MeatEater Got Me F*cked Up!

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes

In order to understand a beef you need a good back story. You need to know how the beef started in order to enjoy the petty. And I’ve got bouquets of fresh cut petty. So, like a delicious stew can’t be made without quality stock, I’m going to start with the bones of this beef.

First, why would Steven Rinella and his hugely popular hunting and wild food platform give a damn about me? I’m an adult-onset hunter who couldn’t hang with any member of MeatEater on the most basic back country hunt. I’m a novice, a beginner, a student of the educational content they put out. They are the big brothers, I’m the snotty little brother who wants to be like them in terms of hunting prowess.

But I do have a level of expertise none of the MeatEater crew has; I’m a Black man born and raised in the United States who’s spent my life examining aspects of this society through the lens of power and oppression.

Almost seven years ago (goodness, has it been that long already?!) I had the incredible privilege to meet on of my favorite public figures, Anthony Bourdain, through friends Mike and Amy of Lost Creek Farm in West Virginia. Amy and Mike run an incredible heritage food and media company centered on Appalachian foodways. They’d been gaining traction among national media outlets and grabbed the attention of Anthony Bourdain’s crew who were doing an episode on West Virginia.

I got an invite to their screening as I had become pretty good friends with Amy and Mike around our love of wild food and cooking. The content I’ve put out through their podcast and documentaries has been the work I’m most proud of.

So after hanging out with Anthony B, I was invited to write an article on a topic of my choice. I thought the topic of learning to hunt as a Black man living in West Virginia, one of the whitest states in the country, would be novel in the hunting world and provide an opportunity to build connections with others like me.

So I wrote Hunting While Black and several months later a follow up article called Notes from an Angry Black Hunter. These pieces had a fairly noticeable impact as I got emails from people expressing their thoughts — mostly positive — about what I wrote. The MeatEater folks were one of the dozen people/orgs who reached out.

I was geeked to get their email because Steven Rinella was one of the few people in the hunting world who I enjoyed watching. That began to change the moment I talked to him on the phone. I wrote about that conversation in last week’s newsletter, so check that out if you haven’t already.

Steven was not convinced that racism among hunters was something to be concerned about beyond “normal” levels of racism. He wanted to know statistics on racist incidents among hunters and statistics on hunting participation among Black people.

Him wanting to know that information, which I didn’t have, was not the issue, so much as knowing that information was the only threshold Steven was going to cross to come to better understand the things I wrote about in my articles. I thought my articles would prompt someone like him to delve into the historical context that sits at the foundation of my reluctance to hunting public lands and be around white people with guns.

My discomfort and critique of mainstream hunting culture is not singularly legible through the lens of the number of Black people murdered by white people while hunting.

We thanked each other for their time, hung up, and have not corresponded with Rinella since.

About a year and a half later, though, I received this email from the MeatEater group, and that’s when things really started going sideways.

The request was fine except that they wanted me to hop on a call with host Ben O’Brien that same day. It was July 2020, the onset of the pandemic, and did not at all acknowledge the possibility that my schedule might not be open. It was clear to me that they lacked a level of professionalism and consideration for my time and for the topic at hand.

Ultimately, Ben and his folks ended up canceling on me 9 minutes before we were supposed to talk the following week, without an apology. I followed up with a set of questions for them to which they’ve never responded.

All of that would have been cool, to some degree. The media business moves quickly and folks aren’t always as considerate as I think they should be. Whatever, no lasting hard feelings. But these dudes kept talking about me on their podcasts!

From episode 89 of The Hunting Collective: Hunting While Black and Questioning Our Cultural Competency w/Dr. Carolyn Finney on 26 November 2019. My name was brought up 7 times by the hosts during this conversation.

I talk about and respond to those mentions in the first exclusive content for Patreon members.

From Episode 230 of The MeatEater Podcast: A Difficult Conversation on 20 July 2020, I only come up once in Steven Rinella’s conversation with the amazing Rue Mapp.

To give you an idea of the level of seriousness the MeatEater group is willing to engage with the topic of race and social justice, two episodes after they interviewed Rue Mapp, they had Donald Trump Jr on their show.

To this day, and despite mentioning my work multiple times, no one from MeatEater has reached back out to continue the conversation on race and hunting. By my count the MeatEater and Hunting Collective podcasts have only featured race and hunting as a primary topic a handful of times in over 700 episodes.

To my knowledge MeatEater has said nothing about Peter Spencer’s murder, perhaps because before said murder one of their own said this about the prospect of a racially motivated murder while hunting:

Killing Black people for stupid and racist reasons is as American as apple pie and baseball. If a twelve year old Black boy can be killed for playing with a toy gun and a Black woman can be killed while sleeping in her own bed and a Black man can be killed in front of his girlfriend and toddler after reporting he had a legal concealed firearm and a Black man can be killed for jogging in the wrong neighborhood and a Black teenager can be killed for sitting in a car at a gas station with the music “too loud” and a Black man can be killed for seeking help after getting into a car accident and several Black women can be targeted and sexually assaulted by a highway patrol officer and Black man can be killed for buying a BB gun at Walmart and a Black woman can wind up dead after a traffic stop and a Black man can be shot in the back for running from the police and two Black brothers can be shot by their new neighbor while surveying their property and a Black teenager can be killed for going to buy skittles and a Black man can be choked to death for a suspected counterfeit twenty dollar bill and and and…why would anyone think a Black man shot nine times — mostly in the back — on a hunting trip with 4 white people could not possibly have anything whatsoever to do with racism or white supremacy?

Yes, this is personal.

They mention my name, my work, my vulnerability, my insight, deliberately misunderstand my worlds in front of the foremost scholar on race in the outdoors as she is trying to teach them, and then, because my approach is direct and discomforting, and because the topic of race is no longer popular, they never answer my respectful request to continue the conversation and add context to their interpretations of my words.

Also, did you catch that these assholes plagerized the title of my article for their podcast episode? Whiteness must be denied nothing.

In all their mentions, offhanded and direct, they never acknowledge my credentials as a scholar. Dr. Finney does, but her subtle naming of my profession never penetrates their consciousness.

In 2011, when I earned my PhD in Ecology, I was one of three African Americans in all of the 400+ PhD granting institutions in the US to earn such a degree. There were more quarterbacks drafted in the first round of the 2011 NFL draft than PhDs in ecology earned by African Americans in the same year.

Steven and his crew knew I was a professor because they got in contact with me and, because google exists. With many a white guest who are also academics, they take the time to acknowledge their credentials, but somehow failed to acknowledge mine. The recognized Dr. Finney as “doctor”, but I’m routinely referred to as “a writer”.

Having a PhD doesn’t make me automatically worthy of praise, but I’ll be damned if I didn’t accomplish something truly exceptional that deserves mention of the title I earned.

Despite my frustrations with how folks from MeatEater have talked about and demonstrated their thinking on race in their profession, I would never fail to acknowledge their expertise as hunters; especially if I was talking about the subject of hunting. Picture me describing MeatEater founder like this:

“Steven Rinella, this father and husband from Michigan, wrote this book about buffalo in America that I found interesting.”

At the end of the day, none of how MeatEater has handled the topic of racism and hunting is surprising to me, but that doesn’t make it less disappointing or frustrating.

They clearly suck at talking about race in their industry and clearly aren’t committed to using their platform to change hunting culture for the better. What’s galling is they routinely, when prompted, claim that the topic of increasing hunter participation and diversity is something they deeply care about and are working on effectively.

Yes, they have/are cultivating a large community of hunters, and have made the practice of hunting something interesting and slightly more approachable for someone like me and I am grateful for that work. But, that work has expired and now it’s just rotting and off-putting.

MeatEater casts their nets for white male hunters, and people of color and women are simply bycatch that they, at best, clumsily engage with before throwing us back.

When they do talk about race, it’s never, ever about whiteness. Not ever. And that perpetuates white supremacy culture in hunting, which, as I and many others talk about, is the primary barrier for folks who look like us participating fully in the practice and accessing resources.

I doubt that the folks at MeatEater could, much less would, talk directly about whiteness, because if there’s something they’ve collectively spent less time thinking about than Blackness, it’s their own whiteness.

Yes, they wrote an article titled “IS HUNTING TOO WHITE?” But that article is a discussion of statistics, mostly about the lack of participation of non-white people in the outdoors, with no discussion of the historical and current drivers of those trends. No mention of anti-Black violence and policies that have shaped the geographies of race in America. They spend the majority of article talking about an “Exceptional [Black] Family” (yes, they actually fucking wrote that).

At no point has anyone from MeatEater approached the idea that, “hey, maybe whiteness, in its current form today, is the problem here.” Why not give whiteness equal time and consideration that you give Blackness?

That’s all I want from these so called “hunting ambassadors”, to unpack the whiteness of hunting with the same “courage” they gave 0.4% of their podcast platform to talk about Blackness. Y’all can solo hunt in grizzly and mountain lion country, but you’re scared to talk about your own racial identity?

(Seriously though, Steven has this amazing story of solo hunting a buffalo in the Canadian mountains that is absolutely incredible and badass. You should read it despite my frustrations with his racial cowardice.)

They probably won’t do that, not even if they read this newsletter, because they’ve decided that that sort of work is too hard, too scary, too uncomfortable, and too risky for a group of famous white dudes who’ve built a lucrative platform on the rock solid foundation of America; white patriarchy.

How do I know this to be true?

Trust me, I’m a professor.

In the meantime, MeatEater…

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Grilling Yard Bird (and a beet)!

I know, technically not a wild food, but I’m cooking in the wild for the first time this year and that’s worth celebrating. Also, we’re making plans to have chickens of our own!

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Business Update

It’s been hard to stay consistent with posting lately, but one that’s grounded me in continuing to build this business is my steady investment in systems that make my content creation more efficient and dear friends who give advice and feedback.

I started using the organizational platform Notion, and it is transforming the way I’m able to accomplish business tasks. I had a lot of friction developing scripts for and conceptualizing my videos, but I’ve reduced that barrier quite a bit and made the process of scripting and planning video content much more enjoyable rather than a chore.

The software is incredibly powerful, and I’m just scratching the surface, but I’m enjoying the learning process and increased productivity quite a bit.

Thanks for reading this week’s newsletter!

-Jonathan