I suspect most people have eaten venison either never, or
constantly, depending on if they know a hunter. I don't know a hunter, so
there's no freshly ground venison sausage being forced on me because
someone's freezer is already packed with the stuff.
It's much easier to find beef than it is venison. But I try not to
eat beef. I'm saving the rainforest.
One of the main reasons for the rainforest being clear cut is to
make grazing space. I'm aware no one's cared about the rainforest since
1992, but it's still there (for today, at least). Pigs don't need grazing
space, chickens and turkey and fish don't need grazing space, only cows.
And buffalo, but the seven buffalo left in the world can graze off of the
median strip of the Garden State Parkway.
I haven't eaten veal in 15 years. I avoid fast food for mostly
socioeconomic reasons (if we only go to restaurants with minimum wage
staff, then soon that's all that will be left). I should probably go full
on vegetarian, but I hate vegetarian food. I don't want to be forced to
order that one plain pasta dish at Friday's for $14. Veggie burgers taste
like moldy bread soaked in grill scrapings. Just because I'm
anti-animal-slaughter doesn't mean I'm pro-cucumbers and broccoli in
every meal.
My favorite food is vegetarian, though: macaroni and cheese. It's
not vegetarian so much as something that accidentally tastes good without adding meat. You can throw in a chopped up hot dog or a can of tuna if you want, but to me that's like putting glitter on the Mona Lisa.
The real reason I'm not a vegetarian is lunch. There's exactly one
decent sandwich you can make without meat: peanut butter. Grilled cheese can't be made with an office microwave. Vegemite's only in Australia. Tofu's like eating a big booger, but without the flavor. Eating peanut butter sandwiches five days a week will revert me back into a
six-year-old. So because of that, I cave in and eat meat.
But I try to avoid the traditional meats. I figure if I support the
eating of non-traditional animals, it cuts down on the demand from
current slaughterhouse employees, while boosting those kind humanitarian ostrich breeders. (Note: I have no proof that ostrich breeders are kinder than other animal breeders. I'm going simply on there being such a small demand for ostrich that the farmer can probably fill his orders just by plucking the birds that died of old age.)
Up there with ostrich is venison, deer meat. Deer are raised for
food in Australia like cows, but in America the easiest way is to get a
gun and shoot one yourself. I've never hunted before, but without
hunters, the deer population would grow and grow, and half of them would starve to death once winter comes. A deer running free and then having one really bad day in November beats a cow who's crammed in a feedlot and fed his siblings' blood for the last few weeks of his life.
Venison's not readily available in most places. I've looked and
looked, and only found it once a decade.
Eighties:
I lived in Wisconsin for half of third grade and all of fourth
grade. It was at that stage in my life when your parents herded you in a
car and took you to some house for a grown up party. The parents would
stand around the kitchen and talk (why grownups liked to do this, I
didn't know), and us kids would have the entire TV to ourselves. The
house we were at had a brand new invention called a VCR, so we watched Willy Wonka.
On the ride over, Mom said there would be fish sandwiches. I thought
that sounded nice. I liked fish sticks (I dipped them in ketchup at the
time) and was interested in fish in another form.
The host, I think, was a fisherman and hunter. He might have been
planning on a big catch, which in Wisconsin was through ice fishing. The
ice was so thick most of the winter you could drive your car on the lake
up to your drilled holes.
The 'fish' sandwich I ended up getting was a small lump of brown
shredded meat in a puddle of gravy. I ate it, noticed it was bad, and
wondered what kind of fish it was. The fish must have heard this guy's
car on the ice and skedaddled, so he had to dig into his venison supply
in the freezer.
If I knew it was venison, maybe I'd enjoy it (unless someone used
that new VCR to show Bambi). But I figured it was just nasty brown fish.
Nineties:
We moved from Wisconsin to Pennsylvania, and then to glorious New
Jersey. While a few of us embrace everything about this fine paved state,
most high school students felt this desire to get the hell out of the
state for college. It didn't matter where, just so long as the college
wasn't in New Jersey. There's a ring of colleges on New York and
Pennsylvania borders just to accommodate these students. My sister
Bridgette chose a little farther north, New Hampshire.
She didn't have a car up there, so Dad ferried her to and from
school in the minivan. Jeff and I are two years ahead of her, so when she
finished sophomore year, we finished senior year. Like most recent college graduates, we had no jobs. Bridgette was going to be ready to be picked up on a Wednesday. Dad could take time off of work for it, or we could do it.
Jeff and I took turns driving the empty minivan up into New England
to her school. Bridgette knew the good restaurants in her area, so once
we arrived, we went to the Common Man.
The Common Man's menu had the usual array of steaks, chicken, fish,
and venison stew. Hold on a sec, venison stew? I usually try to get the
food on the menu that I'm not likely to get anywhere else. I look for
deep dish pizza in Chicago, chowder in Boston and penguin burgers in Antarctica. I didn't know what food was native to a New Hampshire college town (aside from pot brownies) but venison stew fit the bill.
The stew came out, a big dish of mashed potatoes with brown gravy.
There were numerous chopped up squares on top. I didn't quite remember what venison tasted like from Wisconsin. I heard it was kind of tough and gamey. But it would be a new flavor.
I took a bite. It was an old flavor: potatoes. This wasn't venison
so much as potatoes on top of more potatoes. Maybe the gravy had a
whitetail hair in it, but that's all.
I was eating this in May. Hunting season is in the fall. So if this
was freshly hunted deer, it had been in deep freeze since last Halloween.
Or the restaurant ran out of deer, kept the stew on the menu, and waved
an antler over the mashed potatoes when someone ordered venison.
Zeros: or Aughts: or whatever the hell this decade will end up being called:
