Asian carp: If you can't beat 'em, eat 'em!

The Carp Must Die

Asian carp are destroying the rivers of the Midwest and preparing to invade the Great Lakes. Can they be stopped?

By Ben Paynter
Bloomberg Businessweek

The Asian carp is a skittish fish, averaging about two feet long and 10 pounds apiece. When startled by something, say a boat’s motor, it’s prone to jump up to 10 feet in the air. So when Blake Ruebush, Levi Solomon, and Chase Holtman, an ecology team with the Illinois Natural History Survey, head out on an early October carp-hunting mission, they do so with caution, and armor.

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Asian carp have been harder to sell to consumers. In March 2011 the Illinois Public Health Dept. approved Asian carp for human consumption. A series of videos posted to the USGS website titled “Flying Fish, Great Dish” hasn’t really caught on. Officials promote carp as a cheap, protein-rich food source that’s lower in mercury than tuna, but in general the fish is considered bony and dirty. “A lot of people call them sewer bass,” says Steve McNitt, the sales manager at Schafer Fisheries in Thomson, Ill. Currently, Schafer turns all the state’s donated catch into an organic fish emulsion fertilizer, but the company is prototyping carp hot dogs, carp burgers, and carp jerky.

Illinois has also hired a chef to conduct taste tests. On a Thursday afternoon in September, Chef Philippe Parola and his business partner, chef Tim Creehan, shuffle around the stainless steel kitchen of Christ the King Jesuit College Preparatory High School on Chicago’s west side, checking on a series of buffet-size trays that will be dished out to more than 300 underprivileged kids in a gymnasium. The menu will be carp cakes—a fish version of crab cakes—with a béarnaise sauce and sides of green beans and sweet potatoes. They are also working on a bit of rebranding. During his presentation, Parola calls the fish by a more inventive and polished name: silverfin. It worked for Patagonian toothfish, also known as Chilean sea bass.

There’s one place, however, where carp is both in short supply and welcome on the menu: China. Since 2010, Illinois has spent $6 million training fisherman to catch carp and helping processors develop ways to better store and ship bulk orders to China. In the homeland of carp, there are hardly any wild-caught specimens available; canal systems are too polluted to support the species. American processors can buy carp for 13¢ per pound on the docks and get up to 92¢ per pound from mainland importers. “In China, we tell everybody that this fish is so fresh and has so much energy that it dances on the water,” says Harano, the marketer at Big River Fish, which recently received a $2  million state grant to expand its packing plant to handle an annual 30-million-pound contract for Beijing. “We market it a lot like you might Angus beef.” Their logo is a bald eagle clutching a fish in its talons while flying over the Mississippi River.

(More here.)