A crash course in roadkill fine dining

“Get up to anything nice last night?” My dentist asks, picking at the neglected crevices between my incisors. Before he pulls out, I have a moment to consider my response. Oh, go on then. “It was quite interesting”, I say, before spitting the acid green mouthwash and any dental remnants into the sink. “I was invited to a dinner where they only served roadkill.”

Rewind ten hours and I’m entering an inconspicuous garage door in Kennington, South London. I’d been told to arrive at 7 pm sharp – wearing all black – and that no photographs are permitted for the duration of the evening. I’m handed a consent form. I skim read; the gist is that I’m liable for everything I’m about to consume. So if I’m hooked up to a blood transfusion tomorrow morning with suspected bTB, it’s all on me. I sign it and, in exchange, am handed a navy overall with the letters KHAM and the number 15 stitched on the breast.

We’re here for a ‘gastronomic experience’ by France-based Russian artist Petr Davydtchenko to mark his upcoming DEATH BOOK, which is a recipe book of sorts, but not your average one. The evening and accompanying installation is hosted at the London HQ of A/Political, a radical arts organisation known for supporting challenging, often politically searing work that would otherwise be impossible to realise in the relatively risk-averse art world. Most recently, they produced and launched Bruce LaBruce’s new film, The Visitor in a London sex party of Berghain proportions.

From 2016-2019, Davydtchenko lived exclusively off carcasses found on roadsides in southern France: cat, dog, bird, snake, fox, donkeys – little was off-menu. People would sometimes visit to check whether he’d found and eaten their pets (sometimes he had) and he became adept at skinning, butchering, rationing and testing for diseases. Instead of slaughtering animals himself, he was feeding off the detritus of automation. DEATH BOOK charts this alternative way of life. It’s not a light read, and some will be repulsed – but whether it’s as repulsive as the capitalist systems it critiques remains on the table.

The mood in the room hovers somewhere between Alcatraz prison and those tentative moments before things get freaky in Eyes Wide Shut. It was a morbid curiosity that had brought me here, and as I stand over the carcass of a tabby (who looks a little like my childhood cat, Dimbleby), I wonder if tonight could be it – the end, that two hours from now my organs will be rotating on a spit surrounding by a table of salivating guests clad in velvet robes and animal skin masks. As I gaze into Dimbleby Jr’s hollowed eyes, I make peace with the fact that if this is how I go, at least it’ll be a story.

Someone points to a freezer, into which other nervous guests also wearing prison issue are peering in. It’s well stocked: badgers, pheasants, various bits of deer, crows and possibly a grouse. So far, so Cotswolds minibreak.

Now, for the moment we’ve all been putting off: dinner. A server passes around shots on a silver platter – the liquid has the look and viscosity of fresh blood, but apparently it’s beetroot and blackcurrent gin. They’re breaking us in. The herd of around 30 guests is ushered to a backroom, dimly lit by a red neon sign that reads “downstairs bar” in Chinese. We’re seated along rows of metal benches and everyone seems to be mentally strapping in for the culinary hurricane. The presence of culinary heavyweight Masayoshi Haraguchi, former executive chef at the Michelin-starred Dominique Bouchet in Paris, is reassuring, along with the news that all ingredients were sourced fresh from roadsides near London within the last week.

First up, it’s roadkill jelly consommé (ft. deer, pheasant, rabbit) with white bean creme, offset by a sharp but fruity Clos des Rocs Burgundy White. Then the Peking duck arrives, except apparently it’s not duck, it’s rat. And while I’m busy vaulting new mental hurdles, my table mate seems unfazed. He tells me, with enthusiasm and visual references, about how he and his friends recently dined on rams’ testicles (I recall Lady Colin Campbell chowing down on turkey balls in one of the more iconic I’m a Celeb bushtucker trials). Someone then clarifies that the dish we just ate was in fact pheasant, not rat, and I lose track of what level of reality I’m operating on. My last culinary recollection is a bone with a series of numbers branded on its shaft skewering a meatball (aka Tsukune). It’s deer, apparently, and it’s delicious; tender and deep. “Where did you find it?” I ask Petr. “The A21,” he says.

As the superficial horror of eating roadkill wears off, I’m left with an odd taste in my mouth: pungent and gamy, but also poignant. The global food industry is riddled with contradictions, hypocrisy, bureaucracy and extreme levels of waste, the truth of which seems much harder to swallow than an immaculately presented wild rabbit shumai, even if it did die on a road instead of in an abattoir. Humans have killed to eat for over 2 million years – the only difference here is intention.

I’d survived the night, which was a bonus. But in the immortal words of Louis Theroux, “I wasn’t quite sure what I’d just seen, but I knew it was time for me to leave.”