EP 3: Hunting, harvesting, and cooking with Wilderness to Table's Bri Van Scotter
No matter how we eat, the way we participate in the food cycle in the most ethical, sustainable, and healthy way is a really important conversation to have. Joining me to talk about cooking what you hunt is Bri Van Scotter, a true renaissance woman with degrees in art, communications, and cuisine – and the force behind Wilderness to Table, through which she teaches people about making, enjoying, and also sourcing delicious and healthy food. We chat with Bri about her journey to becoming a self-sustained food maker through harvesting and hunting, hearing about how she felt unfulfilled with her initial education and career before learning about cuisine and becoming fascinated with self-sourced ingredients.
She talks about how she learned to hunt and reconcile her hesitance to kill with her belief that it’s more humane than mass farmed approaches, recounting the story of her first kill and how she overcome the initial shock. We consider the contrasts between factory farms, slaughterhouses, and sustainable harvesting, and Bri weighs in on our culture's damaging eating habits, how organic food helped her health journey, and that self-harvesting results in a more meaningful cooking process. Bri speaks about the contrast between Instagram’s culture of trophy hunting and her approach, according to which the whole hunt is geared toward the meal, and the work she is doing to advocate it with women's hunting groups and a course in the pipeline. Bri’s current career also takes center stage, and we chat about her show, the hunts she goes on, her favorite game meat, the new recipe book she is working on, and the nose-to-tail message behind all her projects. For this and a whole lot more on the topic of self-sustained cooking, tune in today!
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Key Points From This Episode:
- Culinary school, rearing a chicken, bowhunting, spearfishing: how Bri found her passion.
- The contrast between the evils of slaughterhouses and rearing/catching your own food.
- How Bri overcame her hesitance to kill; learning humane practices, and her chef background.
- Bri’s perspective that cooking becomes more respectful if you have harvested the meat.
- Bri’s approach to ethical questions of Instagram trophy shots, and the backlash she still gets.
- How Bri learned her bow skills, her first hunt, and what the hunts she goes on involve.
- Bri’s work with women hunters promoting approaches centered around cuisine, not trophies.
- How Bri dealt with feelings of shock after killing and field dressing a doe on her first hunt.
- The influence of Bri’s childhood and chef/hunter mentality to her nose-to-tail approach.
- The need for ‘normal’ people being the face of the organ meat movement.
- Bri’s career since leaving the restaurant industry: focusing on her show and personal brand.
- The message behind Bri’s brand; bridging the gap between wild game hunting and cuisine.
- Bri’s renaissance woman status with five degrees in photography, cuisine, and more!
- Some of the recipes Bri is working on using duck fat and wild boar lard.
- How eating organic protein helps Bri manage rheumatoid arthritis and stop taking meds.
- Side effects of the eating habits of our culture and the importance of eating organic foods.
- Bri’s thoughts on making her recipe-dense wild game cookbook and when it will drop.
- Why Bri loves moose and bear so much and which periods their meat tastes best.
- Perspectives on the quality of organic food and the need for farming to become more humane.
- New projects that Bri is working on which teach how to cook meat you harvested.
Tweetables:
“I need to pay respect to these animals and if I had my hands on them since the beginning, I need to have only my hands on them in the end.” — @Chefbrivs [0:06:19]
“Even when I hunt, if I can’t get a good shot, I am not going to take it, because the last thing I want is for that animal to suffer.” — @Chefbrivs [0:10:46]
“It’s been my dream to have a cookbook. As a chef, that’s my goal, but I never thought I was going to have a wild game cookbook.” — @Chefbrivs [0:43:35]
“Farming could be transformed into something really amazing.” — @Chefbrivs [0:54:18]
“You have to know what to cook before you harvest your animal because that determines how you butcher in the field.” — @Chefbrivs [1:00:37]
Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:
The Culinary Institute of America