Really, he's dead serious - this guy wants roadkill

I sat at Ryan Haag's kitchen table with a pair of Starbucks mugs, a burning scented candle and four strips of jerky displayed neatly on a white plate. I mistook them for some kind of pastry upon first glance.

I drove to Suffolk to talk about his recent Craigslist posting. You may have seen it on the national "Best of Craigs-list," but if not, the headline pretty much tells you everything you need to know: "Wanted: Roadkill."

To hear that a man in Suffolk is collecting roadkill may conjure up images of someone in a coon-skin cap sitting on the porch of his shanty, but Haag's neighborhood is almost cookie-cutter suburbia. His house is impeccable, as if it came right from a Pier 1 catalog. His hair is short and neat.

Since he posted the ad in late January, it's received a lot of attention. Mother Jones called for an interview. So did a Canadian newspaper. And he's received a glut of e-mails, almost all of which support the idea and cheer him on.

Haag is not trying to mimic a "Reno 911" skit. The 26-year-old Navy officer is dead serious. He wants roadkill.

Not just any roadkill. Not the raccoon that lacks the reflexes to make it to the other side of the road or the afternoon snack the hawks have been picking at. Haag wants animals the size of a deer or larger, which really only means... bear. And he wants it fresh.

If you're a state police officer, he wouldn't mind if you kept his phone number handy. Haag will happily come check out an animal killed in an accident.

He wants only fresh meat, an animal that's been dead four to eight hours. Anything longer and things start to get gross, which is funny, because for plenty of people, the concept of eating animals found in the middle of the highway is gross.

He'll collect the roadkill, haul it, clean it and gut it. For his work, it seems only fair that he'll keep half the meat.

If the deer is in good enough condition, he'll bring it home, back his Civic into the drive-way and clean the deer right there in his garage. When he's done, he'll wrap and vacuum-seal each piece, labeling it with the date and the cut, then place it in a stand-alone freezer. The freezer had nearly three dozen packages when I visited recently. It was as if someone had gone crazy in the venison aisle of Costco, if Costco sold venison.

Haag loves venison. With all that meat in his freezer, he'll have venison hamburgers, venison chili, venison stir-fry, venison stroganoff and, yes, of course, now it all makes sense. That's not a cinnamon pastry in front of me. It's venison jerky, courtesy of an accident Haag witnessed while in Michigan in November.

It would be rude not to try some. And it tastes like... jerky. Haag says he's never been sick from the meat.

For many people like me, especially those who didn't grow up hunting or eating venison, the question about Haag's venture is, why?

Sure, the economy is bad, but this isn't it.

"Why not?" he asks. "It tastes great. It's just a replacement for beef."

Haag says he can save hundreds of dollars a year on venison, as opposed to beef. Plus, he believes deer are among the most environmentally safe animals to eat because they live off the land and aren't injected with hormones or steroids. He thinks of it as a green approach. A lot of deer meat goes to waste, but Haag sees what he does as putting it to use.

There's something creepy, almost postapocalyptic, about it. So far, no one's taken him up on his Craigslist offer. He'll try again in the summer.

But people have eaten stranger things. Families across the United States are expected to trust the guy over in Lynchburg who declined to eat his own peanut butter before Congress. They are expected to believe that executives who are accused of willfully ignoring health codes will follow the rules again. They expect that opening a jar of peanut butter won't lead to salmonella.

Suddenly, venison jerky doesn't seem so crazy.

Mike Gruss, (757) 446-2277, mike.gruss@pilotonline.com