Vous reprendrez bien un petit peu d’hippo ?

Illustration ©Mark Summers

Burnham challenged the committee to consider how bizarre it is that we eat only cows, pigs, sheep, and poultry—just four types of animals, basically all of which had themselves been imported by Europeans centuries ago. Why, somewhere along the line, had we stopped feeling entitled to improve our country’s food stocks by infusing them with animals from the great global pantry abroad? “I think we are allowing one of our greatest assets to lie idle,” Burnham told the committee. It was only the passage of time that had made a pork chop or a bowl of chicken soup feel American—not their actual origins. Time would make hippo roasts just as familiar.

 Jon Mooallem - American Hippopotamus (The Atavist-2014)