Last month, I made a post about the Hunter within me.  How it manifests in thoughts and actions.  And how even in an environment of relative plenty I feel impoverished and hungry.  I made that comment almost as an aside without realizing what was there.

I’m beginning to understand why.  The food we’re given is poison to the Hunter, and he knows it.  He picks at eggs that come from malnourished chickens, and begrudgingly eats potatoes full of antinutrients and partially defused toxins.. fried in vegetable oil that is full of Omega-6 fats.  He looks around for food he can eat that will make him whole, and is discovering that even what is supposed to be the “right food” is so deficient in the vitamins and fats his Hunter mind and body needs that he eats to survive, not to thrive.  He is sick, he is tired, he is dying under the weight of corn-fed animals slaughtered for meat and corn syrup poured into everything else.  The Hunter craves food that is healthy, food that nourishes his body, his mind, and his spirit.  Instead, all that he is fed is inappropriate.. quite literally bird seed and feces.

I could go on for pages about this.  I’ve ranted privately, and tweeted publically, about all the sloppy science and outright lies we’ve been told (example: did you know that there is very little evidence that shows cholesterol causes heart disease?  And in fact, cholesterol actually has net positive effects on cardiovascular ((Horwich, T.B. et. al, “Low Serum Cholesterol is Associated With Marked Increase in Mortality in Advanced Heart Failure”, Journal of Cardiac Failure vol. 8 no. 4, 2002, pp 216-224)) ((Jacobs D. et. al., “Report of the Conference on Low Blood Cholesterol: Mortality Associations”, Circulation vol 86 no 3, September 1992, pp 1046-1060)), but more importantly, mental health?  And that cholesterol is actually needed by our brains for neurotransmitter function, like seratonin absorption? ((Engelberg, H, “Low Serum Cholesterol and Suicide”, Lancet no. 339, March 21, 1992 pp. 727-728))  Yes, my friends who take SSRIs: that low cholesterol level your MD is proud of and prescribing medication to maintain may be making your depression worse.).

There are no easy answers.  As I discovered early in this search for knowledge, there’s a lot of entrenched “common sense” that is outright bollocks.  Many of you in my circle of friends have bought a whole lot of bullshit.  Conspiracy theories aside, the Food Establishment wants to keep you dumb and confused.  The foods they are feeding you are cheap to make, can be sold to you at considerable profit, and controlled as commodities by megacorporations and governments to rape both the planet and our blessed farmers who toil on Her surface.  By making statements like your form of diet is “better for the planet” you are in essence saying “this form of rape is more acceptable.”  And I’m not just looking at vegetarians here, although from my perspective as the Hunter you seem especially silly in this regard.

But, fundamentally it is still rape.  You don’t know any better, so as much as the Hunter wants to rage, he is just beginning to understand.  And he is beginning to feel sorrow for his world: a world that takes away individualism, replaces it with empty promises of a better tomorrow while virtually guaranteeing there will be no tomorrow.

One of the books I stumbled across in this quest was The Vegetarian Myth by Lierre Keith.  Even though I never had the notion of vegetarianism as a “save the planet!” perspective, she utterly shatters any hope of me ever accepting that viewpoint.  She also rearms my feeling about eating “paleolithically” with more hard evidence that the modern diet of corn, potatoes, and other grains is fundamentally unhealthy.  But the strongest words of all were the ones that spoke directly to the Hunter within.

Somewhere inside you is an animal that wants to eat. There’s no dishonor in that animal. She’s the same animal who wants to curl up around her sleeping beloveds, to keep them safe and warm. She’s the same animal who comes alive at the smell of rain. She’s an animal who belongs here.

She’s four million years old. She’s in the shape of your teeth, the empty bowl of your one stomach. She’s in your stalwart heart, a hundred years strong, surrounded by animal fat. She’s in the folds of your brain, and the messages they can carry. Across four million years, these folds grew exquisite, until the messages needed an answer. Your animal found language, art. She answered. She drew what mattered. Go look. The pictures are still there. She left them for you: take, eat, this is the body we have made, predator and prey together. This is the pact, the prayer, our true first communion, not wine but blood: we are all part of each other.

Bow your head and take aim. Then take your turn.

This Hunter may finally be ready to take his. For the sake of brotherhood, for the sake of this planet, for the sake of the millions of years of evolution that has created every one of us, I hope others join me.

If you’d like to follow along with my “journey”, here’s a brief reading list.

• the aforementioned The Vegetarian Myth by Lierre Keith.
  Written from a feminist perspective, so some of the feminism might be hard to swallow for us men.  Very well researched, with tons of references and cites.
• The Paleo Diet: Lose Weight… by Loren Cordain
  Written as a diet self-help book, and sometimes hammers a point into a fine powder, but a great launching point for research.  It’s worth buying just for the bibliography and citations.
• The New Evolution Diet by Arthur deVany.
  Another look at the Paleolithic diet perspective.  Written more as a narrative of one man’s journey than a “how-to” book, but still very meaty and cite-rich.
• Whole Earth Discipline by Stewart Brand
  While not strictly written along the lines above, it is the book that is almost single-handedly responsible for getting me to question the mainstream “environmentalist” movement’s motives and ideals.  If Lierre Keith is written from the perspective of “burn it all down, civilization is a cancer” this book proffers the perspective that civilization and the environment can, in fact, peacefully coexist IF we are willing to accept the lessons civilization’s failures are teaching us.
• Almost forgot this one.  Watch the movie King Corn.  It will sicken you how we’ve taken formerly proud citizen-farmers and turned them into corporate wage slaves.