The Mindful Carnivore
Read The Mindful Carnivore Online
Authors: Tovar Cerulli
THE
MINDFUL
CARNIVORE
A Vegetarian’s
Hunt for Sustenance
TOVAR CERULLI
PEGASUS BOOKS
NEW YORK
For Willie and Mark,
for all who eat and care,
and for the living earth that feeds us.
Praise for
The Mindful Carnivore
“Entertaining and erudite. Cerulli’s refreshingly evenhanded tone allows readers to judge the author’s argument on the merits of his literary and personal evidence. Today’s noisy media environment often consists of rigid, uninformed viewpoints passed off as the sole truth. Cerulli provides a welcome antidote to the bluster.”
—
Kirkus Reviews
“A remarkably candid, nuanced, and engaging meditation on what it means to be human. There are no prescriptions or preachy admonitions—just an honest account of the mindful unfolding of a person who has taken seriously the responsibility of being dependent upon the deaths of other organisms in order to live. A bracing read.”
—Jan E. Dizard, author of
Going Wild
and
Mortal Stakes
“A personal tale of how one man comes to terms with the meat on his plate and a historical look at humanity’s connection to animals.
The Mindful Carnivore
delivers new insight in the too often simplistic vegetarian versus carnivore argument.”
—Novella Carpenter, author of
Farm City
:
The Education of an Urban Farmer
“Bull’s-eye! This coming-of-age story is right on target in equating living—and killing—with eating. Cerulli cuts through forests of argument with a thoughtful and thrilling narrative as he turns from vegan to hunter, stalking, killing and eating his first deer. We experience his growing awareness of what it means to be fully involved in the web of nature. With him we can wonder at its complex mystery and share in ‘mindful eating’ as a sacred act.”
—Betty Fussell, author of
The Story of Corn
and
Raising Steaks
“Tovar Cerulli embarks on an unlikely journey from vegan to hunter, laying bare the complicated relationship we have with the food we eat, exposing the many myths and prejudices that pile up on our plates.
The Mindful Carnivore
is a healthy reminder that our choices matter and an invitation to vegetarians and carnivores alike to examine their paths to sustenance.”
—Langdon Cook, author of
Fat of the Land: Adventures of a 21st Century Forager
“Tovar Cerulli has written the book I’ve been waiting for. It’s memoir, adventure story, exploration and a journey into history, ethics, nutrition, ecology, and philosophy. An entertaining read—and an entertaining ride—into the human experience. A savory morsel indeed.”
—Daniel Herman, author of
Hunting and the American Imagination
“Cerulli offers penetrating insights into not only where our food comes from, but what our daily dietary choices say about who we are as human beings.”
—Hank Shaw, author of
Hunt, Gather, Cook: Finding the Forgotten Feast
“Within these pages Tovar Cerulli navigates our role in the cycle of life in a way that is spiritual, intuitive, and profoundly real. By witnessing his transformation from staunch vegan to thoughtful hunter, we are reminded that mindful hunting not only makes us stewards of the land, but thoughtful eaters and more awake human beings. Bravo!”
—Georgia Pellegrini, author of
Girl Hunter
and
Food Heroes
“An unflinching account of one omnivore’s dilemma, drawn with psychological sensitivity and ecological sense. Cerulli treats compelling arguments on both the pro- and anti-hunting sides of the environmental divide with equanimity, while being just as equally impatient with both sides’ time-worn clichés and soundbite slogans. A nourishing read!”
—Mary Zeiss Stange, author of
Woman the Hunter
and
Hard Grass: Life on the Crazy Woman Bison Ranch
“Elegantly written, thoughtful, intensely personal yet universal,
The Mindful Carnivore
is destined to become a classic.”
—Nicolette Hahn Niman, author of
Righteous Porkchop: Finding a Life and
Good Food Beyond Factory Farms
CONTENTS
5 • Where the Great Heron Feeds
1
No More Blood
The lavish Earth heaps up her riches and her gentle foods, and offers you dainties without blood and without slaughter.
—Ovid,
Metamorphoses
T
he trout, pinned to the cutting board, flared its gills for water that wasn’t there. The thin blade of my fillet knife hovered above. I had been thinking about kindness.
The week before—halfway through college and full of questions—I had attended a retreat led by Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh. He spoke of compassion. He encouraged vegetarianism and said how glad he was to see tofu becoming available in American supermarkets. Most of all, he encouraged mindfulness.
Awareness.
Aliveness.
Being awake.
I severed the trout’s head and felt a sharp twinge as the blade bit.
The killing hadn’t bothered me when I was a boy. I remember a snapshot from back then: My father’s friend Willie stands beside me on a low granite shelf at the water’s edge. We’re both bundled in winter jackets, his giant form dwarfing my small one, our attention fixed on the boundary between air and water and on the unseen presences moving below.
I remember how chilly it was that April day. I remember my father out on the water in the battered, oft-patched rowboat; he had his camera with him. I remember because that was the day of the salmon egg.
Willie had opened his tackle box, taken out a jar, unscrewed the lid, and extracted a small red orb, no more than a quarter-inch across. Deftly, his big hands pierced the salty-smelling egg with a tiny gold hook. It disappeared inside. The length of nearly invisible leader between hook and swivel seemed too delicate to withstand a fish of any size. Willie cast out a short distance and let the egg settle into the depths. Minutes later, the diminutive tackle struck its mark and he reeled in the biggest brook trout I’d ever seen, its sparkling bulk almost a foot and a half long.
Willie grinned, cheeks bunching up on either side of his broad face. I was thrilled. And mystified, too, that he had accomplished the feat with such finesse, with such improbably small implements.
I lost the photo years ago. But the image remains with me: the place where it was pinned up in my father’s house, the intent looks on Willie’s face and mine, the quarry wall behind us, the blueberry bushes and birch saplings clinging to crevices in the rock.
I had caught my first fish within twenty yards of that spot, a few years earlier, at the age of three or four. My mother had chaperoned me down to the water’s edge and I’d tossed in a hook baited with bread. Rewarded by a tug on the line, I had hauled up my first scaly prize. I suppose I should prevaricate here, in the venerable tradition of fish stories both exaggerated and fabricated, by waxing lyrical about the majesty of carp—which Izaak Walton called “the queen of rivers”—and about the daring exploits of carp fishermen around the globe. There is, however, no getting around it. The carp I caught was an orange-and-white goldfish. Some nine inches long, perhaps, but a goldfish nonetheless.
When the fishing bug bit me more seriously at five or six, Willie became my mentor in all things finned and gilled. A big man, quick to laugh, he had grown up in South Carolina and Harlem, and had met my father years later when they both lived in Boston. I didn’t know much of his story then. I knew he was a clever angler, knowledgeable about fish and water and tackle; I had no idea his innate brilliance had earned him a full scholarship at Boston University and, later, admission to Harvard Business School, which he attended on the GI Bill, both in an era when racial integration was far from the norm. I knew he was imperturbable; I had no idea that he’d done three tours of duty with the navy and another tour in the struggle for civil rights, sustained by a spirituality that had little to do with religion. I knew he always seemed genuinely happy—“in good humor and good spirits,” as he put it; I had no idea how deep he’d dug, completing his MBA at Harvard and then turning his back on the lucrative life he could have led to start a custom furniture business and return to the craft he had learned to love in the high school woodshop at Bronx Science.
Nor did I know what it was like for him to visit us there in southern New Hampshire. The area was, like me, quite white. And Willie was black. I never stopped to think about it. To me, he was simply a marvelous fisherman and longtime friend.
By the time he and I started fishing together, I was living in Vermont with my mother and stepfather. Whenever Willie’s visits to New Hampshire coincided with mine, we made the most of the daylight. We stood for hours on low ledges around the quarry’s perimeter. Or we drifted around those two and a half acres of water in the old rowboat, flakes of pale-blue paint peeling from its interior. My father, who didn’t care to fish, left us to it.
Willie treated me like a full-fledged fishing partner. When I had questions, he listened closely and gave real answers. On the water, though, we talked little. Mostly we waited in silence, watching our spiraled lines dimple the water’s surface as they went out, praying for an acceleration or pause in their movement, any sign of a trout taking the bait. As the lines straightened, all attention went to our rod tips, to anticipating a slight twitch, a sudden increase in the tension of line against forefinger. When we pulled trout from twenty, forty, or sixty feet down, we delighted in their sparkling jewel-like colors, red spots haloed in blue. Then we ate them.
We did not catch and release. Why torture your food? We caught and killed, stopping when we had enough. And we had no qualms about it. Like Willie, I enjoyed the catching: the undeniable excitement of the first tug on the line, the uncertainty of whether I would land the fish and, if I did, of how large or small it would prove to be. Not that the size of the catch mattered much: We were fishing for lunch, not bragging rights.
An enthusiastic young omnivore, I also enjoyed the eating. The killing was merely a means to an end, to putting the trout on a plate. I took no pleasure in beheading my prey. I simply did it, without thought or apology. Willie and I didn’t talk about such things back then. We just fished, killed, and ate.
Willie’s passion for food had, over the years, enlarged his naturally big frame. I remember him standing near the water one time, telling my father how he had lost weight. He pointed to his leather belt, at eye level for me. Curved wear lines showed that he had taken it in several notches.
“The only exercise I’ve been doing is pushing myself away from the table,” said Willie. He demonstrated the motion with his big arms and laughed, his barrel chest heaving with a surprisingly high-pitched, nasal chuckle.
We cooked the brookies simply. Each was beheaded and gutted with my birch-handled fillet knife, then fried in a cast-iron skillet with butter. The finely scaled skin crisped to a golden brown. The delicate flesh separated easily from spine and ribs.
Between catching and cooking, each fish was measured, its length jotted in a little spiral-bound logbook that Willie had encouraged me to start: date, length of fish, lure or bait used, any special notes such as food found in the mouth or stomach. Though he had spent much of his life in cities and still lived in the Boston area, Willie observed the world with a naturalist’s eye. He knew that keeping track of details would help me understand the fish we hunted and the ecology of the place. It had been years since any trout were stocked in the quarry but they—like the goldfish someone had apparently dumped there—had taken well to their new home. The big trout suggested ample insects and minnows to feast on. The constant presence of little ones indicated successful spawning.