Nicolette Hahn Niman
Nicolette Hahn Niman is an attorney, writer and livestock rancher. She is regularly featured in media about sustainable food production, including an August 2009 TIME magazine cover story. Her writings include the books Defending Beef (Chelsea Green, 2014), and Righteous Porkchop: Finding a Life and Good Food Beyond Factory Farms (HarperCollins, 2009), which Michael Pollan called, “a searing and utterly convincing indictment of the modern meat industry.†She has authored several essays on the subject of food and farming for the New York Times, as well as for the Wall Street Journal, and Sunday Los Angeles Times. She was regular blogger for The Atlantic, and has written for The San Francisco Chronicle, Huffington Post, Cowboys & Indians, and CHOW, among others. Previously, she was the Senior Attorney for the environmental organization Waterkeeper Alliance where she was in charge of the organization’s campaign to reform the concentrated livestock and poultry industry, and, before that, an attorney for National Wildlife Federation. She served two years on the Board of Overseers for Chefs Collaborative. Ms. Hahn Niman served two terms on the city council for the City of Kalamazoo, Michigan (pop. 80,000), during which time she served on sixteen community boards and commissions including the Environmental Concerns Committee. She received her Juris Doctorate, cum laude, from the University of Michigan in 1993 and her B.A. in Biology and French from Kalamazoo College in 1989. She lives on a ranch in Northern California with her two sons and her husband, Bill Niman, founder of Niman Ranch, a natural meat company supplied by a network of over 700 traditional farmers and ranchers. They now market the products of their ranch under the name BN Ranch.
