A few years ago, James saw Food, Inc. and some other documentary about industrial feed lots and had a nervous breakdown about meat. The direct result of this is that we now buy $17 chickens. $17, heritage breed, lovingly tended, SAT prepped organically and humanely raised chickens, the purchase of which involves standing in the cold in front of a butcher's stall at the local market at the crack of dawn every Saturday morning. The people we buy the meat from are hippies of the rankest degree, and they have this really hideous tendency to advertise what will be available next week by posting pictures of actual living animals. Next week, goat! His name is Herbert! He has NO IDEA.But apparently all this was not enough for my intrepid husband because this past fall he brought out the rifle bequeathed to him by his grandfather and started fall this crazy talk about how good it would feel to live off the land, to be in touch with his hunter-gatherer roots, to know the meat he was eating was safe because he went out and killed it himself.
I didn't get it. But then I read Georgia Pelligrini's Girl Hunter. And now I think I do.
Hunting is an extension of our being both humans and animals--our first work and craft, one of our original instincts...if you want to feel what it is like to be human again, you should hunt, even if just once. Because that understanding, I believe, will propel a shift in how we view and interact with this world that we eat in.
Pelligrini began her journey as the Girl Hunter as a chef working in a four-star farm-to-table restaurant in upstate New York. One day, she was asked to go out and kill a turkey for service that night, a task that seemed wholly foreign to her. But how could that be? Meat was, after all, one of the tools of her trade. Why, then, should its origin be a mystery to her?
Over the course of twelve months, Pelligrini resolved to live only on the meat that she herself could kill in an attempt to find out whether the "pleasures of knowing what occured on the journey from the field to the table" would alter the way she cooked and ate. Her journey led her to a New Orleans bayou, where she hunted ducks with an environmental lawyer; to the border of Texas and Mexico, where she stared into the small, blind eyes of a pig called javelina; and, scarily, to a vast expanse of empty land in Wyoming, where an encounter with a deer poacher thrust her into danger.
Each chapter recounts the thrill of the successful hunt or the tedium of the unsuccessful one, the beauty of the surroundings, the moment of the kill and the butcher of the animal, in all its bloody detail (Pelligrini isn't a chef who's a writer--she's a writer who happens to also be a chef, so her descriptions are incredibly vivid and sometimes take a little getting used to). And then there are stories of the (mostly) good-hearted people that Pelligrini meets along the way, who take her into their fold--warily, sometimes, at first, but wholeheartedly in the end. It was reading about Pelligrini's winning them over that made me smile the most--each time she made her shot and proved that she was more than a stiletto-wearing, martini-drinking New Yorker, I wanted to cheer.
Pelligrini is passionate about hunting, and doesn't just pay lip service: at the end of each chapter is a series of recipes for the protein discussed in the preceding pages, with detailed and eloquent instructions, ideas for substitutions, and even an appendix for sauces and gravies, with a list of kitchen tools to have on hand when working with game meats. You get the idea that she really wants the reader to experience what she has experienced, to share her wonderful discovery that "the food tastes so much better" her way.
I would have liked to hear perhaps a little more of the worlds-collide aspect of Pelligrini's story; there's a point at which she imagines her Manhattanite friends squealing over the idea of eating squirrel. I would have liked to have seen that. What did her friends think about her efforts? What did her colleagues say?
Overall, though, even without that bit of well roundedness, Girl Hunter is still one of the most interesting and original books I've read in a long time. And convincing--for a minute, I got really excited and started talking about going out to the woods with James. But then I remembered that I have to take a Klonopin when I see those ASPCA commercials on TV and that perhaps I have a way to go before I am quite THERE.
But if James brings home a squirrel? I'll be more than glad to help him make up a batch of Pelligrini's squirrel putach, no problem.
Note: I received a copy of this book from the publisher.
Curious - I grew up in a hunting family, around hunting people. It's a way of life in my neck of the woods; in farming country, you have to hunt deer or they will destroy your crops. And probably your car, given their tendencies to play in the roads.
ReplyDeleteHOWEVER, the first time my sister shot a deer, she found just the smell of the venison from it afterward made her sick. It was years before she could eat any venison at all, and she has to decide each season which she would prefer - eating venison that year, or going out hunting with her husband. She can eat food shot by others, still, but for her, the act of hunting it herself renders the food inedible for her.
For me, of course, I don't hunt simply because I'm such a terrible shot that I would be a danger to myself and anyone around me, but never to my target. So we keep the guns away from me :-)
From your description of the book, this is one that I could never complete reading, no matter how interesting it seems. I prefer not thinking of where my meat comes from and like to think it gets made in some sort of replicator like on those Star Trek episodes my dad loves so much...or that it grows on trees like fruit. :)
ReplyDeleteBut I did love your review.
lol at the butcher stall advertisements. I'm curious about the author's run-in with the poacher and am generally curious about books that address the issue of where we get our food.
ReplyDeleteThis sounds fantastic. Like something I would really enjoy!
ReplyDeleteI too need to be sedated when Sarah MacLachlan starts singing Silent Night on tv and the pictures of all the homeless, caged animals begin flowing across my screen...my girls and I actually race to the tv to change the channel :/
ReplyDeleteHowever, I grew up eating only the meat that was in season...not out of choice but necessity. I am not against hunting, but I don't think I would enjoy it. The only thing that bristles me is hunters who break the law and seem to get more thrill from the kill rather than the harvest of meat.
I knew this would be a thought-provoking read.
ReplyDeleteTo Louise, T&B and Dr. Peppermint (hey, you earned the title!): I have been thinking a lot about this, too. Why I can eat meat that I KNOW was killed by SOMEONE (and until our $17 chickens, usually in a cruel way, after a lifetime of suffering) but balk at the idea of killing it myself. I think it can only be the disconnect that spurred Pelligrini to write this book in the first place: we've become so removed, psychologically, from the DEATH part of dinner that it seems outlandish to us. We can't connect Herbert the Goat with the loin on our plate. It's a weird aspect of modern society, that this should have happened. But is it progress? I don't think so. I think it's kind of a perversion of our natural state.
Like you, David, I prefer not to think about where my meat comes from--or rather, I did. But once I learned of where it comes from, I had to make a choice: stop participating, or find the most humane way to get it. Girl Hunter discusses this: the animals Pelligrini killed live a good life, a natural life, doing the things they were supposed to do in the place they were supposed to do it, not a feed lot. They died a quick, clean death. She knows this, because she was the one who killed them. She takes responsibility. She witnesses it, and "pays the full karmic load" for it.
I'd LOVE to hear more thoughts on this, so if you have them, post them. And I urge you to read this book if you want more on this thorny issue. I'm planning on doing a giveaway of my ARC sometime in the next month, so stay tuned.
In Kingsolver's Animal Vegetable Miracle she pledged for one year to only eat foods (meat, vegetable, bread...everything) that was locally harvested (100 mile radius, I believe?) She met several members of her community who specialized in one or two products and they all shared the produce. Her description of visiting the farm where chickens were raised and then processed was a little icky but I made myself read it bc of the very comments you made. If I'm going to eat it, I need to be aware of exactly WHAT I'm eating and exactly HOW it got on my table. It's astonishing to me how much we put in our bodies and have no earthly idea where it came from. Great discussion :)
ReplyDeletePeppermint: I read Kingsolver's book, too, and was really awakened by it. I find it just ridiculously amazing how little thought we give to food, and how we are even encouraged not to think about it.
ReplyDeleteThe fact that eating natural foods is seen as a luxury for those with lots of time and money always shocks me. Yes, it's convenient to be able to buy tomatoes year round--until you learn the toll on other humans and on the environment to be able to do that. I think it separates us from our humanity, I really do.