"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...