Where the wild things eat
Restaurant diners have become famously particular, with their demands for gluten-free options or sauce on the side. And restaurants have become accommodating. But imagine feeding hundreds of diners every day and having to deal with the requirements of not only a variety of personalities, but species — meeting the dietary expectations of lions, tigers and bears.
To do so, Gino Lombardi works quickly in the kitchen in the Toronto Zoo’s administration building, a small radio setting the pace with a tinny expulsion of Top 40 radio hits as he slices honeydew melons, kiwis and pears, weighing each portion before bagging it.
The bags, added to bins, are labelled with names and weights: spinach for Egyptian geese; potatoes, squash and carrots for red river hawks; nectar for pygmy sugar gliders; carrots, yam and corn on the cob for naked mole rats; sausage and terrines for the Komodo dragons.
Each bag of vibrant vegetables — in the bucket labelled “Africa Pavilion” — would sell as a $15 salad in a downtown restaurant.
“This is a very costly affair,” says Jaap Wensvoort, the zoo’s nutritionist, pressing his feet into the disin- fectant-soaked floor mat outside the kitchen, white suds squeezing out from under the tan work boots. There are occasional donations of manufacturing defects or in-season bushels of apples and carrots. But most of the food is purchased. “The sustainability of donations is not very good. But it is handy and definitely welcome.”
Just like in a restaurant kitchen, there’s a daily prep list, meals to pump out, horse-heart and fruit gels to make. And just like in any restaurant, keeping the customers happy is at the top of the list. The major difference between restaurant customers and the zoo animals is that the animals don’t pay. But they can’t leave a nasty review on Yelp either. It’s also a research centre. “We do not do research here to better keep animals in a captive situation,” says Wensvoort. “We do research that supports conservation in the wild.”
For a trial last year, they mimicked the wild diet of a polar bear, as best they could without catching seals for the bear to eat. The data is shared with scientists up north, who analyze its “fatty acid signature,” which they can compare with wild animals to better calculate what they are eating.
“And that’s crucial to understanding the polar bear ecology.
“Because you need to know if it’s been eating harp seals or ring seals or belugas or fish.”
In a big empty room (the area needs space for the boxes of bones routinely stacked here) is an industrial Hobart mixer, a multi-gallon drum with a spinning blade that I hope only turns when the lid is shut.
Into the mixer I throw armfuls of lettuce, tomatoes, bananas, apples and so on. Locking down the machine’s top, the blade spins until it’s a khaki soup inside.
Then we add a collection of powdered vitamins and minerals, plus gelatin to help it solidify. These are the real ingredients. The delicious apples and bananas are the lure to get the animals to eat their vitamins. Finishing the soft-bill gel with a dash of salt, we mix again before pouring the sludge into a tray to set, later to be portioned and fed to gorillas and other species.
Lined on a table are four different trays of freshly made gels, ready to be portioned. These are much more colourful and bright. There’s a brown one, an orange one, a pink and dark pink (that one has double the amount of ground horse heart). They look so good, shiny and smooth, I want to taste them all. It’s easy to imagine these served at a downtown nose-to-tail restaurant, a parallelogram wedge of the pink one on a plate, billed as “heart mousse,” maybe the top dusted with sugar and bruleed, a few puddles of fennel crème fraîche piped over top, with black trumpet mushrooms and a grating of dehydrated egg yolk.
It looks good enough to eat with- out any of that. But I wouldn’t eat it. I’m cool with raw horse heart but I’m allergic to bananas.