Local food production

Southern farmers and Northwestern trappers

By Culinate staff

January 10, 2012

A couple of months ago, the New Yorker profiled a chef busy reinventing the Southern-food wheel. Now comes a New York Times article profiling Southern food producers doing the same: searching for Southern roots and making them new again. As Julia Moskin writes, the movement’s members look both backwards and forwards:

They want to reclaim the agrarian roots of Southern cooking, restore its lost traditions and dignity, and if all goes according to plan, completely redefine American cuisine for a global audience.

Meanwhile, folks outside the South are going local and sustainable and traditional in their own hardcore ways. As the Seattle Times reported, back-yard chickens and goats are the old urban-homesteading frontier; harvesting squirrels in your front yard is the new DIY frontier.

Tired of squirrels invading her home’s crawlspaces, Seattleite Melany Vorass decided to trap and eat them instead. For Vorass, squirrel for dinner wasn’t a big deal:

She grew up in northern Wisconsin where, she says, her mother was a deer poacher and local cuisine included porcupines. Squirrel isn’t as gamy as venison, she says, and tastes like rabbit. (Adhering to the journalistic creed of “trust but verify,” we sampled the squirrel; it had a nutty flavor and tender, slightly greasy texture.)

Want to try it yourself? Check out Vorass’ blog, Essential Bread, which includes a how-to post on trapping, killing, and dressing a squirrel.