It was about this time in 1910 when a member of Congress thought the next big food trend would be hippo meat.
This was US Representative Robert Broussard of Louisiana, and no, he wasn’t a foodie.
He was trying to find a way to stop the spread of the invasive water hyacinth, which had been clogging up waterways in his state for two decades.
Broussard teamed up with US Department of Agriculture researcher William Newton Irwin, who was trying to find a solution to the country’s meat shortage.
He was convinced the answer was to import hippos and raise them for meat.
Never mind that he was primarily an expert on apples; he liked to think outside the orchard.
Sometimes he served hippo jerky to reporters who visited his office, to popularize his idea.
Broussard was into the hippo meat proposal because hippos could eat water hyacinths and therefore solve Louisiana’s invasive plant problem, while also serving as a new inexpensive food source for the country.
His bill won support from former President Theodore Roosevelt and other big game hunters.
They liked the idea because they thought America should have as big a population of safari animals as possible.
But Broussard’s colleagues in Congress were less enthusiastic about “lake bacon” than he was.
And with good reason: the plan had some pretty big drawbacks.
Hippos do eat vegetation, but the water hyacinth wouldn’t have been nutritious enough to serve as their primary food source.
And these are huge and strong animals; good luck trying to fence in huge numbers of hippos, and if one gets out, well, you wouldn’t want to be in its path.
The congressional committee kept the hippo meat proposal in limbo until the country moved on to other things.
But in case you’re wondering, one of the backers did have an answer to a frequently asked question about hippo meat: he said it tasted like a combination of pork and beef.
In the UK, December 26th is called Boxing Day, though it has more to do with little boxed gifts than it does with the sport of boxing.
The community of Williams Lake, British Columbia designates every January 2nd as Wrestling Day… and this doesn’t have to do with a sport either.
Instead it’s for people “wrestling” with the hangovers they got over the New Year’s holiday.
Lake Bacon: The Story of The Man Who Wanted Us to Eat Mississippi Hippos (The Daily Beast)
A city in B.C. has an actual civic holiday called Wrestling Day (Vancouver Is Awesome)
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Image: The Spokane Press, retrieved from the Library of Congress
