Food is one way people relate to one another. It can also be, conversely, the means by which people fail to do so entirely. Barack Obama’s affinity for arugula, the leafy salad green, almost sunk his campaign into a voter-starved abyss of coastal elitism, in spite of arugula being so ubiquitous that it’s sold at Wal-Mart.

Still, arugula is hardly a sign of hardiness. Americans want their candidates to prefer edgy foods, like pork rinds or fatback. (Well, maybe not fatback.)

With this in mind, I wondered what Sarah Palin’s self-described affinity for mooseburgers says about her. Might her hunting, killing, grinding, and grilling these goofy-looking but noble giants into patty form make her — and not John McCain — heir to the legacy of noted hunter, governor, president, and national greatness conservative Teddy Roosevelt? And could I, an urban non-hunter, a foodie who has never stalked, killed, gutted, and cooked anything (save for the odd trout) somehow relate to Palin through her decidedly non-genteel choice of a favorite food?

With the words of the famed French gastronome Anthelme Brillat- Savarin in mind (“Tell me what you eat, and I will tell what you are”), could I, my chin aglisten with mooseburger drippings, understand the real Sarah Palin?

Since I sure as hell wasn’t getting an interview, and since Palin rarely says anything comprehensible on those rare occasions she does speak to the press, I figured that eating a mooseburger would be my tastiest and best hope.

Wild Moose Chase

Searching for moose online, though, I quickly found that hope was about all I could do.

In the United States, all meat must be inspected (or subject to inspection) by the Department of Agriculture. Wild-caught moose, like most hunted-down game animals, may be sold by neither companies nor individuals.

I went to Wagshal’s. In my opinion, it's the best butcher in Washington, DC, and it carries plenty of exotic meats.

“Right now in our freezer we’ve got everything from alligator to python, kangaroo, ostrich, buffalo, frogs’ legs, duck, exotic game, birds,” operations manager Aaron Fuchs says. “In addition to that my supplier has gotten in the past bear, lion — believe it or not — yak, antelope, venison.… There are probably tons I’m forgetting.”

Fuchs promised to do his best to track down some USDA-inspected moose meat. No luck. “I tried my wholesaler in upstate New Jersey, New York…. I tried some local meat vendors here,” Fuchs told me. “I even tried the slaughterhouses where we get all our beef from in Baltimore.”