Australians have long been mocked for being the only country that eats the animal on its coat of arms. Yet mainstream Australia only began discovering kangaroo when they became a pest that needed to be controlled.
Dr Gary Mortimer, a QUT consumer behaviourist, recognised the change in attitude. "We saw that about ten years ago; kangaroo started it move away from boutique restaurants. It was really the restaurants and chefs starting to toy with native flora and fauna; Things like crocodile, buffalo, emu and certainly kangaroo."
Professor Phillip Hayward from Southern Cross University suggests we should look to invasive introduced species as a food supply, helping to control the damage.
"You've got a voracious and invasive kind of sea urchin, which is coming in to Tasmanian waters and is causing major havoc to the habitat. One good way to think about get rid of it is eating it, because sea urchins are a highly nutritious, succulent marine resource."
There's dozens more. The Federal Government culled 160,000 camels over four years as part of a 19 million program that ended last year. With camels weighing as much as a ton each, that's 160,000 tonnes of meat, or the sum total of Australia's beef exports to China last year.
"Camels manage pretty well in drought environments, so the issue is not trying to keep them alive, it's trying to control the numbers."
What about cane toads?
"There's absolutely no reason why not. There's quite a lot of meat on a cane toad. Now a lot of it is poinonous but it has pretty good leg muscles. So if we can find ways of getting the meat off quickly, easily, and getting it to market, that could be a major impetus for cleaning up cane toads."
There is, however, a problem of perception, as Dr Mortimer notes.
"We've seen a number of multicultural aspects permeating into the marketplace; Indian restaurants are very famous for goat curries, and goat wasn't really a product we had eaten much of in Australia, so there's opportunites for goat. There's great opportunities to start to market these more aggressively. I think the challenges marketers face with eating cane toads, frogs, insects, even snake, is that they are historically poisonous animals and been a risk to domestic pets. But we're starting to see these products pop up in to traditional food markets and supermarkets."
