Content for Carnivores

Hunter Eats His Bounty in Sportsman Cooking Series

By Mark Robichaux -- Multichannel News, 12/5/2011 12:01:00 AM

The next time you eat a burger, think about the cow.

That’s not exactly the premise behind the newest Sportsman Channel series, but it comes close to capturing the hunting ethos of the show’s host, author and outdoorsman Steven Rinella.

In a first of sorts for the channel, Sportsman plans to launch a new original cooking series on New Year’s Day with Rinella called MeatEater — but it’s not of the “stand-andstir” variety you’d encounter on the Food Network or the Cooking Channel.

The new Sportsman Channel show begins with the hunt for food. The weekly half-hour series, an original production with Zero Point Zero, will showcase Rinella bowhunting for javelins (wild hogs) in West Texas, hunting black bears and ducks in Alaska or tracking a mountain lion in southern Arizona.

Each episode ends with Rinella preparing the day’s harvest for a meal. When Rinella tracks Aoudad sheep in Texas, for example, he cooks it in a clay pot. After shooting a Coues whitetail in Arizona, he wraps the heart in caul fat — a sheet of lattice-like fat that lines the stomach — and turns it on a spit over an open fire.

“One of the greatest pleasures of hunting is to harvest the meat and, right there on the spot, cook it and eat it,” Rinella said in an interview. “It’s one of the strongest and most profound connections you can make to the ancestral huntergatherer. It’s my way of saying to the land and animal, you will be respected.”

“I don’t like to separate eating from hunting,” he said. “Hunting is food acquisition. I want to do whatever I can to tighten that connection.”

Rinella, author of the books The Scavenger’s Guide to Haute Cuisine and American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon, said that connection will, hopefully, make hunting a more palatable outdoor activity among the non-hunting crowd.

Many critics of hunting have a hard time resolving the moral issue of hunting for food when eating a chicken sandwich or a juicy hamburger. Both involve the harvest of an animal for human sustenance.

The show is one of 30 new series debuting in the first quarter for Sportsman, which reaches 27 million homes and is making a push to build its subscriber base. Gavin Harvey, CEO, said in a statement: Rinella “is extraordinarily talented at conveying the emotional and spiritual aspects of what it means to be a hunter, what really drives us to prey on and consume wild game.”