Jesse Griffiths takes hunting seriously. “If you see an animal die or have a hand in that animal dying,” he says, “that’ll give you a bigger perspective about other things in this world.” Griffiths hunts deer, feral pigs and game birds in the Central Texas Hill Country around Austin. Most of the time, he works at the other end of the chain, buying venison and feral pigs from state and USDA-inspected purveyors like Broken Arrow Ranch processing it, and selling it at weekend farmer’s markets, turning it into sausages alongside homemade salsas and chutneys. He also cooks wild-boar burgers, hashes and breakfast tacos to order. When you buy from Griffiths’ pop-up butcher shop Dai Due, you’re getting the whole food chain, from someone who understands the whole food chain, start to finish. “It’s such an exciting thing to see that process,” he says. “To know where everything comes from.”
In this beautifully made, deliberately tense video, we follow Griffiths on a wild-boar hunt in the Hill Country. With his shaggy red beard, trucker’s hat and scruffy, logo-strewn clothes, Griffiths may look like a stereotypical food hipster. But there’s nothing frivolous about him. He looks at hunting almost like a sacred duty, a social responsibility. He’s a steward of the land and of the food it produces.
There are millions of feral pigs roaming the open land of Texas. They lay waste to crops and backyard gardens, causing up to $50 million of damage in that one state alone every year. And they’re spreading across the country to Wisconsin and to the Adirondack Mountains because they’re smart and because they have no natural predators. So Griffiths hunts them, culling the herd, not eliminating it entirely. He offers three-day hunting schools throughout the year to other people who are interested in joining him. The experience, as channeled through Griffiths’ sensibility, isn’t a glamorous gun party, some sort of senseless machine-gun slaughter. It’s hard, long, boring work with visceral and emotionally challenging results. Read more….