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

by Michael Pollan

The image that appeared on my computer screen hit me like an unexpected blow to the body. A hunter in an orange sweater was kneeling on the ground behind a pig the side of whose head has erupted in blood that is spreading like a river delta toward the bottom of the frame. The hunter’s rifle is angled just so across his chest; clearly he is observing some hoary convention of the hunter’s trophy portrait. One proprietary hand rests on the dead animal’s broad flank. The man is looking into the camera with an expression of unbounded pride, wearing a big shit-eating grin that might have been winning, if perhaps incomprehensible, had the bloodied carcass sprawled beneath him been cropped out of the frame. But the bloodied carcass was right there, front and center, and it rendered that grin—there’s no other word for it—obscene. I felt as though I had stumbled on some stranger’s pornography. I hurried my mouse to the corner of the image and clicked, closing it as quickly as I could. No one should ever see this. What could I possibly have been thinking? What was the man in that picture feeling? I couldn’t for the life of me explain what could have inspired such a mad grin, it seemed so distant and alien from me now. If I didn’t know better I would have said that the man in the picture was drunk. And perhaps he was, captured in the throes of some sort of Dionysian intoxication, the “bloodlust” that Ortega says will sometimes overtake the successful hunter. And what was I so damned p...