From Popular Science:
Welcome to invasivorism, the boldest solution to ethical eating yet
Turning invasive species into gourmet meals could blunt environmental and economic costs across the US. But can Americans stomach them? Chefs and biologists are taking a gamble.
The dining room at Juniper Bar and Restaurant in Burlington is about as bespoke as one would expect from a woodsy Vermont establishment. Ferns top tables carved at a nearby tree farm, while granite slabs hewn from a local quarry tile the walls. Even the floorboards come from a reclaimed New England barn.
Then there’s the food. As staff scramble to serve plates of pastured lamb lasagna and birch-syrup-drizzled pistachio hummus, executive chef Doug Paine watches quietly, a calm island in a hectic sea, to ensure that each morsel of porchetta and dab of aioli meets his standard of “fresh and local.”
Few diners realize, though, that when they lift a forkful of Paine’s salad, the peppery bite in the dressing comes from chopped sprigs of garlic mustard. The quick-growing European weed is notorious for pushing into Vermont forest understories and lacing the soil with a chemical that prevents native plants from germinating. On the other hand, it’s tasty, which prompted Paine to join a boundary-pushing trend that combines ethical eating with invasive-species warfare.
It’s a conflict humans brought upon themselves. Whether it’s raccoon-size rodents called nutria using massive chompers to clear-cut Louisiana marshes into mud flats or shrubby Japanese knotweed smothering local flora up and down the East Coast, there are thousands of examples with people thoughtlessly introducing a species into a new environment, then battling to bring it under control. Invasives have cost the world an estimated $1.3 trillion by ruining agricultural yields, undermining tourism, and hurting public health over the past half century. Even worse, these outlaws are responsible for roughly a third of extinctions over the past 500 years, including, in 2021, the loss of the Maui ʻākepa bird and a Hawaiian variety of flowering mint. There are now 4,300 nonnative types of wildlife in the United States destructive enough for conservationists to label them as invasive....
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