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It’s the longest night of the year and I’m uncomfortably close to a lot of strangers, queueing to eat something I’m not used to seeing on a menu – brushtail possum.

Dark Mofo, Tasmania’s mid-winter art, music and food festival, has always dished up a side-serve of discomfort, and this year’s Winter Feast is no exception.

Part food tourism, part theatre, it’s the wonderfully weird food market of your dreams. Bathed in blood-red light, with long, candlelit communal tables, the wholly decadent market centres unusual Tasmanian ingredients like bull kelp, abalone and wild-caught wallaby.

This year, sitting casually beside ex-dairy cow burgers, is possum bao: delightfully innocuous, sweet-as-pie little parcels filled with slow-cooked wild Tasmanian possum. So why do I feel odd about eating it?

Jeremy “Jezz” Waterhouse, chef from Hobart’s South Wine Bar, first put possum on his restaurant’s menu roughly three years ago.

“People were a bit freaked out. My wife thought I was crazy, so I ordered it on the sly,” he says.

It took Waterhouse about six months of trial and error to create a recipe that would feel familiar enough to coax people into trying it. To make the bao served at Dark Mofo, the whole carcass is brined for 24 hours, dusted with spices, then sous vide in a steam oven for a further 10 hours before the meat is shredded. At his restaurant, Waterhouse puts possum on the specials menu half a dozen times a year, in dishes like rillette and pizza.

The naysayers thought it would never work. Now, people are queueing for it. Waterhouse has had so many requests for the bao since Dark Mofo, he’s started serving it at his restaurant too.

Last year, Winter Feast received some questions about the ethics of possum appearing on the menu, ranging from “but aren’t they protected?” to the difficult to answer “how could you?”.

Possums are a national icon, a native back yard visitor, an annoyance. They’ve been anthropomorphised, befriended and hated. The dusk silhouette of a possum performing a deft high-wire dance is etched into the Australian imagination.

And while I am not a vegetarian, I am not insensitive to the ethical dilemma of consuming any animal. If anything, I can be dramatically oversensitive when it comes to the plight of creatures. I will rescue an ant. The hypocrisy is not lost on me, but I do care about the lives and deaths of the animals I eat.

To be clear, yes, it is legal to harvest brushtail possums in Tasmania, but the process is highly regulated to make sure it is sustainable and humane. The ecologist Henry Cook says: “Ecologically, it’s all very much above board.”

Over the years, Cook has worked to protect the swift parrot, orange-bellied parrot and spotted pardalote – species whose precarious existence has given him an intimate understanding of Tasmania’s changing landscapes.

Cook says that the modification of habitats through agriculture and forestry have benefited brushtail possums, while the Tasmanian devil, one of their only natural predators, has experienced catastrophic decline. These possums are now abundant enough to have become a problem. So if the animals are already being culled, why not eat them?

Possum-as-protein has a long history. Kitana Mansell, a Palawa woman, business manager and chef, tells me that Palawa people – Tasmanian Aboriginal people – have eaten possum for a millennia. She describes a traditional method of slow cooking it in an earth oven: a covered pit that is not unlike a steam oven. “We barbecue it too,” she says.

Her catering company Palawa Kipli, which translates to Tasmanian Aboriginal Food, is Tasmania’s only Aboriginal-owned and operated food enterprise. As a nation, Australia has embraced multicultural eating with gusto, yet very little of the diet of its First Peoples are incorporated into national cuisine.

The possum’s utility goes well beyond meat. At Lenah Game Meats, who supplied Winter Fest stallholders with wallaby, venison and possum this year, nothing is discarded. Possum and wallaby fur is sold as a raw product for yarn, while wallaby skins are tanned in Melbourne and used to create Lenah’s own Wugg boots – wallaby ugg boots.

“Most of our possum skins go to First Nations people and organisations,” says Lenah’s Katrina Kelly. “A big percentage are made into cloaks.” Possum-skin cloaks are lifelong garments, traditionally worn from birth and eventually used as burial shrouds.

John Kelly, co-founder of Lenah Game Meats, is a softly-spoken radical thinker, third generation cattle farmer and agricultural scientist who set out to normalise the eating of wild Tasmanian game. His honours thesis explored the idea of “eating the problem”, helping to shape a philosophy that views invasive species and abundant wildlife not as pests, or pet food, but as a nutritious food source for humans. Wallaby and possum require no cleared land, fertiliser or feedlots. In fact, a recent carbon emissions assessment suggests that harvesting abundant local wildlife and invasive species carries a remarkably low emissions footprint. Kelly calls this “pragmatic environmentalism”.

We have a hierarchy of comfort when it comes to meat eating, but the question runs deeper than what feels familiar, what we have compartmentalised as food, and what we can stomach.

Living honourably can’t always mean eating what makes us feel morally tidy. In the messy, nuanced reality of feeding 8 billion or so humans, a pragmatic choice might not be the most comfortable one. Eating a food that is local, abundant and low-impact deserves serious consideration, even if it challenges our inherited ideas of what belongs on a plate.

Time, then, to put my money where my mouth is. Possum tastes a little sweet, melts in the mouth, perhaps in the ballpark of duck, but lighter. Was it a transcendent experience? No. But nor did it feel like an offence.

I asked a couple of other punters what they thought of their possum bao. Andrew “loved it!”. Angus felt he had finally settled a score with the species wreaking havoc in his roof.