his argument that we must reclaim our diets and practice “sane eating,” but, he says, it’s something we must do ourselves, not “expect Big Food or the government to help us fix it.” For an avid reader of sustainable literature, he’s preaching to the choir, and I’m mumbling “Amen” as I work my way through the book. But – and here’s a big but – does (or will) this message, as delivered, resonate outside my food-obsessed universe, among the die-hard meat lovers who dunk donuts into their morning coffee and for whom the words “organic” and “sustainable” may as well be Greek?

Here’s what food writer Fuchsia Dunlop says in her recent review in the Washington Post Book World: “One suspects that Bittman is preaching to the semi-converted. The real challenge, surely, lies in persuading people who don’t read such books to invest time in preparing food for their families and reminding them how to do it (an immense task, as the British TV chef Jamie Oliver showed in his recent “Ministry of Food” series).”

There’s no doubt that Bittman’s heart (and message) is in the right place, but this book feels like two halves of two different books grafted together, asking lots of questions but offering relatively few answers. Well articulated, Part One’s plea to change our food system makes us hungry for an action plan, which is not fully realized in Part Two. Although the second half plays to Bittman’s strengths as a cookbook writer, the month of meal plans and accompanying recipes feel awkwardly attached to a political essay and without context to the mission which he clearly spells out on page 69: “Eat less meat, and fewer animal products in general. Eat fewer refined carbohydrates, like white bread, cookies, white rice (although try telling that to a family whose diet is based on the convenience of highly processed foods) and pretzels. Eat way less junk food: soda, chips, snack food, candy, and so on. And eat far more vegetables, legumes, fruits, and whole grains – as much as you can.”

I’m wondering, for example, why he doesn’t offer sustainable sourcing suggestions for the bacon in his yummy-sounding spinach and sweet potato salad with warm bacon dressing. (There’s an extensive bibliography but no list of resources, as is thoroughly done in “Eat Where You Live,” by Lou Bendrick) And why, if he “assumes, however, that if you want a grilled steak or a bowl of ice cream you won’t be looking here to find it” does he include a recipe for Thai beef salad, which calls for grilled flank steak?

As I’ve already mentioned, Bittman had me at “hello,” and I reckon you feel similarly, fellow Civil Eats fan. But what about the majority of Americans left out in the pasture scratching their heads about what the next step is supposed to be? For those just getting started on this “sane eating” journey, a bit more guidance may be in order. His “shop where you like and buy what looks freshest and most appealing to you” advice on page 104 is sound, but leaves the reader without a road map or a wellspring from which to jump. And how do you rally the eaters living in a food desert – rural areas with nary a farm market in sight or in the inner city where supermarkets are more an exception than the rule?

A noble attempt indeed to connect the dots between manifesto and mealtime, but the lines in this case are fragmented still and leaving us wanting more.