By Joel Thurtell
Couple weeks ago, my friend Donna invited me to dinner.
I was delighted. Donna has a summer place near our cottage in McGregor Bay, Ontario, and I’ve eaten her food before. She is a brilliant cook.
We are more or less neighbors in the States, too.
Dinner at her place would most certainly be a culinary treat, and the company, four retired profs along with her intellectual pal Bob, also promised to be a delight.
The main course turned out to be flat noodles topped with a dark meat with accompanying dark sauce. It was delicious, and after the main course, but before dessert, I went to the kitchen to tell Donna how much I liked her meal.
“Best beef stroganoff I’ve ever had,” I said.
Donna was doing something or other near the sink, and I figured her silence was due to concentrating on the task of entertaining half a dozen people while getting food to the table. I went back to the dining room and took my seat.
A few minutes later, Donna returned from the kitchen and sat down. “Joel said this was the best beef stroganoff he’d ever had,” Donna said. “Does anybody know what you’ve just eaten?”
In return, she got five blank stares. I think Bob was in on the trick.
“What you just ate,” said Donna, “Was wild goose.”
Wow! Wild goose! I’d never before tasted wild goose. I’m not sure I’ve ever had tame goose, either.
Duck, presumably tame, I eat often when I go to Thai Bistro in Canton Township.
Pintade, or guinea fowl, I used to eat plenty of when I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Togo, West Africa. Guinea fowl eggs are great, too.
Somehow, I missed out on goose.
I’m glad to have tried wild goose, which Donna said was sent to her by cousins in Iowa who hunt.
A friend I told about Donna’s little dinner party trick was outraged. “She waited till you finished to tell you what it was?”
Well, actually, I do wish I’d known beforehand, because I would have paid more attention to flavor and texture.
But why be pissed off at having a chance to try a new meat?
I LIKE to eat meat.
So why not try new species of flesh?
A few days after Donna’s wild goose dinner, I was visiting my friends Zoe and Burnley in McGregor Bay. A lot of cottages were broken into by bears this past summer. Finally, some people hired a hunter, who shot two mature bears, one a sow with two cubs. Four bear in all were killed, and according to Ontario wildlife law, the bears had to be dumped. They could not be butchered and eaten. They rotted while vultures cleaned up the mess. Too bad. Waste of good bear meat. Not that I’ve ever had bear, but I’d like to try.
Zoe and Burnley told me they had a hunk of bear meat in their freezer, given them by a hunter friend. I offered to swap some beef or chicken for it. No way. They don’t like bear. Canadians in general, so I’m told, look upon bear as trash animals. Not desirable either as targets for hunting or as subjects for the palate. So they gave me their chunk of bear. It’s in my freezer, and I’m weighing how and when to serve it.
I thought of inviting Donna over and announcing after we’ve eaten that it was bear stroganoff.
Today, which is October 24, 2011, I read an article in The New York Times: “Slaughter of Horses Goes On, Just Not in U.S.”
Now I understand why the friend who was bent out of shape on hearing of Donna’s joke was so mad.
There is no parity in the way people perceive meat.
What if Donna had announced we’d just eaten horse?
Goose is easy to swallow, compared to our trusty beast of burden, the horse.
But why is this so? Why are people so protective of horses? Why not put the same energy into saving cows or sheep or pigs?
My wife, Karen Fonde, told me of an experience she had while in training with the Peace Corps in Togo. Jean, a Peace Corps chauffeur from the Ewe ethnic group in southern Togo, was driving Karen and some other health education volunteers to their work sites in various villages in Togo. As they approached the town of Lama-Kara, Karen remarked that she’d heard that the Cabrai people of that area eat dogs. Yes, confirmed Jean, they do eat dogs in this place. All agreed that eating dogs was disgusting. Then Karen noted that some people in Togo eat cats. “Nothing wrong with eating cat,” said Jean. “I eat cat.”
Karen told this story to Seydou Bukari, a Muslim boy from the Mossi group who helped us around our house in Dapango in northern Togo. Seydou told us that his people are not supposed to eat monkey. But they eat beef, goat, sheep, fish and other kinds of flesh.
“Why not eat monkey?” I asked. He went home to ask his dad. Later, he told me: “Monkeys look too much like humans.”
In Togo, I was served rat — bush rat, that is. It’s called agouti and is considered a delicacy. I have a photo of two guys roasting a big rat — not agouti, but a well-fed rat caught in a grain building — in front of our house in Dapango. They didn’t offer me a bite, or I’d have tried it.
I never was served dog or cat, but would have tried it, given the chance.
Karen and I traveled through West Africa and in Ouagadougou, we found a French-style restaurant with a chalk board menu advertising cheval. I wanted to try it, but the waiter told me they’d run out of horse.
Back in the States a few years later, I was editor of The Journal Era newspaper in Berrien Springs. One of our staff was a horse lover and got all pissed off when a slaughterhouse out in the Niles-Buchanan boondocks started slaughtering horses. Horse-lovers made the alaughterhouse into a political hot potato and somehow got it shut down.
Or maybe they stopped it from opening. All I know is that once again, I missed out on eating horse.
But more than once I had lunch with the horse woman from the paper. She had no problem wolfing down a cheeseburger or French dip or other beef-based lunches.
How can people who shovel down their throats the flesh of cows, pigs, lambs, turkeys and chickens possibly be morally outraged when other people chomp on Champ?
If you eat any kind of animal flesh, you have no moral authority to tell others they can’t eat some other kind of animal.
I’d draw the line at human beings.
Except in emergencies.
There’s a ban on slaughtering horses in the U.S., but it’s done in Mexico and Canada.
Mexico’s a bit far, but Canada I can do.
Okay, I’m on this — gonna order some steak du cheval from Montreal.
Hey, Donna — wanta come over for dinner?
