Maybe this is the fact that I’ve always lived in cities talking, but the idea of giving roadkill meat to food banks just floors me. From a food safety standpoint, it doesn’t seem safe to eat meat that’s been lying out at ambient temperature for who knows how long - I mean, I’ll throw out hamburger meat from the store if I accidentally forget to put it in the fridge and it sits out for an hour. Ive had far too much education on food safety to trust my health to a dead animal on the curb. Wild meat could have all kinds of parasites in it or be carrying diseases that farmed meat is screened for. From a human standpoint, it seems demeaning to the poor to expect them to eat meat that can’t be guaranteed to be safe, especially when a low-income household might not have anything besides a microwave or a toaster oven to cook with.
My family had to take advantage of food banks when I was a kid and never once were we given mystery meat. I work at a grocery store and all the food banks around here get most of their stock from us and our competitors, and from talking to the people who work at them I’ve been told that if someome did show up with random meat it goes right in the dumpster.
Is this really a thing? How does it get done safely? Have you ever received roadkill from a food bank or given it with the expectation that it would be used?
Can’t answer for food banks, but I’ve eaten roadkill deer. I was a kid at the time, and my father knew very well it was perfectly fresh, since he was the one who’d (completely unintentionally) hit it. It was in the pickup in minutes, being processed as any other game within the hour.
I’d imagine it would first have to go to a butcher to get processed first. I’m guessing people are donating the meat, not the carcass.
From Wisconsin, for deer hunters: https://dnr.wisconsin.gov/topic/hunt/donation.html
It states what I was guessing, you have it processed and donate the meat. You’re not just hauling a dead deer to the pantry.
A friend of mine comes from a hunting family. A while back she was working “nuisance control” for a city and one of her jobs involved assisting cops with roadkill. Once or twice she field dressed a deer on the side of the road and took it home.
If it’s known to be fresh (I’d hesitate at it having been dead more than an hour or two), I see no reason to not take it home and make use of it. Seems better than wasting all that meat.
I assume that getting in touch with animal control and hauling the carcass to a butcher would take several hours if not overnight. That seems like a problem to me if it isn’t promptly refrigerated. Am I missing something here?
It was totally a thing in Alaska, until Covid. So many moose are killed on roads each year, Alaska State Troopers has an official list to sign up to butcher roadkill. It use to be that you had to give half the meat to the food bank.
Yeah, you don’t do it with road pizza that you just found lying there wearing tire tread. And you certainly don’t do it with an animal who died of natural causes. When you hit the deer, you call the authorities right away. It’s no different from a deer that died from a gunshot, and hunted game is prized in rural areas (I’ve had some seriously amazing venison chili).
As for freshness, even with the time to get the authorities there and get it to a butcher, it’s probably still a lot fresher than the beef and pork you city-folk eat. City folk might think country attitudes are weird, but the feeling is absolutely mutual.
If you shoot a deer in the woods there will be a time interval before you get it to either a butcher for processing or take it home to do it yourself.
The meat you get at the grocery store, not to put too fine a point on it, has been dead for days already. It has already “used up” a lot of the time until it’s no longer fit to eat. Something just killed should be processed as soon as practical, but it’s not an emergency and it doesn’t have to be done in an hour (though it’s great if it can happen that fast). Field dressing removes the greatest spoilage hazard, after which the carcass is not only lighter but has some time before it goes bad.
You are missing the vast majority of human history when people didn’t have “prompt refrigeration” and survived eating meat that was a few hours old just fine.
If, big if, you’re alive. Good.
If the deer is still alive, possible. It needs to be dispatched quickly.
It’s best to wait on LE to do this. They get Game warden out quickly enough. He and whoever he can enlist field dress it. The Game wardens have freezers available and places that make applications for it. They know exactly where to take it.
I’m sure rotten roadkill of unknown heritage is not donated. Just hauled to a landfill somewhere.
Well, the ones who didn’t die of trichinosis, at least.
I’m not sure I understand the process of deciding what animal that’s dead on the roadside is and isn’t safe to eat. I would not do well in a post-apocalypse.
What about RFK’s bear that inspired this post? If he’d called that in, would they be sending bear meat to the food bank?
I don’t know what’s hard to understand. This isn’t people finding random corpses of unknown age, this is animals immediately after they are hit so the exact time of death is known.
Freshness isn’t the only concern. How do you determine on the roadside that the animal didn’t have parasites or an infection that could taint the meat? I’m legitimately asking.
But with the farmed animal the interval before it goes into refrigeration is much shorter, is it not?
The same way you would with a shot animal, I assume. Then you cook the meat so that any unnoticed parasites are killed. They aren’t feeding people moose tartare.