Enjoy Pothole Possum Stew at the RoadKill Cook-Off

Weird food festivals are gaining popularity among Americans, who are generally more known for enjoying a rather limited diet than for being gastronomic adventurers.  There’s Honolulu’s Spam Jam, Raleigh’s BugFest and Gilroy’s Garlic Festival, but perhaps most interesting of all is the RoadKill Cook-Off held in the small town of Marlinton, West Virginia every year.

From CNN.com:

It’s RoadKill Cook-Off time, where past years’ crowds have sampled dishes like Pothole Possum Stew, Fricasseed Wabbit Gumbo and Smeared Hog with Groundhog Gravy.

The RoadKill Cook-Off is so popular that it fills all the motels and hotels in the county when it takes place on the last Saturday in September, said David Cain, who runs the event and samples all the dishes.

“There are some that are better than others, but I’ve never really had anything that I really didn’t like,” Cain said. “But there was one year they cooked a rattlesnake in some kind of stew, and … there was no way I could taste that one.”

The RoadKill Cook-Off began in 1991, when organizers thought it might boost attendance at the main event: the Pocahontas County Autumn Harvest Festival.
Did it ever.

About 10,000 people from all over the country came to last year’s gathering, Cain said. All dishes featured in the festival must have animals commonly found dead on the side of the road — such as deer, squirrels and snakes — as their main ingredient. But the meat doesn’t have to be actual roadkill.

“Judges will deduct points for every chipped tooth resulting from gravel not removed from the RoadKill,” the official rules warn. “All judges have been tested for cast-iron stomachs and have sworn under oath to have no vegetarian tendencies.”

It could be argued that eating roadkill is the ultimate green way to be a meat eater. And it’s not just rural folks living in extreme poverty that will peel a recently-dead raccoon off the road and make it dinner. Some environmentalists see it as equivalent to foraging or dumpster diving.

Fergus Drennan, star of the BBC program The Roadkill Chef, explains:

Drennan describes himself as a vegetarian, saying he’s got “issues” with animal husbandry, and won’t eat creatures that are raised for slaughter. Ones killed by accident on our roads, though, are “just another resource”.

“One of the few things that I tend to avoid are cats and dogs,” he explains. “In theory, I’d have no problem with eating them. But they’ve always got name tags on their collars, and since I have two cats, it’s a step too far.

It makes sense – it’s all about using what’s available. Eating roadkill has an even lower environmental footprint than being a conventional vegetarian who buys groceries at the market, plus, it’s free.

So, do the popularity of festivals like the RoadKill Cook-Off mean more Americans will become open to the idea of foraging for food? Probably not – it’s all about the novelty factor for most. But it’s an intriguing idea.

Link [CNN] +[The Independent]

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