Kenney - Cooked raw: how one celebrity chef risked everything to change the way we eat

My deepest appreciation goes out to all who have shaped my journey over the years and to those who continue to work beside me on a daily basis. I hope that my impact on your lives will be as meaningful as yours has been on mine. This book would not be complete without success and failure, challenge and growth, alignment and resistance. For this reason, I acknowledge and appreciate you all, the friends and supporters, adversaries and naysayers, collaborators and partners, family and loved ones, and especially my colleagues, who run beside me on this journey to craft the future of food. You are all a part of this story in some way, and I thank you.

M.K.

Pancake Breakfast

Try blueberry pancakes on a chilled morning with warm, sweet, milky coffee in Styrofoam cups. They have crispy edges, slightly burnt from the heat of butter and a black skillet, overloaded with the tiny and tart wild Maine berries, and generously covered with local maple syrup. It would never occur to most of the world that men in the small towns of America would be awake at this hour, congregating over these sweet delicacies before walking through the woods for hours. The coffee goes down like waterwe can easily drink three or four cupsas we slowly emerge from the morning haze.

HUNTER

Matt, ready to go huntin?

I mumbled something indicating my desire to do just that, but I did not move. It was well before sunrise. My dads soothing voice was no competition for a blistering headache, the product of a long night of cheap beer and other libations.

Ignoring my haze, Dad began to tell me about a dream hed had in the night about the enormous buck we had seen several times in deer season over the last couple years. The buck always seemed to turn up, but we could never get close enough take a clean shot. It wasnt until my eye focused on the paper in my dads hand that I actually considered moving from my childhood bed. It was a map hed drawn of the deers whereabouts, indicating precisely where and how I was going to shoot it.

I was home for a late fall weekend, taking a break from my college routine and seeing my local Maine friends. In reality, walking through the damp, dark woods with a loaded rifle fell somewhere between an ice bath and chewing glass on the excitement scale. It speaks volumes of my desire to please my father that I crawled out of bed and managed to throw on my insulated L.L. Bean boots, thick wool socks, dark green pants that weighed more than a young elephant, and the requisite red-and-black plaid coat. Full-on fluorescent orange was for the tourists, but still, staying in the confines of safety, the comically bright orange cap rounded it off. My gloves were deerskin, ironically, lined with soft inserts and broken in so that the trigger finger would not be compromised.

A thermos of coffee in hand, I grabbed our most precise weapon, a bolt-action 7mm Magnum with its high-powered Bausch and Lomb scope, and a handful of 175-grain bullets. The feel of the cold steel against my hands and the smell of its well-oiled barrel created that familiar sense of anxiety I always felt when walking into the woods, never knowing what I should expect.

My dad, Robert Kenney, explained the map during the twenty-minute ride to my grandfathers property in Brooks, a small Maine farming town. Deer tend to be habitual and often will follow the same paths, depending on the wind and terrain, but older bucks tend to be intelligent and crafty, as theyve survived a few hunting seasons and their instincts are well honed. Wed seen deer literally crawling to stay low in the brush in order to evade a predator. When Dad not only pointed out the general area where wed find this deer, but also exactly where I should shoot it, I was skeptical, to say the least. We were talking about an area that included hundreds of acres and uncountable potential escape routes. Robert Kenney can fix anything and doesnt overpromiseexcept when it comes to the Red Sox winning and the chances of getting a deer. So, I took it all with a grain of salt.

Hunting wasnt new to me. When I was about eight, I started trailing my dad through the woods all day while he taught me how to walk quietly, how to understand the wind, how to use a compass, and how to smell a deer, something he always tried to explain.

Matt, you smell that? Theres a deer around here.

Wed examine the deer droppings, critiquing the size of the pellets (Big buck!) and the color and dryness (This ones fresh). Tracks were always another sign, and the real prize deer, the big ones, would use their ample antlers to scrape and mark trees, taking off a layer of bark. If you saw fresh scrapings on a tree, you knew you were in the right place.

We usually walked; that was how my dad and I liked to hunt. Other hunters sit all day, waiting, which is a good strategy if you know youre on a regular deer crossing. Some build tree stands, which are the adult version of a treehouse. I was never into thatthe Maine woods are too cold in the late fall, and its a bore to sit in a tree all day, even with a good book. I enjoyed walking on the mixed terrain, feeling the autumn leaves crunching under my squishy boots, snapping twigs, and, at other times, creeping over mossy hills quietly.

The deep woods can be a very profound place. You might come across remnants of a buildings foundation on the top of an expansive mountain or a rusty barbed wire fence, alluding to life perhaps a hundred years ago. You may see a couple squirrels chasing one another in the sun or a lone white rabbit hop along out of your way. Occasionally, while inching through thick brush, I would scare a pheasant out of its perch and, at the same time, scare myself out of my boots.

Of course, before you can even walk into the woods, you must learn gun safety and how to handle the various types of weapons. I started with BB guns. I could hit a telephone pole or a bird on a wire from well over one hundred feet awaya hobby I practiced from my second-floor bedroom window on a regular basis. I must have gone through ten thousand BBs as a child and got into some trouble because of it. My dad was just starting his business in those days, so we only had a couple of guns: a hand-me-down Winchester and an old bolt-action rig that couldnt hit a barn from ten yards away.

I got my first deer with the classic Winchester 30-30, a no-nonsense lever-action riflesimilar to the ones you see on old western TV showswith a wooden handle and wooden armrest and the remainder cold, blue steel. Id learned the action itself from my BB guns, which were modeled after these. I was just ten years oldthe year you are allowed to hunt, supervised, in Maineand I was about as tall as the gun. In all fairness, my first deer may have been a bit of beginners luck, but it sure made an impression.

We had walked pretty deep into the woods on that dry and clear November afternoon. It felt like noon, but since wed only entered the woods at daybreak, it was probably only 9 a.m. We stopped to share a Snickers bar, and my dad sipped on the lukewarm coffee in his pale green Coleman thermos. He gave me the good gunthe lever actionand he carried the bolt. Our guns were resting on a tree while we snacked and took in the quiet, cool air. I imagine it must have been such a tender moment for him, seeing his young son out there on the land he grew up around, ready to hit the family tradition head on. I loved it, too, and even at that young age, I appreciated the ceremony of the break and savored the moment.