(Review) The Mindful Carnivore: A Vegetarian’s Hunt for Sustenance, by Tovar Cerulli

Where’s the groundhog?

Twenty-three years ago, I ceased eating meat. Over time, I’ve gone through incarnations of eating seafood and not eating seafood (currently it’s on the menu); but I freely admit that I’ve never given as much thought to the why of my pisco-lacto-vegetarianism as has the gifted writer, (and thoughtful eater), Tovar Cerulli.

In The Mindful Carnivore: A Vegetarian’s Hunt for Sustenance (Pegasus Books, 2012), Cerulli beautifully chronicles his philosophical approach to eating and living. The book follows his journey from eschewing not only flesh but all animal products—such as milk and honey—to becoming, improbably, a hunter of deer in New England’s woods.

Rest assured, his journey is far from a navel-gazing or vain adventure. In his writing, Cerulli interweaves literary influences and meditations that span from Buddhism to animal-rights ethics to farming to hunting. It’s an approach that augments the threads of his personal life narrative with a broader connection to the link between the ethics of how animals (both wild and domestic) are treated in our normal channels of food production—even the organic farming of vegetables.

The vast array of sources Cerulli draws upon reveal his deep interest in pursuing “mindful” eating, and exposes his driving mission to seek out the “right” way to live. I interpreted this “right path,” in his view, to be one of minimal impact to the natural world, but also one that yields a healthy diet and a deep personal connection to food and how it is produced.

One of the things I most appreciated about Cerulli’s book is the honesty he demonstrates in anecdote after anecdote when explaining how his thoughts and attitudes toward food, and animals in particular, have changed over time.

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(Review) The Wolf’s Tooth, by Cristina Eisenberg

The Wolf's Tooth, cover (Island Press)

If I could use only three words to describe The Wolf’s Tooth, these are the ones I’d choose: elegant, forceful and fluid.

This is a story about how two intertwined ecological concepts — keystone predators and trophic cascades — leave their signatures upon entire landscapes. The Wolf’s Tooth is authored by Cristina Eisenberg, a PhD candidate at Oregon State University who studies conservation biology. Before graduate school, she was a journalist and editor. Her dual career paths collide in The Wolf’s Tooth, and the result is a remarkable and timely  story about her own research but also an entire mountain of literature that came before her.

Before I go on, some definitions may be helpful. Trophic cascades are a phenomenon whereby reactions cascade through a trophic web, or food web. Because trophic webs are really giant networks that process energy and nutrients through an ecosystem, when something causes a glitch or a change in the system it ripples through to other levels. Eisenberg studies this concept with a focus on the interactions between reintroduced gray wolves, elk and aspen and willows. This is a three level trophic web, where the wolves eat the elk which eat the aspen and willows. In this system, the wolves would also be known as a keystone species. By definition, these are carnivorous species that are the glue that bind their ecosystem together; without them, things have a tendency to fall apart or shift dramatically. Keystone species exert a disproportionately strong influence on the other species in their systems. For example, in the very real case of wolves being extirpated from Yellowstone National Park, the elk population swelled to great numbers and then ate the aspen and willow stands down to the point that new trees were not growing into mature trees because of over-browsing.

To tell the story of trophic cascades and how we know what we do about them, Eisenberg weaves fluid first-hand accounts of her PhD field work and personal experiences in nature with summaries of foundational studies. Her own field work entailed monitoring aspen and willow stands for herbivory patterns from elk, and correlating these patterns with the presence or absence of wolves and predators in the area. The scenes she bases on her field work transport the reader to the slopes and valleys she worked in Glacier and Yellowstone national parks, the H. J. Andrews Experimental Forest in Oregon and elsewhere. As a reader, you experience what she does: you discover a coyote carcass with its throat torn out by wolves, clear evidence of a territorial dispute; you tiptoe through a den site littered with the chew toys of wolf puppies; and you feel the hair on your neck raise when a moose is taken down by wolves only a few hundred yards from Eisenberg as she’s wrapping up a transect line. The sheer force of her narratives thrust you into the journey she’s embarked upon to understand how species interact in the web of life.