"Roadkill!," by Jacob Bauthumley

Road killed meat is good, my friends. Between October and the end of April (remember our English North Sea Coast climate is cold…) I eat whatever I find dead on the road while out on the bicycle for a run: a Muntjac deer (once), rabbits, hares, pheasants (the most common Michelin bounty) and a chicken (once). Advantages of road killed meat: 1. It did not die by your own hand. If you buy meat, you had a hand in the animal’s suffering and death. There is no getting away from it. 2. It is generally organic, wild and free. 3. You are cleaning up the roads by eating it, and so it is Green and clean. 4. You may bless the dead animal as you eat and thus honour its life and gift to you. Make a point of this. 5. Scavenging thus is honorable as well as safe: I have been dining off the A11, the B1150, the A140, the A1151 and other Norfolk (UK) roads thus for more than 20 years, and never once has the meat thereof affected me adversely in any way. On the other hand, if you really hate meat then you will not touch roadkill, either! Veganism is really a lifestyle choice in my view: we must not pretend that it has any political significance, though it may well be of spiritual significance in a non-violent lifestyle. Vegetarianism, on the other hand, may well be the Tao of nutrition (Vegetarians live longer, etc), as well as politically highly significant (reducing CO2 emissions etc, reducing cruelty) and humane, and I would be a vegetarian… If it were not for my partiality to roadkill!

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22 thoughts on “"Roadkill!," by Jacob Bauthumley”

  1. Curious about #1.
    If the aversive motive for one’s vegetarianism is the cruel nature of slaughtering an animal, can’t we argue:
    * Eating road kill in your lovely countryside is truly cruel since the animal was enjoying a wild and free existence before being run down by a motorized contraption of modern society?
    * Eating an animal slaughtered within the guts of the modern food manufacturing industry is a ultimately humane since you are taking part in releasing an animal from the grueling and unnatural cruelty it faces in its cramped, filthy, and disease-ridden farm housing?
    Your roadkill sounds downright sumptuous…I can hardly say the same of roadkill in my neck of the woods which more often than not are stray ghetto dogs and urbanized skunks.

  2. * Eating an animal slaughtered within the guts of the modern food manufacturing industry is a ultimately humane since you are taking part in releasing an animal from the grueling and unnatural cruelty it faces in its cramped, filthy, and disease-ridden farm housing?
    Truly bizarre, that viewpoint…since we perpetuate the cruelties of factory farming through our lust for meat. The only honest way to eat meat to go and hunt it yourself, or find it, like I do. Note that I live in a very rural area, with lots of game in the woods and fields, and low levels of pollution…

    1. Truly an Orwellian/Kafkaesque/nightmarish realm in which we create the dystopia and further distort reality by asking you to perform illogical and evil acts behind the brainwashed illogical pretense of righting a wrong (even though you’re just wronging a wrong).

  3. Hello Jacob,
    Fascinating story. Where do you draw the line in terms of “freshness?”. Also, doesn’t the road-kill process tend to cause intestinal matter to mix with the muscle tissue, and thus render the animal unpalatable?

    1. I would smell it. If it smells bad, don’t eat it. If it smells ok, then throw it in the trunk real quick and race it home and throw it in the freezer!
      I pick up roadkilled snakes all the time, because I am a snake fanatic. A lot of times they are just near death and not really dead yet. For sure those would be fresh! Sometimes I take them home and troll them across the lawn and watch my cats play with them.
      I really wondered about cooking up this one gopher snake I found. I wanted to eat that sucker so bad! Damn, I could taste it!
      But I never did. I took them out to the field in the back of the lot and threw them out there. I threw lots of dead animals out there. Weird thing was they seldom remained there for more than 1 or 2 days and then they were gone. Nature is a great trash collector sometimes.
      *I want to eat a snake so bad!*
      I told some people about the stuff I just wrote above and they all said I’m weird. A lot of them laughed at me. People are mean.

        1. Eating children is just wrong! I realize that there are people out there who eat children, especially if they are really hungry. I don’t agree with this thinking! They kill the child and then they eat it! Can you believe that there are people out there who actually advocate this?!
          OTOH, here is a moral dilemma. What if you found a *roadkilled child*?! Ok, look, this kid is just roadkill, right? Hell, he got run over by a car, he’s gone. His parents are no longer around, they were probably lucky enough to get away from the careening automobile. There will be a funeral, but who wants to see a mangled body in the coffin?! So you can do everyone a favor by hoisting the kid into your car and taking him home, cooking him up and eating him. Plus you would seriously save on food bills!
          But I have a moral dilemma with this. Even though the kid is just roadkill by the side of the road (I mean, fuck him, right?), is it still morally acceptable to take him home and eat him, even if you are behind on the rent? I don’t think I could do it. I have still have some morals despite the declining economy.
          Thoughts?

      1. Enticing.
        I would go one step further and advocate that, in the interest of cushioning the displeasures of poverty and malnutrition in our rocky economic times, folks would now have the option of donating their body to food kitchens (after rigor mortis sets in, of course).
        Perhaps indicated by a special sticker on the back of your driver’s license or ID.
        Children, being minors, unfortunately, would not have the ability to make such postmortem contributions to society. Adult roadkill, YES. Child roadkill, NO 🙁

    1. I don’t know to cook them. Don’t you make turtle soup out of them?
      I have found badgers, bobcats and ringtails roadkilled though. Very fresh. I wonder what predators taste like? How come we never eat predators? We only eat herbivores.

  4. Is it OK to eat people if your on a plane and it crashes into the mountains in South America and you become very very hungry?

    1. Afraid so. WTF, they are dead already. People do that shit all the time. I don’t agree with killing others in that situation just to eat them. Fuck that. I hope I would not do that! It often degenerates into that.

  5. Hey the debate has really kicked off! I know Jacob; I am a French friend of his, and he is not joking! I sat down with a ate his stewed Muntjac deer, stewed in red wine with herbs anbd vegetables and red wine. It was excellent. In fact he’s a very good cook. I should teach him to hunt, really, as Norfolk is great for wild game and I am a good shot.
    Jacob’s rules are the following:
    1. Never pick up a damaged animal (blows to the head are ok, but if the intestinal contents are spilled, leave it). Mangled stuff, or animals where the skin is broken and the flesh exposed, he just leaves on the road. He is a connoissseur! As far as I know he started eating road kill around 1988, after meeting a woman called Catherine Eccles in Suffolk (the county just to the South of us). She had been picking up and eating dead animals for years, and she knew exactly what to take and what to leave. It’s a skill like any other, and your tools are your eyes, your sixth sense and your nose….
    2. The weather has to be cold, and if the temperature is above around 45 degrees Fahreinheit, you don’t pick up anything EVER.
    3. The animal has to be less than 24 hours old, but preferably killed within the hour. There are ways of telling this, and he picked up a pheasant two weeks ago that was still warm, coming back with me from a walk on Holkham beach.
    4. If the animal has been poisoned, or died from
    some other cause than an accident de la route, Jacob leaves it.
    We are too squeamish about meat. Better to get down and dirty with it….Personally I like nothing better than shooting an animal with a clean shot, skinning and gutting it, and then cooking the result!
    I don’t even buy stuff from the butcher. You don’t even know where it has been…have you ever seen the inside of an abattoir in operation? It is not a sight you are likely to forget in a hurry,
    Regards, Jean-paul Jeannin.

  6. Yummy in my tummy! Roadkill briskets and stews and kabobs!! Nothing compares! Now for that special spicy kick you gotta try squashed skunk.
    Now I have to confess, my OCD passion for roadkill has resulted in my playing chicken with various critters who dare to run into the road ahead of my car. I now try to run those cute little fury creatures over so I can fetch enough fresh roadkill to keep my freezer stocked all year.
    You know, I’m thinking that maybe I should look into starting a roadside roadkill diner for the discerning roadkill gourmets. I could even have a stuffed roadkill gift shop adjacent to the diner where mom and dad could buy little bratty junior his own pillow buddies that only hours before were living critters.
    Aren’t the squeamish vegans and vegetarians a silly lot to not love roadkill?

  7. i went to college with a girl who would pick up all the roadkill squirrels and turn them into moccasins.
    that deer stewed in red wine sounds pretty good. i would definitely eat some roadkill.

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