Sometimes meaningful cultural moments crop up in the most unexpected places.

One place you’ll find them is on the Discovery Channel show Man vs. Wild (Friday nights at 9 EST). In each episode, Bear Grylls, a former British military commando and an expert on survival techniques, shows how to get through the worst wilderness conditions and find one’s way back to civilization.

It’s a fascinating and informative show, for the techniques he uses are often quite ingenious, and although there has been some controversy over the fact that some of the show consists of recreations or scenes in which Grylls had protective equipment to ensure that he was not injured during the shooting of the programs, it’s clear that he knows what he’s talking about, and whe know that he has been through some extremely dangerous situations.

However, what I find most interesting about the show are two things. One is how matter-of-fact Grylls is about killing animals and eating them. As Grylls makes clear, when you’re in a fight for your survival, there’s no room for sentiment or squeamishness. Hence while on his adventures he eats all sorts of bugs, spiders, grubs, snakes, and the like, and he makes sure to let us know just how awful they taste. He’s also perfectly willing to eat cuddly things such as rabbits, and he is shown on screen snapping animal’s necks and performing other such killings.

It’s rather bracing to see such a practical mind and a smart lack of sentimentality in our Disneyfied world. Grylls is a tonic in that regard.

The other way in which Grylls is unusual is much more subtle. Typically he begins each adventure by jumping out of a helicopter, parachuting from a plane, or performing some other such reasonably dangerous exploit. And before each of these instances he almost invariably makes the Christian sign of the cross.

It’s a subtle thing, as I say, but it speaks volumes.