As a boy, Tovar Cerulli spent his summers fishing trout and hunting bullfrogs. While still in high school, he began to experiment with vegetarianism, and by the age of twenty he was a vegan. Ten years later, in the face of declining health, he would find himself picking up a rifle and heading into the woods. Through his personal quest, Tovar Cerulli bridges disparate worldviews and questions moral certainties, challenging both the behavior of many hunters and the illusion of blamelessness maintained by many vegetarians. Are fishing and hunting barbaric, murderous anachronisms? Or can they be respectful ways for humans to connect to nature? How harmless is vegetarianism? Can sustenance hunters and vegetarians be motivated by similar values and instincts? In this time of intensifying concern over ecological degradation, how do we make peace with the fact that, even in growing organic vegetables, life is sustained by death? Drawing on personal anecdotes, philosophy, history, and religion, Cerulli shows how America'¬"s overly sanitized habits of consumption and disconnection with our food have resulted in so many of the health and environmental crises we now face.

Tovar Cerulli awarded a graduate school fellowship by the University of Massachusetts-Amherst in 2009, where he is researching diverse perspectives on human relationships with the natural world. He lives in Vermont with his wife, Catherine.  Visit his webiste at www.tovarcerulli.com.