Best Food Writing 2013 (32 page)

Mellencamp was also a frequent champion of the skinning contests the group held in years when the collective kill was higher. That's why everyone stood back while he made a cut under the tail of each squirrel, planted his boot on it while gripping the hind legs, and peeled off the hide like a wet sock. He finished in less than ten minutes.

Caudill didn't do so well either that morning. He'd hit two grays in the body, but his adult son Matt got two head shots and won the day. Matt and his friend Nathan Knoblitt made short work of cleaning them, slitting their bellies open and whipping out their viscera.

I asked Knoblitt why Mellencamp cut off the heads when he was skinning them. Doesn't anybody eat them? “It tastes like every nut in the forest. It's full of flavor,” he affirmed, but lots of folks stopped eating them for fear of mad squirrel disease. He then looked me straight in the eye and his face abruptly twitched and froze in a contorted rictus. I looked around uncomfortably and felt relieved when he started laughing.

Pretty much every squirrel recipe you can find is written on the assumption that cooks will obtain wild country squirrels like the ones the Indiana hunters sent me home with: animals fattened on acorns, hickory nuts, walnuts, and perhaps the odd nest egg or two. Nowhere does anyone advise the consumption of their far more fearless and omnivorous urban brethren. Why is that?

First there's the question of diet. City squirrels, faced with a relatively scarcer supply of tree nuts, supplement with the bounty of gardens and bird feeders, or scavenge what we cast away. They're rats with good PR, as the saying goes.

Rats at least know fear. City squirrels, on the other hand, know that the municipal code prevents you from drawing a bead on them with a muzzle loader. This emboldens the sort of bad behavior a
Washington County squirrel wouldn't dream of. A squirrel (or maybe it was two) ran onto the field during two sold-out games of the National League Division Series at Busch Stadium in Saint Louis last fall—and scampered across home plate while the Cardinals' Skip Schumaker was at bat in the fifth inning of game four before leaping into the stands. One afternoon a few summers back I followed a furious rustling into the kitchen and found a plump squirrel perched atop the counter tearing into a bag of peanut M&M's. While my cat dozed in a corner, it stood on its hind legs and confronted me with a hideous moaning, quacking call—QUA-QUA-QUA—before retreating through the hole it had torn in the window screen. I can count dozens and dozens of them along the path of my morning run, recently blocked by a bushy-tail nibbling on a piece of toast.

Would eating a Dumpster-diving rodent addicted to cold pizza, hot dogs, and tomatoes be any worse than eating a battery chicken that lives its life in a square-foot space sustained on slaughterhouse waste and antibiotics? Do they pick up any diseases or parasites their country cousins don't?

“Most problematic issues can be taken care of by thorough cooking, so eating is going to be the least of your worries,” says Steve Sullivan, curator of urban ecology for the Chicago Academy of Sciences and a specialist in the urban squirrel. He heads up Project Squirrel, a “citizen science” study that invites participants to log squirrel sightings on its website with the aim of gaining insights into the larger local ecosystem.

Sullivan didn't recoil when I asked if him if there was any reason not to eat city squirrels. Speaking strictly theoretically, he said it wouldn't be a bad idea at all—with proper management.

“People cry about how much corn it takes and how much land it takes to make a cow,” he says, “and especially pigs, with their excretory fluids in our waterways and things. Well, squirrels don't have any of those issues. So why would we not be using those, say, from the health, environmental, ethical standpoint? I don't see any reason not to, other than this cultural hang-up.”

The gray squirrel is remarkably prolific, Sullivan pointed out, sometimes breeding twice in a year with litters ranging in size from two to four pups. And it's resilient. “Squirrel populations can withstand relatively high levels of harvest without a significant decrease
in abundance because of compensatory reproduction,” biologists Michael A. Steele and John L. Koprowski write in
North American Tree Squirrels,
the authoritative work on the subject.

There are lots of complicating variables, but “one of the rules of thumb,” says Sullivan, “is you can harvest something less than 80 percent of the squirrel population every year and have it bounce back.” Roughly 80 percent of all squirrels don't make it past their first year, with most dying from predators and starvation. “They're selected for reproduction rather than longevity, unlike, say, elephants,” he points out.

There's even a possibility, though purely hypothetical, that reducing the eastern gray squirrel's numbers in the city would improve biodiversity by encouraging the fox squirrel—which tends to get pushed around by the gray—to move in.

Sullivan is, in theory at least, a dauntless omnivore. There are plenty of invasive and overpopulated plant and animal species in and around the city for which persuasive arguments could be made for promoting them in our diets: Asian carp, Louisiana crayfish, and garlic mustard greens, to name a few. “The fact of the matter is that we have made a cultural decision to self-limit protein,” he says. “That's a very arbitrary decision, and it's silly, ultimately. We have all these other options. Let's use ‘em!”

Sullivan doesn't suggest this without caution. He points to the familiar case of the passenger pigeon, once so populous that its flocks blotted out the sky. The species was driven to extinction by habitat loss and hunting, and the last one died in captivity in 1914.

“We as humans have an amazing ability to destroy everything in our path,” he says. “As a preindustrial and then industrial society we had a strong need for regulation of firearms and hunting and things like this within our cities. As cities have evolved, as species have adapted, as landscapes have stabilized, we've come to see that there are certain species that do really well amongst us: deer, Canada geese, squirrels, rabbits, raccoons, and opossums. If we could really get over the cultural hang-ups, darn it, we should be eating rats too. And I'm excited about the idea of changing regulations and helping people realize that consumption of wild-born, wild-grown meats is OK, and harvesting of said meats in an urban environment is something we can do in a regulated way, safe for humans and humane for
the harvested animal. We can't just have an anarchical harvesting of any game, under any circumstances, in any place. But I don't see why we can't have a regulated harvesting regime of all game of all species in all places, with the understanding that some species will be taken off the list.”

The state Department of Natural Resources could regulate the harvesting of urban squirrels for food much in the way it does rural ones: issue licenses and set a daily bag limit (currently five) and seasonal possession limit (ten).

But even if it did, a squirrel is not a deer or a turkey, and though it may taste somewhat similar, it isn't a chicken either. Adult gray squirrels rarely grow over two pounds. Is there enough meat on a squirrel to satisfy any appetite? “A lot of people in the world would look at that carcass and say, ‘Hey, that's a bonanza,'” Sullivan suggests.

My job as a food writer takes me to a lot of restaurants that serve rich foods that are hardly necessary, let alone healthy if eaten in excess. And that includes lots of meat. Two years ago I made a concerted effort to change my diet when I was off duty. I mastered portion control, and when not on the job I started eating mostly vegetarian. In that time I lost 35 pounds and I can once again touch my toes without losing my breath. I still love it, but don't crave meat as much anymore. I'm satisfied with less when I do eat it, and I appreciate it more. I'm not even close to endorsing a vegan diet. But collectively Americans, whose per capita meat consumption in 2011 was 216 pounds, could stand to eat a bit less.

But if I were to lose this swell gig, I'd need to replace the meat. If it came to that, why couldn't city squirrel be a plentiful, healthy, and nondestructive option?

Well, there are laws standing in the way. In Illinois the eastern gray squirrel is a protected species, along with domestic pigeons, striped skunks, bats, and dozens of other mammals and birds. It is illegal to hunt squirrels with a gun outside of the state-mandated season from August 1 to February 15, and it's illegal to trap them anytime for hunting purposes. And obviously it's illegal to hunt at all within the Chicago city limits—even if it's an animal that's gnawing through your power lines, chewing into your attic, and scrabbling above your head at five in the morning.

So what recourse do you have if squirrels are tormenting you? The city's Animal Care and Control department will remove nuisance wildlife from homes, but only if an officer actually sees it on the premises, which typically precludes removal of the squirrels and raccoons lurking in your attic or walls. In extreme circumstances department officials will leave a trap, and if they catch anything they'll take the animal to a wildlife rehabilitator, says Officer Carey Logan. “But we don't have the manpower to monitor those traps.”

A private company with the proper state-issued permits to trap and remove wildlife can take care of that, but it's going to cost you. Brad Reiter of Critter Control of Chicago, the local franchise of the country's largest wildlife removal firm, says he traps more squirrels than any other animal, about 2,000 a year. But that can be expensive. Armando Martinez of Pest Control Chicagoland says if there's more than one squirrel involved, a typical job including house repairs can cost anywhere from $500 to $2,000.

For anyone who doesn't take the killing of animals lightly, it should be pointed out that squirrels (and raccoons and skunks and bats and birds) trapped by removal specialists aren't typically relocated to some paradisiacal nature preserve. They're euthanized. And unlike the squirrels that were ravaging colonial cornfields, nobody's making burgoo out of them.

Popular culture is awash in dystopian survivalist fiction and film—
World War Z, Contagion, The Road,
to name a few recent examples. For the kids there's
The Hunger Games.
This appetite for apocalyptic anxiety in our diversions is curious, because these are scenarios that with some imagination don't seem any less frightening than those discussed in the documentary
Collapse,
in which former LAPD cop and prominent chain-smoking doomer Michael Ruppert asserts that the earth's resources have reached their peak ability to sustain industrial society. Grow a garden, he counsels. Save your seeds. The shit is coming down.

Why shouldn't we be at least a little bit paranoid? Last fall the Greater Chicago Food Depository released a report stating that 20.6 percent of Chicagoans are food insecure, meaning over half a million people in the city are unsure where their next meal is coming from, or they're not getting enough to eat every day, or they don't have any place to get it. Not long after, Wall Street reported its worst
quarter since the 2008 meltdown, Tyson recalled 131,300 pounds of ground beef in 14 states, and a Listeria outbreak ensued after Colorado-grown cantaloupes were shipped to 25 states, sickening 146 people and killing at least 30. Last month an Associated Press survey of economists, think tanks, and academics reported the U.S. poverty rate is at its highest since 1965—and thanks to this summer of drought, the US Agriculture Department says food prices will rise 3 to 4 percent. Right now, we're unable to pay our mortgages, find jobs, or fill the gas tank. How much longer until we're unable to feed ourselves?

Meanwhile, Alderman Lona Lane wanted to ban chickens in the 18th Ward, collective-food-production incubator Logan Square Kitchen closed in May after enduring 19 inspections over the prior two years from city inspectors who couldn't or wouldn't understand its business model, and police routinely harass pushcart vendors who support their families by cutting up fresh fruit and sprinkling it with lime juice and chili powder. The city remains hostile and uncomprehending toward small-scale private and commercial food producers precisely at a time when the economy needs them the most.

What if a real catastrophe occurred and trucks stopped delivering cases of pink-dyed farmed salmon fillets and barrels of ketchup-flavored corn syrup to Costco? Could you feed your family in the middle of a teeming, hungry metropolis? What would you do? What could you do? Would you turn away a meal of squirrel or pigeon or rat if you could catch it? Could you catch it?

Last December the
Seattle Times
reported that a local woman had begun regularly trapping and eating the squirrels that had been invading her home. In Washington it's legal for homeowners to trap and euthanize animals that are causing property damage (though the American Veterinary Medical Association considers her method of dispatching them—drowning—to be inhumane).

Thinking on the fringe: if things got really bad, could I feed my family on city squirrel? Build up a stash? Maybe make cross-rooftop trades with the neighbors—squirrel meat for matches, flour, and cooking oil?

The chef led me through the kitchen and onto the sun-dappled patio behind his restaurant. A meticulous student of southern food history,
he took a dead squirrel by the tail and nailed it to a wooden railroad tie braced against the brick wall.

“Americans have gotten really, really weird about food in a very short period of time,” he said. “Obviously, working in restaurants I work with a lot of immigrants, and they're not afraid of bones or weird animal parts.”