And, yes, this is a 2012 book that was still sitting on my shelves in pre-publication form six years later. You know how I've mentioned that publishers don't send me books for review much anymore? That's why. Six-years-delayed coverage is possibly worse, or at least more annoying, than no coverage at all.
Luckily, I never claimed to be a major media outlet....
Anyway, that's the sordid backstory. The book is Eating Aliens, a travelogue by Jackson Landers about finding various invasive species in the Eastern USA, hunting them, cooking them, and eating them. Landers's aim is simple: he knows that invasive species take over because they out-compete the local fauna, and that getting rid of those species before they drive natives to extinction is important -- or at least knocking down the invaders over and over again to keep those extinctions at bay.
But relying on big government programs to find all of these invaders and kill them is probably not a viable strategy -- it would be too expensive, and bureaucracies tend to find ways to perpetuate themselves and the situations they were created to address. On the other hand, concerted human action has repeatedly decimated or eliminated animal populations -- witness the passenger pigeon and bison. If only there were a way to harness that destructive power for good.
That's what Landers wants to do: get people to want to eat invasive species, to create a market for their meat, to give incentives for individual hunters and fishers or larger operations to semi-industrialize the destruction of the right animals. In most of these chapters, he's got a local guide -- sometimes the guy hired to knock down this particular invasive species in the area, sometimes just a local hunter who knows the territory -- to help him locate and bag the particular prize.
Call it the carnivore's response to vegetarianism: only eating animals that deserve it. (Landers grew up as a vegetarian, actually, and then made a living as a hunting instructor and writer. I'm using the past tense here because this book is six years old, and he could have moved on to something completely different by now...googles...well, he's moved slightly sideways into science journalism with a current sideline in civil rights. )
Eating Aliens has a dozen chapters, each of which chronicles an expedition to hunt and eat something invasive, from two different kinds of iguanas (neither native to Florida; both flourishing there) to feral hogs to lionfish to Asian carp to nutria to Canada geese to the evocatively named Chinese Mystery Snails. Landers also has a shorter afterword about cases where he didn't manage to bag something, so each of the main chapters does include cooking and tasting that particular thing.
Generally, human beings have gotten pretty good at turning the flora and fauna of our planet into tasty food -- it's one of the things we as a species are best at. So it comes as no surprise that Landers generally manages to get something worth eating out of each of these species -- Eating Aliens is not a cookbook, so there aren't serious details of cooking time and preparation, but a diligent reader could pull out enough tips to get started himself if he wanted to.
And, to fit the cliche, an awful lot of this stuff ends up tasting more or less like chicken -- or like what you cook it with. That's a bug rather than a feature, I think: we already eat a lot of chicken, and having something "chicken-y" that we could gather in our own neighborhoods as a hobby could be appealing to a lot of people. (And having something new and exotic that interesting men harvest for you will be appealing to a slightly different lot of people.)
I love the idea of this book, though I assume it will never work out quite the way Landers wants: humans are too ornery, cross-grained and stupid to jump onto obvious win-win situations, as has been proved too many times. Still, even if it only gets some more local hunters bagging nutria or iguanas on the fringes, that's a big positive.
This is a great book for fans of adventure journalism, for adventurous eaters, and for hunters and fishermen looking for a new challenge. Landers is an entertaining writer on top of being on the side of righteousness, and the structure makes it an easy book to pick up and read a chunk at a time. Even if you're unlikely to eat any aliens yourself -- I don't expect it to come up much in my diet any time soon -- it's still enjoyable and interesting, and might give you a slightly different perspective on hunters and sustainability.
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