Vermont millennials aren’t heading out to hunt game the way their forebears did. In a bid to inspire more of them to try, the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department is casting Vermont wild turkey, deer, fish and bear as hyper-local food that is fresh and natural.
Vermont Fish and Wildlife is holding a series of seminars this summer to show would-be hunters and anglers how to prepare the food that they have killed outside. Seminar-goers will get a chance to sample bear meat that is prepared by an experienced chef, and learn how to filet a freshly caught fish.
The program is a bid to connect the popular locavore movement with the increasingly less popular traditions of hunting and fishing, which have seen participation drop 10% in Vermont since 2012.
“The whole local food scene is about local, sustainable, healthy food,” said Nicole Meier, an information and education specialist with Fish and Wildlife in Montpelier. “We’re trying to show people that going out and fishing for your dinner is almost the same as going to the farmers market and meeting the farmer who grew the zucchini you’re going to have for your dinner.”
Hunting has long been a critical mainstay of Vermont’s traditional culture, and just a few decades ago, it was common to see hunters driving through town with a deer in the back of their vehicle or weighing their kill at a check-in station. Country stores around the state still serve as game check-in stations, with kills often listed on blackboards.
But as the hunters — many of them baby boomers — age, they aren’t being replaced by younger people. When all the baby boomers have hung up their weapons for good, hunting could drop by 25%, according to a report from U.S. Fish and Wildlife. The 2018 report, which was based on U.S. Census data, said that a quarter of all hunters are ages 55 to 64.
The problem is acute in Vermont, where Gov. Phil Scott announced last winter that he would close the Salisbury fish hatchery to cover $250,000 needed to balance the Fish and Wildlife budget. While an outcry changed the governor’s mind, the problem remains: In the last six years, Vermont Fish and Wildlife Fund license and fee revenues — collected from those who hunt, fish and trap — have dropped 6.5%, or $500,000, according to William Jacobus, the co-founder of Trout Unlimited in Vermont.
Jacobus said that the number of paid licenses dropped overall 10% between 2012 and 2018, and hunting licenses alone dropped 15% in that time to 69,943, a historic low. While the national average has increased slightly, the numbers are going backwards in the Northeast. Vermont is aging faster than the rest of the nation, and the U.S. Census says the state’s population is in decline.
For Fish and Wildlife, survival means showing the new locavores their connection to the original locavores — the Vermonters who lived off the land. One way to make the experience more palatable is to demonstrate how good game can taste when it’s cooked by people who know what they’re doing, said Meier. Fish and Wildlife has recruited volunteers from its own staff to prepare meat for seminar-goers.
“A lot of people have this preconceived notion that wild game is gamey and tough and chewy, and it can be if it’s not cooked properly,” said Meier. “We’ll be cooking bear really nicely so people will have the chance to taste the real flavor of Vermont.”
Fish and Wildlife is not the first group to see the benefit of appealing to people who want to obtain their food very locally. The University of Vermont’s Real Food Working Group promotes eating invasive species such as the periwinkle, sow thistle, watercress and nutria (also known as river rat) through a program called Eat the Invaders.
The Inn at Weathersfield last summer offered foraging workshops that included cooking lessons with a chef, and Green Mountain Audubon this year is offering a mushroom-foraging workshop in Huntington. The Institute for Applied Ecology in Corvallis, Oregon, is preparing for its annual invasive species cook-off on Aug. 3.
But it’s a first for Fish and Wildlife, which came up with the idea for the seminars last spring as a way to interest more people in hunting and fishing. The seminars will include a fish-fileting lesson where participants can filet a perch or crappie. The seminars are scheduled for July 30, Aug. 7 and Aug. 14 in Barre, Middlebury and Burlington.
“It’s clever, quite frankly, and it’s worth the energy to see if in fact they can entice people,” said Jacobus of the cooking seminars. But with the population in rural areas declining – and alternatives to hunting proliferating – Jacobus, 76, said he’s very worried.
“The rural areas are sort of being absorbed by Chittenden County,” said Jacobus. “When you get a larger suburban population, the percentage of people who actually hunt goes down quite a bit, and that’s sort of the dynamic that Vermont is in right now.”
Fish and Wildlife worked closely with Rooted in Vermont, a program of the Vermont Sustainable Jobs Fund that aims to increase demand for local food. Framing hunting as an activity for locavores is a natural fit, said Shane Rogers, Rooted in Vermont project manager.
Hunters and anglers haven’t always been present at local food discussions, said Rogers.
“We want the people who are really dedicated to buying from their local farm to also see hunting and fishing as a viable option for procuring local food,” he said. “Really the whole idea here is to build a bridge between these two communities. It doesn’t make a lot of sense that we haven’t been making this partnership before.”
