I love meat. Beef. Pork. Chicken. Fish. Don’t get me wrong I love veggies too, and I’ve even been known to consume some tofu every now and then. But my true love is game meat. Venison. Elk. Pheasant. Duck.
I’m a hunter. I fish too, but I enjoy hunting more. I love the personal connection to the food I put on the table, and I love that hunting is one more big middle finger raised to the establishment of factory farming and the industrial food complex.
Some look at hunting as barbaric, and ask how I can look at a beautiful creature, center it’s body in the crosshairs of my riflescope, and send a bullet into it’s body, killing it. Well, as a consumer, everything I consume had to die in order to become food whether it be plant or animal. That deer, elk, boar, duck or pheasant had a truly free and fulfilling life until the moment it became food, for which I am truly thankful. That ribeye steak or pack of hamburger wrapped in plastic in the store was once a living breathing cow. It spent it’s last days cramped together with thousands of other cows in a feedlot being forcefed corn, not part of it’s natural diet, before it was forced through a chute, bludgeoned to death, and tossed in a pile to be processed without a second thought.
I feel a bit more respect for the food I eat whether it come from an animal or from my garden because I had a hand in procuring it.
As I sit here tonight eating grilled chili-rubbed venison backstrap, I feel very much alive and inspired.
Well said.
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