4th Blog Assignment - Harvesting Food

For this second Blog post, please read pgs 1 – 17 of The Scavenger’s Guide to Haute Cuisine, and feel free to check out the rest of it if you want. The book is on Reserve for this class. I also want you to read the article on Reserve Jim Harrison’s “A Really Big Lunch: Annals of Eating” from the New Yorker.

For your post I want you to consider the following questions:

Assuming that harvesting your own food, (whether it’s shooting a deer, catching a fish, or growing carrots) gives you a stronger connection to the source of your food (as opposed to buying a package of meat and not thinking about where it comes from) – is this a good thing? Is it advantageous to have a stronger connection to where your food comes from? Or put another way, would you be more or less likely to eat meat if you had to kill and butcher the animals you ate?

Is hunting moral? Is it morally justifiable to kill a wild animal for food when there is so much food already killed and for sale? The situation is obviously different if the hunter is living below the poverty line, but I’m talking about typical middle and upper class hunters.

What was your reaction to Steve Rinella’s plan to kill a fairly substantial number of different animals for the sake of putting on a mammoth feed in honor of Escoffier’s Guide Culinaire?

What is your feeling about Harrison’s meal? Is this gluttony? Is this a moral act? Is it OK to harvest this much food for one meal? What are your feelings about this?

Feel free to consider other questions as well.

Your post should be a minimum of 200 words.

In addition to your post, please include, at the end, a recommendation for two books that Summit owns (but this library doesn’t) dealing with the issue of harvesting your own food and/or gluttony.

Include the citation for the books. Please use MLA Citation Style for your entries.

Your posting is due by Midnight Sunday, 4/27/08.