I’m sure most of you have already heard yesterday’s news about the Facebook Founder, Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement.  For the rest of this year, he’ll only eat meat that he’s killed himself. 

I couldn’t decide whether to comment on this one or not, because it’s not clear to me if he’s joining the locavore/paleo craze or if he’s just being weird.  Extraordinarily rich people can be like that… both faddish and weird.  But either way, I think it’s sort of cool.  When someone with the kind of exposure that Mark Zuckerberg has right now comes right out and embraces the idea of taking responsibility for the meat on his table, it says a lot.  If nothing else (and there’s a lot of “else” around this), it will make some people think about the concept.  Of course you can imagine the uproar amongst the PETA types.  That’s totally de-rigeur.  You can also probably imagine (and read) the assault from folks who have axes to grind with Zuckerberg for his business practices and the insidiously ubiquitous nature of his social networking application. 

More importantly, though, he’s giving exposure to an idea that a lot of us hunters consider a key element of what we do.  We provision our table with meat we’ve killed ourselves, and take pride and succour in knowing how that animal lived and died.  There’s a connection there, between us and our food, and I think it shapes our relationship to the birds and animals we eat in a positive way.  We value them more.

And rightly so.  Meat should be precious.  It wasn’t very long ago when a fresh piece of beef, pork, or even poultry was not taken for granted.  In many households, it was procured through hard work, often slaughtered and processed at home, and doled out in careful rations, commensurate with the effort and work that went into putting it on the table in the first place.  Eating “high on the hog” was a relatively rare and privileged occasion. 

Comparatively, today we (Americans) eat way more meat than we need and take our surfeit for granted.  There’s meat on the table for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and the industry that’s come up to provide for our gluttonous appetites has grown fat right along with us.  To keep up with demand, animals are pumped full of crap intended to grow it faster and fatter, to get it from suckling to slaughterhouse as quickly as possible.  They’re filled with antibiotics to fight the diseases caused by their living conditions, which are then passed along to us… even as the diseases evolve to be resistant to the drugs.   And what’s worse, most people have lost their respect for the animals themselves… along with the connection to those animals’ lives as a source of sustenance for our own. 

Before I go all Michael Pollan here (his book is worth a read if this topic interests you), I’ll get back to the point.

What was that point?

I’m not sure I had one… but in a nutshell, I think I’m glad to see Zuckerberg take on this challenge, self-issued as it may have been.  If it gets a tiny handful of people interested in changing their relationship with food, there’s value in it.  It doesn’t matter what you think about Facebook or about social networking in general.  Put those things aside for a moment, and enjoy the self-satisfaction of knowing that this rich guy is discovering a “secret” that most of us hunters already share.

And yeah.  I’d take him hog hunting in a heartbeat.

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