My mum went to a barbeque at the weekend and was presented with squirrel as a starter. When she first told me this my initial thought was disgust. Why would you want to eat something that is like a rat? The fact that people even consider eating an animal so scrawny with a ratty long tail and huge teeth makes me feel a little sick. Plus, I always think of squirrels as dirty animals, like you could catch something from them, if you know what I mean.
Why would you eat this?
Apparently, my mum told me, eating squirrel is bang on trend and is all the rage nowadays. “They even did something on the One Show about it Rachael.” Maybe is it a middle-aged, middle-class trend as I certainly cannot imagine myself or my friends picking up some squirrel from Tesco Metro on the way home (I even had to look up how to spell squirrel on the spellchecker – that is how often the animal comes into my thoughts).
Eating squirrel is so trendy nowadays that the Daily Mail website (our office bible) ran an article on it a week ago http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/food/article-1299479/Squirrel-salad–You-nuts-A-supermarket-started-stocking-week-So-whats-squirrel-meat-really-like.html. Quite frankly I am not interested in trying out this tufty meat for myself but apparently when cooking a squirrel it needs to be checked for diseases first (I told you they were dirty animals). The meat is not particularly tasty nor has any flavour to it. According to my mum ‘it tastes a bit like pork but some thought it tasted like rabbit’. When I asked her more specifically about its flavours and textures she said ‘the recipe used had so many spices and flavours in it I’m not sure.’ Thanks mum. Why eat squirrel then? Novelty? Provoke a talking point? Something different?
This led me to think about what other weird, and downright disgusting, things people eat. My dad once told me that when he lived in the Middle East he was presented with a sheep’s eye. He had to eat it, he said, as sheep’s eyes were considered a delicacy and were not presented to many people. They would have been incredibly offended if he had turned it down. Note to faint hearted, do not read this: http://www.nbc.com/Fear_Factor/stunts/stunt_sheepeyes.shtml.
In certain cultures eating these sorts of things is considered the norm and often an honour but I feel like in British society it is done merely to shock or be different. You only need to look at celebrities eating kangeroo’s testicles on I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here to realise that it is not for taste that people eat such things. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQ0ZrhlxRC0 Fast forward to 3.31 minutes. Bloody hilarious. I really shouldn’t have watched this before eating my lunch.
{ 0 comments }