The Road Kill Chef

Today I came across a documentary that has been uploaded to Youtube in six nine-minute segments. I’m still processing what I watched and how I felt about it, but in general I was impressed.

The documentary is about a young man in England named Fergus Drenna who has been foraging for food for 15 years. He’s a self-labeled vegetarian, but he makes allowances for meat if he comes across it freshly killed along the road. In other words, he eats road kill. He considers it wasted life, basically, if an animal unfortunate enough to have been killed by a car or truck is left to rot. And in the case of badgers, if he deems them unfresh, he drags them into the woods from which they came so that its fellow badgers may bury and mourn it (according to Fergus, badgers are known to do this).

The documentary follows him around a small town in the countryside called Sandwich as he shares his foraging knowledge with local people and then tries to recruit them for a big meal he wants to throw for whoever is interested. For the meal, he collects watercress from the local river, mushrooms (including the giant puffball and horn of plenty), blackberries, wild plums, wild spinach, wild flowers, stinging nettles, and local seaweed from the town’s rocky beaches. Rabbits and pheasants feature as the road kill meat; he would have prepared badger, too, but a health inspector advised against it, and Fergus decided he wouldn’t take the chance with his guests.

Fergus is a natural in front of the camera, and if he were on the Travel Channel I expect that he’d do just as well as Andrew Zimmern and Anthony Bourdain in attracting a huge audience. He’s personable, quick-witted, enthusiastic, and articulate. His articulateness is important, too, because his philosophies about food and nature are very convincing. (Don't worry, Mom, I'm not going to eat road kill.)

I have to admit that I was riveted by the documentary. I would love to have the knowledge that would allow me not just to find food in nature, but also to prepare it properly for consumption. In both cases, I haven’t the foggiest idea of where to start. Wild foods, as many note in the documentary, have a much stronger flavor than what is available in stores and markets. They’re also probably much more nutritious, and the fact that they haven’t been processed or transported thousands of miles is obviously a big plus, too.

Road kill, on the other hand, I’m too queasy for. If you have a well-trained nose and are comfortable handling dead animals lying in ditches – and if you’re willing to bend down in front of passing cars to sniff a dead animal – I guess that’s an advantage. So is the belief that an animal died simply because it was struck by a vehicle; he never talks about the possibility of disease factoring into an animal’s demise.

In the United States, the legal ramifications of a “road kill feast” gone terribly wrong are obvious, but perhaps the law is different in the U.K. (or people simply aren’t as litigious). Then again, maybe it’s such a “new idea” that the law hasn’t quite caught up to it yet.

If you’re interested in the documentary, have a look below.



I’ll warn you that there are a few moments that might make the more sensitive viewer turn away, but those moments are rare and, in my opinion, not particularly disturbing – PG13 stuff, in other words.

Also, in 1968 John McPhee wrote a fascinating piece for The New Yorker about Euell Gibbons, a well-known forager and wild edible plants author. Aptly named “A Forager,” it can be found here (registration required):

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1968/04/06/1968_04_06_045_TNY_CARDS_000291011

The article also appears in Secret Ingredients: The New Yorker Book of Food and Drink.

If anyone reading this has done any serious foraging, I'd be interested to hear about your experiences...and advice!