This shredded wild boar meat was made by Texas chef and hunter Jesse Griffiths. Wild boars are one of the most destructive invasive species and are increasingly appearing on the menus of high-end restaurants.
摄影：JODY HORTON，THE HOG BOOK
Written by: EVE CONANT
Two words on the menu that don't look so tempting? "Swamp" and "Rat".
At least it was a ship of chefs up to the black humor. On a sweltering morning before the start of COVID-19, a ship of cooks sailed through louisiana's prehistoric swamps in a boat. Southerners were still socializing and didn't maintain social distancing.
The open-cabin ship, with 24 cooks, was invited by local scientists to help them save Louisiana's threatened wetlands. The "swamp rat" in question is an invasive beaver rat that gnaws on a large amount of green plants, forcing the state to offer a bounty of $6 each for the killing of the rodent.
Although the beaver rat has become a dish in restaurants, it has not been very popular. In reality, though, from kudzu to wild boar, more and more exotic plants and animals are appearing on the tables of the American South. In addition to thousands of non-native and "nasty" species, the United States has more than 4,000 invasive species that reproduce and survive more than native species, spread disease to native species, and destroy habitats. In the right hands of a chef, many invasive species can turn into fairly tasty food.
The Southern United States has been severely affected by invasive species, but not only in the South. Oregon hosts the "Invasive Species Eaters" cooking contest every year, and crayfish cooking events are held in the great lakes area. New England foodies recently collaborated with ecologists on the Green Crab Cookbook, which uses recipes from vast regions from Venice to Vietnam to entice people to eat green crab and turn "problems into food." They even launched a free campaign called "Shuck at Home 2020" to distribute this invasive crab to people who cook at home.
Tourist Adam Kunz and hunting guide Kristin Parma prepare to drag a wild boar out of the wild as part of a course designed to encourage hunters to learn to dress up, cut and cook wild boar in the wild.
In February 2020, participants killed four wild boars during a hunting expedition organized by the New School of Traditional Cooking. In 2006, the school was founded in Austin, Texas, with a primary focus on picking food and invasive species.
Photo by GRETA RYBUS, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
The "Invasive Species Diners" movement, although small in scale, has some clear culinary and environmental logic. Imagine that wild species like wild boars, not just "grazing," are destroying organic habitats all their lives. Add in some anti-waste chef rhetoric, and you have every reason for what proponents need to call radical environmental management.
While COVID-19 is disrupting businesses, it has not brought them to a halt. At Dai Due in Austin, for example, the current holiday selection menu includes smoked boar ham: wild boar meat marinated with star anise, bay and brown sugar, then roasted with oak.
Many environmentalists are excited about chef collaborators, who are often the stars of their communities. "The chefs here are our local celebrities," said Jacques Hebert, a Louisiana native and member of the Restored Mississippi River Delta Alliance. "Our culture revolves around eating. We love the food, we like to talk about the next meal while eating. ”
However, during a culinary journey to invade diners before the outbreak of COVID-19 (from Atlanta to Austin), I learned the truth about what he was saying.
Georgia: "If we blow it up, customers will taste it"
Known as the "vine that devours the south," kudzu can grow 0.3 meters a day, kudzu has occupied trees and buildings across the Country since it was first introduced from the Japan Pavilion in the United States during the Philadelphia World's Fair in 1876. However, wild kudzu in the southern United States grew wildly, because farmers had feared a second sandstorm, so they planted a large number of wild kudzu. Since then, street lampposts and trees have been overgrown with wild kudzu, and southerners' impressions of plants have been wrapped in it.
However, Wild Kudzu has always appealed to Chef Matt Marcus at Atlanta's Watershed restaurant (which is currently closed). He pickled, dried and fermented wild kudzu to "make" salads. He made a green pie out of wild kudzu gel, chopped wild kudzu leaves to make a risotto, and a wild kudzu leaf fried in pecans and brown butter. He joked: "If we fry wild kudzu leaves, customers will try!" ”
The invading wild kudzu occupied part of the Westlake community in Atlanta, Georgia. Once planted in an ornamental botanical garden, kudzu vines can cause plants and trees to suffocate to death and then grow wildly. A small percentage of chefs now use this plant to make pesto sauce, jam and salad ingredients.
Photo by JESSE PRATT LÓPEZ
The day we met him, he offered my son Bennett and me a dish of fish sprinkled with kudzu powder. "You can feel the chlorophyll in it, you can taste the green," Marcus said. One of his suppliers cut the kudzu vine from the edge of the organic farm without any overhead costs. Wild kudzu grows in organic soil and can be used to make salads with high nutritional value.
Alabama: Dinner Ingredients 'Disgusting'
On the highway, as we crossed the state border, my son shouted "Love To Alabama." We counted the number of swamps along the way, and we laughed when the host of Alabama Public Radio warned largemouth bass and smallmouth bass to avoid a certain river because of a middle school fishing contest. Our goal was to arrive in Daphne, Alabama in time for dinner with Chef Chris Sherrill, a chef organized by nuisance Group in Alabama. NUISANCE Group is an acronym for "nasty, undereaten ingredients or invasive animals, but sustainably used through proper cooking" and aims to raise public awareness of the consumption of the animals and plants mentioned above.
His partner, Chandra Wright, was a former divorce lawyer who became an environmentalist after the BP oil spill. He burst out laughing, recalling the experience they had had when they came up with the abbreviated name. "We struggled for a long time." In 2015, Alabama's Director of Marine Resources called Chef Sherrrill, worried about lionfish invading Gulf of Mexico waters, and asked, "Do you know how lionfish taste?" ”
It turns out sherrrill can make anything delicious. Dinner was a sustainable Swedish-style buffet: wild boar sausages, he said, "and wild boar meat is probably closer to the pork our great-grandparents ate than the pork we eat now." Beef brisket and red snapper fins with wild kudzu pesto sauce.
"Every chef in the Southeast can add wild kudzu leaves to a billion dishes," Sherrill said. "I bought it from the side of the road, and I knew they didn't spray pesticides, they picked some from the poles and put them in a food processor, plus some olives, roasted acorns, a lot of garlic, sweet onions and parmesan cheese."
We gathered around the table trying to describe the taste of wild kudzu, and someone said "A bit like a nut?" And some people feel a little "the taste of fresh vegetables?" But their friend Miriam won, he said, "Like the smell of the outdoors?" ”
New Orleans: "The most delicious smoked"
There seems to be everything on the Louisiana menu. One chef said that, like many others, he was taught from an early age to "go under the logs and look for what is the food for dinner." "However, when it comes to dealing with local invasive animals, it is best to go into the wild and stab a few lionfish to death yourself."
"Toxic means you won't eat it now." It's a word of encouragement from biologist Alex Fogg, who is eating a Vietnamese-style tempura fried lionfish, but the spines on this lionfish are so strange that they can even be used as medieval weapons at the same time.
Fogg took a few of the fried spines and put them in his mouth. Lionfish are able to secrete venom, but not toxicity, and they must deliberately inject you with venom to harm you.
Thousands of lionfish were caught at Fort Walton Beach near Destin, Florida. Biologist Alex Fogg hosts an annual lionfish fishing competition to catch this invasive species, which is then donated to local restaurants.
Photo by ALEX FOGG
We came to GW Fins, a lively upscale restaurant in new Orleans' French Quarter, where partner and chef Tenney Flynn is often referred to as the fishmonger leader of the Gulf of Mexico region. He took to Instagram to remind diners to serve lionfish tonight. "It's a novel dish," he says. ”
In the beginning, Flynn tried to stab the lionfish with his fishing gear himself — people thought it would be a good citizen to just see the lionfish stab it to death. But he said he wasn't an expert: "I stabbed a small, stationary lionfish. "But he's a real leader in mobilizing people like Fogg to catch large quantities of lionfish from Gulf waters." Alex can tell you about their science," Flynn said, and as soon as he finished, he realized he needed to go back to the kitchen. "But if they're not controlled, they're going to be a very big problem."
Lionfish have few natural predators and are therefore "fearless," Fogg said. While researching lionfish, he began offering it to restaurants, saying it was a side hustle to help him complete his graduate studies. As more and more people recognized the threat of lionfish, fishing for lionfish became a huge event of great concern — he had just held the largest ever "lionfish fishing competition" in Destin, Florida, and caught nearly 19,000 fish, relieving the pressure on the already struggling reef.
"Some people would never consider killing wildlife," Fogg said. "However, fishing for lionfish is an activity that those people can support because it helps protect the environment." He recalled that there was a vegetarian woman at the lionfish fishing competition who told him that "the only non-vegetarian food she ate was lionfish, and that's why." ”
We ordered a sashimi with Fresno peppers, Thai lemon, taro slices and mint. The dish looks as delicate and beautiful as sashimi, and it feels like we're eating a dreamy combination of air and water.
Another night, I crossed the underground passage to a place full of murals called Kermit's Treme Mother-In-Law Lounge. Here you can find Kermit Ruffins himself, a trumpeter and singer reminiscent of jazz musician Louis Armstrong. Of course, Kermit Ruffins' grilled meats are also popular, including roasted beaver rat meat about twice a year, accompanied by "beer or wine, and celery, onions and bell peppers, which chefs call trinity." "I always give it away," he said, "and never sell it." ”
Of course, invasive cuisine is hard to compare to classic dishes like braised seafood and Bennett cakes. "But under the example of celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain, people are becoming more adventurous," said Chef Nathan Richard at Cavan Restaurant, which is housed in an old, trendy mansion in New Orleans' Garden District.
What advice does he have for home cooks of beaver rat meat? "The results of the stew are best." He also won the "Invasive Species Food Cooking Contest" sponsored by local ecological organizations for taco made from Asian carp, which wreaked havoc on the Mississippi River.
New Orleans' GW Fins restaurant is known for its exquisite seafood, including this Vietnamese-inspired stir-fried lionfish dish. Lionfish have 14 stingers, so home cooks should be careful when making lionfish, or seek help from fishmongers, chef Tenney Flynn says in her cookbook, Extreme Taste. (High temperatures denature the venom, so fried lionfish are safe to eat.) ）
摄影：DANNY LEE，THE DEEP END OF FLAVOR COOKBOOK
"We're trying to pickle roe right now," Richard said. However, he said that if I really wanted to know about Asian carp, I would definitely go to Baton Rouge and talk to a local chef: "He knows Asian carp very well. ”
When the music was on and the bartender was making cocktails, our waitress Emilie interjected that she had overheard Richard say that it was best to coat the beaver rat meat with a lot of oil and grill it. "I had a beaver rat when I was a kid," she said. "It's called Tim. When I hear you guys talking about 'tender' and 'meat', my reaction is, oh no! When she told us that she used to put Tim in a Barbie car and pull it with a rope, we all buried our faces in our hands with the pain of loving animals.
I put on a serious attitude and asked, that big pink Barbie?
"No, lime green with pink hues."
Baton Rouge: The man who knows the most about The Asian carp
If I had to comment on the most invasive species-obsessed chefs I've met, it would be Chef Philippe Parola, a rough Frenchman in Baton Rouge who runs a website called "Can't Beat 'Em, Eat 'Em" and is dedicated to getting more people to eat to solve environmental problems.
In the 1990s, Louisiana launched a campaign to eat beaver rats, and Philippe Parola was an opponent from Europe. Although beaver rats rival beef in terms of protein content and semantic masking with the French name ragondin on the menu, the sport ended in failure.
Pictured here is a beaver rat in its native Argentina, which Americans imported to the United States for fur. Now, beaver rats are spread across the wild, threatening Louisiana's wetlands. In the 1990s, Louisiana launched a campaign to encourage people to eat beaver rat meat, but it failed. The invasive species is now found in at least 20 states.
Photo by CHRISTIAN HEEB, LAIF/REDUX
"It's a waste of natural protein," he said in a thick French accent, revealing a deeper, more tangible sadness.
Still, he hasn't given up on efforts to de-stigmatize other invasive species. He focuses on turning Asian carp (very strong and has a lot of spines, most chefs don't have time to process the meat) into a food: frying pre-prepared frozen carp meatballs in a frying pan. He has contracted with some large venues, such as university cafeterias, to quickly maximize the number of people eating Asian carp. "We can't wait, it's long overdue. Science is progressing too slowly," he said.
Despite Parola's ambitions, he has no illusions that carp cake will end America's Asian carp invasion problem. However, he is confident in the great power of the Asian carp recipe, which is what motivates him to persevere. "Remember Paul Prudhomme and his smoked salmon?" he asked. In the 1980s, the huge demand for this dish in The United States almost led to the extinction of salmon in Louisiana. "With this one recipe, that person almost led to the extinction of salmon!" A chef! A recipe! ”
Will Asian carp become as popular as salmon? Parola hopes so.
He wondered if 15-year-old Bennett would like the nuggets, after all he was very environmentally conscious. He soon discovered that Bennett was already asking for a second one.
Texas: "Certified Wild Boar Meat"
We headed to Austin – a place full of food trucks that offer everything from delicious grilled meats to lavender lattes. Yes, all the people here try to "keep Austin's peculiarity". We met many of these people, including our Airbnb homeowner, a dog trainer who taught her rescue pig named Hamela Anderson to walk spacewalks on the kitchen floor.
However, we are here to learn about another kind of pig. In every state we've been to, we've heard about the devastation caused by wild boars, the destruction of wetlands, the digging of holes in flood banks, the destruction of crops. Still, Texas is in the lead in encouraging hunters, the meat processing industry and chefs to try something against them.
Worried state officials called it an "illegal tetrapod" and chefs called it a "wild boar." A chef in Austin is known for making this pest animal into food.
"Wild boars are non-domestic pigs," says Chef Jesse Griffiths. Once in the wild, he said, pigs change: "Their fur will become coarser and their mouths will become longer so that they can dig faster when digging on the ground." ”
We came to the Dai Due Butcher Shop and Supper Club in Griffiths. Here you can eat bone broth, wild boar and flower deer lasagna. The walls are decorated with the skulls of the blue wildebeest. The blue wildebeest was introduced from India in the 1930s for hunting and now competes with local wildlife and cattle for pasture.
Part of a private ranch, 160 km south of San Antonio, Texas, this range sometimes hosts wild boar hunting training classes.
The restaurant is also home to a new school of traditional cooking, which offers three-hour boar slaughtering classes and multi-day hunting on pastures filled with wild boar, blue wildebeest and deer. The flower deer, another animal originally introduced for hunting, escaped from the hunting grounds, causing problems for the local ecology.
"In the last two years, the flower deer has entered the sights as an invasive species," said Griffiths, who is burly, has a large red beard and tattoos on his body. He has loved fishing since he was a child, but describes himself as an "adult" hunter, and now he has become an expert in hunting invasive species and junk fish (i.e., undereaten and undesirable fish) and ensures that most of his ingredients are caught and picked.
"Eating invasive species now is a good thing," Griffiths says, as we eat wild boar tortillas while enjoying sausages made from delicious blue wildebeest meat. My favorite is the tomato salad sprinkled with deer pollen. This dish is light and full-bodied, with limes and salt that gives a strange original taste. Then there's the wild boar meat bone broth, drizzled with citrus juice, which is very tasty.
The wild boar was one of four killed in a Texas weekend hunting class and has not yet been processed or cleaned.
Chef Jesse Griffiths at Dai Due Butcher Shop & Supper Club slaughters a wild boar. Many hunters in the Southern United States don't like to eat wild boar meat, but Griffiths has worked hard to prove that this devastating species is not only edible, but delicious.
Smoked wild boar steak with applesauce is one of the recipes in Griffiths' forthcoming Pork Recipes.
Griffiths supplies 300 to 400 wild boars per year. Still, he said, the wild boar he could personally hunt from his natural environment was "insignificant."
"My main task is to eat more wild boars. We hunted a lot of wild boar but didn't eat enough, they were a resource. Many people choose to poison wild boars, but it slows down the process of wild boar's death and can have a negative impact on the environment, he said. In contrast, hunting or short-term imprisonment is more humane.
"Every time you eat a wild boar, you kill one less industrially raised livestock," Griffiths added.
During a weekend hunt organized by the New School of Traditional Cooking, Coleton Evans fired a shot at a wild boar, after which he scanned his surroundings to see if the boar had been hit and if it needed to be tracked. Texas law allows the use of feeders to lure wild boars because the number of wild boars has increased dramatically, causing massive crop losses and putting enormous ecological pressure on them.
When I was full, I left the table and went to the shelf in front of his store to look. In addition to the various frozen foods in the freezer, the shelves are stacked with T-shirts printed with the words "Eat wild boar, save the world" and soap made of wild boar fat.
Griffiths knows that he has little chance of winning when it comes to wiping out wild boar populations: "Some ecologists are right that we can't solve this problem by eating. ”
The hardships and obstacles didn't stop the chef, though, especially given the irresistible qualities he considered wild boars to possess.
"Wild boars are extremely destructive, but they can also be eaten."
(Translator: Stray Dog)