Cook Wild, Kentucky!

How a new program is helping educate rural residents about healthy, delicious ways to prepare locally-sourced wild game.

“What is that? It looks like little pieces of tire tread!” My hunting-averse mom hollered from the pantry one afternoon, and I just knew that we’d been caught.

On something of a lark, my dad took up hunting while I was in middle school—leaving for Bell County on frost-covered mornings in his mighty 2002 Ford Ranger—but didn’t quite come clean about it to the entire family. My mom, Connie, was a longtime vegetarian, and in her mind the leap from sprout sandwiches to store-bought bacon was a whole lot less dramatic than from eggplant fritters to venison tenderloin.

(Which, of course, makes no sense from an “eat local” or health perspective…)

For months, I’d been enjoying expertly-cured, Clay County Mennonite-made deer jerky from my dad’s first harvest on the sly, reaching a greedy hand into a clear plastic bag tucked in the back of the pantry and hoping I’d hidden the stash back correctly.

Until one day when I, well, didn’t.

The “tire tread” my mom thought she saw peeking out from behind a box of saltines was actually her first glimpse of venison: a protein in extra-salty, snackable jerky form that has now dominated our diets for a decade or so. (Connie came around, eventually.) Eastern Kentucky venison harvested by my dad was the first meat my toddler ever tried, and we even bought a separate freezer to store our game meat. What can I say? I’m a real evangelist about it.

It’s easy to imagine that venison would’ve been an easier sell for my wild-game-skeptic mom if a program like Cook Wild Kentucky existed during my furtive jerky-eating days. Launched two years ago as part of efforts to help the state’s most vulnerable citizens learn how to prepare wild game like venison, rabbit and dove, Cook Wild Kentucky has distributed over 20,500 wild game recipes cards to date, while donating over 4,000 pounds of venison to those in need and hosting upwards of 100 people at wild game recipe tasting events across the state.

Below, Cook Wild Kentucky’s Campton-based Jann Knappage explores why the program has proven to be so popular, as well as the reasoning behind wild game being considered a cornerstone of local foodways—particularly in Kentucky. (Bonus: recipes!)

Jann Knappage: Food Systems Specialist, Cook Wild Kentucky