Beaver barbecue at Bootleggin’ BBQ in St. Louis, Mo. Though many Catholics abstain from eating meat on Fridays during Lent, in some parts of the country, water-dwelling mammals have long been considered fair game.
Alan Greenblatt for NPR
It doesn’t taste like chicken and it’s definitely not a fish, but some people in St. Louis are eating beaver for Lent.
Many Catholics abstain from eating meat on Fridays in observance of Lent, the season of penance between Ash Wednesday and Easter. The church has made exceptions — at times, in some places — for aquatic mammals such as beavers, muskrats and capybara.
That’s good enough for Brenton Brown. “A friend of ours said that the Catholic Church is fine with this for Lent,” says Brown, co-owner of Bootleggin’ BBQ in St. Louis,…