Invasive species on
the menu can help
the environment.

There’s a new shift in the politics of food, not quite a movement yet, more of an eco-culinary frisson. But it may have staying power. Vegans, freegans, locavores - meet the invasivores.

Some divers in the Florida Keys recently held a lionfish derby, the idea being to kill and eat lionfish, an invasive species - that is, a potentially harmful species not native to a local area. Local chefs cooperated by promoting the lionfish as a tasty entree. The idea drew editorial support from Andrew Revkin in a post on The Times’s Dot Earth blog in which he also mentioned an attempt by some fisheries biologists to rename the invading Asian carp “Kentucky tuna” to make it more appealing to diners. And the Utne Reader magazine recently ran an article about Chicago chefs cooking the same invasive fish.

In 2009, a San Francisco blogger, Rachel Kesel, posted a nicely turned argument for the “invasive species diet.”

Ms. Kesel is a vegetarian, but she included animals as well as plants in her proposed diet. She said that she was studying in London when she wrote the post. “If you really want to get down on conservation you should eat weeds,” she decided. And so she blogged.

Now working for the parks department of San Francisco, she said she did pursue the vegetable side of the diet. “I’m really looking forward to some of our spring weeds here,” she said, notably Brassica rapa, also known as field mustard or turnip mustard.

Ms. Kesel has a flair for the kind of rhetoric that any movement needs. “I’m almost serious here,” she concluded her diet post. “Eat for the environment. Eat locally. Eat wild meat. Eat for habitat. Eat invasive.”

Jackson Landers, unlike Ms. Kesel, is completely serious. As the Locavore Hunter, based in Virginia, he teaches urbanites how to hunt and butcher deer. He has branched out from the locavore life to invasives, and lionfish are one target. But expanding beyond the invasivore approach, he has hunted and eaten feral pigs, two species of iguana, armadillos, starlings, pigeons and resident Canada geese. Mr. Landers, who grew up in a vegetarian household, taught himself to hunt. He believes that eating invasives can have a real effect.

“When human beings decide that something tastes good, we can take them down pretty quickly,” he said. Our taste for passenger pigeon wiped that species out, he said. What if we developed a similar taste for starlings?

I was pleased to see Canada geese and pigeons included in his list, because in the American Northeast, neophyte invasivores face some unappetizing possibilities, like the zebra mussel (too little meat and too much salmonella) and the unpleasant and unwanted freshwater algae, Didymosphenia geminata, commonly called didymo, or, with absolutely no trace of affection, rock snot.

If we broaden the definition of invasives to include the things that invade the average American suburbanite’s yard and golf course, a world of possibilities open up - deer, raccoons, opossums, squirrels, skunks, rabbits and woodchucks.

The movement will, of course, need the support of cooks and eaters as well as hunters and environmentalists, but I see that happening already. Witness the request for a good python recipe on the Web site Chowhound. Among the comments was this, which I take to be a sign that Mr. Landers and Ms. Kesel are on the right path: “We usually cook alligator and snake in an etouffee.”

Why, of course.


By JAMES GORMAN