Land & Table Book Club

Books play a key role in helping us envision and take steps towards positive life change. And it’s a journey - no one ever arrives, but we can encourage each other along the way.

The Land & Table book club is a way to engage with the core ideas and topics that are motivating a new generation to create a more resilient food system and vibrant local community life. We’ll be reading books about: eating local, self-reliant living, agrarian culture, growing food, culinary history, community resilience, going back-to-the-land, and more.

This is not a book club that will be technical in nature. And if you don’t have a green thumb, you’ll still feel at home. You don’t have to grow your own food or be a homesteader or farmer to enjoy these books. But…you do have to be curious about reviving your connection with the land, with other people, and with the food you eat. And the reality is: tending to those connections is important for all of us.

We meet on the first Thursday of each month and welcome anyone to our meetings - even if you have not read the book we will be discussing.

Registration is encouraged, but not required.

For more information about Land & Table, please visit their website: https://landandtable.com/.

This month we will be discussing: Defending Beef: the Ecological and Nutritional Case for Meat by Nicolette Hahn Niman.

(1st edition has a different subtitle: The Case for Sustainable Meat Production.)

(Click title link above to place a copy on hold. Defending Beef also available as an ebook (2nd ed.) and as an audiobook (1st ed.) on HOOPLA.)

Summary 

For decades it has been nearly universal dogma among environmentalists that many forms of livestock―goats, sheep, and others, but especially cattle―are Public Enemy Number One. They erode soils, pollute air and water, damage riparian areas, and decimate wildlife populations. As recently as 2019, a widely circulated Green New Deal fact sheet even highlighted the problem of “farting cows.” 

But is the matter really so clear-cut? Hardly. In Defending Beef, Second Edition, environmental lawyer turned rancher Nicolette Hahn Niman argues that cattle are not inherently bad for the earth. The impact of grazing can be either negative or positive, depending on how livestock are managed. In fact, with proper oversight, livestock can play an essential role in maintaining grassland ecosystems by performing the same functions as the natural herbivores that once roamed and grazed there.

With more public discussions and media being paid to connections between health and diet, food and climate, and climate and farming―especially cattle farming, Defending Beef has never been more timely. And in this newly revised and updated edition, the author also addresses the explosion in popularity of “fake meat” (both highly processed “plant-based foods” and meat grown from cells in a lab, rather than on the hoof).

Defending Beef is simultaneously a book about big issues and the personal journey of the author, who continues to fight for animal welfare and good science. Hahn Niman shows how dispersed, grass-based, smaller-scale farms can and should become the basis of American food production.