Photo by MDC Staff, courtesy Missouri Department of Conservation.
By: Zoe DeYoung
A billion dollar project to prevent invasive Asian carp from entering the Great Lakes is set to begin construction this year, but don’t feel too bad for the nuisance fish.
The species has been wreaking havoc throughout the Mississippi River Basin, out-competing native fish for living space and resources since the 1980s.
Pictured: Jill Moon
Longtime Alton Telegraph reporter Jill Moon first heard of the invasive carp issue at a 2009 city council meeting in Grafton, a river town where the Illinois River acts as a perfect feeder for breeding carp.
Three entrepreneurs presented a plan at the meeting to capitalize on the carp. “They thought they had a good money making venture,” Moon said.
The plan involved an Asian carp processing plant. It got the green light. Moon was on the story from there: if you have lemons, make lemonade; if you have carp, put them on the menu.
“When I went to these city council meetings, they would have the boring stuff like, ‘The Street Department fixed Oak Avenue.’ A factory to make Asian carp byproducts stood out to me. And I already knew that the Asian carp was a problem,” Moon said.
A problem not only for native aquatic life, but for boaters. Asian carp tend to feed at the water’s surface and are very easily disturbed. When agitated by a boat propeller or even a sculler’s oar, they can jump up to 10 feet in the air. Think popcorn, but instead it is hundreds of soaring fish.
“Certain times of year when they are spawning, the Asian carp will jump out of the Illinois River. They’ve jumped in boats before, and they’ve accidentally given bloody noses,” Moon explained. “They’re a nuisance species,” Moon added. “So that just struck a nerve in me to find out more.”
The Grafton-based American Heartland Fish Products plant was the brainchild of those entrepreneurs at the meeting Their plan came to fruition, soon processing as much as 60,000 pounds of carp a day, as well as fish oil, fish meal and a funky smell.
The odor began to bother residents, so much so that the plant was given 30 days to address the stink. Ultimately, the plant went kaput.
By this time, Moon had established herself on the “carp beat.”
“I was actually the only downstate Illinois reporter who was writing extensively about the subject,” Moon said.
Her carp reporting put her on the map. So much so that in 2011, she was asked to apply for a fellowship sponsored by the Institute for Journalism and Natural Resources called the Asian Carp Institute.
“The institute was examining ways to keep this invasive species out of the Great Lakes. The species would damage the sport fishing there,” Moon said. “That would damage the Great Lakes economy.”
The fellowship program, which was held in Chicago, examined solutions to the exploding carp population. Water bubble curtains, underwater sound machines and electronic fish barriers were among proposed solutions.
Construction projects are set to begin this year and will implement some of these preventive measures. The so-called Brandon Road Interbasin Project will provide more protection at the Brandon Road Lock and Dam near Joliet, Illinois, a natural choke point on the Des Plaines River.
Even if Lake Michigan is protected, the question remains; What do we do with the scores of carp overtaking the Missouri and Illinois rivers, and spilling into beautiful waterways and lakes? French chef Philippe Parola seems to have the solution.
“He knew they were abundant right here in Grafton,” Moon said.
She met Parola at the Chicago fellowship. There, Moon joined around 150 media outlets with hungry journalists, and she tried the fish that Parola says tastes good, is high in protein and contains little to no mercury.
“At that event we pretty much changed the perception of the Asian carp being a bad fish,” Parola said. “It was in the newspaper in the next few days nationwide. Several chefs got on board and put it on the menu.
In 2012 Parola trademarked the name “Silverfin” as an alternative to carp. This was to attract consumers who might otherwise be turned off by the stigma of carp as a “junk” fish. He said when he started 15 years ago, nobody wanted to eat Asian carp.
“I knew that we had to come up with some kind of new brand name to kind of change the image of the Asian carp to help facilitate consumers to try it out. And you know, if they jump in the boat they get put on the barbeque pit and eaten because they are actually excellent fish to eat,” Parola said.
Ahead Of His Time
Pictured: Carp Chef Philippe Parola.
Parola said he was ahead of his time, and for that reason he struggled to find an investment group to support Silverfin.
“My banker was actually laughing at me trying to process Asian carp,” Parola said.
In 2020, it seemed Parola had broken through. He made a call to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Trade Office, and was connected with five processors in Vietnam. He shipped the carp frozen and whole to Vietnam, and spent a year-and-a-half traveling back and forth teaching his recipes.
There, he finalized the recipe for his carp fishcake, and began to market for food service operation. As the story goes, COVID-19 interrupted his big chance to sign a contract that would have put his fishcake on the market.
“I lost a pretty good bet on that opportunity. After COVID-19, it’s almost impossible and too costly to do what I did,” Parola said. “So, I’m definitely looking here to set up a plan and try to do what I did.”
“Here” is Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The “plan” would be a processing plant, a costly but convenient solution to the excessive carp. According to Parola, the benefits of turning carp into food “don’t stop.”
“You could provide food for the soup kitchen. You could provide food for the public school system, food for the grocery store and regular consumers, and it’s a win-win situation because you remove the fish,” Parola said. “I got the formulas down the past few years and I did work on a new process de-boning the fish and new recipes and quite a few value added products ready to add to the marketplace.”
He says a processing plant would go for around $12 million, a fraction of the price tag on the Brandon Road Interbasin Project. Parola calls the project “a joke.” He says if the Carp wanted to enter Lake Michigan, they would have done so by now.
“They put a solution to a problem that is not even existing,” Parola said. “The Great Lake is very deep, and the plankton reproduction is very slow. Asian carp are really river fish, they will not reproduce in a great lake. Many scientists agree with me that they will not survive in a Great Lake.”
Parola’s position is grounded in compassion, and he sees several possible positive outcomes that could come from carp processing.
“With the project, you don’t address the problem from way up north there on the Great Lakes all the way down to where we are in Louisiana. How many jobs [could a plant] create at the end of the day, throughout the Mississippi Basin where many areas are still depressed?
“I traveled to the area where the youngsters don’t have any hope of getting a good job. That would be the whirlwind situation where you open several plants throughout the Mississippi Basin, you create jobs, you increase the local economies, and you provide food,” he insisted.
Parola plans to continue pushing carp as a mainstay on the market.
“My dream is to really properly process the Asian carp and be able to have products on the market that will be easy to sell, and consumers would be very pleased. It would be good and inexpensive enough for them to put that on the grocery list,” Parola said.
“If I can make a difference with what I know, I will. It’s like a payback to this country for the great years of fishing and hunting that I have lived,” he said.
Environmental Echo 