JAPAN: Get your goat - From yard to table, it's a healthy alternative

OSAKA (Daily Yomiuri), June 13, 2008: Tom Baker/Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer Goat sushi, anyone? It's a tasty dish, according to Prof. Takeyuki Ozawa of Nippon Veterinary and Life Sciences University in Tokyo. Just place thin slices of yagi-sashi raw goat meat atop balls of sushi rice with a dab of wasabi, and you've got a simple but unusual gourmet treat. Ozawa sees great potential in goat meat and goat milk, in terms of their taste, their nutritional value and their potential to boost Japan's rate of food self-sufficiency. Although goat sushi may not be served in most of Japan, goat meat has popular roots in Okinawa Prefecture. Zenei Yogi, president of the Maruichi Meat Co., based in Naha, told The Daily Yomiuri through an e-mail from a spokesman that goat meat is traditionally served in Okinawa "at a time of celebration for such events as housewarming or birth of a new baby. Goat meat is also eaten as remedy for recovery from fatigue after planting rice or harvesting sugar cane." Ozawa told The Daily Yomiuri in an interview at his Tokyo office that one of his Okinawan meat industry contacts said a more casual pattern of consumption is for middle-aged men to buy a hunk of raw goat meat to keep in the refrigerator all week, slicing off thin pieces to enjoy with a can of beer or glass of awamori Okinawan liquor after they get home from work each night. Other traditional Okinawan dishes include stir-fried goat and yagi-jiru goat soup. But even in Okinawa, goat meat has a certain image problem. Ozawa said: "I have heard from a meat supplier in Okinawa...that their tradition is getting weaker because the young people in Okinawa don't really prefer to eat yagi, or goat meat, anymore. They have strong prejudices: 'Goat meat is for the elderly people' [or] 'Goat meat stinks.'" Ozawa cheerfully admitted that goat meat can have a strong odor. When he tried some packaged yagi-jiru soup from Okiham, another Okinawa-based meat company, he found it pungent, even though one of his former students who works for the company told him they had toned down the aroma for mainland Japanese tastes. "It smells a little bit," Ozawa said. "But that's characteristic. If you take out all the smell, it's no longer goat soup. If you go to Okinawa and have the real yagi-jiru, you'll be shocked by the smell. You'll be knocked out. And after that, you'll be a goat lover. That's for sure...You'll be baptized by the goat soup." But young Okinawans' apparently declining interest in goat may mirror a generational change that has already occurred in the rest of the nation. There were 413,000 goats in Japan in 1950, according to government statistics cited by Ozawa in one of his academic articles on the subject. By 2005 there were only 19,823. "Some people over 55 have experience of drinking goat milk in their childhood," Ozawa said. "That's because goats were all over [in the postwar period]. If they were short of their mother's milk, the mother went out asking for goat milk. It was very common. One of our professors always says, 'I was raised by goats.' Because his mother was starving." "But with our economy growing up, we [began] seeking something delicious, something more rich, which is cattle. So people just abandoned raising goats anymore," Ozawa said. Due to trends in the world food supply, Ozawa suggests the time may be ripe to give goat meat and milk a more prominent place in Japan's cuisine. © The Yomiuri Shimbun. For More about Goats in Japan