How to Eat Roadkill

Guinea Fowl crossing the road via My Retirement Chronicles


Should we eat roadkill?
In theory, it's an excellent exercise in ethics, environmentalism, and self-reliance.
Why leave it to rot when you can take it home and cook it for dinner?

According to PETA, roadkill is a better choice than the factory-farmed, shrink-wrapped product you find in the supermarket. The group recommends it from a health standpoint, because it doesn't contain antibiotics, hormones, and growth stimulants. And it's the more humane option because the animals haven't been castrated, dehorned, debeaked, or suffered through any of the other horrors of intensive animal agriculture.

Perhaps you prefer the term flat meat.
Roadkill is fresh, organic, and free. It was clearly free-ranging, as some unlucky driver knows all too well. It's sustainable and supportable through an enlightened political ideology, and there's plenty of it—according to estimates by Animal People Online, the annual roadkill toll tops 100 million animals, and that's not even counting the species categorized ever so delicately as indiscernible.

The legality of taking home roadkill varies by state.
Alaska considers it state property but residents can get on a waiting list for a moose, caribou, or bear; Illinois says the driver gets first dibs, though the privilege is only extended to state residents; Texas had to outlaw roadkill because of too many not-quite accidents; and in Tennessee, on the day that the legislature legalized the taking of roadkill, the state senator who had introduced the bill was presented with a bumper sticker: Cat—The Other White Meat.

Tastes just like chicken.
Steve Rinella, who collided with and then stewed up a raccoon for an episode of his now surprisingly defunct Travel Channel show The Wild Within says that "[roadkilled] meat is actually much fresher than what you might find in a grocery store." The wiki How to Eat Roadkill recommends that you "learn the signs of healthy roadkill": it should be freshly killed, preferably from an accident you witness, although you get some slack time in the winter months; you want a fresh stench, since the impact can force excrement rapidly through the animal's digestive tract; and fleas are a good sign, maggots are not. And not to worry about rabies—sure, it's a deadly communicable virus that infects the central nervous system, but the wiki tells us that it dies off quickly with the animal.

Should we eat roadkill?
Waste not, want not, right?

Gigabiting: where food meets culture and technology.

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