Visiting Naples and Everglades City, Florida will not only treat your eyes with the festive colors of both man-made structures and natural wonders, you will also be treated in the belly with its sumptuous delights. There are many types of fresh water and salt water fish and also the famous Stone Crab. However, if you are more the adventurous type and would like to delight your taste buds with perhaps something new, you might want to try the gator meat. But we do understand if you’re a bit hesitant for now. After all, gator meat is not something you easily grab out of the grocery store. Not to worry because eating it is perfectly safe. Allow us to explain why.
Alligator meat is considered white meat which similar to chicken or fish. It is a low-cholesterol meat and low in saturated fats. Every serving is packed with protein, vitamin B12, niacin and other nutrients and healthy acids. It is prepared like you would with chicken. This is a great alternative for the health conscious and those who watch what they eat.
Eating gator dates back to the early settlers, who not only sold the gator hides to local trading posts, but also ate gator to survive. Remember that most of the early settlers came to South Florida from neighboring or nearby Southern states like Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina, where frying food is an art. Therefore, the idea of frying gator tail for your lunch or dinner was born, and carried on throughout the decades.
Nowadays, there is more than one way to eat gator. The traditional way to eat gator, and still by far the favorite way, is to dice up the tail into “nuggets” and fry them in a thick batter, like you would use for fish, until nice and crispy. However, you can also try gator grilled, blackened, or ground and served as an appetizer with flat bread. Some say it has the taste of chicken, others say of shrimp while a few say it tastes like the combination of both. We suppose you might have to try to figure it out yourself, yes?
For those of you thinking that eating gator is a tad barbaric or questionably legal, it isn’t. All gators served on your plate come from special farms throughout the state of Florida, who raise alligators specifically to be used for meat. Eating and killing an alligator in the wild is illegal, however the kind of gator you eat at a restaurant is as legal as eating chicken, because it comes from a farm. In regards to being barbaric, well, to our knowledge, the alligators at the farms are treated very well, eating lots and lots of chicken, and get to roam around naturally as they were in the wild, but within the premises of the farm. They are actually treated better than most chickens raised on commercial farms in the United States, so calling the practice barbaric is far from the truth. And the people that handle the meat in post-processing in most establishments are skilled enough so they make sure all the gators served in dishes are clean to eat.
We’re pretty sure by now that we have do enough to convince somebody who hasn’t tried gator yet to be brave enough to try a dish. There are several establishments around the region that serve the meat and we can assure you of the succulent and exotic but at the same time familiar taste of the gator tail.
