The pervasiveness of roadkill harvest in the Methow hints at a broader cultural transformation. Once, salvage was considered déclassé, if not outright dangerous. Snarked the humorist Dave Barry in 1998, commenting on the consumption of squirrels in the Miami Herald: “Doesn’t a person who eats roadkill rodent organs pretty much deserve to die?” Today, however, New Jersey residents can claim deer, Oregonians deer and elk, and enterprising Wyomingites deer, elk, moose, bison, and turkey. West Virginia is a comparative free-for-all, where anything goes aside from spotted fawns, bear cubs, and some birds.

Roadkill, for many families, provides food security—a free source of organic, high-quality meat perpetually available to communities that share the land with wildlife. From 2010 to 2020, the Alaska Moose Federation dispensed some 4,000 car-struck moose to poor, elderly, disabled, and Native households around the 49th state. “I don’t know how many times I pulled up to somebody’s house, and they were like, ‘We just put our last meal on the table; we didn’t know what we were gonna do,’” Laurie Speakman, a longtime Federation driver known locally as Laurie the Moose Lady, told me. When the Federation shut down in 2020 due to COVID-related budgetary issues, the closure sent ripples throughout Alaska. “I actually learned to sleep again,” Speakman said. “But people miss it tremendously.”

Still, salvage has its detractors. Groups like the Humane Society fret that legalization gives drivers a perverse incentive to run down animals (a rare event, but not unprecedented). Food-safety advocates note that wild meat could be tainted with salmonella, E. coli, or the like (though, as far as I can tell, the scientific literature contains no documented cases of roadkill-to-human transmission). One attorney has charged that serving roadkill in food banks is “highly discriminatory,” insofar as it implies that poor people don’t deserve the same rigorous food-safety standards as the wealthy. (To that, one might rejoin that a free-range venison steak is perhaps healthier than a hormone-pumped hamburger raised in a feedlot.)