This past summer British media reported the bizarre job ad posted by an eco-conscious couple looking to pay a chef £5,000 to prepare a wedding banquet out of roadkill.

The unusual ad, featured on Bark.com, the UK’s leading online local service marketplace, mentioned that the couple had already sourced about 20kg of roadkill, including squirrel, pheasant, rabbit, partridge and deer, and were looking for someone with experience in preparing courses out of wild meats. The ideal candidate would able to skin, butcher and joint the cuts of meat, as well as prepare them in such a way that the guests wouldn’t know what meat they were eating.

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Calling Albert Podell ‘well traveled’ would be an understatement. 78-year-old Podell, a former Playboy editor, can truly say that he’s seen it all, after spending half a century visiting every country in the world. He’s encountered pretty much everything on his travels, right from guerillas in Yemen, to flying-crab attacks in Algeria, and police interrogations in Cuba. He has chased water buffaloes, broken his bones, and eaten all kinds of weird stuff. He’s been robbed, arrested, and almost lynched!

Podell was bitten by the travel bug at a very young age. “Aged six, I started to collect postage stamps, and where the other kids specialised in certain countries, I wanted a stamp from every country in the world,” he told Daily Mail. “Getting a passport stamp from every one may have been inspired by that.”

“Those little coloured bits of perforated paper also instilled in me a fascination with travel because I wanted to see the lands where all the objects, people, and places depicted on those stamps came from.” So he resolved early on that “there was more to life than hanging around in one city forever.”

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For a lot of people, the term “ethical fur” is nothing more than an oxymoron, since it still involves killing animals for their pelts, but one fashion designer is actually legitimizing the expression by using roadkill for her fur accessories.

Pamela Paquin, founder of the aptly-named Petite Mort fashion label, picks up animal carcasses from the side of the road and turns their pelts into fur accessories that sell for up to $1,000 a piece. All of her creations, from gloves, to leg warmers and hats are marked with a specially-designed silver disk that lets people know they are ethical products. “People need to look at the fur and say okay, that’s Petite Mort, it’s an ethical fur,” Paquin said about the distinctive label. I would add that it’s also a great heads-up to animal activists not to smear the expensive fur accessories them with paint, as they tend to do at public events.

The idea of roadkill fur had been in Pamela’s head for a few years, before she actually decided to actually make it happen. But after traveling the world as a global sustainability consultant and living in Denmark for seven years, she and her daughter returned to New England, looking to start over. She told the Washington Post that she found herself “sitting in the woods literally staring at the trees. Winter was coming. I was like: ‘What am I doing to do with myself?” There was that dead raccoon on the road the other day. My cousin’s a hunter. Maybe I should just do this.'”

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72-year-old Arthur Boyt from Bodmin Moor, England is an unusual man who eats unusual food. His preference in meat leans towards roadkill – the dead animals that lie on the side of highways after being hit by speeding vehicles. This has earned him a bad reputation, but he just considers it a waste to eat anything else.

Over the years, Boyt has taken on the fancy title of ‘Roadkill Connoisseur’. “I am often asked how did this all begin,” he says in an interview. “After 1976, when I was living on my own, I didn’t have to bother with anybody else’s feelings in the matter. The food was there to be bought home and eaten. I would pick up roadkill in those days to bring home, I’m a taxidermist, I skin things and stuff them. And instead of throwing the body away, I decided to start eating them. I think that’s how it came about.” Boyt isn’t queasy about eating a lot of things, including Polecats, whose meat he says has a vile stink. But he’s figured out a way to get rid of the nasty smell – just place the meat under running water for four days, and it’s good to eat for him. He’s eaten badgers and once even a swan, which “tasted like mud.” One of his favorites is Labrador. “It has a pleasant taste and flavor that is a bit like lamb. It turns people off when I say that Labrador is my favorite thing to eat but the point is, I would never kill an animal.” True enough, Boyt is not a wasteful person by nature. “I don’t believe in waste,” he says. “I’m a freegan, I try to eat all my meals for free.” Read More »

Because he doesn’t like the way farm animals are being treated, Jonathan McGowan, an English taxidermist from Bournemouth, Dorset has been eating roadkill instead of supermarket meat for the last 30 years.

44-year-old Jonathan McGowan first tasted roadkill at the age of 14, when he cooked a dead adder. It didn’t taste very good, but it did make him curious about how other dead animals might taste like. ‘From a young age I was always interested in natural history and being brought up amongst the farming, hunting and shooting communities of the Dorset countryside meant I was right in the middle of everything. Everywhere I looked there were dead animals; fish that had been caught, pheasants that had been shot and animals that had been run over in the road so naturally I became drawn to nature and how it worked.” He remembers he used to cut up dead animals to see their insides and all he could see was fresh organic meat better than what he saw in any meat shops. That’s why he didn’t see any problem with cooking and eating it. His parents knew he was bringing animals home to stuff, but he didn’t tell them he sometimes ate them too, because he knew they wouldn’t approve.

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I know what you’re thinking, so do those fashion companies making real fur coats, but Jess Eaton only uses the remains of animals that died of natural causes, have been hit by cars, or that have been killed for food.

Jess’ Roadkil Couture collection features weird items and accessories, like a necklace made from with the skulls of 12 dead pheasants, a bolero jacked made from the furs of 50 white rats eaten by her friend’s reptile, or a hat made from four magpie wings, but the designer claims she’s not out to shock the world. Sure, some of her pieces look like something only Lady Gaga would dare wear, but Jess Eaton says her creations are only meant to be beautiful, not outrageous.

While other women would probably flinch at the sight of a dead animal, Jess is more than happy to pick it up, skin it herself and use its various body parts in her unique fashion item. She recently received a dead horse’s head, which she carved and used in various pieces, proving she’d definitely not squeamish when it comes to working with her material of choice. Her seven-year-old son, Norton, however is sick of the smell of flesh-eating bugs in their Brighton house, and can’t wait until Jess finally opens her own studio, away from home. If there is an advantage to working with dead animals, is that the “fabrics” for her works are always free.

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