Note: This is a version of my keynote speech at the national banquet of Pheasants Forever and Quail Forever, which I gave on March 12.
I get asked a lot of questions. All day long, every day. It’s part of my life.
But if there was one question I get asked more than anything else, and this one’s from people who don’t hunt, it’s this: Do you eat it?
I can pretty much guarantee that everyone reading this who hunts has been asked this question a hundred times or more. And for all of you who don’t hunt: I bet you’ve asked that question, either out loud to friends and family who hunt, or at the very least in your head when you’re trying to evaluate the hunters you encounter throughout your life.
The answer to the question of whether we eat what we kill is an instant litmus test by which we hunters are judged, even by other hunters.
If you answer yes, you can sometimes even hear the sigh of relief. Good, they think, you’re not some psychopath. Or at least probably not.
If the answer is no, well, you got some ’splainin’ to do.
Emphasizing food as a primary result and benefit of hunting can not only draw in more new hunters, it can also improve the perception of hunting among the 95 percent of Americans who don't hunt — and, ultimately, it can encourage more to join the struggle to preserve those places where we hunt and live.
I gotta tell you, though, the “do you eat it” question bothers me.
That it needs to be asked at all is a signal failure of the hunting public, here in the US, Canada, the United Kingdom, and probably a whole lot of other places.
The default, the assumption, the given, should be that we hunters eat what we kill, and that it is, or should be, the primary reason – or at least a primary reason -- for engaging in this pursuit of ours.
I pointedly use the term pursuit, because to me “sport” seems too glib, too flippant. No one dies in sports, at least not normally.
Keep in mind that while I am a chef, I am not talking about cheffy food here. A simple pheasant salad sandwich served on Wonder bread is every bit as valid in the grand scheme of things as a dish that requires years of practice to pull off.
The important thing is that we eat the game we bring home, not how.
Hell, I know hunters who grind whole deer, or who put almost all of their pheasant into runzas, or pheasant soup. That’s good enough for them, and it’s good enough for me, even though I’d probably go nuts limiting myself like that.
The meal at the end of the hunt means more than just calories. It represents connection.
A long time ago, I used to hate on “poppers,” that concoction of jalapeños, bacon, cream cheese and some meat bit from some game animal.
I don’t do that anymore. Why? Because as I hunted doves more and more, year after year, I started to realize that dove poppers are to Labor Day what turkey is to Thanksgiving. A cultural touchstone. Connection.
Newcomers to hunting are desperately seeking this connection. Something more real than supermarket meat, more real even than the meat they buy at farmer’s markets. They want to know where their food comes from. Really know.
This “field to table” movement has created a tsunami of new hunters who have taken up rifles and bows later in life. And that’s a good thing.
Unfortunately, many of these newcomers entered hunting with the same preconceived, ugly and untrue notions about those who were born into hunting that spark the “do you eat it” question in the first place.
And the reverse is true, too. If I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard an old timer complain that all newcomers are just “hipster hunters” uninterested in the realities of a hunting life — that they’re dilettantes just “doin’ it for the ‘Gram,” I could afford to fill my gas tank.
Thankfully, I’ve seen most of this fall away as the new gets to know the old, and vice versa.
It’s this new blood — hunters younger, more urban, more diverse, and politically all over the map — who will likely be the future of hunting, for good or for ill. And just as those of us who have hunted for decades can show them the way, they can join us in showing the vast majority of the population who don’t hunt that what we do is neither bloodthirsty, nor cruel.
I’ve walked this road.
I’m from Jersey. The same part they filmed the TV show “The Sopranos” in. Urban. Dirty. Crowded. Noisy. Nature exists only on the periphery of our lives, or “down the Shore.” I went to college on Long Island, at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, which was only marginally more suburban.
I’m telling you this because while I’ve been an angler and a gatherer of wild plants my whole life, I didn’t even meet another hunter until I was 19 years old. He was a teammate on my cross country team.
Think about that for a second.
For the first two decades of my life, I had no notion of what a hunter was. And you know what? I didn’t care.
The fact that my teammate hunted was merely a blip. He never really talked about it. Hunters and hunting never entered my mind until I moved to Wisconsin for graduate school. (Go Badgers!) As you probably know, you can’t be alive in Wisconsin without being at least aware of the importance of deer season. The world stops.
But even then, I shrugged my shoulders, stayed out of the woods and moved on with my life.
It was not until another decade later, when I was a reporter in Minnesota, that I actually had a friend who hunted and for whom it was important enough to talk to me about it. Some of you know that friend. His name is Chris Niskanen, and he and I worked for the St. Paul Pioneer Press at the time; I was an investigative reporter, he was the outdoors reporter.
Niskie and I had fished together a lot. And that first winter, he began offering me game: pheasant, mallards, venison. As a former restaurant cook, I knew what to do with these gifts — and I gotta tell ya, I loved them. Right off the bat.
So, when hunting season approached the following year, I started practicing with a .22 and a shotgun and took my first tentative steps into the world of hunting. It was a pheasant hunt in Aberdeen, South Dakota. And no, I didn’t hit anything.
I can hardly believe that was 20 years ago, but it was. The rest, as they say, is history.
What Chris did was to practice the art of drumstick diplomacy long before this current trend of “adult onset hunters” even existed.
And it worked. I was hooked.
Food is what got me into hunting, and while it is still the primary reason I hunt, over time it began to share space with a growing realization that a prairie, a marsh, or a grouse wood that has a healthy population of birds not only makes for a better hunt, but it is also a marker for an ecosystem that we humans have not yet ruined.
Over time it started to occur to me that I needed to give back, which is why I first joined Quail Forever, and why I later decided to drop the cash to became a Life Member. It’s also why I’ve been donating a portion of the profits from my book Pheasant, Quail, Cottontail back to Pheasants and Quail Forever to help them protect and preserve habitat.
Hunting connects us, new and old, to where our food comes from.
It’s a hell of a lot harder to chuck some meat in the trash that’s a little past its prime if you had to walk all day just to get it. You figure it out. You do something with it. And every new step taken, from using more of the animal, to trying out new recipes and techniques, reinforces that connection — it fuels a feeling of independence, a sense of quiet competence, and it makes us count down the days to the opener.
As all this soaks in, year after year, as hunting becomes more of a way of life for us, we start to see the interdependence we as humans — not just as hunters — have with the wild world around us.
We see, really see, the needs of not only the animals we pursue, but also the needs of their neighbors, too. A healthy prairie for sharpies is also going to have tons of meadowlarks and grasshoppers, rose hips and clover, and a hundred other plants besides.
Hunt long enough, though, and you will see some of those places die.
Sometimes it’s natural, from fire or flood or whatever. More often we humans are to blame. Subdivisions and clean farming and pesticides and the various extraction industries are the most common culprits. The plants and animals can’t really do much about it, but we can.
And that legion of new hunters who came after me? They are starting to come to the same conclusion: Habitat is king. This progression makes perfect sense, because no matter when you began your hunting journey, those first years are all about figuring out how to just be barely competent in the field. Only once our skills and successes mature can we really see how important it is to give back — not only to the people around us, but to the land.
Here’s the bottom line: Hunting as a pursuit will continue to exist on the edges of American society. There will always be more non-hunters than there are hunters. That’s just the way it is.
So it is critical that hunting remains, at the very least, neutral in the eyes of the non-hunting public. And hunting for food, and celebrating that feast, is far and away the easiest path to do that.
And to that eternal question? D’ya eat it?
We as hunters need to do our part to flip that script. Yes of course we eat what we hunt, and… would you like some?
Loved the piece. And I’m enjoying the new blog. Keep up the great work. 👍👍👍
Most hunters (including me) DO eat what they kill, as they should. It helps form the connection between the hunter, the land, and the food that comes from the land. This is why I have a problem with things like wolf hunting, and even some big-game trophy hunting (as in Africa). Killing an animal like a wolf or a lion just to say you killed it, and/or to have a taxidermist mount it for display, gives all hunters a bad name, in the eyes of many non-hunters. And I can see why. Personally, I will never take the life of an animal that I have no intention of eating.