Tucked two miles deep in the Austin Cary Memorial Forest, Saturday night’s Beast Feast had all the ingredients of a good old-fashioned dinner: iguana stew, elk spaghetti and python étouffée.
The 27th annual Beast Feast, sponsored by the UF chapter of the Wildlife Society, gave Gainesville residents an all-you-can-eat opportunity to dine on dishes not served at traditional restaurants.
About 200 people showed up to sample dishes including white-tailed deer chili, buffalo fajitas, caribou pot roast and raccoon, said Danielle Abbey, UF Wildlife Society president.
For dessert, guests dined on delicacies such as mealworm brownies and cricket cake.
“I keep pulling cricket legs out of my teeth, which is weird,” one diner said.
The event raised about $2,000 from tickets, which were $15 at the door. Proceeds from the event go toward funding the group’s trips to national and state conferences.
“It’s about trying something new,” Abbey said.
Emily Williams, the club’s vice president who organized the event, said the group collected about 550 pounds of meat from private donors since September for the dinner.
“People are excited that it’s not your typical beef and chicken at the grocery store,” Williams said.
Blaine Holmberg and Tony Malara, two UF students who came out for the Beast Feast Saturday, scraped their dishes clean.
“I’m completely comfortable with this stuff,” said Holmberg, a UF food science graduate student who had gator tail and deer lasagna on his plate.
“People eat this stuff in other parts of the world. I think it would be interesting to tell someone you’ve eaten zebra,” Holmberg said.
Malara added, “I’m doing a whole lot of chewing.”
Although the menu was mainly composed of meat selections, Abbey said her group has non-meat eaters and that herbivores were more than welcome at the feast.
“Some of us are vegan, some of us are halfway and some of us are hunters and fishers,” Abbey said.
But Malara disagreed.
“This would be a vegetarian’s worst nightmare,” he said.
