Stalking food guilt Temple author takes aim at man’s impact on nature

LIVING WILD AND DOMESTIC: THE EDUCATION OF A HUNTER-GARDENER, by Robert Kimber, The Lyons Press, Guilford, Conn.; 2002, $22.95.

When you sit down to breakfast, do you consider the meaning of life for the pig that became your bacon, or the happiness of the hens that laid your eggs? Does your stomach churn with guilt over the hundreds of birds and insects that may have died when a Florida farmer sprayed his orange groves with pesticides so that you could drink a fresh glass of juice?

Probably not.

In his recent book, “Living Wild and Domestic,” Kimber agonizes – enough for all of us – over his meals’ impact on the environment.

The Temple author, who has lived as both a hunter and a homesteader, is well equipped for the task. He enjoys a spear of organic asparagus, but wouldn’t turn down a plate full of juicy stewed porcupine.

Kimball succeeds in shattering the illusions of a kind vegetarian living light on the land and a selfish, bloodthirsty hunter.

Even a strict vegan who grows his own food in a backyard garden affects the animals whose habitat he takes for his plot. In fact, the ancient hunter-gatherer lifestyle might be the most natural, Kimber concludes.

“The tame world, cleansed of the wolf and fed by agribusiness, may appear to be the safer world for human beings,” he writes. “The world of the forager, however, which is riskier for us personally than the farmer’s world, is ecologically the safer, more stable world.”

But what of the millions of us who haven’t the time to hunt and gather on our lunch hour, or the wealth to quit our nine-to-five jobs in favor of homesteading? Like so much utopian philosophy, food guilt seems to belong to the leisure class.

Still, Kimball’s book is interesting reading, and he addresses many of the deeper issues that hunters, fishermen and in fact, all carnivores ought to wrestle with. After all, meat doesn’t grow nicely wrapped in plastic – a fact that Kimball vividly illustrates with a passage describing his difficulty slaughtering a herd of lambs.

If Kimball has a political agenda, he hides it well. There’s no preaching here, only an eloquent description of the nobility of hunting in many traditional societies. Taking another creature’s life to preserve your own can be an act of utmost respect, he writes.

But after pondering the rightness of hunting, Kimball agonizes over the pastime’s wrongs.

“We know we are at some level killing for ‘fun,’ no matter what ingenious gloss we may choose to put on our killing,” he says.

Kimber describes the preparation of a porcupine he killed both for a stew and to protect his dog.

“My hunter’s justification for this kill may not stand up either,” he reflects. “We do not need this animal for food. We have plenty to live on … we have dried bananas from Nicaragua and dried apricots from Turkey.”

Passages of this book should be required reading for anyone who wants a hunting license. It brings to life the old-fashioned hunter’s ethic near and dear to many Mainers.

“Living Wild and Domestic” is not solely a hunter’s book, however. Kimball uses the universal issue of food to focus on how our lives impact the larger world and whether we can ever really be part of the natural ecosystem.

Kimball never does come to terms with his “muddled nature as herbivore and carnivore, as sheep and tiger.”

“I live … both literally and morally, in a fluid, ill-defined border territory between the wild and the domestic, between the tilled soil and the beasts of the field,” he writes. “Rural Maine is like that.”

But Kimball takes readers on a great journey. So read “Living Wild and Domestic,” and take an extra few minutes at the grocery store to wander aimlessly from aisle to aisle, pondering your own stomach.