by Tovar Cerulli
Pegasus Books, 2012
Environmentally conscious Americans have been partaking, for some time now, in long, spirited, and often muddied discussions about energy. Whether it’s wind, hydro, wood, nuclear, natural gas, or solar, we’ve come to understand that every form of energy comes with some sort of ecological cost.
In The Mindful Carnivore, Tovar Cerulli explores how food, like other forms of energy, comes with an ecological cost. His desire to minimize those costs led him to be a vegan, and later a hunter. It’s that transformation – from carrot cruncher to tenderloin taster – that makes up the narrative of the book.
Cerulli’s book serves as a well-reasoned blueprint for why people hunt – particularly why they hunt white-tailed deer, an animal most woodlot owners are all too familiar with. It also pulls back the curtain on the steep environmental demands of the developed world’s food system. You sense early on that even when he was filling his craw with hummus, Cerulli struggled with people who refused to consider the toll big agriculture exacts on landscapes and water tables, not to mention its dependence on fossil fuels.
Cerulli was already contemplating his role in this system when his doctor suggested that he needed more protein in his diet. As the book progresses, he begins to eat eggs, then fish, and then chicken. Not long after, encouraged by friends, family, and a chance encounter with a well-mannered hunter on his central Vermont property, he turns to hunting. It seems like a natural progression, really, for a guy who gardens and logs and tries to live like a localvore. Exactly what drove Cerulli from the salad bar to the tree stand is a pretty personal story. Certainly not every hunter is motivated by the same forces that inspired Cerulli, and his story will likely not cause every vegetarian to reconsider the lack of meat in their diet. Ultimately, Cerulli’s point is that food doesn’t just come from the grocery store; it can, in fact, come from the beech ridge on the back 40 or the overgrown apple orchard on the outskirts of town.
If you’re already a mindful hunter, much of the ground Cerulli covers will be familiar. He quotes liberally from the likes of Aldo Leopold, Ted Kerasote, Richard Nelson, and José Ortega y Gasset. Like a jazz musician, Cerulli picks up their riffs, noodles around a bit, and lays down a few solid tracks that are distinctly his. It’s an old story, but Cerulli’s version is worth reading anyway.
Thankfully, there’s not a lot of navel gazing when Cerulli kills – first fish, then a snowshoe hare, and eventually deer. He touches briefly on the soulsearching and the sense of remorse most hunters face when the life leaves an animal’s body, but he doesn’t dose the reader heavily with the drama.
Cerulli doesn’t deliver the definitive manuscript on why humans hunt – and that clearly wasn’t his aim. This is the story about a man coming to the realization that if he wanted to make peace with his food, he was going to have to head into the woods to do it.