In a personal essay, the author recounts her struggle with disordered eating and body image. She argues that harvesting her own venison in Wyoming fundamentally altered her psychological relationship with food, replacing years of restrictive dieting and guilt with an appreciation for sustenance.
Childhood Dietary Restriction and the European Paris Incident
The essay details the author’s history of restrictive eating patterns spanning her teens and twenties. At age nineteen, while staying on the top floor of a six-story walkup in Paris during a family vacation, she experienced body dissatisfaction. She describes standing in front of a mirror and struggling with intrusive thoughts regarding her physical form. This behavior mirrored years of calculated nutritional restriction, which included drinking 32 ounces of cold green tea every morning to target belly fat, eliminating bagels entirely after a friend noted the carbohydrate equivalence to 10 slices of bread, consuming canned tuna before dawn workouts, and practicing intermittent fasting from 8pm until noon the next day.
Economic Pressures and the Rise of the MeatEater Brand
At age 24, armed with a master’s degree, the author took a job with MeatEater, the hunting media brand built around Steven Rinella’s television show which premiered on the Sportsman channel in 2012. After moving to Netflix in 2018, the brand expanded its audience during the pandemic. This growth captured ethical vegans, curious outdoors enthusiasts, and suburban parents confronting surging grocery prices. The essay notes specific economic data: ground beef prices rose 78% compared to the pre-pandemic price, climbing from $3.88 per pound in March 2020 to $4.74 in June 2020, and reaching $6.92.
The Wyoming Hunt and the Shift in Perspective
In the fall of 2021, the author traveled to Wyoming with her father to hunt with a tag for a white-tailed doe. Biologically, the overabundance of white-tailed deer impacts ecosystem health and competes with mule deer, an iconic western species less adaptable to environmental shifts. On the final night, she shot a white-tailed doe from 184 yards away. The bullet passed through both lungs, causing rapid death with minimal visible suffering. Kneeling by the animal, she experienced an emotional reaction of shaking, crying, and apologizing before learning to field-dress the carcass from a family friend and guide.
| Metric / Item | Pre-Pandemic Baseline (March 2020) | Mid-Pandemic (June 2020) | Current Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ground Beef (per pound) | $3.88 | $4.74 | $6.92 (78% higher than pre-pandemic price) |
| White-Tailed Doe Populations | Abundant | Abundant | Managed via tags to protect ecosystem health |
Psychological Insights on Eating Disorders
The essay incorporates perspective from Dr. Hannah Carl, a Chicago-based psychologist specializing in treating people with eating disorders, who identifies the nutritional chaos of adolescence as an oscillation between viewing food as fuel versus food as enemy. The author connects this underlying psychological disconnect directly to modern society’s detachment from the biological origins of sustenance. Observing the fat encasing the harvested deer’s kidneys—an evolutionary adaptation ensuring survival through harsh winters—sparked a realization regarding societal standards of body composition. The author noted the irony that human cultural definitions of being in “great shape” prioritize less body fat, contrasting starkly with biological realities required for survival.
