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Meat Eater: Adventures from the Life of an American Hunter Paperback – September 10, 2013
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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. As a child, Rinella devoured stories of the American wilderness, especially the exploits of his hero, Daniel Boone. He began fishing at the age of three and shot his first squirrel at eight and his first deer at thirteen. He chose the colleges he went to by their proximity to good hunting ground, and he experimented with living solely off wild meat. As an adult, he feeds his family from the food he hunts.
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 in the remotest corners of North America. He tells of having a struggling career as a fur trapper 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, Rinella 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, he 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.
- Print length256 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherRandom House
- Publication dateSeptember 10, 2013
- Dimensions5.19 x 0.55 x 8 inches
- ISBN-109780385529822
- ISBN-13978-0385529822
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Outdoor Kids in an Inside World | The MeatEater Guide to Wilderness Skills and Survival | The MeatEater Fish and Game Cookbook | The Scavenger's Guide to Haute Cuisine | The Complete Guide to Hunting, Butchering, and Cooking Wild Game, Vol. 1 | The Complete Guide to Hunting, Butchering, & Cooking Wild Game, Vol. 2 | |
The indispensable case for parenting tough, curious, and competent kids who feel at home in the outdoors, from the author and host of the TV series and podcast MeatEater. | An indispensable guide to surviving everything from an extended wilderness exploration to a day-long boat trip, with hard-earned advice from the host of the show MeatEater as seen on Netflix. | From the host of the television series and podcast MeatEater, the long-awaited definitive guide to cooking wild game, including fish and fowl, featuring more than 100 new recipes. | An absorbing account of one man’s relationship with family, friends, food, and the natural world; a rollicking tale of the American wild and its spoils. | A comprehensive big-game hunting guide, perfect for hunters ranging from first-time novices to seasoned experts, with more than 400 full-color photographs, including work by renowned outdoor. | A comprehensive small-game hunting guide, perfect for hunters ranging from first-time novices to seasoned experts, with photography by renowned outdoor photographer John Hafner. |
Editorial Reviews
Review
“Steven Rinella is one of the best nature writers of the last decade. . . . This book was a page-turner.”—Tim Ferris
“Rinella’s writing is unerringly smart, direct, and sharply detailed.”—The Boston Globe
“Chances are, Steven Rinella’s life is very different from yours or mine. He does not source his food at the local supermarket. Meat Eater is a unique and valuable alternate view of where our food comes from—and what can be involved. It’s a look both backward, at the way things used to be, and forward, to a time when every diner will truly understand what’s on the end of the fork.”—Anthony Bourdain
“Meat Eater begins with a promise—‘This book has a hell of a lot going for it, simply because it’s a hunting story’—and then delivers ceaselessly, like a Domino’s guy with O.C.D. This is survival of the most literate. . . . This—genuine passion, humbly conveyed—is when nonfiction slaughters fiction and hangs it over its mantel. The text is relentlessly vivid and clear. . . . What Rinella does to prepare a muskrat trap when he’s in fifth grade takes five more steps and is infinitely more loving than whatever I did as a fifth grader to break in my baseball glove.”—The New York Times Book Review
“Rinella is an astute observer, with an eye for delightfully telling details.”—Paste
“An insider’s look at hunting that devotees and nonparticipants alike should find fascinating.”—Kirkus Reviews
“If hunting has fewer participants and advocates than ever before, Rinella is doing his best to reverse the trend.”—Booklist
“Woven into Rinella’s thoughtful prose detailing his outdoor adventures (or misadventures, in some cases) are historical, ecological, or technical observations dealing with the landscape, the animals, or the manner in which the game is harvested. . . . Rinella has a passion for hunting and wilderness that comes across in his writing.”—Publishers Weekly
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Standing Ground
This book has a hell of a lot going for it, simply because it’s a hunting story. That’s because hunting stories are the oldest and most widespread form of story on earth. The genre has been around so long, and has such deep roots, that it extends beyond humans. When two wolves meet up, they’ll often go through a routine of smelling each other’s breath. For a wolf to put his nose to another wolf’s mouth is to pose a question: “What happened while you were hunting?” To exhale is to answer: “You can still smell the blood.”
Of course, nothing tells a hunting story like a human. Long ago, our ancestors may have told hunting stories in ways that are similar to those of animals today. It’s been proposed that the human kiss finds its origins in a mouth-to-mouth greeting similar to that of the modern wolf’s. Similarly, it’s been proposed that the handshake originated as a way of proving that neither party was concealing a weapon.
But at some point—at least by fifty thousand years ago, though possibly much earlier—we began to tell our hunting stories through the complex languages that are now a hallmark of our species. Linguists and anthropologists theorize that complex language evolved just for this purpose: to coordinate hunting and gathering activities, to categorize an increasingly complex arsenal of hunting tools and weapons, and to convey details about animals and habitat that might be hidden from sight. In short, language came about for the same purposes that I’m engaged in at this very moment.
Granted, these first hunting stories were probably not “stories” at all, at least not in the way we now think of that word. I imagine them more as instructions and descriptions, which is fitting, since the purpose of the vast majority of writing about hunting today is to teach readers how to do something. This “something” can often be quite esoteric. Maybe it’s a technique for hunting mallard ducks over flooded corn in Iowa, or maybe it’s an explanation of why it’s better to sharpen the blade of your skinning knife at an angle of thirteen degrees rather than fifteen. Hunters usually call this kind of information “how-to,” and I have read and enjoyed a great many pieces of how-to writing in my life. But while you will find a trove of hunting tips and tricks within this book, this is not intended as how-to material. Instead, you might think of this book as why-to, who-to, and what-to. That is, this book uses the ancient art of the hunting story to answer the questions of why I hunt, who I am as a hunter, and what hunting means to me.
As I ponder the first of those questions—why do I hunt?—two particular moments come to mind. The first took place on a recent spring day when I was hunting turkeys in the Powder River Badlands of southeastern Montana with my brother Matt. Early that morning we left Matt’s pack llamas, Timmy and Haggy, tethered near our camp. Matt headed south, and I went into the next valley to the west. Around late morning I started after a tom, or male turkey, that I’d heard gobbling several hundred yards away. I followed the bird for close to an hour, only once catching a glimpse of it. He was walking fast along the edge of a sandstone cliff, maybe about thirty yards higher than me and two hundred yards out. I sat down amid a tangle of fallen timber and used a turkey call to mimic the soft clucks of a hen.
Almost as soon as I did, the tom jumped off the cliff and took flight. He flapped his wings maybe six times and soared right over my head. Turkeys are not graceful fliers; nor are they graceful landers. This one crashed through the limbs of a ponderosa pine and then thudded to the ground on the timbered slope of a deep ravine off to my left. I turned my head in that direction, so that my chin was over my left shoulder. I kept on clucking. I was hopeful that the tom would come to check on the source of the calls, but after a couple of minutes I hadn’t seen or heard a thing. I called some more, but still nothing happened.
You have to be very careful about movement and sound when you’re hunting turkeys, so I continued to hold dead still even though I hadn’t heard or seen the bird since it landed. Maybe about five minutes went by without my ever turning my head away from its position over my left shoulder.
And then something strange happened. Suddenly, someone sighed very loudly just behind my right shoulder. I’ve had coyotes and bobcats come to my turkey call, but this sigh sounded like that of an annoyed person who was slightly out of breath from running up a hill. My immediate response was to turn my head very quickly in its direction. My chin was just about to begin passing over my right shoulder when I noticed a large male black bear standing on its rear feet with its front feet propped up on a log that was leaning against the log that I was leaning against. I’m sure he was hoping to find a nest full of turkey eggs and, if everything went well, to catch the turkey, too. Now he was staring at me with a very inquisitive look in his eye as he struggled to recalibrate his expectations.
I once heard a radio interview with a neuroscientist who studies mental processes during extremely stressful moments. He described how people in such situations will recall having dozens of distinct thoughts in the seconds that it takes for, say, a person that has fallen from a roof to hit the ground. His belief, he explained, is that we aren’t actually having those thoughts when we think we are; rather, through a trick of memory, we just think we had them whenever we try to recall the moment. Regardless of what that guy says, I know that I had the following thoughts over the course of the next second or so: I thought about how weird it was that this bear and I both happened to be hunting turkeys in the same place at the same time; and I thought about how weird it was that I was trying to deceive a turkey in order to kill it and eat it, and how my efforts to do so had in turn deceived another creature that would have liked to have killed and eaten that turkey as well; and I wondered what effect my turkey gun, a twelve-gauge shotgun loaded with copper-coated #5 pellets, would have on a black bear at close range; and I imagined myself making a case for self-defense when I was investigated by a game warden for killing a black bear without the proper permit; and I imagined what it would be like to get mauled by a black bear; and, if I did get mauled, I imagined that it would be a very minor mauling as the bear would quickly realize that I wasn’t what he was after; and then I thought about how black bears hardly ever mess with people; and then I imagined myself telling this story for a very long time, regardless of the actual outcome.
The bear interrupted this whirlwind litany of thoughts with a woof, like the first noise a dog might make when someone knocks at the door. He then ran off through the timber at the casual pace of a jogging human. The sound of the bear’s running died away, and the forest returned to its usual crisp and breezy stillness. I leaned back to wait for my pulse to slow, as it was racing at a speed that I figured to be unhealthy. I sat for maybe five minutes, just breathing and thinking. I had that grateful and relieved feeling that you get when you first realize that you’re recovering from the flu. Then I heard a turkey gobble, so far away and faint that the sound seemed more like a feeling than an actual noise. I got up to look for it, happy to be alive and walking in this wonderful and ancient world where bears sigh and turkeys gobble.
The second moment that helps answer the question of why I hunt occurred well over two thousand miles to the north of where I was hunting turkeys. I was camped on the North Slope of Alaska’s Brooks Range, about seventy-five miles south of the Arctic Ocean’s Beaufort Sea. I’d been there for a week, waiting for the arrival of caribou. I hadn’t intended to stay so long, and I was running low on food. This was worrying me just as the sound of food came by. I was lying in my sleeping bag during the first moments of morning light, and the noise I heard was a rush of wings so close to my tent that the nylon quivered. It was followed by the strange cackling of ptarmigan, a grouselike bird that is bigger than a quail but smaller than a pheasant. My brother Danny has heard their call described as go-back, go-back, go-back, but it reminds me more of Curly’s signature laugh from the Three Stooges—a sort of nyack-nyack-nyack.
My boots were frozen, but I pulled them on as best as I could and stepped out to a gravel bar that was crusted in frost. I dragged a rubberized duffel bag out from under my flipped-over canoe, grabbed a twenty-gauge shotgun in one hand and a handful of shells in the other, and trotted off in the direction that the birds had gone. I crossed the ice of a small pond, formed where a braid of the river had become isolated from the main channel. It was almost frozen to the bottom, and I could see a small school of sticklebacks biding their time inside a doomed world. The pond ended at a steeply eroded cut bank. I pulled myself up the ledge and then rose to my feet. I was now standing on the soft, moss-padded ground of the tundra. The birds had already molted to their white winter plumage, though there was no snow yet. This was bad for them but good for me, as I could see them running along the ground as plainly as softballs rolling across a field.
Product details
- ASIN : 0385529821
- Publisher : Random House; Reprint edition (September 10, 2013)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 256 pages
- ISBN-10 : 9780385529822
- ISBN-13 : 978-0385529822
- Item Weight : 7.2 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.19 x 0.55 x 8 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #32,833 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #21 in Hunting
- #58 in Hiking & Camping Instructional Guides
- #1,433 in Memoirs (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

In addition to being an expert chef known for working with wild game, Steven Rinella is an outdoorsman, writer, and television and podcast personality with an exceptional ability to communicate the hunting lifestyle to a wide variety of audiences. The host of the television show and podcast MeatEater, he is also the author of two volumes of The Complete Guide to Hunting, Butchering, and Cooking Wild Game; Meat Eater: Adventures from the Life of an American Hunter; American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon; and The Scavenger’s Guide to Haute Cuisine. His writing has appeared in many publications, including Outside, Field & Stream, The New Yorker, Glamour, The New York Times, Men’s Journal, Salon, O: The Oprah Magazine, Bowhunter, and the anthologies Best American Travel Writing and Best Food Writing.
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Reviewed in the United States on February 1, 2019
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Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
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Well, I wrote my initial review after reading only seven chapters. I was already irritated by his entire family's general willingness to ignore fish and game regulations as well as his early days of market trapping to supply rich women with fur coats (and I hadn't even got to the later chapter where he describes setting illegal snares near popular hiking trails in National Forests). But it was after reading the chapter, "Playing With Food," that I became so incensed that I put the book down and took Steven to task for his low opinion of catch-and-release fly fishing (and b/c he kept and ate a protected bonefish from a game reserve in Mexico).
Where I live and fish (in Colorado), catch-and-release regulations are absolutely necessary in some areas to maintain populations of wild trout (one of which happens to be an endangered species) and because of fishing pressure on our world famous tailwaters. Why did Steven not understand this? Why did he have to insinuate (wrongly) that catch-and-release fly fishermen are merely effete contemplatives who are too squeamish to gut a fish and fry it up in a pan? And further, if you're going to eat recreationally caught fish to sustain yourself, what about contamination by methyl mercury? Steven Rinella doesn't even address this concern-and for anybody that eats fish (wild caught or otherwise), it should be a VERY legitimate concern. "Man, what's up this guy?," is what I kept thinking to myself. Steven Rinella was literally making me angry.
BUT, I kept reading. I'd read some and then I'd have to stop and complain to my wife about what an idiot this guy is. About how he just doesn't get it. About how he shouldn't have skipped school so much as a kid and should have spent more time paying attention in the ecology section of his ninth grade physical science class. I'd complain about how stupid trophy hunting is and how I agreed with critics that mountain lions shouldn't be hunted with dogs. Steven Rinella shouldn't have killed that river otter for its pelt. He shouldn't be so snarky and dismissive of "progressive politics" for fear that these forces would conspire to take his hunting rifles away and prevent him from doing what it is he wants to do-kill wild game for food (and occasionally stick their head on the wall). I think at one point I called him, "just another right wing gun nut."
BUT, finally, I finished the book. And you know that scene in the movie "Dumb and Dumber" where Harry's walking alone down some nowhere road in Nebraska after giving up on making it to Aspen, exhausted and broken, and Lloyd pulls up on that tiny gas powered scooter to pick him up and head back toward the Rockies, and Harry goes, "Just when I think you couldn't be any dumber, you go and do something like this. AND TOTALLY REDEEM YOURSELF!!!!" Well, for me, that's the final chapter of this book. Almost.
I still think Rinella needs to reconsider his position on catch-and-release fly fishing but otherwise I'd totally recommend you read Meat Eater. Maybe read the last chapter twice.
Steven Rinella skipped the contorted, snobbish, and apologetic philosophical hogwash that has characterized generations of hunting literature. He skipped the self-indulgent glamor of hunting trophy kill tales. This is not hunting pornography; it's real stories about a real hunter pursuing animals for all the reasons that people actually do that.
The book is composed of stories that illustrate these various motivations to hunt. As a child, it was because his dad and brothers did. In college, because he needed food. He went crazy for steelhead and bonefish fishing because it was so damn exciting. He hunted for adventure in the Missouri Breaks, and Dall sheep for the challenge. And always, it was for every one of those reasons--and to satisfy a deep, primal, desire that needs to explanation or apology. And yeah, to get meat.
There's another thing about these stories--they're awesome. Really well-written, and full of subtle insight. I read the whole thing within 20 hours of getting the book in my hand. As an avid hunter who spends many winter nights reading about it, I felt, "finally, someone who thinks about hunting like I do."
Rinella doesn't shy away from the moral and ethical questions that surround hunting, fishing, and trapping (hereafter I'll refer to them all as "hunting, because they are). He explores them not in an abstract sense, but from the more credible point of view of his own personal experiences. He doesn't cowardly justify trapping with imaginary ecology (saying that the animals are overpopulated); he speaks of the youthful fantasies of fronteir life that fueled his passion to live as a trapper. He isn't afraid to challenge some hunting practices, or to describe death in its real and vivid detail. He isn't afraid of the emotion that electrifies the hunting experiences; he taps into it and makes the reader remember and relive (if it's a hunter) or understand (for non-hunters) how real it is.
That is the book's power: it's the first true hunter/non-hunter crossover book, that speaks intelligently to both sides and tackles the questions that both sides grapple with. But after all that is said, he stays grounded in the most basic fact: hunting is about food. In that sense, it is as morally unassailable as gardening and gathering.
My only problem with the entire book was a factual one, in which Rinella mentions that Africa and the Americas were overrun by Europeans because they were populated by hunter-gatherers. Actually, sub-saharan Africa was not overrun (the people there still have dark skin) precisely because that continent was fully agricultural way before European colonialism--the takeover of forager territory by agriculturalists in Africa had occurred thousands of years earlier by other people from within Africa.
That notwithstanding, this is the best narrative or philosophical hunting book I've ever read, and the first I'd recommend to anybody.
Top reviews from other countries

I live in Ireland and hunt Deer, mainly Fallow (no bag limits here). I love to eat what I shoot and so I have an understanding of what Steven is writing about. I have watched all his 'Meat Eater' shows on Netflicks and can recommend you to see them too.
Each chapter is an experience in hunting and cooking the kill.
Buy the book even if you don't go hunting.



