Morning Story: Stemming flow of culinary treason

How do you get a room of pakeha to pull the pukana?

Ask them if they eat wild duck.

I canvassed a few colleagues last week whether they rated mallard fresh from the maimai - most squirmed, dilated their eyes and stuck out their tongues.

"Too gamey" was, by and large, the most common response.

I thought back to when a good Ngapuhi friend of mine took me diving a few years ago.

After we'd bagged some paua and swum back to rocks, he proceeded to flick one out of its shell, rip off the gut and take a big bite.

He then offered it to me. Like my colleagues, I was initially inclined to perform the white man's pukana.

But I'm glad I didn't.

The white foot of a paua only seconds from the sea has the same texture as fresh coconut. It was salty but sweet, creamy and delicious.

(That said, I prefer it with coriander and chilli - but that's another story).

It was a stark lesson. That is, conquering the yuck-factor is crucial to enjoying our best natural fare.

But it also taught me something else. The yuck-factor underlines just how far removed we are from our hunter-gatherer instincts.

It seems the instinct now is to strip the wild from food. Supermarkets are the experts in mitigating the yuck-factor.

Game, after all, is surely the opposite of processed food. That "gamey" flavour you're tasting is simply the absence of all the sanitising processes required before meat is cling-wrapped atop a polystyrene tray.

The advent of the Farmer's Market has gone some way to redress this of course, but I still feel we've been corralled into how to perceive taste.

Who would have thought too much flavour was a bad thing?

But said pukana is understandable - unless you were fortunate enough to have friends drop wild meat at your door - as we've had years of the dumbed down version.

If you've eaten wild-pork chops after a lifetime of consuming farmed swine, you'll know what I mean.

I suspect it's this disconnect between muscle and meal that gives voice to the country's herbivores and animal activists. Both of which unwaveringly find voice this time of year when hunters fell ducks from the feathery firmament.

Such howling, like the pukana, gets up my nose. And for much the same reason. We're predators, reconnecting with the yuck factor and bypassing the CBD for what Fish & Game calls the "outdoor supermarket".

Last year I heard one activist claim the practice was "inhuman".

Admittedly, most of the population has lost the inclination, necessity and ability to hunt, but that hardly makes it inhuman. It's the opposite of inhuman; it's quintessentially human.

Like our taste buds, we've simply forgotten how to taste.

The current foodie climate indicates a renaissance in homegrown produce. Yet the notion of sourcing our own meat, however, isn't as popular.

After shooting a wild hare a few seasons back, a local farmer (while pulling the pukana) gave me some advice: "Boil that for days or it'll taste like old boots."

While he was possibly right about the leg joints, the two saddle strips either side of the spine are like eye-fillet.

It amazes me that even those who work the land consider wild meat inferior to that which they're farming.

That's why the return to the Bay of our prodigal chef Kent Baddeley, is something to rejoice this autumn.

Now, I'm not even sure if he likes game. But I once had a rabbit and crayfish stew from his kitchen, which I still rate as the best dish I've ever eaten in this province.

So, Mr Baddeley, here's the meal deal. I'll bring the wine, (I believe I owe you a few reds after my last home visit - please pass on my apologies to your wife), if you show me how to best cook duck.

We'll make a good number of toasts to all things wild and, if only for a few hours, stem the flow of culinary treason.

Mark Story is assistant editor at Hawke's Bay Today.