Road Kill Chefs: The Culinary Creators of the Highway Supermarket

Don't touch that brake, don't turn that wheel,
The life you save could be our next meal.
Four-legged critters make tasty dinners,
Went something splatters, we'll make a platter.

CHO: At the Road Kill Cafe,
We'll do it up your way.
We'll cook it fresh right from your grill to ours,
Just scrape it off the tire and we'll toss it on the fire.
Come chew the fat at the Road Kill Cafe.

Doesn't that sound appealing? Certain chefs seem to think so.

People have been cooking and eating road kill for longer than we are probably aware of but in today's world where food is processed before cooking, road kill chefs find themselves in the ewww mixture.

Fergus Drennan is most commonly known as the Roadkill Chef in Europe. He is a self proclaimed vegetarian that only eats meat if it has been killed on the road by someone else.

The law prohibits him, and anyone else for that matter, from taking out wild animals with automobiles, collecting them and eating them. However, the law does allow people to collect animals that have been hit by someone else and eat them.

Fergus Drennan is what is known as a forager, someone who roams the land collecting dead carcasses for consumption. He has supplied chefs with road kill ingredients for restaurants like London's The Ivy and Jamie Oliver's Fifteen.

Drennan says his favorite roadside dish consists of roast pheasant with Chinese dumplings, wild veggies with seasoned vinegar, soy sauce and garlic. Yummy.

One of Fergus Drennan's comrades and fellow forager is the famous chef once known as The Naked Chef, Jamie Oliver.

Jamie Oliver launched a new show on the BBC called the Roadkill Café where he will try to convince people that meals made from foraged roadkill is healthier than meals derived from supermarket meats.

Before the days of Fergus Drennan and Jamie Oliver came a man named Arthur Boyt. Boyt, a former taxidermist who started eating road kill food over fifty years ago and is currently writing a cookbook with recipes that include the use of badger, hedgehog, rabbit, mice and foxes not to mention an assortment of other wild animals.

While Arthur Boyt might enjoy a meal of badger sandwiches, you will not find him ordering a side dish of Canadian porcupine. According to Boyt the strangest thing he's eaten has been a horseshoe bat which he claims doesn't have a lot of flavor.

Road kill chefs are becoming increasingly popular especially in the Southern United States like West Virginia where local roadkill cook-offs are serving up dishes like "Buzzard Breath Maggotini" and "Blood Rocks and Guts over Snails & Maggots" (ground venison with black beans and rice).