Tovar Cerulli > Quotes

“Every acre of agricultural land I had ever seen—every cow or sheep pasture, every wheat or soybean or vegetable field—was once forest, wetland, prairie: another kind of land. Regardless of whether the farming was done well or poorly, its initial establishment in all those places had required conquest, eviction of the creatures that lived there before, and conversion of the land to a new use. And maintaining it required constant defense against nature’s efforts at reclamation.”
― 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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“Was that when I first began to see that I could not achieve utopia by planting a vegetable garden? Was that when I first knew that nature would not bend to my will or be chased away, either by my cleverness or by the ferocity of my bluff?”
― 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

“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

“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

“We were fishing for lunch, not bragging 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

“No matter what I ate, habitat had already been sacrificed. No matter what I ate, animals would be killed.”
― Tovar Cerulli, The Mindful Carnivore

“In hindsight, I realize that the gun changed my frog hunting for the worse. The killing became too efficient, too coldly distant. And there was the chance of injury.”
― 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

“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

“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

“Whenever any of us sit down for breakfast, lunch, dinner, or a snack, it’s likely that deer were killed to protect some of the food we eat and the beverages we drink … Everyone in modern North America who lives each day on agricultural foods belongs to an ecological network that necessarily involves deer hunting.”
― Tovar Cerulli, The Mindful Carnivore

“She sat by the brook, needing to hear the rhythm of the water.”
― 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

“I recognized that yogurt production involved the killing of calves as surely as soybean production involved the killing of deer.”
― Tovar Cerulli, The Mindful Carnivore

“Why should dropping trees seem so different from beheading stalks of broccoli or uprooting the wild raspberries and milkweed that encroached on the garden? Did killing trees feel different merely because they were bigger?”
― 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

“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

“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

“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

“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