I have heard a lot of doubt over the last year or two over whether this modern hunting movement will really last and matter. Journalists interviewing me will often ask whether this thing really has staying power or if it is just a fad and if most of the people trying this out will go right back to cubicle life in a few years.I'd like to place the matter in a historical context.
Most readers are probably familiar with the 'back to the land' movement of the late 1960's and 1970's. A group of people popularly labelled 'hippies' left the enclaves of Haight-Ashbury and the Village to start small farms (often attached to communes). This movement also incorporated the DIY housing movement exemplified by people like Lloyd Kahn, Ken Kern, and later John Raabe.
I don't have a source of hard data, but based on anecdotal reports I am pretty sure that most of the farmsteads established by people during this time were failures. Urban college drop-outs found that they couldn't hack it in the wild and went back to the world they knew. Interpersonal conflicts doomed a lot of farming communes that might have made it as family farms. In terms of raw numbers, you could call the back-to-the-land movement a failure.
Bur forget the raw numbers. Culturally, the back-to-the-land movement was a massive success. Look at the dividends today.
The whole idea of organic food would not exist without the back to the land movement. Who do you think was promulgating 'organic' back in the 1990's and 1980's? It was those old hippies who had figured out how to make a go of it and had codified their values into a system of agriculture. Organic meat and produce is now a multi-billion dollar industry.
And what about farmers markets? Without the back to the land movement I do not think that there would be a single farmers market anywhere in North America. These markets have had a huge resurgence in the last 15 years. And look at who made it happen -- old hippies and their kids. The impact that urban farmers markets have had on American culture and cuisine has been huge.
The back to the land movement was not a failure, in the long run. It turned out that this wasn't about raw numbers of farmers or acreage. A small number of people stuck it out and eventually made a major impact on American culture through their work as farmers.
Before those hippies got into the industry, was there any business so unglamorous as farming? Being a farmer was something that you ran away from if you were an artist, a writer or a free spirit of any sort. It was almost something to be ashamed of. That has changed. Dramatically.
Back in the spring of 2011 I found myself in New Haven, Connecticut, having dinner with the head of Yale University's farm, which produces produce for the school. The gentleman I was talking to (a recent Yale alumnus) was bemoaning the lack of educational opportunities for Yale students to engage with what was happening at the farm, outside of clubs. He observed over sushi, "they're studying economics and psychology but they all just want to be farmers now."
The work and the values of those farming intellectual hippies (most of who just thought of themselves as 'free Americans') has seared itself into American culture. What they worked for has truly resulted in the social revolution that they'd hoped for. Could Whole Foods even exist without the work that they did? I don't think so.
It is through this lens that I view the work being done today by a small club of hunter-intellectuals. People like Hank Shaw, Tovar Cerulli, and myself. What we are trying to do today is akin to what the back-to-the-land crowd did with agriculture almost 50 years ago. We want people to think about where their meat comes from, about the suffering required to produce it, and about what happens to the habitat from which we owe our meal.
Yes, I've taught hundreds of people how to hunt for food. And yes, most of those alumni will go back to their lives in cubicles within a few years. I know that this is probably true. But it doesn't matter in the long run. In the long run, the value of this work will be more defined by both the intellectual and mortal successes of that minority of dedicated hunters, rather than by the failures of those who walk away.
I grew up in the shadow of the social accomplishments of the 'hippie' generation. When I was a teenager in the mid-1990's I begged my parents to get me through the door to see live acts like Arlo Guthrie and John Hartford. When I got older I paid more attention to parts of that culture that didn't sell as well.
Lloyd Kahn's best known book was 'Shelter,' published in 1973. It inspired several generations of homesteaders to build their own homes. Then he published 'Home Work in 2004. I read an article about 'Home Work' in the New York Times, was impressed, and ordered a copy on Amazon.
'Home Work' continues to be a constant source of inspiration to me. Soon after receiving it in the mail, I wrote a review on Amazon. A few months later I got an email from Lloyd Kahn himself, offering to send me some more of his books.
Lloyd and I had a conversation for a little while via email. It turned out that we had a lot in common. Back in the 1960's he had worked a while for his father's wholesale insurance brokerage firm in San Francisco before realizing where the world was going and switching careers. I, too, was working at a wholesale insurance brokerage firm that my father had started.
Years later I made the jump and became a full-time teacher, hunter and author. My first book, 'The Beginners Guide to Hunting Deer for Food' launched; and in a few few weeks my second book will launch, 'Eating Aliens.' I've already plunged into the work on number three.
What will come of all of this? If it was just me then I don't think that much would follow were I to drop dead tomorrow. But there are other good writers who have books out and some others who have books in this genre launching in the next year. I've been in touch with other people around the country who are trying to teach deer hunting classes based on my own. It sure looks like there is a movement that has momentum which no longer depends a whit on my involvement.
Does the locavore hunting movement have staying power? Why yes, I think that it does. Even if most of these hunters don't manage a single kill. An intellectual tradition has been born which should influence American culture for a long time.
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