Sustainable Protein

Excellent piece n ESPN Outdoors (via InstaPundit) on hunting:

The short version — if you don't want to plod through the math below — eating a pound of wild venison instead of a pound of beef may keep roughly a gallon of gas out of industrial food production.

If you figure that the average American eats almost half a pound of meat per day, that's potentially a huge savings of carbon going into the atmosphere (to say nothing of the national security implications of saving oil).

"If you think of the average hunter as a guy who hunts around his area, a lot of venison comes from a block away," says Steven Rinella, a hunter and author of "The Scavenger's Guide to Haute Cuisine" and, forthcoming in a couple of weeks, "American Buffalo."

He said that as a kid, he used to bowhunt deer right around his house, "before anyone had any idea about this 'eating local' garbage."

Yes, "eating local." That would be the premise that an eater — e.g., you and everyone you know — can conserve natural resources almost passively, simply by eating food produced close to home. Pick the farmer's market blueberries instead of those flown in from Chile, the thinking goes, and you spare the Earth a heapin' helping of exhaust fumes.