by The Mindful Carnivore: A Vegetarian's Hunt for Sustenance
“Sure,” I said. My father had kept a few Rhode Island Reds.
“You remember the trouble he had with raccoons?”
I did. The hens had provided eggs, but hardly ever got old enough to be retired to the stew pot. Despite the nighttime protection of the rugged henhouse my father had built of rough-sawn lumber, the birds usually met early ends. Most of their untimely demises involved happy raccoons.
“One night,” said Willie, “a raccoon got into the henhouse by pulling open the little door the chickens used during the day. So your father put a heavy latch on it. He figured he could outsmart that raccoon. But I told him, ‘You’re going to have to shoot him.’”
My father’s next report to Willie was that the raccoon had dug its way in underneath the henhouse. So he had put chicken wire down around the edges.
“I told him,” said Willie, “‘Look, twenty-four hours a day that raccoon is figuring out new ways to get to those chickens. You can only spend a little time here and there trying to stop him. You’re going to have to shoot him.’”
Willie shook his head, smiling wryly. “But your father said no, he wanted to live in harmony with the land.
“Finally,” Willie said, “your father called me and said he’d heard a bunch of noise in the henhouse one night. He went out there with a flashlight and opened the door and there was the raccoon right in the middle of the place. ‘What’d you do?’ I asked. And your father said, ‘I shot him.’
“Mmmnnnn-hnnh!” Willie grunted, nodding his big head and grinning.
I grinned, too. When, as a kid, I heard my father’s version of this story, he seemed matter-of-fact about it, showing me the skull with its small hole, saying he had made raccoon stew instead of chicken. I never guessed that he had tried so hard to stave off the inevitable. Though it seemed to me that a henhouse should be easier to secure than a garden, I shook my head and chuckled with Willie—at my father, at myself, at the futility of our parallel efforts to segregate domestic and wild, to impose our rules and fantasies upon the world. And I wished again that I had known how to gut, skin, and cook that woodchuck.
Later that day, when Beth went to Saturday evening Mass, Willie and I went fishing.
Down the road a few miles, we parked his station wagon by a bridge and carried rods and tackle box to the middle of the span. The tide was high and would soon be falling, sweeping small fish from the Spruce Creek inlet out toward the sea. Predators would be prowling there for an easy meal. Among them would be our prey: striped bass.
Stripers, named for the dark stripes that run down their silvery bodies from gills to tail, are popular with anglers all along the Atlantic coast of North America. Like salmon, they’re anadromous—from the Greek anadromos, “running up”—meaning that they live most of their lives in the ocean, but return to rivers and head upstream to spawn. They can weigh fifty pounds or more, though most are far smaller. And they are, Willie attested, delicious.
Hefting the rod he handed me—far heavier than anything I had used as a kid—and inspecting the tough, braided line, I wondered what I was getting into here on this bridge, fishing for the first time in a dozen years. What if I hooked into something big?
I need not have worried. We got no bites that evening. As the sun set, we just stood, sometimes talking, sometimes silent, watching our parallel lines run out toward the open ocean, entranced by the uncertainty of what fate had in store.
We were back at the bridge early the next morning, again fishing the falling tide. On the second or third cast, a sudden tug ran through my body like an electric charge. What I hauled in, though, was not a striper, but a darkly mottled fish of a pound or two, bristling with fins and spines.
“A sculpin,” said Willie, as he removed the hook and dropped the creature back into the gently outflowing tide. The rugged fish darted off vigorously. “They’re bottom-feeders. Not good eating.”
Boyishly, I was thrilled to have caught a fish again, yet I disliked the idea of putting a creature through such struggle to no end.
Even as a kid, twenty-some years earlier, hooking fish solely for the fun of it had never occurred to me, and Willie had never suggested I throw a fish back. We hadn’t spoken of it. We just didn’t play with our food.
The sculpin proved to be our one and only bite. By afternoon, I was headed back north.
A few weeks later, Willie walked me to the altar: a small table covered with lace, roses, and sprigs of cedar. After seven years together, Cath and I were formalizing what we had long known in our hearts.
In a grassy clearing, surrounded by family and friends, white birches and dark-green softwoods, we exchanged vows. And rings, too: simple gold bands, circumscribed by a dark, finely cut line, tracing the contours of the hills and valleys we had come to call home.
That night, after the festivities had subsided, Cath and I wandered into the dining room of the barn-turned-1950s-skilodge we had rented for the occasion. It was empty, except for one table tucked back in a low corner alcove. Eight or so people sat around it, playing poker. Willie—having divested himself of suit and tie and crisp white shirt—presided. He was explaining the rules for yet another variation of Black Mariah, a kind of seven-card stud.
I grinned. My best man took his fun seriously.
The next weekend, when Cath and I went to sit by a pond and watch the sun set, I brought along a lightweight rod and reel that Willie had helped me pick out in Maine.
I didn’t know the place well enough to fish it seriously. I needed casting practice, though, so I tied on one of the silvery oblong lures Willie had suggested I buy, added a few sinkers to the line for extra casting weight, and flicked the ugly conglomeration out into the shallow water. When spoon and weights slapped the surface, I reeled quickly to keep from snagging among the rocks there in the shallows. There was no subtlety to it. None of Willie’s practical finesse. Certainly none of a fly fisherman’s panache.
And yet, on the second or third cast, just as the lure hit the water, the surface exploded. Stunned, I whipped the rod tip up, cranked the reel, and a sleek trout came splashing to shore.
In a motion both foreign and familiar, I reached out and grabbed dinner.
5
Where the Great Heron Feeds
We have labeled and separated the moose and the wolf, and in so doing we have lost sight of their essential unity. We also have misunderstood ourselves, for the biggest separation we have imposed on the world is between ourselves and nature.
—Paul Rezendes, Tracking and the Art of Seeing
The question now wasn’t whether my eating inflicted harm, but what kind of harm.
The inevitable in-the-moment price exacted by every living, breathing, eating animal on the planet? Or the gratuitous suffering and long-term destruction at which we humans have proven ourselves uniquely adept? Perhaps it simply came down to respect and restraint, to how we treated soil, water, plants, and animals, to whether the tilling was prudent and the killing clean.
Looking out our living-room window, I occasionally caught sight of a ruffed grouse feeding high among the branches of a nearby aspen. The bird—perhaps eighteen inches long from stout beak to barred gray-and-black tail—would pluck the tree’s buds one by one. The tree, I imagined, did not particularly appreciate this depredation. The late wildlife ecologist and grouse expert Gordon Gullion speculated that aspens may defend themselves against birds and insects alike by producing chemical compounds that make their buds less palatable and nutritious.
The grouse, likewise, would do its best not to become food. But eventually it would, in turn, be plucked from the air by hawk or owl, or from the ground by bobcat or fox.
The costs incurred were fleeting: the aspen buds nipped, the grouse struck down and devoured, food always coming in the form of other living things. Collectively, nothing was lost. Grouse droppings and owl pellets—eventually even the body of the owl itself—all returned to the forest soil, to aspen roots.
I knew that industrial food systems,
in contrast, took a lasting toll on the land, giving little or nothing back. They were linear, not cyclical.
Agricultural production of grains and vegetables alters entire landscapes, and the ecological arguments against industrial meat production have, if anything, gotten stronger since I went vegan. An estimated 30 percent of the planet’s land surface is now dedicated to livestock. Of the earth’s current pasture and rangeland, one-fifth has been degraded by overgrazing, erosion, and soil compaction. Livestock operations contribute heavily to water usage and pollution, with concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) compartmentalizing animals from the land, often making toxic cesspools of their manure rather than allowing it to fertilize and build the soil. Livestock production is also a driving force behind deforestation in many parts of the world, particularly Latin America. It has even been implicated in climate change. Related greenhouse-gas estimates encompass the felling and burning of forests to make way for grazing, the manufacture of chemical fertilizer for feed corn, and the transport of feed, livestock, and meat, not to mention the methane from cattle burps and farts.
I knew that our food systems took a toll on animals, too: birds poisoned by pesticides, rodents maimed by grain combines, livestock brutalized and confined until the day of their inevitable slaughter. And I had no doubt that these creatures, like the chickens and fish I was now eating, had the capacity to suffer. This, as British philosopher Jeremy Bentham pointed out two hundred years ago, was the ethical heart of the matter: “The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?”
I owed these creatures compassion. I had an obligation to ask how they lived and died. To remember Thich Nhat Hanh’s teachings on kindness. To eat with my eyes wide open.
It was not, Cath and I concluded, so much what we ate that mattered—tofu or trout, chard or chicken—as how that food came to our plates.
Not that we were purists. If someone served us barbecued chicken, we didn’t ask where it came from. But we paid attention to what we brought home to our own kitchen.
We felt reasonably confident buying poultry through food co-ops: The sources were local and the co-ops’ concerns about animal welfare and ecology matched our own. We felt even better when we could buy direct. It was reassuring to know the people who raised our chickens, to stop by and see the birds pecking away in the grass, to return later in the season and walk out of the farmhouse kitchen with a paper grocery bag full of meat.
We were less sure about seafood. Pamphlets and websites told us which fish species were showing high concentrations of mercury, PCBs, and other toxins. They told us which were being fished sustainably, without overburdening populations, damaging the ocean floor, or resulting in excessive “bycatch”: the wasteful killing of all manner of creatures, from turtles, dolphins, and sea birds to fish species that boats and crews didn’t happen to be after. And they told us about the impacts of various fish-farming practices, from the massive harvesting of wild fish as feed to the buildup of nitrogen-rich waste and the resulting deoxygenation of areas surrounding in-ocean operations to the parasites and diseases that thrived among overcrowded fish and could spread to wild populations.
There was, I realized, only one way to know exactly what harm was inflicted in the procurement of the fish we were eating: by catching and killing with my own hands. When, near dusk, I went to a deep pool in a nearby stream, tossed in a small hook I had decorated with bits of red and white yarn, and enticed a pair of brook trout to strike, I marveled at their jewel-toned beauty. And then at their delicate flavor. When I took our canoe out on a lake one afternoon and a big rainbow went for a silvery spoon, I considered how lightly it was hooked: one steel point barely lodged at the edge of the mouth. Such a fine line between life and death, between continuing-life-in-one-form and feeding-life-in-another-form.
Now that I was fishing, the water had come alive. Ponds and lakes were no longer mere scenery. When I walked along a brook or drove over a bridge that spanned a river, I wondered what fish lived there. Did a brookie or a rainbow lurk behind that big rock, waiting for hapless insects to swirl by? Water was no longer just a surface to glance at or paddle across, but a living depth to participate in.
Fishing—like gardening—provided sustenance I could not get from grocery-store foods, the circumstances of their production unknown and unreal, a gaping chasm between field and table. “The supermarket,” wrote Richard Nelson in Heart and Blood, “is an agent of our forgetfulness.” Pulling a trout from water, like pulling a carrot from soil, reminded me of the origins of all nourishment in earth, water, and sun. Each was an antidote to forgetfulness. Each reminded me that glossy boxes and cellophane wrappers were illusions that divorced me from nature.
And there was something else, too, something in the killing itself. If I was going to eat flesh foods, I needed to be brought face to face with living, breathing creatures, to look directly at them. “Behind every meal of meat,” argues feminist and vegan Carol J. Adams, “is an absence: the death of the animal whose place the meat takes. The ‘absent referent’ is that which separates the meat eater from the animal and the animal from the end product.” That was an absence I could not stomach. I couldn’t go on eating without any real sense of what it meant, keeping the truth at bay just as I did in my vegan days, eating tofu and rice—and Joey’s greens and strawberries—without seeing, or wanting to see, the whole picture. I couldn’t go on killing by proxy.
In his autobiography, the 14th Dalai Lama comments on Tibetans’ relationship with meat. He notes that, in the 1960s, at least, very few Tibetan dishes were vegetarian. Alongside tsampa—a kind of barley bread—meat was a staple of the local diet. This, however, was complicated by religion. Buddhism, the Dalai Lama writes, doesn’t prohibit meat eating “but it does say that animals should not be killed for food.” And there lay the crux of what he calls Tibetans’ “rather curious attitude” toward meat.
Tibetan Buddhists could buy meat, but they couldn’t order it, “since that might lead to an animal being killed” for them specifically. What, then, were Tibetan Buddhists to do? How could they eat meat without being involved in butchery? How could they consume flesh, yet prevent themselves from being implicated in killing?
Simple. They did what I, as an American shopper, was already doing. They got someone else to do the killing for them. In the Tibetan case, writes the Dalai Lama, much of it was left to local Muslims.
I understood the comfort we find in not knowing, or in knowing and not looking or thinking. But I could find no virtue in it. If there was some kind of cosmic accounting system at work, it seemed to me that such willful ignorance should accrue extra bad karma, not less.
My fishing, however, wasn’t yielding much food.
Even if it had been, I would have been leery of eating it in quantity. The Vermont Department of Health Fish Consumption Advisory—displayed on bulletin boards at public boat ramps and printed in the back of the state digest of hunting and fishing laws—informed me that our local freshwater fish were, like many ocean fish, toxic. Mercury, released upwind of us by the combustion of fossil fuels and the incineration of household garbage and medical waste, gets deposited in surface water, where it interacts with anaerobic organisms, resulting in the formation of methyl-mercury: a toxin that accumulates in fish. Though coldwater species like brook trout were rated as safer than bass, pickerel, pike, and walleye, I felt uneasy. And saddened, too, that even here, in free-flowing rivers and remote ponds, nothing could escape the poison threads we have woven into the web of life.
If I wanted to take firsthand responsibility for more of our flesh foods, I would have to look somewhere other than our local waters.
One Saturday morning in May, the spring after my return to fishing, I noticed a pickup truck parked partway down our driveway, where a path led into neighboring woods. A turkey hunter, I thought. In years past, I would have been irritated. Now, I was mainly curious. I left a polite note on the windshield, requesting that the vehicle’s owner
ask permission to park there in the future. Around noon, the truck pulled into our yard.
The driver—a man I judged to be in his sixties—apologized for not asking first. He hadn’t planned that morning’s outing far enough in advance.
Not a big deal, I assured him. Was he hunting turkeys? I asked.
He said he was, though he hadn’t seen any.
Did he know these woods well?
Not as well as he once did, he said. He hadn’t hunted here in some years.
We stood and talked for the better part of an hour. By the time he turned his truck around and headed off, I was thoroughly impressed by his friendly manner, his knowledge of the outdoors, and his affection for the natural world. I watched him go, an idea tickling at the back of my mind.
What about hunting? The thought came quietly, furtively, like an unwelcome stranger.
My first objection was simple: With the exception of turkeys and the occasional grouse or woodcock, the creatures I could hunt in these woods were four-legged, and we still weren’t eating mammals. Not as a rule, at least. At Thanksgiving—when Cath’s older brother lifted the top off a dish of his homemade braciole, releasing a plume of steam redolent of pork and parmesan, basil and parsley, garlic and tomato—it would be silly to insist, presidentially, that we didn’t inhale, or that we wouldn’t be spooning some of the tender, slow-simmered meat onto our plates and savoring every bite.
But we were not buying beef, lamb, or pork. Such meat seemed unpalatably alien, and perhaps unpalatably familiar, too, in its mammal-ness. The deaths of birds and fish were easier to contemplate, their pale flesh easier to consume. Was this mere habit, though? Or prejudice?
I had begun to grasp that cows and sheep, like chickens, could be raised not only humanely, but ecologically. Cattle didn’t have to erode the topsoil of the pastures they trod. Their manure could fertilize and build it instead.