But when Tristram acknowledged that he ate meat occasionally, well, that’s a little bit too much.
Tristram kills deer and eats them!
…along with the wild blackberries and the horseradish I picked and dug from a grassy verge in the English countryside, I recently served guests with sausages made from a deer I shot in the preceding days. How — when I gazed down my rifle-telescope at the exquisite animal grazing in the woods, twitching the flies away with its ears — did I manage to pull the trigger that ended its life? Although I have been culling deer for 13 years, it is still hard.
That’s an understatement.
This is how Tristram justifies his deer killing,
Heartless though it may seem to some, among the least harmful things to eat are sustainably culled wild animals. In the absence of natural predators, deer populations in parts of Britain have reached such dense numbers that the woodlands they browse fail to regenerate. Rabbits also are in no danger of being wiped out, and the non-native grey squirrel (whose palatability British celebrity chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall highlighted by employing its culinary name, the “flightless partridge”), can be a pest to forestry as well as a threat to red squirrels.
Perhaps Tristram will now receive an ethical cuisine award from PETA like the one they gave Hugh.
The other quibble with The Bloodless Revolution is the assertion that Hitler was a vegetarian. This chestnut has been put to bed by Rynn Berry and Roberta Kalechofsky in her essay, Hitler’s Vegetarianism: A Question of How You Define Vegetarianism.
