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.
“We know that this isn’t something the ‘average’ chef would be happy
in helping us with, but are hoping that someone with the right skills
and our same passion for the environment can step forward and help us
out,” the couple wrote. “We have sourced the meat, so all they’d need to
do is come up with some delicious recipes to put on a roadkill banquet
for our 30 guests, we have approximately 20kg of roadkill meat in our
freezer!”
In an attempt to explain their strange choice of meat for the
wedding, the couple wrote that they had been eating roadkill for the
last three years as a way of minimizing food waste, and didn’t want to
break their principles, even for their wedding.
“The environment is so important to us, and will continue to be as we
settle down and start our family. Although money isn’t too much of an
issue, weddings are resource heavy and result in so much waste that we
don’t want to have any part in that,” the ad stated.
Bark.com
co-founder Kai Feller admitted that the job ad was unorthodox, but said
that he and his team pride themselves “on being able to connect
customers with the perfect professional, no matter what the job is”.
While eating roadkill is perfectly legal in the UK, provided the
animals have been killed accidentally and their meat isn’t sold, but
serving it to dozens of clueless guests does raise some ethical
questions. Then there’s the obvious safety concerns. While
commercially-raised animals undergo health check to ensure their meat
doesn’t contain any disease, wild animals do not.
