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. People in the Twin Cities are lucky, because they have a lot of resources if they want to buy meat that has been humanely raised.
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.
