Foodie Get Your Gun

So what's up with the recent reviews up books by people who took up hunting in adulthood because of dietary rather than sporting interests?  Certainly they're within the bounds of staple FTR content. But these authors are representative of a broader movement that's caught my interest: a growing interest in hunting among young urban professionals who have little or no previous experience with it, entering the sport out of a desire to limit their dependence on the industrial food system and eat the freshest, most sustainably sourced meat they can.

They're interesting to me partly because they represent a notable exception to the trend of declining participation in hunting.  And they don't fit the profile of most hunters, at least as I understand that.  Hunters for the most part have conservative social/political sensibilities, and however dedicated to conservation they might be, often are antagonistic toward broader forms of environmental protection and activism.  There exists what might amount to a red/blue divide between more typical hunters and the newer breed, a cultural clash noted by some members of the latter. 

Describing her initiation into hunting  Juliana Hanle recalled sitting in a hunters' safety class of mostly "worn looking" white men and hearing, among other things, lectures on the ethics and traditions of hunting. "Hunters have a duty to conservation, to protecting land and resources for sustained use," one of her instructors exhorted. "A hunter kills only as many creatures as a healthy ecosystem can afford."  But quickly he reassured the class that "conservation is not environmentalism."   Reflecting on the moment, Hanle supposed that to the instructor, “'environmentalism'” means something too extreme, irrelevant, and yuppie—a little like me, staring at him from the aisle two rows back."

Yet Hanle didn't  believe the divide between her and her instructor and classmates was  absolute and unbridgeable. "[F]rom where I sit," she writes, "conservation is environmentalism. In an America where food is produced on fear-inducing scales and where we throw away our meals as easily as we consume them, the idea of being conservative in what you kill and eat is countercultural."  She admired that "Most of these men were preparing to enter a hunting community sustained by tradition," a  tradition that meant their families "have been eating sustainably for generations."  In them she saw "signs of an unspoken, deep respect for the natural landscape,"  and wondered what other common ground she and they might have.

As I've written before, the division between outdoor enthusiasts who engage in "consumptive" activities (i.e., hunting and fishing) and those who don't is a tragedy for conservation, or environmentalism, or whatever you want to call it.  People who ought to be working together on so many things too often don't, partly because they can't get past negative assumptions and stereotypes about the other.  Sometimes there are valid reasons for the antagonism between them--some backpacker types are rabidly anti-gun, and some hunters sincerely believe you can never have too many roads cutting through the woods.   Some urban non-hunters people think most rural people are ignorant rednecks, and some rural hunters think city people are effete snobs.  The foodie hunters exist in the middle of these "two cultures" in the outdoor sports.   They represent some hope that a middle way of thinking about the outdoor sports--connected to tradition but aware of modern problems with how we use animals and how we stress the planet we live on--could in fact become the center.