Did you know if you ever did a stretch in Maricopa County under Sheriff Joe Arpaio, you probably ate emu?
I’m talking from personal experience here, and honestly, it wasn’t even too bad. If you spent plenty of time walking the yards at Durango, sweating it out under the canvas at Tent City, or sitting in the horseshoe, you know exactly what the lockdown grind was like. You remember the heat, the pink underwear, and that morning announcement over the speaker. But the real core memory for a lot of us was what ended up on the tray.
Back when the Arizona emu farming craze crashed in the early 2000s, Joe seized the opportunity to cut the county food budget down to pennies. He took thousands of pounds of donated emu meat and started serving it up to the inmates. For a while, that lean, red bird meat was a staple, ground up into stews or slapped onto a tray as a burger. Compared to the infamous, warm surplus green bologna that we all dreaded, the emu was practically a steak upgrade. It had a rich flavor that tasted surprisingly like lean beef, and when you were working up an appetite just surviving the summer heat under those military tents, you didn't complain. It is a wild piece of local history that only the ones who lived through it truly understand.