Public attitudes toward eating roadkill are changing, slowly but surely. You can see the shift at North Valley Food Bank in Montana where, rather than being grossed out by the cooked roadkill, patrons tend to be curious and interested.
“It’s more I see a fascination with it,” Grogan-King said.
And, as food bank patron Daniel Kaasa pointed out to Montana Public Radio:
“I mean, if you’re hungry you’ll eat. And there’s nothing wrong with it.”
He and his wife have been getting groceries from the food bank since 2013 and have become known for requesting roadkill meat whenever the kitchen has it in-stock.
“It tastes fine and it’s better than low-quality food,” he said.
If you pluck an animal off the road immediately after it’s hit — or, as some recommend, within two hours if it’s summer; 10 if it’s winter — and if you prepare and store it properly, the remains can be safely salvaged into consumable meat later on.
Rather than just dismissing the dead animals, salvaging their meat can be a way of paying respects to it, or at the very least avoiding unnecessary waste of a perfectly fine food source. Typically, in most states, maintenance crews will just remove the roadkill to be burned, buried, composted, or recycled at rendering plants.
Cooking roadkill can help food banks and charity organizations cut costs, and it can also save the state and city some expenses by reducing the need for roadside clean-up crews and disposal methods.
That’s sort of how a roadkill feeding program in Trempealeau County, Wisconsin, called “Helping the Hungry,” started in 2015. When the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources quit contracting with its counties to remove dead animals off the roadsides, many counties, including Trempealeau, initially decided to just throw the bodies in ditches and let them rot.
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