Harvesting Food

After reading the articles "The Scavenger's Guide to Haute Cuisine" and "The Urban Deerslayer" my views of hunting have changed someone. I had never really thought about hunting as a necessity and rather a sport for two reasons. First, I never saw it as necessary when you could walk into a grocery store and get meat from animals who have already been killed for that purpose, for humans to consume. Second, hunting always seemed to be more of a sport. People seem to get so much joy out of hunting and it seemed to me that they turned it into more of a party than was necessary.

The authors of both articles helped me to see things from a different perspective. I never had though about the satisfaction one would get from harvesting their own food, and the connection it would give to the food. How much more you would appreciate the animal you were eating if you were the one who had killed it. Although I had previously seen hunting as immoral because their is already so much meat at grocery stores, I never really thought of people hunting out of necessity because they may not have enough money to purchase meat from a grocery store. In one of the articles the author mentions that for the price of a hunting license (I believe it was around forty dollars or so) he could keep his family fed for almost a year.

Hayes, Ruth. Gluttony. Seattle: Random Motion, 1985.

Regguinti, Gordon, and Dale Kakkak. The Sacred Harvest: Ojibway Wild Rice Gathering. Minneapolis: Learner Publications, 1992.