Way back in the heady days of the dotcom boom, as a newbie in San Francisco, I fell in with a group of hipsters trying to revivify the soggy corpse of the SF Cacophony Society, which, for a while, consisted mostly of a bunch of underemployed young adults on an email list kidding around with each other and trying to come up with funny ideas. Finally, one day, a young woman who went by the on-list moniker "Drunken Consumptive Panda" threw out a sentence that was to change a lot of lives: "We should have a pigeon roast in Union Square".
The Union Square Pigeon Roast, as it happens, deserves a much longer reminiscence, is it was the start of a remarkable, brief but fun period of activity that lasted a few years. The event itself was ludicrous: we posed as a group called "Bay Area Rotisserie Friends" (that was my idea; check the acronym) advocating for harvesting SF's pigeon population as a food source. My old ex-friend Rick Abruzzo printed up t-shirts of a pigeon in a chef's hat and the slogan "Pigeon, the other other white meat", and several large signs were made. Unbeknownst to us, another group of people, in on the joke, organized a faux protest to show up and oppose us as the "Pigeon Eating Temperance Association". On the day, we fired up hibachis in Union Square, complete with little roast squabs we'd purchased pre-cooked in Chinatown.
The whole thing sounds rather mortifying in summary 25 years later, but you have to understand the tenor of the times. San Francisco at the time was home to a lot of these kinds of street pranks, people trying to see just how ludicrous they could be in public without people realizing it was a put on, this became a larger event that we expected, and we made a pretty entertaining afternoon of it. I have some media coverage archived on my old site at https://mikeycosm.org/pranks/pigeons/sfbg.html. Really, the event deserves the whole background story being written down at some point, there was a lot to it. The city got involved, before even the day of the event there was an amusing interaction with some folks we'd apparently caused some consternation for at the Dept. of Health, and eventually the police confiscated everything, including our signs.
Anyway, as part of the event, I made up these flyers to hand out, "Why Eat Pigeon?" Scattered among actual recipes (mostly actually duck recipies, IIRC), a false history of pigeon-eating's supposed popularity, and an intentionally much-too-graphic description of how to "field dress" a pigeon, were ludicrous "facts" such as "Pigeons are among nature's most hygienic creatures. A pigeon's bill is as clean as stainless steel".
I was pretty proud of them, even moreso when, years later, I saw Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist, interviewed in a newspaper, and in the photograph he had a "Why Eat Pigeon?" leaflet tacked up on the wall behind his desk.
If you for some reason want a copy, the original PDF is still posted at https://mikeycosm.org/pranks/pigeons/pigeonfinal.pdf
