Gene Owens

Possums could cure our Asian trade imbalance
By Gene Owens

While Southerners have been playing possum by the roadside, New Zealanders have been busy exploiting the huge Asian market for possum meat.

New Zealand has a 10-year head start on us in putting possum on the Oriental table. The magazine "International Business" reports that some 70 million possums roam the forests of New Zealand. That's about the number you'll see flattened in the fast lane of I-95 on a typical drive from Fayetteville to Jacksonville.

New Zealanders have been exporting the meat to Hong Kong and Taiwan, where it is prized because it tastes a lot like gouzili, an endangered variety of the cat-like civet. I'm told that Southern possum tastes a lot like chicken, which is probably about what gouzili tastes like, though I'm not about to find out first hand..

I see the possum trade as the ideal remedy for our imbalance of payments to the Orient. Let the Asians send us their Toyotas, Hondas and Kias; we can use them to run down possums on our highways. Then we can harvest the road kill and export it back to Asia.

First, of course, we have to beat the competition from New Zealand, where they grow their own brand of possum. They borrowed the name from our Virginia possum, which was feeding Pocahontas and her family before John Smith arrived with pigs and long before Captain Cook discovered the lands Down Under.

The New Zealand possum is a distant relative of the Virginia possum, which is identical to the possum that roams Southern swamps from the Dismal to the Okefenokee to the Everglades. Like our possum, the Down Under critter is a marsupial, which means its babies are born tiny and spend their early weeks in Mama's pouch. Unlike our possum, it's cute, which makes it a shame to kill it and eat it.

Possum meat is on the menu in Asia as "kiwi bear." That's good marketing. Many a Southern muskrat has gone on the menu Up North as "Swamp rabbit."

The new Legend Hotel in Malaysia's Kuala Lumpur offers a choice of stewed or boiled possum with taro, garlic, waterchestnut, black fungus or ginseng.

My guess is that Southern possums would arrive with their own accumulation of black fungus after lying on the center stripe awaiting harvesting.

The government of New Zealand considers the possum to be a pest and is looking for a way to bring its numbers down to the level of the human population, which is about the same as the population of South Carolina. That's a tall order, because the possum has survived generations of hunters looking for meat for the pot.

We have more roads and more cars in the South, so we should be better able to supply the untapped possum market in Mainland China.

Before the automobile came along as the primary harvester of possums, Southern hunters went into the woods with their hounds and came back with possums for the pot. Those with more cultivated palates preferred to trap the possum and feed it fruit, grain and other clean stuff until it had worked its normal grub-and-insect diet out of its system.

That's a slow and inefficient way of harvesting possum. The more expeditious way is to run it over with a car, SUV or semi and allow the meat to cure on the center line. After a day or two in the sun, all the impurities will have been baked out.

Southern ingenuity should be able to devise a motorized contraption for scraping the possum off the Interstate without turning the harvesters into road kill. It could slow down murderous Yankee traffic by towing a lighted sign reading "Possum Scraper Ahead."

Removing the gravel and the fur from the meat may prove to be a challenge, but not beyond the ingenuity of a people who have mastered the art of skinning catfish and cracking hickory nuts.

Entering the possum trade could involve us in international controversy similar to the one that arose when the Vietnamese tried to flood our market with their catfish, which was plainly a different breed of cat from the one that inhabits Dixie rivers and farm ponds.

We'll have to find a way to establish the difference between the American and Down Under possums. The New Zealanders market their possum meat as "kiwi bear." We wouldn't want to call ours that, because our possums are not bears and we don't want to suggest that they come from New Zealand, where a kiwi can be a fuzzy fruit, an ugly bird or a person who talks vaguely like an Aussie.

Maybe, given their similarity in taste to the civet, we could call them "Dixie Cats." Or, given the fact that they taste like chicken, "Dixie Chicks."

(Readers may write Gene Owens at 1004 Cobbs Glen Drive, Anderson SC 29621, or e-mail him at WadesDixieco@aol.com)