Thursday 9 February 2012

Meet Tovar Cerulli


Always a pleasure to big-up a fellow blogger - writing for the love of reading and writing.  Bloggers come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. Some of us are silly, some investigative, some great at evoking wild spaces with sparse prose. The blogosphere has some amazing voices and some of them make it into traditional print. Tovar is a fascinating voice, the first person to diagnose adult onset hunting [read this one it's very funny], and my favorite 'foodie philosopher'  who has grasped the nettle of food bullshit, writing about the unintended consequences to food choices.

Have a watch of this, then have a read of his blog.

At twenty, moved by the compassionate words of Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh and concerned about the ecological impacts of meat, I became a vegetarian. Soon I went vegan.

Almost a decade later, having moved back to a rural community from New York City, I realized that all food has its costs. From habitat destruction to grain combines that inadvertently mince rabbits to the shooting of deer in soybean and lettuce fields, crop production is far from harmless. Even in our own organic garden, my wife and I were battling ravenous insects and fence-defying woodchucks. I began to see that the question wasn’t what we ate but how that food came to our plates.

A few years later, my wife—who was studying holistic health and nutrition— suggested that we shift our diet. My health improved when we started eating dairy and eggs. It improved still more when we started eating chicken and fish.

Searching for ethical, ecologically responsible ways to come to terms with my food, I began to contemplate the unthinkable: hunting. Two years later, I took up a deer rifle.


More soon, your pal

SBW