Meat Eater

Book excerpt: From the #1 New York Times bestselling author and host of Netflix’s MeatEater comes “a unique and valuable alternate view of where our food comes from” (Anthony Bourdain). “Revelatory . . . With every chapter, you get a history lesson, a hunting lesson, a nature lesson, and a cooking lesson. . . . Meat Eater offers an overabundance to savor.”—The New York Times Book Review Meat Eater chronicles Steven Rinella’s lifelong relationship with nature and hunting through the lens of ten hunts, beginning when he was an aspiring mountain man at age ten and ending as a thirty-seven-year-old Brooklyn father who hunts in the remotest corners of North America. He tells of having a struggling career as a fur trapper just as fur prices were falling; of a dalliance with catch-and-release steelhead fishing; of canoeing in the Missouri Breaks in search of mule deer just as the Missouri River was freezing up one November; and of hunting the elusive Dall sheep in the glaciated mountains of Alaska. A thrilling storyteller, Rinella grapples with themes such as the role of the hunter in shaping America, the vanishing frontier, the ethics of killing, and the disappearance of the hunter himself as consumers lose their connection with the way their food finds its way to their tables. The result is a loving portrait of a way of life that is part of who we are—as humans and as Americans.