DARWIN'S GLUTTON CLUB
A few months ago a few friends of mine approached me with an idea, not a very new idea, but definitely a quirky idea. They wanted to form Darwin’s first Glutton Club.
While Charles Darwin was studying at Cambridge, he presided over a Glutton Club, which was nothing else but a group of friends that met weekly with the goal of tasting ‘strange flesh’. They got together and dined on the weirdest animals they could find. It is well documented that they managed to eat hawks and bitterns, among other ‘strange’ creatures. But it all stopped after they tried brown owl, which was so foul that Darwin himself wrote that it was ‘indescribable’. Yet, that didn’t stop young Chucky D from indulging in other strange creatures during his travels on board the HMS Beagle. He reportedly ate iguana, Galapagos tortoise, rhea, armadillo, and a mystery giant (9 kg) rodent from South America that he described as the best meat he ever had - I would like to think he is referring to a capybara, but 9 kilos is not big enough, so it was probably an agouti, a paca, or even a mara if he got it around Argentina.
I am a biologist and for the last two and a half years I have been developing a management plan for agile wallabies in the Northern Territory. To summarise the situation, Australians farmers use European techniques for agriculture and livestock production. They bring highly nutritious grasses, fumigate them, irrigate them; and also shoot feral dogs, and dingos alike. So, most kangaroos and wallabies find this Garden of Eden with plenty of highly nutritious food, water, and no predators and say to themselves: “Hey, why not having a gazillion babies?” The agile wallabies - just like the red, euro, wallaroos, eastern greys and western grey kangaroos - are considered a pest by farmers.
By law farmers are allowed to shoot wallabies as a means of controlling them, but they are not allowed to earn any economic income off the wallabies they shoot. So most farmers shoot them, and if they have working dogs, use a few of the carcases to feed the dogs, and throw the rest into a pit to rot. In the meantime, here I come, looking to quantify the wallaby population and get demographic data, so I ask the farmers to let me know when they are shooting. While measuring some freshly shot
wallaby carcases I realised that throwing these animals in a pit to rot was such a waste. So, I took one.
Shortly after, I invited some friends for a wallaby BBQ. During the meal silence ensued, and a feeding frenzy started. Everyone was delighted with the beautiful meat of this otherwise disregarded animal, and the only thing I did was put some olive oil and lemon myrtle on it. It was delicious and it was nothing like the kangaroo meat you can buy in the supermarket. That was it for me; I was then a harvester of wasted meat. The next time I went to a farm shooting event I took four wallabies, this
time indulging my inner researcher – I took a mix of large animals and small animals, two females and two males, as I was determined to test if the meat flavour and quality changed with the age and sex of the animals.
The agile wallaby, butchered and ready for cooking and tasting. Photo credit: Miguel Bedoya-Pérez
Most people think that agile wallaby tastes like kangaroo. I can say that that’s definitely not true. So far at the Darwin’s Glutton Club we have tried deboned thighs & side fillets marinated in olive oil & lemon myrtle, and cooked on the BBQ; slow cooked shanks, tails and neck with red wine & bush tomato; and slow cooked chilli con carne made with the flank. In all cases, the gamey taste is milder than that of the
kangaroo meat from the supermarket. The cuts of meat cooked in the BBQ were significantly tenderer.
After trying all four wallabies of different sizes and sexes, I know now that the younger animals are considerably tenderer and lack the gamey flavour completely, while the older animals are a bit tougher and more gamey. Yet, the most gamey of them all was the large 22 kilo male. Male agile wallabies can get as heavy as 25 kilos, so this male was quite large, which made me think about how the kangaroo
harvesting industry is set up. You see, all kangaroo shooters get paid per kilo, so they go out and target the biggest animals they can. Chances are these large animals are older males, since, in kangaroos, males are normally bigger than females. Thus, there is no doubt these animals’ meat is going to be tougher and more gamey.
As I said, the Darwin’s Glutton Club is still a work in progress. One thing is certain, we want to keep it ‘legal’; we will only work with legally source meat, and will not eat endangered species. Thus far we have wallaby and magpie geese. We haven’t had an official first meeting, but we have tried both meats at different occasions. We have received a few people interested in being part of it, but there is not much
point in including everyone without having ‘strange flesh’ to offer. We are hoping to solve these details little by little. In the meantime we will focus on enjoying our magpie geese, and hope everyone is ready for the next Darwin’s Glutton Club review.
Miguel is a Research Fellow at CDU.
