Excerpts from the Atlas Obscura -
How Alaska’s Roadkill Gets a Second Life as Dinner
A unique system turns moose killed in collisions into meals.
BY MARK HAY
But in the ‘70s, Alaska developed a clever system to turn this burden into a boon: The state created a roadkill salvage program. In this system, the state contacts citizens and charities every time a trooper finds or is alerted to a big animal dead on the road. Soon thereafter, these groups and individuals swoop in, spirit the corpses away, and turn them into hundreds of thousands of pounds of edible meat every year. In theory, this lean red flesh is as versatile as beef, but it’s typically hacked into stew chuck or ground down for use in burgers and sausages. Game meats, which are wiry to start with and ever tougher with age, benefit from being being broken up and mixed with their own fat.
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Salvaging roadside moose probably wasn’t a radical or challenging idea in 1970s Alaska. People familiar with game meats, as many in the state were and are, know how to tell when an animal is diseased or when meat’s been corrupted by heat, time, or damage to internal organs. With that knowledge, roadkill isn’t disgusting or dangerous. It is, as Buck Peterson, a longtime writer on American “cuisine de asphalt,” puts it, “a gift.”
That’s especially true for moose. Though it’s not sold in supermarkets, moose is widely coveted and consumed in Alaska, with local hunters harvesting and divvying up millions of pounds of flesh every year. And even one good animal can feed one man for about a year. “Everybody sees the value in 200 to 400 pounds of high-quality, edible meat,” says Del Frate. Especially in a state with high (and rising) food insecurity, no one wants to waste that resource.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/moose-salvage-network-alaska
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