Tovar Cerruli grew up in Massachussets catching and eating
fish and bullfrogs. Though he didn’t hunt, he wasn’t above taking up arms
against other critters, shooting the occasional woodchuck raiding his parents’
garden and once on a whim potting a chickadee with his .22. Though he afterward regretted killing the bird
simply to test his aim, the idea of killing your own food didn’t seem
remarkable to him, especially growing up among friends and family members who
hunted and fished. He in fact gave little thought to the origins of anything he
ate. But as he approached adulthood,
growing knowledge of the health risks of
meat consumption and the squalid conditions of large scale livestock farms made
him reconsider eating meat. Further
influenced by teachings on nonviolence by the Dalai Lama and the Buddhist
thinker Thich Nhat Hahn as well as by feminist philosophy, Cerulli had by the
time he finished college come to see killing animals for food as needless and
indefensibly cruel, and become a committed vegan.
The first chapter of Cerruli’s The Mindful Carnivore traces this progression and ends with the
image of him dumping a freshly cleaned rabbit on his kitchen counter eight
years after swearing off meat. In the rest
of the book Cerulli describes the encounters and reflections that led him to
that moment and, eventually, into deer hunting.
The route he followed is in parts is the same one many consumers lately
have followed into the stalls of farmers’ markets, the dirt of community
gardens, and the pages of Michael Pollan.
Shortly out of college, living in
a cabin in upstate New York, he and his (mostly vegetarian) partner resolved to
restrict their diet as much as possible to foods that were fresh, local, and
organic; these watchwords, he writes, “signified harmlessness,” and the possibility
that eating and raising food could be practices conducted in harmony with, even
to the benefit of, the land. But as he read to further understand the
origins of what he ate, he learned to his chagrin that millions of animals and
birds were killed, incidentally or deliberately, in the course of raising
grains and vegetables, even in sustainable, organic farming operations. Deer alone, he discovers, are shot by the
thousands to protect crops, and even by the neighborhood organic farmer who he’d
admired as a uniquely kind and conscientious steward of the land. The particular fondness of deer for soybeans,
he realizes, means that even tofu eaters have blood on their hands.
Following
a move to Vermont, Cerulli began working as a logger, and through his time in
the woods came to appreciate that he was part of larger natural systems that
were always affected, in helpful as well as deleterious ways, by human
actions. Predation, he observed
firsthand, was an essential aspect of those systems. Around the same time he was making these
discoveries, Cerulli learned he was suffering from protein deficiency. Research into this condition led to the
conclusion that he needed to add animal proteins to his diet. He started with eggs and dairy (locally
produced, of course), graduated to meat, and soon took up fishing again. As a born-again carnivore with a commitment
to eating local, it wasn’t long before he asked himself “What about hunting?”
To
answer that question, he turns, just as he did with other investigations of
food, health, and ecology, to books, and in short order finds he is entering long-disputed
grounds, From historians and
anthropologists, he learns that the relation of hunting (as well as meat eating
itself) to physical, moral, and spiritual being has been disputed practically
from biblical times. As Cerrulli considers the ethics of killing for food,
he plunges into the work of contemporary philosophers such as Val Plumwood and
Carol Adams. He draw from them primary insight
that most eaters are disconnected from the reality that the meat they eat
originated with a living, sentient animal.
He turns also the to the work of thoughtful hunting apologists such as
Richard Nelson and Ted Kerasote who see in hunting a path to deeper awareness
of the natural world and one’s place in it.
Cerulli makes the obligatory stop at Ortega y Gasset’s Meditations on Hunting, but faults it for fixating on the pursuit of game and discounting the killing and consuming it that follow--in short, for keeping crucial aspects of the hunt out of mind.
The
breadth of Cerulli’s research, as well as his contemplation and critique of the
works it includes, is one of the book’s
most impressive features. He scrutinizes individual ideas—as well as his
own perceptions drawn from experience--deliberately and at length, recognizing
but not rushing to resolve conflicts (e.g., hunting seems admirable among aboriginal
peoples; why does it sometimes appear less so when practiced by contemporary
sport hunters?). Neither, once he begins
hunting himself, does he deny an ambivalence about killing animals. In light of many other contemporary defenses of
hunting that refuse to acknowledge any legitimate criticism of the act, Cerulli’s
open mindedness and sensitivity are refreshing. Some hunters might scoff at these, but the
nearly unassailable defense of hunting he offers—its providing sustainable food
as well as greater awareness of the broad natural context we depend on to eat—gives
good reason for any hunter, or for that matter any anti-hunter, to take the
book seriously.
However, justifying hunting isn’t Cerulli’s ultimate
goal. As the title suggests, it is the advocacy
of mindfulness, awareness of the other lives that sustain ours, whether we
directly consume other creatures or not, and the value of those lives. While hunting is the focus of the book,
Cerulli does not privilege it other forms of seeking such awareness. Gardening,
talking with farmers, even reading can cultivate this kind of enlightenment.
One might ask, even if sympathetic to The Mindful Carnivore’s argument, if hunting might in fact be less promising than these as an approach to mindful, sustainable eating.
Cerulli does most of the hunting he describes in the book near his home.
But many hunters drive, or fly, considerable
distances to hunt (Cerulli himself recounts trips to Cape Cod and the southern Appalachians
to hunt with an uncle). It’s not
uncommon for hunters to drive several hundred miles in given week, or even in a
day, to scout for game. This leaves a
rather large carbon footprint, and contributes to various other environmental
harms related to extracting and processing oil.
Given that the supply of game,
and the amount of land open to public hunting (not to mention the number of
people with the free time to take up a sport with a very long learning curve) is
limited, it’s questionable just how broadly hunting could figure as a path to
mindful eating. Still, the questions the
book does take up it handles with intelligence and passion. The
Mindful Carnivore is a unique and provocative contribution to the growing
body of popular writing on the ecology, economics, and ethics of food.
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