A Hunter Gather Point of View

Scavenging has a seriously negative connation for me with the suggestion of extreme poverty. Gleaning is looking over a harvested field and picking up the small fruit or vegetable that got missed by the machinery, scavenging suggests a coyote eating the already dead animal which made reading Rinella’s Scavenger’s Guide difficult to get into. I grew up hunting and fishing and like Rinella, I cringed when he said he enjoyed” killing his own food.” You don’t kill, you hunt. You kill a varmint or a pest. It’s all in the word usage isn’t it? I was learning Spanish and my friends’ sister made up a cassette tape that I could play during a road trip I was taking. What she did was talk about “body parts” instead of” parts of the body. I found fear over taking me as I listened to the tape so I tossed it out the window! –I felt like I was listening to a crime scene description.
It’s in growing our own food that makes us aware of the symbiotic relationship between human beings and the land. There is a “country” proverb: “don’t s….in your own pond” We’ve probably all heard some variation of that bit of wisdom. Those who plant gardens don’t want to eat food grown in chemicals, just as fishermen don’t want our water ways to be polluted so their fish is safe to eat. And who better than a hunter understands the need for culling done by bears and wolves when they eat the sick and weak deer and elk. The population of deer is too big to support itself and so you see diseased, sickly, weak animals that need to have food brought in to them because the predators are removed from the area. Hunters and fishermen understand the need for a healthy ecology.

Gollner, Adam. The Fruit Hunters: A Story of Nature, Adventure, Commerce and Obsession. New York: Scribner, 2008. Print.

Prose, Francine. Gluttony. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Print.