I’ve had countless philosophical conversations with non-hunting family members about why I hunt. While they’ve always respected these reasons and tried to engage in the conversations, I always questioned just how much I was really getting through. Was I actually creating any deeper sense of understanding on a personal level? At some point, it occurred to me that the old saying may be true, that the way to a person’s heart might truly be through the stomach.

Many hunters can relate to the excitement in sharing meals of wild meat with friends and family, something that I think is partially rooted in an opportunity for us to relive the excitement of the hunt, and to feel like we are able to share a little bit of that with those people we care about who weren’t there with us. I think we’d be hard pressed to find a culture anywhere in the world that doesn’t gather around food in some way for meaningful occasions, and that doesn’t associate sharing food with happiness and celebration. At the most basic level, it’s simply fun and exciting to get together and share meals with people, and I think there’s a depth added to this experience when it’s food that we’ve collected ourselves – whether grown in a garden or hunted.

When I first started bringing wild meat home to my family to try, there was a reticence that many of us are probably familiar with and have heard expressed in various forms. It ranges from a somewhat unfamiliar emotional feeling when someone associates the food on their plate with iconic images of deer and the social representations we ascribe to them; to the somewhat dirty or unsanitary idea people hold about Canada geese; or ideas about black bears eating nothing but household garbage, and so on down the taxonomic chain. It has been my experience that in most of these cases, it is culturally-based associations that make people hesitant to try wild meat. Sometimes people are aware of health concerns like trichinosis with bear meat, or the uncertainty about chronic wasting disease (CWD) with deer, but usually, it’s much less scientific than that.

One time while visiting my family, I brought a selection of wild meat for them to try, and knowing that the particular selection I chose would be somewhat different for them, I was determined to cook such a delicious meal that they would have no choice but to reconsider some of their preconceptions (a tall order, I know). Growing up, the rule in my house was always that I had to try everything once, and then if I didn’t like it, I didn’t have to eat it; I used the same argument on my family.

On this occasion, I brought a Canada goose breast and leg and a deer heart, both having been killed only about a week or two prior. The idea of eating a deer heart was definitely a difficult one for some people to stomach, intellectually speaking. So the pressure was on to ensure they liked the taste of everything so much that they didn’t feel like monsters for eating heart and dirty for eating Canada goose. I’m certainly not an accomplished chef, so there weren’t going to be any award winning recipes here, it just had to taste good.

For the heart, I chose a simple recipe. I sliced it into thin discs and preheated a frying pan. I seasoned the heart with some garlic and seared the half inch discs in the pan. The key with heart is to not over cook it; rare or medium-rare is the ticket. So searing it just cooks the outsides an since the pieces were so thin, it left the insides perfectly rare. To make the meal a little more familiar to everyone, I made a quick mushroom gravy from a package (remember, the idea here was to ease people into the meal). I served it on fresh buns as open-faced sandwiches.

For the goose, it was also simple. I seasoned the breast with salt and pepper and cooked it in a fairly hot frying pan somewhere between medium-rare and medium. One of the complaints I often hear about waterfowl is that it’s too greasy, so I wanted to cook it in a way that I could burn off some of the grease and still keep it tender on the inside. I fried the leg and cooked it more fully through, figuring that since it was on a bone, it would have some great flavour from that. Again, the purpose of the meal was to add just enough of a new thing that people would let themselves enjoy it. In that sense, I thought that if people associated the goose leg with a chicken wing, they would find themselves slightly more at ease if it was more fully cooked.

Conclusions

In the end, I’m happy to report that although this small amount of meat was being served to five people and we were all on limited rations, everyone went back for seconds (and no, they didn’t all use the gravy on the heart). Everyone loved every piece they tried. Perhaps most importantly, I believe that there were some minds changed from the experience. People came to realise that at a purely biological level, heart meat is still meat, and in fact, it’s some of the best, richest meat from a deer.

Although none of them saw the deer while it was alive and did not experience the hunt, we associate emotions with the heart organ, and I think this helped people feel like they had a sense of connection with the individual deer they were eating. In regards to the goose, although some of them may still view Canada geese as a nuisance, they also had a somewhat more full picture of geese as a species that eats, digests, and travels at such great distances that they have developed incredibly powerful muscles that create dark, rich, delicious meat. In this case, I think they now see geese with a more full idea of its ecology as a species, rather than simply a bunch of critters that fill lawns with pounds of grassy poop (literally, a single goose can produce a pound of poop per day).

The point in all this, to me, is that I can talk to non-hunting friends and family until I’m blue in the face about the political, conservation, historical, and even personal reasons I hunt (and trust me, I can). They can even respect and try to understand all of these reasons; however, I think one of my biggest breakthroughs was sharing a meal of wild meat. I’ve cooked many meals of wild meat for friends, brought a number of different dishes to potlucks and dinner events, and this example here has generally been the rule for me: give someone an experience they truly enjoy and associate with good times amongst friends and family, and they will remember their encounter with wild meat fondly. This, in turn, has the potential to foster a sense of respect and even personal attachment to the whole idea of wild meat and hunting. As hunters, it’s hard to imagine a more important measure of success in our efforts to be ambassadors of the lifestyle.

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I’ll be trying this next time I get my hands on a deer heart:
http://themeateater.com/2014/recipe-wild-game-chili-tacos/

For some other deer heart recipes, this forum has a bunch of ideas:
http://forums.bowsite.com/TF/bgforums/thread.cfm?threadid=376828&forum=4