F is for Urban Foraging or How to Skin and Dress Squirrel
Urban Foraging is also known as trash picking, dumpster diving, curb crawling, scavenging, and gleaning. Of course, this doesn't solely relate to food; much of urban foraging is all about what one spies and then claims from that peripheral zone known as the side of the curb. I, personally, have many things in my apartment that have come to me simply through a random walk after dinner - a Mennonite table/lamp stand, 2 art deco orange armless chairs, an Edwardian couch, several pieces of art, a few enormous pinecones, a bird's nest, a pellet from a shotgun, a bee hive, and a purple glass ball that I trash-picked when I was 5 years old and I've carried it around ever since. I like the idea of recovering items that have simply worn out their use someplace but still have life held within them, something to offer to someone new, and the acquisition doesn't require the exchange of money or the plundering of new materials. I apply the same philosophy in pets (why breed one when several already exist?) and cars. Food? Well, although I forage from gardens, I'm not nearly so adventurous when it comes to food that's been either swept up off the floor or taken from a former diner's plate. Let alone road kill. But I'll get to that later.
An extreme form of urban foraging is known as Freeganism. What is a Freegan? The www.freegan.info website states that freegans "embrace community, generosity, social concern, freedom, cooperation, and sharing in opposition a society based on materialism, moral apathy, competition, conformity, and greed." The goal is to live as minimally dependent as possible on the conventional economic structure while consuming the least amount of resources. I do not take a political or social stand on this. I'm all for vegans and freegans but I would rather people participate in the concepts of food democracy/policy/security on a legitimate level than form an anarchy that subsists of hungry, angry, anarchists who eat larvae-infested car crash possum. Grow a garden. Get into an urban elementary school and start a seed workshop, a salad bar, any alternative to over-done roast beef, hash browns, and gravy made from a powdered mix. I think a lot of our waste issues has to do with food standards and quality assurance. It’s pretty hard for restaurants to get rid of already cooked or prepared foods. There is so much waste involved. How can that be resolved? My concerns with food waste tend to revolve around both large and small groceries. At Loblaws I’ve often seen produce managers plucking away perfectly good bananas with only a smidgeon of speckling about to occur in order to freshly display a pile of green under ripe inedible ones. Do we just want a banana or do we care where it comes from, what are the politics involved, how much mileage (and therefore gas) does a food product travel before it hits our shelves. For those who are concerned about electricity, hydro, energy, gas, fuel sustainability, a large focal point of the “eat locally” (i.e. most of your food at least fresh food comes from within a 90 km radius of where you buy it from) movement is the simple fact that if your food doesn’t have a lot of mileage to travel than the resources it requires to get to you are minimal. If your rice is from Thailand and your meat from Bolivia and your cheese from Italy and you want ugli fruits from Singapore and figs from California and bananas from corrupt plantations in the Dominican Republic then your solar panels keep your household use of energy down but your actions override the benefits.
For more on Freeganism, I would check out their website. It’s quite the manifesto with words like infection and sickness and monster and capitalism. There will always be excess in human social communities and civilizations just like there always has been. I encourage any remedy to over consumption and irresponsible mismanagement of food resources. I admit that I prefer the way of Forbes Wild Foods (i.e. cultivating wild and native foods in a sustainable way) over eating from the trash but that’s simply my opinion.
Road Kill
An excerpt taken from the bright green website: "With road kill, the two rules to remember are:
How fresh is it?... stuff killed at night should be taken before the crows get to it at dawn... anything a bit puffy is bad!
How flat is it? If it has been splattered, you'll have fragments of bones, spilled gut contents, etc... Pick roadkill that has been struck a glancing blow, and if necessary, discard any pulpy bits. "
Taken from one of my favourite books on simple and plain living, the Foxfire Books, here is an excerpt on how to skin, dress, and cook squirrel (because if you’re an urban forager eating road kill this will be your most likely entrée): “The most common way of skinning a squirrel in the mountains was to ring the back legs at the feet, and cut around the top of the base of the tail. The hunter then put the squirrel on its back, put his foot on its tail, grabbed its back legs firmly, and pulled. The hide would come off just like a jacket right up to the neck. Then the front legs were pulled up out of the skin and cut off at the feet, and the pelt cut off at the neck. Usually, the head was not skinned out, but if you wanted to, it would be done about the same as with the coon. Cut off the head, back feet, and tail. Then gut.” Straightforward enough directions.
Now here’s how to cook a squirrel (warning: your apartment neighbours let alone roommates might not be so enamoured of the odours): “After soaking the squirrel long enough to get all the blood out, cut it into pieces and roll the pieces in flour, salt, and pepper. Fry until tender and brown. If the squirrel is old, you may want to parboil it in water containing sage to take out the wild taste.” Page 269. The Foxfire Book, Anchor Press/Doubleday 1972.
