by The Mindful Carnivore: A Vegetarian's Hunt for Sustenance
In mid-December, I looked out our back window and saw a whitetail bedded in the snow under a widely branching pine. I watched through binoculars until the head turned and I could see the round, foreshortened features of a young one—a small doe or perhaps a button buck. The animal lay just thirty yards beyond my archery target. It was the second-to-last day of Vermont’s final deer season, and my archery tag was valid for antlerless deer. Stalking through the gently falling snow, I might get close enough for a shot, but I was in no hurry to kill again so soon. Instead, I watched, wishing the little one well in the cold, hard months ahead.
Late that winter, nourished by venison stew, I dug out the old brass buckle Mark had given me almost thirty years earlier, the symmetrical cross in a near circle. When I started hunting, I had purchased a length of thick, smooth leather from a local shoe-repair shop, thinking I would make a new belt. Now I laid the blank strap on the kitchen table. It took me weeks to see what belonged there. With tools Mark had loaned me, I carved pairs of maple leaves all around the belt, first defining their outlines, then stamping the texture of their veins. Nestled between each pair of leaves, I fashioned a buck, his body curved and flowing, head turned to look back.
Carefully packaged and frozen, the venison kept well. In summer, Cath and I were still eating it: salad greens from the garden topped with thin slices of deer steak, lightly sautéed.
The next November, near dusk on opening day of rifle season, I followed a young buck through the forest. I had hunted the morning and early afternoon with Richard in the Hundred Acre Woods and decided to spend the last hour of light in timberland less than a mile from home. The young buck—a spikehorn, perhaps—ghosted away in the fading light. But he led me to a place I knew: a small stand of hemlocks I had found years earlier, in my first scouting forays. I couldn’t have said why, then or now, but the place felt right.
A few days later, I returned. Just after first light, my second buck dropped where he stood, consciousness snuffed out in a flash.
The following autumn, another deer went down in nearly the same spot, my bullet through his heart. Grateful for the venison, and for my unlikely success a third year in a row, I knelt to lean a few small sticks against each other, then cloaked them with three fern fronds, still green in mid-November: a tiny, ephemeral shrine. When the field dressing was complete, I returned to the house to leave off rifle and pack. Soon, I would hike back into the woods and drag the animal home.
“How are you doing?” Cath asked, as we sat at the kitchen table sipping coffee.
I waggled one hand: so-so. “I’m in that zone.”
She nodded. She had come to expect it.
It wasn’t just the sudden disquiet of the kill itself: the unexpected opportunity, the prayer that my aim was true, the relief when the animal went down fast, the shock of the act. Nor was it the storm of uncertainty and grief that whirled through me after that first time in the Hundred Acre Woods. I felt clearer about my hunting now. Nor was it the terrible remorse I knew I would feel if I wounded an animal, causing suffering.
No, it was something else. It was a feeling for which I had no name. In a day or two, the sensation would crest like a great wave and begin to ebb slowly. Again and again, I would replay the kill in memory, trying to sift out something elusive, some meaning that lived just below the visible surface of the event.
Yes, it was something else. Some kind of soul-wrenching. Some altered state triggered by the encounter with animal and death. By my snipping of that thread of life.
Five weeks after my third buck fell, a doe stepped into the road. As I slowed the car, she trotted across and bounded into the woods. Cath and I both relaxed. We weren’t going fast, but that had been close.
Then the second doe was there, very close, pausing at the edge of the road. I caught the flash of movement at the periphery of the headlights as she leapt forward. I went hard left. But she came in a blur. Cath and I heard the thud as the deer careened off the passenger side.
I stopped and backed up. The doe was lying in the road.
Done for, I thought.
Then she raised her head.
Oh, no. A sick feeling rose up inside. Done for, but not dead.
I had never hit a deer with a car before, and I was going to have to finish this one off, which would be illegal—or drive the half mile back home, call a game warden, and make the doe wait for mercy at the official hand of the law.
When Cath and I got out of the car, the doe stood up. Then, recognizing us as bipeds, she trotted off and disappeared into the woods. Examining the dented fender over the wheel, we realized it was more a case of deer hitting car than car hitting deer.
As we drove off, we agreed that we had all been lucky. It could have been far worse: for us, the doe, and the car.
Three hours later, I followed the doe’s tracks by flashlight, figuring she would stop nearby if she was seriously hurt. In the snow, I found only hoofprints: no sign of a fresh bed. I prayed she had made it with nothing worse than bruises and a newfound respect for headlights, yet the incident still troubled me.
I knew, of course, that animals get maimed and killed by cars. As a volunteer firefighter, I had been on accident scenes. On one such scene, the driver had said she thought the deer ran away, but when I walked back down the highway in search of the missing front license plate, I saw the doe drag herself into the underbrush. I called the game warden and showed him where she had gone. I heard the gun’s sharp report. The warden came back and told me what I already knew: She had been very badly injured.
I knew, too, that we maim and kill in a million other ways, our industrial, economic, and agricultural machinery incurring a massive debt in animal lives and, worse, in habitat. But I had always found such harm—regrettable and unintended—easier to accept than premeditated violence.
Now, thinking about the doe and the sick feeling that rose up as I saw her lying there in the road, I reconsidered. Did I really find it easier to accept these kinds of impacts? Did I really prefer the inadvertent, often-messy, often-unseen ravages I inflict on my fellow creatures as I go about the everyday routines of life? The answer, I realized, was no. If my existence was going to take a toll on other beings, I would rather exact that toll consciously, respectfully, swiftly—and for the specific purpose of eating. I could make a deeper peace with intentional harm, with the kill I had prepared for and chosen.
Hunting, of course, is not the only path to mindful eating.
Gardening reminds us to look deeply into our food, to contemplate our interactions with earth, plants, and animals, to see both the harmony and the harm. If gardening was impractical, if Cath and I lived somewhere like the Brooklyn apartment where I spent my last two years of college, then tending a few clay pots by a window could serve the purpose—our sense of interconnectedness awakened by touching soil, plucking basil, snipping leaves into simmering pasta sauce.
Learning about agriculture calls us to attention as well. Visiting a farm, talking with a farmer or compost producer, reading a magazine article about the growing of grains, beans, fruits, and vegetables—each of these brings our food into focus, cultivating awareness of the landscape changes wrought by crops and the constant impact on other beings.
We can, and sometimes do, visit the places where our poultry is raised. Meeting the people makes them more than faceless producers. Meeting the birds makes them more than food. Seeing them, and the conditions in which they live and die, helps us appreciate what it means to cook up a pan full of chicken marsala. If we were raising our own birds—for eggs or meat or both—that, too, would help us see more deeply, as we cared for them, got to know them, and confronted their deaths.
The particular practice does not matter. What matters is that deep looking. What matters is the kind of insight that can leap from here to there, from the simple fact of food on a plate to the ecological and ethical complexities of its origins. What matters is being able to walk into the grocery store, pick up a bag of apples or a loaf of b
read, a bag of salad greens or a package of chicken legs, and imagine the mortality involved. What matters is seeing beyond the money I fork over in those trouble-free transactions of cash for food: at least guessing at the other costs incurred.
I do not need to weigh myself down with such awareness. As far as I can see, that brand of guilt serves no worthwhile purpose. But awareness encourages me to pause and reflect, to celebrate the food that reaches our plates, to respect the organisms we ingest and the people who bring them to our table, to say a few words of thanks before taking up fork or spoon.
And, for me, hunting helps. Year-round, it summons my attention, like the ringing of a prayer bell. In winter and spring, I can’t slice stew meat or sauté backstrap without thinking of the animal I dragged home, recalling the specific impact my life had on that life. In late summer, as our venison dwindles, my attention turns again to the forest and I prowl along brooks and old stone walls, through stands of maple and hemlock, checking old deer trails for fresh sign. In autumn, I hike into the woods in the predawn dark, Orion high over one shoulder, frozen leaves underfoot. If I kill, I crouch beside the fallen whitetail to give thanks for all that sustains me, then make my way to the kitchen counter to complete the butchering: a meditation with meat and knife.
Notes
I could not have written this book were it not for the efforts of historians, anthropologists, biologists, ecologists, philosophers, poets, and other researchers and writers who preceded me. I am in their debt.
The opening epigraph is from Mary Midgley’s Animals and Why They Matter (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1984), 27.
Chapter 1: No More Blood
It is difficult for me to imagine who I would have been as a kid—or who I would be as an adult—if I had not spent my boyhood summers almost entirely outdoors, wandering the woods, fishing for trout, catching tadpoles and bullfrogs. Interaction with the natural world is, I believe, vital to children’s physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual health. I highly recommend Richard Louv’s insightful exploration of this topic, Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder (Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 2005). Though ambivalent about hunting, Louv makes the case that “fishing and hunting remain among the last ways that the young learn of the mystery and moral complexity of nature in a way that no videotape can convey” (193). He takes his arguments a step further in The Nature Principle: Human Restoration and the End of Nature-Deficit Disorder (Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 2011), contending that adults also need nature.
My brief discussions of the history and taxonomy of trout and salmon draw primarily on Robert J. Behnke’s Trout and Salmon of North America (New York: The Free Press, 2002). Izaak Walton’s description of carp as “the queen of rivers” comes from The Compleat Angler (1676; repr., New York: Wiley & Putnam, 1847), 147.
As noted on the copyright page, I am grateful for permission to reprint Wendell Berry’s fine poem “The Peace of Wild Things.”
This chapter’s epigraph, from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, can be found quoted in Howard Williams, The Ethics of Diet: A Catena of Authorities Deprecatory of the Practice of Flesh-Eating (1883; repr., Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 26.
Chapter 2: Man the Gardener
In my final two years of undergraduate work, completed at the New School for Social Research, I studied Mohandas K. Gandhi’s moral and political philosophy under the guidance of the late feminist philosopher Sara Ruddick, and was particularly impressed by the twin commitments of Gandhi’s lifelong quest for truth. On the one hand, he lived according to what he saw as the truth, which must, he wrote, “be my beacon, my shield and buckler.” On the other hand, he had the humility and wisdom to recognize that his truth was incomplete, that it was only “the relative truth as I have conceived it.” These lines are from Gandhi’s aptly subtitled An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth (1957; repr., Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), xxviii. The line about “the life of a lamb” appears on page 235.
Discussion of vegetarianism in Greece, India, and Europe can be found in The Ethics of Diet, cited above, and also in Colin Spencer’s Vegetarianism: A History (London: Grub Street, 2000). For a detailed exploration of the links between early European vegetarianism and Hindu traditions, see Tristram Stuart’s The Bloodless Revolution: A Cultural History of vegetarianism from 1600 to Modern Times (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007).
My primary source on the history of U.S. vegetarianism was Adam D. Shprintzen’s “Abstention to Consumption: The Development of American Vegetarianism, 1817-1917” (PhD diss., Loyola University Chicago, 2011), which he generously shared and discussed in personal correspondence. The direct quotes drawn from Shprintzen’s work are listed here, by opening words and page numbers in his dissertation: “an unwavering moral principle,” 113; “a fascination with the possibilities,” 218. Shprintzen’s work was also my source for quotes from several other people and publications. These are listed here, with page numbers from Shprintzen’s dissertation: Sylvester Graham, “the lower animals,” 30; “dietetic intemperance and lewdness,” 32; Charles Dickens, “breakfast would have been no breakfast,” 51; Scientific American, “a good conceit,” 106; Saturday Evening Post, “weak and cowardly,” 107; Water-Cure Journal, “were there no hogs,” 114; American Vegetarian and Health Journal, “a radical reform,” 129; Chicago Daily Tribune, “leg breaking and ear twisting savagery,” 290.
This chapter’s epigraph is from the Book of Isaiah in the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament.
Chapter 3: Trouble in Eden
Howard Williams discusses Hesiod and “the peaceful spirit of agriculture” on page 2 of The Ethics of Diet. David Pimentel’s study is described in his article “Soil Erosion: A Food and Environmental Threat,” Environment, Development and Sustainability 8 (2006): 119-137. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service numbers on birds and pesticides were drawn from a two-page pamphlet issued by the Office of Migratory Bird Management, Pesticides and Birds (March 2000).
Several studies on the harm done to animals by grain harvesting are listed in a fact sheet by Champe Green, Reducing Mortality of Grassland Wildlife During Haying and Wheat-Harvesting Operations (Stillwater, OK: Oklahoma Cooperative Extension Service, 2007). For a related, intriguing, and controversial article based on Tom Regan’s theory of animal rights, see Steven L. Davis, “The Least Harm Principle May Require That Humans Consume a Diet Containing Large Herbivores, Not a Vegan Diet,” Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 16 (2003): 387-394.
Richard Nelson’s Heart and Blood: Living with Deer in America (New York: Random House, 1997) is one of my favorite books on deer, not only because it is thoroughly researched and elegantly written, but because Nelson treats everyone—from animal-rights activists to trophy hunters—with respect. I have drawn quotes from his chapter on deer and agriculture, “The Hidden Harvest” (298-311). Thanks also to freelance writer Al Cambronne for discussing deer management and history with me.
In developing my historical sketch of the New England landscape, I consulted William Cronon’s fascinating book, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983), which includes his description of the precolonial coastal forest as “remarkably open” (25). I also drew on Tom Wessels’s Reading the Forested Landscape: A Natural History of New England (Woodstock, VT: The Countryman Press, 1997) and Charles W. Johnson’s The Nature of Vermont: Introduction and Guide to a New England Environment (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1980).
Wessels’s Reading the Forested Landscape provides an intriguing introduction to the historical forces—from logging and agriculture to fires and hurricanes—that have shaped the region’s forests. David Ludlum’s remark about the “wool craze,” from Ludlum’s Social Ferment in Vermont, 1791-1850 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939), is quoted on page 57 of Wessels’s book. The suggestion that New England’s stone walls be considered “the eighth wonder of the world” appears
on page 59.
I am grateful to Victoria Hughes and Marjorie Strong of the Vermont Historical Society for tracking down the Vermont Merino Sheep Association’s Spanish Merino Sheep: Their Importation (1879), and helping me figure out what became of the several thousand animals William Jarvis brought over from Europe. Thanks also to Jennifer Donaldson of the Woodstock Historical Society for finding the local newspaper account of Alexander Crowell’s slaying of the catamount, “Panther Hunt in Barnard,” The Standard (Woodstock, VT), December 1, 1881.
This chapter’s epigraph comes from Wendell Berry, The Gift of Good Land: Further Essays Cultural and Agricultural (New York: North Point Press, 1982), 281.
Chapter 4: An Animal Who Eats
The Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, mentions his dietary journey in Freedom in Exile: The Autobiography of the Dalai Lama (New York: HarperCollins, 1990). In light of my own certainty as a vegan, I was intrigued by his description of how, in his vegetarian phase, he felt “a sense of fulfillment from a strict interpretation of the rule” (179).
Henry van Dyke’s discussion of “the enchantment of uncertainty” is from Fisherman’s Luck and Some Other Uncertain Things (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1899), 10.
This chapter’s epigraph—from John Hersey’s Blues (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987), 9—is the Fisherman’s initial reply to the Stranger, who has just expressed his distaste for “the fishing mystique: all that notion of the elegance and nobility of a brutal blood sport.”
Chapter 5: Where the Great Heron Feeds
Speculations on aspens’ chemical defenses are discussed in a number of articles, including Walter J. Jakubas and Gordon W. Guillon, “Coniferyl Benzoate in Quaking Aspen: A Ruffed Grouse Feeding Deterrent,” Journal of Chemical Ecology 16, no. 4 (1990): 1077-1087.
I drew information on the global impacts of the livestock industry from Henning Steinfeld et al., Livestock’s Long Shadow: Environmental Issues and Options (Rome: United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, 2006). Some of this study’s calculations and conclusions have been contested, especially those concerning greenhouse gases. It is important to recognize that the ecological impacts of livestock production vary greatly, depending on the methods employed; see, for example, the writings of Nicolette Hahn Niman, including Righteous Porkchop: Finding a Life and Good Food Beyond Factory Farms (New York: HarperCollins, 2009).