We Don't Eat Swans - Hacker News

I'm generally a pretty adventurous cook/eater and did a goose for christmas last year(geese are a hella pest but somehow the dead one I bought was $70 or something) and probably wouldn't do a swan if it's similar. Geese are almost "beefy"

Goose is also popular for Christmas, turkey not really. Actually, goose is probably the thing to make for Christmas where I’m from.

Goose is obviously not chicken or turkey, but I really love it with very fatty gravy, a crispy, salty crust, and quite dry meat. I love fried chicken, too, I think everyone does, plus turkey, but that’s not what I’m looking for when eating roasted goose breast.

We eat tons of turkey in the U.S., but usually sliced. Most people only roast a whole turkey at Thanksgiving, but it's not uncommon to make it at Christmas. In the U.S., if you're cooking a bird, it's probably a chicken. Duck is more of a restaurant thing, particularly at slightly nicer Chinese restaurants.

This story has got me really thinking. I made a fig pudding (adapted from a 120-year-old British recipe) at Christmas two years ago. It was OK. I think I overdid it with the amaretto. Maybe my next Christmas cooking adventure will be goose.

Delicious and really economicaly.

The only things that are a dollar a pound here are onions and potatoes.

Goose is very fatty, and goose fat is very flavorful. Find ways to celebrate that, particularly on a cold christmas. Make a gravy, or roast some fruits in it, or potatoes, or... but it's definitely something you should be planning around.

Add to the fact that the pure liquid fattiness of the(even raw) bird in my experience makes it a huge hassle(I was told by my grandmother whose house I cooked it at that her oven smelled strongly of goose/grease until she ran the hardcore clean cycle).

"anecdotally" eating goose is not something that I was exposed to(outside of a "wild game dinner" put on by a hunting club) in my generic(fairly privileged) middle american childhood and I was exposed to a lot of cuisine(adventurous father)

Yah. In Grad. school, I once bought a whole duck on a dare. One of those long nights, I decided to stuff it and cook it. The damn tray was swimming in duck oil.

So I guess the claim that people in US dislike eating swans still comes from their English heritage, where swans had been royal game only.

http://www.columbia.edu/itc/cerc/danoff-burg/invasion_bio/in...

http://www.avclub.com/tvclub/curb-your-enthusiasm-the-black-...

Jumping between vastly different regions doesn't help either ("Swans are the property of the crown in the UK, but a pest in Michigan." What??).

1. The article contains an interesting link to "An Act Concerning Swans" (1482): http://www.theswansanctuary.org.uk/images/an%20act%20concern...

There once was a man from St John's Who coveted one of the swans, "Oh no" said the Porter, Please take my daughter, The swans are reserved for the dons.

Someone then discovered that the growing population of coyotes in the area were going after the eggs, and the population as a result has stablized.

- Why? You don't like animals chilling out in a protected area.

Fortunately, the meat is pretty tasty.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kangaroo_meat

I didn't like it, it tasted a lot like rabbit to me, and sourness in a meat is just weird to me.

If you can get your hands on that sort of things, I really recommend trying

- a steak from a horse

- sausages, barbecued (hey, I'm German. Let's play the stereotype card) => Bratwurst

- as pointed out elsewhere in this thread: Sauerbraten (although that's somewhat 'special'. I'd say everyone eating meat should try the first two, the last one is really weird and a dish that is both savory and sweet)

Odd. I have had both Rabbit and Kangaroo. Both were lean flavorful, the Kangaroo more close to a lean beef than anything. But I wouldn't associate "sour" with both meats. Could you have sampled a bad batch?

(Whereas a tender sous vide steak of beef can be utterly scrumptious on its own, even unseasoned.)

I think most people would prefer the OP's proposal.

Michigan: No idea about that, that WAS news to me. But the article is about "Why don't we eat swans" and the Michigan part is really a bad example. So ... it's a pest? No hunting season though? And no explanation?

Frankly, I like swans. I regularly met and fed a couple of swans in Cologne in Germany here, checking on the young ones if the season was right.

I'd love to eat them though.

The article, for me at least, fails to deliver at least a hint of an answer to the question it proposed. That's just a bad format for me. If your main subject is a question, you need to at least try to answer it (and "yeah, they might be cute" isn't it).

While the article doesn't explicitly say the exact reason why, I think these were the main points. So I guess that is badly formatting on the article writers side.

I mean, I consider cats cute, lots of people consider dogs cute - and both animals are eaten in this world. Better example: Horses are cherished as companions and pets for some people and I _regularly_ like to eat them. There's even a dish local to the Rhine area in Germany [1] that (used to, it is replaced by beef quite often by now) is based on horse meat.

People tend to love dolphins. Asian cultures eat them. "They are cute" is not an argument here. That might explain a bias, but not why there's (according to the article) no swan to be found on any menu?

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sauerbraten

"window-herb growers, career farmers, people who have chickens, people who want to have chickens and anyone who wants to know more about how food reaches their plate"

and given the staff members are all US oriented, it's most likely assuming a US readership and US food culture.

Thus we, who are random fly-by strangers to the magazine, shouldn't really criticize harshly when they don't take an unexpected audience into account.

This sentence you wrote exonerates the article in it's entirety. You would dearly love to eat a swan, but have not and will not, and you present no compelling reason on why you have not eaten one.

You embody the entire cognitive dissonance around swans.

Being from the UK all I know is that swans belong to my old boss and we teach children that a swan is powerful enough to break your arm if it feels threatened so stay away from them.

I would have no problem cooking and eating a swan but I imagine the majority of UK society would struggle to see the swan as anything other than a majestic, un-eatable animal rather than just an alternative to goose, duck, chicken, turkey or even pigeon.

Maybe they could introduce cold hardy alligators to Michigan? But then there would be two problems....

"We don't eat swans. They are a pest in michigan. Why don't people eat swan?"

That is not an article it's something you'd say at a party while drunk and everyone would look at you funny.

Their numbers are too small to get into volume "manufacturing" (CAFO's).

15,000 swans. That's cute.

We harvest 10,000 kiloTonnes of cattle per year in the USA alone. That means, our CAFO'S produce about 2 million pounds of beef for every 1 swan we could harvest.

Our food system loves repeatable processes & volume efficiencies that wild game can't provide.

Note: I may be nearly vegetarian, & eat only local organic meat rarely. But, the facts of CAFO's dominate the market.

My guess is that royalty ate them initially largely because they looked regal. The fact that they redressed them with the feathers before serving lends further credence to this idea.

Geese are pretty awful to eat.. particularly wild geese from what my brother in law says. Swans are probably even worse.

For what it's worth, it was a huge scandal in the early 1990s in my country when it was rumored that members of our local gipsy community had eaten swans after they had just arrived in Vienna. It stuck along as a stereotype for at least a decade, if not more. As for the reference, the best I could find was this: http://books.google.ro/books?id=gHKm95EweOwC&pg=PT272&lpg=PT... , but there was also a Sun story from 2008 about "Eastern" immigrants having eaten swans.

This was in a country where they are protected but are a pest and are in large numbers locally. Protected largely for historical reasons (the Queen).

In future I would (will) use the pressure cooker however.

Swanturducken.

Sometimes when I get excited that an animal population gets to the point of potentially excess, I have to remind myself that it might be that we've adapted our lives to the absence of the animal and can't tolerate its presence even in modest amounts. Yes, swans are aggressive, but just because they are annoying doesn't mean they are overpopulated. Or concerns that some wild cats might take dogs. That sucks for the dog owner if it happens, but is it really okay to have the expectation that your animal can be in nature without any natural repercussions?

That said, once swans become common we shouldn't be afraid to push back against their aggressiveness. Nature does have away to balance behavior, and if humans think they just have to put up with asshole swans or else kill the swans I think we're missing out on some obvious behavior correction opportunities.

Swan Egg Omelet anyone?

What this article doesn't explain is that swan meat isn't actually very good. Goose is better, but duck is the best (in my opinion). Goose is more gamey, tough, and has less meat than a duck. Swan is even more gamey than goose.

I suspect if the author spent more time investigating the "old boys network" he would have realized that hunting and consumption of swan does exist in the US today. Even a simple "hunting swan in america" google search turns up a useful information. Have a look at the aptly named swanhunting.com if you want more info.

Ive found all sorts of meat (22 types from my specialty butcher), yet swan isn't there. Perhaps it's "too beautiful" to eat, or perhaps it has a more visceral "horse meat" kind of feeling to it.

I don't know. And the article is lacking in detail. So, the answer is "it's not sold".

And the answer to that might be because people wouldn't buy it. Or if they did, only once because it tastes like an old glove that was left in the parrot cage.

I went back and looked and the guy was a professional chef. And probably some sort of esoteric gourmet of the kind that might drink civet poop coffee.

I have to believe if swans were really good people would have started eating them in large numbers a long time ago and they would commercially raise them.

Maybe I'm wrong. I suppose with current regulations and the fact swans don't live in my area I don't have a way to test my hypothesis.

Dynamic eating!

I would upvote it to counter whoever downvoted it but not enough karma.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_John's_College,_Cambridge#Ea...

I have no doubt this influence culinary attitudes in all of England's former colonies as well.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_John%27s_College,_Oxford)

Yeah, against massive international outcry from people who don't live here and don't understand that fisheries is literally the only job left.

I originally omitted in my comment about thoughts of dogs, cats, and bunnies being taboo as meals in the US. It probably has a lot to do with not only perceived cuteness, but then we have a tendency to make cute things pets, and then they become "part of the family".

You don't usually see piglets or lambs as options in the pet store.

Dogs and cats: probably eaten in some cultures, though the thought is shocking to me. But bunny? Not only eaten, but also skinned for their pelts: this is extremely common, to the point I know people who breed them for this exact purpose (and to sell them as pets as well). Rabbit is a common dish in Spanish restaurants, for example.

I'll argue the highly subjective notion that rabbits are cuter than swans, yet we eat and skin rabbits. And they are available in pet stores, unlike... swan!

I don't think ducks are rare in the US. They're common in asian and french restaurants, but not much in any other I've been too.

Rabbit is almost never seen on a menu, there are few asian restaurants that I've seen it, usually in the form of stew.

Horse meat is also rare in restaurants, only a few in the entire US and Canada serves it.

Cuteness is always subjective =)

In fact they're so cute when the French wanted to boycott the World Cup in 2001 because the Koreans eat dog the Koreans countered with "And you eat those cute bunnies". (or so I was told)

"The birds attack people in the water and on shore, particularly children that wander too close to their nests."

absurd.

I don't even know whether this was intentional, which makes it the best kind of wordplay

Particularly on Friday afternoon when I don't feel like doing much.

Because they don't taste very good.

“We once ate a swan at Christmas nine or ten years ago,” [chef Mario Batali] told Esquire. “It was delicious — deep red, lean, lightly gamey, moist, and succulent… but I’ve never seen swan on a market list.”

But "lightly gamey" doesn't sound very good to me.

I cooked a goose once out of curiosity. As another poster mentions it was very expensive. And, it wasn't very good. An $8 chicken beat it hands down.

If swans were really tasty they would have probably been commercially farmed a long time ago. So I have to believe they really don't.... taste very good. Queen of England aside, there are plenty of other countries that would have raised them commercially.

Having said this as reasons why expense and gameyness are not a discouragement to some people. I would think that the lack of commercial farming is probably a startup idea in waiting. :)

Why not swan when they eat boar, ducks and deer?

I see one and only one very obvious answer. And I'm sticking with it... downvotes be damned!

Uh...and Swans and stuff...

Probably him. Or some guy with a lot of time on his hands pretending to be him.