By Fiona Capp
The Ethical Carnivore: My Year Killing to Eat
LOUISE GRAY
The Ethical Carnivore, by Louise Gray, looks at the reality of eating meat.
BLOOMSBURY, $27.99
When Louise Gray shot her first rabbit, she felt she had done something horribly wrong. She wanted to spend a year eating only food she had killed in order to confront the bloody reality of being a carnivore. Like most Britons, she had been brought up on "a literary diet of talking woodland animals". And while killing a lobster might not seem confronting, it's a different story when you have observed them in their underwater world. Most disturbing of all was her visit to a slaughterhouse. "It's not the killing that is the most violent thing. It is what happens next: it is the skinning, the burning, the boiling … the evisceration." While most of us prefer not to think about where our meat comes from, Gray tackles the issue head on to show what ethical eating might mean.