According to the New York Times, “the city’s too fertile and apparently pesky geese will soon face a grim fate, but will not go to waste: They will go to feed hungry Pennsylvanians.” I’m not making this up.
The idea might sound familiar to Grant Writing Confidential readers. Isaac wrote a post called “Project NUTRIA: A Study in Project Concept Development,” which describes how to conceptualize project development while parodying some of the crazy concepts we see bandied about. A nutria, for those who don’t know, is basically a very big rat, and they were apparently terrorizing Seattle not long ago. So Isaac suggested that low-income and/or homeless individuals be trained to capture the nutria and turn them into food.
This was (mostly) a joke.
The New York Times article, however, indicates that something quite similar is actually happening. No word on whether there’s a job training element to the proposed project or an acronym. If whoever runs this program needs an acronym, we’re willing to contribute one gratis: Project GEESE (Geese Expeditiously Evicted and Served to Everyone). You could change “Evicted” to “Eviscerated.” No word yet regarding whether any of the unsuspecting geese will force fed first to produce foie gras, which I’ve eaten once and would not care to eat again.
Furthermore, you may want to take a gander at this article article from a different source, which claims that “Due to strict New York guidelines regulating the processing and distribution of goose meat, local authorities finally decided to send them off to Pennsylvania, which already has an established protocol for distributing slaughtered geese.” Who knew? So there’s a bureaucratic perspective to this feathered tale as well.
In other acronym-related news, the Health Resources and Services Administration’s (HRSA) Service Area Competition (SAC) Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) has been announced, which you should celebrate by asking WTF took so long and ordering some BBQ.
EDIT: In “Why Soup Kitchens Serve So Much Venison,” Henry Grabar reports that “a growing percentage of [venison served to the homeless and needy] comes from the suburbs of American cities, at the unlikely but unmistakably American intersection of bow hunting, pest control and hunger relief.” There are too many deer and too many hungry people, and they intersect here.