Unless you are personally involved in something, it’s often hard to fully understand it.
My husband is a hunter, has been his whole life, and despite his many attempts to explain to me why he does it, there is part of me that doesn’t fully get it.
I accept and appreciate his passion and I encourage it and maybe that’s the best I can do without sharing those feelings.
In an attempt to gain some perspective, I’ve reached out to women who hunt. A few months ago I wrote an article for her magazine about local women hunters, several of whom hunt with male counterparts, but others who go it alone.
I came across information about Georgia Pellegrini’s book “Girl Hunter” by accident one day and of course the title grabbed my attention. A review copy appeared in the mail a few days later and about a week after that I was turning the final pages.
The book is an interesting glimpse at a bonafide “city girl” -- Georgia worked at Lehman Brothers, lived in New York City -- turned pioneer. She walked away from her job, went to culinary school and immersed herself in every aspect of preparing a meal, including harvesting the meat.
The cover of the book offers a pretty girl (Georgia) with a gun in one hand and a cast iron skillet in the other. The image almost seems gimicky at first, but I grew to appreciate the depiction of an attractive, feminine woman who writes about field dressing a deer with nothing but a pocketknife.
Each chapter offers Georgia’s experience hunting a different game animal and concludes with recipes to prepare it.
Her mission is to improve the way she cooks and consumes food by understanding and accepting where it comes from. In her poignant conclusion, she writes of how far her journey has taken her and the struggles she encountered to get there.
“I am entirely different than the girl who came here (The Village, a favored hunting location) four years ago to learn to hunt a turkey,” Georgia writes in the epilogue. “There are the obvious differences, such as the fact that I can shoot a deer through the heart without batting an eye … Then, if I want to, I can portion the meat into those elegant pieces we see neatly wrapped up in plastic in the grocery store meat section, with no signs that it was ever a living thing. Except that for me, that will never be the case again. I will always know. I will have looked my food in the eye and made a choice … I am a more thoughtful eater, a more thoughtful chef, and a more awake human being.”
With her smart and insightful perspective, hopefully a voice like Georgia’s will encourage others to listen and understand too.
