I Need Squab

Plus the wildest presidential meal yet

I’ll cut right to the chase: I need a squab. Not only a squab, but a goose, a turkey, a partridge, and maybe a dove, pheasant or other wood fowl. Do you have ANY idea how to get your hands on one of these and get it to Los Angeles, California without it costing $1000?

You’re probably wondering why I need a squab & company — it’s a top secret project that I’m excited to cook up with someone else in the history space, and it might just involve eating 8 different kinds of poultry.

It’s strange that it’s so difficult to find any poultry outside of chicken, turkey or duck (and the occasional Cornish game hen) in stores. I realize pheasants are more common in the Midwest and Rust Belt (my dad does have two in his freezer), but why have we decided upon these three birds as the ultimate winged meals?

1. Chicken produces more meat per square foot of space needed to raise them.

2. They produce more eggs than most other bird species.

3. Turduckens.

The recipe I’m working on calls for much rarer birds in today’s society. These birds would be commonplace in 1700s New England, but in a metropolitan mega city like LA? I’m having a tough time. Please send bird help.

I also have to recap what is probably the wildest lunch I’ve eaten so far in my Eat Like a President series, and it’s courtesy of Gerald Ford. I thought Ford would be bland and basic, much like the Accidental President himself.

I was hellaciously wrong.

Gerald Ford’s average lunch: a scoop of cottage cheese topped with A1 steak sauce and slices of raw onion.

To drink? A gin martini (down from TWO gin martinis at lunch when he was a mere congressman).

To say this was the worst presidential meal is an understatement — even Trump’s four sandwich super-dinner couldn’t match this lunch, because at least a Big Mac tastes like food.

Maybe I should’ve smoked a bunch of cigarettes before I ate it, that would really give me that authentic asbestos-mouth 1970s palate.

Please tell me what you put on cottage cheese, because I’m a honey + berries + nuts kinda guy. A1 steak sauce and raw onion doing it for you?

With love and an upset stomach,

-Bennett