Ex$pen$ive Minner$

What is the most expensive thing to eat that you can buy in Farmerville? It’s not steak and it’s not lobster.  Hint: White perch like to eat them…

Shiners. Minnows (“minners” to some of my less refined fishing friends).  That’s right:  Fish bait!!!!  The going rate for a pound of shiners is around $14.00, just about double the price of a good bone-in ribeye steak. That means the white perch (when the decide to bite) are eating better than most of us!

It doesn’t seem to slow anybody down, though. Tackle shops around here are selling them fast as they can scoop them up these days as the white perch start biting.

I asked resident minnow expert Cooter Anderson of Anderson’s Sporting Goods why minnows are more expensive than steak. “Well,” he started. “You don’t have to tell everybody that!  But they are expensive because of the feed and mostly the price of gasoline to get them to us,” he said.  And then there is the cost of the right setup to keep them alive long enough for them to go fishing. Makes sense to me, I said, as I asked him to bag me up a pound of filet mignon, I mean minnows.

There’s one thing, though. I don’t know anybody who ever caught a white perch on a ribeye or a piece of lobster. Probably because nobody has ever tried. I mean, what fisherman in his right mind is going to spend that much on FISH BAIT????