By SEAN PATRICK FARRELL
CHARLOTTESVILLE, Virginia - The call to forge deeper connections with the food we eat has drawn thousands to farmers’ markets, sprouted a million backyard seedlings and stimulated fresh interest in canning, baking from scratch and other pursuits from an older time.

Now add hunting to the list. Novice urban hunters are forming classes and clubs to learn skills that a few generations ago were often passed down from parent to child.

Jackson Landers, an insurance broker, teaches a course here called Deer Hunting for Locavores. Mr. Landers, 31, started the classes this year for largely urban adults who, like him, did not grow up stalking prey but have gravitated to harvesting and cooking their own game.



Jackson Landers prepares a meal from fresh deer meat. / JAY PAUL FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

He teaches deer biology, habitat and anatomy, and rounds out his students’ education with field trips to a firing range to practice shooting and a session on butchery and cooking. One of the last lessons covered field dressing a freshly killed deer. As the students gathered around, Mr. Landers produced a hunting knife and explained its gut-hook feature, which promised to open the deer “like a zipper.”

“I’d never fired a gun before,” said Michael Davis, 44, a graphic designer and a student in the class. “I grew up in Southern California. We surfed, we didn’t hunt.”

But Mr. Davis said he needed to understand what it meant to hunt for food. “I think going through my life without at least experiencing that most primal thing of hunting would be cheating,” he said.

It was a taste for wild boar that spurred Nick Zigelbaum, 26, and Nick Chaset, 27, to form the Bull Moose Hunting Society, a hunting and dining club in San Francisco. The society, founded in 2007, was designed to appeal to young urban residents looking to expand their horizons.

The club now has roughly 55 duespaying members, many of them in their 20s and 30s, who hunt for boar, pheasant and waterfowl together. They share the spoils in the field .

Across the United States, the number of hunters has been in decline for decades. The shift from rural to urban life is the main reason, said Mark Damian Duda, executive director of Responsive Management, a research firm that specializes in natural resources and outdoor recreation issues.

According to his firm’s research, only 22 percent of hunters now say they hunt primarily for food. Most say they do so for recreation or to spend time with their families. “Thirty years ago it was about half the hunters who were hunting for food,” Mr. Duda said.

Anthony Licata, the editor of Field & Stream magazine, said he wasn’t surprised that a new generation was discovering what traditional hunters have known all along.

“There’s nothing more organic and free range than meat you hunt for yourself and your family,” he said. “When you do hunt and if you’re lucky enough to fill your freezer with venison and feed your family, it’s a powerful thing. They aren’t going to want to stop.”

Mr. Landers, who tries to take Virginia’s full limit of six deer a year, agreed. For the cost of the necessary licenses, $36.50, he said he can stock his freezer with nearly free protein. He also argued that for the environmentally conscious, hunting is fairly carbon neutral. “If you can shoot a deer in your own backyard, butcher it there, that’s zero food miles,” he said.

A recent convert to hunting, Mr. Landers became interested in wild game a few years ago when he inherited his great-grandfather’s hunting rifle. He read up on deer management, queried his in-laws, many of whom are hunters, and was soon putting venison on the table.

Like many people, he’d become concerned about large-scale agricultural methods, the use of antibiotics in livestock and the ethics of raising animals in tight quarters. Hunting seemed like a good alternative. “I felt bad about meat,” he said, “but not so bad that I was willing to give it up.”

Before founding their hunting club, Mr. Zigelbaum and Mr. Chaset wanted a closer connection with their food, but finding information about hunting in the San Francisco area was daunting.

Mr. Chaset recalled searching for a suitable wild boar hunting weapon at a gun shop in San Francisco. The staff tried to convince him that a pistol would be fine. He left with the shop’s only rifle, which he used to fell his first boar , an experience he described as “an epiphany.”

“I got this strong sensation of the cycle of life,” he said. It didn’t hurt that he thought the taste of the boar was amazing.

Mr. Zigelbaum said wild boar meat, which tends to be darker and denser than domesticated pork, was “lean, but tasted like bacon.” He plans to travel to the south of France, where he hopes to study traditional charcuterie methods. Wild boar prosciutto, he said, would be “awesome.”


More young Americans are hunting game for food. Nick Chaset, with a
deer he shot, helped found a hunting society for urban neophytes. / MICHAEL TEMCHINE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES