An unusual menu item is on it’s way to New York soup kitchens
For all the bad economic news in this financial season, there is one tiny bright spot for those forced into soup kitchens this season in New York State. Soon, there will be pheasant on the menu.
A pheasant on Randall’s Island. (Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times)
New York, like many states, has been hit by a major budget crisis, and Governor David Paterson is looking to raise revenues and cut costs anywhere he can.
Like the newly reformed Scrooge who brings a Christmas goose to Tiny Tim’s impoverished household, Governor Paterson has shut down a state-owned game farm and promised the game (all plucked and frozen) to the less fortunate.
In the past, the Reynolds Game Farm near Ithica raised pheasants that were released for bird hunters who could go out to the woods in season and shoot one of nature’s most elegant of winged creatures. (In most cases, these pheasants had their wings clipped, so in reality it was about as sporting as shooting squirrels in Central Park).
This year, a few of the Reynolds birds will go to private game breeders or farms, but most of the 8,000 or so state-fed pheasants will be “processed and packaged” — i.e. offed — and then given to the hungry.
It turns out that the game farm has been costing the taxpayers about $750,000 a year. That works out to almost $100 a bird, quite a boondoggle of a government program in the best of times — but especially so now.
This could be a small silver lining of the current economic crisis.
As governments pore over their budgets cutting costs, we may learn about more programs like this one, that leave us wondering: why were taxpayers ever paying for this in the first place?