(upbeat music) (camera beeping) (image whooshes) (gentle upbeat music) - Welcome "InFocus" on WSIU.

I'm Jennifer Fuller.

Invasive species can be devastating to local ecology and many sometimes wonder whether it's easy or even possible to stop the spread.

For one example, invasive carp along the Mississippi River and other waterways in Illinois have been devastating for more than a decade.

But now some are trying to change how invasive carp are seen, and in some cases, consumed.

We get the story from Benjy Jeffords.

- [Benjy] The Illinois Department of Natural Resources unveiled a new name and rebranding campaign for the Asian carp to clear up public misconceptions about the invasive species.

There are four different types of carp that are considered invasive in the United States, bighead, black, grass, and silver carp.

They've been used in aquaculture for centuries because of their food source.

Silvers eat plankton, the black eat mussels and snails, the bighead eats zooplankton, and the grass eats aquatic plants.

Jim Garvey is the director of the Center for Fisheries, Aquaculture and Aquatic Sciences at SIU and says in the 70s, the carp found their way to the Mississippi River basin from flooding and accidental release.

- Now they can be found in the upper Mississippi River, the Missouri River, the Ohio River, Tennessee River drainage, and of course, lots of lakes and things like that.

And they continue to slowly creep throughout the United States.

They could easily get introduced into the eastern seaboard as well as the Westerns drainages.

- [Benjy] Garvey says these fish are causing major headaches in the United States and Canada as experts in the two countries try to contain them and to stop them from spreading out further.

- The big problem is, is that they're getting close to the Great Lakes, and there's a very big concern among policymakers, managers, that they're gonna get into the Great Lakes and then harm the recreational and commercial fisheries that are there.

- [Benjy] If they do reach the Great Lakes, that could mean trouble.

- It could be an ecological and economic Armageddon for the fishes that are out there and also for other species.

They are voracious feeders on zooplankton and phytoplankton.

So these are very small aquatic animals and aquatic plants that are important for the food chain and feed other fishes like yellow perch and trout, things like that.

And so the concern is that once they get in there, they'll knock out the bottom of the food chain and then cause the fisheries collapse.

- [Benjy] The carp are able to push out other native fish species because they've evolved a much faster reproduction rate, which they need because in their original habitat they had a high mortality rate.

- A single female bighead or silver carp can produce almost a million eggs.

So, you know, you multiply that by hundreds of thousands of fish, we're talking about a tremendous amount of reproductive potential.

- [Benjy] After 20 years of research, Garvey says the best way to control the population is to harvest them.

- Research that we've done here at SIU that we started with suggests that yes, if we do a good job of fishing these down in proper places, primarily the Mississippi and the Illinois rivers right now, that we can cause their populations to contract.

And actually, they'll slowly move back towards the center range.

And hopefully, we'll be able to reduce their spread throughout the United States and Canada.

- [Benjy] One way to get more people to eat these harvested fish is to rebrand it, including changing the name to copi.

- There's been some concern about the word Asian carp being one, maybe has a negative connotation because we're, you know, grouping them into a whole group of folks, so there's a cultural issue, but also the word carp can have negative connotations and so there has been a push for 20 plus years to try to get these fish renamed.

And so this has been the first successful attempt to get an official renaming and rebranding of these fish from the carp moniker to the copi moniker, which stands for copious, is a short term for that.

- [Benjy] Span is the Chicago-based graphic design company heading the campaign, and Design Principal Nick Adams says they chose to name copi as a play on the word copious because of the high number of copi in the waterways.

- This is because the fish has a name-based perception issue.

The great news is this isn't a unique problem.

This has been solved many times before through renaming, and we know that renaming food works.

Orange Roughy, it's originally known as Slimehead due to its mucus glands, and it became Orange Roughy because it was impossible to sell or to serve something called Slimehead.

- [Benjy] Garvey says they're also less difficult to eat than the fish people are used to.

- When we think of fish bones, we often think of those little tiny pin bones that you would get in a fish that you're eating, and they get stuck in your teeth, in the back of your throat.

One of the benefits of copi is that they have very large bones, and so they're bony, but the bones are manageable.

So it's akin to eating in a chicken wing.

You know, 30 years ago someone would say, "Eat a chicken wing, it's just all bone," but now, people love it.

The same thing with copi.

You can pick around the bones, and either that way, or there are ways to filet them or process them so that you can use the meat for a whole variety of different things.

- [Benjy] Cristaudos in Carbondale uses copi on occasions for fish tacos for the Southern Illinois Collaborative Kitchen.

Co-owner Leah Maciell says copi can be used in a variety of different ways.

- [Maciell] So far we've had really good feedback from it.

And so this is probably about the third time that we have made copi tacos with it in the last few years.

So, and people seem to really enjoy it.

I've also known some chefs that have made like fish cakes out of it that have had a really good reception to it.

So it's just a really good product to work with, and there's abundance of it, and so I'm kind of happy that they're utilizing something that's already an abundance in our rivers that is not necessarily supposed to be there.

- [Benjy] Maciell says it's also very easy to cook with.

- [Maciell] It's pretty easy.

It comes already minced, and it's such a mild flavor that it basically just like absorbs anything that you put on it.

I kind of compare it to that, tofu fish.

So it basically just, it has a mild flavor, so it could lend itself to anything.

- [Benjy] Garvey says with marketing and time, more Americans may start seeing copi at grocery stores and restaurants.

- The problem we've had over the last 20 or 30 years of trying to get these into the market is that there hasn't been any coherent message sent to the American consumer.

Now, with copi and a commitment on the both the federal and the state sides, there is a real interest in continuing to push this now for at least four or five years with the hope that this will help to allow markets to then just take over the slack and help us control these that way.

- [Benjy] For "InFocus," I'm Benjy Jeffords.

- We continue our conversation about copi and invasive carp with the assistant chief of fisheries at the Illinois Department of Natural Resources, Kevin Irons.

Kevin, thanks for joining us.

- Oh, it was my pleasure.

Thanks for having me, Jennifer.

- You know, I think by now people may be familiar with invasive carp, They've seen the stories, perhaps they've even been out on the waterways, but, you know, how big an impact do these fish have on the lake, streams, and rivers in Illinois?

- Well, certainly if we're out there on a waterway, the silver carp, the one that jumps can certainly make a huge impact, not only ecologically, but physically by jumping into boats.

And that's where we see 'em more often is when they are jumping into or behind a boat on the Illinois River, the Mississippi, or the Ohio River.

They're plentiful, and they're certainly impacting our native fish.

- And those impacts include not just preying on those fish, but really disrupting the whole food chain, is that right?

- Right.

In fact, they're not preying on the fish.

They're eating the smallest items of food things.

The stuff that makes the water green, we call it plankton, zooplankton or phytoplankton.

That's what they're eating.

They're the building blocks of energy in these large rivers, and they basically are taking the feet out of the bottom of the food web, so impacting the smallest fish and a few of those fish that eat plankton throughout their life.

- So you've been dealing with this for many years now, this isn't a new issue for you, but how has that fight, that management evolved since you first started noticing these invasive carp?

- Sure.

So, in probably 1986, we saw a couple of these fish arrive in Illinois.

And so they're just another new fish in in the neighborhood.

Their numbers grew and very quickly, "What are they doing?"

"How are they affecting our native fish?"

And then most importantly, are they spreading?

We are certainly worried about them moving into novel places like the Great Lakes or the lakes that we like to fish in our backyard.

So we know today from a lot of hard work, a lot of agency people on the water, where they are and where they aren't.

But there's probably a period of 10 or 12 years that we really weren't sure, and we had to investigate.

So now that we know where they are, we have to reduce their numbers, and we're focusing on that today.

- Sure.

And that part of that reduction is managing the population through, I assume the hope is more harvesting of these carp, is that right?

- It is.

It's a logical step.

We can put deterrents up, and we can make sure they don't spread, but really to affect them where they are, we have to think of the biggest tool in the toolbox and probably commercial harvesting and human consumption, what will be really pivotal in that.

We know where they're native, in China, human consumption, commercial fishing has made a difference.

- This is something that people have been talking about for some time even before the new marketing campaign, the switch to the name copi.

When you talk about actually consuming the fish, you know, there have been a lot of trials, "We'll try it in this particular instance."

I believe perhaps they were used in some of the prisons as food choices as well.

How difficult is it to try and get people to try something new here?

- Well, the name was certainly getting in the way.

One, this is one of the most consumed fish in the world, but here in the US, a relative to the bighead, silver, grass, and black carp these invasive carps we're talking about, the common carp was introduced back in the 1880s.

But people have a very strong opinion whether they like or don't like common carp, and trying to change that idea, it was tough.

So even though people like to eat it, it's still a carp, and a carp by any other name is something they didn't wanna take on.

So we're not gonna change bighead carp, silver carp into water, but we're providing a name.

So when you go to the store or go to the restaurant, copi is now something that resonates, it's something that sounds good to eat.

It is delicious to eat, it's healthy to eat, and people will try it.

And it's been just a huge success for us.

- What's the market like here?

Do you see a lot of people looking for a fish like this when they're cooking.

- It is a perfect American fish.

Once it's processed, it has bones, but it can be processed to a point where it's either a minced product, no bones at all, or boneless strips where, you know, people can actually make it.

And think of a Friday night fish fry type of boneless strips.

So, people, once they try it and can find it's working.

And this is a slow roll.

We're trying to get into more and more places.

The industry can't appear overnight, but through central Illinois now Southern Illinois, you can go out and find copi, restaurants are serving copi.

The bottom line, you know, a healthy protein is certainly at need throughout the state.

- Seems like in addition to the ecological benefits of this, there's an economic benefit as you see, as you mentioned, processors, distributors, the fishers themselves.

Do you see something like that growing as this starts to take off?

- Well, we certainly started this thinking, what can it do for Illinois?

We have it in stores in Tennessee.

One of the most impoverished parts of our country, the Mississippi River Valley.

Now we can put a fishing industry into those places 'cause that's where the carp are thriving, and we want to go and remove those fish where they're thriving.

So there certainly is an economic benefit, and those areas are probably short protein.

So we're putting a high quality, fresh local protein into place where there isn't a lot of that today.

- What kinda hiccup does this put into the process when you've got IDNR that's managing so many different species, so many different things in waterways, lakes, and rivers and things like that.

And then you've got this new invasive species that's really taking over.

- It's been a challenge for us.

You know, I'm not saying we're caught flat footed, but we're set up with our licensed revenues to manage those sport fish where our anglers are out there, invasive species, whether it's an aquatic weed, these carp or or other species start honing in on what we can do with those sport fish.

So as we're developing our agency and managing it, it's not just managing fast per se, it's managing the environment.

Invasive species are one of those big challenges we have moving forward.

- Sure.

Invasive carp certainly continue to be a problem, but we'll watch that as it continues as they move into this new copi phase.

Kevin Irons is the assistant fisheries chief for the Illinois Department of Natural Resources.

Kevin, I appreciate your time.

- [Kevin] Thanks for having me.

Choosecopi.com.

- We continue our copi conversation this episode of "InFocus" with an expert on foods from Southern Illinois University Carbondale.

Dr. Niki Davis is a professor in the Hospitality, Tourism and Event Management department at SIU.

Niki, thanks for joining us.

- Well, thanks for having me.

I'm excited.

- A lot of people have been listening and watching so far, and they've heard about how carp is known as copi when it gets to market, and I think a lot of them are sitting at home and thinking, "I'm not so sure about this."

So, you know about this evolution of carp being now branded as copi.

What's going on here?

What do people need to know?

- Well, honestly, it's a marketing positioning and branding situation for the carp, for the fish itself.

And the carp situation is not unusual.

We've had other fish that have been rebranded for the consumer's perspective and the consumer's sake.

Orange Roughy is one of them.

It used to be known as the Slimehead fish, and that's not very attractive or appetizing.

(Jennifer laughing) And I think we consider carp in much the same way.

And it has a bit of a negative connotation.

So the rebranding is in hopes to get people to want to eat it, maybe want to fish it in some cases, and certainly for restaurant chefs to put it on menus.

And eventually, it will come to market for the home cook.

- Let's talk about this carp specifically because some people are familiar with the common carp, and they'll say, "Eh, it's not the kind of fish for me.

It's just not the type of fish that I would normally choose."

But these invasive carp that we're now calling copi, it's a different kind of fish.

- It's a different fish altogether.

And you are right about the common carp, it has a unattractive taste for many.

It's a little bit fishy if you're not used to it.

And fishermen generally don't like to struggle with it either.

Probably not all fishermen are that way, but the copi carp is a completely different species, and it's much milder.

It's much flakier, a little bit more like cod than what we consider the common carp and stands up to the cooking process in many different ways.

So from a home cook perspective, which is, you know, what I am, certainly, it's something that I could bake, I could fry if I wanted to, I could broil just like I would a cod or another white fish.

- Sure.

When we talk about this evolution of the names of things, you mentioned Orange Roughy, there are lots of things whose names have changed dramatically.

How does that work?

Does someone just wake up one morning and say, "We need to market this differently," or do things change organically?

- Well, in the case for copi, that's pretty much what happens certainly.

And over time, I think marketing takes its space in how we eat and what we consume and even what we shop for and what we prefer in a lot of cases.

If we kind of stick in the fish arena, let's say, mud bugs is my favorite to talk about, and we've had this conversation before, they're crawfish or crayfish if you're from Louisiana, but we call them mud bugs still here in Southern Illinois, but who really wants to eat a mud bug?

So crayfish and crawfish are more appetizing.

- What about how people shop for food, whether it's, you know, there are a lot of people going to a more sustainable outlook.

Shopping for fish caught here in Southern Illinois or along the borders here clearly would be much better, much more sustainable than buying something that's frozen and flown in.

Does that happen a lot as well, where you see these regional foods kind of take off and grow more broadly from there?

- Well, I think in a broad sense of food in general and not just fish, we've seen that take off as a result of the pandemic, and we were certainly moving toward more of a local foods, more sustainable situation pre-pandemic, but with supply chain disruptions and shortages on foods and not being able to find the foods that we're used to in the supermarket, we're now moving back to that concept in our own shopping.

So we're shopping farmer's markets, we're shopping at local meat markets because the inventory is there where it might not be in the grocery store.

- How does marketing change what we eat?

How does it change the overall picture of that, do you think?

- Marketing is marketing?

(both laughing) That's probably a little bit of a broad question to answer, but in general, you know, really the purpose behind marketing is to make consumers do something, right?

Whether it's to make a purchase for shampoo or whatever it happens to be.

So when we rebrand something like a fish or when we start marketing products like canned food in the 1930s and 40s, and gelatin in the 1950s, then all of a sudden we have this in front of us as consumers, and it's something that hopefully we try and we kind of take on and pull into our own home cooking repertoire.

- Talk about, if you could, the technology of all of this and the technology of how food evolves.

I'm guessing that a lot of people don't really understand all that goes into this.

- This one of my favorite topics because we can think back a hundred plus years where we had a milkman delivering milk on a daily basis or every other day, but we didn't have refrigeration; that wasn't, certainly not common, and as a result we had to make do with those daily and maybe every other day deliveries on milk.

Ice was the same way.

Homes were built at the time for the iceman to actually slide a block of ice into the kitchen from the outside.

And that was kind of how we lived.

Well, enter refrigeration and on into kind of mid-century, that changed how we store food, how we consume food, how we can cook food, and that just kind of proliferated into modern day.

The microwave's another great example, you and I grew up with a microwave, that was not the case for our parents, right?

I'm not sure if that's good or bad that we grew up with a microwave, (chuckling) but nonetheless, in the 80s they took hold and all of a sudden we were cooking in a microwave as opposed to cooking from scratch in an oven.

- You know, we were talking a bit ago about the sustainable foods and buying local.

People were able to do that a little bit more easily many years ago, and they perhaps could have bought seafood much more easily simply because of transportation changes.

So, how does that change what we're able to get?

You can't go to the river anymore and buy things off of the boats as they come through.

- No.

Right.

Well, today supply chains and issues with diesel shortages and all sorts of things that are happening right now are constricting that a little bit.

Let's back up to pre-pandemic.

We were able to get pretty much anything we wanted to.

Even here in the Midwest, we can get foods that might not be common and certainly aren't native to the area.

Post pandemic, it's a little bit more difficult to do.

- Is this something where people you think need to or will change how they eat, change how they shop based on what's available?

- I think we will need to, and I think we are doing that.

And we're certainly seeing that locally.

And even in just the past decade, our farmers' markets around the country have increased substantially because people have moved back to wanting to be connected to the land and wanting to know where the food comes from.

And if we go to farmers' market, we know where the tomatoes and the cucumbers, and right now, winter squash, you know where that comes from because it's coming from a farm that's local to us.

- Sure.

Let me circle back into talking about copi.

There are a lot of people who hear carp and think, "Mm, maybe not as healthy, maybe not what I'm looking for."

Is this fish different?

Is it going to, you know, benefit people in terms of the good fats that you find in fish and things like that?

- Well, I think in general, carp, common carp or this carp that we're talking about, copi, yes, it's beneficial from a nutritional perspective.

I don't know that your average home cook is going to look at that as the primary reason to purchase it, certainly some will.

Others will look at this from a sustainability perspective, and others will look at this as, "I want to add fish to my diet."

There lies where the marketing comes in.

- When you talk about marketing too, there has to be in some cases a tourism aspect to this.

People who may be foodies, for example, who want to see these fish in action and then be able to try them.

Is that something that you think could benefit Southern Illinois in terms of an economy?

Tourism's a big deal here.

- Culinary tourism specifically on the whole, absolutely.

I don't know that I would suggest watching copi in action, necessarily.

(both laughing) We've heard plenty of stories about how that might backfire from a floppy fish perspective, right?

But, yes, culinary tourism generally speaking is a huge draw for any part of the country, and we definitely have that here in Southern Illinois, whether it's with our fish, mud bugs, (chuckles) I enter that picture a little bit, but certainly with our wine trail here locally, we have Centennial Orchards here locally.

Barbecue, I mean the list goes on and on.

And for that foodie who's interested in that aspect, absolutely.

- Culinary tourism, does that get to not just the way a food is prepared, but people are wanting to try food that is unique to a particular area?

- Yes, and what we're seeing trending kind of in that culinary tourism space now is travelers who want more authenticity in a place.

So coming to Southern Illinois, for instance, barbecue might be that for us.

The wine trail certainly is that for us.

Now we have local breweries and a brewery trail, so that changes over time.

But the traveler themselves, what we're seeing now is they really do want that authenticity in the place, and they'll hunt for it.

They'll go find it.

- So when we try to put all of these pieces together, a copious amount of supply, which is why they call it copi, right?

- copi, yes.

- A marketing campaign, the possibility of some tourism or some other portions of the economy, how long does something like this need to take hold?

Would we see something in five years where copi is similar to tilapia or something like that?

- Where copi is concerned, we're probably in the five to 10 year space before we really see it starting hit the grocery stores for you and I to go pick up and and cook at home.

There are a handful of chefs across the country that have committed to using it on their menus and in their restaurants, but we're in for the long haul on getting it to market for consumers, for end users.

Maybe a decade if I had to put a number on that.

- Do you think that it's going to take people learning how to eat it somewhere before they bring it home and try to make it themselves?

- Absolutely.

And we see that in food marketing over history.

We saw that, I mentioned Jello earlier.

What probably will happen in some way, shape, or form, cooking demonstrations at the state fairs.

And we actually did one of those here at our Du Quoin State Fair when it happened.

And Dr. Smith, which is one of my colleagues, and Dr. Noel out of our dietetics program, did exactly that.

They demoed, you know, did the onstage demonstration and served up copi chowder, and it's delicious.

And I think that's what it's going to take to get people to embrace it.

- We will certainly see.

Dr. Niki Davis, thank you so much for your time.

- [Niki] Thank you.

- And that'll do it for this episode of "InFocus" on WSIU.

You can find all of our episodes by going to our website, wsiu.org or subscribe on our YouTube channel.

Thanks for joining us.

For all of us here, I'm Jennifer Fuller.

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