Eating Aliens by Jackson Landers

Author:Jackson Landers
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Storey Publishing, LLC
Published: 2012-08-20T20:00:00+00:00

I LEFT MISSOURI WITH A COOLER FULL OF CARP and my head teeming with thoughts about entire rivers with hundreds of tons of a highly edible fish per mile and almost nobody in America eating them.

Before heading for Virginia, I had one more stop to make. Vince had arranged a meeting for me at an IHOP with a commercial fisherman named Cliff. Like a lot of other watermen today, Cliff cobbles together a living from a number of little things. He catches sturgeon for part of the year; he and his wife harvest the eggs for caviar, which they ship to buyers around the world, mostly in Russia and Japan. Cliff also fishes for catfish, bigheads, and silver carp.

He uses several types of large nets for different situations and different waters. He rounds up bigheads and catfish by laying out several hundred yards of long net around a dike, where the fish tend to congregate in large numbers. The fish are corralled tighter and tighter until the net can be hauled onto the boat.

Wild-caught catfish are an easy sell to domestic markets. Carp are a little tougher, but Cliff still gets paid. He sells some directly to local grocery stores, where they retail for about two dollars per pound. It’s always the least expensive meat in a store. A few years ago, there were very few buyers, but with the recession, folks have gotten less fussy. Large wholesalers are shipping carp fillets to China, where the heads are also popular in soup. In order to be salable, though, the heads must be of very high quality and cut just the right way. Most of what’s left is sold for as little as seven cents per pound and turned into fertilizer.

The biggest marketing hurdle in this country is that, as mentioned earlier, consumers don’t want to eat carp. If it had any other name, it would probably fly off the shelf (or, really, out of the freezer compartment or the fresh-fish counter). Cliff also mentioned the lack of factories equipped to process huge amounts of carp — a moot point until the public is ready to buy it.

According to Cliff, most of the other guys out there fishing for carp (they’re all men) are barely surviving. Many are locked into exclusive contracts with a large buyer that sends the heads to China and grinds the rest into fertilizer. They’re getting paid anywhere from seven to fifteen cents per pound, and the buyer sometimes goes months on end without paying them at all. They’d walk away, but there just aren’t any other jobs. Their equipment is falling apart and they can barely pay for the gas it takes to get out on the water. There isn’t much of an incentive for people to start catching carp in meaningful numbers.

If public demand for the fish causes the wholesale price to go up to twenty-five cents a pound, Cliff thinks that all of this will change. The fishermen will be able to pay their bills again, replace their tattered nets, and hire crews.

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