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Deer are regularly hunted across the United States, but some people pay exorbitant prices for imported deer meat:
Wintertime is a special time of year at Cafe Berlin, located just a few blocks from the Capitol building in Washington, D.C. This is when they roll out their menu of wild game, such as deer, wild boar, and quail. Regular customers have come to expect it. "They ask, weeks in advance, 'When does the wild game menu start? When does it start?'" says James Watson, one of the restaurant's chefs. And the star of that menu is venison. The restaurant serves venison ribs, venison loin, even venison tartar. It's food that takes your mind back to old European castles, where you can imagine eating like aristocracy.
You won't see venison in ordinary supermarkets. At Wagshall's, a specialty food shop in Washington, I found venison loin selling for $40 a pound. This venison comes from farms, usually from a species of very large deer called red deer. Much of it is imported from New Zealand.
Yet there's a very different side to this luxury meat. Less than two hours drive from Washington, Daniel Crigler has a whole freezer full of venison that he got for free. Crigler's home in central Virginia is surrounded by woodlands full of white-tail deer. For Crigler, they are venison on the hoof. And he loves hunting. "I love the outdoors. I love being out. But I also like to eat the meat," he says, chuckling. It's pretty much the only red meat he eats. And as he shows off the frozen cuts of venison in his freezer, this crusty man reveals his inner epicurean. "That's a whole loin, right there," he says. "What I like to do with that is split it open, fill it full of blue cheese, wrap it up in tin foil and put it on the grill for about an hour and a half."
And here's the odd thing about this meat, so scarce and expensive in big cities; so abundant if you're a hunter in Madison County, Virginia. Hunters like Crigler kill millions of deer every year in America, but the meat from those animals can't be sold: It hasn't been officially approved by meat inspectors. Also, the government doesn't want hunters to make money from poaching. Yet hunters are allowed to give it away, and many do. As a result, venison occupies a paradoxical place in the world of food. It's a luxury food that turns up in notably non-luxurious places.
Related: Arby's is Selling Venison Sandwiches in Six Deer-Hunting States
Deer in Multiple U.S. States Test Positive for Chronic Wasting Disease, Leading to Restrictions
(Score: 4, Informative) by physicsmajor on Thursday January 04 2018, @02:05AM (16 children)
This is, in essence, mad cow disease but in deer. It's spreading. Can't be diagnosed except on pathology examination of a brain, so it's undoubtedly beyond the known range.
Hasn't crossed over to humans yet that we know, but prion diseases are terrifying. Personally, I have no intention of consuming venison full stop.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 04 2018, @02:58AM (10 children)
You'd probably have to go vegan, or at least not consume mammals. Apparently they feed chicken bits of cows too sometimes, don't you love "efficient agriculture practices"?
https://www.cdc.gov/prions/bse/case-us.html [cdc.gov]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday January 04 2018, @03:33AM (9 children)
It's not so much expensive rather regular chicken is absurdly cheap
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Thursday January 04 2018, @03:42AM (7 children)
Friends of ours born in the 1920s remarked how chicken used to be a special treat, rare dish to splurge on for a holiday or something. And, by the 1990s, it was just everyday fare, like rice and beans used to be.
Factory farming does make cheaper product, but to call it chicken is like calling an LCD Casio watch a Rolex.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 04 2018, @03:54AM (4 children)
Quartz-driven casio is infinitely better than mechanical rolex toy.
(Score: 4, Touché) by bob_super on Thursday January 04 2018, @06:34AM (3 children)
No, it's not.
Try: The Casio is a handful of orders of magnitude more precise at providing accurate timing.
The Rolex toy is many orders of magnitude better at conveying information about disposable income, or propensity to buy status things one can't really afford.
(Score: 2) by Rich on Thursday January 04 2018, @01:09PM (1 child)
Lobster used to be the "rat of the sea". Or even "cockroach"...
We have this communist politician in Germany, Mrs. Wagenknecht. Despite being communist, her first husband was an entrepreneur (since, she changed over to a rather greasy socialist). And some day - some animals are more equal -, she was seen at some sort of cocktail party, enjoying her lobster.
Confronted by the press and outraged party comrades, the response was: "We shouldn't have problem with enjoying lobster. My political work pushes towards everyone being able to enjoy lobster."
Now, my very humble personal opinion is, that if she succeeds at that attempt, the poor lobsters would be considered "rats of the sea" again. Or maybe they'd be not so poor in that case, because that would save them from being boiled alive...
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday January 04 2018, @02:02PM
Lobster would be "rats of the sea" if they weren't so scarce. New Zealand, Belize, Everglades National Park in the Florida Keys and maybe a tiny handful of other places around the world have demonstrated that marine no-take zones (not weak preserves that still allow "limited" harvesting), will allow lobster numbers to recover to pre-harvested levels - big lobster that were becoming extremely rare do regrow and they reshape the ecosystems, cleaning up detritus from the bottom.
Incidentally, lobster numbers in the no take zones get so high that they migrate out into the open season areas - if it weren't for this migration, the lobster season in the Florida Keys would have had to be severely shortened decades ago, driving commercial prices even higher than they are.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday January 04 2018, @01:49PM
And, in this context, serving a chicken dinner in 1929 was more about conveying information about disposable income - if not status things, and affordability is in the decision making process of the consumer. Many consumers (and Casino owners) "legally" decide to purchase items beyond their financial means then accept the risk of bankruptcy. In the 1920s, it's likely more than one server of chicken dinners could have avoided insolvency by serving potatoes instead.
There is also a difference in quality and durability. My grandmother bought me a Rolex she "couldn't afford" when I received my Masters' degree, did the same for my dad 20 years earlier - and never required a financial bailout in her whole 98 years of life. I wore that daily, stocking shelves at a grocery store, doing concrete demolition and construction work, SCUBA diving, etc. and it still looks as good and functions as well as it ever did now 30 years later. 100 casios would have died attempting to do the same.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday January 04 2018, @07:54AM (1 child)
This has led to a common problem with broken leg bones.
It's gotta be rough being a factory chicken.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 04 2018, @03:46PM
That's why - to protect the chickens - we lock them in scaffold cages too small to stand up in.
(Score: 2) by dak664 on Thursday January 04 2018, @05:15PM
Indeed, cheap chicken will have been a major poster child for our age:
http://www.resilience.org/stories/2018-01-04/unearthing-the-capitalocene-towards-a-reparations-ecology/ [resilience.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 04 2018, @05:15AM (1 child)
We just call it "chronic Runaway" disease, now. Tends to make its victims post on subjects they know nothing about. Bad enough when it was just deer doing it.
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Thursday January 04 2018, @09:40AM
World first as AC wastes everyone's time with vacuous whining. More at 11.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 04 2018, @05:52AM (1 child)
It can be diagnosed, just not definitively. It has clear symptoms.
And the prions in question reside in neural tissue, not muscle. As long as you steer clear of the spinal cord and brain, you're fine.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 05 2018, @06:25PM
Muscles are innervated.
The whole body is innervated.
Cerebral-spinal just has the highest neural concentration. Every nerve is neural. That's literally what the word means.
If this prion crosses to all nerves it's Still A Problem. What prionic load is enough to start replication? A single prion? Or is a population necessary like for biologics?
(Score: 3, Informative) by Kromagv0 on Thursday January 04 2018, @02:50PM
CWD is something that while bad can be dealt with. As it spreads by close contact through saliva it is very rare in wild populations unless there are piles of food available for a bunch of them to be eating at nose to nose. The outbreaks usually occur near a cattle farm, elk farm, or deer farm where wild deer sneak in for food and the commercial farm has diseased critters. The other places where outbreaks usually happen are where people are actively putting out piles of food for the deer or are baiting deer.
When an outbreak happens the best thing to do is to really reduce the deer population as this stops the spread. You then need to have a monitoring program for several years to test all the deer near by to see if it really eradicated. There was a CWD outbreak in either a commercial deer or elk farm somewhat near where I hunt this year. So all deer taken in all of the areas nearby (probably well over 500 square miles) were tested. All of those tests came back negative but the testing program in that area will continue for at least another year.
T-Shirts and bumper stickers [zazzle.com] to offend someone