Meat in the city

When I lived in Brooklyn in the early 1990s, I wouldn’t have gone hunting. For one thing, I found the idea of killing animals reprehensible.

For another, I would have attracted police attention if I’d hiked over to Prospect Park toting a squirrel rifle. Not that firearms were taboo in the neighborhood where I had an apartment. I suspect that Tony, Paulie, and Vito were all packing heat. But I digress.

Union Square Market in NYC — Photo credit: urban75.com

In response to my post of January 1^st, John raised the question of how city-dwellers can sidestep factory farming and get meat from animals who have lived well, been killed humanely, and had minimal ecological impact. I’m no expert on this, so I hope you’ll help me answer John’s question by adding your thoughts below.

One way is to hunt, only taking shots you feel sure will kill mercifully. Nearly half of American hunters live in urban areas. (They just can’t walk out the front door with rifle or shotgun and head over to the city park.) You may have seen the recent New York Times story about novice urbanite predators taking classes in hunting from folks like Virginian Jack Landers and forming clubs like the San Francisco-based Bull Moose Hunting Society.

Honestly, though, for most of us hunting isn’t a terribly efficient way to get meat. Besides, not every American meat-eater wants to hunt. And it’s a good thing. On average, Americans consume an astonishing 200-plus pounds of meat per year. There are more than 300 million of us. That comes out to 60-plus billion pounds of meat annually. (We could stand to cut this number dramatically, for many reasons. But that’s another topic.)

Our most common big-game animal, the white-tailed deer, numbers 25 million or so. Roughly, that’s what, 1 or 2 billion pounds of venison? Maybe 5 pounds per American? Whitetails would disappear in a hurry if everyone hunted them. Wildlife managers would have to implement dramatic season and license restrictions to protect deer from being pushed to the brink of extinction, as they were by market hunters in the late 1800s.

Another approach, at least as adventurous, is to raise your own animals. More and more city and suburb dwellers are setting up chicken coops in their backyards. For a great account of one such endeavor—one that takes things farther than most folks are apt to—check out Novella Carpenter’s book Farm City. Right now, she’s co-writing a how-to manual. But urban farming isn’t for everyone either.

For those who prefer simply to buy their meat, there are plenty of ways to “redefine the hunt,” as John put it. It shouldn’t take too much hard-core scouting and tracking. Some grocery stores and many food co-ops carry local, sustainably and humanely raised meats. And farmer’s markets are great places to buy direct from people who raise animals. If I lived in the Big Apple today, I’d probably still frequent the market in Union Square, but now I’d buy chicken along with my veggies.

You can also contact nearby farms directly. Many will sell you meat by the piece or pound, or by the “package” or “share” as part of a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) model. Ask around or check out options through networks like Local Harvest and EatWild.

Come to think of it, these are the same basic options we have in rural areas. They’re also the same options we have for obtaining sustainably-grown vegetables: stalk them in the wild (inefficient for most of us, but rewarding in other ways), grow them ourselves, or buy them from stores and farms.

Do you have other ideas or resources to suggest?

Whatever we eat—meat or veggie—let’s enjoy and celebrate it. Knowing what’s going on in Haiti right now reminds me that it’s a privilege simply to have enough food on our plates and enough time to think about different ways of putting it there.

Oh, and for a laugh, if you haven’t seen The Meatrix, you gotta check it out.

A call for rabbit

The man called about buying some rabbit. My friend Lila—ex-vegetarian and present-day purveyor of fine, homegrown meats—welcomed him to stop by the house late in the day. The rabbit would be cool by then.

“You mean it’s still alive right now?”

It was. And the caller, perhaps suddenly imagining Thumper hopping happily about, decided not to come that day.

“Maybe I’ll just come next week,” he said.

Lila—who, like her husband Dave, needs to know that their animals have lived well and died humanely—realized belatedly that she shouldn’t have given a potential customer quite so many details. But she was amazed, she told me, that “even conscientious meat purchasers need to disconnect from the real fact that meat is animal.”

To his credit, the man had gone to the trouble of finding a source of local, healthy, humanely-raised meat. But he balked, his conscience uneasy. Was he deterred by recognizing that “meat is animal”? Was he deterred by “the reality of individual death,” as Holly Heyser put it in her recent blog post? Quite possibly.

But there may, I imagine, have been another factor, too.

When I departed from the path of vegetarianism, I had to confront more than the recently-living individual-birdness of the chicken legs I was suddenly barbequing. I also had to confront why the bird had died. It had died for me.

That’s not how we usually think of it, of course. Buying meat in the store lets us tell ourselves a little story: It’s already dead. I didn’t cause its death.

But whether we acknowledge it or not—whether we buy meat in a store, get it from a farm, or kill it ourselves—the animal is killed for whoever eats it. In a sense, it is killed by whoever eats it. Maybe, in that brief conversation with Lila, the fellow realized that his phone call was about to trigger a rabbit’s death, as surely as if he had picked up the animal and done the deed himself.

That’s one reason I took up hunting. When I look down a rifle barrel—sights aligned with the head of a snowshoe hare or the heart of a white-tailed deer—I’m brought face to face with more than the exquisite living, breathing creature. I’m brought face to face with myself: the one who chooses to take its life.

Feathers in the snow

First, a downy tuft. Then a barred tail feather. I scanned the path ahead and the woods to either side. Usually, when I find a few grouse feathers, there are more nearby, then more, then the spot where it happened.

This time, I did find more feathers, perhaps a couple dozen. But no epicenter.

One tail feather, caught a few feet off the ground among the snow-laden branches of a hemlock sapling, suggested a dramatic scene: a hawk or owl swooping, taking its prey on the wing—or off a branch above—and carrying it off for dinner. That’s how most ruffed grouse go, snatched by a raptor.

I sympathize with both hungry predator and wary prey, and am awed by both: the powerful strike of one bird, the subtle camouflage and evasive maneuvers of the other.

These kinds of predatory encounters happen all the time—birds, bugs, fish, amphibians, reptiles, and mammals eating each other constantly. Yet, in our daily lives, we rarely see such nutritional transactions. And in our animated films—pale, distorted parables of nature that they are—animals rarely eat; miraculously, predators and prey become buddies.

It’s easy to forget about all the eating. Like the raptor swooping overhead, prey in talons, it hardly touches the ground of our consciousness.

When our thoughts do turn to nature and eating and humans, we know where we stand. At the top. You’ve probably seen the slogan on T-shirts and bumper stickers: “I Didn’t Claw My Way to the Top of the Food Chain to Eat Vegetables.”

It’s quite a fantasy—linear, neatly avoiding the cyclical truth of our own mortality. For we, too, are part of nature. We’re like the large carnivores who “in the end,” as Paul Shepard once put it, “are pursued by microbes, fungi, and plant roots.”

If you stop to think about it, there’s beauty here. The nutrients of our bodies becoming part of field, forest, and stream. Perhaps part of grouse or hawk, or drawn up into the stem and needles of the small hemlock where the grouse feather alights.

Omnivorous predator though I am, I think the T-shirt should read: “I Clawed and Clawed But Couldn’t Escape the Food Web – Soon I’ll Be Feeding Vegetables.”

This meat or that?

“Is this venison?”

Our friend had just spooned several meatballs onto his plate. I replied that yes, indeed, it was. Sensing an edge to the question, I decided not to elaborate on how I’d shot the five-point buck within a half-mile of the house that November.

“I don’t mind,” he said and nodded toward his wife, to whom he was about to pass the serving bowl. She did mind.

She didn’t comment. She just passed on the meatballs. And she is no vegetarian. I didn’t inquire into her reasons, but the moment got me thinking.

I know a lot of meat-eaters who won’t eat wild game. Maybe they don’t like the flavor (or think they don’t). Maybe they don’t like the idea of eating a species for which they have a particular Disneyfied fondness—deer, say. Maybe they believe industrial beef is safer or healthier than meat processed in a hunter’s kitchen. Or maybe they just don’t like hunting.

But here’s the thing. I know other people—some of them near-vegetarians—who won’t eat any meat except wild game. Or who will only eat meat—wild or domestic—if they know how the animal lived and died.

I find the contrast intriguing.

Personally, I prefer to know the origins of my meat. I hunt, aiming to kill with swift mercy. When the gods of the hunt smile on me and a deer comes my way, I’m always shocked by the immediacy of the encounter with the death that sustains life.

And Cath and I buy locally-raised chickens, some of them raised by fellow ex-vegetarians. We don’t buy meat from who-knows-where.

If you’re an omnivore, do you like to know as much as possible about your meat, even to the point of knowing what the animal’s face looked like? Or would you rather it be anonymously churned out by the Big Meat Factory in the Sky? Do you care about the dignity of the animal’s life and death, its ecological footprint, or the attitude of the person who raised or hunted it?

If you’re a vegetarian, do certain kinds of meat seem more acceptable to you than others?