Jamie Oliver’s new series, Road Kill Café:

Will fresh badger burgers replace Turkey Twizzlers? A new series from
Jamie Oliver will champion the culinary merits of roadkill.

In the BBC programme Road Kill Café, viewers are shown how to forage by the roadside for foxes, squirrels and chickens that have met a sticky end.

Fergus
Drennan, a food forager who supplies restaurants including The Ivy and
Oliver’s Fifteen, demonstrates how to test animals for rigor mortis. If
the death is recent, Drennan promises to create a tasty meal from
tarmac to table within 24 hours of bumper impact.

The programme, created for BBC Three by Oliver’s Fresh One
production company, aims to show that fresh fox, hedgehog and badger
have a nutritional value that is greater than supermarket meats.

Now, a little bit of extremely valuable legal advice here. One of the easiest pieces of roadkill to obtain is pheasant: early evenings they are known to come to the roadside of the little back country lanes around the shooting estates to pick up gravel for their gizzards.

It’s not as if you’re trying to hit them as you speed around those lanes, but it does of course happen (Oops, sorry Guv’!). Now, if you hit one and then pick it up and take it home to eat it that is poaching. Tsk tsk. However, if someone else hits one and then you pick it up that isn’t, that’s entirely legit, you’re picking up roadkill, however fresh it might be.

The area just north of Bath, both before and the other side of the M4, moving up into Gloucestershire, is rich in such sporting estates. The Duke  of Somerset’s for example (Badminton) and others.

No, no, we never went up there with two cars early of an autumn’s evening, no, not at all.