Field to Fork
ROBYN MIGLIORINI doesn’t look like your typical hunter. That is, she’s not a white, male baby boomer. She’s a millennial—and a former vegan. A few years ago, however, she realized she could fight back against America’s industrialized food system, its feedlots and battery cages, while remaining an omnivore.
“Something was missing,” Migliorini said. “I had this ambiguous craving that I couldn’t fulfill, and I wondered if this was a craving for animal protein.”
At the time, Migliorini lived in an apartment in San Diego with no access to farmyards or pasture, so growing her own meat was not really an option, and buying from a sustainable operation was forbiddingly expensive. More important to her, if an animal had to die to feed her, she wanted to take responsibility for that.
Migliorini read Ted Kerasote’s beautiful, philosophical work, Bloodties. In it, Kerasote concludes that trophy killing is indefensible but supports hunting for food, asking: “Was being mindful of death’s red flower—revering it, lamenting it, celebrating it—the necessary state of mind that makes the taking of animal life different from murder or the mere cropping of a ‘resource’? Was that what makes hunting ethical?”
Migliorini and her husband, Nick, looked to the desert hills of San Diego County, near their home. Could they just kill one of the hares or mule deer they encountered out there while backpacking? Historically, most people learn to hunt from a family member. But she had grown up in a suburb of Boston and no one in her family had ever hunted, or even had a gun. “It wasn’t even so much that it was looked upon negatively; it just simply wasn’t a concept that was relevant in the town that I grew up in,” she said.
True millennials, the couple went online for help. From 2010 through 2012, they studied YouTube videos on hunting and read through hunters’ forums. “What we figured out early on was there really was no go-to resource for people who wanted to learn how to hunt,” she said. Mostly, they
