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posted by Fnord666 on Thursday January 04 2018, @12:48AM   Printer-friendly
from the eat-more-Bambi dept.

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


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  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday January 04 2018, @01:49PM

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Thursday January 04 2018, @01:49PM (#617662)

    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.

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