Couple forage vegetables and eat roadkill to avoid shopping at supermarkets
A couple in the US hardly shops at supermarkets because they forage vegetables and eat roadkill.
Eric Joseph Lewis, 41, and Jess Russell, 26, make their meals from ‘wild food’ every day, meaning they only have to go to supermarkets for certain staples and treats.
The pair, who spend half the year living in Florida, forage mushrooms, coconuts, avocados, berries and more.
For protein, they rely on trapping wild hogs and iguanas, eggs from friends who keep chickens and catching invasive species of fish, such as catfish.
They also eat roadkill – deer (a carcass can provide up to 100lbs of meat), opossums, groundhogs, squirrels, wild turkeys and ducks.
Eric, from Knoxville, Maryland, said he makes sure to use every part of a dead deer for bone broth, bones for his dog Leela and to make leather.
‘If you can get over the fear and discomfort of this being a dead animal, you can recognise it was a life lived in freedom and respect it. Nothing had to die for it,’ he said.
https://metro.co.uk/wp-content/uploa...size=540%2C720
Eric, his girlfriend Jess and their dog Leela (Picture: SWNS)https://metro.co.uk/wp-content/uploa...size=540%2C720
Eric ‘processing’ an iguana he hunted in Florida (Picture: SWNS)https://metro.co.uk/wp-content/uploa...size=540%2C720
One of Eric and Jess’s ‘wild food’ meals (Picture: SWNS)https://metro.co.uk/wp-content/uploa...size=540%2C720
The couple sorting through wild-caught blue crabs and lotus seeds (Picture: SWNS)A typical meal for the couple would consist of home-grown onion, sweet potato and chayote topped with a wild mushroom they have foraged and garnished with stinging nettles.
They also often make wild berry smoothies and nettle pesto.
Eric and Jess still end up spending about £40 ($50) a week at grocery stores – to buy lentils, rice, kombucha, coconut yoghurt and the odd treat.
‘We get sweet drinks and treats – if we just got what we needed it would be $20,’ Eric said.
