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When the Eat Well team headed upstate a few weeks ago, we were looking forward to getting out to some farms, meeting some farmers, learning more about their sustainable methods and eating some good food. I don’t think anybody anticipated seeing groundhog stew on the menu until the night before we took off, when our friend Severine sent us an email, telling us that her friend Erin, who works at Sisters Hill farm (and blogs about her work there at Farmer Erin blog) had trapped, killed and cooked one up for us.

How could we eat an animal as (sort of) cute as the one in that photo? As our good friend Kerry explained in her post about it, the groundhog needed to go–it’d been helping itself to the veggies Erin and her co-workers had so lovingly planted and tended for their CSA members. In fact, Erin said the groundhog (or woodchuck, whichever suits you–they’re synonyms) had laid waste to nine entire pea plants.

To my understanding (most of which comes from Joan Gussow’s This Organic Life) gardeners and farmers have limited options when it comes to pest removal in upstate New York. If one chooses to trap a pesky critter alive, as the squeamish may understandably prefer, it is against the law to relocate it. I have no idea how strictly this law is enforced, or what kind of punishment breaking it might carry, but it’s enough of a deterrent that most who do keep it pretty hush-hush.

If you can’t move it and you can’t let it stay and keep eating up all your CSA shares, it seems to make sense to kill it but more importantly, if you are going to kill it, it surely makes sense to eat it. Even more than staying on the right side of the law, such a waste-not-want-not mentality seems to answer to a higher moral code, one that seeks to ensure that lives, even animal ones, even pesky animal ones at that, are not taken lightly, and that resources in whatever form (compost, flesh, etc) are used and not squandered. Some people argue that if a person is willing to eat the flesh of an animal, that they should be willing to take an active role in its death, and Destin has voiced her interest in learning to hunt and slaughter a range of animals. I too hope to test myself on that point one day soon, as Destin and Chelsea both did at a chicken-slaughter workshop at this year’s PASA conference, but in the meantime, I’ll keep holding those who do up on a pedestal.

Including Erin, who served up an amazing meal that evening, which included rice, fresh asparagus, parsnips and potatoes, salad greens and a deliciously tart rhubarb compote in addition to the aforementioned groundhog stew, and we ate it around a big table on the screened-in front porch. The stew was tasty, once I made peace with the fact I was eating a groundhog (why it should be so different than eating a cow or a deer or a chicken, I don’t know), though ever so slightly chewy. She’d also cooked its liver with onions, which tasted about like any liver and onions I ever had (a little rich for my taste). In case you have a pesky varmint you’d like to trap, stew and eat, here’s her (albeit slightly vague) recipe, in her words: