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Save the Tennessee Fainting Goat!
Posted By katie allison granju
A NYT article suggests the best way to save endangered critters and plants is to …eat them:
SOME people would just as soon ignore the culinary potential of the Carolina flying squirrel or the Waldoboro green neck rutabaga. To them, the creamy Hutterite soup bean is too obscure and the Tennessee fainting goat, which keels over when startled, sounds more like a sideshow act than the centerpiece of a barbecue.
But not Gary Paul Nabhan. He has spent most of the past four years compiling a list of endangered plants and animals that were once fairly commonplace in American kitchens but are now threatened, endangered or essentially extinct in the marketplace. He has set out to save them, which often involves urging people to eat them
But Mr. Nabhan doesn’t want people to eat everything on his list. The idea of eater-based conservation, which holds that to save something, one has to eat it, works well for agricultural products and some wild foods like clams that benefit from regular harvesting. For some wild species, however, like the foot-long, pink-fleshed Carolina flying squirrel, a harvest would create too much pressure on a tiny population.
The squirrels used to make regular appearances in Appalachian game-meat stews. But as their forests declined, so did the squirrel population; they are now on state and federal endangered species lists. Even if catching them were legal, Mr. Nabhan says a trapper would be hard-pressed to bag more than half a dozen a season.
Because the squirrel was once so important to the diets of North Carolina and east Tennessee, Mr. Nabhan included it on his list, along with a recipe for the thick vegetable stew called Kentucky burgoo.
It calls for corn, lima beans, spring water and two pounds of cubed and fried squirrel meat. Just don’t use flying squirrel. At least not yet.
Interestingly, when she was preparing this article, the NYT reporter contacted local blogger Les Jones to ask him whether he could hook her up with a photo of the tasty flying squirrel.
May 2nd, 2008
I worked on a Ambulance here in knoxville a few years back. we did alot of rural pick ups for doctor’s appointments and such well one little place we went to had some fainting goats the old guy there said on way out hit your siren well we did he had about 20 of these guys and when wew hit siren these guys just fell like bowling pins it was so funny.