Road Kill: It's Fresh, It's Organic, It's Free
By Sandor Ellix Katz, Chelsea Green Publishing
July 28, 2009
How broke would you have to get to eat roadkill?
Don't freak out. This isn't a sensationalist necrophilic bizarre fetishized kind of thing. It's legit. Actually, depending on several factors, it can be perfectly safe (and entirely affordable) to eat meat that has been left by the side of a highway or county road.
In fact, there may be not much of a difference from a deer you hunt, and a deer you kill accidentally. Now, this may sound a bit extreme to you. But according to Sandor Katz, lifelong activist and food lover, roadkill has been a source of food for poor people since cars were invented. So, don't be classist. At least read more about it!
The following is an excerpt from The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved: Inside America's Underground Food Movements by Sandor Ellix Katz. It has been adapted for the Web.
If you pay attention and look at the road while driving (or, even more so, while walking or biking), you will inevitably encounter roadkill. Animals moving across the landscape are often unavoidable prey at fifty-five miles per hour. Little systematic counting has been done, but extrapolating from data collected by road crews in Ohio, one analysis estimates there are an average of more than one hundred million roadkill victims in the United States each year. Dr. Splatt, the pseudonym of a high-school science teacher who for thirteen years has organized students around New England to participate in a roadkill census, comes up with a very similar estimate of 250,000 animals killed by cars in the United States on an average day. Some people see food in these unfortunate victims of our car culture and regularly pick roadkill up off the road to take home and eat.
A few passionate souls I have encountered eat roadkill almost every day. My neighbors Casper and Pixey bring roadkill stews to our potlucks. For a while they did their frying in grease rendered from a roadkill bear they came across in the mountains. On one of my friends Terra and Natalie's visits, they had strips of roadkill venisons splayed across their dashboard drying into jerky.
Please read the complete article at:
http://www.alternet.org/environment/141595/road_kill%3A_it%27s_fresh%2C_it%27s_organic%2C_it%27s_free/