The Mindful Carnivore: A Vegetarian's Hunt for Sustenance [Hardcover]

Tovar Cerulli (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 15, 2012

A vegan turned hunter reignites the connection between humans and our food sources and continues the dialogue begun by Michael Pollan and Barbara Kingsolver.

As a boy, Tovar Cerulli spent his summers fishing for trout and hunting bullfrogs. While still in high school, he began to experiment with vegetarianism. By the age of twenty he was a vegan. A decade later, in the face of declining health, he returned to omnivory and within a few years found himself headed into the woods, rifle in hand.

In this deeply personal narrative, Cerulli explores our nutritional connections with the larger-than-human world. From a fateful encounter with a brook trout to a rekindled relationship with the only hunter in his family, he traces the evolution of his dietary philosophy. Contemplating vegetable gardens, farm fields, and deer woods with intellectual and emotional candor, he stalks both food and meaning.

Cerulli’s tale brings nuance to conversations often dominated by black-and-white thinking. He sets contemporary debates in context by looking back over centuries of history, delving into our changing natural and cultural landscapes, and examining the shifting meanings of vegetarianism and hunting. In place of moral certainties, he offers questions.

Can hunters and vegetarians be motivated by similar values and instincts? In this time of intensifying concern over ecological degradation and animal welfare, how do we make peace with the fact that, even in growing organic vegetables, life is sustained by death?

At once compassionate and probing, The Mindful Carnivore invites us to reconsider what it means to eat.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

"A touching and thought-provoking exploration of not only what we eat but how we eat it." --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Review

Serious Eats
"As a long-time vegetarian . . . I was more than a little wary. . . Fortunately, this book retires exhausted tropes and instead presents a truly original and touching account of connecting with nature.”

Novella Carpenter, author of Farm City
"Both a personal tale of how one man comes to terms with the meat on his plate and a historical look at humanity’s connection to animals, The Mindful Carnivore delivers new insight in the too often simplistic vegetarian-versus-carnivore argument."

Sports Afield
"A gripping look at some of the central questions, both practical and philosophical, of human existence."

Casual Kitchen
“One of the most unusual and intriguing books I’ve ever read. . . . Thought-provoking, educational, subtle, and agenda-free.”

New Mexico Wildlife
"This groundbreaking book has enormous potential to create a dialogue with differing groups."

Publishers Weekly
"A touching and thought-provoking exploration of not only what we eat but how we eat it."

Hank Shaw, author of Hunt, Gather, Cook
"Cerulli offers penetrating insights into not only where our food comes from, but what our daily dietary choices say about who we are as human beings."

Nicolette Hahn Niman, author of Righteous Porkchop
"Elegantly written, thoughtful, intensely personal yet universal, Tovar Cerulli’s The Mindful Carnivore is destined to become a classic."

Betty Fussell, author of The Story of Corn and Raising Steaks
"Bull’s-eye! Cerulli cuts through forests of argument with a thoughtful and thrilling narrative. We experience his growing awareness of what it means to be fully involved in the web of nature. With him we can wonder at its complex mystery and share in ‘mindful eating’ as a sacred act."

Jan E. Dizard, author of Mortal Stakes and Going Wild
"A remarkably candid, nuanced, and engaging meditation on what it means to be human. The Mindful Carnivore is a bracing read."

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Pegasus; First Edition edition (February 15, 2012)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1605982776
• ISBN-13: 978-1605982779
• Product Dimensions: 6.4 x 1 x 9.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #783,108 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Tovar Cerulli has worked as a logger, carpenter, and freelance writer. His essays and articles have appeared in various publications, including Outdoor America and Northern Woodlands. In 2009, Cerulli was awarded a graduate school fellowship by the University of Massachusetts, where his research has focused on food, hunting, and human relationships with the natural world.

He lives in Vermont with his wife Catherine, their Labrador retriever, and an eclectic mix of cookbooks.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Food for thought February 14, 2012

By G. Hinds

Format:Hardcover

This is a very readable book about the complex web of interdependence between humans and our food, whether it be animal or vegetable. Not highly editorialized, it is nevertheless a call to examine more deeply our relationship to food. Cerulli is not defending the meat industry -- throughout the book he is in agreement with the general consensus that the meat industry is highly problematic. But he points out eloquently that things are a bit more complicated than "meat bad, veggies good," and not just because of the nutritional pitfalls of plant-based diets. To simply avoid meat and reach for tofu at the grocery store is still to be out of touch with our food and everything that went into bringing it to us -- including, yes, the death of animals. Cerulli's search for a better way to stock his fridge is useful and informative, in much the same way as the documentary "No-Impact Man."

I found the book clear, insightful, and very beautifully written. The point about the complexity of the web of interdependence is well-illustrated and reenforced throughout but not heavy-handed. There's a lot of interesting information on the history of hunting and wildlife management, as well as the wide spectrum of philosophical stances and approaches found among hunters. There's definitely an element of suspense as well, whether you happen to be rooting for man or deer.

For the record, I have known the author for many years. I am not a hunter. I have been a vegetarian, and am a vegetarian sympathizer.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A different look at hunting and food February 21, 2012

By Phillip Loughlin

Format:Hardcover

Tovar's story is relatively unique in itself. To simply read about his journey of transformation to veganism and back, would have made this a good book. But the deeper look into his own relationship with food and his impacts on the natural world around him provides us with an opportunity to look a little deeper into ourselves. Best of all, he accomplishes this without preaching or self-righteous dogma.

"This is how I see it," is basically what he says. It's never, "this is how YOU should see it."

He just presents the opportunity, and the reader can hardly help but take it.

It's not a completely comfortable book, especially for the long-time hunter. Tovar tips some sacred cows in his quest to find answers, and he asks some pretty tough questions. For example, he challenges the often contorted logic that hunters need good PR, so we should be ethical and safe. Shouldn't we be ethical and safe anyway? Good PR will logically follow.

In his very thoughtful approach to the decision to kill a deer, and in the efforts that culminate in his first success, Tovar sheds a little light on the thought process that many of us long-time hunters have come to take for granted. To me, at least, it was an opportunity to look back at my own choices and decisions and take stock of where my personal ethics come into play. I think there's a lot of value in a book that makes you stop to think without telling you what you should be thinking. And this is what makes The Mindful Carnivore a great book.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Some big ideas to chew on... February 20, 2012

By Al Cambronne

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

I've just finished Tovar Cerulli's newly released The Mindful Carnivore: A Vegetarian's Hunt for Sustenance, and I highly recommend it to just about anyone who eats and reads. No matter how you'd label yourself--hunter, nonhunter, antihunter, vegan, vegetarian, carnivore, or just an omnivore with dilemmas--this is a book worth reading. And once you've finished it, you may begin questioning those labels that once seemed so simple and clear. But apart from all the big ideas in this book, it's just a good read.

As Cerulli tells a deeply personal story of his own journey from vegan to hunter, he connects his experiences to larger themes having to do with meat, meaning, and the karmic costs of every food on his table--including the brown rice, tofu, and organic vegetables. As you'll immediately guess from the book's title and cover, Cerulli is now something of a venison evangelist. But he wasn't always. After reflecting on the compassionate words of Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh, he became a vegetarian at age 20. Soon, after learning more about the modern egg and dairy industries, he went completely vegan. Eventually, however, he began to have second thoughts.

"I realized," he writes in his bio for a recent panel discussion, "that all food has its costs. From habitat destruction to combines that inadvertently mince rabbits to the shooting of deer in farm 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, and my health improved when we started eating dairy and eggs. It improved still more when we started eating chicken and fish."

Two years later, Cerulli picked up a rifle and stepped into the deer woods. When he did, he also brought with him a vegetarian's values and sensibilities. This was not a decision he made lightly, and it's one he still thinks about quite a lot. He is indeed a mindful carnivore.

As far as I know, Cerulli is also the writer who first coined a delightful neologism that appears to be sticking: the "adult-onset hunter." The term is appearing more often, and so are the hunters it describes. Cerulli is one, and I am myself. If you're one, too, then this book is definitely for you. I suspect that most of us adult-onset hunters are the kind of people who tend to think just a little too much about where our food comes from.

And even if you've been hunting all your life, you'll find fascinating the ideas that Cerulli explores in The Mindful Carnivore. Today fewer than 15% of Americans hunt, and some surveys suggest that as few as 5% of us get out in the field regularly, year after year. Hunters are definitely a tiny minority. When they find themselves feeling besieged and persecuted, they'd do well to reach for some fresher, more useful intellectual and philosophical ammunition than the usual stale, warmed-over José Ortega y Gasset they've been trotting out for the past half-century or so. They could do no better than The Mindful Carnivore. (In the book, and then later in his notes, Cerulli also mentions several other works that will be of interest to his hunting and nonhunting readers. He's been thinking about these questions a lot, and it's clear he's also been discussing and reading about them a lot.)

I hope that even a few open-minded vegans will give this book a chance. But in the end, Tovar may find a larger audience among open-minded nonhunters who are already mindful omnivores. And who knows? Once they've finished reading The Mindful Carnivore, they may come to view hunters and hunting differently. They may even come to view the meat and vegetables on their own plates differently. I hope their neighbors who do hunt will invite them over for venison, vino, and some interesting conversations about what all this means.

I have to agree with the Kirkus Reviews, which described the book as an "entertaining and erudite meditation." It's an enjoyable read that will also give you some big ideas to chew on. (Sorry.) I'm afraid other reviewers have already used this and nearly every other possible food or meat-related metaphor, leaving me only the most obvious: The Mindful Carnivore is definitely food for thought.