In 1972, I arrived in Singapore to attend the Singapore American School and soon after was introduced to a documentary film, called Future Shock, based on a book by Alvin Toffler and narrated by Orson Welles which was taking the US by storm. As a child, it totally freaked me out….perhaps one of the reasons I avoided computers until I could avoid them no longer. At that time there was also a large movement to get back to basics.

It revealed itself in the very large “Ecology” movement of the 1970s (remember the riff on the American flag, in green with the Greek letter ‘Theta’ where the stars and blue background would have been?), and publications like The Foxfire Books, a collection of stories detailing life in Southern Appalachia. I still have my father’s copies that he picked up on visits back to the States. It’s full of information on woodcraft and pre-supermarket self-reliance. They even showed how to properly scald a pig, which I used in this episode of Cork’s Outdoor TV on roasting a pig.

I’m reminded greatly of the back-to-basics movement of the 1970s, by these latest “slow food” and “green food” movements recorded by Michael Pollan and Paul Bertolli. What could be better than eating food that led to a slower and more relaxed society? But, so much information has been lost due to the increasing lack of family histories and traditions being handed down through live practice, i.e. on a farm or ranch. So many generations have moved off the land and into cities. Nowadays, most slow food information is that carried into the US by new immigrants from Asia and Latin America.

This is a pity as there was a lot of slow food information held in the family lines that came here from Northern Europe. In March of this year, I had the opportunity to complete a phone interview for Cork’s Outdoors Radio with one such food authority on her latest book on getting back to the basics (be sure to listen to the audio and watch the show below).

Darina Allen is noted as the “Julia Child of Ireland” and has been entertaining and educating on the subject of cooking in Ireland and the United Kingdom through her TV show and a collection of books. Her latest book, Forgotten Skills of Cooking: The Time Honored Ways are The Best – Over 700 Recipes Show You Why, is that treasure trove of not only Irish, British, and foods from other parts of the world, like Italian slow food recipes, but also articles and remedies for raising your own chickens for meat and eggs, how to properly butcher large farm animals like pigs, cattle and lambs.

It’s a gorgeous book, with photos that took all the seasons to create, evidenced by plants in bloom, and the foods in season. It’s all about being seasonal, Allen says, something clear in how she describes not only those foods that are collected on the farm, but also on a day’s walk in the woods gathering such morsels for the kitchen as nettles, mushrooms and a number of herbs, leafy greens, and berries.

Both land and water are covered, with foraging rewards, like limpets that are easily found in the Americas, and are cooked in a number of dishes that incorporate the bounty of the farm and field.

Though spending a lot of time reading through the scrumptious recipes that anyone would easily take a few years preparing all the scrumptious family meals using organic ingredients (either purchased or foraged): pies, breads, puddings, roasts and grilled fishes, I was keen on the game and fish sections.

Hare, venison, duck and goose are covered well, both as farm offerings and from the marsh, and of course the obligatory pheasant, but I’d done enough pheasant recipes lately, so I quickly focused on the basil cream rabbit recipe. It was the very cottontail taken with a .22 pellet rifle from Crosman. Who would have thought the hardest part for this recipe was to get the caul fat: Thank God for Dittmer’s in Mountain View, CA!

Watch the preparation and presentation on Cork’s Outdoors and return for the recipe below:

SADDLE OF RABBIT WITH CREAM, BASIL, AND CARAMELIZED SHALLOTS

 reprinted with permission from the publisher, KYLE BOOKS

SERVES 6

6 saddle of rabbit (use the legs for confit)

4oz pork caul fat

salt and freshly ground pepper

extra virgin olive oil

2⁄3 cup dry white wine

2⁄3 cup Chicken Stock

2⁄3 cup cream

2oz basil leaves

Caramelized Shallots (see below)

 Steps:

1. Trim the flap of each saddle, if necessary (use in stock or pâté).
2. Remove the membrane and sinews from the back of the saddles
3. with a small knife.
4. Wrap each saddle loosely in pork caul fat.
5. Season well with salt and freshly ground pepper.
6. Preheat the oven to 400°F. Place the rabbit pieces in a stainless steel or heavy roasting pan and roast for 8–12 minutes, depending on size.
7. Remove from the oven, cover, and allow to rest.
8. Degrease the pan if necessary, and put the wine to reduce in the roasting pan.
9. Reduce by half over medium heat, add the chicken stock, and continue to reduce.
10. Add the cream.
11. Bring to a boil, season with salt and freshly ground pepper, and add lots of snipped basil.
12. Serve the rabbit with the basil sauce, caramelized shallots, boiled new potatoes, and a good green salad.

CARAMELIZED SHALLOTS

1lb shallots, peeled

4 tablespoons butter

1⁄2 cup water

1–2 tablespoons sugar

salt and freshly ground pepper

 Steps:

1. Put all the ingredients in a small saucepan, and add the peeled shallots.
2. Cover and cook on a gentle heat for about 10–15 minutes or until the shallots are soft and juicy.
3. Remove the lid, increase the heat to medium, and cook, stirring occasionally.
4. Allow the juices to evaporate and caramelize. Be careful not to let them burn.

For more information on Darina Allen’s cooking school in Ireland, check out her school’s website: Ballymaloe Cookery School

For your daily commute on your MP3 player – Download and Enjoy Darina Allen’s interview on Cork’s Outdoors Radio:

Few books really get me emotionally anymore, especially non-fiction. But, when I began reading Lierre Keith’s personal account of a strict vegan diet on her body over 20 years I was floored with one question: how in the world?

How in the world could people put themselves through such a lifestyle? How could we have arrived at such a point in our lives that those who profess a close relationship to the Earth, the morally anti-hunting/anti-animal protein driven vegan, are a great part of it’s destruction? How in the world as Western humanity gotten so far away its understanding of how the world works, how life and death are in separable?

Pain

Both Keith and I were born in the same year. That means when we were 16, she started on the vegan diet…and I was beginning to wonder why no matter the amount of high school PE and football and soccer, I couldn’t seem to get into excellent shape, even though both sides of my parental lines were in great shape from their childhood until their mid-30s. And no matter how much cereal I had for breakfast, I was hungry long before lunch, and I could never stay awake in class. The only difference between my parents and me was that my parents had an animal protein-based breakfast.

What Lierre Keith’s diet left her with after 20 years on the diet, was a degenerative bone disease, weak musculature, and nervous system of pain, that presently it can’t even support her for more than 15 minutes of standing. Not to mention all the other effects on a malnutritioned body during its most important growth years. And it was even worse ten years ago, BEFORE she began to see some slight improvements from finally getting the nutrients animal proteins provide all omnivores and carnivores.

The Book

The Vegetarian Myth is divided into three sections and in a very appropriate way. First is the moral philosophy of the vegetarian, then the political and finally the nutritional reasons spouted by the anti-hunting and anti-meat religion…and yes, I call it a religion: it what’s so dastard in how something that was a way of life has become a movement and personal identity…you should have seen the reaction I got from a guest to a party, who considered her book an insult to him personally—as if by her describing the effects of the vegetarian movement and diet actually doing what those who go on the diet are trying to stop: the destruction of the environment….I thought he was going to come at me swinging: and all I did was ask him if he had read her book!

It’s also one of the reasons that so many “dyed in the wool”, and even militant (more on that later) vegetarians will say how much Keith’s book is a fabrication twisting of lies. And how many of these same people say they’ve actually read the book when pushed: almost none!

Vegetarian Hunger Destroying Topsoil

In her thesis, Keith does bring up the fact of loss of topsoil. If you’ve studied the history of Iraq (old Mesopotamia), or other ancient nations bordering the Mediterranean and Persian Gulf, you’ll be keen to know why what were lush, tree-covered lands came to be the lands that we see on the news everyday—barren, rocky islands and sand. Their agricultural societies basically tilled the topsoil into the ocean.

Now, this is where it really gets depressing. We’ve been an agricultural society for easily 12,000 years. Our major cultural makeup and politics revolves around agriculture. Most especially, our money and way of doing business revolves around agriculture. The worst examples of it are mega-corporation animal factories with chickens and pigs sitting in cages unable to move, drugged up on antibiotics, cranking out eggs and piglets for market.

If anyone doesn’t think that effects you personally as a consumer, then you’ve never eaten meat from animals that have been properly raised, in a chicken yard, or large pig pen, even left out to graze on other food types other than grain. Previously, I thought grain-feeding livestock was the way to go: more bang for the buck. Yes, more cost effective cash wise, but health wise, I’m not sure. One of the examples I know of is eating meat raised in the US on these factory farms, contrasted to eating steak in places like Vietnam, Thailand and South Korea, where they refuse to raise livestock the way we do in the US, not specifically for the animal’s interest, but more for taste and sustenance—meat is a very precious commodity in those places.

On the bright side, if you’ve tasted free-range beef and chicken here in the US, you know what I’m talking about. If you hunt and tasted the power of venison, elk and bison, you definitely know what I’m talking about. Chickens are omnivores, needing that freedom to throw in a bug, worm, or lizard in with the occasional weekly toss of grain and grazing of wild seeds. Beef, sheep, and pigs are fortified by the calm relaxation of feeding beyond grain, filling up on grasses and whatever attracts their tastes in a pasture. If you don’t think pigs need free-roam, too, then you don’t know how the Spanish make the best prosciutto, called Serrano ham: they let their pigs free to graze on fresh-fallen acorns in September, just before the butchering season.

Keith’s answer to the loss of topsoil could be considered very extreme, basically removing ourselves from an agriculturally based society, and returning to hunter-gatherers. As one who lived in Alaska for a year as hunting-gathering subsistence hunter and angler, let me tell you it’s not easy work. It was a great way to get myself back on track with regards to understanding money, and culture and healthy ways of living. But, practically, if every human being on the planet suddenly became a hunter-gatherer, because the human population is SO massive now, every wild living thing with fins, wings and legs would be decimated within a year, two at the most. Our population has turned us into a major predator; our technology has turned us into THE mega-predator.

The question Keith brings up is whether the present agricultural economy is sustainable. At the present rate of growth of the human population across the planet, especially in places where there’s already a population supported only by imports, like India, Africa and China, it’s not—the wildlife in those places are barely hanging on! The question is whether our agricultural society suddenly implodes within 20 years, somehow struggles for another hundred at its same rate of production and the dramatic effects on the topsoil: and collapses…I’ll leave that part of the thesis to your own mental machinations.

Countering Past Inaccuracies

What I’m most keen about in the solid information provided in The Vegetarian Myth, is that Keith, unlike so many new and old vegetarians, did her homework. She even went past what we’ve been spoon-fed by the government for the last 60 years about food triangle (when you read the history of those studies and how lies can have such longevity, you’ll probably say the same I did—what in the world?): wide and heavy on bread and grains, thin on meats, cheese and fish…even that demonized, but so important cholesterol. Actually there’s a metaphor if you’ve got a weight problem or dealing with hypoglycemia. I know personally from my own prior experiences, as a past believer that nutrition pyramid, when I should have flipped it: more meat and fish, much less bread and grain…but I’ve jumped ahead to the last section of the book.

The Hypoglycemic and Diabetic's Food Pyramid

The first section on the moral attitudes of the vegetarian is priceless. For those who have studied any type of ancient religions, everything has life and life survives because of the death another living being. Somehow strict vegetarians believe that if it doesn’t have a face or mother it’s somehow not killing: remind of those who fish, but hate hunters? Oh, but fish and lobster have different nervous systems…they don’t feel pain—how in the world do you know?! I stopped flyfishing for entertainment, now when I fish it’s to catch one or two and put them in frying pan, leaving the rest to stay unmolested and healthy, get big, and possibly end up as an enjoyed meal for a bigger fish, after a good life of swimming and eating.

Scientific research has found that plant life also has societies and even reacts to attacks—do you know that the largest living organism on dry land is an aspen grove in Utah? My years apprenticing and training in the Native American healing communities taught me that it’s not whether we kill, we kill by simply stepping blade of grass. It’s whether we do that killing with respect for that which dies. The joke often shared in the community, especially when “the light eye” hippies, and “Wannabe Indians”, searching for meaning to their lives were appalled that the “shaman” actually the proper term “healer” (“shaman” is a Siberian native term), wasn’t a vegetarian—lesson one to the truth seeker: you live because something dies—respect that animal or plant’s death and enjoy your food…say a prayer of thanks, if you’d like!

Vegan Politics

In the second section the author takes on the political component of vegetarianism. This is where she describes how wars and battles for possession of land, and wealth are the results of an agricultural society. Yes, wars have always been fought for religion, food, money and land. She does acquiesce to the fact that hunter-gatherers did fight, also, and definitely for the same reasons of land, except for hunting grounds that provided food, as compared to land for planting that offered food. And there is definitely a much too idealistic view, even naïve attitude that comes across in her writing, and much evidenced in her surprise that militant vegetarians would throw pies at her during an anarchist book fair.

First, she was at an anarchist’s book fair when it happened after all. Secondly, every strict vegetarian, especially one whose personal identity is labeled “Vegetarian” has always had an angry quality about them: either aggressively so, as those who attacked and continue to attack her, and those passive aggressive who get in their little circles, complaining about how horrible the world is how the US Government is the leader in atrocities against the world. It’s all about how the world isn’t how they personally want it to be. Often, they’re also the same kinds of people who spike trees that will send a chainsaw’s broken chain into a logger’s head, a logger who’s just trying to keep his family fed and by doing so also open land for regrowth that enables, young saplings a chance, and an abundance food for deer and other ungulates…These are the same militant vegetarians who come yelling and screaming into hunting areas during hunting season, thinking they’re helping animals.

Did they purchase the hunting licenses and tags that fund all the wildlife areas for not only game species, but also non-game species?

Have they put any money and actual effort toward saving animals, instead of making it look like they’re helping animals?

Remember that the next time you hear the name Wayne Pacelle who also says he has been on a strict vegetarian diet for 20 years—considering all the other lies he spreads, do you think he’s really a strict vegan? When I think of strict vegetarians, I think of flim-flam artists like Pacelle, and most definitely Wiley Brooks (rhymes with Wiley Coyote) and his Breatharian Institute (as he used to say on his website before Keith’s book, about his $1,000,000 his “Immortality Workshop”, “no, that’s not a misprint”) Now he incorporates a diet Coke and McDonald’s quarter-pounder into his scheister sales letter after he was caught publicly enjoying them…there are people out there who actually believe this! No, I wasn’t surprised about the attacks on Lierre Keith by the political vegetarians, and most definitely those at the anarchist book fair.

Her writings on the way the US government, at the behest of major agricultural corporations, is well researched and developed in describing how third world nations are basically enslaved into a diet support almost completely by imports from the United States. And this is where I was lost, even though the research and collection of history is spot on!

The world works in treaties and negotiations, and all of them are based on business. Unlike in the days of old, these days that means corporate negotiations. If we’re lucky, the local populace benefits through democracy and lack of unrest. If we’re not, it means dictatorship and totalitarian rule, and the potential for a mega civil war: something we should recall well from stupid government actions by Nicaragua’s Somoza ruling line and El Salvador’s Juntas.

…It’s Keiths’ proposal that I found so impractical: there is no way humans, unless there’s a major catastrophe that basically takes out 80 percent of the human population, are going to say good bye to the plough and pick up the spear and bow and arrow—you wont have the commerce to support gunpowder production and the bullets.

Personally, I’d love to see every east-west highway raised ten feet above the ground, and every length of fencing in the Midwest be used to not keep in cattle and livestock, but used to surround homes and cities, keeping the wild animals out. In doing so, we’d create a causeway that would redistribute and open up the land so that bison, deer, and elk populations would have their traditional migration routes. I bet you, within 10 years, the herds would be so large you would have to wait a week for each one to pass, as Lewis and Clark observed when the made their way west. A dream. A fantasy. Can you imagine how much healthy, red meat there’d be for everyone? And all the topsoil that has been lost to the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico would instead stay and get thicker, rejuvenated by the stomping of the bison’s hooves…never again would the US run the risk of something like the 1930s Great Dustbowl.

Enjoy That Steak

The section of the book that I most enjoyed was the one on nutritional reasons espoused by vegetarians. Not to mention her descriptions of how a strict vegan diet really effects the brain and brain chemistry in a horrifying manner…there’s a reason vegans lose it when they’re on such an unnatural diet (when humans get a number of extra stomachs and eat our food with side-to-side grinding jaw motions of cows and sheep, instead of the present stomachs and teeth closest to the very carnivorous dog we’ve had since the origins of mankind, I’ll become a vegan)—not the least of the reasons is the hypoglycemic reactions to the diet that turns most vegans into cookies and cakes addicts, to get that immediate, yet never sated, mental stimulation of a sugar rush.

After reading that section, I’m never drinking soymilk again…and even though I have a taste for tofu from being raised in Asia, I’ll definitely cut back on the tofu orders at dim-sum. Tofu increases memory loss. If you’ve ever seen how tofu is made you’ll understand partly why…and the part about soy’s phytoestrogens, that has historically made it attractive to sex abstinent, vegetarian monks, was the last straw!

Now, I could go on and on about what’s in the book, but unless I wrote a length of text that would fit into a book as long as The Vegetarian Myth, it wouldn’t do the subject justice. As Keith says there are no meat eating slogans like the vegetarian’s quaint but hollow, “Meat is Murder”. There’re only facts and research, and that time and pages to read, 276 to be exact.

If you know someone even thinking of going on a vegetarian diet, or especially if you know a mother who wants replace her child’s mother’s milk with soy milk, please save them from a lot of grief by getting them a copy of this book!

For your daily commute on your MP3 player – Download and Enjoy Lierre Keith’s interview on Cork’s Outdoors Radio:

 

Never a dull moment with my buddy, Dan Caughey. Last time we went on a canyon jaunt was two years ago, during the heat of the California A zone deer season. I almost died from heat exhaustion and dehydration—and the Columbian blacktail buck we thought from a long distance was a legal forked-horn, ended up just being a non-legal spike as we drew close.       

When we found a spring at the bottom on that death march, I sucked up all the cold fresh water I could, straining through the dead branches and leaves, thanking my stars later than that I didn’t get anything into my system, like giardia.       

Dan Caughey flipping over a rock to see a crawdad

This time we were after monster crawdads, which meant we’d be walking the creek 90 percent of the time. Still, I filled my Blackhawk Camel Bak and carried it comfortably on my back, as we made the first initial leap off canyon road to the stream below. It’s very comforting and relaxing to be sucking refreshing water as the day heats up.       

It would be a hell-crawl on hands and knees through thick underbrush on our way out, but for now, it was almost an idyllic hike through tall redwoods. I already knew I had picked the wrong footwear to use on this trip—slip on sneakers.  I should have used some Hi-Tec-type sneaker boots or at least a pair of lace up sneakers with thick soles.   

Though my feet were feeling every small rock and pointy object as we walked, it was my knee that was giving me problems. Heavily traumatized during some very high-impact events in Central America during my early 20s, all injuries were now making themselves known. Twisting, and pounding as I jumped from a high embankment to creek, the knee felt it the most—the next day I wouldn’t even be able to bend, or walk on it, without extreme pain, but for now, the promise of crawdads as big as small lobsters drew me forward.    

Pacifastacus leniusculus, generally known as the Signal Crayfish, was our target. Signal crayfish aren’t indigenous to Northern California. A 1912 Department of Fish and Game experiment gone wrong (they just dumped the crayfish into the local San Lorenzo River of Santa Cruz County when they were done investigating the depredatory effects of crayfish on small trout), they’ve overtaken the coastal streams from Monterey to British Columbia, and made their way into all rivers feeding into the Sacramento Valley their home.       

With the drop in populations of the endangered steelhead, I consider it every steelheader and salmon anglers responsibility to take as many of these small fish and fish eggs eating freshwater crustaceans they can…and even if you’re extremely lucky, you might make a tiny dent. They’re just all over and they’ve pretty much taken out not only a number of small fish and the offspring of larger sea-run trout and salmon, but are endangering the much smaller indigenous crawdads in the waterways they’ve overtaken.       

Is it any wonder that there’s no limit on signal crayfish in California?       

With this in mind, I wanted to get as many as we could. Caughey’s record was 400 in a day’s haul. That’s what I call a feast on a great scale with what I endearingly call the “Po’ Boy’s Lobster”!       

Look at the size of those sweet meat claws!

Though a much larger haul can be got with crayfish traps, Caughey enjoys more the hunting and fishing-like activity using his normal bass and trout fishing rig, with a steak as bait; a dip net for actual capture: Remember to not have any fishing hooks in your possession, because the warden will cite you if you do so on rivers and streams closed to normal fishing—such as coastal steelhead streams during the summer.      

Finding a pool that was only about four feet deep, and crystal clear (many think it’s because of the voracious appetites of the overpopulated crayfish that eat frogs, fish and vegetation), Caughey stopped and said, “Let’s try this one.”      

From one of the two 5 gallon paint buckets were carried with us, he grabbed the cheapest, pot-roast I could find at the supermarket the night before, and sliced off a steak.       

“See what I’m doing?” he said, as he began slicing out from the center of the steak in a daisy-wheel pattern. “This gives them something to hold on so they don’t let go before we can get the net under them.”       

He tied it on with a few wraps of the fishing line lengthwise and then crosswise across the meat (going in between the cuts), ending with clipping the line with the swivel. With a short cast, the chunk of meat was in the water and it didn’t take long…       

A steak for a Po' Boy Freshwater Lobster...

Three minutes later it was covered in five crawdads and the pool seemed alive with crawdads crawling out of their holes and from under rocks, excited by the scent of fresh meat and blood in the water.       

“Ready?” Caughey asked.       

“Yep.” I pulled up on the rod as I had been told, working the meat straight off the bottom and toward us, making sure to keep constant drag, but not so fast as to make the steak pinwheel: pinwheeling sends the crawdads flying, and sudden stops and sinking back, cause the crayfish to let go immediately. The key is to keep them holding on.       

“Keep it coming,” Caughey said as he slipped the long-handled dip net under them. Bringing the crawdads and meat up in one lift, we had six big, fat signal crayfish—what a great start to the day!       

The next four hours was spent walking up the cold stream, sometimes deep enough for us to have to remove our wallets and keys from our shorts and carrying them above water. When we got to Dan’s girlfriend Vivian’s home, where she would prepare them in the style of her Norwegian heritage, we counted 286 of the feisty little buggers, many not little at all: the largest was 9 inches long from end of tail to tip of claw!   

 To  fill up on fresh crayfish and help native steelhead, trout and salmon…you’ll need the following:      

• Fishing license.
• Stiff fishing rod and with strong line, say 10-15lb strength line is good.
• Bait net with at least a 5 to 6-foot length handle.
• Pot roast.
• Swivel.
• Knife to cut the meat.
• Five-gallon bucket, with a few small 1/16 inch holes drilled into the side of the lower half of the bucket to let fresh water in and then as you work you way up the waterway.
• Burlap bag or material to moisten and lay on top of the crayfish to keep them moist, but not suffocating in still water.   

Vivian’s Traditional Norwegian Dill and Saltwater boil Recipe: 

 This is probably the easiest recipe you’ll find for crawdads out there, and it’s in its simplicity that it lets you really enjoy the sweet, lobster meat taste of the crawdads.       

Ingredients:

• 10 gallons of freshwater
• 1 pound of Kosher salt
• 3 full bundles of fresh dill   

Steps: 

1. Start the fire under the water pot and pour in the pound of salt
2. Unbundle the dill and throw them in whole
3. Once the dill and saltwater is at rolling boil, begin tossing in the crawdads
4. As they finish cooking, the’ll float up to the top bright red.      

Vivian likes to seal the crawdads in large Tupperware containers for later enjoyment. According to her, the length of time in the freezer, in the saltwater and dills really helps impart the flavor into the meat, and makes them that much more delicious.

Spice-rubbed wild boar ready to become Babi Guling!

No matter how you cut it, there is a reason that vegetarians suffer from a number of ailments, not the least of which is a deficiency in vitamin B12: humans have developed over thousands of years to be omnivores, not herbivores! Our diets developed over years of evolution to make sure that humans could survive in any environment, something necessary to a species that evolved as a nomadic group, a group who by necessity has had to survive on an opportunistic diet.

The only species more nomadic than humans are the world’s carnivores. Yet what are the most successful species? Always it’s the omnivores: humans, pigs and bears. These are the most successful populations of any large mammals.

But what’s an omnivore to do when disconnected societal vegetarian fads spring up during every generation, either because of religious or cultural fads inspired by powerful advertising? Get in informed…

Such is the important information I found in the masterpiece The River Cottage MEAT Book by UK food personality Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall…it was as though someone from PETA, but someone who actually did their research instead of just offering a knee-jerk emotional response to eating meat so far from reality it’s a crime, wrote a book on cooking healthy, following ecologically sound farming practices.

Meat is good, and good for you! But, as the author says, there’s good meat and there’s bad meat. Or, as Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1755 -1826), “Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are.”

If you get meat from a meat factory that holds its cattle in boxes that prevent movement and they’ve never even had the opportunity to graze in an open field and under a sky light by sunlight and moonlight, you’re going to get an animal full of body chemicals resulting from stress, not to mention the antibiotics and other manmade materials that bring into question their residual effects in our bodies.

Instead, imagine a cow, pig, or lamb enjoying life in a beautiful pasture, feeding well on all the natural grasses and herbs and brush that bring not only incredible flavor to the animal’s meat, but also bring up a healthy offering for the table that makes you feel so sated and happy when you’re done eating. That (aside from some innovative and interesting spins on more traditional British and international recipes) is what Fearnley-Whittingstall brings to the conversation about eating meat that has long been overdue.

We live in a society in the major cities of the US and UK that is so far removed from its roots in the country, that even adults are shocked to find themselves responding strictly emotionally to become strict vegetarians, and trying to legitimize their decision through questionable science.

If you’ve ever ridden on public transportation in Thailand and India, where meat consumption is very low, and seen natives fast asleep with their heads banging against the window as the bus rattles along, you might have noticed a few of the symptoms of long-term vegetarianism: sluggishness, anemia. And, if only eating vegetables is so good for you why do vegetarians so often need vitamin supplements and why do we no longer have more than one stomach, like so many real herbivores—ever wonder what your appendix used to be?

That’s right! It is used to help us digest foliage, as true vegetarians, when we used to move across the great savannahs of prehistoric Africa.

What happened?

We advanced and learned how to make tools. And by learning to make tools we made weapons for killing to eat meat as a main part of our meals instead of just an infrequent lucky addition.

Our brain size development from what we were as a prehistoric man to what we are now resulted from our more regular consumption of meat proteins. Now, I’m not saying that every meal should have a meat protein, but mixed with a full offering of colors and varieties of vegetables, fruits and nuts and I think you’ll notice a not only a more calming, but reaffirming experience, and definitely less-stressed, daily experience.

Personally, I’ve tried a vegetarian diet. As an effort toward spiritual, mental and physiological cleansing as a form of fasting from meat, seafood and birds, it’s very effective. But any longer than that, have you also noticed how weak and sluggish you feel after the initial cleansing has occurred? That’s your body telling you something!

Meat gives you strength. And when you eat a bit much of beef, it does seem to deliver a bit of an aggressive attitude to a person’s personality. This is an observation that goes to at least as far back as Dickens and Oliver Twist:

‘It’s not Madness, ma’am,’ replied Mr. Bumble, after a few moments of deep meditation. ‘It’s Meat.’

‘What?’ exclaimed Mrs. Sowerberry.

‘Meat, ma’am, meat,’ replied Bumble, with stern emphasis.

‘You’ve over-fed him, ma’am. You’ve raised a artificial soul and spirit in him, ma’am unbecoming a person of his condition: as the board, Mrs. Sowerberry, who are practical philosophers, will tell you. What have paupers to do with soul or spirit? It’s quite enough that we let ‘em have live bodies. If you had kept the boy on gruel, ma’am, this would never have happened.’

‘Dear, dear!’ ejaculated Mrs. Sowerberry, piously raising her eyes to the kitchen ceiling: ‘this comes of being liberal!’

Heaven forbid the peasants get fed meat!

I do notice that I too can get a little pointed in my comments and hot under the collar when I’ve eaten beef more than four or five days straight, and not had it as part of a well-balanced meal that includes some grains, vegetables and fruit. I must also add that I’ve never had any type of aggressive response with the other red meat: venison.

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall makes a great case that there’s nothing as satisfying as a well-prepared and cooked slab of meat that came from a farm animal living a good life on a farm, instead of a prison-like slaughter yard. And yet, he doesn’t shield the reader for the realities of eating-and why should he? Cellophane-wrapped meat that makes children think that our food comes neat and clean from a machine is why we’re having the drastic disconnect problem we’re in now!

The photos of slaughtering and butchering, which reminded me of police photos I’ve seen of crime scenes and scenes in the city morgue on CSI were a bit shocking…but perhaps because even with my field experiences killing and butchering wild game, even doing something as close farm animal slaughtering as killing a farm-raised goat with .22 and butchering it in a woods glen in Alaska, I’d never done my basic butchering in a slaughter house, i.e., the animal is still whole, in an antiseptic, white-walled room.

Kind of gave me the creeps, seeing that steer’s live eyes as a pneumatic piston gun is put to its head. Then, the next frame is the dead eye as he lies on his side…but, like the vegemite-sundaes like to say, if you can’t deal with the honesty of the death of the animal, can you really condone the eating of meat?

Yes, I accept the honesty of the fact that something died so that I can live. And there’s something contrary, to that which the vegemite-sundaes like to think of selectively: they don’t respect, or really are afraid to accept, that EVERYTHING lives because something dies. Is the only reason that vegetarians condone the killing of vegetables and fruits is that they can’t hear them scream—and who are they to think that all living things don’t feel their death and scream…that it’s only that humans don’t normally speak the language of carrots?

Many aboriginal societies revered and respected that fact that all living things, and in their thinking, inanimate objects are alive, and die and scream when their killing is brought about with little respect: that includes carrots that are just ripped out of the ground without first being asked to offer themselves to the upcoming meal.

Are vegemite-sundaes only vegetarians because they can’t deal with death being a fact of life in all its forms?

I leave that up for you to decide…all I know is that when I’ve dealt with strict vegetarians their avoidance of Nature’s facts are often deplorable: they come off as seeming to think that only the furry and cute creatures on this planet deserve to live, and everything else that can’t be heard to scream, or doesn’t run away when you try to eat it, is okay to eat, in other words, kill.

I don’t have time for vegemite-sundaes because everyone of them comes off as a hypocrite when you really get to know their beliefs and understandings about what the Earth so graciously provides—to them, it’s all about avoidance of that cycle of death that Nature has put all on living creatures….and it seems…nature is the very one to remind vegemite-sundaes that their diet isn’t what we’ve evolved towards over thousands of years of eating meat, with vegetarians setting themselves up for osteoporosis and B12 deficiency, making itself known through the following symptoms: confusion or change in mental status in severe or advanced cases, decreased sense of vibration, diarrhea, fatigue, loss of appetite, numbness and tingling of hands and feet, pallor, shortness of breath, sore mouth and tongue, weakness.

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall still seems to offer an olive branch to the PETA folks, though I think anyone who considers themselves a “true” vegetarian will never accept that branch other than to further their agenda, as organizations like PETA and HSUS continue to do right now, saying that they just want to improve conditions for animals, when all their directors just want more money (if you’ve ever dealt with an unscrupulous animal rights ‘non-profit’ you really know where the money and how being ‘non-profit’ doesn’t mean being poor) and to stop all hunting: they’d have all native tribes in cities living on canned vegetarian foods if they had their dithers…

…Yet again they perpetuate what the urbanization of humans has done all along: a total disconnect between humans and our origins…and no, a quick hike through the woods is really as disconnected as the average PETA true believer, stuck in an apartment with their only sense of wildlife a pet cat or their Chihuahua, heavily modified through thousands of years of breeding for Aztec and Mayan dining halls. Hikers in the woods are like sex voyeurs, titillated by what they see, but not willing, and often afraid, to get down and dirty with its realities.

We’ve gotten so far away from what enabled us to survive in a real world that I sometimes wonder if this very modern and violent cult following in PETA/HSUS-related vegetarianism isn’t just a human form of lemmings running off cliffs…

Don’t get me wrong, I respect and enjoy my greens, too—it’s just I have a problem with healthy habits that become fanatic movements trying to keep themselves aloft through unsound science and actions that actually go against their professed reasons: smaller hunter numbers have actually led to lower amounts of revenues that would have gone to the support of all animals through the Pittman-Robertson Act of 1937 (In contrast, if you want to know where PETA funds really go, READ HERE; they sure aren’t putting those millions of dollars into helping animal populations like hunters do…)

Whenever I come across an author that seems to be more on an even keel, and in the UK no less, the historic origins of the present PETA/HSUS madness, I jump up and down in joy that there might be hope. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall is just such a man, who takes the reader through the different options for getting that organic success that leads to a healthy and great-tasting meal with meat as the centerpiece: whether a beef roast, roast chicken, or game collected in the field.

There are a number of game recipes that I’m looking forward to cooking, and will in the future with game he mentions, like pheasant, rabbit and hare. Taking to heart the axiom of using everything the animal offers, the Fearnley-Whittingstall also delivers a great chapter the use of offal gathered from a slaughtered animal. And I’d be remiss in not mention a great dissertation on the practice of aging meat: in his research he really pushed the limits of time! If you live in a warmer/drier climate like I do in California, remember that the variance in temperature, i.e. wamers, will shorten your aging times.

But, it was the roast pig that really got me excited!

…Instead of a traditional roasting spit, beautifully described in a photo story on page 390 and pages 392 to 394 in The River Cottage MEAT Book, I wanted to roast a true organic meat (If it’s been touched by human hands, or fed by humans hands, something that didn’t grow naturally, feeding on whatever it could find on its travels, without human direction or intention, how can you call it true organic?) a wild boar in a La Caja China that I had done a bang-up job with on a farm pig.

Not only that, I wanted to try a recipe I enjoyed as a child in Southeast Asia, on a trip to Indonesia, specifically Bali, called babi guling. Click on the photo of Babi Guling below to watch how we prepared him!

 RELATED LINKS

1. La Caja China

2. Blackhawk!

3. Winchester

4. Remington

5. Native Hunt

COMING UP

1. Surmounting the Cultural Conflict of Tactical Clothing and Equipment in the Outdoors

2. Wild Lifers vs. Game Farmers

Click on the Roast Babi Guling to watch how to make it!

 

Having graduated to outdoor writing in the new and burgeoning form of multimedia, I’m still leery of labeling a new author in the same manner as I had been so early in my career, not because of that boost to one’s career (Knowing how hard it is to succeed, I wish every writer the best in their career!), but because of how much it’s also an incredible weight and responsibility, and even for some, can be like a TV or film actor’s typecasting that is almost impossible to get out from under. Yet, when I read Fat of the Land by Langdon Cook, I couldn’t help but think how much, in relation to the urbanized society we’ve largely become in the United States, Cook, 42, is the Henry David Thoreau of his generation.

When I review a book, I’m in search of a number of offerings in that writing: education, entertainment and escape. Few authors can offer all that consistently and keeping it going throughout a book. When they do, it’s a great book!

Cork Graham subsistence hunting moose and Dall sheep on the Kenai Peninsula, 1990

As someone who lived in Alaska as a subsistence hunter, angler and forager, I’m always impressed with a writer who can take me back to the only place in the world, that I’ve lived in that I can say I’m truly homesick for, much less in a book that isn’t even about Alaska. With nice touches of a personal history reaching back to the East Coast, and often simply because of his beautiful poetic form of honesty, Cook was able to transport me to all the places I love through the window of Oregon and Washington.

Through Cook’s writing, that never once takes the reader over that sickeningly sappy poetic license that amateur writers often attempt, my voyage of escape from the flu I was fighting last week, was amazingly easy. At the open of “Honey, Get the Gun”, I was back on the shores of Clam Gulch, Alaska, in the middle of December, with my then girlfriend, a longtime resident, digging up razor clams. Some would be fried. Others would end up in my favorite “Razor Scampi”. Many were smoked and canned, enjoyed later as boat lunches during commercial salmon season.

For those who may be wondering if Fat of the Land will only appeal to someone who has “gone and done it”, worry not. I was never a fungi fan (but because of his “Confessions of an Amanita Eater”, I am now), nor have I been “Fiddling Around” for fiddleheads; yet, I was still with Cook, rooting for him and his gang when they succeeded, though appalled when he did something that just made me cringe. Yet, through his eyes, I saw what’s really happening for those now starting out in the world of hunting, even underwater, and even when he brought up a controversy in the arena of wildlife conservation that at times seems clichéd: from chapter one to its end, I was still completely vested in the book!

That heart and mind investment started with the hunt for the wild dangerous creature known to many a forager who prowls the shores of Puget Sound, (my great uncle would regal us with how many there were when he was a salmon fisherman out of Seattle just after WWII). If you think I’m being factious, try going after clams with your hands, like the new-to-Alaska, Cheechako I was. All it takes is a finger or hand split to the bone on the sharp edge of the shell to appreciate the common name for siliqua patula, and the practicality of an elongated clam shovel or a tube gun.

Cook talks with authority on the subject of clams, their history, and sadly, their possible future, a topic that can easily be spread throughout other flora and fauna speared, hooked or gathered in Fat of the Land, and which has put me in a quandary as someone who not only enjoys hunting, foraging and fishing, but also teaches others how to do it for themselves—can the wild flora and fauna populations support this, especially as a a human population sees that same wild bounty as an opportunity to overcome ever-increasing prices of food, or draw an income through foraging, in this horrible economy?

Moving deeper into the water, albeit still connected to land by the deck of a pier, was a lesson not only in how to fish for squid, but also how to start learning from those more experienced, and why it behooves everyone to learn an extra language—this hit home when I was eighteen, unlucky, and under harsh interrogations in a Communist Vietnamese prison, unable to string more than three words together from the Vietnamese I spoke fluently as the result of having been an American expat’s young child trying to survive in a Vietnamese-dominated French Catholic kindergarten in Saigon.

Surprisingly, or maybe it’s not, because of the multitude of immigrants who now ply the waters, streams and mountains for game and fish; being fluent in Spanish, French and Korean and having the ability to at least ask someone how and where to do something in Russian, Mandarin, Lao, Thai and Vietnamese, have offered me new techniques and secret places for putting meat, fish and forage on the table. It’s also kept me from getting a bullet in my head as I quickly removed myself from a illegal and dangerous farming venture, because I heard and understood them before they had a chance to know I was there while deer hunting: the amount of wild game that the pot growers (most often kidnapped and coerced by the murderous Mexican drug cartel to sneak illegally into this country) slaughtered and left to rot that was later found by CAMP, was atrocious—Is it any wonder how hypocritical it appears when someone staunchly says they’re environmentalists and ecologists, and yet they light up a joint or bong loaded with marijuana likely grown on illegal pot farms in the national forests and other public lands, turning them into free-fire zones where every living thing is killed through boobytraps and shooting to protect those fields?

The multinational flavor of the foraging community described in Fat of the Land carried to a chapter on shad fishing, notorious for its numbers and fight. If you haven’t caught them before, by the time you’re at that moment in your life where a flyrod and the meditative quality of flycasting calls out to you, you quickly realize it’s time to use “Shad Darts at Dawn”. The stringers become long and heavy with the American shad, immigrants from the waterways of the East Coast, and a boon to those who like to fill their larder, yet not impact the indigenous; but for my tastes, the much better fight on the line and fare for the table, lower-numbered steelhead and salmon.

Langdon Cook and a full stringer of American shad.

When I cringed it wasn’t the Christmas tree formed of a number of shad on a stringer; nor was it the catching and releasing of steelhead. Hatchery or wild, it really doesn’t matter to me as fish is good to eat from either and money aside (made from an industry that thrives only because of catch and release) when more and more research says that practice of catch and release leads to up to 63 percent accidental kill, and it becomes more and more as salmon farming increases and  the wild strains follow the way of the California condor.

No. It was when Cook and his mentor were becoming “The Inhuman”. I know a bit of what I talk about when it comes to spearfishing. I’ve been a spearo since the early-1980s spearing great seafood meals in the Caribbean, and Pacific. Repeatedly did so until my buddy, Randy Fry, lost his life to a great white shark at Kibbesillah Rock, just off Fort Bragg. The event put a stop to my spearfishing and ab-diving, until right after I returned from a teaching sabbatical in South Korea: I’ve seen people killed in combat, in some very horrific ways, but let me tell you, just imagining a good friend diving into a shark’s mouth and being bit clean through from shoulder to shoulder bring the mind back to its most primordial fears of teeth and claws—It led to a four year hiatus from entering the waters off Northern California as a freediver.

As one who tries my best to make as quick and efficient a kill as possible, and with the least amount of waste, when I read how not only Cook had gone after a lingcod with a traditional pole spear (Though Cooks calls his setup a Hawaiian Sling, a Hawaiian sling is actually a set up with a handle system, that has a hole through which a free-shooting spear is shot, almost like a slingshot), but that his “mentor” Dave, the professor, often hunted lingcod with not just a pole spear, but with the tri-pronged spearhead that pole spears normally come with—I found that atrocious!

It’s one thing, to not know. When someone who is a teacher, a professor no less, doesn’t investigate further, it’s a shame . The problem wasn’t the use of a pole spear: Master Spearo “Shark Man” Manny Puig, is well-known for his environmental work and being a spearfisherman, and especially for efficiently using a pole spear for putting fish on the table—it’s actually more efficient than a speargun, as you don’t lose time reeling in line to get your fish off your spear and on the stringer. The difference is that Puig uses a Hawaiian style barb, which flips open to hold the fish on the spear: for halibut and lingcod, even this isn’t enough.

Lingcod and halibut rank up there as the most easy to lose with a pole spear or a speargun. That’s why those who go after them use either the detachable spear tip, or 5-prong Trident spear. Mentor Dave knew about the best wetsuits to use, and Cook detailed well how it’s more comfortable and efficient to use a 4 mm suit, as compared to 5 mm, to descend, but when he didn’t tell Cook to replace a speartip infamous for losing fish, that just brought me back to how important is for this new generation of hunters, anglers and foragers to get the right tutelage, or else yet another generation will needlessly become fodder for the “antis” movement.

If this new generation does “do the job right”, the benefits to the ecosystem will be multitude: waste will be kept down; populations of hunters and anglers will increase enough that the funds collected through fishing and hunting licensing will once again provide more habitat to support and improve numbers of game and fish on public land.

Right now, because the wealthy pay great fees for prime hunting, the only place with abundant game and fish are  lands that are privately owned. It wasn’t always this way. Before, there were more than enough people who went fishing and hunting, so much so that the departments of fish and game catered more to this group, by improving habitat and stocking. In the process, all other non-game creatures also benefited. If there’s enough good habitat, and stewarding of the land, game and fish populations can be prolific on their own.

It’s for this very reason that I’m in favor of having all coastal dams removed from Baja California to Canada. There are so many other forms of electrical power, and would free up the waterways so that the salmon and steelhead would come back on the their own. Not many know that the largest salmon run in the world was not some river up in Alaska, like the Kenai: the Sacramento River held the largest run, with salmon up to 100 pound netted on the McCloud River. In the 1856, Hutching’s California Magazine actually complained that you couldn’t navigate across the upper Delta and lower Sacramento without being overcome by the stench of hundreds of thousands of spawned out salmon carcasses. Lake Shasta and all the later dammed up rivers, like the Mokelumme and Stanislaus to name a few, ended that.

A wild, healthy salmon on the Rogue River for Langdon Cook

Aside from the ill-advised suggestion to use inadequate equipment, what are my thoughts? As I mentioned earlier, I’m in a quandary. When I started hunting, I was a thirteen-year-old, fresh from a previous life as an American expat in Southeast Asia. The hunting and fishing opportunities my father enjoyed at that same age in Spokane, Seattle, and the Midwest, during the early 1940s and the glory days of great opportunity resulting from hunters and anglers going off to WWII that provided a six-year break for game and fish populations, were long gone by the time I blindly searched for the guidance of those who knew what they were talking about and weren’t arrogantly talking through the romance of hunting and fishing were few.

When I found them, I cherished and kept in good friendship with them even as they aged and died. That generation that had to hunt and fish to provide for the table, and had not been barraged by divisive advertising campaigns to separate the hunter from the environmentalist, is quickly disappearing.

Chantarelle success!

Cook has the writing skills, that’re beyond evident. And, he’s honest. He shows what life and death is about in nature, and how humankind was never meant to be removed and simply an observer in the most intimate of all settings: the cycle of life. Where his honesty comes from, is where I hope as he ventures into hunting on land, as he has mentioned on his Fat of the Land (FATL) blog, will spur him to search out the most experienced, and not just rely on those most easily accessible, wrong, and frankly lazy in their own edification (or worse, just disrespectful to the very prey that gives them nourishment), in the assessment of efficiency, as Professor Dave: 200 hundred days a year in the water, according to Cook, but evidently not interacting with those who could have taught him better.

In a nutshell, Fat of the Land is a great telling of a newbie’s entry into the world of West Coast spearfishing, fishing and foraging. It’s unlike so many books that try to romanticize the wilds, something that almost seems a crime, especially when I remember Christopher McCandless’ stupidity in Alaska, only a year after I came back to California. That honesty about Cook’s activities and those around him is what informs, educates and entertains (the humorous anecdotes are priceless and many of you who have ventured forth in your own rite, might easily recognize similar funny experiences). Through this writing, readers don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Through his writing, readers have an opportunity see if the world of living off the fat of the land is feasible or desired.

If you were stuck in bed like me last two week, you’ll feel fortunate to enjoy the escape to the wilds that a writer of Langdon Cook’s artistic ability brings to the page, making it so easy to “be there”, keeping your attention even through the blurred fog of a flu. Once I regain my sense of smell and taste, I can’t wait to try the recipes at the end of each chapter, related to the subject of that chapter, one of which I’ve enjoyed greatly in the past: oyster po’boys! Cook is so on the money, making sandwiches with those big as steaks North Pacific oysters.

As I said at the beginning, I see a new Thoreau in Langdon Cook, and with that amazing skill of capturing natures beauty like a photo, I look forward to him coming easily to the challenge of those ensuing responsibilities in his future books.

For you to enjoy your own copy of Fat of the Land!