Deer Population Control

In the last decade in the Northeast deer have gone from being an enchanting, occasional sighting to being a pest.  They eat crops, invade gardens, eat small trees and keep wandering in front of cars.  There are less sport hunters and “culling” services are expensive and unpalatable to the sensibilities of many suburban residents.  What can be done about this problem?

The Ideapreneur has a potential solution.  Allow commercial enterprises to hunt wild deer and process it into a high-end food supply.  The enterprise would be issued a game management license for a region, perhaps Western New York, for a specific time period, maybe 10 years.  This would give “Gourmet Venison” (working name) enough supply to justify the investment in the facilities and marketing.

You have objections, the ideapreneur has answers:

Would people buy “wild harvested” venison?  They buy “wild caught” fish.

Isn’t it inhumane?  Is it more humane to allow deer to overpopulate so that they starve to death?

Will people pay a premium for deer meat over chicken or beef?  They used to in the early 20th century.  People pay a massive premium for snails and abalone.

Why would politicians support this very non-green idea?  Because it would generate tax revenue and jobs and would lower deer damage.  The idea could be very popular with their constituents.

The Ideapreneur:  You see problems we see opportunities.

 

Capirotada

Capirotada is a book about Nogales written by Alberto Rios.  Capirotada is also a Mexican bread pudding.  Read the book and you will learn about food and the border and immigrants.

Here is my review on Amazon:

Capirotada is a special book.  Its simplicity moved me and the small stories that it told helped me feel how Nogales was in the 1950’s and 60’s.  I usually find memoirs to be too orderly for literature and to self-serving for nonfiction. This one is different.  Rios’s memoir is beautiful literature.

Alberto Rios writes in the same way that a great abstract painter paints.  He draws an outline and leaves blank spaces.  He admits that he doesn’t know things.  The pieces that he puts in are enough so that you can accept the unknowns and the uncertainties of his life or yours and just see enough of the picture so you can feel how it was without knowing everything.

Capirotada is brilliantly written book that is a marvelous tribute to his parents, to Nogales, and to immigrants everywhere.

I bough the book many years ago and found it the other day while looking for another book with a map of Tijuana.  I was going to send it to Maria Sedgewick since she lives and works in Nogales but I read a few pages and was captivated.  I ended up with four connections to the book.  Rios’s mother came to the US from England on the same Cunard ship that I came on.  I was about six years behind her.  Rios teaches at ASU where the Changing Boundaries Map exhibit is currently and he has, according to his web site an interest in maps.  And finally there is our shared connection to Nogales.

 

Immigrants and Food

I wrote a story about the miners from Cornwall, England’s contribution to the cuisine of Mexico.  I know it sounds strange but Cornish Pastys are part of the food heritage of Moreles, Mexico.

I posted the story on my Rational Immigration site.  But I though I should share it here if only because it made me think about Elizabeth C and her empanadas.   And it raised the eternal question:  Which came first the Empanada or the Pasty?

English food suffer from a bad naming issue.  Which would you prefer egg pie or souffle?

 

Energy (Bar) Henge

Last week in a teaser post I promised to build Millennium Bar Henge and here it is.

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Energy Henge is (was) a thing of beauty looming on the workbench in the garage and giving of the sweet artificial smell of cherry cough syrup.  Its completion was held up by the need to recalibrate the bars to account for the daylight savings time adjustment.

If you like hengy things you should check out Clone Henge.  Where the extremely creative Nancy Wisser perseveres in her attempt to catalog all things henge-like.

More photos on Flickr

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