The Mindful Carnivore Quotes

“Unlike the hunted animal, he writes, “The animal raised and slaughtered is not a gift. We have earned that food in a different way, and when we eat that animal, we are not accepting a gift as much as we are exercising our property rights.”
― Tovar Cerulli, The Mindful Carnivore

“What matters is the kind of insight that can leap from here to there, from the simple fact of food on a plate to the ecological and ethical complexities of its origins. What matters is being able to walk into the grocery store, pick up a bag of apples or a loaf of bread, a bag of salad greens or a package of chicken legs, and imagine the mortality involved.”
― Tovar Cerulli, The Mindful Carnivore

“Gardening reminds us to look deeply into our food, to contemplate our interactions with earth, plants, and animals, to see both the harmony and the harm.”
― Tovar Cerulli, The Mindful Carnivore

“I still sought a respectful, holistic way of eating and living, my decision to hunt shaped by the same concerns that shaped my veganism. My inner aim had also been the same. Having concluded that I needed some animal protein in my diet and that some harm to animals was inevitable in even the gentlest forms of agriculture, integrity and alignment could only come from taking responsibility for at least a portion of the killing.”
― Tovar Cerulli, The Mindful Carnivore

“I saw, too, that Cath and I would be eating more than this whitetail. We would also be eating everything the deer had eaten.”
― Tovar Cerulli, The Mindful Carnivore

“In tofu, I saw the rifles and shotguns used to plug deer in soybean fields. In grains, I saw the birds, mice, and rabbits sliced and diced by combines. In cabbage, I saw caterpillars killed by insecticides, organic or not. In salad greens, I saw a whitetail cut open and dragged around the perimeter of a farm field, the scent of blood warning other deer not to eat the organic arugula and radicchio destined for upscale restaurants and grocery stores in San Francisco. In Joey’s kale and berries, I saw smoke-bombed burrows. Even in the vegetables from our garden—broccoli and green beans, lettuce and snap peas—I saw the wild grasses we uprooted, the earthworms we chopped with our shovels, the beetles I crushed between thumb and forefinger, the woodchucks I shot, and the dairy cows whose manure and carcasses fed the soil. In my own life and in the lives around me—heron and trout, hawk and hare, coyote and deer—I saw that the entire living, breathing, eating world was more beautiful and more terrible than I had imagined. Like Richard, I saw that sentient beings fed on sentient beings.”
― Tovar Cerulli, The Mindful Carnivore

“Like Nhat Hanh—who, in a passage entitled “Tangerine Meditation,” reminds us not only to notice our food’s taste and fragrance, but also to visualize “the blossoms in the sunshine and in the rain”—I saw beauty in my food.”
― Tovar Cerulli, The Mindful Carnivore

“here—as in the timberland behind our house—I felt a sense of belonging, a growing familiarity that encompassed both conscious knowledge and something less tangible: an impression, a grasp of how things connected and of how animals lived and moved on this land, an unsketched and perhaps unsketchable map.”
― Tovar Cerulli, The Mindful Carnivore

“Sitting there at the base of the tree Mark had picked out, I spoke silently to the unseen deer. I praised their beauty, agility, and speed. I praised their ability to become nearly invisible, standing still, blending into the forest.”
― Tovar Cerulli, The Mindful Carnivore

“Hunting brings us into close contact with land and animals. Approached with humility, such contact can help us recall our place in the natural world, reminding us to celebrate all those lives intertwined with ours. Approached with arrogance, it only alienates us further.”
― Tovar Cerulli, The Mindful Carnivore

“Joseph Campbell once said that the “essence of life is that it lives by killing and eating.”
― Tovar Cerulli, The Mindful Carnivore

“She sat by the brook, needing to hear the rhythm of the water.”
― Tovar Cerulli, The Mindful Carnivore

“I go to Nature to be soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in tune once more. —John Burroughs, “The Gospel of Nature”
― Tovar Cerulli, The Mindful Carnivore

“What I did need was the honest confrontation, the reminder of what it means to eat. This one creature’s heart had stopped beating, but its flesh was far from lifeless. It would go on, not as bobcat or coyote or owl, but as human.”
― Tovar Cerulli, The Mindful Carnivore

“They took to woods and fields, as Stange writes, “for the same inner reasons they always have: for food, of course, but also for connection, and for knowledge about what it means to be human in our complex and increasingly fragile world.”
― Tovar Cerulli, The Mindful Carnivore

“He argued that the reformation of American hunting depends on recreating it as “the disciplined, mindful, sacred activity it once was for our species.” Likewise, he suggested that the redemption of our culture as a whole depends on bringing greater compassion and restraint to our relationships with animals and nature, on returning to an attitude of reverence, humility, and mutual regard. And he contended that such a cultural reformation can only be accomplished if more of us participate in “the world that feeds us”—whether by hunting, fishing, gardening, or growing a bit of lettuce or basil in a pot by a window.”
― Tovar Cerulli, The Mindful Carnivore

“But he pointed out that disrespect of nature and animals is not unique to thoughtless hunters. As a whole, our society operates with little regard for its impacts. From rapacious development and logging to ecologically devastating agricultural practices and the application of toxic herbicides to suburban lawns, we inflict enormous damage—most of which we never see.”
― Tovar Cerulli, The Mindful Carnivore

“It is the utilitarian hunter dependent on the hunt for sustenance,” Kimber writes, “who will have the greatest knowledge of, and respect for, his wild brethren and whose culture will make that knowledge and respect manifest in its arts, rituals, myths, and day-to-day behavior.”
― Tovar Cerulli, The Mindful Carnivore

“Lord, let me kill clean … and if I can’t kill clean, let me miss clean.”
― Tovar Cerulli, The Mindful Carnivore

“He didn’t encourage me to be interested in firearms, but he did want me to be at ease with them—careful and unafraid, respecting them for their explosive power, seeing them simply as a kind of tool.”
― Tovar Cerulli, The Mindful Carnivore

“Killing,” he wrote, “is not something to be taken lightly.” Even after four decades as a hunter, he felt a wave of conflicting emotions at every kill: sorrow mixed with elation and gratitude.”
― Tovar Cerulli, The Mindful Carnivore

“Why should fishing, a thoroughly predatory activity, be so much more socially acceptable than hunting, and so much more popular? Nearly 30 million Americans fish each year, while only 12.5 million hunt.”
― Tovar Cerulli, The Mindful Carnivore

“When men and women put on blaze orange hunting vests or camo, they temporarily lose their individuality beneath the layers of symbolism loaded on the image of hunter.”
― Tovar Cerulli, The Mindful Carnivore

“Maybe the T-shirt should read, “I Clawed and Clawed But Couldn’t Escape the Food Web—Soon I’ll Be Feeding Vegetables.”
― Tovar Cerulli, The Mindful Carnivore

“In the extreme of anthropomorphism, we project human personalities, typically those of children, on to characters like Bambi. On the flip side, in the extreme of anthropocentrism, we deny animals any semblance of value as beings, treating them as nothing more than “live stock”—living, fleshy commodities. In grocery- store coolers we do not see “animals” but “meat,” prepackaged, even pre-prepared for our convenience. In both extremes, we remain self-absorbed, caught up in our own fantasies. Stuck there, how can we hope to understand animals, or even respect them?”
― Tovar Cerulli, The Mindful Carnivore

“I wanted the creatures I was eating to have lived well and died swiftly. As much as possible, I wanted their journeys to my plate to resemble the workings of nature: the grouse snatched from the air by a great-horned owl, the minnow plucked from the water by a kingfisher.”
― Tovar Cerulli, The Mindful Carnivore

“If ecology was one of my measures of merit when it came to food, wouldn’t it make more sense to eat meat from a locally pastured beef cow than to buy salmon shipped in from Alaska or processed blocks of tofu made from soybeans grown a thousand miles away on industrially farmed land where diverse prairie habitat once thrived? If humaneness was another of my measures, wouldn’t it make more sense to shoot a deer who had lived a truly free life than to buy even the happiest, most local, backyard chicken? What meat could be more ethical than fifty or more pounds of venison resulting from a single, quick death?”
― Tovar Cerulli, The Mindful Carnivore

“Collectively, nothing was lost. Grouse droppings and owl pellets—eventually even the body of the owl itself—all returned to the forest soil, to aspen roots. I knew that industrial food systems, in contrast, took a lasting toll on the land, giving little or nothing back. They were linear, not cyclical.”
― Tovar Cerulli, The Mindful Carnivore

“The question now wasn’t whether my eating inflicted harm, but what kind of harm.”
― Tovar Cerulli, The Mindful Carnivore

“Wasn’t there something similar, I mused, in his two favorite pastimes—fishing and cards? In both lay the challenge of honing his formidable skills, paired with the inescapable knowledge that he was up against chance, fate, forces totally beyond his control.”
― Tovar Cerulli, The Mindful Carnivore