The Dish

Kristen French covers “wind-farm syndrome”:

Those who believe in the syndrome say it’s caused by sound waves released when the giant turbine blades collide with the wind—not just the audible whooshing noise, but the rumbling vibrations created by a low-­frequency sound, or infrasound. Nonbelievers, including most scientists and doctors, say it doesn’t exist, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention do not recognize it as a legitimate syndrome.

So what is causing the health issues?

Large-scale population surveys conducted by scientists in Sweden and the Netherlands have found that stress and sleep disturbances were more likely if the turbines were visible and less likely if the individuals benefitted economically from them. Other studies found that having a bad attitude about the turbines and subjective sensitivity to noise were more likely to lead to annoyance and negative health effects than actual exposure to audible sound or infrasound. (Back in 2007, three years before the Falmouth turbines were even built, a handful of residents expressed concern about the potential for illness after reading about symptoms online, and those health effects were even written up in the local newspaper.) And in recent lab tests, subjects who were told to expect side effects from infrasound ahead of time felt some of those symptoms even when they were exposed to sham infrasound.

Simon Chapman, an Australian professor of public health at the University of Sydney, believes wind-turbine syndrome is just the latest in a series of 21st-century technophobias (think of the well-publicized fears about microwave ovens, cell phones, cell towers, and Wi-Fi). “If wind farms genuinely did pose a problem to people who lived near them, you would expect to see a relationship which was fairly consistent from country to country, wind farm to wind farm,” Chapman says, “and that’s far from the case.” In Australia, the majority of complaints come from just six of the country’s 51 wind farms, according to his research. “The six wind farms where people have been getting sick are the ones where the anti-wind folks have been most active, with high-­profile media attention amplifying the word-of-mouth stuff,” he says.

On the creepy and charming old chap profiled above:

Meet 73-year-old Arthur Boyt, notorious resident of remote Bodmin Moor in Cornwall, and connoisseur of cooking and eating roadkill – nothing is too far fetched or fanciful to end up on his plate. In this film we take a trip into Arthur’s universe and learn how to cook a cracking badger casserole, as well as find out how best to prepare polecat meat before cooking.

Money quote from Arthur:

I ate a badger once that someone else had picked up because they wanted its skull. It was blown up like a horse on the western front and it smelt rather horrible. When I cut into it, the flesh was green but nevertheless I persevered and stewed it. It made the house smell like the old fashioned mental hospitals used too, but boy it tasted delicious!

A few readers add to the thread:

One of my best cocktail party stories recounts the night 25 years ago that my wife hit a deer in Wisconsin (that roadkill could even be a cocktail party topic betrays the fact that I still live in the Upper Midwest).

In Wisconsin, you are allowed to strap a car-harvested deer onto your roof top and bring it home so long as you call the accident into the state patrol and obtain a proper deer tag. The damage to car and carcass was minimal (the car was still drivable, and the blunt force impact didn’t draw blood). It was too late at night to bring the deer straight to the butcher, and it was too warm a night to leave the undressed buck alone until morning. I knew that I needed to gut the deer to avoid the meat spoiling, but (not being a hunter) I didn’t have a clue how to do the job. More importantly, my wife and I were living in a small apartment in downtown Madison, and there was no place where we could even hang the deer (a practice that facilitates the gutting and keeps the dogs away).

A phone call to my father provided a detailed step-by-step; a second call to one of my wife’s former roommates provided the tree. I’ll spare my fellow Dishheads the grizzly details. Suffice to say the job was finished around 4am and the deer was left to hang in the backyard of a rented house just off campus.

But it didn’t hang very long. Unfortunately, the person who said we could borrow the tree forgot to notify his housemates. And the tree was very close to the back of the house, within view of the kitchen windows. So imagine the housemates’ surprise early the next morning when they went to the sink for some coffee pot water, looked out the window, and found themselves face to face with Bambi (with a rope tied around its neck and its tongue sticking out). Did I mention that this housemate was a vegan? Talk about awkward …

P.S. The venison was delicious, especially the bratwurst.

But a member of the New Zealand Meat Industry Association warns:

No – it is NOT OK to eat roadkill. It is potentially dangerous. When an animal is hit by a vehicle, bacteria in the internal organs will probably spill into the muscle (meat). The hide is also likely to be damaged, again, pushing bacteria into the muscle (meat). Some animals have musk glands, which are not going to make eating an enjoyable experience. A lot of wild animals are sick with diseases that are kept under control in domestic livestock (TB in particular). And a lot of wild animals that are killed on the roads are there because they have been poisoned and are dying. In short, roadkill is contaminated and possibly poisonous.

If you repeat bloggers’ comments that it is OK to eat roadkill, could you please, as a public service, also point out that there are real risks.