Foodie hunters ... most of the time

Today was my fourth hunt in seven days, and at the end of the day, a delicious irony dawned on me.

One of the reasons my boyfriend and I love hunting is that we love the quality of the meat. Since we've begun hunting, almost all the meat we eat is either hunted, pastured or otherwise raised in a way that produces healthy, nutritious meat from animals that lived decent lives. We never buy factory-farmed meat at the grocery store. Lord, it just doesn't have any flavor.

But when we left our hunt today in a car filled with sodden gear and and a bag of teal, spoonie and scaup, where's the first place we went?

Burger King.

Yes, the King, where you can get King-size servings of chemicals, additives and grease bundled up with meat from cows treated like crap. And man, it is so good when you've just spent a couple hours standing in flooded corn in Day 2 of the biggest storm to hit our region this season.

To salvage my self-esteem, I went back and read a friend's recent blog post about a wild-game dinner at our house last weekend. You'd never know from reading it that the hosts of the dinner party could be found at least once a week this time of year in a drive-thru, yelling at a crackly speaker, "I'll take the No. 5. King size, please."

And about that hunt today? It was something else - my first experience in a very guy hunting-camp atmosphere. But I'm getting up bright and early for a goose hunt tomorrow morning, so that tale will have to wait for another day.

© Holly A. Heyser 2008