My grandparents on both sides depended on creative interpretations of game laws to get through the winter. I made a list one time and found that I could remember eating well over 50 species of animals.
Cows, chickens and pigs are very thoroughly domesticated and easy to raise in high volume.
Racoons (I bet somebody did START a racoon farm…), aligators, rattlesnakes, kangaroo, deer, elk, moose, ptarmigan, bear, cougar, pheasant, sparrow, grasshopper, earthworm, rabbit, etc. are all viable options and they and many more may be available in your local weird store, but they simply haven’t become a domesticated monoculture, for some very complicated reasons. Well, okay, the bears are for an easy reason, the rattlesnakes too, but you see what I’m saying.
Plains Indians hereabouts used to eat grasshoppers as a major food source. They’d make a big circle, and sweep them all in to the firepit they’d dug in the middle of the circle. I’ve never tried grasshopper, but Lord knows there’re still enough of those around that you could have a good feed. On the other hand, you could just go and spend a couple of bucks on a sirloin and call it good.
Game ranching has had problems with disease, as has fish farming, and when you consider the path that corn has taken from a single kernel on the end of a stalk to the luscious (and sterile) eight inch heads you can find at any grocery store today, you start to see that the development of a staple food source is not in any way a fast process.
Cows used to be viable mammals who defended themselves against wily predators. Now you can hunt them with a hammer. It took a while, but we made them that way.
