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The Daily

Eating What You Kill This Thanksgiving

The Daily

The New York Times

Daily News, News

4.4102.8K Ratings

🗓️ 27 November 2025

⏱️ 57 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

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.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Do you just want me to run through the different sounds?

0:05.0

Okay.

0:06.0

So yeah, a simple quack is just and then a lot of times this morning to grab those ducks attention,

0:13.0

I was doing five to seven quacks in a row.

0:18.0

So yeah, it's just like music.

0:24.4

You're one with the duck.

0:27.6

I try to be. I try my best. When most of us sit down today for Thanksgiving dinner, if we're being honest,

0:43.9

we're not really thinking all that hard about where the food on the table actually came from.

0:49.5

It came from the grocery store.

0:52.8

And to the degree that we did think about where it came from,

0:56.5

maybe we shopped the local free-range organic aisle.

1:01.2

Still, it came from the supermarket.

1:04.4

But for Stephen Ronella, the question of where his food comes from

1:09.3

is almost a religion.

1:12.7

Ronella is a lifelong hunter, perhaps the country's most famous hunter,

1:17.1

who shares his passion for eating what he catches through a growing media empire

1:23.1

that includes a Netflix show and a podcast, both called Meat Eater.

1:29.0

If you're just by yourself and you kill a moose in September,

1:32.4

yeah.

1:33.4

How long can one guy live off that moose?

1:37.9

You know, if that's all you're eating, you know, probably three months.

1:43.3

He's also written more than a dozen books,

...

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