Home » local food » Page 3

Tag: local food

Meditation with meat and knife

My fingers slide under the muscle, separating it from the layer below. My knife snips tendons and traces the curvature of bone.

I add the slab of venison to one of the 13×9 pans on the kitchen counter.

Hours ago, this leg was a deer. In the early morning light, the animal was moving somewhere in the cool, damp forest. Then pausing to listen and test the breeze. Then walking or trotting on again, toward the gentle slope where I sat waiting among the hemlocks.

Much of my time in the woods is quiet, contemplative. Afternoons spent scouting in late summer and early fall, looking for tracks and other sign. Hours, days, or entire seasons spent listening and watching, seeing no deer.

If I get the chance for a clean shot, the killing is over in a flash.

When I crouch beside the fallen animal and whisper thanks, I am both grateful and unsettled. There in the woods, though, there is work to be done—gutting the deer and dragging the body home.

It’s at the kitchen counter that I make my peace with the killing. There, with a leg on the cutting board, contemplation returns. Separating flesh from bone, I marvel at the power these muscles held, to launch the buck in great leaps.

There is a quiet rhythm to the task, like canning, my wife Cath suggests: a small repetitive act done by these hands, a pattern within the larger rhythmic patterns of the seasons, the patterns of all things that live and eat and die and feed one another.

Inexperienced as I am, it takes me a long while to get from skinning the animal to grinding the last pounds of burger. Someday, caught between my slowness and my schedule, I may have to pay a local butcher to do the work. But not soon, I hope.

© 2010 Tovar Cerulli

Meditation with meat and knife

My fingers slide under the muscle, separating it from the layer below. My knife snips tendons and traces the curvature of bone.

I add the slab of venison to one of the 13×9 pans on the kitchen counter.

Hours ago, this leg was a deer. In the early morning light, the animal was moving somewhere in the cool, damp forest. Then pausing to listen and test the breeze. Then walking or trotting on again, toward the gentle slope where I sat waiting among the hemlocks.

Much of my time in the woods is quiet, contemplative. Afternoons spent scouting in late summer and early fall, looking for tracks and other sign. Hours, days, or entire seasons spent listening and watching, seeing no deer.

If I get the chance for a clean shot, the killing is over in a flash.

When I crouch beside the fallen animal and whisper my thanks, I am both grateful and unsettled. There in the woods, though, there is work to be done—gutting the deer and dragging the body from the woods.

It’s at the kitchen counter that I make my peace with the killing. There, with a leg on the cutting board, contemplation returns. Separating flesh from bone, I marvel at the power these muscles held, to launch the buck in great leaps.

There is a quiet rhythm to the task, like canning, my wife Cath suggests: a small repetitive act done by these hands, a pattern within the larger rhythmic patterns of the seasons, the patterns of all things that live and eat and die and feed one another.

Inexperienced as I am, it takes me a long while to get from skinning the animal to grinding the last pounds of burger. Someday, caught between my slowness and my schedule, I’ll have to pay a local butcher to do the work. But not soon, I hope.

The why of the hunt

When I was a vegetarian, I had no clue why modern people hunted.

Now that I hunt, I still puzzle over it. Every hunter has his or her own reasons, of course. I wonder mostly about my own, and even there it’s often hard to lay claim to certainty.

Photo credit: Robert Bryan

Of two things, though, I feel sure.

First, the labels we ascribe to ourselves say very little about why we hunt.

When, a few years ago, a local hunter told me he was a “meat” hunter, he wasn’t saying that “meat” explained his hunting; he only gets a deer once every few years, and enjoys his time in the woods for its own sake. He was saying that he was perfectly willing to shoot a doe if he got the chance. In other words, he was telling me what kind of hunter he isn’t. He’s not a trophy hunter. He doesn’t hunt for antlers.

This way of defining ourselves—by marking the boundary between “us” and “them”—is a human habit long studied by anthropologists. “Identity,” after all, comes from the Latin idem, meaning “the same.” We say who we are by saying who’s different: who we are not.

At times, labels serve an important function. They help us denounce the intolerable. In the mid- and late-1800s, American “sport” hunters defined themselves in part by pointing to what they were not: “market” hunters, who were pushing the continent’s wildlife to the brink of extinction. (Less helpfully, these middle and upper-class hunters also denigrated backwoods “pot” hunters, the meat hunters of the day.) Today, whatever we call ourselves, many of us decry the “slob” hunter, whose disrespect—for animals, people, and land—leaves a deep stain on the image of the American hunter.

When wildlife populations and real ethics are at stake, it’s important to say who we are not. Even then, though, labels fail to convey why we hunt.

Second, I feel sure that it’s worth making the effort to understand and explain why we hunt.

Some hunters, of course, feel that explaining such things is part of “being on the defensive.” They don’t want to go there. They hunt because (1) it’s legal and (2) they want to. And they leave it at that. Fair enough.

But I think the effort can be more positive than that. As a non-hunter (and sometimes anti-hunter), talking with respectful hunters and reading words written by respectful hunters helped me see past my negative stereotypes, opening my eyes to what hunting could be. And at least a few acquaintances have, in turn, had their views of the pursuit improved by talking with me about my hunting.

I think we need to continue the effort to understand and explain what hunting means to us. If, that is, we want hunting to be accepted by the non-hunting majority—and supported at the polls when related ballots are cast.

We need to go beyond the tired argument that hunting is needed to keep wildlife populations in balance with habitat. It happens to be true, at least where ungulates are abundant and no longer hunted by other large predators. But, as Thomas Baumeister argued in his essay “Heart of the Hunt,” it “falls pitifully short” as a way of explaining hunting.

The challenge, as I suggested above—“now that I hunt, I still puzzle over it”—seems to be understanding the “why” of our own hunting. Some parts of my hunting I can name and explain: how it helps me confront the impacts of my own eating, how it puts wonderful, local, organic, wild meat on my table, how it heightens my appreciation for everything I ingest (animal and vegetable), how it gives me a sense of participation in nature, and so on.

Other parts are harder to pin down: that sense of mystery, that call for which I still have no good name. Those pieces may be—as the late John Madson put it in “Why We Hunt”—“too deeply rooted in the metaphysical to allow clinical examination.” But I’ll keep on trying. Not for the clinical—which would, I fear, kill the mystery—but for the moderately comprehensible.

Now and then, though, I do wish that we were more like other animals. That we could, like dog or wolf, sniff at the places others have labeled, marking boundaries, and actually learn something useful.

© 2010 Tovar Cerulli

Note: Thanks to Montana Outdoors magazine for making both of the above-mentioned essays available online.

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.

Photo credit: urban75.com

In response to my post of January 1st, 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.

© 2010 Tovar Cerulli

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.

© 2010 Tovar Cerulli

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?

© 2010 Tovar Cerulli