I do not know if I can answer the question of whether harvesting food gives me a stronger connection to the food I eat. I never tended a garden and I have never shot an animal and eaten it. My father recently planted a tomato bush and it produces some delicious cherry tomatoes but to be honest I have tasted better in a store bought package.
Reading the Urban Deerslayer made me think of how the hunter's viewed their relationship to the deer they were killing. When I eat an animal, first of all, I do not want to be up close and personal with said animal. I would not want to gut my food, and skin my food, and butcher my food. And I have never felt, if I saw a deer eating at my father's garden, the need to seek revenge on the animal and kill him and eat him. When you put this humanistic quality on the animal, this need to seek revenge or the thought that the deer may have known it was your garden, it comes off sounding cannibalistic.
I choose to be an oblivious eater and know this may be wrong. I am not eating an animal because they are overpopulating my community or they are ruining my property. If were to put this kind of emotion in to the act of eating them I would not want to eat meat and the animal would become more than food.
Millstone, Erik and Tim Lang. The Atlas of Food. Berkley Univerisity of California, 2008
Patti, Charles H. The Food Book. New York: Fleet, 1973
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I think a lot of people think this way and although it might not be right, I know I partly do that to. I can feel a connection with growing food because we had gardens growing up. But when it comes to killing animals I can't even imagine just going out ad killing a deer just because it happened to wander into my garden. I have never really hunted though either for any reason
ReplyDeleteI'm definitely on the same page, I would never be able to eat meat if I knew I had seen the animal in it's alive form. I pretend that meat and the animals it comes from our different things altogether.
ReplyDeleteTo me the thought of harvesting and hunting for yourself seems like it would definitely give you a greater connection to your food, but when I apply that idea to my actual life it just sounds like liberal BS. Basically I fool myself because a lot of things sound good on paper but it's a whole other step to live them out.
ReplyDeleteI agree. I don't know where it comes from is exactly how I like it. I accidentally killed a squirrel today and was traumatized. I have grown vegetables when I was younger and I remember be very proud of myself. But is what more just pride in accomplishing a task than a connection to the food I ate. I think the same feeling applies to those that kill their own food but that is speculation -- not based in fact. It is more about pride than connection with food.
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