tions enjoy eating Asian carp. But, throughout the rest of the U.S., people snub the abundant food source, and supply continues to outweigh demand.

“One of the problems is that they’re not native to America, so Americans are just not going to eat them,” Marsden says. “It’s just hard to get people to try them.”

Clint Carter, manager at Springfield’s Carter’s Fish Market, says Asian carp aren’t on his menus, but not because the meat isn’t good. To the contrary, he says the fish, which feed close to the water’s surface, provide clean-tasting white meat.

For fun, Carter experiments with Asian carp and serves them to his friends. “I’ve cooked them for a lot of people and haven’t had many complaints,” he says.

“But the negatives overwhelm it,” Carter says. The ‘Y’ bones that drop down on both sides of a silver carp’s body are enveloped by flesh, making it time-consuming and difficult to separate good meat from inedible bone.

Yet if the Asian carp is properly cut and fried, the bones will pop out of the meat with relative ease, Carter says. He also suggests mincing them up and making patties out of them, or smoking them. He adds that they’d make a great imitation fish.

But besides bones, Asian carp also have a public relations problem. “They’ve got the name ‘carp’ and there aren’t many people who like carp,” Carter says. When people think of carp, they think of the bottom-feeding common variety which have a darker meat, not realizing that Asian carp feed close to the surface, are less likely to hold high levels of contaminants and aren’t fishy tasting. Despite the setbacks, in the last decade Illinois’ commercial fishing industry managed to ramp up the market for Asian carp from zero to 15 million pounds, but that’s not enough to bring native fish populations back up, Marsden says.

“We need sales for probably closer to 50 million pounds per year to actually reduce [the Asian carp population].” Marsden says that with that amount of production, commercial fishermen could reduce Asian carp populations by 95 percent within five years. In decreasing Asian carp populations, fishermen could turn their attention back to catching native fish, which would be hardier because they’d have less competition for food.

The only problems, Marsden says, are transportation costs to foreign countries and marketing in the U.S.

Cost is also a primary concern for another stakeholder. Dr. Tim Leeds, a representative of Heartland Processing, says he can make a useful product out of parts or all of

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