Everywhere, Everywhere, Whoopie!

I’ve been eating a lot of rabbit lately.  I wasn’t giving that fact much thought when shopping for dinner, the muscular rabbits arranged in a conga line next to the less svelte chickens in the glass case.  I love the completeness of rabbit, from start to finish.  Butchering them is quite similar to chicken, trading in wings for front legs and breasts for loins.  The parts are all there, and can intuitively be sorted out with a few minutes and a boning knife.  And the saying that they taste like chicken is, actually, fairly accurate, especially if you’ve never knowingly eaten it before.

Yesterday, I picked up two rabbits from the local butcher shop.  The owner and I chatted for a moment about my plans to braise the legs, thighs, and belly flaps, how the loins are to be saved for a client, and the bones set aside to make a stock later in the week with chicken bones.  The livers are going to become a rabbit liver mousse, along with a nub of foie left over from a previous project.  If included, (sometimes they get lost in the shuffle), hearts will be braised and kidneys are to be seared off and nibbled by Jaimy; I’ll go for a half kidney, but that is my limit.  Discussing my plans for the rabbit felt good, knowing I was accounting for each part of the bunny for complete utilization.  I very much enjoyed walking these three and a half pound brown paper bundles home for dinner, daydreaming about new dishes the whole way.

An hour later, I began telling my mother the dinner menu over the phone.  There was a long pause.  With the two hour time difference, I thought that perhaps she was already eating dinner, that her mouth was full and needed a few seconds to finish chewing so that she could exclaim how delicious my braised rabbit bolognese sounded.  But no, she was taking a moment to choose her words carefully.

“Aren’t you afraid of the.... karmic repercussions of eating so much rabbit?  You used to have one as a pet.”  Now it was my turn to pause.  I immediately knew what she meant: cute adorable little bunnies, the subject of many children’s books, nursery rhymes, MY own childhood pet, eaten for dinner?  I get it.  They are adorable.  Painfully so- I still get weepy over my childhood rabbit, Max, and his terribly sad ending when his tunnel caved in on him.  I even named, as an adult, a cat in his honor. 

As any daughter does when speaking to her mother, I became defensive.  “What, you think that because they are cute, their lives are somehow more valuable than that of a fish or a chicken?  How cute was that pig whose shoulder you braised last week?”  While I waited for a response, adorable bunny memories began flashing through my mind.  At the Common Ground Fair in Maine a few years ago, a woman sat with an angora bunny in her lap while she combed it and directly fed it’s fur into a spinning wheel.  The bunny sat there, patiently chewing on a piece of hay.  Tonight’s memory will be bunny sitting on a sauce of San Marzano tomatoes and picholene olives over pappardelle.

Now, I am not one of those people who does not understand that eating meat means killing animals.  I have spent countless hours trying to decide which factors are most important in deciding how to and what to eat.  An average cow of 1,200 pounds will yield nearly 500 pounds of meat, or anywhere from 1,000 to 1,500 servings.  A 3 1/2 pound rabbit will provide 2-3 servings.  One life for a thousand meals or one life for dinner for two?  Looks like it’s beef for dinner.  But what about carbon footprint?  Slow Food USA reported that the resources required to create one pound of meat of beef can create six pounds of rabbit meat.  And while I have never myself raised (well, not for the purposes of eating) or slaughtered (never, for any purpose) a rabbit, Michael Pollan reports that they are not invasive: they are quiet, less stinky, and easier to kill than most other farm animals.  Not to mention they have reputation for fast and frequent procreation- a gestation period of only thirty days and potential to breed four to six times a year (though I still can’t seem to get the notion of rabbits laying eggs out of my head, damn you, Cadbury!).  Now I’m leaning toward rabbit for dinner.

After serving a rabbit confit terrine during the French wine tasting on the Taber this summer, I was proudly rattling off my rabbit knowledge to a guest from British Columbia.  From a couple of visits to Jaimy’s hometown in the Kootenays, I had a good idea that the guest knew a bit or two about animal farming.  And, without being patronizing, he very quickly showed me that I did not.  After quoting the ease of raising and dispatching rabbits and my intention to raise some myself when I have some land, the guest told me that he raises cows instead.  I was insistent to communicate what I had read about how quiet and pleasant rabbits are to raise. 

“Well, they’re only quiet until you try to kill them.  Then they scream so loud that the neighbors think you’re killing your own kids.  I got tired of having to kill an adorable animal every single time I wanted meat for dinner, it created an unappetizing association.” 

My eyes grew wide with my naivete.  “Oh, um, wow.”  No rebuttal there.

Back to the karmic value of taking a rabbit’s life.  I’d like to think that I have pretty good karma.  I let cars merge in front of me.  I pick up trash on the street.  I smile at strangers.  Am I cashing in the good karma I am creating here so I can eat rabbit for dinner?  Once my mother planted the seed, I started wondering how other people felt about rabbit.  Thomas Keller described his first rabbit dispatching experience in The French Laundry Cookbook.  His farmer arrived with six rabbits in a cage, demoed killing and cleaning one for Chef Keller, then abruptly left him with the remaining terrified rabbits to deal with.  The lesson he was reminded of?  Respect every ingredient. 

But that doesn’t apply only to rabbits.  It may be their cuteness that reminds us to think about the food we eat, but in the end it applies to all animals, all ingredients.  Life, energy, and resources go into everything that grows, animal or vegetable.  Cute or ugly, we must not waste or disrespect any ingredient.  As a cook, I’ve seen other line cooks, even chefs, toss the narrow tail portion of salmon, the rounded trim of parsnips that were squared off, and chicken carcasses into the garbage.  It is this wastefulness, this assumption that food is abundant, never-ending, and cheap, that contributed to the birth of the nose to tail movement.  In a culture where I swear there is a boneless, skinless, chicken breast factory full of legless chickens out there, there is another culture growing that utilizes everything, treats every part of every animal with respect.  The cute bunny munching on carrot tops?  A reminder to us all to consume meat mindfully. And give thanks to the animal whose life was sacrificed for us to eat. 

Please tell me your thoughts on rabbits.  I am fairly vocal about my continued love for them, and have found that it is often met with intrigue and curiosity.  They are everywhere, let me know if you prefer them in a field or on your plate.  This includes you, Mom.

*Please be aware that during the entire writing of this entry, I sang a song of rabbits in my head.  Captains Ken and Ellen used to sing this song with Evelyn and Jan Kok from Presque Isle.  It was coined “The Dead Rabbit Song”, and starts with “everywhere, everywhere, whoopie! rabbits rabbits rabbits rabbits” and continues to tell a tale of rabbits procreating and taking over... until someone decides to fight back.