Zoo Recipes

So, when you go to the Louisiana swamp part of the Audubon Zoo in New Orleans, they have all the bayou animals, including this really cool alligator with leucism, which looks almost exactly like albinism except that your eyes aren't red and it's actually a completely different disease. If it survived Hurricane Katrina, you should really check this alligator out.

But anyway, they also have recipes on the walls mixed in with all the bayou animal tanks. Things like crawfish boil or crawfish étoufée. You read it and then there are the little crawfish crawling around (or doing whatever it is that they do). And that's the idea - posting recipes of the zoo animals above their cages. Ideally these would be recipes of people who had to subsist on these things in the wild.

You wouldn't want to encourage people to hunt endangered species and make like giant panda stew, but I think if you could get recipes or even just first hand stories of people interacting with these animals in the wild, it would make it that much more real to people, and you could get a sense of the whole ecosystem, rather than just looking at a miserable little guy in a box or pen.

Another corollary idea is this: you should really check out the Cajun section of the Audubon Zoo, because it's pretty bad ass - especially the white alligator, whose house is air conditioned, I might add.