July 2008 | On Our Radar
Roadkill
It’s What’s for Dinner
By Andy Anderson
Amidst the growing number of niches in today’s ever-evolving eco-scene are those committed greenies who are swearing off [insert enviro-vice here] for an entire calendar year: plastics, trash, foods grown more than 100 miles away — the list goes on.
One intrepid Englishman aims to trump them all. On April 1st, Fergus Drennan, a.k.a Fergus the Forager, set out on a mission to eat nothing but wild-foraged forest foods for a full 365 days. With a commanding knowledge of edible plants and fungi and loads of foraging experience, Drennan scours the woods daily for whatever he can find, from wild garlic and chanterelle mushrooms to seaweed, snails and immature pine cones. He filters ocean water for salts and harvests fruits to make wine, all in the name of reconnecting with nature and reducing society’s food-based waste.
And while Drennan is against the killing of animals for human consumption and considers himself a vegetarian, he occasionally gets his protein from freshly mauled game scavenged off English country roadsides. However stomach turning this might seem, Drennan considers eating roadkill just another way to make use of wasted resources.
The BBC featured his culinary exploits in The Roadkill Chef, a documentary that tracked his travels through the English town of Sandwich as he attempted to turn on the townspeople to the benefits of wild food through foraging fieldtrips and a climactic wild food feast at a local restaurant. Part of the show featured Drennan finding and eating roadkill duck, badger and rabbit.
Drennan’s Wild Man Wild Food company provides locally foraged ingredients (minus the roadkill) to fancy London restaurants. But during his year of wild food, where every action throughout the day must be evaluated for its caloric exertion and nutritional return, he’s making most of his living leading foraging seminars, with a wild foods cookbook to follow soon. Chart his progress at wildmanwildfood.com.
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