Psst. Looking for a cheap (free, even, in many cases) source of protein that’s easy on the environment? Get ready for some tiny, delicious Buffalo wings, ’cause you’re gonna be eating pigeon!
Over at the Wired Science blog, Alexis Madrigal muses on “The Next Step in Local Eating”: the pigeon.
After all, he notes, pigeons are descendants of the passenger pigeon, which went extinct because it was just too tasty to live. And not only that, but because they basically eat garbage, “Pigeons are direct waste-to-food converters, like edible protein weeds, that leave droppings that could be used as fertilizer as a bonus.”
Of course, like other once-déclassé delights, they may need a different name. And how in the heck are you supposed to prepare the little buggers?
The type of pigeons typically found in cities (”rock doves” or “rock pigeons”) are not descended from the passenger pigeon. Rock doves are an introduced European species, passengers a native American species. Madrigal says they are “related,” which is true enough. Of course, both species are also related to dodos, which reputedly tasted awful.
Still, food for thought. For a while anyway — passengers were hunted to extinction within a very short time. Dodos, too, despite not being good eating.
I had to laugh over this. We were in San Francisco recently and had lived there for many years. We were walking in the Union Square area when I noticed a “street person” feeding the pigeons. I was thinking, oh man, don’t do that; they’re such a nuisance as it is. At that moment, he grabbed the nearest bird, (I assume) wrung its neck and placed it in a black plastic garbage bag he had with him. At first, I was SO grossed out. And then I thought, hey, he might be having a nice little dinner under a freeway bridge that night, better than dumpster diving. I hadn’t considered the “green” component.