Pigeons: The Next Step in Local Eating (No, Really)





At a time when rising demand for meat across the globe endangers the food system, and local eating has gained millions of (T-shirt wearing) adherents, it's time to reconsider our assumptions about what protein sources are considered OK to eat.

You see, city pigeons are the feral descendants of birds that were domesticated by humans thousands of years ago so that we could eat them and use their guano as fertilizer, we read in Der Spiegel. They're still doing their part, i.e. eating and breeding, but we humans have stopped doing ours, i.e. eating them.

Numbering in the hundreds of millions, they could be a new source of guilt-free protein for locavores in urban centers. Instead, we're still trying to kill off our species' former pet birds, which (as any city-dweller can attest) doesn't work.

"Killing makes no sense at all," Daniel Haag-Wackernagel, a biologist at the University of Basel, told Der Spiegel. "The birds have an enormous reproduction capacity and they'll just come back. There is a linear relationship between the bird population and the amount of food available."

And in the developed world after World War II, there's always been plenty of food.

"This explosion of the pigeon population is due to the large food supply, because after the war food became cheap in relation to income," Haag-Wackernagel argues on his website.
"Since this increase in our welfare, society has produced pigeon food in abundance through our wasteful practices."

It sure sounds like a bad situation, but put the two quotes together in the context of food production. A food source that lives on our trash that is so reproductively prolific that we can't kill it off?


And yet we expend energy trying to get rid of them.

It wasn't always this way. In fact, eating pigeons is as American as eating pumpkin pie. Probably more so, on a net weight basis, actually.

A 1917 report to the Massachusetts Board of Agriculture details the story of the
American passenger pigeon, extinct kin to our current city birds. The birds provided our founding fathers with a bountiful feast in 1648 when, according to Massachusets Bay Colony luminary John Winthrop, "multitudes of them were killed daily."

The report describes the many millions of birds that were killed all across the nation through the 19th century. A specialized itinerant profession even arose, the netters, who when pigeons were spotted
"learned their whereabouts by telegraph, packed up their belongings, and moved to the new location." In one particularly fascinating section, the author describes the last great flock of New
York pigeons on the lam from marauding bands of netters who sell their meat to market.

*Possibly the last great slaughter of pigeons in New York, of which we have record, was some time in the 70s. A flock had nested in Missouri in
April, where they were followed by the same pigeoners, who again destroyed the squabs. *The New York market alone would take 100
barrels a day for weeks without a break in price. Chicago, St. Louis,
Boston and all the great and little cities of the North and East joined in the demand. Need we wonder why the pigeons have vanished?

That's right: Passenger pigeons were hunted to extinction because they were a popular food in the great cities of Restoration-era America.

Of course, the obvious objection is that pigeons carry disease, but some evidence suggests that they aren't particularly susceptible to avian flu. As for the meat itself, I called up the FDA's food safety line to ask how pigeon compared, safety-wise, to your average factory-farmed pig or chicken, but after one-and-a-half hours on hold, the office closed down and I gave up.

But as part of this 65 percent not-kidding thought experiment, let's assume that there's nothing horrifically bad about eating pigeon.

Really, all pigeons need is a re-branding. Just as the spurned Patagonian toothfish became the majestic Chilean sea bass and the silly Chinese gooseberry became the beloved kiwifruit, pigeons can merely reclaim their previous sufficiently arugula-sounding name: squab.

The term squab now refers to the meat of the baby pigeon, but it can also mean pigeons in general, so we can simply extend the brand back to its historical proportions. In fact, some companies like Bokhari Squab Farms are already doing good business selling the stuff: A dozen of Bokhari's live squab goes for $60.

So, go buy sustainablesquab.com and encourage your urban friends to make omnivorism local. Just remind them: Pigeons are fowl.

*Disclaimer: How serious am I? 65 percent not-kidding. *

Image: A composite image of scavenger pigeons on the left and squab on the right. Left: flickr/ulterior epicure. Right: flickr/vanberto.

Thanks to urban agriculture supporter, TJ Sondermann, for his Twitter research help. Even though I'm pretty sure he's not going to be eating pigeon any time soon.
