Georgia Pellegrini is on a mission to save humanity—or at
least to inspire readers of Girl Hunter
to recover a lost measure of their humanity by harvesting their own meat from
forest, field and sky. This project had its origins in a request to
kill a turkey with her bare hands. A stockbroker-turned-chef,
Pellegrini was working for a restaurant that operated its own farm when she and
several fellow cooks were dispatched to harvest free-ranging turkeys for the
evening’s menu. Though a lifelong meat
eater, Pellegrini realized then she didn’t have the stomach to kill her own
food, and froze on the spot while her colleagues chased the birds down on foot and
cut their throats. She admits the experience briefly swayed her toward
vegetarianism. But the process of cleaning a turkey, which
she describes in lingering and intimate detail, stirred “a dormant, primal part
of me,” she writes; it “made the kind of sense that I could feel deep in my
marrow,” and revealed to her what it truly meant to be an omnivore.
It ultimately
launched her on a quest to learn “if it is truly possible today to live off the
best your hands can produce.” Girl Hunter tracks Pellegrini’s pursuit
of this question through forays around the US hunting deer, pheasants, turkeys,
and wild hogs. Her short answer is “yes,”
though by the end of the book this finding seems almost incidental. Hunting, she discovers, is not only practical
but transformative. With a nod to the
longstanding thesis that hunting among early humanoid groups gave rise to the
intelligence and social organization that defined our species, Pellegrini contends
that hunting can give people a fuller sense of their humanity by immersing them
in the wild world that is their natural home and the true source of their nourishment. She foresees that such awareness “will
propel a shift in how we view and interact with the world we eat in,” with the
result that “the kind of food we demand, as omnivores, will never be the same.”
Despite these sweeping convictions, Girl Hunter is at bottom a story of personal awakening, a
conversion narrative of sorts. Over the
four years of hunts recounted here, Pellegrini found herself profoundly changed—humanized,
as she sees it—by active participation in nature. She saw herself relating to landscapes in a
different way by virtue of turning to them for sustenance. She learned and came
to value an array of skills she’d never known existed. Animals
ceased to be mere ingredients and became
instead individuals, teachers, and
objects of immense respect. Stereotypes about hunters and rural people absorbed
during life in New York and Paris fell away as she spent time among generous,
learned, and amiable guides, ranchers, and
planters.
The vivid portrayals of the individuals who initiated Pellegrini
into hunting are among the most engaging parts of the book, conveying their
knowledge, care, and passion about hunting, even when these are stated silently
or indirectly. Their examples show too
how one’s life as a hunter and the rest of his or her life can shape each other.
Her descriptions of landscapes immerse
readers in the sensory experience of hunting, and she does not overlook the
discomforts that can come with a day afield.
Being a chef, Pellegrini naturally describes the preparing, cooking, and
consumption of wild game in great (and deeply sensual) detail. For those wishing to follow her example,
each chapter concludes with an assortment of recipes for preparing the animals
hunted in it.
Unlike Tovar Cerulli and some other literary hunters,
Pellegrini doesn’t spend much time pondering the ethics of hunting. Its historic role in human societies is
justification enough for her. Neither does she devote much of the book to
considering her position as a woman in the largely male world of hunting,
despite the title’s calling attention to that. Aside
from an unwelcome “slap on the ass” at a wild game dinner party (a sensation
all too familiar to her from work in brokerages and kitchens dominated by men), her entry into what is still mostly
the domain of men appears to bring few
or no complications—a good thing, of course, but then why headline the issue? She acknowledges that as a woman hunter she
is atypical, mentioning that she seldom encounters women in hunting situations. But what about those she does? How might their experiences add to what it
means to be a “girl hunter”?
By advocating hunting
as a means to eating more mindfully, Pellegrini aligns herself with “foodie”
authors like Michael Pollan. And by
presenting hunts taken on sprawling private ranches or hunting preserves, in
the company of affluent planters or retired Berkely academics, leading to
dinners replete with fine wines and Cuban cigars, she is open to the same
charge of elitism often lobbed at Pollan and his counterparts. The recipes Pellegrini offers—Poached Dove
and Pears in Brandy Sauce, or Pheasant
Tagine, for instance—don’t offer any defense, and certainly don’t make hunting
seem more practical or approachable (though perhaps these may be inevitable in
a book by an elite chef). But, at the
risk of stereotyping a bit, hunting is
likely to seem more alien to sippers of Chateauneuf du Pape than to fans of
Pfeiffer’s. Georgia Pellegrini may be
just the evangelist to bring them into the congregation of the camouflaged.
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