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Xavier Legette has drawn a lot of attention recently after first revealing back on Thanksgiving that the food he was most excited to eat was raccoon. Legette then doubled down last week on a podcast and discussed how he hunts the trash pandas himself and how he prepares them and what the flavor of raccoon is like.
Following all the chatter, Bizarre Foods host and celebrity chef Andrew Zimmern, who I interviewed years ago, came out in defense of Xavier Legette’s eating habits. Zimmern says he eats raccoon a few times a year, primarily in the Southeast, and discussed the merits of eating raccoon while speaking with TMZ Sports the other day:
After writing about Xavier Legette’s love for eating raccoon last week, I was overwhelmed by the amount of people who emailed me or tagged me on the BroBible Facebook page with comments. The feedback was primarily about how ignorant I was for suggesting that Xavier Legette, who has a 4-year, $12.3M contract which included a $5.8M signing bonus, could choose to eat things other than raccoon *and* to be very particular about the foods that enter his body during his prime earning years as a professional athlete.
To all of those people who had feedback for me about the merits of eating raccoon, I’d just like to say that I’m a LOT closer in diet to Andrew Zimmern than I am to a professional athlete. I’ve eaten fermented shark (Hákarl) and whale in Iceland, rattlesnake many times, pig brains, tarantula, various types of insects, and all sorts of other unorthodox foods. I’ll pretty much try anything once and see if it’s good but raccoons are, in fact, well known carriers of rabies and I’m just not into tempting fate against a disease with a 100% mortality rate.
I’ve eaten the Japanese fugu pufferfish which is considered a delicacy but where there’s a rare chance of fatal poisoning. I was okay with the long odds there. But when it comes to raccoon, it is just infinitely easier to keep on living my life and sampling rare foods on occasion than tempting fate for a food I really have no interest in eating to begin with. You do you, eat raccoon, and I’ll do me and eat alligator tail down here in Florida or reindeer/puffin next time I’m traveling in Scandinavia. We can share field notes.