The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

by Michael Pollan

What shames at least some of us about hunting is the same thing that shames us about every other reminder of our origins: that is, the incompleteness of our transcendence of our animal nature. So which view of me the hunter is the right one, the shame at the photograph or the joy of the man in it, the outside gaze or the inside one? The moralist is eager to decide this question once and for all, to join Cotton Mather in his noble quest for a more complete transcendence. The hunter—or at least the grown-up hunter, the uneasy hunter—recognizes the truths disclosed in both views, which is why his joy is tempered by shame, his appetite shadowed by disgust. The fact that you cannot come out of hunting feeling unambiguously good about it is perhaps what should commend the practice to us. You certainly don’t come out of it eager to protest your innocence. If I’ve learned anything about hunting and eating meat it’s that it’s even messier than the moralist thinks. Having killed a pig and looked at myself in that picture and now looking forward (if that’s the word) to eating that pig, I have to say there is a part of me that envies the moral clarity of the vegetarian, the blamelessness of the tofu eater. Yet part of me pities him, too. Dreams of innocence are just that; they usually depend on a denial of reality that can be its own form of hubris. Ortega suggests that there is an immorality in failing to look clearly at reality, or in believing that the sheer force of human will can...