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Comment by foobarian | Hacker News Reader

TIL kangaroos are harvested for meat

If you're in the US, meat selection tends toward the conservative. People have literally been fired for serving kangaroo: https://time.com/5430454/nebraska-school-cook-fired-kangaroo...

But in some European countries, more bits of the animal are being eaten (beef tongue, e.g.), and more animals are being eaten (e.g. horses). In Switzerland, kangaroo and ostrich became somewhat popular when at the height of the Mad Cow Disease epidemic, people were reluctant to eat beef.

And that’s a shame, I really feel like we need more exotic meats in the US.

Maybe we can bring back the “lake cows” and their “lake cow bacon”.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-the-us-almost-bec...

You can definitely get beef tongue in the US.

Yes, I did not mean to imply that you can't. But in my informal surveys of Americans, "Do you eat beef tongue?" is an interesting shibboleth to determine culture of origin of the respondent.

I think I've yet to meet somebody with a Christian Anglo-Saxon background who said they did. People with Hispanic, Jewish, Eastern European, and many continental Western European backgrounds often do. Of course beef tongue is also found in Chinese cuisine.

Leather as well - kangaroo leather was rather prized in the motorcycle community for being more abrasion-resistant per thickness/weight than cow-hide leather. I think its popularity has somewhat fallen off but I believe it's still the most performant material.

Same for whips as I recall. Niche use cases, but it’s apparently much better than others.

Hmm, I wonder which material properties contribute the most benefit to that application. "Abrasion resistance per weight/thickness" seems like it would be somewhat lower on the scale for whips than it is for motorcycle rider protection.

Yeah. Very similar to venison, in both taste (lean and a bit gamey) and reasons for culling; too many in an area and no real predators other than humans.

That sounds ironic as kangaroo’s predators were predated (“culled”) by humans.

We're just going to work our way down the food chain.

Already have, many people personally cull grass periodically.

We even have solar panels.

Out of curiosity, what are/were kangaroo's predators?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thylacoleo

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thylacine too, but probably not for adult kangaroos.

Also dingos, crocodiles, pitons and eagles.

Also australian aborigines.

Same with deer (wolf culling)

You can buy the jerky on Amazon last I checked. This amazed me the first time I learned about it but apparently it's pretty mundane in Australia

It's a common ingredient in dog food. If a dog is having some sort of allergic reaction, a vet will often recommend switching to kangaroo food to try to rule out a dietary cause. (I guess because kangaroo allergies are rare in dogs? At least in NA?).

It's a common ingredient in human food here in Australia.

https://www.coles.com.au/search?q=kangaroo

It's pretty gamey, I don't find it unpleasant, but I wouldn't eat it in favour of a good beef steak.

not just, but yeah !

Kangaroo meat is super lean and very tasty. needs to be cooked very carefully or it goes very chewy and dry.

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