From Ramen Noodles to Wild Game

My interest in hunting came well before I ever could’ve envisioned myself wearing camo, wielding a gun or field dressing game. It began, like so many other major changes in my life, with a burning question. “What is in my food?”

This question arose as a natural progression from the changing of roles within my family. We went from a household run by college students, homeschooling our son and trying to make ends meet, to something more like we are now; one parent working outside the home and one mainly inside the home. If I was going to be the one running the house and my primary duties were to revolve around the education of our son and feeding our family, I was determined to do a damn fine job. So I rolled up my sleeves and dove in neck deep to answer another question, “What is in the food that I am feeding my family? and Can I do better?”

If I am the feeder of my family, do I not owe it to them to at least know what I am feeding them? and at best improve the level of ingredients until I reach an answer to the question that will allow me to sleep well at night? Our initial diet, when I started down this path consisted of things like Ramen Noodles, Pop Tarts and Kool Aid. This was clearly not cutting it.

I began to move my family’s diet away from conventional foods and toward organic food. We kept all of the modern conveniences of microwave meals and boxes of mac n cheese, but we had the “good” kind… or did we? My thinking at the time was that the real danger in the food came from the chemicals used in its growth and production. I also had a misconception that the "organic" label meant more than it really did. I naively assumed (as many people do) that it meant that the food was healthier, had no chemicals anywhere in the production, and that it was grown ethically. If it was meat, I assumed the organic meat producers would also treat the animals well.

        My son, at 6yrs old, very much approved of the “poptart lifestyle”

I quickly began to feel uneasy about the ingredient lists on the organic instant burritos and the organic jalapeno cheetos. Was it really that much better? I mean, they cost so much more than the “conventional” food and the ingredient list was still a frightening attempt at a chemistry lesson. Now, instead of eating your everyday run of the mill rocket fuel, we had premium organic rocket fuel. The improvement seemed hardly worth the cost. Discovering that there were no more ethics involved in the organic labeling than the conventional foods was disheartening. The organic label was allowed to go onto foods that had been grown in a large monoculture with "organic pesticides" or "organic fertilizers" sometimes used in excess and washing down steams and into lakes and oceans, or with any amount of synthetics and chemicals in the foods, including high fructose corn syrup, which seemed like it was quickly invading every food! I was having a very difficult time puzzling out the right direction for our food choices… vegetarian? organic? free range? grass fed? sugar free? Which things mattered most? How many vendors would we have to visit to put together the whole shopping list? Eventually through a lot of sleepless nights and a library trips I came to the answers that seemed to most satisfactorily answer my questions.

My preference was for foods that were as close to “whole foods” as possible, (ie: apple, wheat berry, meat, milk) unadulterated and unprocessed, with as few ingredients as possible, ideally one. Additionally I prefer that our food be produced as close, geographically, to where I live and shop as possible. I wanted to be able to look the person who grew or raised or made my food directly in the eye across a small table, ask them how they do the work they do, and buy that food right from their hands. Our local farmer's market allowed us to do just that. There is something so very powerful about building a relationship with the people who feed you, it literally changes, not just the way you eat, but the way you look at the whole world. It connects you to the rest of humanity in a deep and profound way that changes you forever. I decided that I would prefer organic, but being close to home is more important in some cases. As for meat I wanted to use it more sparingly than before, but meat, dairy & eggs should all be free range, pastured, grass fed, which many small, local farmers do simply because it is easier and more productive on the small scale. I also found that the gratification of growing what food I could grow my self, and the direct knowledge of it's path to my table was the most comforting of all food choices. It did not take long for me to realize that, in following this entire line of thinking to its logical end, the most “free range” animals are wild, and having my direct connection to that food production initiated the beginning of my journey in the realm of a hunter.

My first “harvest” a spring turkey April 29, 2014

The next year I would, buy my first gun, take my hunter safety course and embark on one of the least expected adventures of my life. I would enter a world in which I studied and stalked my food. I would learned to use and love guns. I would take life in order to give life. I would do my part in what Clarissa Pinkola Estes calls the life/death/life cycle, that is a necessary part of a natural existence.