Another Lenten delight

By Tony Staley
Compass Editor

As part of our continuing exploration of Catholics' Lenten diets, we look to Venezuela where, like southeast Michigan, they can eat a rodent on Fridays. But instead of munching on muskrats, they chew on capybara, the world's largest rodent.

Dick and Shirley Schultz, former residents of the Green Bay Diocese now living in South Pasadena, Fla., passed along this culinary curiosity from a New York Times story in the St. Petersburg Times (3/23/07).

It was back in the 18th century that Venezuelan clergy asked the Vatican to call the capybara a fish. It was an honest mistake given that the capybara are a semi-aquatic animal that looks something like another water-dwelling mammal. No, not a whale, but a small hairy hippopotamus. So how big is a capybara? About the size of a Labrador retriever, though some males can be 4-feet-long and weigh 140 pounds.

What do they taste like? Some say chicken; others say rabbit or a mix of sardines and pork.

As fishy as this may sound, don't expect to find it on the menu next Lent at your parish's Friday fry.