If you eat meat, consider where it's coming from, says this farmer's book

Star Tribune (Minneapolis) (MCT) - In her first book, "Hit by a Farm," author Catherine Friend wrote with eloquence and humor about how her city slicker self came to love life on a Zumbrota, Minn., sheep farm. In her new book, "The Compassionate Carnivore: Or, How to Keep Animals Happy, Save Old MacDonald's Farm, Reduce Your Hoofprint, and Still Eat Meat" (Da Capo Press, $24), Friend uses that first-hand experience to gently lead consumers toward adopting a sustainable approach to buying beef, lamb, pork and poultry. She took a few moments away from her farm's busy lambing season to speak with us.

Q: Why do you prefer to think of yourself as a carnivore rather than as an omnivore?

A: There's something a little more meaty about the word carnivore (laughs). I'm not concerned about the vegetable part of my diet, I'm more concerned about the meat part, and carnivore tends to remind me of that.

Q: You wrote, "I continue to farm because I love animals." What does that mean?

A: It goes back to why I wrote the book in the first place. I wasn't raised on a farm, and there are plenty of hard days here, but I'm here because I've fallen in love with the animals. We've stopped paying attention to what meat is, where it comes from, how it's raised. We're so disconnected that meat becomes a very easy thing to waste, we forget that it's an animal. But we can shift the attention now and then, can't we? If you do that once a week, or even once a month, you're ahead of the game.

Q: What's with that chapter on the "F" word?

A: That's "F" as in feedlot. It has become a dirty word, which is why I was shocked to learn that most farms, like ours, have feedlots, although they're smaller, and most often they're used only in the winter. It's not a bad word until you start talking about scale; there's a big difference between 50 animals versus 50,000 animals.

Q: Are there any plusses to factory farms?

A: Well, they produce a lot of meat, and it's very cheap. The negative side of those cheap prices is that they don't accurately reflect the cost to the environment or to the animals themselves. Farmers will raise what we want them to raise, and right now what we're telling them is that we want them to raise a lot of meat, and sell it cheaply. When we tell them that we're willing to pay more for humanely raised meat, then that's what they'll do.

Q: In the book you wrote about hearing the sounds of the worms on the farm for the first time. Noise-making worms, who knew?

A: It's a weird sound, like tinkling glass, but with a softer edge to it. I'm not a nature girl, so getting excited about earthworms is pretty bizarre for me. We have 53 acres, and it was heavily farmed with corn and soybeans; the soil was pretty dead. We stopped all that and just grazed _ no chemicals _ and eventually it started coming back. I never thought of soil as a living organism, but it is. It's a sign of health if the earthworms are there, it's a sign that we're doing something good.

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Q: Will becoming a compassionate carnivore mean that I'll have to give up the convenience foods that I have become grudgingly dependent upon?

A: The more convenient food is for us, the less convenient it is for the animal and for the environment. It would be great if the convenience food companies would catch on, but their scale is just too large. I'm hoping that people reach out to farmers and replace some of their factory meat, even if it's once a week or even once a month. I'm just as busy as the next person, plus I'm a little lazy and I'm not a good cook, so I know that it takes work.

Q: So how can I become a compassionate carnivore in five minutes or less? Pretend you're writing one of those aggravating how-to articles for Men's Health or Cosmo.

A: Gee, we're in trouble now (laughs). It's the steps I outline in the book: Start paying attention, stop wasting so much meat, order less at restaurants, use your leftovers. The hardest for me to swallow is to say that, if you can't do any of these things, then you might want to eat less meat. We're eating too much meat because it's so cheap. If we were paying the cost that it takes to raise animals humanely, we would be eating a lot less. I'd rather eat less meat if I'm paying a price that more closely reflects all of the costs involved in raising it.

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QUOTE FROM BOOK

"One problem, and it's a big one: a cow is not a widget. Neither is a pig or a beef steer or a chicken. They need to eat, drink, and defecate, and their quality of life will certainly deteriorate if there are fifty thousand animals in the pen with them instead of fifty, or if they are kept in cages or feedlots instead of allowed to move around. Yet modern agriculture sees them as nothing more than factory parts used to put together widgets called chicken Alfredo or beef Wellington or pork roast. There is a cost associated with treating animals this way, but that cost isn't borne by the company, it's borne by the animals themselves.

"So while we've been asleep at the wheel, secure in the cozy belief that our meat is being raised by Little Bo Peep and Little Boy Blue on Old MacDonald's farm, something else entirely different has grown up in its place. This something different is a place few humans see unless they work there, but it's where billions of animals spend every hour of every day for most of their short lives."

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From "The Compassionate Carnivore" by Catherine Friend

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© 2008, Star Tribune (Minneapolis)