Diners in New York pay US$100 to feast on rats
Feast on this: New York City artist Laura Ginn serves a multi-course meal made up entirely of rats. — Picture courtesy of shutterstock.comNEW YORK, July 31 — If you are what you eat, a group of 20 diners in New York were temporarily turned into furry rodents last week after paying US$100 (RM312) to feast on a dinner composed entirely of rats.
In a statement on sustainable dining and “self-sufficiency”, Brooklyn-based artist Laura Ginn hosted a dinner party for a group of adventurous guests who tucked into a multi-course meal featuring one of New York City’s most abundant natural resources: rats.
Dubbed, “Tomorrow We Feast Again on What We Catch”, the dinner, described as a “post-apocalyptic hunter-gatherer feast”, challenged diners to set aside their conventional notions of food with a meal featuring an animal traditionally regarded as vermin pests in Western society.
“What I hope to achieve with that is to give people an experience of pushing their boundaries... and expanding their idea of what a resource is and what’s available to them,” explained Ginn in a video on Kickstarter, a crowd-sourcing platform for creative projects.
For the 20 guests, that meant biting into goat cheese crostini with rat meat, rat and pork terrine, braised rats and a roasted half rat served over a sweet corn salad, reported The New York Observer.
No need to call the hygiene or sanitation police, however, as the animals were not fished off the underground subway rails but ordered in bulk from a facility and delivered whole, unskinned and frozen. The meal, prepared by chef Yuri Hart, was the culmination of a year’s worth of work.
For more info on the project, visit Ginn’s Kickstarter video below. — AFP/Relaxnews
