… after suggesting culled badgers be cooked
The fur is flying in Britain after a popular food writer suggested that badgers be eaten as food.
Clarissa Dickson-Wright, best known in the U.S. as one of the stars of the PBS cooking series “Two Fat Ladies,” told the Telegraph that she enjoyed eating badgers when she was younger.
The mean-looking critters are now a protected species in Great Britain, but may be culled in Gloucestershire County because of fears they may spread tuberculosis to cattle. The British government recently approved a trial plan to kill badgers in an attempt to slow the spread of infection, the Associated Press reported. Soon hunters that are licensed to cull will be roaming by night in search of the animals, but Wright wants the badger carcasses to be consumed, rather than just discarded.
”It would solve the problem. There’s going to be a cull, so rather than just throw them in the landfill site why not eat them?” she told the Telegraph. ”I would have no objection to eating badgers. I have no objection to eating anything very much, really.”
Badgers aren’t commonly eaten these days, but Dickson-Wright said they were widely consumed centuries ago.
“Staple food of the population, well before rabbit because rabbit was a luxury food,” she told HuffPost UK. “People ate badger because badger was plentiful.”
She added that badger was even a popular bar food when she was growing up. Before the animal became a protected species, Dickson-Wright ate it barbecued, filleted and even in the form of a cured ham. She recommends budding badger cooks baste the meat properly because it’s very lean.
Dickson-Wright may be promoting the idea of badgers as food, but her comments have angered Queen guitarist Brian May, who is against the badger cull The musician is urging people to boycott milk produced in areas where culls take place and believes Dickson-Wright would be a better entree than any badger.
“I think we should seriously consider eating senseless people like this Clarissa whoever-she-is,” he said, according to the Independent. “She’s obviously outlived her usefulness. I wonder if she would be best boiled or braised.”