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Tastes great in a salad, though. And the more of it you eat, the less of it there is to do its damage.
During the summer months, Bun Lai of Miya’s Sushi in New Haven, Conn., serves a popular roll featuring Japanese knotweed, in addition to a few other dishes made with invasive species. Asian shore crabs might be a nightmare for the shell fishing industry, but flash-fried with a bit of lemon dill sauce, they’ve got a great crunch to them.
Lai is part of a growing national movement to take species that are usually considered dangerous alien invaders and turn them into dinner. Practitioners have got a name: “invasivores.”
Invasivores might eat things like zebra mussels, a plague in the Great Lakes, or kudzu, which has spread throughout the south. Fish have been one of the strongest fronts for invasivores: fisheries for the world’s more popular fishes have been decimated in the modern era, but other species are expanding to the point that they’re destroying ecosystems all over the world.
In the Midwest, chefs and activists alike are trying get people eating Asian carp, an invasive species of fish that has smashed the ecosystem of the Mississippi River and is moving en masse into the Great Lakes. In Florida, conservationists are trying to get seafood lovers to develop a taste for lionfish, which have wreaked havoc on coral reefs.
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But the movement faces serious difficulties getting their particular world view to take hold. People like to eat what they like to eat, and food is one place where cultural norms carry significant weight. Wisconsin publisher Reggie McLeod has held a contest for chefs and restaurants to submit recipes for the Asian carp, but despite ongoing media coverage, he hasn’t gotten an entry yet.
“There’s a lot of cultural prejudice against different types of food,” he told AOL News. “Carp have been enormously popular in Asia for thousands of years, and people in the United States consider them undesirable. And yet people eat octopus and lobsters, and 150 years ago those were considered inedible in North America.”
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And yet McLeod remembers that when he was growing up, his friends with eastern European and German parents would eat carp on Christmas Day as a delicacy. Now, most people won’t go near the stuff. You don’t even need a pole to catch carp in the upper Mississippi — they will literally jump right into your boat. Some restaurants serve them, but they have yet to catch on in a widespread way.
Land-based invasive species consumption faces similar challenges — the idea of eating weeds has probably been around since people started considering some plants “weeds,” but outside of times of hardship, most people tend to prefer to eat higher on the hog.
But as McLeod points out, tastes do change. And some chefs are trying to move them toward a more sustainable direction.
“As a chef, the challenge is not to create something that is sensationalistic,” Lai told AOL News. “It’s our responsibility as artists to translate palatability from one culture to another.”
(Editor’s note: Dave Thier occasionally works for Miya’s Sushi.)
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