I eat roadkill and forage — we should treat plants and animals like people

Teach a man to eat roadkill you feed him for a lifetime — which may not be long considering his risky diet.

Eric Joseph Lewis, 41, spends just $50 a week on store-bought food, opting to forage for wild plants and eat roadkill, instead.

Lewis and his girlfriend Jess Russell, 26, spend their days eating wild food like berry smoothies and nettle pesto, and scavenging for stray carcasses, such as dead deer, which could provide up to 100lbs of meat.

“I eat wild food on a daily basis and grow a good amount,” Lewis, who lives in Knoxville, Maryland, told SWNS. “We should treat plants like people.”

Also a fan of opossums, squirrel and groundhog, the homesteader said that eating roadkill isn’t as bad as it sounds.

“If you can get over the fear and discomfort of this being a dead animal, you can recognize it was a life lived in freedom and respect it,” he declared.

Lewis, who finds work as a horticulture educator, says he still relies on supermarkets for specialties such as kombucha and coconut yogurt, but his food expenses have been drastically slashed by his roadkill regimen.

Lewis began his new age journey in his late 20s after getting into yoga and meditation and even spent some time living in a tent in the woods, working just one day a week as a painter to fund his food shop.

His interest in foraging was ignited in 2010 after his beloved, late uncle pointed out that he was living on top of a blueberry patch.

Now he lives at a plant nursery, which grows fruit, vegetables and nuts. And when he’s not dining on already-dead animals, he hunts sustainably by targeting invasive species, such as catfish, helping to rebalance the local ecosystem.

The plant enthusiast from New England also spends several months of the year in Florida in search of mushrooms, and setting traps for invasive animals such as wild hogs and iguanas.

“We gather coconuts, avocados and different mushrooms,” he shared. “I’m teaching [my dog] Leela — a mix between a blue heeler and beagle — to forage for mushrooms too.”

Lewis believes in using the whole animal, by turning their skin into leather or using the bones for broth and for their dog, which is to “treat them respectfully and lovingly,” he rued.