Turns out I’m something of a locavore, though until a few weeks ago I was oblivious of that fact. If I understand the word correctly, the world would be a better place if we all got a little more locavoristic. The locavore’s goal is, as much as possible, to eat food grown locally—say within 150 miles of your home. Here’s the pitch. Eating locally forges closer ties to the place where we live and the people with whom we share it; builds stronger local economies; consumes less energy; creates greater incentives to protect open spaces; and provides fresher, healthier food. Best of all, the food tastes better. It’s basically how everyone on earth ate until a few centuries ago. The radical shifts in where our food comes from unfolded in the past ten decades. Now people are questioning whether those changes were for the better.
Even though my own locavorism is haphazard and fraught with exceptions—coffee, chocolate, olive oil and coconut milk leap to mind—knowing Who’s your farmer? makes perfect sense. In studying up on the topic, though, there’s a weird hole. Everyone focuses solely on raising food. You just never see bumper stickers asking, Who’s your hunter-gatherer?
All this put me to thinking about a dinner I shared back in August. Beset by delays but cheerful, Liz and I shouldered our backpacks and left the trailhead at 10:30 p.m. Neither of us had ever been to the lake that lay roughly six miles away and the map showed no trail the last half mile (and 700 vertical feet) down to it. Friends had told her there was a rough path, though, and spoke in reverent tones of the campsite at its end. The moon was full, the sky faultless, and after 100 yards we switched off our headlamps and never used them again.
Swinging along the trail, singing softly, we were struck by a huckleberry wind. Sorely tempted to shuck our packs and follow the ripe waft to its source, we figured we’d best press on. But it proved a sweet omen. We made the lake in the earliest hours of a new day. Waking hot in the tiny tent later that morning, we went directly into the shocking water. Drying on a slab of granite, drinking in the basin, mountain goat hair tinseling the low bushes all around, the prospect of a full day and another sunrise here was a rich gift indeed.
Late that afternoon I caught a fat cutthroat, sides lit with a mad sunset of spawning colors. I broke her neck, slit her belly and slipped her back into the chill water for safekeeping. Making our way around the far end of the lake, we found ourselves among huckleberries. As the sun slid behind the cirque, we fried the trout golden and drizzled it with huckleberry sauce. It was one of the simplest and most satisfying meals of the year.
Such bounty is slow food. The whole process of hunting, fishing and gathering frees us from the everyday mayhem. Sharing it with family and friends, as most of us do, deepens the blessing. Slowing down, savoring, saying grace. These experiences, especially taking a life and making it food, bond us with wild places in a way that farming and gardening never can. That passion is the fuel that drives us to keep elk country wild.
Most anthropologists cite the advent of farming as the defining event in the shaping of humanity. People started cultivating corn and beans, planting squash and potatoes and, over time, planted themselves. In putting down roots, they needed more complex and specialized tools and systems for irrigation, food storage, sewage disposal, communication. Agriculture was the fork in the road. Early farmers hung a long, gradual right turn. Hunter-gatherers just kept heading on down the trail, pausing to notice a clump of grass cropped by wild incisors sometime the night before, singing a traveling song, never suspecting their way of life was pointed toward oblivion.
Whatever chromosome sows agrarian dispositions in some folks, it passed me over. All my gardens have been farcical: sprawling pumpkin patch a testament to whimsy, withered leaves and rampant weeds the sad flags of neglect. It seems I’d rather shop at Wild-mart. Come spring, I pick greens and mushrooms. In the summer, berries. January through August, I fish. In the fall—with its yellow leaves, orange moons, red hands—then at last it’s time for birds and beasts.
Maybe I’m still too nomadic. Maybe it’s just that the trigger finger wins out over the green thumb. Happy in my atavism, I remain unabashedly a hunter and gatherer. If that makes me more loco-carnivore than locavore, so be it. I absolutely embrace lightening our carbon footprint, buying locally, knowing the folks who grow the apples and corn and hogs we eat. But what I hunger for most is connection with the wild landscape where I live. And nothing feeds that quite like a day in the mountains, hunting hard.