Poor little bird!

Some hipster guy with a book about hunting and cooking game animals is profiled in the Times. Now I got nothing against people who hunt to eat, and I got nothing against people who aren't to squeamish to kill their own food. (Those people are not me, alas.)

But it seems to me that trapping little sparrows in the backyard of your Brooklyn brownstone just to eat them is kinda mean. I suppose it's not that much more mean than commodity chicken farming, but that's pretty mean too. Sieur Rinella has a book he's promoting, The Scavenger's Guide to Haute Cuisine, within which you can find recipes for cooking black bear and moose, neither of which are (anymore) indigenous to Brownstone Brooklyn. Pigeons, however, are epidemic, and Sieur Rinella suggests trapping them behind air conditioner units before roasting them. He also points out, rightly so, that Americans have depersonalized their food (viz., my comment about commodity chicken farming) and are profoundly disconnected from what's on their plate, and how it actually got there.

This may well be true, but I still feel sorry for that poor little sparrow. I know, I know, it's hypocritical, but thus it is to be human. Hypocrisy is the original human condition, she says cynically.