Eating What You Kill This Thanksgiving

Here at “The Daily,” we take our annual Thanksgiving episode very seriously.

A few years ago, we rang up an expert from the Butterball Turkey Talk-Line, who told us that yes, in a pinch, you can cook a turkey in the microwave. Last year, we invited ourselves over to Ina Garten’s house to learn the timeless art of holiday entertaining (Ina’s tip: flowers that match your napkins complete a table.).

This year, determined to outdo ourselves, we traveled to Montana to hunt our very own food. Our guest, Steven Rinella — perhaps the country’s most famous hunter — is an avid conservationist and a lifelong believer in eating what you kill.

What first drew us to Rinella was the provocative argument he put forth in his best-selling book, “Meat Eater.”

“To abhor hunting,” he wrote, “is to hate the place from which you came, which is akin to hating yourself in some distant, abstract way.”

So, a few weeks ago, we spoke with Rinella at his podcast studio in Bozeman, Mont, about the forces that turned him into what he describes as an “environmentalist with a gun”. The next morning, we hunted ducks with him, and then, inspired by Rinella, we ate what we had killed.

Photo: Will Warasila for The New York Times

Audio Produced by Tina Antolini. Edited by Wendy Dorr. Engineered by Efim Shapiro and Alyssa Moxley. Fact-checking by Susan Lee. Original music by Daniel Powell and Marion Lozano.

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