Here in America especially, people have pretty narrow ideas of what is acceptable to eat. We’ve cut back our produce variety to a very small percentage of what’s actually out there, and there are only a handful of animals that are considered standard fare. So, it’s not surprising that people might balk at the idea of eating pigeons – those little waste-scavenging creatures commonly known as ‘rats with wings’.
From Wired:
You see, city pigeons are the feral descendants of birds that were domesticated by humans thousands of years ago so that we could eat them and use their guano as fertilizer, we read in Der Spiegel. They’re still doing their part, i.e. eating and breeding, but we humans have stopped doing ours, i.e. eating them.
Numbering in the hundreds of millions, they could be a new source of guilt-free protein for locavores in urban centers. Instead, we’re still trying to kill off our species’ former pet birds, which (as any city-dweller can attest) doesn’t work.
“Killing makes no sense at all,” Daniel Haag-Wackernagel, a biologist at the University of Basel, told Der Spiegel. “The birds have an enormous reproduction capacity and they’ll just come back. There is a linear relationship between the bird population and the amount of food available.”
Our own wasteful practices are what has encouraged these birds to be fruitful and multiply. Our culture has gotten so prosperous, we routinely throw insane amounts of food away. Wired declares that eating pigeons is ‘green tech at its finest’, given that the birds live off our trash – we don’t have to spend money to feed them. The author of this piece attempted to get information about the safety of eating pigeons, but wasn’t successful. Still, he says he’s ‘65% not kidding’.
Would you be open to eating things not commonly considered appropriate as food? Pigeons? Squirrels?
Link [Wired]
Photo credit: Flickr user weaponofchoice
