The Mane Course

The small but growing world of exotic meat allows adventurous appetites a taste of the wild. But as Reporter Ike Sriskandarajah found out, game meat is vastly unregulated and sometimes illegal. He follows the trail of lion meat sold at his corner grocer to a shady corner of the meat industry. Along the way he meets with store owners, online exotic meat retailers, the United States Department of Agriculture, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Fish and Wildlife Service. Few can say where the lions come from, but all signs point to a big cat-skinning operation in a Chicago suburb. The butcher associated with it has been in the game for years and was arrested for passing off meat from endangered tigers, leopards, and ligers as legal lion meat. Tests conducted by the FDA show that he is back to his old tricks, selling mislabeled game meat. This investigation shows that we can eat almost anything—but the story behind where our meat comes from can make it hard to swallow.