Bear's Grease, Bullfrog Legs, Back Strap of Wild Hog, Armadillo Cheeks, Roasted Coot, Fried Mink, Turtle Claws. . . And Did We Mention, for the Main Course, a Nice Braised Shank of Free-Range Possum?

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Outside Magazine July 2001

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Bear's Grease, Bullfrog Legs, Back Strap of Wild Hog, Armadillo Cheeks, Roasted Coot, Fried Mink, Turtle Claws. . . And Did We Mention, for the Main Course, a Nice Braised Shank of Free-Range Possum?
The South's true country cuisine rises again

By Burkhard Bilger


	We were foragers once, anf hungry: Jeff Jackson surveys the woods along the road to his Georgia homestead.

"What we have here is a radial pattern of wild meats," Jeff Jackson says, pointing his spatula at a cast-iron skillet. Four small mounds of mangled protein, each a different shade and texture, lie in a perfect parabola, like tissue samples from a crime lab. "First you'll eat them," Jackson says. "Then I'll tell you what they are." Lifting my fork, I probe a mushroom cap brimming with a gray, speckled, liverish substance. To my right, Jackson's wife, Phyllis, picks at her salad and watches. "Back before we were married, we spent a whole summer living off roadkill," she says. "I remember one time, we ate a mink. That was one tough little animal. Can't say I liked the taste, either. There was this urine flavor, like the kidneys hadn't filtered out all the impurities." Jeff settles into the chair across from me. "Leeches were disappointing too," he sighs. "Tasted just like the marinade. Didn't have any leech flavor at all."

Glancing up at their expectant faces, I feel a wave of peer pressure such as I haven't experienced since junior high. It's early April, and the air is thick with the scent of sweet gums and pines, of things busy being born and busy dying. I have come to Georgia to expand my palate, to see what pockets of resistance remain in the South to the advancing army of Whoppers and Big Macs. But I was hoping to ease into the topic more gradually. The Jacksons, I thought, could offer a sober, academic accounting of the politics and economics of hunting and gathering for one's own table. After all, Jeff, 60, is a professor of wildlife management in the School of Forest Resources at the University of Georgia, and Phyllis, 55, rounds out her homemaking and carpentry by documenting the vegetation of the Smoky Mountains for the University of Georgia's Center for Remote Sensing and Mapping. But scientific dispassion, I find, makes its own gustatory demands.

Two centuries ago, an explorer would have thought nothing of sitting down at a stranger's table and eating whatever flesh was placed before him. When Indian guides led British explorer John Lawson through the Carolina wilderness in 1701, he dined on beaver, polecat, and bear, among other delicacies. ("A roasted or barbakued Turkey, eaten with Bears Fat, is held a good Dish," Lawson wrote in his diary. "And indeed, I approve of it very well; for the Bears Grease is the sweetest and least offensive to the StomachÉof any Fat of Animals I ever tasted.") As late as 1909, the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce served persimmon beer, turtle soup, and barbecued possum to the president-elect. "Surely the famous smile of William Howard Taft never kindled across a happier evening," a reporter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution wrote. Years later, another reporter at the paper mused: "It was believed to be the last time that a U.S. president supped on marsupial."

But in the decades since, the American diet has cut loose from its wilderness moorings. I grew up in Oklahoma, where southern cooking once left off and cowboy carbo-loading began. Yet after two years spent researching and writing a book on clandestine southern traditions, I am led to believe that everyone eats the same stuff. To most northerners, the South is the last refuge of strange food—of Moon Pies and pig organs and pickled eggs bobbing pinkly next to the cash register. But from what I've seen, southerners are the least adventurous eaters of all. Their cities are girdled with an extra layer of fast food, their vegetables invariably canned or overcooked, their palates tuned to the twin wavelengths of ketchup and processed meat. And so I've left the beltways and strip malls and gone in search of something more savory.

Now, chewing on another rich yet fibrous flap of mystery muscle, I wonder what it is, exactly, that makes something inedible. Is it just a matter of physiology, of nutrient deficiencies and taste-bud densities, or is it more psychological—a habit of mind shaped by culture, temperament, and parents telling us to eat our vegetables? Taste is a mind-body problem of the most intractable kind, and nothing brings it into focus as vividly as eating something unknown and potentially disgusting. Jeff, smiling faintly, informs me that this particular mouthful is armadillo meat. Why should that make my throat constrict and my stomach leap into my diaphragm? Does the fact that some southerners call this "possum on the half shell" make it any less palatable? The answers may determine whether true southern food can ever rise again.

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