Please don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

This is true: I absolutely never will buy meat at the supermarket again, ESPECIALLY pork. There is a wonderful and entertaining book called "Pig Perfect: Encounters with Remarkable Swine and Some Great Ways to Cook Them" by Peter Kaminsky. The whole thing is a lovesong to the perfect ham, until he arrives in North Carolina and is acquainted with the horrors of factory farms, where the pigs are kept in pens, on concrete, inside. Standing in their own feces and urine, breathing the ammoniated gases that enter their bloodstream through their lungs...it's worse than disgusting, it's revolting and heartbreaking. Worse still, the pig—whose natural inclination is to revel and root in the dirt with his snout, and who longs to sleep in a "pigpile" with his siblings—will not even see the sunshine. A sow will never see the piglets she nurses: she will never see her own feet.

However, people who eat meat CAN buy from local farms and ranches with humane practices. The same people who brought you "The Meatrix" promote something called EatWellGuide.com, where you can plug in your zip code and find sustainably grown, humanely raised meat, eggs, and dairy. There is also the wonderful website, my most favorite, most-promoted ever (in my eighteen years online), LocalHarvest.org: again, plug in your zip code and find farms, ranches, CSAs, restaurants, farmers markets, anything related to local food. Each farmer and rancher list their practices online: sustainable (no spray), organic, conventional, etcetera.

Beyond that, there is a wonderful organization called CertifiedHumane.org, which involves a third party certification for ranchers. Essentially, it comes down to the fact that it's not enough to be organic—you could still mistreat your animals. The Certified Humane label guarantees that a rancher cares deeply about both the land and the animals.

Niman Ranch does not (yet) bear this label, but according to Peter Kaminsky, they use humane practices in raising their animals.

It's good to know who to trust, and why.

And without trying to promote myself as much as a discussion of these issues, I recently wrote several pieces about these issues on my own I Heart Farms (www.iheartfarms.com) website. My experiences are more personal, as I actually have two ranches nearby in Santa Cruz county, and the ranchers are my friends, who are both organic and humane. The meat is absolutely the cleanest imaginable, and free of the taste and stench of the filthy living conditions. Yes, those are things one can detect, once you've had clean meat. There is no comparison.

Keep up the good work, please.

Thanks.