Revisiting the Omnivore's Dilemma

[urbpan]

I just read the last two chapters of the Omnivore's Dilemma, finally finishing a book that I started reading (with an excerpt from the author's website) two years ago. The penultimate chapter is about foraging for mushrooms, and more pointedly, about foraging for food (as opposed to cultivating it

Comments

[bellelvsbeast]

I am not a fan of hunting myself...especially with guns...it's not fair imo...if you have to run up on the animal, tackle it and stab it, maybe that is more fair since it's more even. With a gun, how one sided is that? The animal has no chance...
But yea

[urbpan]

I agree with you, to a point. I've always objected to hunting being referred to as a "sport," partly for the reason you state (not very sporting) and partly because I think it trivializes killing. But for taking an animal for food, I've come to believe that a gun is the right tool.

[bellelvsbeast]

Yea as a sport it just irritates me people can even CONSIDER it a sport...but still even if it's for sustenance, there are better ways...I don't know, bow hunting seems more fair to me...

[brush_rat]

More far, but a lot more potentially cruel. Unless you're very good, it's much easier to wound with a bow and have an animal slowly bleed to death or die days later from an infection. I've heard bow hunters say a well placed shot with a bow kills the animal without it even knowing it was hit. It jerjks looks around confused and then falls over. I've got no personal experience with any hunting at all however.

[dragonwrites]

part of me thinks our lives would be easier if our main concerns were food and shelter, rather than all these needless societal complications invented in pursuit of an easier, more comfortable life (yeah, like this computer really simplifies things). then again, I just reread his Botany of Desire and it seems to me that Pollan kind of likes complication. I very much wish I knew more about identifying edible plants. Aside from a few easy ones, like morels and raspberries, I have no clue.

[buboniclou]

You live in a pretty nice area for water. Why not start fishing?

[urbpan]

An excellent question! Which can best be answered by this golden oldie: On the pleasures of fishing.

in short, I don't like the taste of fish. (but please read the linked post, I thought it was funny at the time)

[buboniclou]

I lol'd, and then I lol'd even more at Alexis' response :D

Aside from loving seafood, I feel pretty much the same way. Catch-and-release fishing stopped being fun the first time I did it, on a girl scout trip, when I had to get the damn hooks out of the fishes' mouths (sunnies too, I think). One of them went through the poor creature's eye, and that was the end of it for me.

[roaming]

"Now, should I take up hunting...?"

Only if you're willing to take your prey down with your bare teeth. Like the other predators do. None of this unfair advantage with gun or knife stuff! ;-P (kidding)

I'm just halfway through In Defense of Food, and promptly ordered ALL his other books. Man that guy can think, and makes you feel like you're thinking too. (Which for me is a BIG improvement these days, lemme tell ya.) I bought a wonderful photgraphic book with essays by different people about how our environment changes us, Voices of the Land, because his name is on the cover (he wrote the foreward).

[aemiis_zoo]

If you take up hunting, it should definitely be bow hunting.

I haven't read the book, but from what you have described, I think it literally would take all day to gather and prepare completely locally grown food. This was easy during prehistoric times, and even times prior to the industrial revolution, but nowadays, most of us have these pesky things called jobs, which occupy a good portion of our time. Before such modern times, I imagine, like any animal, our days would have been taken up actively pursuing (and preparing) food.