[OKC] FW: From Slate - New twist on local and sustainable eating

[Miles, Karen]

Does This Rabbit Taste Like Tires?


Road kill: It's what's for dinner.

By Catherine Price
Posted Wednesday, Feb. 2, 2011, at 3:54 AM ET 
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It really was a good-looking rabbit. Shiny coat, sleek body, glassy
eyes-only its mangled back leg hinted at its violent cause of death. My
husband Peter and I had come across this rabbit on a trip to a bird
sanctuary in Gridley, Calif. It was lying in the middle of a narrow
country road, stretched stiffly across the pavement; Peter swerved
slightly to avoid its body. 
"That was a pretty rabbit," he said, guiding the car back into the
correct lane. 
I agreed. We continued down the road in silence. Then, several hundred
meters later, Peter spoke again.
"Should we go back and pick it up?"
He was suggesting that we take the rabbit home and eat it. Yes, I'm
aware that this sounds crazy. And no, I'm not a back-to-the-land hippie:
I grew up in Manhattan, where eating something off the street will
likely result in an untimely death. But we were living in Oakland,
Calif., dangerously close to Berkeley-the epicenter of the organic food
movement, where the words local and sustainable are prized more than
Michelin stars. This rabbit was wild, grass-fed, and presumably
antibiotic- and artificial hormone-free. Except for the car that had hit
it, no food miles had been accrued delivering it to us. So why not bring
it home for dinner? 
"I don't know," I said hesitantly, aware that now that the idea had been
planted in our minds, we were going to have to do it. "Leaving it there
does seem like a waste."
Peter made a U-turn. When we reached the rabbit, still lying sprawled
across the pavement, I refused to get out of the car. Instead, I watched
as Peter crouched down to examine the bunny and, with me telling him to
only pick it up if it "seemed fresh," returned holding its stiff body in
his hands. 
"Only its back leg is messed up," he said as I stared into the rabbit's
vacant eyes. 
"Is it warm?" 
"Sort of," he said, side-stepping the question. "Look at how nice its
fur is. I could make a pouch." 
Peter and I have different recollections of who was responsible for what
happened next. But the end result was indisputable: By the time we
pulled away, the rabbit was in our trunk, its plastic-bagged corpse
right next to my yoga mat. 
While official statistics are difficult to come by, a 2008 report by the
Federal Highway Administration
<http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/research/safety/08034/08034.pdf>
estimated that there are between 1 million and 2 million collisions
between vehicles and large animals in the United States each year
(rabbits presumably excluded). Large animals are usually called in to
the authorities and hauled away, but small game is often not reported
and therefore stays where it lands, pummeled by passing traffic until it
blends into the pavement. Occasionally, a dead animal will be tossed to
the side of the road, where it's picked on by birds and insects until
only the bones remain. Only rarely does a human treat it as food-mostly
because it's considered gross, but also because doing so is often
illegal: Kirsten Macintyre, communications manager at the California
Department of Fish and Game, later told me that under California law, "a
car is not a legal method of take." (She then asked if I had heard the
story about a guy in Pennsylvania who was arrested for trying to
resuscitate a possum on the side of a road. The department is not
without a sense of humor.) 
Legality, however, was the last thing in our minds as we headed back
toward Oakland. We had a much more pressing problem: what to do with the
body. Neither of us had any idea how to skin or gut a rabbit, let alone
determine whether its meat was safe to eat. 
Article continues at URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2283223/
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