It = raccoon.
Inspectors from the LA County Health Department visited the Metro Supermarket in Temple City on Tuesday, after being informed that the market was selling raccoons as food.
Employees at the market declined to appear on camera, but did show entire raccoons, frozen, bagged, and selling for $9.99 per pound. The employees say raccoon is considered a delicacy in China.
Well, is that so terrible? Maybe we meat-eaters ought to have to see the "expression" on the face of the being whose death we find acceptable for our needs and pleasures. And why shouldn't the consumer take possession of the fur? Eat enough raccoon, and you could have a nice fur coat.
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Reminds me of the Beverly Hillbillies TV show.
Food elite looking down on the choices of those they consider other. Microaggression.
I live in NC and a friend (from the north) was recently horrified to learn that I eat collards.
He thought they were a small animal. Like a gerbil.
This is true.
He also didn't know what 'pot likker' was.
Raccoons are prone to parasites - one reason not to eat them.
Raccoon may be a delicacy in China, but I suspect that "raccoon" is an entirely different species from the North American Raccoon. If they're importing Chinese raccoons for use in food, I have to think there's some kind of import law issue. But they're probably just using the unrelated American species. No particular reason to think they even taste similar, although I've never eaten either, so I couldn't say.
Raccoons are vermin. I'm not going to eat them, but if other people want to then I'm for it.
Now, what do we have to do to drum up a market for armadillo?
Here's a film I made about an annual raccoon dinner in Wisconsin:
http://skyfullofbacon.com/blog/?p=188
There is nothing wrong with eating raccoon, and in fact, since they're mainly hunted for the pelts, it's downright environmental.
(You want to eat wild, forest raccoon, by the way. Ones that eat human garbage are not so palatable, or so I'm told.)
Armadillo - that carries leprosy - may not be a wise choice in exotic foods.
I recall an episode of the Waltons where a wandering homeless person (Depression era hobo with a heart of gold) almost killed the kids' pet raccoon for food, before being taken into the family's care. The kids pointed out that raccoon was one of the nastiest things one could eat - apparently a bit of TV-verite by the writers about rural Depression dietary standards.
"Now, what do we have to do to drum up a market for armadillo?"
Armadillos carry leprosy.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/28/health/28leprosy.html
I am so shocked upon reading the link that the complaining person reacting emotionally to the sight of the raccoons and calling down the authorities despite the sales probably being completely legal ... was a woman.
Which is one of the many reasons I'd like fewer of them in my garden, gentlemen.
People are completely irrational about eating meat. It's hilarious to try them to articulate a moral principle that explains their phobias. I've never eaten raccoon outside of a Brunswick stew (and God only know what's been in a few of the Brunswick stews I've eaten.) The small forest mammals I've eaten (squirrel, possum) have been tough and stringy. Not a bad flavor, but not good enough to make up for the texture.
Moreover, $10 a pound for the whole carcass seems pretty steep. The yield in meat is probably something like a third of the total carcass weight. Better be some mighty tasty raccoon.
Why don't they complain about whole fish on display?
It may not be terrible but it's probably illegal.
For a long time raccoon was quite acceptable as wild game. It still is, but selling wild game in markets is illegal or highly restricted in most of the US.
So maybe these were farm raised raccoon.
Anyway they do know how to cut down on the processing costs.
A guy I knew became a vegetarian in his 40s. I quietly thought, there's a time and place to become a vegetarian, and it's when you're a 13-year-old girl.
Nah, just kidding, kind of. I respect principled vegetarianism, I really do. But I think if you haven't thought through those issues by the time you're a teenager, well, you're not a very thoughtful person. The issues are as obvious as they come. Either you get comfortable with using animals for your pleasure and convenience, or you don't. And making raccoon vs. chicken vs. cow vs. squirrel distinctions is pretty much a waste of time.
We could post the decapitated, dismembered, eviscerated bodies of unwanted human babies in front of Planned Parenthood et al clinics. Employees at abortion clinics declined to appear on camera complaining that it was all voluntary. Women following the secular profits of wealth, pleasure, and leisure declined interviews. The government backers refused to appear in public fearing that it may prejudice voters. Now we're covered.
Well, it is one the four ingredients required to make the American hot dog,
http://i.imgur.com/u9IfMGr.jpg
Our family owned a bluetick coonhound when I was growing up. The evening coon hunting jaunts through the woods and marshes of southern Wisconsin are among my happiest memories. Coon meat can be a bit tough and stingy, so it is often served in soups and stews.
I'm too fat to wear a fur coat, but I really love the feel of fur. My mother had a fur coat and stole back in the '60's. The cedar closet was always the best hiding place for hide and seek.
I was under the impression that it was illegal to sell any game-caught animals or fish in California.
So here's my racist statement of the month. At least here in California, virtually any game-related offense you hear about has been committed by Asians, usually Vietnamese.
Calls to mind the lady who e-mailed Sarah Palin and bawled her out for killing that beautiful caribou. She should go to the store and buy factory-made meat like everybody else!
Stores used to have Live Lobster tanks. The lobsters watched you from inside and pleaded not to die in boiling water at the hands of a monster land mammals. I cry to remember that...but they were good with melted butter.
"The employees say raccoon is considered a delicacy in China. "
Really? I went to a university with about 10,000 Chinese students, and a campus that was overrun with large raccoon, and I never heard of one attempting to eat the other.
Obama ate dog.
As I've said to many Chinese when I lived there, most Western meat-eaters have basically vegetarian instincts, so they don't want to be reminded that what they're eating is a dead animal.
So, they don't like eating fish cooked with the head, things that are recognizably heads and feet of animals, or encounter other "animalness" when eating. They want to get pre-cut meat in plastic or paper wrappers from the store, and don't dwell on where the meat came from.
Maybe we meat-eaters ought to have to see the "expression" on the face of the being whose death we find acceptable for our needs and pleasures.
Have to? No.
But then again, last Friday I was cutting off parts of a pig's face and eating them.
(Dead and cooked, obviously.
The snout was delicious.)
Also, re. Sparrow's pictures.
She thinks dogs are next because raccoons? Because that makes sense somehow?
And it's "sick"?
Does she not know that pork and beef are also ... animals? Dead ones? That we eat?
The unexpressed assumptions there are manifold.
And amusing.
Eat whatever tastes good, I say! And if it doesn't taste good? Garlic and butter, my friends, garlic and butter.
I think there was a Kliban cartoon, "Raccoon on Toast"
As long as sanitary standards are being maintained in the processing of the animal to prepare it for sale to the public, who cares what kind of animal it is? What business it is of some government inspector to restrict particular animals, absent some specific threat?
You can get "armadillo toes" in D'Hanis, Texas.
And what a bourgy,First-World-Problem conceit. Freaking out because your food has a face on it. Better not order the lobster or sea bass, then.
Wah, HEY. Y'all kin feed a family o' four on a halfway decent-size coon.
What's wrong with thay-ut. RACCOON ... the other yellow meat.
Sigvald: eating dog is not "next." Eating dog is "Presidential".
http://tinyurl.com/d2x9gqo
There's an ample supply of raccoon in the storm sewers around my house. But as they are city 'coons, they likely taste bad, even though all the food garbage in the neighborhood is organic and locally sourced.
There is a company that is trying to open a horse slaughterhouse in NM, and it is meeting all kinds of resistance from various quarters.
The taboo on horsemeat for people of Germanic extraction comes from the association with "the old religion" - Odin, Thor, etc. - where eating horsemeat was part of the religious observances. This probably originated in the Germanic tribes homelands on the steppes in southern Russia with large herds of horses.
Then, of course, there are us moderns, brought up on Roy Rogers movies.
I enjoyed reading this book a few years ago even though I don't think its a practical alternative to replace big agriculture. I remember reading that the chickens about to be slaughtered didn't show any fright even as a chicken nearby was being slaughtered.
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver
"This is the story of a year in which we made every attempt to feed ourselves animals and vegetables whose provenance we really knew . . . and of how our family was changed by our first year of deliberately eating food produced from the same place where we worked, went to school, loved our neighbors, drank the water, and breathed the air."
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver
http://www.kingsolver.com/books/animal-vegetable-miracle.html
Maybe we meat-eaters ought to have to see the "expression" on the face of the being whose death we find acceptable for our needs and pleasures.
I do all the time. I think in irder to appreciate what you eat you should kill it and clean it yourself.
And why shouldn't the consumer take possession of the fur? Eat enough raccoon, and you could have a nice fur coat.
I've been eating pussy for awhile now and I'm nowhere near a fur coat.
Does a turnip want to be eaten? Is it moral to devour a rutabega, a fellow eukaryote, just because evolution hasn't provided it with a face? Are vegans exploiting plants just because they consider plants to be "beneath" them?
The only reason raccoon hasn't caught on is it's not cost effective--not a whole lot of meat on those little guys, so even if you grew them on farms you'd have to fatten them up quite a bit to make them worthwhile.
Now, insects--that'll be the new protein source. You could probably grow tons of grasshoppers and crickets, fry them up with sauce and make quite the delicacy.
See if I'm wrong--they'll be in mainstream restaurants in a decade.
Armadillos carry leprosy.
Ya just gotta target your marketing campaign. I can think of a lot of people who could use a good dose of leprosy.
Export hilal armadillo to ISIS.
I've been eating p____ for awhile now and I'm nowhere near a fur coat.
Funny.
Now get your mind out of the gutter, this is the place for elevated repartee.
True story.
While back in grad school, my brother and I had access to a big plot of timber land in Oregon.
My brother, who was always looking for a get rich scheme, decided to try trapping, and put out a bunch of traps.
The only thing he ever got was a smallish 'coon, which his dog promptly killed. We took it back to camp, gutted and skinned it, chunked it up, and fried it, and mixed it with Top Ramen noodles. It's a good whitish meat (not at all like porcupine) and decent. We named the dish "'coon suey."
I tanned the hide, and still have it in a closet somewhere.
I'd think anyone who'd lost dinner on a camping trip to a raccoon would appreciate turning the tables (so to speak).
I can also remember my dad ringing a chicken's neck and seeing the chicken flop around on the ground for a while.
If there was a cable channel for root vegetables, a TurnipTV as it were, it would be "The Day of the Triffids" 24/7.
Mark my words, when the lights go out in the kitchen and the house has gone to sleep, the carrots and onions are plotting while the potatoes keep their eyes peeled.
Brian Williams and I started this whole business on a drunken lark. I can't believe it is still going on.
Vaguely remember a movie called (I think) "A Boy and His Dog," with Don Johnson...
Hey Kramer, have you ever killed a racoon?
What do you think Junior? You think these hands - they've been skinning carrots?
Another Big Hoax dies as we watch...no not Brian Williams, but the dietary Chloresterol clogs hearts myth and its partner in Fake Scienc, the fat in foods make you fat myth.
That's enough victory for one day.
True story.
I was working as a local prosecutor in central Illinois some 30 years ago. A detective asked me if I wanted to go with him to pick up some juvenile miscreant, a well known criminal. I'm sure he's now in prison or a grave. But I digress.
We drove out into the country to a wooden, unpainted house. We walked up to the front porch and saw the patriarch of this clan with several young'ns sitting on the floor, skinning raccoons, each with a large knife. Blood everywhere.
The detective greeted him and asked for "Rickey", that he needed to come with us. Daddy said "Hold on" and called for Rickey. He emerged from the inside of the house and after a minor ruckus, came with us.
In the car, the detective asked Rickey if he liked eating raccoon. "Raccoon? I don't eat no raccoon. That's nasty." Well, what about the activity on the front porch?
"Oh, I eat coon. But I don't eat no raccoon."
I read a story of a Chinese student at Harvard who said she knew America was a rich country when nobody was trying to catch and eat the squirrels in the park.
I thought raccoons mostly had rabies. That's what I heard in Virginia
"We will eat anything with legs except the table" is the expression a Chinese friend of mine liked to use.
My livestock dogs consider raccoon (and possum and squirrel) to be delicacies. They are not (to my knowledge) Chinese.
traditionalguy:
It seems that they confused cause and effect. Cholesterol is likely to function like platelets that accumulate near the sight of an abrasion or inflammation. As for fat, the best advice for sedentary or low activity people is to eat moderate amounts of fat and protein, and less sugars and other fast metabolized products. And, of course, veggies; but, be sure to skin them after they're dead. You don't want innocent carrots, brutally tortured, weighing on your mind.
You want to eat wild, forest raccoon, by the way.
Too gamy.
There is a company that is trying to open a horse slaughterhouse in NM, and it is meeting all kinds of resistance from various quarters.
I love Secretariat as much as the next hippophile and for that reason don't find horsemeat appealing, but what in the world is one supposed to do with a carcass that can weigh more than 1,000 lbs and require who-knows-how-many-permits to bury/burn/dump?
That is what rendering plants are for.
Get off your high horse. Christians killed raccoons during the Crusades.
Since when is it illegal to eat raccoon?
Do we need government permission on what we eat?
If freedom doesn't include being able to decide what goes on your plate, then we are already too far gone.
There was a story in (I think) the Washington Post 30-40 years ago that I've always remembered. I'm not going to try to track it down because a lot of things that old haven't made it onto the web.
Anyway, someone sued because the Lexington Market in Baltimore was selling (whole, skinned) possums and raccoons that had never been inspected by any government agency. The judge asked if they could come up with any single person who even claimed to have gotten sick from eating a possum or raccoon bought at the LM, and when they admitted that they couldn't, she threw out their case and told them to come back when they could find one. It warmed the cockles of (the small-l libertarian half of) my cold cold heart.
No, I didn't go buy a possum or a raccoon. I do seem to recall hearing that raccoons offered for sale (at the LM? in China? I forget where) always have one paw left on, so you can be sure they're not cats.
I just took my kids on a walk around our farm. A couple days ago I had seen a black cat a few days in a row and figured I was going to have to ss and su but on our walk I saw coyote tracks and then about a quarter mile down the path, the black cat, in the coyote poop. Guy did me a favor. I've never seen a cat in raccoon poop.
"The employees say raccoon is considered a delicacy in China."
"the SARS coronavirus could be isolated from masked palm civets...raccoons, ferrets, badgers, domestic cats, and bats."
Good luck with eating those Chinese delicacies.
Btw, Chinese like their delicacies fresh, not frozen.
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