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Outside Magazine July 2001

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Bear Grease. . . -- cont.


	Mystery meat en croute: Chef Berry's grilled breat of coot and loin of possum between fried green tomatoes over braised greens and southern checker peas.

As I head south from the Jacksons' across the Piedmont hills, the country clubs and subdivisions give way to brick-and-magnolia county seats and the tarmac turns to red clay. "This program is brought to you by The Last Resort Grill," an Atlanta station announces, "featuring nouvelle southern cuisine in a casually elegant setting enhanced by the work of local artists."

Even as hunters become an endangered species, more people are choosing to have their wilderness served to them on a platter. Not long ago, catfish were considered fit only for other bottom-feeders; now U.S. farms grow more than half a billion pounds every year. Crawfish gross on average $50 million annually in Louisiana alone, and other animals are making the same transition. In the last 15 years, bison ranches, deer ranches, pigeon, alligator, and turtle farms have sprung up across the South, and urbanites have begun to develop a taste for game. In Boston, at Savenor's Market, kangaroo meat sells for $15.99 a pound, camel for $39.99, lion for $19.99, and zebra for $39.99. All of it is raised on game farms in the United States.

Over the next few days I meander through Georgia's sand hills and along the coastal plain, gathering wild meats as I go. In Alapaha I talk to a man named Ken Holyoak who traps turtles for the voodoo trade and other religious purposes. "The Haitians, they put the turtle on a pedestal and worship him," he says. "The Cubans tie him to their stomach and dance around." He also claims to have perfected the first system for mass-producing bullfrogs. (I leave with one of each.) I investigate the cult of the wild ramp—"the world's most potent onion"—and watch a young man called Big Foot shoot, skin, and gut a wild hog. (He gives me the "back strap" to consume later.) But to find a true test for the modern American palate, I have to cross the border into Alabama, favored dwelling place of the creature once savored by William Howard Taft.

Opossums are America's great "underutilized meat," Jeff Jackson told me: plentiful, easy to catch, and twice as high in protein as beef cattle, pound for pound. Opossums were here before the Ice Age and will likely be here long after global warming. Like frogs and squirrels, they were a subsistence food for generations, their fat a godsend to calorie-starved settlers. For years, Appalachian families fattened one up every fall for Thanksgiving dinner. But when packaged foods came in and fatty foods went out, marsupials were the first items dropped from the menu. What culinary currency the animal still has is due almost entirely to one man: Frank Basil Clark.

Born in the North Carolina hills in 1930 and raised on anything he could kill, Clark moved to Clanton, Alabama, as a young man and managed a drive-in theater. It was there, in 1969, that a thought struck him with the force of revelation: "America has put a man on the moon, but it hasn't done a thing with the possum."

Clark was living in a mobile home at the time, and he had no real experience as a revolutionary, but he knew this thing was bigger than just one man. Pooling his meager resources, he founded the Possum Growers & Breeders Association of America in 1971 and hatched plans to breed a superpossum. He organized possum beauty contests and crowned a Possum Queen. He convinced the U.S. Agency for International Development to look into raising possums for food and physically handed a particularly handsome specimen to Richard Nixon during a presidential campaign stop in Birmingham in 1972. Most of all, he flooded the country with his bumper stickers, turning his motto into a redneck rallying cry: "Eat More Possum." The possum campaign grew beyond any rational bounds. By the mid-1980s the PGBAA's membership had ballooned to more than 100,000, and Clanton was an obligatory photo-op for presidential candidates. "George Bush Sr. said if he was elected, me and a possum could spend the night in Abraham Lincoln's bed," Clark remembers.

Unfortunately, by the time I arrive in Clanton, the possum madness has died down. Buoyed by his celebrity, Clark served two terms as mayor, from 1976 to 1984, but realpolitik seems to have let the air out of his possum propaganda. In the late eighties he took a job installing telephone lines and left town for a spell. He's back now, still spinning the same spiel, but PGBAA membership is way down, and even the bumper stickers have started to grow scarce. "I lost a bunch of good possum growers to them crazies," Clark says, referring to activists with People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, who "wouldn't leave [him] alone" for a while. "You're not one of them crazies, are you?"

Bulb-nosed and rheumy-eyed, with a widening gut, Clark proudly shows me the swimming pool he had built as mayor, and the nice new curbs in the black part of town. But when I ask him for some possum meat for the road, he looks away uncomfortably. "If I start sellin' possums," he says, "the other growers will think the market is bad." And that would presumably lead to a frenzied sell-off—the possum world's own Black Tuesday. Eventually we have to drive out to his friend Barney's house to find an animal. "I don't like to eat 'em much," Barney says, dropping the writhing animal in Clark's cage. "I just like to catch 'em in the woods and then watch 'em with their babies."

These days, Clark's son Tom does most of the possum breeding in town—though he's shifted his sights from feeding the poor to starting a possum theme park. Not long ago, a church in Opelika called to see if he might bring a couple of possums to a wild-game cookout they were hosting. There would be a thousand guests or more, they told him, and crow and squirrel would be on the menu as well. "I picked some nice ones ahead of time and fattened 'em up good," Tom says. "But when I called the preacher later, he said people hardly touched 'em. "We had a lot of folks,' he told me," but we had too much possum.'"

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