How appetizing does pan-seared raccoon sound? Or how about some wood-grilled possum? Those aren’t dishes from a Depression-era restaurant, but they could be part of an environmentally conscious diet.
Left-wing environmentalists are popularizing an idea from a book by so-called food-preservationist Sandor Ellix Katz called “The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved: Inside America's Underground Food Movements.” Katz made the case for roadkill to be part of a diet in the name of sustainability, noting millions of roadkill casualties litter the nation’s roads annually. His July 28 opinion piece saying “It's Fresh, It's Organic, It's Free” ran on the left-wing site Alternet.
“If you pay attention and look at the road while driving (or, even more so, while walking or biking), you will inevitably encounter roadkill,” Katz wrote. “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.”
Lefty groups have trotted out other bizarre and seemingly extreme measures in the name of promoting the green agenda. In 2007, Paul Watson, founder and president of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society advocated a drop in the world population below one billion. And just this year, the city of
Katz isn’t alone in his roadkill focus. He pointed to another estimate compiled by a Brewster Bartlett, a
“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
Katz got the idea from a newsletter called “The Feral Forager,” put out by a self-described green anarchist and vegan that makes her own case for roadkill consumption, part of a freegan lifestyle.
“Eating roadkill challenges our society’s taboos concerning what is fit and unfit to eat,” Terra wrote. “In the same spirit as dumpster-diving, we salvage the waste products of our decadent culture, while the wealthy turn their noses’ up at us and purchase chemical-laden slaughterhouse products. Conventional meat products carry with them the suffering of the factory farm, exuding stress and misery in every tissue and cell. This misery transfers itself to the plate of the consumer, infecting billions worldwide with the same neurotic trauma of domestication. At least an animal killed on the highway lived wild and free until the point of impact.”
And this lifestyle is the correct “ecological choice,” she explained.
“Defining veganism as a practice rather than an ideology makes the most sense to us. At this place and time,” Terra wrote. “It’s Indeed the more ecological choice when choosing between that and domestic meat-eating, even organic and free-range. But can we say the same for the indigenous of Siberia or the
