IDNR Director Marc Miller, Louisiana Chef Philippe Parola and Chef Tim Creehan at last week's Target Hunger Now Event in Chicago.  Over 350 meals were served to the Chicagoland Community.  Photo provided by the Illinois DNR.

SPRINGFIELD — Most people associate Asian carp with something that is pesky or annoying.
However, the Illinois Department of Natural Resources are asking people to consider these large, boney fish that are destroying ecosystems in the Illinois river system as something that is edible.

In effort to remove Asian carp from rivers in Illinois, IDNR has launched a campaign to change the image of the Asian carp.
“The Illinois Department of Natural Resource’s goal is to get these fish down to a manageable size and one of the ways that will help remove them from the Illinois river system is for there to be a demand for them,” said IDNR Spokesman Chris McCloud. “That’s why we’re asking people to try them so that more folks will — commercial fishermen and the like — will start removing them from Illinois’ ecosystem.”
According to McCloud, Asian carp taste like white fish.
“Asian carp actually is pretty tasty,” said McCloud. “It tastes like what I think people would consider a normal white fish.”
At a recent IDNR Asian carp tasting event, a Louisiana chef prepared the fish a number of different ways for about 350 people.
“We served over 350 meals and most the people there were actually very surprised at the taste, just because of the reputation problem,” said McCloud. “Most people when they hear ‘carp’ they think ‘common carp’ and common carp are completely different. They’ve rooted at the bottom of rivers and have kind of a muddy taste, whereas Asian carp do not.
“They (Asian carp) swim the upper water columns of the rivers and eat plankton. They don’t eat other fish. They don’t eat crustaceans or worms. They eat plankton and algae, so they’re actually healthier than many fish and they have a good oil content to them too.”
Several chefs do not prepare Asian carp fish because it is difficult to fillet their meat, said McCloud.
“One of the reasons many chefs have not worked with them is because they’re very boney,” said McCloud. “They have bones throughout their flesh, so you can’t just fillet them and have a nice boneless fillet when you fillet them. If there’s a demand for them, I think there will be quicker solutions to finding a way to debone them and have them ready to either prepare or serve in grocery stores and restaurants and food banks.”
Some commercial fishermen are already catching Asian carp in rivers in Southern Illinois and selling them to food processing plants that send them to China, said McCloud.
“They are being taken by commercial fishermen in the southern portion of the state because there is a demand for them overseas, but we’re trying to create a demand for them in the United States,” said McCloud.
 Asian carp were imported from China in the 1970s to remove catfish from ponds.
“They were actually brought here in the ‘70s in the southern states to clean catfish ponds because they do eat plankton and algae,” said McCloud.
Flooding allowed the Asian carp to spread to the Mississippi River, leading them to the Illinois River and other connecting rivers. Famous for leaping from the water when startled, at times slamming into boaters with bone-shattering force, and growing up to 4 feet long and 100 pounds, Asian carp are spreading further north of the Illinois River and into the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, a man-made link between Lake Michigan and the Mississippi River system.
If the Asian carp reach the Great Lakes they could decimate food supplies and starve out native fish species, disrupting a $7 billion fishing industry.
To prevent the fish from spreading into the Great Lakes, IDNR are netting Asian carp near the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal.
“With or without the market, the IDNR is removing these fish where we think they are northerly to take pressure off the barrier systems that we have in place up in Romeoville,” said McCloud.
In addition to preventing the spread of the fish into the Great Lakes, IDNR wants to remove the fish from the Illinois river system to preserve native fish species.
“There are places in Illinois where 9 out of every 10 fish is an Asian carp and so they have kind of invaded our waterways,” said McCloud. “They eat a lot so they compete for food sources with our native fish and they breed very quickly.”