The ethics of short-tail food chains

  I'm a hunter. Plain and simple. I've been hunting since I was a wee lad and hunting for food is my big "shooting sport."

  Which is why I was very excited to see this article on the Ottawa Citizen:

Ethical killers: Hipster hunters take up guns as part of sustainable food movement


  Basically, it boils down to a trend up north of more and more young people taking up hunting - enough of them to reverse a 30 year trend downwards in hunting applications. Among the reasons that these young hunters are taking up the hobby is because they're thinking more and more about their food and the sources that provide that food.

  The locavore revolution is turning a corner.


 

  I think this is freaking fantastic. My wife and I have been thinking very hard in the past few years about our own food sources and how far the things we eat travel to get to our tables. At this time, about 80% of the food we eat originates within a few hundred miles of our home. We're working on a vegetable garden to further reduce our carbon footprint. 

  At this time., the *average* food item in America travels 1500 miles from source to consumer. That's an amazingly long chain for it to follow. A number of the things we eat travel much further than that - coming in from overseas, other continents. Fresh produce is being selectively engineered and bred to favor post-harvest shelf life, often at the cost of flavour and potentially nutrition. 

  Local foods help us combat that. They reduce the amount of petrochemicals needed to get the food to our tables. It allows us to grow older, purer strains of produce that are packed with the flavour its gengineered cousins forgot. It also keeps more money in our local economies. Every dollar I spend on local food is a dollar that gets reinvested in my community. 

  Commercially produced meat also tends to be loaded with a variety of growth hormones and antibiotics that aren't necessarily the best things for us to eat. Add in rampant reports of poor conditions at factory farms, and it's easy to see why the sterile-looking shrink-wrapped-on-a-foam-plate cuts in your chain grocer are not so appetizing. 

  One easy solution is local butcher shops. We are blessed with a number of local butchers that provide top-quality meat from extremely local sources. None of the farms that regularly provides us with meat is more than a three-hour drive from our house. There's even one butcher shop that deals in exotics, meaning we have year-round access to elk, bison, ostrich and several other offbeat varieties. 

  The other hyper-local solution for meat is to hunt. Hunted meat is grass-fed, organic, free range and raised without the use of antibiotics. The lives they live are their own, and a good hunter ends that life simply, quickly, painlessly. The hunter is involved in the processing at every step along the way - even if it's taken to a game processor, the hunter still knows where it's going and what's happening to it.

  I love the taste and texture of wild meat - be it deer, elk, grouse, dove, squirrel. I think it's important to know where your food is coming from and to make choices that best align with your morals. I applaud these young hunters and I want them to be successful in their hunts.