About The Wild Harvest Table

The Wild Harvest Table started as a celebration of the culinary bounty represented by wild game and fish in the Finger Lakes region of New York State.  Cornell Cooperative Extension Nutrition Educator, Moira Tidball, from Seneca County started the website in January of 2009 as a resource for game and fish recipes, nutrition information, and preparation techniques.  Her partner, Dr. Keith G. Tidball, Senior Extension Associate in the Department of Natural Resources (DNR) at Cornell, helped with the inception of the website and recognized potential research questions evolving from the project.  With the help of Dr. Paul Curtis from DNR, the team secured USDA funding for “Leveraging the Locavore Movement: Exploring Family and Community Food Decision-making” to examine how the “locavore” movement presents an opportunity to study and influence citizen’s decision-making about procuring, preparing, and consuming wild fish and game. Research objectives include: 1) determining the importance of wild fish and game consumption to food security in local NYS communities; 2) evaluating  why people are motivated to eat, or not eat, wild fish and game; 3) examining the importance or “legibility” of nutritional analysis for wild fish and game, and the way labeling influences consumer choices; and, 4) determining how people learn about processing and preparing wild fish and game, and barriers to finding and adopting this information.

All of the recipes on the website have been tested to be delicious and relatively simple to prepare!  Nutrition facts are included, though some species do not have nutrition information available.  Part of our research is investigating this gap in nutrition information for wild game and fish species.  More information on this can be found under “Nutrition Findings” in the “Helpful Resources” section.

Comments on posts are encouraged, and questions will be answered in a timely fashion. We want you to share your stories, including recipes, with us. The information will be posted in the section aptly named, “Your Stories.”

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2 thoughts on “About The Wild Harvest Table

  1. Joey Diana Gates

    Thank you for this information. Interesting that I am reading this article on the day we are about to give thanks and process a deer a friend has for us. We do wonder about the diet that the wild game eat as there are alot of pollutants (biological and chemical) out there to which they are exposed. However, we find it preferable to an animal that has lived a life in confinement, and it is local. We also wildcraft and enjoy cookbooks by folks like Steve Brill. Do you plan to endeavor into the plant world to conduct nutritional analyses, etc.?

  2. mmt65@cornell.edu

    Thank you for your comment. It would be interesting to look at the nutritional analysis of wild plants, yet we still have a long way to go to get all of the game and fish species analyzed. Wild mushrooms and greens definitely complement the flavors of game…enjoy your venison!

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