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Of Blue Babe Stew!

  • Writer: A Crazy Little Bird Told Me
    A Crazy Little Bird Told Me
  • May 10, 2023
  • 2 min read



Did you know that mummified bison can be eaten in a stew?

Yup, I kid you not. True story!

I can see some of you asking a bewildered "why", but there is a perfectly logical explanation.


You see, it all started in July 1979 when a gold miner, minding his own business, noticed a pair of bison feet sticking out of the mud, and wisely decided that somebody that knew about such things should really be consulted. He named the animal Blue Babe, partly because it was blue all around, thanks to vivianite coating (blue iron phosphate), and partly in reference to Paul Bunyan’s giant blue ox.


Side note, if like me you have no idea who are Paul Bunyan or the giant blue ox, here you go. Paul Bunyan is a giant lumberjack and folk hero in American and Canadian folklore. His tall tales revolve around his superhuman labours, and he is customarily accompanied by Babe the Blue Ox, who turned permanently blue when he was buried to the horns in a blizzard (obviously!).


Back to our mummified bison. A necropsy was performed by Dale Guthrie of the University of Alaska, and it was estimated that the creature was 36,000 years old. The mummy was extremely well preserved, allowing for sex and age identification. The claw and tooth marks eventually identified the American lion as the source of his demise. The poor lad led a dangerous life before turning into a popsicle!


Blue Babe froze extremely fast after passing and muscle tissue was preserved comparably to that of beef jerky with fat and bone marrow, and this is where the research team got creative.

“All of us working on this thing had heard the tales of the Russians [who] excavated things like bison and mammoth in the Far North [that] were frozen enough to eat,” Guthrie says of several infamous meals. “So we decided, ‘You know what we can do? Make a meal using this bison.’”

And so, they did just that: “To climax and celebrate Eirik Granqvist’s [the taxidermist] work with Blue Babe, we had a bison stew dinner for him and for Bjorn Kurten, who was giving a guest lecture [...] A small part of the mummy’s neck was diced and simmered in a pot of stock and vegetables.”

“We had Blue Babe for dinner. The meat was well aged but still a little tough, and it gave the stew a strong Pleistocene aroma, but nobody there would have dared miss it.”


I am not sure what is the most disturbing though: the fact that they thought it was a good idea, the fact I am thinking "well, why not" or the fact this was not even unusual, it seems!



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