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Flavor depends partly on the species but hugely on what the animals have been eating. My free range Ancona ducks were delicious. And their diet included huge amounts of earth worms, slugs, and insects. However, if they had been eating much fish, both meat and eggs would have been off flavor. Likewise if their feed had included fish meal. The flavor of Berkshire pork requires free ranging your Berkshire pigs. The famous Iberian hams are a certain breed of hogs free ranged in areas where their diet includes a lot of acorns. Sometimes farmers in the South used to net huge amounts of carp and use them to feed hogs. Then they would sell the hogs to markets in which the hogs would be mixed with hogs from many growers and transported to distant markets. This was necessary to prevent the buyer from figuring out who had sold them the hogs with the really awful fishy flavored meat and soft fat. If the cow has a pasture with too many alliums--plants of the onion-garlic family, her milk might have an off onion-garlic flavor. Grass-fed grass-finished beef tastes completely different from corn-finished beef, though both taste good. When I was a kiddie in Georgia , good ole boy farmers sometimes trapped raccoons in fall, put them in cages, and fattened and finished them on a diet that included windfall apples as the main source of carbohydrates. Newly trapped coons didn't necessarily taste good because they usually had been eating too much fish or carrion or other stuff that tainted the meat. I'm guessing the coons were probably lots tenderer after lounging in a small cage for a few weeks too. A friend of mine once finished a hog on Sweet Meat squash. The meat was so strongly flavored with the distinctive flavor of that squash that anyone familiar with the squash would know beyond doubt what the hog had been eating.Whenever I see a comment like this, I'm always reminded that...
Herbivores taste way better than carni/omni -vores.
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