image via Triple Threat Principal

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It is perfectly legal to buy and cook lion.

Let’s leave aside the question of why for the moment.

It’s illegal to sell wild, hunted game in the U.S., and of course anything on the endangered species list is federally protected. But the laws are full of loopholes and exceptions that make it legal to buy everything from camel to zebra to black bear. Some animals, like yak, are farmed. Small game, like raccoons and beavers, can’t be hunted for meat, but they can be trapped for fur; confoundingly, that meat can be legally sold. Lions generally come to the market from circuses and zoos. When the animals are too old to breed or show, they can be slaughtered for fur and meat.

It definitely doesn’t taste like chicken.

Most game meats are very low in saturated fat and cholesterol– lower than beef and pork and even chicken and turkey. When the animals are raised on grass, their meat is high in heart-healthy omega-3 fatty acids. Lion meat, however, is not particularly healthy. Lions are strict carnivores at the top of the food chain; their meat contains concentrated levels of toxins and toxic proteins that have been absorbed by all of the animals along their dietary food chain.

You can buy lion meat in the form of shoulder roasts, tenderloin and other steaks, ground, and ribs. The meat is very pale and soft, but with almost no intramuscular fat it cooks up tough and dry. It purportedly tastes like pork with an added tang. It is definitely not kosher.

There are some better choices. You’ll swear you’re eating the best-tasting duck of your life when you’re served yak, or so they say. Antelope look like deer but are actually in the goat family, with a similar mild taste and fine grain. Beaver tail is supposed to be fantastic— woodsy and musk- flavored with meat the texture of short ribs. Try it brined, the experts say.

Which brings us to why.

Maybe you’re burned out on hamburgers and hot dogs from the long, grilling season. Or you’ve seen one too many bizarre food episodes with the Travel Channel’s Anthony Bourdain. It’s also possible that this is the start of a pendulum swing back from the effeteness of too many dainty little sprinkle-covered cupcakes.

Mainstream supermarket chains have responded to the popularity of game meats. Fresh ostrich meat and ground bison are butcher counter staples, and wild boar sausage can frequently be found packaged with the hot dogs.

You’ll need to shop online if you want to truly go wild.

[a disclaimer: at Gigabiting, we are deeply troubled by the treatment of animals raised for fur, circuses, and similar purposes. But it seems ethically unambiguous to eat, rather than waste, the by-product of these other activities.]

Czimer’s is known for the broadest and most reliable selection of exotic meats. This is the place for hard-to-find animals like black bear, camel, kangaroo, and African lion.

Alongside the zebra and rat meat, Anshu’s Exotic Meat Market has a selection of game meat hot dogs and bacon.

Download Exotic Meats USA’s What Things Taste Like for a guide to cooking and eating large and small game.

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image via Des Moines Register

A new generation of cooks is preserving traditions along with the jams and pickles.

They are reinvigorating culinary traditions, hewing close to authenticity, but with contemporary tastes and sensibilities. These new food artisans tend to be young, educated, and internet savvy. Unlike previous generations of small-scale producers, they are looking for more than the blue ribbon and bragging rights of a county fair prize. For many of them, the ultimate goal is to build a viable food business.

Here come the Good Food Awards.

A participating roster of big-name food authorities (former Gourmet editor Ruth Reichl, Alice Waters, Nell Newman from Newman’s Own…), guarantees plenty of media attention, and winners are promised marketing and distribution support from sponsors like Whole Foods Markets, and online sellers Etsy and Foodzie. Winners will be determined through blind-tastings to find the best in artisanal cheese, jam, beer, charcuterie, chocolate, coffee, and pickles.

Calling all home cooks and pickle hobbyists.

Samples will be judged solely on taste. In theory, the competition is open to everyone from home cooks to corporate giants, but to be eligible, the products have to be ‘authentically and responsibly produced,’ which should rule out the global food conglomerates. Except for the charcuterie category, entrants are not required to carry any kind of business license or insurance, and don’t need to operate out of a licensed commercial kitchen.

Product samples need to be sent in by  September 15. And if you’re not a cook, you can always enter the Good Foods Award poster competition. You’ll find all the details, specs. and product  criteria on the Good Food Awards website.

Read more about the new food economy in Gigabiting’s Underground Food Markets: The New Speakeasies.

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We have camera flashes going off in restaurants. Food blogs are full of lush, color-saturated close-ups of food at its most delicious: the drizzle of olive oil glistens atop a gorgeous plate of ripe tomatoes; the charred flecks of the bruléed sugar crust has us practically listening for the crackle as spoon meets custard.

Illustrated food blogs can feel like a relief after the sensory overload of too much food porn.

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They Draw and Cook (illustrations above) takes you on a world tour of illustration. Each day’s post has been submitted by an artist somewhere on the planet, resulting in a smörgåsbord of cuisines and visual styles. This past week alone we saw an exuberant cossack dancing through a Russian artist’s blini recipe, a cartoonish bacon and egg toastie from England, and a spicy chocolate drink rendered like a desert toned fairy tale from an Israeli illustrator. Young artists are represented on the spin-off Kids Draw and Cook.

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Kokblog (illustration at left) brings us the life and recipes of a Swedish designer with a taste for stylishly rustic cooking. It’s all rendered in simple, mostly black-and-white line drawings.

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Plenty of food bloggers document everything they eat with photographs. Riki Takaoka does it with paintings— meals, snacks, sometimes even the contents of his refrigerator. A more time consuming proposition than photography, he has gotten used to eating his hot food when it’s cold (see Riki’s illustrations, below).

image via the Urban Craft Center

The blogosphere seems downright sedate when you see what’s going on with zines.

For the uninitiated, a zine is a small circulation, independently produced publication. It can be a hand-drawn masterpiece or a crudely photocopied manifesto. The time and materials needed are seldom matched by sales revenue, but profit is rarely the goal of these labors of love. 1,000 copies at $3.00 apiece would be a pretty big deal to most zine publishers.

Zine publishers relish their outsider status. They opt to explore stories and employ narrative motifs that are ignored by the traditional food media. The content might be controversial or sexual, or its theme might be obsessively focused on a single, arcane subject. Publications like Veganarchy (a zine for anarchists who happen to be vegans, and vice versa), Big Hands (the goings-on in a 24-hour doughnut shop in Bloomington, Indiana), and Burritos are Tasty (you get it) probably will never reach broad, mainstream audiences, but hey, that’s not what they’re aiming for anyway, although there are a few (Boing Boing, Bust, Bitch) that have crossed over.

A zine is a DIY publishing event.

These days, when every ninny with an internet connection and a Blogger account is a publisher, zines remain scrappy and lo-fi; resolutely imperfect, unpolished little gems. The writing is  feisty and original, and the lack of spell-checking is made up in passion and exuberance.

Herding Cats.

Zines tend to come and go, volumes can appear at irregular intervals, and print runs are small. There are no traditional review sources or conventional distributors. Retail efforts are pretty much limited to the flier racks at independent booksellers and indie record outlets, ads in the back of other zines, and swap meet-like ‘zine fests’.

The best plan of attack is to find a food zine you like and network it from there through the ads it carries for other zines, and through the creator or publisher’s website. There are also meta-zines that exist to review other zines, but of course you still have to locate one of those.

Here are some links to get you started:

Metazines Broken Pencil, Alternative Press Review, and Fact Sheet 5 all publish zine reviews and other windows on the world of independent media.

Recommended zines (I’ll keep my fingers crossed for availability):

Snack Bar Confidential is a fun and kitschy visit to the golden age of snack food from a writer with a fascination for the advertising and packaging of the ’60s and ’70s.

Gastrolater digs deeply into food and pop culture with intelligent, personal meditations.

Coffee Shop Crushes explores the private interactions and unrequited loves of baristas and their customers.

Each issue of Last Supper tackles a specific theme– an ingredient, a holiday, a technique, or a broader social issue. Writers and visual artists are paired to create a submission combining a dish, a drawing, a recipe, and a personal reflection.

Also helpful: Writer Action Girl (zinesters love nicknames) has tips on ordering etiquette on the House of Fun website like the helpful hint to always send cash– bank accounts are rare in zine circles– but not a lot of change because it jams up the post office machines.

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Recipe tweets, or twecipes, are incredible feats of verbal compression.

To make the 140 character cut, the recipe has to be reduced to its essence, trimmed and edited, and then trimmed again. Every keystroke has to pull its weight; each word should vibrate with economy.

The best twecipes are models of clarity and usefulness. Take this one for mussels in a creamy fennel sauce:

brwn fennel/garlc/T buttr. Boil+c wtwine; +2lb mussel. Cvr,shake5m; rmv open to bowl(discard shut). Boil sauce+⅓c srcrm/s+p.

It relies heavily on the reader’s familiarity with ingredients and techniques (no stated prep steps for the fennel bulb or garlic, no warning about the curdling tendency of over-boiled sour cream), but directions are thorough, unfussy, and I’m betting it’s delicious.

Less successful are those that rely heavily on often cryptic abbreviations. Take the following recipe for pureed eggplant:

Brush aub w/evoo, roast 20m, 200c. Peel, msh, + halfonion/1TS ginger/chilli/halfTS cumin/lime/coriander. Season.

In this instance, it’s unclear what you even end up with— eggplant skin on and uncooked onion for a chunky side dish, or no skin and sauteed onion for a silky-smooth dip.

Some cooks, presumably those who do the NYT Sunday crossword in ink, claim to enjoy puzzling through twecipes. For the rest of us, help can be found in an online glossary of culinary twitterese, although even that didn’t help with parsing the eggplant recipe’s use of ‘evoo’ for extra virgin olive oil.

The first cookbook collection of twecipes will arrive in stores next week.

Eat Tweet comes from Maureen Evans, the cook behind the twitter recipe feed @cookbook. The hands-down queen of the genre, the surprising poetry and miniaturized elegance of Ms. Evans’ twecipes has been likened to Fabergé eggs and bonsai trees. Appropriately, she has a sideline as a poetess of haiku, also available through twitter.

Mk smthng gr8 4 dnr 2nit.

For more twecipes check out the recipe directory at twitter aggregator We Follow. It provides links to over a thousand twitterers, ranging from champion tweeter Jamie Oliver, with more than a half a million followers, to  GrandmaVera whose tagline reads: OK I think I may have this twitter stuff figured out now…

Creative Commons image via San Jose Public Library
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How do you teach Home Economics to a generation raised on Top Chef and Project Runway?

For starters, it’s not Home Ec, but Family and Consumer Sciences. Cooking is now culinary arts, and sewing has given way to fashion design. And many believe that’s the problem.

Home Economics for girls and Shop for boys had long been required for high school graduation. In the 1970′s, classrooms went coed, but by then, the traditional Home Ec curriculum of hand-stitched hems and tuna casseroles was deemed fusty and outmoded. Instead of retooling, most school districts simply dropped the graduation requirement; the Reagan era tax cuts made the decision for them.

If it breaks, get a new one. If you’re hungry, try the drive-through.

Basic life skills like household repairs, balancing checkbooks, and preparing simple meals are no longer routinely taught in school– and what busy, working parents of teenagers have the time or the inclination to give home lessons? Instead, non-mandatory Home Economics has led to boutique electives in fashion merchandising and sushi-rolling. And this in the midst of a childhood obesity epidemic and our collectively declining financial health.

Nobody wants to see a return to the gender-stereotyped classrooms and curriculum, or the tuna casseroles, but how about some basic principles and pragmatic instruction that would transform daunting chores into manageable and rewarding pursuits? Home Economics is not like you remember. Here’s a thought for this back-to-school season: maybe it should be.

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