Canada on Canada Geese

The National Post ran a nice piece this morning about our victory on the goose front.

This is really very satisfying. The policy got changed without protests, or naming-calling, or lobbyists, or any money at all. I simply made my case and turned hunting and cooking into a political statement which proved that wild geese aren't trash and that they should be eaten instead of thrown into landfills.

Neat.

According to the National Post, the Canadian Wildlife Service has starting looking into using their culled geese as food as well.

Gail Nyberg, the executive director of Canada's largest food bank doesn't want to serve them on account of two reasons.

First, because the birds need to be plucked. Well, I strongly suspect that all of the other poultry she serves needed to be plucked at some point as well. This can be avoided by skinning, or when they know that they are about to receive a good number of geese they can get a big pot of water heated up and dunk them before plucking. It goes much more quickly. I would also be very happy to try to raise the money to buy them a Whiz-Bang plucking machine. My father-in-law just built one for his chickens and they are very easy to use.

Secondly, she thinks that geese taste bad and are too fatty on account of having tried goose once. She doesn't want to serve something she won't eat. Gail, I've eaten badly cooked chicken before but that doesn't mean that the ingredient can't be good. Promptly gutted and quickly refrigerated, you will love wild goose. I would be very happy to bring a few geese and a chef up to Toronto and prove it.

[Photo used courtesy of Michelle Sanders. That's me in the orange vest gutting and plucking geese with Michael Macfarlan of Glass House Winery]