You may know Steven Rinella from The Wild Within, his 2011 series on the Travel Channel, or MeatEater, his current series on the Sportsman channel. An avid hunter and outdoorsman, Rinella’s adventures hunting moose, black bear, mountain lions, turkey, mountain goat, duck, javelina and more have all been televised.

When I was a kid growing up in the ‘burbs and watching cartoons and bad sitcoms, Steven Rinella was out in the woods shooting squirrels and deer. He’s the kind of guy you wish was your best friend. He’d entertain you with elaborate hunting stories, and they would all be true, and then he’d give you enough antelope and reindeer and venison to stock your freezer for weeks.



You’re on your own for game meat, but Rinella’s new book, Meat Eater: Adventures from the Life of an American Hunter, tells riveting hunting tales within a historical context. He also provides “Tasting Notes” at the end of each chapter, should you be lucky enough to score some wild game. The book also delves into philosophical issues about the ethics and responsibilities of hunting, the shrinking landscape, and the role of the hunter in a changing world.

I spoke with Rinella by phone to ask him how non-hunters can get ahold of the good meat, among other things.

Performance Menu: Do you think that people who eat meat have an obligation to hunt? Like, they should kill it themselves if they’re going to eat it?

Steven Rinella: No, I don’t think there’s an obligation. I remember an essay I read one time by a writer I like a lot, she’s very controversial, a writer named Camille Paglia. She has this book she wrote called Vamps and Tramps, it’s a collection of essays she wrote, and one of the essays is called “No Law In the Arena: The Pagan Theory on Sexuality,” and in this essay she’s taking on the argument that homosexuality is wrong because it’s unnatural. And she says the whole point of civilization is to remove us in some way from the grotesquery, from the obligations of nature. It puts us above nature, it puts us outside of nature, so that everything we do isn’t just to facilitate naturalness.

And if you think about it, a lot of people, you and me included I’m sure, do not process our own raw sewage, and we might not work on our own cars anymore, we don’t build our own homes. There are many many things that we have other people do so we can pursue our own specializations. So in that way, I don’t think that you should then be obligated to kill your own food. It’s one of many things that many people decide not to participate in. We’ve created this amazing structure, society, so that some things we can back out of and just let other people handle.

Now, with that said, if someone feels the need or feels the desire or feels that kind of calling, then I want to help them make that connection. But as much as it’d be good for my position to make that case, I can’t sit around with a straight face and act like I think people who don’t kill their own meat are somehow ethically wrong, the same way that I don’t think people who don’t build their own homes are somehow ethically wrong. It’d be like saying, “Dude, you live in a house. You mean to say that you didn’t build your own house?” Some people don’t know how to build houses. Some people don’t want to build houses but they want to live in one. So I don’t really feel that it’s a decent argument to make.

But a lot of people, including myself, feel that calling. It’s somehow genetic, somehow spiritual, physical, to go out and hunt for one’s own food. But really, we have 300 million Americans. If everyone this year went out and killed a deer we’d have a deficit of 100 million deer. Everybody can’t go hunting.

For someone like me who…I grew up in the suburbs, but I’ve only eaten roadkill, never learned how to hunt, and I think some people reading this who haven’t hunted may like the idea of hunting, but don’t really have a lot of time or money to put into it. How would you recommend they get started?

Yeah, it’s hard to learn how to hunt, man. I know some people who got into hunting in their 20s and 30s and if you didn’t grow up around it, and experience it from a really young age, there’s a handicap that’s very difficult to overcome. I spend a lot of time talking about hunter recruitment. We do need a lot of hunters to protect ourselves in the legislature. This is probably not what you’re asking, but it’s an important point. Hunters exist in this country at the pleasure of the non-hunting public. I mean we live in a democracy, okay? You have states like California and New Jersey where less than 1% of the population is a licensed hunter. That 1% of the population that’s hunting in New Jersey (and I’m actually going hunting in New Jersey in a month) could very easily be just shut out through referendums and other legal actions by the 99% that don’t hunt.

So hunters need to be aware of our perception in the non-hunting public; while maybe they don’t want to participate in it they need to condone or approve of what we’re doing. But hunters also need to have, we need to have enough of us to have legal clout. I spend a lot of time thinking about hunter recruitment and how to get more people into the lifestyle, or rather help people who want to get into the lifestyle. And people often think that what’s keeping them from hunting is skills sets, they don’t know how to do things. But in my experience the number one thing that’s keeping people who want to hunt from hunting is access to land. The second thing that’s keeping them from hunting is just having the ability to understand the very complicated legal structures that govern hunting. When you ate roadkill, you were probably breaking the law.

Those are two things that prevent people from getting into it, and while people who don’t want to hunt—I can’t say that they’re wrong, but I do think there need to be more hunters.

So if somebody’s intrigued by the idea of hunting but has never done it, how would you recommend they get started?

I get asked this often and the answer would be this: go after underexploited resources in your area. What you’re going to find when you begin hunting and want to have some success with the lowest skill level, you should pursue species that are not as heavily targeted as others. Things that are going to be heavily targeted, say you’re on the fringes of suburbia heading into the country, deer, there’s going to be a lot of guys going after deer. Ducks, there’s going to be a lot of guys going after ducks. And they’re going to have a lot of the resources gobbled up. They’re going to know where the deer are, and which times of the year, and they’re going to be there waiting for them. If you have exclusive access to land, then there’s no problem, but if you’re trying to work on public property, and you’re trying to hunt just state forest land, national forest land, any place like that, you’re going to have to go after species that aren’t being targeted heavily. And what those species tend to be are small game animals, like squirrels and rabbit, non-game species like opossums, and unprotected species like street pigeons, for instance, those unprotected, unmanaged, non-native, deleterious species; that’s wide open all the time and nobody’s chasing after them. So you can go on public land or open areas and get in on some of these hunts without having to worry about being outperformed by people who are much more highly skilled.

If somebody doesn’t want to hunt but is sick of eating the same meat, since you can’t buy wild game meat, is there any way to get ahold of it in this country?

Yeah, there’s a few ways, but one thing I don’t like… you’re right that you can’t buy wild game meat, but a lot of people feel that you can buy wild game meat, but what you’re buying when you buy wild game meat in the U.S. is you’re buying wild animals raised domestically. You can go to a restaurant and they’ll say, “Oh, we have a wild game menu,” and they have elk on the menu—well, that elk was raised on a farm in a fence, it’s not wild. It’s just taking a livestock model and applying it to deer. If you’re buying venison coming out of Scotland, you’re probably buying wild red deer. A lot of it winds up getting sold in Europe, but some of it makes its way here. If you’re buying red deer, wild venison coming out of New Zealand, you’re probably buying farm-raised red deer. You can get wild species raised domestically.

Another way that you see a lot of wild game distributed is through food pantries. I have a friend, a guy named Joe Lasher, who runs an organization called Backyard Bow Pro. And what Backyard Bow Pro does is, he has a lot of affiliations with organic farmers and other people who have deer problems; they have an abundance of deer on their land they’d like to cull off because it’s interfering with their ability to conduct agricultural practices, but they’re leery of just opening their door to any old hunter that comes along. So Joe Lasher teams these people up with skilled certified bow hunters. The bow hunters go in and shoot off some of that excess deer and a significant portion of that meat goes to food pantries in North Carolina to feed the poor. So poor people go to the food pantries and they’ll be getting frozen 1 lb. packages of wild venison.

In a practical sense for someone who’s not reliant on food pantries, I’d think you’d want to expend out some feelers to local hunters or local hunting organizations and let people know that you’re interested in getting some wild meat, and if you offered up that you’re also interested in processing and packaging it, you’re probably going to get some takers.

I have a wide selection of people that I keep supplied with small amounts of game meat. In fact, I had a bunch of people over eating game meat last night and some of them took some home. Hunters are normally very generous because they need to be aware of public perception. If someone comes to me and they want deer meat or elk meat or bear meat, there’s no way I’m going to turn them away because I want them to have a positive impression of what I do and the way to do that is to feed them. You can show someone deer heads and deer skulls all day long and it’s not going to speak to them if they’re not a hunter, but you give them a deer steak and that speaks to them.

In your book, it seems like everything you write about is so steeped not even in your own experience, but historical. Were you trying to bring a modern perspective on hunting culture and how it’s steeped in history and bring it to the modern day?

That was very much my purpose. It’s funny, any time I set out to write something, when I’m in the planning, note-taking and research stage, I don’t write anything down about personal experience. I don’t even think about my personal experience going into it. I spend all my time trying to figure out how to inform it historically. And the academic subject I’m most interested in would be anthropology, I read a lot about early humans, human evolution, hunting, how hunting fits into that, fits into the settlement of America. So it’s something I’m constantly reading about anyway, and a subject I’m greatly interested in, and there’s no way that’s not going to pop up in my work.

If I was writing a book about trans-Oceanic shipping in 1800 Britain, I’d probably wind up having something about early human hunting practices. It’s just something that’s always on my mind. So I did, I wanted to have something on the history of it, and also when you write something, the end product isn’t always what you envision it being. But I envisioned a very historically oriented polemic about hunting and I did that in the guise of writing out hunting stories, my own hunting stories. But I tried to have it serve that purpose, of being almost a historical narrative about our interaction with animals, our interaction with the land, and because I’ve been a hunter all my life my greatest resource, my greatest research subject was my own evolution as a hunter. That was the most readily available way for me to discuss what hunting has meant and what t means and what it will continue to mean.

I think you killed a lot of stereotypes about hunters in your book; at least, it did for me.

Stereotypes about hunters are troubling, man, because they’re often based on a lot of reality. I hope it comes across in the book that I’m not trying to sanitize hunting. Hunting could very well be viewed as a very brutal activity, and I don’t try to act like it’s somehow not. It involves life and death. It involves blood. So in some of those things, I try to be truthful to [them].

When I’m reading a hunting writer or someone who covers hunting in their writing and it seems like every time they kill an animal they drop down on their knees and cry…oftentimes when I’m hunting something and I get it, I’m just very happy. I’m happy that I got it. I don’t feel like my heart’s been torn out, you know, it’s just like, I’m a predator and I think when I’ve made a kill I get a sense of elation from it, from having accomplished my goal. I set out to do something and I’m happy when I’ve completed the task.

I never try to appeal to people’s, to win over supporters of hunting by acting as though it’s strictly spiritual. It’s exciting to hunt. There’s a thrill to it. So I try not to act like I’m out there doing the world a favor by hunting.

I think what surprised me was, well, I was surprised by the level of sportsmanship and fair play that you wrote about, and also the understanding of ecology. I guess my view of a lot of hunters is that they don’t care, they don’t really know much about the area that they’re in. They’re just single-minded about what they’re trying to kill and they don’t care about the context of it or the history behind it or their environmental impact or even the ecology of the area they’re in.

I think that’s very true. I think you’re on to something and that’s a problem I’ll address. There’s two conversations I have all the time. There’s the conversation I have when I’m talking to non-hunters. When I’m talking to non-hunters, I try to represent hunting in a light that makes sense to them. Hopefully they’ll come away understanding it better or it’ll appeal to them more when I’m done talking to them about it. The other conversation is when I’m talking to hunters. When I’m talking to hunters, I’m telling them, “You need to be mindful of our perception with the non-hunting public. You need to be more like what I’m saying we’re like.”

For the non-hunting public, they look at hunters and think, “As long as you eat it and treat the animal with respect, that’s cool. I understand what you do.” When I’m talking to hunters, I tell them that we need to be mindful of the way we’re perceived. We need to behave properly and behave in a way that’s respected by non-hunters. And in that way I do try to tell hunters to be more articulate about what they’re doing and to show the respect they have.

But I think a lot of people who haven’t come out of a hunting culture feel the call to hunting. They feel the desire to hunt. When they look out in the woods, they want to be out there on the land with a weapon, hunting game. That’s elemental. I think that some portion of that is just hardwired into us. It’s there. The ethics is something you have to learn and develop. So a lot of people feel the call of hunting, but they’re coming at it from a confused perspective. And they need to think about the things that they really do admire. But I think that when someone is exposed to that kind of thinking or shown the way on that, they come around. But yeah, there are a lot of hunters out there that are doing the activity of hunting, but they’re simply doing it wrong, often because someone never showed them how to do it right, because they’re not really translating their own emotions properly. They’re not really understanding…

What do you mean by doing it wrong? What is it that they’re doing that you think is wrong?

There’s hundreds of things. Violating game laws. Taking more than your share. I have a lot of respect and admiration for game laws set up by the state. I think the states that monitor their game laws do a wonderful job of science-based resource management. If you’re hunting and you’re not following those codes as set forth by state law, I think you’re doing it wrong. If you’re hunting penned animals, you’re hunting high wire fences, I think you’re doing it wrong. I think that you’re confusing hunting with something else.

They’ll never admit it but a lot of hunting shows are hunting high wire fences. They’re in Texas hunting high wire. They’re in New Zealand hunting high wire. They’re hunting penned animals. It violates the very notion of fair chase. I’m not saying it should be illegal to hunt penned animals, but don’t call it hunting. It’s not hunting. It’s something different.

Back to the topic of food… what are your favorite organs to eat?

My favorite organ by far is the heart. There’s no animal the heart’s not good in. I like the consistency of it. It brings up fond memories because we ate a lot of venison heart when I was growing up. I always keep it. It’s stable. Some organs will spoil so fast. I love heart. I stuff it and bake it. My favorite is to cut it in thin slices and fry it with onions. Sometimes I’ll grind it into ground meat and make heart burger.

The second favorite organ for me is liver. The third favorite for me for animals that are big enough is tongue. We were just hunting in New Zealand and there’s wild sheep there. I hadn’t been hunting there in years. I shot a wild lamb and we ate organ scramble with the lamb using the lungs, the kidneys, the heart, the liver; all that stuff’s real good.

On some animals the thymus gland is really good, but on older animals it changes and gets waxy and it’s not as good. But heart and liver are kind of the mainstays; they’re the two things I’ll always grab.