The cool hunters

Shooting to kill

By Culinate staff

October 5, 2012

With such guides as Steven Rinella and Georgia Pellegrini holding our hands, we’ve been rediscovering the ancient art of hunting for a while now. (The latest in the hunting-memoir genre are Tovar Cerulli’s The Mindful Carnivore and Lily Raff McCaulou’s Call of the Mild.) But it’s hard to top Mark Zuckerberg — better known as the founder of Facebook — as the new poster boy for hunting.

As the New York Times recently noted, this is not the old school of macho hunting thought:

What feels counterintuitive and new here though is this: These writers have largely taken to hunting, they say, for ethical reasons. They’ve read their Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser, their Peter Singer and Jonathan Safran Foer, and are intimate with the horrors of industrial meat production.

Zuckerberg, for example, spent a year eating only meat he had hunted or slaughtered himself. But as the Times wryly reported, once the year was up, Zuckerberg went back to coding software.