Rancher, attorney and writer Nicolette Hahn Niman discusses why our food system needs to operate more in synch with nature
Acres U.S.A. Your book Defending Beef first came out seven years ago, but you’re releasing a revised and expanded version. What’s changed in those seven years that required you to come out with another version?
Niman. When I first wrote the book, I thought it was really timely. I thought, this is an issue that’s out there, where people are talking about it, thinking about it. And that was true, but it turns out that the issue became more topical. There was more discussion. There were more actions being taken — positive and negative — surrounding beef and cattle and grazing.
I kept thinking I’d love to update the book, but I didn’t do anything about it, and then my publisher, Chelsea Green, contacted me and said, “Could you redo this book and make it up-to-date?” Initially I told them I’d probably need about three months, but I began working on it — going through it page by page, line by line — and I came back to them and said I actually needed about a year.
There’s a huge amount that’s still there from the original version, but my thinking has evolved quite a bit. I didn’t realize that until I started going through the book. I wanted the current version to reflect that evolution in my thinking. And I also think the public conversation and understanding of all of these issues has evolved quite a bit.
It was a pretty labor-intensive process of preparing it for a reissue, and I’m very proud of the new book. Quite honestly, I think it’s a better book, too, because I had that opportunity.
Acres U.S.A. In the seven years that have passed from the first edition of the book and this revised edition, there’s been almost a change in consciousness brought on by a whole host of things, including some prominent, popular documentary films like Kiss the Ground that promote a certain kind of regenerative agriculture that includes livestock.
But then you think of someone like Bill Gates coming out and saying, “We can’t eat meat anymore — we’ve got to eat alternative meat.” In the last seven years, “plant-based” has become a household word that wasn’t in anyone’s consciousness when your book came out.
Now cattle are public enemy number one. They’re causing climate change. They’ve become a symbol for the global effort to address this sort of emergency that faces us right now.
Niman. That’s exactly what I was seeing as well. On the one hand, there was more focus on this idea that meat is inherently problematic — from a lot of different perspectives, but certainly from a climate change standpoint. And, therefore, the solution is to get rid of the animals in our food system and to create these processed-food alternatives that are faux meats, basically.
And on the other hand, the hopeful part of the story, from my perspective, is that you had documentaries like Sustainable, Kiss the Ground and Sacred Cow that are saying, “Actually, the food system, to be truly ecologically vibrant and sustainable, needs to be much more interrelated, more diverse, more complex. We need plants and animals together. We have to have animal impact.” So that conversation was evolving a long way from where it was ten years ago or seven years ago.
And on another hand, we had what I would think of as the wrong solution — the oversimplified one. As H.L. Mencken said, for every complex problem, there’s a simple solution that’s wrong. I think that’s happening a lot, too.
The reason why I find the quick and easy solutions — like everyone becoming vegan — so problematic is because it’s going to lead to a whole new host of problems. This argument I’m trying to make is that we need an agriculture and a diet that’s much more connected to our evolution as a species — to the way ecosystems work and the way we need our food system to look more like ecosystems and to be more connected with our ecosystems and our landscapes.
As Charles Massey says in Call of the Reed Warbler, we need to understand the actual function of the landscape — what it’s supposed to be doing in terms of its natural functions — and to work with that in harmony. It’s a pretty radical rethinking of agriculture that is so urgently needed, but those are complex ideas and so it’s harder and harder to make that message heard as people feel more and more of a sense of urgency and they want that quick, immediate, silver-bullet response.
But amid all of this din of voices, I do feel a lot of hope because of a few things. My husband, Bill Niman, and I gave the talk at the Young Farmers Conference at Stone Barns a few years ago and there were hundreds of young people there, all in their 20s and 30s. We talked to many of them, and there was not one single person there that I talked to that had grown up on a farm. I’m not saying that’s a good thing. I want young people from farms as well to be going into regenerative agriculture, but this was a really interesting phenomenon that I hadn’t fully grasped until that day of young people that had already begun a career. They’d gone to college. In many cases, they were in finance and banking and all kinds of non-agricultural careers.
They were really fired up about this idea of regenerative agriculture and this idea of complex systems where you have animals, you have a diversity of crops — everything’s connected and trying to work like the natural model. I am quite confident you couldn’t have found a young-farmer group 20 or 30 years ago where you had people talking about that — at least not a large number of them.
I see this new generation, with this very new ethos, coming into farming. I see chefs and consumers more and more concerned and interested in this idea of food from regenerative farmers. I think people are grasping that this complexity, this reflection of nature, this role of animals—they’re getting that that’s part of it. And so, while on the one hand I’m discouraged by some of the trends that are out there, I’m also very heartened by some of them.
Acres U.S.A. It’s important also to define what you’re not defending. The title of the book is not “Defending CAFO.” It’s not “Defending Industrial Meat Production.” It’s Defending Beef. Specifically, it’s defending a certain kind of production style — call it ecological, call it regenerative. How would you define what you’re not defending?
Niman. My whole perspective is trying to understand the natural world and how it functions. I’ve never thought it would be a good idea for humans to try to dominate it or erase what’s there and then put our own systems in. I come from this ethos, from early childhood — really, from my parents — my father was someone who took long walks every day in a large, wooded area near our house. He was a history professor, and he used to walk every day to and from work, even in the snow, because he just loved being outdoors. I was raised with that ethos from the beginning, and then I majored in biology in college, and then I worked as an attorney, but specifically as an attorney for environmental organizations for several years.
My whole perspective is that humans are too disconnected from nature and our understanding of natural systems and the importance of them and how we need to work with them, rather than try to subvert them or dominate them or erase them. I’ve been living on a ranch now for the past 18 years, and I’ve been working in this space for a long time. More and more — from things I’ve seen and read, and people have told me and videos I’ve watched, and things I’ve seen all over the world — I’m more and more persuaded that what we really need to try to do in food systems thinking is to try to understand how natural systems work and try to model them.
They obviously will never look exactly like a natural system, but to try to understand their wisdom and their beauty and how they recycle everything and how they regenerate everything, how the life is the key. I love the way Gabe Brown says it. He says, when he was part of a conventional farm, he used to think every morning, okay, what do I need to kill today? What insect? What weed? What fungus? His whole mindset, he realized, was shifting to: What kind of life am I going to be seeing out there today that I haven’t seen before? And what’s going to be flourishing out there today? And it’s so true. That’s such a brilliant way of putting it.
So, my mindset has always been, how do we make this biologically flourishing environment? And, unfortunately, mainstream meat production has not been in that mindset, at least in the industrialized world, for a very long time. Although cattle and beef gets more attention than the other sectors generally — negative attention — I actually think that, from having been on dozens of farms and ranches over the last 20 years, the people who are raising cattle are often the ones that are most connected to their local environments.
They know the climates and the land and the history. They know the wildlife, they know the soils — because they’re literally living out there. The cattle are still basically being raised outdoors. They’re not the feedlot operators. They’re the ones that are raising the cattle out on the rangeland and in the pastures, and so they’re out there with their animals — versus (and I’ve been on quite a few of these as well) the large confinement operations. The animals are literally not even outside anymore. The people that I’ve met on those places never talk to me about what’s happening with the local wildlife or the riparian sounds or things like that. There’s just a whole different lexicon that you’ll encounter.
I believe that people who are involved in beef, for the most part, are pretty ecologically aware and focused. I actually think there’s a false dichotomy between environmentalists — the people advocating for the good planetary stewardship — and the beef community, because these are people who care passionately about the earth and about the land.
What I think we need to do is to have a recognition that there’s a lot that we need to better, and I would include our own ranch. We’re always talking about, “How can we do this better?” and asking ourselves that question on a daily basis. I believe in the importance of these grazing animals as part of ecosystems and, as Alan Savory says, having domesticated animals be the proxies for the disappeared wild grazing animals that once covered so much of the globe. If we think of it that way, and we say to ourselves, “Okay, how do we manage these animals in such ways that they’re having the kind of ecosystem impact that the disappeared wild grazing animals once would’ve had?” — if we start from that space, then I think there’s tremendous potential for positive ecological impact from cattle.
And, actually, for the most part, grazing is not a negative impact. It’s being done not nearly well enough, but from my perspective, the collective ecological impact of the large-scale monocrop that’s creating biological dead zones in large portions of the Upper Midwest is worse. I was driving by a huge potato-growing area in Idaho a few years ago, and it was like a moonscape. It was just this gray, dusty area — the crop wasn’t growing at that time — and there was nothing there. It was lifeless. I’ve never seen a cattle ranch look like that. You always have some vegetative cover. You still have wildlife there.
I quote Wes Jackson in my book, saying that the worst-managed cattle ranch is probably still better than a lot of the crop production that’s out there. I really believe that we have to think in these bigger-picture ways of ecosystems. When we do it like that, it’s so obvious that the animals are very important.
Acres U.S.A. What you’re talking about reminded me of a quote from Wendell Berry — once plants and animals were raised together, on the same farm, which, therefore, neither produced unmanageable surpluses of manure to be wasted and to pollute the water supply, nor was dependent on such quantities of commercial fertilizer. The genius of American farm experts is very well demonstrated here. They can take a solution and divide it neatly into two problems.
Niman. Yes. It’s so funny that you quote him because I literally was posting something on Facebook this morning from Wendell Berry, and I was saying he’s the most articulate person in America today in writing. I would say in any category, but definitely in agriculture. He has such a beautiful way with words. Yeah, that’s exactly it.
All of this segmentation, oversimplification and separation that characterize modern agriculture has taken these complex, diverse systems that even still existed on most American farms 50 years ago — not that long ago — and that doesn’t mean they were doing everything perfectly, but the fundamental way it was operating was not as a constant producer of massive pollution problems and odors for the community and all the other things that came about when we separated and segmented and oversimplified.
I had this epiphany when I was watching a philosopher and physicist, Fritjof Capra, speak a few years ago, and he said, “Nothing in nature is linear. Only humans create linear machines. In nature, everything is connected.” I had already written Defending Beef, and I thought, he just explained exactly the whole argument of Defending Beef. It was perfect.
When we say, “We’re going to produce soy here. We’re going to produce wheat here. We’re going to produce chickens over here,” we’re taking that whole notion of all this connectedness of living organisms and we’re just ripping it apart and saying, “That no longer matters.” The Wendell Berry quote talks about the importance of essentially the nutrients contained in the manure, but, honestly, I think we’ve realized in recent years that so much of the research on soil health and the impacts of grazing and so forth have shown that it’s a lot more than that — that there’s a whole catalyzing effect that having the animals on the land does to the soils.
The nutrients in the manure and the urine are part of it, but it goes much deeper. Humans around the globe have known this for a really long time. The bison in the Upper Midwest is such a great example of this, where you have this biomass that’s moving through and grazing and doing the pooing and peeing and everything. We didn’t fully understand all of what it was doing, but we could see ecological health resulting from that impact.
And so now, I think, scientists are beginning to dig down in there with their microscopes and their high-tech equipment and they’ve discovered things like glomalin, which is a substance that coats the root fingers — tiny little hyphae down in the soil — and facilitates the exchanges between the plant and the soil and allows the soil to get the carbon from the photosynthetic process, and it allows the plant to get the nutrients that it needs in exchange.
No one knew about glomalin until just a couple of decades ago, when USDA soil scientists discovered it. We’re starting to understand the science more now, but I think humans around the world knew for a long time that animals were an important part of healthy ecosystems in whatever form. So the idea that you would somehow separate all of these things and simplify the production of every type of food — right away, to me, it’s really problematic.
Now we’re seeing the effects. There’s more and more recognition that all of the agricultural chemicals that have replaced natural cycles of fertility — not just the nutrients, but also that biological life in the soils that are stimulated by animal impact — I think we’re starting to see that. We’re starting to recognize that you can’t just act like these are factories.
Food production places are not factories. They’re more like ecosystems. That’s the whole fundamental shift I think we need to make. We need to go away from an industrial mindset more to an ecological, ecosystem-based kind of thinking.
Acres U.S.A. When you think about the American dinner plate, it’s such a space of anxiety and uncertainty. People just don’t know what to eat anymore. In the past, it was something that you received through cultural wisdom — your grandmother taught you how to eat.
On the one hand, you have a vegan who’s arguing their viewpoint of why you should eat plant-based. And then on the other hand, you have people who say, “I eat nothing but ribeyes, and you should, too.” Both seem a little extreme. How do you sort of sort through that? What is healthy? What should we be eating?
Niman. Yeah, it’s a very interesting question. My parents were both very health conscious as well as interested in being outdoors. My mother had a large garden and she used to bake and cook a lot, so I kind of had this idea from early on that the way you eat is really closely related to your health and how you feel. And I’m really grateful for that. That’s been really helpful for me my whole life.
They also paid attention to a lot of what was being written in the mainstream media, and so sometimes that led them astray. I remember when my parents decided that we shouldn’t buy butter anymore and we should just have margarine; now I look back and realize, “No, I don’t actually think that was a good choice.”
What’s odd is this whole idea — and this did not click in my mind until reading Fred Provenza’s book, Nourishment — that we need to be told what to eat — that we’re idiots who know nothing about what we should be eating. That’s essentially the message we’re getting right now from the nutrition experts. I have two sisters who are both medical doctors, MDs, and I’m very supportive and pleased that there’s modern medicine out there. But I’ve become increasingly discouraged and kind of cynical about the way diet and health is approached — in the way medicine is practiced in modern society — because there’s this idea that, essentially, we don’t know anything. We need to be told by experts what to eat, and that that’s always a moving target.
Before Defending Beef, I really dug into the demographic data and looked at how Americans have eaten — not just what articles tell you, but what the data actually shows. What the data actually shows is that Americans, over the last few decades, really cut back on their animal fat and on their red meat, and their whole-egg consumption declined pretty considerably. Their butter consumption declined. Their whole-milk consumption plummeted. People were replacing these things with — in the case of whole milk — unfortunately, things like juice and other sweetened beverages and then skim milk, which is the biggest scam out there because they charge you more for it and they take the most valuable part out of it.
People made shifts in diet based on the advice that we were being told everywhere — from dietary experts and medical experts. We were being told to cut the fats, especially the animal fats. If you look at what’s happened with American health and health in the industrialized world — it’s very similar around the world — we were told that we shouldn’t be eating fat, especially not animal fats, and that red meat was bad for us.
As our consumption of those things declined in the United States we increased our vegetable oil consumption by over 400 percent in the last few decades. We were replacing these real, whole foods (including the fats) with the products of industry in our diet. Our processed food consumption rose dramatically. Our overall carbohydrate consumption rose dramatically. Anything like flour, sugar, etc. — that all went up a lot.
As that was happening, we were seeing a dramatic rise over the last few decades in obesity, diabetes, and other diet-related disease — especially in metabolically triggered, diet-related diseases. Things like heart disease, stroke, etc. — that all went up. I think Gary Taubes especially has done a remarkable job at going through all the science on that and pointing out how this societal shift in the United States was catastrophic.
And so, for me, I agree: It’s really fraught. What should we eat? But I love Fred Provenza’s message — that we have this inherent nutritional wisdom. In fact, I can’t go a single day without recommending his book, Nourishment. It’s such an amazing book. He’s an amazing person, and his work is so remarkable. I think he argues incredibly compellingly in his book that there’s a cultural beginning to our own understanding of what our body needs that begins in utero, actually.
If the mother is eating real, whole foods, the knowledge for the baby that’s growing inside of her will begin to develop. What Fred Provenza argues — and also The Dorito Effect, by Mark Schatzker, which I recently read — is that flavor is so connected to nutrition. Fred shows that all wild animals, and even domesticated animals, and humans, know what they need. You can actually keep yourself healthy — and even prophylactically treat yourself for some emerging illness that you might have or treat existing illnesses that you have.
That’s not to say you throw out modern medicine and never go to your doctor again. But keeping yourself healthy on a daily basis is something that you can do if you’re listening to your body, and if you’re teaching your body how to recognize nutrition by eating real, whole foods that are simply prepared, and avoiding processed foods. If you want to stay healthy, you need to eat foods that contain biological life, essentially. Very few people are doing that nowadays. I think it’s a really compelling argument that, if we listen to our cultural wisdom and our nutritional wisdom, we can stay healthy, and don’t need to be following the USDA’s latest version of MyPlate or the food pyramid or whatever. I don’t trust those things very much because they really support processed foods, which I think is absolutely the key problem in the modern diet.
Acres U.S.A. Let’s talk specifically about the nutritional profile of beef. Is there a difference between CAFO beef and beef that is raised on pasture?
Niman. That’s an interesting question because it’s one of the key differences between my two books — the first version of Defending Beef and the current one. I acknowledged that there was a difference between those things in the first version, but I became more persuaded, because of things like Fred Provenza’s work — that animals grazing, whether on a rangeland or a pasture, is more important than I had acknowledged in the original version of the book.
So, yes, I think there’s a pretty persuasive nutritional difference between conventional beef and totally grass-fed beef. It’s higher in a lot of nutrients. For example, things like calcium have been shown to be at much higher levels in totally grass-fed beef. The health of the animals has also been shown to be better. They don’t develop the health problems that they often do when they’re fed a concentrated feedlot and not allowed to exercise, and so the animal is healthier when it goes to a slaughter.
Of course, the use of antibiotics — which is not as prevalent in beef feedlots, actually, as in other types of CAFOs — is still quite prevalent in things that are being fed to the cattle. It’s just problematic.
I think there’s a really compelling argument for grass-fed. Again, going back to Nourishment and Fred Provenza’s work, he argues that having a diversified pasture — the plant community that the animal is grazing on — is really important. That is something I did not know when I wrote the first book.
I think that knowing where your meat comes from is compelling, both from a health and nutrition standpoint and the eating quality. I do a lot of speaking and writing about food and health and ecosystems, and we rarely talk about the enjoyment of eating food. For myself, this became really personal when I started eating meat again a couple of years ago. After 33 years as a vegetarian, I was super surprised by how much I enjoyed eating it — actually shocked.
When I gave up meat, I was 19 years old, and I didn’t really care that much about meat at that time from a dietary enjoyment standpoint. Now I’m 54 years old and I think my body really needs the meat and really benefits from it. I think that’s probably part of the reason I’m enjoying it so much. But I’m eating really great meat because I’m getting it from our ranch and from other farms and ranches that we know, so it’s really flavorful, delicious meat.
Acres U.S.A. People often say that the poison is in the dose. I wonder, from your perspective, do you think people eat too much meat? There’s also the criticism about grass-fed beef that yes, it may be more nutritionally dense, but it can’t scale to meet the demand of consumers. What do you think about that?
Niman. I talk about those issues in detail in Defending Beef, because those are things people bring up a lot. On the scalability question first, I’ve discussed this with multiple different experts in the agricultural field over the years, and I’ve also read a lot of reports from thinktanks that tried to evaluate this from a global-supply standpoint — how much grass is available, etc. I also spoke with the people at the Savory Institute years ago, who had done an analysis specifically looking at the United States and trying to figure out how much grazing area would be available if you took all of the animals off of grain and put them out in range or pasture situations.
The consensus that I’ve come up with from all of this information is that there is ample grazing land. There was an analysis done in 2016 in the Journal of Soil and Water Conservation arguing that you could actually reduce the total climate change impact of agriculture if you converted all of the soy and grainfields in the upper Midwest to grazing areas. We could get rid of large areas of monocrop, which would have many ecological benefits. But also, when you have good grazing — holistic, well-managed, adaptive-management-type grazing — you are much more productive, so you produce a lot more from the land that the animals are on. When people do a really simple, back-of-the-envelope calculation and just look at how much grazing area we have in the country and how many cattle we have, and how much feed the cattle need, it doesn’t include any of those considerations. Plus people just assume it. They just say, “Well, we clearly can’t do that.” Well, it’s not true.
The Savory Institute’s analysis found that there was not just enough land to graze all the animals in the country — you’d have a 30 percent surplus of land. That was their conclusion. Their analysis could be flawed as well, but I think it’s certainly credible to believe that we could raise a comparable number of animals, and we just need to focus on good grazing practices and making sure that we’re doing it in the best possible way, because that makes the land a lot more productive and has many other ecological benefits, such as much more water being held in the soil, etc.
The first part of your question — whether people are eating too much meat — I would say, first of all, no, because I think meat is a really valuable food for human health. My thinking has evolved on this — I’ve increasingly become convinced that we’re not eating in a way that is supporting our physiology; we need to understand and listen to what our bodies need.
I think meat is certainly something that we should have, along with a lot of other types of foods. I’ve met quite a few people in the carnivore community, and it’s pretty compelling — the stuff they’ve told me about their personal health. Most of them did it because they were having some really glaring health issue that was going to require pretty dramatic medical intervention, and they got it under control through a carnivore-type diet — which is intriguing, and I don’t think it should be discounted.
But I think for the long term, and for most people — Michael Pollan says that humans have eaten 80,000-plus things as food over the globe. To me, that’s the key: we are meant to be omnivores. We’re meant to eat a tremendous variety, and our genetics and our history and our heritage would’ve come from these different parts of the globe that had different plants, different seasons, different animals and different ways of eating that reflect the region that we’re from. So I think there’s a really intriguing idea that each of us probably has somewhat different nutritional needs based on our genetics.
In my earlier book, Righteous Porkchop, I said that I thought people should probably eat less meat and eat better meat, and I don’t really believe that anymore. Maybe some people should. But now that I’ve reincorporated meat, it’s actually made it much easier for me, because I found that, for 33 years, I was kind of hungry all the time.
When I began eating meat again, for the first time in a very long time, I really felt satiated. So it’s been so much easier for me not to overeat and not to eat sweets all the time — all the things that I was struggling with for years as a vegetarian. So, in my case, should I eat less meat? No. My sons, when they want a snack, I don’t want them eating a bunch of processed carbohydrates, sugary snack foods — and that’s pretty much what’s out there. They eat fruit a lot as a snack, but I also encourage them to eat things like jerky, which they love, and it works really well. It’s really filling and really satiating, and I know that it’s nutritionally dense and valuable, and they’re satisfied with just a small amount. It satiates their hunger.
Acres U.S.A. You mentioned margarine earlier. Is fake meat the new margarine of our day?
Niman. Yeah, that’s how I see it. It’s like, “Butter’s a problem, and here’s the solution.” But butter is a thing that you could literally make yourself. You go out, milk a cow, separate it out, shake it in a jar or a churn, and you have butter. Margarine is this very industrialized product that comes from a far-away, large, monocrop field and goes through a whole bunch of processes and then comes back to you in some unrecognizable form.
We’re told these things like butter are problems and things like margarine are the solution, and I think beef is now the problem and the fake burger is the solution. To me, it’s really just processed food replacing a real, whole food. Beef is so nutrient rich and dense, and it’s absolutely carbohydrate free — which is something I also didn’t know for years. As a vegetarian, I didn’t pay attention to that. But when I started looking into nutritional qualities of beef and comparing it to the modern diet, I realized, wow — when you reduce your meat and your animal fats, you almost automatically begin eating more processed carbohydrates, because you are hungry, you are losing a lot of nutritional value, and you’re trying to fill yourself. It’s much harder to do that, and it takes a lot more calories to feel full, when you’re eating processed carbohydrates — or even something like beans.
Diana Rogers has done a really good job of comparing the number of calories in beans to get whatever levels of nutrients — in particular, protein — but she looks at other things as well, and then compares that to beef. It’s so much fewer calories to get the same amount of nutrition. Comparing 100 grams to 100 grams is often the way it’s done, but actually, the calories are really important. How many calories are you consuming to get the nutrition? And when you think about it that way, it explains why so many people gain so much weight as they shift away from meat and toward more pasta, more bread, more bagels, more Dorito chips. I think we have to get away from this idea that there’s inherently a problem for your health if you’re eating meat.
Acres U.S.A. Break down what these alternative meats consist of. Obviously, every brand has its own little proprietary blend, they’re using their own genetically modified yeast strain in order to approximate blood or whatever it is. What are people actually eating when they buy one of these products at the grocery store?
Niman. One thing people should do is actually look at the ingredients label. First of all, you’ll notice right away that it has a lot of ingredients. But you won’t even fully understand how processed a food it is when you look at it. For example, you just mentioned that genetically modified ingredient that approximates the appearance of blood coming out of the burger, which, in and of itself so absurd to me. Processed foods are designed to trick you — to trick your senses into thinking you’re eating something that you’re not.
Increasingly, I think that’s so much of what’s wrong with how we’re eating. We’re not allowing that nutritional wisdom to work, because we’re eating things that were very carefully engineered to trick our senses into thinking we’re getting something that’s good for our bodies. As The Dorito Effect says, we keep wanting to eat more and more. We’re never satiated. We’re never satisfied. It’s all part of the engineering of the food.
The first thing you notice when you look at these faux burgers is they have a lot of ingredients and that you won’t recognize some of them. There are a bunch of videos that show how all of this stuff is done, and there’s a tremendous amount of processing involved. Your body is not going to even recognize most of these ingredients because there’s so much processing going on. On the farming side, it’s an industrial farming process.
To me, it’s just a highly processed food. If you think about what could be in your beef burger, it’s just one ingredient, and it’s a real food. It’s a whole food that has a tremendous amount of nutrition. Your body knows what to do with it. It provides a tremendous amount of valuable protein and many other nutrients. Especially if you get grass-fed beef, there’s a lot of secondary compounds in there as well that are really valuable for health.
