Why don't we eat more goat meat?

Factual Questions
1

Here in the US we seem to be focused on Beef, Pork, Chicken, and to a certain extent Lamb, for our meat protein choices. I learned recently that Goat is fairly common in Latin American cuisine, and is also seen in southern European cooking.

So somewhere along the way Americans, who at one point probably raised goats for meat, switched to other proteins.

Why did we stop eating goat? Is the flavor of goat distasteful to too many people? Was it deemed unhealthful compared to other meats? Are goats too hard to commercially raise?

I have never had goat myself, but I wouldn’t hesitate to order it if I ever saw it on a menu.

2

From my (limited) experience of being around them on a school farm, they are smart as the dickens and difficult to contain. (Climb everything.)

3

I wouldn’t have thought so - it’s a mild-tasting red meat, somewhere between lamb, beef and venison in flavour.

4

People don’t tend to think about eating goat here, and so it’s a specialty product, and therefore not subject to the benefits of large-scale production and therefore expensive. Since it’s expensive and not many people want to pay extra for the meat, lots of grocery stores don’t carry it. So people aren’t used to it and don’t want to buy it. It’s a self-reinforcing circle.

5

I’ve never seen anything that would indicate it is anything more than cultural tradition. Waxwinged may have hit on something though, raising goats for meat may not be as practical as cows, sheep, and pigs.

6

You forgot Turkey. On a mainstream American diet you could go for years without eating any meat/poultry that didn’t come from a cow, pig, chicken, or turkey, to the point that most Americans would consider just about anything outside those “big four” to be unfamiliar and exotic.

7

I’ll cop to that. It still sort of surprises me every time I notice that I can get duck in my local grocery store.

8

I don’t think I’ve ever heard of industrial goat farming. Here in Spain they’re usually raised in mixed traveling herds in which the majority of the animals are sheep: lamb is common (much more than in the US), kid isn’t something you see every day at any butcher’s. There is certainly a matter of “it never took hold”, but I think there’s a combination of root causes for it, including those which made cows (both free range and industrial) much more common in the US than in those countries in which goat is common.

9

I’ve bought goat at Costco. I’ve had some in Mexico also. I think it is just a matter of the standard American culture not being used to it.
There seems to be a lot less lamb consumption than when I was a kid, possibly because it is in general more expensive now.

10

I’m Armenian. That’s my girlfriend you’re talking about. :mad:

11

People raise a lot of goats here in South Georgia. They are said to be eaten, but I never see goat in the local stores. I did have some barbecue goat (pulled and sauced) one time at a small-town eatery, but it just tasted like some kind of meat in barbecue sauce. If someone told me it was beef or pork, I would have believed it. I still want to eat a hunk of plain roast goat to see what it tastes like.

12

There are several places in Chicago that offer it, both restaurants and small ethnic groceries. I love it; if the big stores offered it I would eat it far more often. My guess is that as a matter of culture and upbringing there’s just now much call for it from the majority of the population.

13

In Chicago, any decent Mexican restaurant (i.e. one where the majority of the diners are Hispanic) has goat on the menu, as do most non-vegetarian Indian ones I’ve been to. It’s delicious. The cheapest way to try it would be to get a goat taco at a good taquería. It will probably cost less than $2.

14

Here in Houston goat/cabrito is common enough, the grocery closest to me has it all the time. I also live in a place that is 50% Hispanic so…

Goat is great IMHO, has a distinct flavor that is not gamey. One of my favorite ways to have it is when a whole goat is roasted in an underground pit, nom. Also there is goat cheese also nom.

WAG I can only assume it is a cultural thing and us gringos reap the benefits

Capt

Cabrito actually means “baby goat” but doesn’t always mean that, IOW it has become a general term for goat meat, not just baby goat

15

I think it’s a cultural thing. Ohio has a significant Somali population, so raising goats for meat is taking off here.

I had goat for the first time a couple of months ago, and it was delicious. Its distinctive flavor is not even as strong as lamb’s (which I love). The meat was meltingly tender and hadn’t been cooked to stringiness to achieve that.

16

Aside from Africans, most of the early US was settled by people from Northern Europe, so that’s probably the main reason.

Not sure there is a factual answer to this, btw.

17

Here in the US, I’d have to say it’s because McDonalds doesn’t want any goat meat.

18

Goats are more of an arid-ecosystem animal. They eat brush, not grass, for preference. Where grass grows lushly and hay is easily made from it (northern Europe), cattle and sheep are easier to grow than goats. When goats are forced to mainly eat grass, they tend to have more parasite problems than the cattle and sheep which evolved to deal with the consequences of eating plants very close to the soil (ruminant parasites spend part of their life cycle in the soil and are transferred at or near ground level).

So, yes, the reason the US doesn’t eat more goat is mostly cultural. Goat is the most commonly eaten meat, world-wide. Meat goat producers in the US try to organize their kid crops so as to be ready for immigrant holy day feasts, as roast kid is traditional for most spring and summer festivals.

Texas and the South have the largest commercial meat goat herds. Unlike cattle and sheep, goats need shelter in hard winters. The US eats all the goat we produce and still imports a lot (New Zealand is a big producer).

Another reason cattle are easier than goat in the US is the predator problem. It is one big reason why the sheep industry has nose-dived in the past fifty years (a great deal of US lamb is now imported). Coyotes can’t kill cows – although they may get newborn calves. You can let cows wander around unsupervised over your ranch for months on end – goats would just be eaten. So they need fencing, livestock guardian dogs, and human shepherds, 24/7. More expensive. But, goat ranching is growing in popularity all the time.

19

According to the book “Fast Food Nation,” until the refrigerated box car became common in rail service, after the 1920s, pork was the most eaten meat.

I grew up on a farm and I can tell you pigs are by far the easiest to raise. Sheep are very easy as well, but they suffer from centuries of domestication which makes them very stupid, prone to disease and predictors.

Losses to sheep were a real problem in the past, (still are but not to the extent they once were).

Chickens were raised in the city but pigs are easy to raise, they can be quite nasty so a predator will think twice about that.

I would say goats are harder than pigs but easier than sheep, as they aren’t as stupid and can protect themselves.

The meat depends a lot on which they feed. I’m not a fan of mutton, though I like lamb. Goat meat can be very strong or mild, depending on the breed type and food it eats.

Goats can also be mean and nasty depending on the breed and how they’re raised and handled.

But the only reason we don’t eat more of it, is there was no call for it.

Goat milk is good, but they don’t make (or haven’t been bred to) milk in huge quantities. One goat can serve about two people for milk. And goat milk is good.

But then why don’t we eat more goose, or even swans? Swans are nasty, even more so than geese, but I’m betting that that is because they haven’t been domesticated really.

But then look at why are gluten free products so expensive? Rice, which makes up a lot of the flour (rice flour) is cheap. You can make rice flour yourself cheap. There just isn’t a lot of demand.

20

Do you have a cite for that? I would have guessed pork. And I’m distinguishing between “meat” and “poultry”, so chicken doesn’t count.