08/21/2026
Year round, we eat more rabbit than all poultry combined. During the winter, we eat more rabbit than red meat. Rabbit can be prepared in so many different ways. It takes on the taste of whatever your cooking it with, so your getting more of taste of the herbs and spices. A lot of ppl don't like looking at the whole butchered rabbit, simple, ask for it to be quartered, ask for just legs, ask for it to be cubed. It doesn't matter if it's whole, quartered or cubed, it's still tastes amazing in any dish that calls for chicken.
Apparently somewhere along the way America decided rabbit meat needed banjo music playing in the background. You know the stereotype. Hillbilly food. Poor people food. Something somebody’s grandpa ate because there wasn’t anything else around. Meanwhile, depending on where you’re buying it in the U.S., whole rabbit can run well into the double digits per pound and specialty cuts can push even higher. That’s a pretty expensive little hillbilly dinner.
The funny part is that our perception of rabbit is largely cultural. Rabbit has a LONG culinary history outside of the little American bubble where we’ve decided certain animals are food and certain animals are absolutely horrifying to put on a dinner plate. In Mexico, rabbit has been part of the diet since pre Hispanic times and is still found in traditional dishes. Across different cultures and cuisines, rabbit isn’t some bizarre survival food. It’s just meat. Good meat.
Here in the U.S., though, it’s become much more of a niche or specialty meat. You probably aren’t going to find a pile of rabbits next to the $6 rotisserie chickens, but that doesn’t mean you can’t buy one. Specialty meat markets, local producers and butcher shops are usually your better bet, and depending on the butcher, it may simply be something you have to request or order.
Publix even sold domestic rabbit meat and ended up at the center of a massive campaign demanding that they stop. That’s really where rabbit gets interesting to me. It isn’t that rabbit somehow stopped being livestock or stopped being food. We just developed a very strong cultural taboo around eating an animal that a lot of Americans also recognize as a pet.
So call it specialty meat, niche meat, gourmet meat, delicacy, whatever fits the market you’re looking at. Just maybe retire the idea that rabbit is some dirt cheap desperation meal being cooked over a barrel behind a single wide trailer. The banjo is optional. The rabbit is apparently bougie.
