PODCAST EP. 381: "Gamey" - A Pheasants Forever and Quail Forever Short Essay

Speaker 1 (00:50.688)

Welcome to On the Wing Podcast presented by Purina Pro Plan. Today's episode, we're gonna have Quail Forever journal editor Ryan Sparks read his essay about his personal distaste, pun intended, for the word gamey. It's filled with a ton of personality. And as you know from previous podcasts, Ryan loves to cook wild game recipes and he loves talking about wild game food. and this is a very fun essay that he penned just a few months ago for the current issue of Quail Forever Journal.

Before I throw it over to Ryan, I wanna do a couple items of cleanup housekeeping. First off, I want to announce the winner of our Irish setter in Pheasants Forever wing shooter boots. That's right. A couple episodes back, we announced the very first time Pheasants Forever has branded hunting boots, and we've done it with our great friends just south of headquarters at Irish Setter based in Red Wing, Minnesota. so first time ever, you can find them at Irish Setter's website, the Scheel's store has them. You can get there through Pheasants Forever, Quail Forever's store on our home pages. You can get to the Scheel's store. They're out and about all over the place. So Pheasants Forever's Irish Setter Wing Shooters.

But a few episodes back, I invited listeners to tell me why they needed a pair of boots and why they should be the winner. Kyle S. from Illinois, your submission is my selected winner. And here for all of our listeners is what Kyle wrote.

"Hi, Bob. I listened to the most recent podcast and was thinking of what to say as to why I need the branded wing shooter boots. The truth is, I don't need them, but there is someone I would like to get them for. A little backstory about myself first. I started hunting back in February 2025 and as part of my journey, I began volunteering with my local Pheasants Forever chapter. It was probably more selfish as I wanted to be around folks who could help me learn how to be an upland hunter and to actually take me hunting. Fast forward to now, I have a 12-week-old female red lab named May who will be my future hunting buddy. Now back to who I am asking the boots for. My chapter - Kane County, Illinois, was recently restarted, and we had our first banquet in many years in 2025. And we are coming up on our second banquet soon. One of our guys, Jamie, is crucial to building our chapter. He is always behind the scenes working on marketing content, setting up event registration, printing flyers, and so on. As a chapter, we are all very grateful for Jamie's contributions. And I think these awesome wing shooter, pheasants forever, Irish setter branded boots would be a great gift. When I travel for work, I listen, I love listening to the podcast and learning more about upland birds and bird dogs. I hope I can become a mentor to someone in the future who wants to become a part of this great community. In the meantime, I hope you'll consider Jamie for these boots. Thank you. Kyle S. from Kane County, Illinois."

Well, that is a winner. When when you are thoughtful enough to ask for a gift on behalf of somebody else who's a volunteer, well, that puts you in the mix. there's a lot of great submissions, including a gentleman from Florida who tried to appeal to my Detroit Tiger fandom. But for this pair of wing shooters, pheasants forever wing shooters.

Kyle, you're our winner. all right.

Purina Pro Plan is the presenting sponsor of On the Wing Podcast and the national dog food sponsor of Pheasants Forever and Quail Forever. As you know, my pups have always eaten Purina Pro Plan, not just because Purina supports the wildlife habitat mission of our organization, but because Purina is a team of the world's best scientists and nutritionists behind their dog food. Purina Pro Plan was created for the working bird dog like yours and like mine. You can learn more at Proplansport.com. Purina ProPlan, nutrition that performs. All right. Ryan Sparks in Gamey. Here we go. Take it away, Ryan.

Speaker 2 (06:01.398)

My wife and I almost never buy meat from the grocery store. Instead, we turn to the variety of game meat stored in our freezer. When we have people over for dinner, we might cook quail, deer, duck, goose, pheasant, or any number of wild things most Americans aren't accustomed to eating. In my mind, our chest freezer is a literal treasure chest, and I'm always excited to prepare wild game for uninitiated palates. Then a tired scenario plays out.

We sit down to eat, everyone tucks in, and inevitably someone uses the word gamey, and I inwardly cringe. I hate the word for a variety of reasons. One is that it assumes all game taste the same. I've heard it applied to smoked antelope and wild turkey during the same meal. Most folks can agree that besides being meat, these two proteins have nothing in common. In fact, animals of the same species are

From different habitats often taste very different. It's what wine enthusiasts call terroir, or the characteristic taste and flavor imparted to a wine by its environment. In wild game, there are so many variables, including age, diet, physical activity, time of year, stress, and how the animal was handled during processing that affect taste. This nuanced flavor enriches the experience of eating what you hunt and is something to be celebrated.

Not paved over with a word like gamey. Another reason I despise the word is that it inherently implies that game meat, in its basic form, tastes bad. I've never heard the word used in a positive light. Gamey is a pejorative term that suggests game meat requires elaborate preparations, powerful marinades, and overpowering sauces to make it palatable. I would argue the opposite is true.

One of my favorite ways to eat quail is to toss them in olive oil, sprinkle them with salt, and throw them on the grill. Simply prepared, you can taste an animal in its purest form. For most of human history, wild meat wasn't an alternative. It was simply meat. Humans have been eating wild animals far longer than domesticated ones, and I'm sure Neolithic humans would scratch their heads at our concept of gaminess. These days,

Speaker 2 (08:26.978)

Gamey has become a blanket term for a variety of smells and flavors, and I would argue that when most people say something tastes gamey, what they're trying to say, although they're usually unaware of it, is that it tastes unfamiliar. Even people who have ordered venison, pheasant, quail, or duck from a restaurant menu haven't tasted the wild equivalent of what arrived on their plate. Enacted in 1900, the Lacey Act stopped hunters from selling game meat to curtail rampant market hunting.

and stabilize plummeting game populations across the country. Now, if a restaurant wants to serve game meat, it must purchase it from a game farm. In other words, if you order quail at a restaurant, it grew up in a pin, not in a plum thicket.

In a modern sense, the word gamey strips away the unique flavors of individual animals and juxtaposes two categories of animals: those raised inside fences and those roaming outside. According to this flawed thinking, if an animal comes from inside a fence, it tastes like pork, chicken, or beef. If it comes from outside a fence, it tastes gamey, regardless of if it flies or walks, what it eats, or where it lives.

People use the word gamey because it's a word our non-wild game eating culture tells them to use. We accept it because of mental laziness. Something might taste unfamiliar, have a unique texture, or taste leaner or richer than we're used to, so we call it gamey. The word is so opaque and broad, it has virtually no meaning. If you applied the same blanket classification to domesticated animals, the absurdity really begins to set in.

Does all domesticated meat share a common characteristic? I've never heard anyone at a restaurant say, Boy, this pork tastes domesticated. When you give it just a bit of thought, you realize the word gamey creates a false dichotomy that does a large disservice to the animals we hunt and love. Why not treat each animal and the meat they provide us with the respect it deserves? That's why I wince when I roast a pheasant or grill some quail.

Speaker 2 (10:39.158)

And a dinner partner tells me it's not as gamey as they expected it would be. You can't judge how good something is by how much it doesn't taste like itself. It's akin to saying, gee whiz, you sure did a good job of removing all the flavor from this, or I can't believe how much you got this deer to taste like feedlot beef. Bringing up how ungamy something is, or telling me your grandma's secret pheasant recipe, the one with the strong marinade where she roasts it on a board.

And then throws the meat away and serves the board is a fast way to get on my never invite to dinner again list. Maybe that's what bothers me most about the word. The sage grouse from Wyoming, the Bob White from Nebraska, the Whitetail from an Iowa river bottom, and the mule deer from a Montana mountainside all become the same thing. Gamey. Yet every wild animal carries the imprint of a particular landscape and season.

Those are differences worth noticing. They are, after all, part of what we are hunting for in the first place. To me, that's not something to hide from. It's the whole point.

Speaker 1 (11:52.68)

And thank you, Ryan. what a great essay. Gamey from the Quail Forever Journal. If you enjoyed that, please consider becoming a member of Quail Forever. You can do that at quailforever.org. as we exit this episode, I want to thank Onyx Hunt. we are here. Hunting season has arrived. We don't hunt for that perfect picture perfect.

photo just for social media, we hunt for the wild places, the time behind our bird dogs, the smell of burnt powder, and the friends that we walk into the field with. The best spots mean more of everything we love. And some of those spots were passed down to us from people we cherish. And hopefully those same traditions we carry forward are the ones we can pass along to somebody else.

After we're gone. Time out here has a way of putting everything else in perspective. The best days rarely involve what ends up in the back of your vest or on that tailgate. They're the stories we tell for years, the unforgettable dog work and the people were there long after the season ends. Those are the things that stay with us. Onyx Hunt, here's the

All right, folks, thank you very much for listening. I'm Bob St.Pierre reminding you to always follow the dog. Something good will rise. Thanks, folks.