One way to fight invasive species? Eat them.
Two words that don’t look tempting on a menu? “Swamp” and “rat.” At least that’s the dark-humored consensus among a literal boatload of chefs cruising along a prehistoric-looking Louisiana swamp on a sweltering morning before the COVID-19 pandemic began, when Southerners were still socializing, not social distancing.
The two dozen chefs in this open boat are here at the invitation of local scientists who need their help saving Louisiana’s threatened wetlands. The “swamp rat” in question is the invasive nutria, which is chewing up so much land the state has placed a six-dollar-per-tail bounty on the rodent.
Nutria hasn't yet succeeded as a restaurant dish, but it turns out there’s a world of environmentally destructive, non-native plants and animals—from kudzu to feral hogs—that are increasingly gracing southern tables. The United States is home to more than 4,000 invasive species that can reproduce aggressively, out-compete and spread disease to local species, and destroy habitat, in addition to tens of thousands of non-native and “nuisance” species. Many of them, in the right chef’s hands, are quite tasty. [...]
The invasivore movement, while small, has some straightforward culinary and conservationist logic. Imagine a wild-foraging species such as boar that’s not just “grass-fed”—it has spent its whole life feasting on organic habitat. Toss in some “micro-local” and anti-waste “snout-to-hoof” chef-speak, and you have what proponents argue are serious starter ingredients for a radical kind of environmental stewardship. [...]
Many conservationists are thrilled with their chef collaborators, often stars in their communities. “Chefs here are our local celebrities,” says Louisiana native Jacques Hebert of the Restore the Mississippi River Delta coalition. “Our culture revolves around eating. We love food, and we love talking about the next meal while we’re still having a meal.”
In all eras, we’ve tried—and mostly failed—to police the boundary between acceptable and unacceptable.
Benjamin R. Cohenideas
10.08.2020
A friend wrote to tell me about fake green olives. When you write a book about adulterated, contaminated, and fake foods, you get a long list of examples from everyday news in your inbox. I started a running tab of these messages, before quitting after it topped 100. The list ranged from ersatz spinach, calamari, whiskey, pomegranate juice, olive oil, and honey to bogus coffee, almond milk, parmesan cheese, wine, chocolate, cantaloupe, and cereal. I’d sometimes get notices of GMO-related controversies too, because people weren’t sure how to fit the genetically modified foods into a real/fake schema. I think they wanted me to say whether these would be OK to eat, but all I thought was: Who decides what counts as “genuine,” and what assumptions are they using?
Congress tried to pass “pure food” legislation, making 190 attempts over the last quarter of the nineteenth century. They finally got it through in 1906, with a decisive shove from Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, the US Department of Agriculture’s Harvey Wiley, and the weight of precedents from numerous European countries. That Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 would lead to the modern FDA. We could trust them. There were back-slapping celebrations. Finally, the scourge of counterfeit and adulterated foods was over.
My inbox showed otherwise.
If you want to learn more about the shortcomings of the food system
By Kasia Pilat
Dec. 16, 2020
At the end of each year, Spotify releases personalized lists of the songs and artists that users listened to most over the last 12 months. There’s no algorithm to count exactly how many times the Food staff made the recipes below in 2020, but consider it the NYT Cooking version of the streaming giant’s end-of-year recap. Among the greatest hits: cheesy pan pizza, Momofuku bo ssam, and, of course, the year’s sleeper hit, Mark Bittman’s No-Knead Bread.
Yewande Komolafe’s baked tofu with peanut sauce and coconut-lime rice hit the table a lot, as did Toni Tipton-Martin’s pork chops in lemon-caper sauce. And if I used to think the Momofuku’s bo ssam was a dish only for special occasions, the pandemic put the lie to that. We made it monthly at least, and often during the week. SAM SIFTON
If you want to see the other recipes, click HERE