Urban Foraging and Using Squirrels for Food

An article about a woman in Seattle that catches squirrels for food.

Melany Vorass is a 49-year-old college-educated woman living in a middle-class neighborhood of Seattle, Washington.

And in the backyard of her quiet neighborhood home, she traps, drowns and butchers squirrels for her dinner table -- one of her family's principle sources of meat.

Ms Vorass is part of a growing crowd of city-dwellers who are 'foragers' -- living off of greens picked from public parks, fish caught from local streams and mushrooms plucked from nearby forests.

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Ms Vorass believes commercial meat is unethical. Cows are raised on inhumane feedlots, butchered in inhumane ways and fed rations of unhealthy and environmentally-damaging antibiotics and feed, she says on her blog Essential Bread.

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Her urban foraging isn't just limited to squirrels. In her backyard, she plants a garden every year and raises chickens and goats.

She picks also dandelion greens and other 'weeds' for salads and occasionally she and her husband catch trout in a local lake.

Ms Vorass began trapping squirrels as a way to get the pesty critters out of her backyard and away from her garden -- which they were terrorizing.

Her husband set up a metal 'Have-A-Heart' live trap and started releasing them in a nearby park.

But then an irate neighbor complained that the was just dumping their problems somewhere else.

About that time, Ms Vorass discovered a recipe for squirrel and instructions on how to skin the rodents in an old Joy of Cooking cookbook.

The classic American cooking was first published in the height of the Great Depression and for many years contained recipes for all manner of wild animals -- from rabbits to opossums.

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Squirrel is tougher and darker than rabbit and somewhat greasy.

It does not taste like chicken.

Squirrel is actually richer than beef in some ways -- higher in fat and cholesterol. However, it's dramatically lower in saturated fats and higher in polyunsaturated, so-called 'good' fats.

 (Link to Ms. Vorass' blog). The reference to the old Joy of Cooking having rural recipes is intriguing. That would be handy to try and track down.

Here is a link to a University of Washington site on urban foraging. At the bottom of the page are links to articles and other web-sites.