Things aren’t going so well in America’s Second City this summer. Chicago’s murder rate is through the roof. More than 20 percent of its residents are food insecure, and the town is mired in the same lousy economy as the rest of us. But that’s OK. Because for a subset of Chicago foodies—”with au courant appetites for sustainable, healthy, and locally sourced meats”—squirrel eating is making a comeback. Just call your dinner the “Chicken of the Trees.”
An article is the Chicago Reader, a major alternative newspaper, describes everything you wanted to know about eating squirrel. In addition to recipes, the article by Mike Sula includes the history of squirrel as food, legal issues, the best cuts of meat, and the typical diet of an urban squirrel.
Sula prepare a squirrel dinner for his friends.
And the question everyone wants to know the answer to is, How does it taste? Apparently it isn’t all that bad. Here’s what Sula’s dinner guests say:
“It was so good that I got kinda depressed,” my neighbor e-mailed later. “There are so many people who don’t get enough protein and here is this menacing squirrel, there for the taking.” …
“If I hadn’t known in advance,” said another, “I doubt I would have been able to tell. But I tasted the cheek and even that, while incredibly delicious, tasted like something between pork and lamb. I never would have guessed it was squirrel in a blind tasting.”
Most guests communicated a general surprise that city squirrels didn’t taste like the wild muskiness of bigger wild game. Proverbially, it tastes like chicken.
birdsoup 
And the hunting page of the Chicago Sun-Times hailed the beginning of mourning dove season (don’t get me started) with the author looking forward to his annual dove dinner. In both cases, I think I’ll stick to what’s in the cases at the Jewel supermarket.
Meredith
I’ve heard about the growth of gang and gun violence in Chicago but never pictured roving bands of armed thugs blasting away at stupid doves.
Chicago has changed since I lived there.
Back then it was a sleepy frontier town. Oh sure, there was the annual trek to the far suburbs to hunt buffalo in Buffalo Grove or elk in Elk Grove. Or searching for gold in the foothills of Mt. Prospect.
That was then, this is now. Sounds like a lot has changed since the big fire.