by Justice William W. Bedsworth

I am not a picky eater. I didn’t get this body by sending food back to the kitchen.

But there’s a lot more gourmand in me than gourmet. The universe of what I consider food is a solar system rather than a galaxy. Meat, potatoes, breads, salads, pizza, tamales, ice cream, cakes, cookies (raw or cooked). That’s pretty much it.

It’s kind of a classic American approach to food. While generations after mine have become more adventuresome,¹ and there have always been nutcake edibles like Rocky Mountain oysters² and county fair food,³ our country is, in general, not in the avant garde of the Bon Appetit readership.

Contrast that with our European cousins. Europeans eat everything.

The French get their pigs to dig up fungi known as truffles, which they then sell to each other for ungodly sums of money. The Brits eat jellied eels, they make sausage with pigs’ blood, and they cover their toast with marmite, a spread made from yeast extract.⁴

The Dutch eat horse meat and a combination of raw herring and raw onion that would be better if it were first cooked . . . and then burned and thrown out.

Tongue, goose liver, duck pancreas, “eye of newt and toe of frog, wool of bat and tongue of dog,” you name it, it has disappeared down the throat of a European. Hell, the Scots eat something they call a haggis.

Here’s the recipe for a haggis: you take the liver, heart, and lungs of a sheep, minced and mixed with beef or mutton suet and oatmeal. Not the beef or mutton, you understand, but the beef or mutton suet. You know what suet is? Suet is the “hard white fat around the kidneys” of barnyard animals.

You take this pudding-like oatmeal, fat, and organ mixture, you season it⁵ and then, if you haven’t thrown up whatever was in your stomach, you pack it into a sheep’s stomach⁶ and boil it.

So help me, this is the national dish of Scotland. And let’s not lose sight of the fact these are the people whose national music is bagpipe marches. Coupla doctoral degrees to be had by any psych major studying masochism in Edinburgh, if you ask me.

But I have to admit, this is all just a matter of taste. What you choose to eat—and what I choose, for that matter—is a matter of personal preference. If you want to eat snails and I want to eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with mayonnaise . . . well, so be it.

Except for roadkill. That’s illegal.

Unless your personal preference is to go to jail after dinner, you can’t eat roadkill. At least not in California.

In California, the animal you run over cannot be carted off to your freezer. It must stay by the side of the road. California reserves jurisdiction over dead animals—wild animals, that is, not pets—to state agencies.

Schrodinger’s deer belongs to no one when it starts to walk across the highway. But if it gets hit by a car, it becomes the property of the state.

This varies from state to state. In Colorado and Massachusetts, the deer is yours if you want it. In Texas and Louisiana, it’s not. I don’t have time to go through all fifty states and commonwealths. If you hit the deer anyplace else, you’ll have to take out your cellphone and look up the legality of putting it on your menu. But in California, you’ll have to walk away from that 100 pounds of venison and go spend six dollars for a pound of ground round.

There are several reasons for this. One is that our state is concerned about whether the meat you’d be reaping is safe. Who knows where that possum has been partying—or with whom? It may have been returning from a possum rave just chock full of ecstasy.

PETA’s official position is that you should be able to eat roadkill, and they probably know more about how wild the life of wildlife is, but the state is afraid you’ll get sick if the goose you run over is an alcoholic and you make a cirrhotic foie gras.

The state is also concerned about your more immediate safety. They’re not sure your life insurance will pay up if you’re hit by a truck while you’re trying to scoop up a raccoon on Pacific Coast Highway.

And other people might be injured trying to avoid you. “So help me, Officer, there was a guy out there with a stick and a spoon trying to scoop a rabbit into a hub cap. I swerved to avoid him and slid into the tree. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.”

But one of the most oft-mentioned reasons we can’t allow roadkill cuisine is fraud. Apparently, our species is so degenerate it would stoop to hunting animals out of season and then trying to pass them off as roadkill.

“Honest, Judge, this bighorn sheep was standing in my driveway. I didn’t see him because it was dark, and as I pulled into my garage, I ran into him and he flew onto my hood. I had just tied him onto the fender to make room for my wife’s car when the officer drove by and saw me. I have no idea how a bighorn sheep ends up in Garden Grove or how he got that bullet hole in his side. Probably gang violence.”

Other states are not as solicitous of their citizens. Most of them have provisions that let their residents harvest whatever they hit. They’re willing to expose those people to all the dangers I’ve described.

Virginia, for example, is now considering expanding their law to allow the hunters and gatherers of their state to gather whatever animal they have hunted down with their Audis and Buicks or whatever animal ANYONE ELSE has clobbered. Virginia House Bill 25 would not only allow dead animal “harvesting”⁷ by the driver who takes it out, but also by anyone who just comes upon a dead animal in the road.

You don’t have to hit it, you just have to find it. You just pull over, take out your cellphone, and call for a state trooper to come and view the animal. If the trooper certifies that the animal was killed accidentally, it’s yours.

Which sounds fine, in the ordinary situation. If it’s two in the morning on Interstate 75, the raccoon has tire tracks across it, and there’s blood on your bumper, you’ve got a pretty good circumstantial case. If, on the other hand, you’re calling from a dirt road in the back woods about a twelve-point trophy buck the day after hunting season ends, it might be a tougher sell.

And what do you do if the state trooper denies your claim? Is there an appeal? Do you get to ask for a second opinion? Call for a coroner’s inquest?

Then there’s this nightmare scenario. Guy calls the highway patrol. Says he just drove past a dead deer on the highway and wants to claim it. Dispatcher tells him to start filling out the form on his app,⁸ and they’ll get somebody out to the scene as soon as possible.

But in the hour it takes to free up a trooper to go check out the dead animal, another guy shows up and claims he’s the guy who actually hit the deer and killed it. Says he went up to the next off-ramp, turned around and came back, only to find this interloper trying to claim his venison. Now not only does the trooper have to figure out who has first dibs on the roadkill, he’s gotta deal with two guys who got into a fistfight waiting for him, both of whom want to file assault charges on the other.

This is not only gonna require the duty magistrate to go out to the scene, it’s probably gonna eat up three days of court time that we desperately need to try crooked politicians.

Those are the kinds of things California has wisely tried to protect you from by prohibiting roadkill harvest.

Well, not exactly “wisely.”

In point of fact, California enacted a bill which would allow you to “hit and eat” in 2019. Both houses passed it, governor signed it, the whole deal. But it turned out it was gonna cost TWO MILLION DOLLARS to implement it.

$575,000 of that was to tell everybody it was okay to harvest pronghorns and wild pigs now, $1,600,000 was for “computer equipment and technology,”⁹ and then another $1,000,000 a year was for . . . well, they didn’t explain that. I guess it probably costs a million dollars to do anything in California.

I thought they could probably make up that cost by serving what the CHP found in government cafeterias, but instead, the legislature said, “Um, two million, huh? Let us get back to you on that.” So, five years later— for better or worse, I’ll leave that to you to decide— you can’t put Bambi in your trunk.

I’ll let you know if this changes. For now, you might want to clip this column out and put it in your glove box. MCLE credits pending.

BEDS NOTES

1. E.g., eating fish that has not been battered and fried. I blame the Japanese.
2. If you don’t know what that is, look it up.
3. Essentially, deep-fried fat.
4. Which you have a lot of lying around if you drink as much beer as the Brits do.
5. Good luck with that. There’s not enough cayenne pepper, tarragon, turmeric, and cardamom on the planet to make this edible for any reason other than cultural lockstep.
6. I am NOT making this up. Boiling it in a sheep’s stomach is as necessary to a Scottish haggis as stuffing is to a Thanksgiving turkey.
7. Their term, not mine.
8. There’s gotta be an app for this, right?
9. I told you there’d be apps.

William W. Bedsworth is an Associate Justice of the California Court of Appeal. He writes this column to get it out of his system. A Criminal Waste of Space won Best Column in California in 2018 from the California Newspaper Publishers Association (CNPA). And look for his latest book, Lawyers, Gubs, and Monkeys, through Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Vandeplas Publishing. He can be contacted at william.bedsworth@jud.ca.gov.