Today, I had the best dinner in the world. It was fantastic: free-range, grass-fed, organic, locally produced, locally harvested, sustainable, native, low-stress, low-impact, humanely slaughtered meat. Best of all, it was delicious. I had medallions from the finest part of the animal, the backstrap. It was snowing outside on April 1, the skiing was unbelievable with a couple of feet of fresh show the last week of March. The meat was passed our way by a friend of my hosts, and we had a fine glass of wine to go with this Montana mule deer.
It's enough to turn some ideas upside down, what's best and why. Hunting is suffering a bit of an image crisis, and it's now viewed by many as a barbaric practice. But locavore, get your gun. If it's ethics in food that you want, hunting can take you there.
I predict that in 10 years or less, hunting is cool again among the urban elite, after the meat gets rebranded. Maybe I'm nuts, or maybe it's the fact that I grew up with hunting. Either way, let's reconvene in a decade and see if hunting is the exciting "new" passion of locavores.
Now let me go sharpen my edges for tomorrow, it's snowing again tonight. Tweet
4 comments:
I grew up around hunting (in NH, lots of swingsets had headless deer on them come November), but my family didn't hunt. I love venison, and I fully intend to take up deer hunting once I get back to New England, for all the reasons you list. Even my hippy friend in western MA is thinking about taking up duck hunting.
So I think you're right on about the imminent rapid hip-ification of hunting. I suppose having urban hipsters wandering the woods with guns is no worse than the current drunken out-of-state contingent.
My dad's become quite the hunter in recent years and we have a motto that if you won't eat it, don't shoot it. That means there's been a few meals that were, ahem, not so great ... but we've also had delicious turkey on holidays and wild boar Italian sausage in our spaghetti. Anytime he has the urge to shoot for the sake of shooting, he belongs to a gun club where he can go and do his thing. ;-)
Hunters have been active in preserving habitat for prey, in some areas. If the habitat is relatively clean, the prey can be delicious and haealthy. Hunted food may indeed become to be seen as "green", because of these benefits. But, will the consumers actually be doing the hunting? If not, will the resulting industry be beneficial for the environment? Bushmeat, anyone?
What a great post, Mark. The ironny is delicious as we encounter all sorts of structural change brought about by the environmental push defining these times. Keep it up.
David
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