Thanksgiving dinner Dan Marsh-style isn't like Thanksgiving dinner grandma-style.

        Oh yum, here's a lovely dish of chicken necks, live meal worms, chopped eggs and dirt.

        Mmmmmm. Here's a lip-licking 40-pound slab of horse meat defrosting on a stainless steel counter, right close to that bag of frozen crickets.

        Dan Marsh, see, is roaming around the Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Garden's commissary, food central for 9,000 animals 365 days a year, and explaining that “sure, it's a gross-out moment. But when you are custodians of all these species, you have to feed them what's best for them.”

Dan Marsh (front), education director at the Cincinnati Zoo, and Daniel Rupp, commissary head keeper, show off animals' food, including wax works for insects, dog food for aardvarks, fresh produce for primates and herring for polar bears. (Gary Landers photo) | ZOOM |

        He's holding a rat, frozen to 20 degrees below zero, as he says it. Ratsicles, he calls them.

        “They're important to the health of our birds of prey. They especially need the roughage.”

        Mr. Marsh, assistant director of education since 1992, is leading a Zoo Gourmet tour, one of several programs the education department cooks up for people who want to go behind the scenes.

        Leaning on an industrial 8-burner stove that has just yielded up a couple loaves of gorilla bread (brown rice, blueberries and a high protein bread product called monkey biscuits), he's handing out slices and assuring the tourists that the bread's a favorite among keepers and gorillas alike.

        Ratsicles, on the other hand, are not.

        No surprise there, but there are a lot of surprises here in the large, gray-ish building just south of the Coors Peacock Pavilion.

        Maybe we should join Mr. Marsh, a 38-year-old Clifton biologist working on a master's in education at UC, for a peek at a dozen and one secrets of the zoo kitchen ...

        • Most animals get food formulated specifically for their needs — — there's a huge firm in Nebraska that processes it — but there is also a lot of improvisation here.

        “It's a little science, a little trial and error when you get right down to it,” Mr. Marsh says. “The aardvark, for example. We have bags of aardvark chow (a dry feed concoction not unlike dog food), but we've found that monkey biscuit mix with Iams canned cat food is a real favorite. They also like a mix of dog food, honey and yogurt, but the yogurt goes bad so quickly, you have to be careful.”

        • Zoo flamingoes are pink because “We feed them the diet they need to stay pink. It's krill, a shrimp-like creature with pink pigment. That's what keeps them pink. Without it, they'd be white.

        “People always want to know what happens if we give them something with green pigment. I don't want to find out.”

        • The chicken neck, mealworm and dirt dish is for the skunks. “We're not trying to stretch their food with dirt. They like to dig around around for food, so we add dirt to the dish.

        “We also sneak in specially formulated vitamins, but the skunks don't know it. It's not 5-star, but it works.”

        • “People think we don't feed the peacocks because they're always roaming around the grounds. But first thing every morning, long before the zoo opens, we toss out scratch (cracked grain) and they eat well.”

        • Sometimes, zoo food is used for enrichment rather than nutrition. “Fiesta parrot food,” he says, scooping out a handful of multi-colored pellets that look like Fruit Loops. The pieces are small to feed to an elephant, what with those big trunks, but the zoo does.

        “We scatter it around the compound, then they have to forage for it. It's a way to make their lives more interesting.”

        • The three highly endangered Sumatran rhinos are big eaters but picky. The zoo flies in 42 boxes of ficus branches from California every week, then feeds the rhinos six boxes a day as a dietary supplement. Zoo night watchmen are in charge of the airport runs to pick them up.

        • The two manatees are every bit as finicky and every bit as hungry: They each get 80 heads of lettuce (romaine only) a day, plus 10 pounds of apples, sweet potatoes, bananas and biscuits.

        • The most popular fish among zoo animals are capelin, herring, mackerel and sardines. The penguins, living high on the hog, get fresh calamari.

        • Every Monday is Easter Sunday in the zoo commissary — staffers fire up all eight burners, click on the 8-foot range hood and boil 30 dozen eggs to dish up throughout the week, usually chopped on top of other food. “It's a protein thing,” Mr. Marsh says.

        • A huge walk-in freezer kept at 20-below houses the meat. Red meat defrosts on long stainless steel counters. The bacteria-prone poultry products go into thawing chests kept at 34 or 35 degrees. A walk-in fridge, kept in the high 30s, houses fruits, vegetables and plant products, including leaves and twigs.

        • These are for the cats, Mr. Marsh says, pulling a 5-pound tube of frozen something out of a thawing chest. “It's feline food, ground meat that we thaw slowly to prevent bacteria growth. The big cats get a high-protein variety, the little ones get low-protein.” The defrosting horse meat is for the big cats.

        • “One thing we have to pay attention to is animals need different diets at different times in their lives,” he says. “This bovine diet, for example: We have one kind for breeders we're hoping will reproduce, another kind for the others.”

        • Ratsicles aren't served year 'round. “We use them more as a summertime treat,” Mr. Marsh says. “Chicksicles, too. They're male chicks from the poultry industry. They're all male, because the industry has little use for males. They keep some for breeding, but mostly they want females for eggs and sale in supermarkets. Our birds don't care.”

        The next Zoo Gourmet tour is 10:30 a.m.-noon and 1-2:30 p.m. Saturday . $6 adult zoo members, $4 children; $9 adult non-members, $6 children. 559-7767.

Hail to the Maestro
It's time to enjoy this area's arts full-time
At the zoo with: Dan Marsh
DAUGHERTY: Line between hearth and homeless can be thin
DEMALINE: The arts
Networks put pinch on animated Grinch
Series focuses on top documentaries
Get to it