Seeing a wire story about a woman suing Wal-Mart for being chased by a nutria made me recall that as part of an effort to get rid of the suckers Louisiana has been promoting eating the things. I have eaten many unusual things in my life, including various constituents of offal, a scorpion, crawdads, eel, frog's legs, rabbit, and both chicken and turkey gizzards, however for some reason when contemplating eating nutria I am getting a caution flag if not a full out stop sign. So, I ask you, IMWANkers, could you eat a nutria? If so, under what circumstances.

Until this thread, I had never even heard of a nutria before in my entire life.

No. Unless I was in a situation where I had to in order to live. So, no.
And that woman suing for "pain, suffering, mental anguish, fear, disabling injuries, and medical expenses" needed to man up and not panic as if being chased by a pack of rabid wolves when the animal came out.

I agree wih Jeff on this. I don't honestly know she's not telling the truth about her injuries, but I just find a lot of these cases are not serious... and it's somewan looking to make money and lot's of it. If she is really serious and hurt at all, then I'll be curious to see how many tens of millions she sues for.

Sure. I like squirrel, so I already have a history of eating members of the order Rodentia. Mind you, I'm in no hurry to kill and cook them myself (Though I know where I could probably find some). But if they appeared on a restaurant menu, or if someone I trusted cooked up a batch of nutria, I wouldn't turn it down.

I do draw the line at using them in artificial sweetners, though. No Nutriasweet for me!

Well, she does have a point as to their not belonging inside the store. I'd really have to wonder about any store that let one of those have the run of the store, especially a place like Wal-Mart that sells food.

But her panic does sound excessive. Nutrias look more like beavers than rats. They're not scary-looking, they're cute! We have them in some parts of Arkansas now.

I recall seeing Alton Brown (of the Food Network) visiting a place that serves nutria.

Isn't it the next trendy thing?

Is this thread aimed at me?

Been there, done that. They're even in some urban areas around here. I had an apartment that backed onto a lake in the middle of Baton Rouge... I came home in the middle of the night to find a few huge nutria hanging out at my fence.

I don't see a difference between eating this and eating rabbit.

I had to go with "WTF is a nutria?"

I am not the person to ask, re: eating meaty things, but a nice nutria coat sounds good!

Sure. Slice the meat into strips and deep fry it. With enough beer and Tabasco sauce, I could do it. I bet you'd have to soak the meat in milk for a while to make it less gamey though.

I'd eat these, no problem.

Can Basketball Nutria be far away?

They sound delicious! "Nutria"....it could be the name of a chocolate bar!

Nutria Bars sound like they'd be aimed at either dieters or athletes.

Or something you'd find in an all-natural health food store. Well, hey, nutrias are nothing if not a product of nature!

Nutria would also be a good name for one of those high-protein shakes in a can.