MEAT EATER

An adventure-packed exploration of humanity’s oldest pursuit - hunting - and its relevance today.

MEAT EATER chronicles Rinella’s lifelong relationship with nature and hunting through the lens of ten hunts, beginning when he was an aspiring mountain man at age ten and ending as a thirty-seven-year-old Brooklyn father who hunts the remotest corners of North America. He tells of his struggling career as a fur trapper, in his teens, just as fur prices were falling; of a dalliance with catch-and-release steelhead fishing; of canoeing in the Missouri Breaks in search of mule deer just as the Missouri River was freezing up one November; and of hunting the elusive Dall sheep in the glaciated mountains of Alaska. Through each story, he grapples with themes such as the role of the hunter in shaping America, the vanishing frontier, the ethics of killing, the allure of hunting trophies, the responsibilities that human predators have to their prey, and the disappearance of the hunter himself as Americans lose their connection with the way their food finds its way to their tables. Hunting, Rinella argues, is intimately connected with our humanity; assuming responsibility for acquiring the meat that we eat, rather than entrusting it to proxy executioners, processors, packagers, and distributors, is one of the most respectful and exhilarating things a meat eater can do.

A thrilling storyteller with boundless interesting facts and historical information about the land, the natural world, and the history of hunting, Rinella also includes after each chapter a section of “Tasting Notes” that draws from his thirty-plus years of eating and cooking wild game, both at home and over a campfire. In Meat Eater he paints a loving portrait of a way of life that is part of who we are as humans and as Americans.

Steven Rinella grew up in Twin Lake, Michigan, the son of a hunter who taught his three sons to love the natural world the way he did. He began fishing at the age of three and shot his first squirrel when he was eight. He chose the colleges he went to by their proximity to good hunting ground. Rinella is the author of AMERICAN BUFFALO, which was the winner of the Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award, and was named one of the best nonfiction books of the year by The San Francisco Chronicle. Since that last book he has developed a solid fan base as a host of the TV show The Wild Within and of his new show MeatEater, on the Sportsman Channel, which is in more than 30 million homes in the US. The MeatEater website, www.themeateater.com, gets 40,000 unique visitors a month. Related Facebook and Twitter accounts-fans are growing. He currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.