How to Handle an Invasive Species? Eat It
By TARAS GRESCOE, NY Times [here]
LATE last year, a flotilla of fluorescent jellyfish covering 10 square miles of ocean was borne by the tide into a small bay on the Irish Sea. These mauve stingers, venomous glow-in-the-dark plankton native to the Mediterranean, slipped through the mesh of aquaculture nets, stinging the 120,000 fish in Northern Ireland’s only salmon farm to death.
Closer to home, the Asian carp, which has been working its way north from the Mississippi Delta since the 1990s, is now on the verge of reaching the Great Lakes. This voracious invader, which weighs up to 100 pounds and eats half its body weight in food in a day, has gained notoriety for vaulting over boats and breaking the arms and noses of recreational anglers. Having outcompeted all native species, it now represents 95 percent of the biomass of fish in the Illinois River and has been sighted within 25 miles of Lake Michigan. The only thing preventing this cold-water-loving species from infesting the Great Lakes, the largest body of fresh water in the world, is an electric barrier on the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal…
In the absence of any concrete action by the shipping industry, I would like to make a modest proposal. To save our oceans and lakes from their apparently inexorable slide back to the Archaean Eon — when all that was moving on the face of the waters was primitive cyanobacteria — it is high time we developed a taste for invasive species.
Diners in Asia, where sesame-oil-drenched jellyfish salad has long been considered a delicious, wholesome dish, are way ahead of us…
… Returning from a fact-finding mission to China, a professor from Japan’s National Fisheries University offered up 10 different recipes for preparing Nomura’s jellyfish. “Making them a popular food,” he told a Japanese newspaper, “is the best way to solve the problem.”…
For years now, fisheries scientists have been telling us that, for our own health and the health of the oceans, we need to start eating down the food chain — closer to the level of oysters than tuna. So, next time you’re in the mood for seafood, ask the chef to whip you up a jambalaya (or a fricassee, or a ragout) of rapa whelks and Chinese mitten crabs, or maybe consider blackening up an entirely new species.
Asian carp, Cajun-style, anyone?
Taras Grescoe is the author of the forthcoming “Bottomfeeder: How to Eat Ethically in a World of Vanishing Seafood.”
What a “novel” approach by a youthful Canadian book author, particularly in light of the fact that GRAZING is known to not only keep certain aggressive, nontoxic plants — “native” or otherwise — in check but also nourish Grazing Animals! Perhaps the denizens of D.C. could dine on dinners of deviled daylily delight, poached — and I mean poached in the cooking sense — phragmites with a side of pink hibiscus mealybugs, grilled giant African snail, steamed small-leaf spiderwort, fricasseed fetid passionflower, air potatoes au gratin with sauteed Asian tiger mosquitoes, French-fried Formosan subterranean termites … you get the idea! Source of “invasive species” aforementioned: http://www.invasivespeciesinfo.gov/animals/main.shtml, http://www.invasive.org/listview.cfm?list=19, and http://plants.usda.gov/java/noxiousDriver
Thanks and a tip of the nutria-fur hat to Julie Kay Smithson of Property Rights Research for pointing out this gem of news clipping.