The Vintage Meat Gen Z Has Probably Never Seen On Dinner Tables

The set of people known as Gen Z have an impressively vast taste in food. All at once, the group generally celebrates global cuisine, vegetarianism and veganism, and will try whatever looks awesome on social media. As diverse as their palates may be, there are some things you probably won't see on the young adults' dinner tables, like rabbit, which actually used to be a popular and widely used protein in America. 

Certain European countries like Spain, Italy, and the Czech Republic still highly utilize the light meat, which is said to taste like white meat chicken with, perhaps, a touch of gaminess. Rabbit is a highly sustainable and simple meat source to raise; they are quiet animals, lean and high in protein, they reproduce and grow rapidly, and are much cheaper to raise than larger animals like cattle. In fact, their sustainability is exactly why you should be eating rabbit. Despite this, you'd be hard-pressed to find the meat in conventional supermarkets because there just isn't a strong demand for it in modern society. This probably has a lot to do with the fact that bunnies are ridiculously cute and fluffy, and their association with endearing things like Easter, Peter Rabbit, stuffed animals, Bugs Bunny, and having them as beloved pets. Rabbit was available at Whole Foods for a time, but low sales (not to mention pushback from animal activists) weren't enough to sustain it. 

So, although America's Gen Z may have fairly adventurous palates, they may not be ready to dip their collective toes into rabbit stew any time soon, or at least until the concept goes viral. Yet, many people say that history eventually repeats itself, and having rabbit on the table was completely normal once upon a time.

Rabbits were a dietary staple of many Native American tribes prior to European civilization. When settlers began arriving in the New World, they found an abundance of these animals, which they, too, used for food and clothing, as the Natives did. As time and colonization progressed, rabbits were undoubtedly used for similar purposes, but by the 20th century, it can be concluded that using rabbits as a food source had significantly decreased. We know this because during World War II, the American government encouraged citizens to raise rabbits for meat because beef and other proteins were heavily rationed at the time.

A Life magazine article titled "Rabbits: Raising Them For Meat Is Now a Helpful Patriotic Hobby" was published in Life magazine in January 1943. Similarly, Gourmet magazine published an article around the same time boasting, "This year we're eating the Easter rabbit," via Smithsonian. When you think about it, that probably wasn't the best way to encourage Americans to eat more rabbit. By the 1960s, American families had largely replaced their rabbit dishes with chicken, pork, and beef, which were readily available again.

Around 2016, rabbit was appearing on some higher-end restaurant menus, but today, the meat appears to be creeping its way into more eateries, particularly those specializing in Southern and Italian cuisines. But with Gen Z leaving the dining table, it's hard to say if these folks are trying these kinds of dishes. Perhaps, if they are opting for take-out.