Want to take a bite out of your fear of snakes? Have 'em for dinner.
If you weren’t around for the 1990s, you missed out on the great era of generic food sloganeering. These ads — which hyped a mainstream product, not a particular company — were everywhere, and were relatively harmless, even if they tended not to make a lot of sense.
“The Incredible, Edible Egg” (created by the American Egg Board) might have been the dumbest, as it implied there was some question as to whether eggs were food or just some sort of decoration, impractical paperweight or, in the right hands, an advanced weapons system.
“Got Milk?”, licensed to the National Milk Processor Education Program, was another. Along with its improper grammar, it was typically stylized in lower case form (“got milk?”) for some reason, but was celebrated for its 90% market saturation — making you wonder about the 10% who have never heard of milk.
Then there were the two big ones, beef and pork, which took two entirely different tacks. In the ’90s, when everyone thought pasta was a health food and there was something called, no lie, the “cabbage soup diet,” pork went for this newly health-conscious crowd with the effective but deceptive “Pork, the Other White Meat.”
Since hogs were being raised on gruel in cramped, sunless high-rises, the meat came to be blanched into a dry, colorless compound that lacked the ruddy complexion and flavor of pork from outdoor pigs.
Chicken was believed to be healthier at the time, so, making lemonade out of their gray, flavorless lemons, pork producers began calling their product “The Other White Meat.”
Cattle ranchers went in the opposite direction with the pugilistic “Beef, It’s What’s For Dinner,” which suggested this was what right-thinking Americans ate, and you could like it and join in, or move to Russia. Beef: Eat it or we’ll hit you.
I was reminded of these campaigns when I heard of the latest idea to get people unhooked from their traditional meat addiction: snake.
You heard me. Now that plant-based meats have flatlined and the lab-grown meat industry has crashed altogether, the hunt is on (literally) for a meat-like source that is healthy and does not befoul the planet. And a new study shows, wrote The Washington Post, that “Pythons may be one of the most Earth-friendly meats to farm on the planet.”
In other words, it produces the most meat while eating the least amount of food itself. “The snakes were fed a mix of locally sourced food, including wild-caught rodents, pork byproducts and fish pellets. They gained up to 1.6 ounces a day, with the females growing faster than their male counterparts.”
Great. Nothing like a locally sourced rat. But if we’re supposed to stop eating fish and pork, and the replacement meat itself is raised on a diet of fish and pork … oh, never mind. The real problem, hoss, is that it’s still a snake. You’re going to need a marketing campaign that goes well beyond “Snake: It’s What’s For Dinner.”
I think most Americans want a meat that’s going to hiss when it hits the grill, not before.
I grant you that factory farming is not ideal, and the entire meat industry can be eye-averting on multiple levels. But for those who believe the future of the planet hangs in the balance of a hamburger, I’d suggest there are some bigger problems out there.
Besides, if people freak out over losing their gas stoves, can you even imagine the fallout of some woke politician taking away their short ribs?
The Post says herpetologist Daniel Natusch “ate snake barbecued, sautéed on skewers, in curries and as jerky.”
What, no Snake Diane?
What does it taste like? “He described the taste as similar to chicken, but a little more gamy.”
Like chicken but more gamy. There’s a slogan for you.
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Tim Rowland is a Herald-Mail columnist.
This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: Slither into this new Earth-friendly meat source: Snakes
