Try Christmas Goose for a Smaller (Wedded) Footprint

What are you serving for Christmas dinner? If you're like my family, it's a reprise of Thanksgiving, from the turkey to the cranberry sauce to the apple pie. I sometimes wonder if there's something a little more interesting we could whip up, and I also wonder about the size of this big meal's environmental footprint.

While getting a small-farm-raised turkey can make your meal a little Earth-friendlier, switching to a whole different — and traditional — kind of Christmas meat will let you shrink your footprint even more. I speak, my friends, of the glorious goose!

For a variety of reasons, geese do not take well to commercial food-production environments, so they tend to be raised on smaller more sustainable farms, according to Sustainable Table. They are also an extremely fast-growing species, turning grass into meat remarkably efficiently.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reports that geese are adept scavengers that thrive when allowed to roam a farmyard in flocks, a characteristic that makes them unfit for mass-production. Male geese usually only breed with one or two females, cutting down on the productivity needed to raise them in a factory-style environment. Further, their voluminous down makes them more difficult to process into meat, which further deters large-scale producers.

They are, however, ideal for small-farm operations; the FAO states that they are "suitable to integrated farming systems since they can be used for weed and pest control." Not only that, but they serve as excellent watchdogs for family-oriented establishments; they have great eyesight, a wide range of vision and a commanding squawk that cannot be calmed until the threat is removed.

As if all that weren't enough to recommend them, geese are one of the fastest-growing avian species that people eat. As they convert grass into body mass efficiently, the resource demands of raising them are relatively low compared to other poultry species. Their meat is nutritious, as are their enormous eggs. The soft down and feathers that one removes before cooking can be made into bedding. The goose seems to be the complete package!

If that's the case, why are geese so rare in this country? Some of their species, such as the American Buff, have been labeled in "critical" status by the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy. And anyone who has ever trotted down the supermarket to get themselves a goose for dinner will be able to tell you they aren't exactly a common food item. Well, if we have mostly factory farms and geese can't be raised in that environment, it's no wonder they aren't produced in abundance.

They are available from small farmers, however. Check Local Harvest's directory to see where they might be available near you. If that's not an option, you can get frozen free-range goose shipped to you, though of course that cancels out some of the environmental good karma you gained by going with goose in the first place. Once you've got your quarry, roast it and enjoy.

Merry Christmas!

Photo courtesy of stock.xchng