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Full Article: Tovar Cerulli on the ethics of eating and his journey from vegan to hunter - Denver - Arts - Show and Tell
Excerpt:
What prompted your transition into hunting?
It was a sort of multi-staged transition. You're not a vegan and then just wake up the next day and say, gee, I think I'll be a hunter. [Laughs.] It doesn't work that way. The first stage of that transition was my growing recognition that my eating had impacts, whether I was eating local vegetables or corn and soybeans grown out in the Midwest, or whatever. I started to realize that the clearing of fields for agriculture wiped out wildlife habitats, that in big industrial fields where big machinery is moving through that lots of small animals were getting displaced, killed, maimed and so on. And that in those fields, and also, as it turned out, just a few miles down the road in a local organic farm where my wife and I would pick strawberries or buy greens, that deer were being shot to protect crops. And in our own gardens we had to deal with insects and a woodchuck eventually, and we were fertilizing our garden with manure, with compost from local dairy farms, and occasionally I'd find a fragment of bone in the compost we were using. I realized that, as I put it in my book, we weren't eating animals, but our vegetables were. Our diet remained intimately connected with animals in terms of fertilizer and pest control and habitat. So that didn't actually change my diet, but what that did is it softened the edges of my rigid, black-and-white ideas about food ethics and what it meant to be a vegan or vegetarian.
The change in diet came from some health concerns. It wasn't that I was desperately ill or anything, but after a decade I had some nutritional deficiencies and my doctor, who was a naturopath, and my wife, who was studying holistic health and was also a vegan alongside me, suggested maybe some of my health concerns like low energy might be addressed by making some dietary shifts. So a radical step was having a bowl of yogurt. [Laughs.] And then we added some eggs into our diet and so on. The stages toward hunting came from a desire to be involved, to confront animal death, whether it was the specific animal I was eating as it would be in hunting, or the fact that there was animal death involved in all sorts of ways with my diet. I started fishing again once we shifted our diet to include some fish and chicken, and hunting was another way to be involved with my food, with death, which I wasn't looking forward to confronting, but I felt like it was important in some way. And also another way to be involved with this place that I live. You get to know it in a way that's different from the way I knew it as a hiker.
Excerpt:
What prompted your transition into hunting?
It was a sort of multi-staged transition. You're not a vegan and then just wake up the next day and say, gee, I think I'll be a hunter. [Laughs.] It doesn't work that way. The first stage of that transition was my growing recognition that my eating had impacts, whether I was eating local vegetables or corn and soybeans grown out in the Midwest, or whatever. I started to realize that the clearing of fields for agriculture wiped out wildlife habitats, that in big industrial fields where big machinery is moving through that lots of small animals were getting displaced, killed, maimed and so on. And that in those fields, and also, as it turned out, just a few miles down the road in a local organic farm where my wife and I would pick strawberries or buy greens, that deer were being shot to protect crops. And in our own gardens we had to deal with insects and a woodchuck eventually, and we were fertilizing our garden with manure, with compost from local dairy farms, and occasionally I'd find a fragment of bone in the compost we were using. I realized that, as I put it in my book, we weren't eating animals, but our vegetables were. Our diet remained intimately connected with animals in terms of fertilizer and pest control and habitat. So that didn't actually change my diet, but what that did is it softened the edges of my rigid, black-and-white ideas about food ethics and what it meant to be a vegan or vegetarian.
The change in diet came from some health concerns. It wasn't that I was desperately ill or anything, but after a decade I had some nutritional deficiencies and my doctor, who was a naturopath, and my wife, who was studying holistic health and was also a vegan alongside me, suggested maybe some of my health concerns like low energy might be addressed by making some dietary shifts. So a radical step was having a bowl of yogurt. [Laughs.] And then we added some eggs into our diet and so on. The stages toward hunting came from a desire to be involved, to confront animal death, whether it was the specific animal I was eating as it would be in hunting, or the fact that there was animal death involved in all sorts of ways with my diet. I started fishing again once we shifted our diet to include some fish and chicken, and hunting was another way to be involved with my food, with death, which I wasn't looking forward to confronting, but I felt like it was important in some way. And also another way to be involved with this place that I live. You get to know it in a way that's different from the way I knew it as a hiker.
