"shoot your own squirrels"

[krisstte]

Please, help me to understand the meaning of the sentence "eating local means shoot your own squirrels." Speaker is from Arkansas. Are there any similar sayings?

Here's the context:

“The Fiveashes have lived in Toad Suck for as long as anyone can remember,” Priscilla said. “They work hard, go to church, and send their kids to school. They shop at Dollar Tree because they don’t want to get dressed up for Walmart. They think eating local means shoot your own squirrels. And when my kin start talking, you’ll wish they came with subtitles."

​

Lisa Kleypas "Crystal Cove"


At first I thought that it may mean something like "eating the food you find in your own garden", bet later story goes about eating "Hot dog casserole with ketchup" and now I am absolutely confused...

 

[GoesStation]

Squirrels are small wild rodents whose meat most Americans never taste in their entire lives. Eating squirrel meat is generally considered a sign of poverty. "Eating local" is a phrase well-off Americans use to mean "buying food products raised or grown in my region", but the Fiveashes think it means "skinning, cleaning, and cooking squirrels we shoot ourselves". It's a humorous line.

 

[krisstte]

Squirrels are small wild rodents whose meat most Americans never taste in their entire lives. Eating squirrel meat is generally considered a sign of poverty. "Eating local" is a phrase well-off Americans use to mean "buying food products raised or grown in my region", but the Fiveashes think it means "skinning, cleaning, and cooking squirrels we shoot ourselves". It's a humorous line.

It's still complicated for me Does it mean, that according to Fiveashes - you must be very poor to eat only "local food"?

Thanks a lot for help!

 

[emsr2d2]

Sort of, but it's more of a play on the term "local food". People who can afford it, buy and eat food that has been grown, cultivated, picked, packed and sold in the local area. People who can't afford that, consider "local food" to be eating an animal you had to kill in your own local area.

It's not that the Fiveashes say you must be poor to eat "local food". It's that their definition of "local food" is very different from other people's.

 

[Tdol]

Many people who talk about eating local food, are buying organic food from expensive shops, not hunting squirrels in their garden.

 

[SoothingDave]

Don't take any of this literally. It's a condescending smear. "Ha ha, my relatives back home are a bunch of inbred backwards hicks."

 

[jutfrank]

Don't take any of this literally. It's a condescending smear. "Ha ha, my relatives back home are a bunch of inbred backwards hicks."

Yes, that's how I read it too. It's a comment on social class more than anything else. The central idea is that these lower-class people cannot even entertain the privileged-class concept of eating locally.

 

[GoesStation]

Yes, that's how I read it too. It's a comment on social class more than anything else. The central idea is that these lower-class people cannot even entertain the privileged-class concept of eating locally.

The idea is introduced when the text says they shop at Dollar Tree, a discount retailer that makes Wal-Mart look like a posh place they'd have to dress up to visit.

 

[GoesStation]

The idea is introduced when the text says they shop at Dollar Tree, a discount retailer that makes Wal-Mart look like a posh place they'd have to dress up to visit.

The British English word "posh" would not be part of the characters' vocabulary, nor indeed that of of many Americans. They might call Wal-Mart "fancy", in the author's imagination.

 

[probus]

The British English word "posh" would not be part of the characters' vocabulary, nor indeed that of of many Americans.

May I suggest that a good AmE equivalent of posh is ritzy.

 

[GoesStation]

May I suggest that a good AmE equivalent of posh is ritzy.

Maybe, but I'm not sure it's part of backwoods Arkansas English.

 

[probus]

On the subject of hillbilly talk, this is fun:

https://youtu.be/iHIJfbYhQFg

 

[GoesStation]

On the subject of hillbilly talk, this is fun:

https://youtu.be/iHIJfbYhQFg

Thanks for this. I've spent a fair bit of time in western North Carolina. Many people in my region have accents similar to those in the video, but they're nearly always closer to standard American English. I didn't have any trouble understanding the dialog — seeing it subtitled is kind of funny to me — but the vocabulary section had a lot of unfamiliar words. I don't remember hearing anyone in western North Carolina say "y'uns". I think "y'all" is more common in the areas I've been in.

"Sigogglin'" sounds like a funny version of "skerwobbledy", our local word for things that are seriously out of whack. Is that an unusual word elsewhere?