Some invasive species now served as dinner favorites
Lionfish, pythons find their way onto menus
FORT MYERS, Fla. — They’re destroying our reefs, uprooting native plants, strangling our birds and choking our waterways.
Florida’s invasive species — lionfish, feral hogs, Burmese pythons, water hyacinth, giant African land snails — have caused a slew of troubles.
One possible solution seems simple enough: Let’s eat them.
Python pizza
In Fort Myers, you can find python fillets on pizza and wild boar on spaghetti. In Miami, they’re frying whole lionfish and serving it with a mango salsa.
It’s only a matter of time before our hunger for the exotic gets the best of these exotics — right?
“It’s not quite that easy,” said naysayer Paul Skelley, a collection manager and entomologist with the Florida Department of Agriculture.
“Could we eat them to extinction? It’s unlikely,” Skelley said. “The problem is humans. Once we decide we like the taste of something, we want to keep it.”
Another problem is agencies like the Food and Drug Administration and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Their inspectors frown upon unregulated sale of wild game and foraged plants to the public. There are safety and quality standards to be met, and processors who are held accountable.
Very few of the exotic proteins seen on menus are harvested locally.
“It’s a liability issue I don’t want to have,” said Sal Basile, owner of Two Meatballs in the Kitchen in Fort Myers, which serves a wild boar ragu as an occasional special. “When it has worms in it, then what happens? It doesn’t pay for me to take that chance.”
Basile orders his wild boar from Cheney Brothers, a Florida-based food distributor. Cheney Brothers gets it from Texas, where the animals roam ranches with access to clean water and pesticide-free food sources.
The Everglades Pizza debuted at Evan’s Neighborhood Pizza in Fort Myers in 2011. Along with alligator sausage and frog legs, python meat tops the $45 pie. But owner Evan Daniell isn’t clubbing Burmese pythons in the Everglades, he’s ordering them, skinned, filleted and vacuum-packed, from the comfort of his computer.
“They come from Vietnam,” Daniell Lionfish are an invasive species that taste great when fried. THE NEWS-PRESS
said.
Fried lionfish tasty
One of the only invasive species human consumption may be denting is the lionfish. The spiny creatures have invaded reefs in the Caribbean, southern Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico. They are prolific breeders, producing 30,000 eggs per spawn and spawning up to three times a month. Their venomous spines make them unattractive to predators.
But, when cleaned and fried, they are tasty.
“It’s really delicate,” said Rebecca Franks, owner of Fish Fish, a restaurant and seafood market in North Miami. “It’s sweet and mild, but not as meaty as grouper, more kind of the texture of Dover sole — flaky and light. It’s just a lovely fish.”
Franks serves lionfish as a special whenever her chef can get his gloved hands on them. South Florida fish mongers primarily offer lionfish during spiny lobster season, which runs August through March. The exotics swim into lobster traps and are pulled up by commercial fishermen.
In 2011 and 2012, commercial fishermen harvested12,464 lionfish in Florida with a value of $57,970. Franks said she pays $7.50 per pound when the lionfish are plentiful.
In the Gulf of Mexico off of Southwest Florida, lionfish are not yet creeping into stone crab or blue crab traps. Because they dwell on reefs, where net fishing is not allowed, spear fishing is the only other means of catching lionfish.
Chris Tomayko is hoping to spear enough lionfish to create a local supply of it. The Port Charlotte man founded Lionfish Solutions Inc. in January. He’s working with local divers and boat captains to lead lionfish dive trips. His goal is to fund the trips by selling their catch to local fish markets and restaurants.