On a clear afternoon late last May, Amy Yang leaned over the side of a small fishing boat. Her hands gripped a bow and arrow. She scanned the surface of Kentucky’s Cumberland River for telltale flickers of silver as the sky darkened. They’d been out for hours, and it was nearly dusk. She’d convinced her boyfriend to drive from her adopted hometown of Chicago to do this, and she didn’t want to miss her chance.
She kept her gaze on the river. The boat bobbed along an especially unglamorous stretch of water, rocky banks dotted with the carp carcasses. “Smelly,” Yang said. Plus, she had to concentrate. A city girl fresh out of college, she wasn’t a seasoned angler. In fact, it was her first time ever fishing. Her arms ached from holding the bow.
Then she saw it—the flicker. Brilliant silver. Then more flickers. The river’s smooth surface turned into a riot of ripples and shining fins. Its shores may have not been much to look at, but life teemed underwater. She stretched the arrow back, hoped her form wasn’t too crappy, and released.
“When we drove back to Chicago, we had a cooler full of fish,” she says.
Not just any fish. Yang is obsessed with one type in particular. At the time, she called it Asian carp, although now it is often called “copi.” (It’s technically a grouping of four separate species: bighead carp, grass carp, black carp, and silver carp.) In the US, this fish is often seen as a threat, particularly to the Great Lakes. An invasive species, it has flourished in the waterways of the American South and Midwest, growing so plentiful that it has killed off native species and warped the ecosystem. But it’s also a viable and abundant potential food source, and Yang wants to help people see it that way.
“I grew up in China,” Yang says, “so the fact that people weren’t eating them didn’t make sense to me.” She remembers seeing it on the dinner table as a child, which isn’t surprising—the fish has been eaten there for thousands of years, and remains popular to this day. Up until recently, though, it was hard to find in Chicago and most other American cities. By the time she went bowfishing, Yang had tired of ordering it in bulk online. A passionate home cook, she runs an Instagram account devoted to showcasing different ways to eat it. (Her favorite recipe? Ceviche.) She tells everyone she meets about copi—how versatile it is, how tasty, how unfairly maligned.
Yang is far from the only person fixated on this fish. There’s a growing movement spearheaded by scientists, chefs, and the US freshwater fishing industry to rehabilitate copi’s reputation, to convince Americans that it’s an underrated, affordable, and ecofriendly protein rather than a pest.
Kevin Irons, for instance, has been devoted to the cause since the 1990s, when he moved his family to Havana, Illinois, to be a large river ecologist. The same year he arrived, a commercial fisherman caught a copi in the Illinois River. The fisherman had never seen it before, and it freaked him out. “He’s dripping fish blood across the carpet in the research center, saying, ‘What the heck is this?’” Irons says.
Copi has been in waterways in parts of the southern United States since the 1970s, when environmentally-minded aquaculturists imported them to clean catfish retainer ponds. At the time, they were seen as a green alternative to chemicals. Perhaps they would have remained just that, had they not escaped during floods, entered local waterways, and then absolutely dominated every other creature. These fish are, above all else, incredibly adaptable and hardy. After it arrived on his home turf, Irons did everything he could to understand them. “I was traveling around the world talking about these critters,” he says. By 2010, Illinois had hired him to build up a program to deal with the invasive creature.
It’s a tough job. Although it took decades for copi to arrive in Illinois, once it was there, it quickly upended the ecological balance. Copi eat plankton and algae—so much plankton that other fish get bupkes and native populations dwindle or die out entirely. In many rivers, the water is so crowded with these creatures that other fish have evolved to be skinnier or oddly-shaped to squeeze past them. If they reach the Great Lakes, they could destroy their ecosystem. The threat is so dire that the government has spent billions erecting massive electric dams to zap the fish back downstream. But these dams are not foolproof. Last year, a silver carp made it all the way to Lake Calumet, just 7 miles from Lake Michigan.
For more than a decade in his role at the Illinois Department of Natural Resources (IDNR), Irons has advocated for another method as part of a larger strategy to keep these fish away from the Great Lakes and reduce their overall population: eat them up. He’s at the center of a long-gestating campaign to give the fish a reputational makeover thorough enough to whet American appetites.
“The name was a barrier,” Irons says. The association between Asian carp and environmental menace was too strong; besides, when most Americans hear “carp,” they think of unappetizing bottom-feeders. There had been previous rebranding attempts for the fish by different states—“Kentucky tuna” didn’t stick—but other successful renaming schemes gave them hope. The deep-sea fish now known as orange roughy, for instance, exploded in popularity after a campaign to change its off-putting original moniker: “slimehead.” Chilean sea bass, now often found on high-end menus, is actually the fish formerly known as Patagonian toothfish. (It’s also neither bass nor from Chile.)
In 2018, the IDNR partnered with a few other organizations, namely the environmental emergency firm Tetra Tech, to give Asian carp the Chilean sea bass treatment. They went all out, hiring a marketing firm called SPAN to come up with a spiffy logo and brand identity for the longtime problem fish, in addition to its new name.
I visited the firm’s loft-like office in Chicago’s West Loop to find out how exactly one rebrands a fish. Design director Bud Rodecker and project lead Nick Adam walked me through their unconventional marketing project. They were psyched about it. Adam fondly recalled how demand had far exceeded expectations when IDNR experimented with selling copi tacos at the Illinois State Fair. “They planned to do 3,000 tacos a day, but did 9,000,” he says. “That feels cool.” He was thrilled when he overheard fair-goers chatting about the fish with its new name.
In addition to creating a friendly, vibrant logo and coming up with the name (a play on “copious”), they also focused on building relationships with all the people and companies they’d need in order to get the fish served on a commercial scale. That meant wooing chefs and fishmongers, but also convincing fisherman, processors, and distributors that the fish was worth their time. “Part of this is about building out a workforce,” Adam says.
There are a few chefs who had already served the fish before the rebranding campaign, like Sara Bradley. Her farm-to-table restaurant Freight House in Paducah, Kentucky, is a locavore’s dream. She’s had the fish on her menu since she opened her doors in 2015. (She refers to it as Kentucky silver carp.) “It was really important to me to serve it,” she says. She likes how small the environmental footprint is; the fish on her menu is caught in a local lake and processed by local businesses. “Buying fish caught about 20 miles away from me and brought fresh every single day—I feel better about that than buying Scottish salmon, farm-raised.” Plus, she said, “it’s delicious.”
Down in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, chef Philippe Parola is another ahead-of-the-curve copi enthusiast. He’s promoted the fish as a food source for 13 years, ever since he realized how plentiful they were on an angling trip when they leapt from the water and into the boat. He recently wrote an entire cookbook (Can’t Beat ’Em, Eat ’Em! 40 Invasive Species With Recipes) devoted to eating invasive species, with a chapter devoted to copi. “We’re working today to get a processing plant in Louisiana,” he says.
Other chefs, like Brian Jupiter, needed a little nudge. Jupiter owns two popular Chicago restaurants, Ina Mae Tavern and Frontier. Although he’s well versed in preparing unusual fare—a whole alligator is on the menu at Frontier—Jupiter found copi’s skeletal structure challenging the first time he tried to cook it. It does not filet easily, thanks to complex intramuscular bones. While eating this type of fish is commonplace in many parts of Europe and Asia, Americans are more accustomed to boneless seafood. When the copi campaign contacted him and asked him to try working with it again, Jupiter decided to focus on serving it in approachable cuisine for the Midwestern palate. “We try to prepare it in ways that people have already had other flaky fish,” he says. “They’ve been receptive.”
He describes the flavor profile as a blank slate: “It’s fun to cook with.” He just wishes the filets were larger.
Jupiter says he sometimes still finds it difficult to source the fish: a sign that the infrastructure to supply the wild catch at a steady clip has room to grow if it’s going to become a bigger part of the American diet. It’s already come a long way in a few years, though.
In central Illinois, distributors and fishers are jubilant that the fish is gaining traction as a food source. Distributor Roy Sorce jumped into the copi game in 2020 and hasn’t looked back. “We’ve harvested close to a million pounds already this year,” he says. When he talks about all the copi products his company makes, he can sound a bit like the white version of Bubba from Forrest Gump talking about shrimp: “We have copi rangoon and copi empanadas, both served at restaurants, copi fajita mix—a cook-and-serve type thing—copi sliders, copi nuggets, copi sausages, copi breakfast links …”
Sorce has teamed up with a cooperative of local fishermen to catch copi, including Clint Carter, who often catches thousands of pounds of fish within two miles of Sorce’s facility. Carter’s family had a fish market for 30 years, and he watched as the arrival of copi contributed to the decimation of Midwestern commercial fishing. “A lot of people got out,” he says. But this new demand for copi is helping to revitalize the beleaguered industry.
Carter stares out at vast amounts of these fish every day, and sees great potential in them. “There shouldn’t be starving people in America,” he says. Not with the rivers stuffed with these creatures.
The copi campaign has a delightful sales pitch. But while many ecologists support this project, some have reservations. For example, Daniel Simberloff, an ecologist and professor at the University of Tennessee, has concerns that creating a commercial industry around copi will incentivize people to keep it around rather than kill it. There’s an obvious logic to this line of thinking—once all the chefs, fishers, processors, and distributors put resources into creating a copi industry, will they really want it gone? Say this campaign became the most successful of its kind and people started eating copi like chicken. What then?
Commodification is a reasonable concern in theory, but regulations that are already in place prevent farming or otherwise raising these fish; they can only legally be caught in the wild, and anyone who tries to move them to new areas risks heavy fines. What’s more, the sheer size of the population makes eradication through commercial fishing highly unlikely. “We could harvest 15 million pounds of fish outside my backdoor and not make a dent in the population,” Sorce says.
“We’re never going to get to all of them,” Carter echoes.
Simberloff is also skeptical because of how abundant these fish are. “I guess you could induce people all over the Midwest to eat carp burgers, or whatever,” he says. But he also thinks it’s improbable that commercial fishing could kill enough copi to substantially reduce their population. “When you have a fish species that produces a gazillion offspring like this, it’s hard for me to imagine how removing a whole bunch of adults is going to generate the necessary pressure.” This is a sound criticism—it is highly unlikely that the copi campaign alone is capable of fully controlling this fish population, or keep them out of the Great Lakes.
But as one component of a more inventive, wide-ranging strategy to manage this fish, it makes sense—especially because of the side benefits. The fishing industry springing up around copi could shift focus to native fish once their populations start replenishing, which is something people like Sorce and Carter are already thinking about.
Copi also has a lot going for it as a potential superfood. Sorce calls it the second-healthiest fish you can eat, and he has a strong argument. Only wild-caught salmon is higher in protein, and because it eats plankton and algae rather than other fish, it doesn’t have the kind of heavy metal contamination that fish like tuna or swordfish have. The first time I ate it—smoked, from the famous Calumet Fisheries on Chicago’s southeast side—I eagerly shared hunks with my toddler son, thinking about how smart it would be to incorporate it into our family’s diet.
one thing has given me pause, however. A recent study about high levels of microplastics in American freshwater fish suggested that, on the whole, those fish have significantly higher levels of microplastics than fish from oceans. But what does that mean, exactly? I called one of the study’s authors, David Q. Andrews, to get his take on copi’s risk profile, but copi wasn’t included among the fish his study tested, and he didn’t know of any studies that did include it. “I think the onus is, in many ways, on the state of Illinois to be doing more comprehensive testing,” he says. “And definitely the FDA [US Food and Drug Administration].”
Next, I asked the FDA whether it had any information available about microplastics and copi. “While we are aware of reports in the scientific literature on the presence of microplastics in fish, we have not identified any studies that specifically report on microplastics in copi,” an FDA spokesperson told me via email. They also pointed to the US Environmental Protection Agency’s fish and shellfish advisories; there are none for copi.
Not especially helpful.
No one had any solid answers about whether copi should be consumed in moderation, like tuna, or whether its risk profile was low enough that you could eat it every day. The closest I got to advice came from ecologist Kevin Rose. The head of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Global Water Lab, Rose is an expert in freshwater ecosystems. “We don’t have a good sense on what the max frequency at which you can eat something like this is,” he says. But he doesn’t want to dissuade people from eating copi, especially since it is otherwise so nutritionally excellent. “In terms of known human health risk effects, my sense is that things like mercury are a much bigger risk.”
The plus sides of eating copi remain plentiful, especially in how it offers a model for the movement to recontextualize invasive or nuisance species as potential societal goods, and as food sources that are abundant, affordable, and healthy.
Joe Roman, a conservation ecologist at the University of Vermont, sees copi as part of a larger push that also includes lionfish and the European green crab, two other invasive species that double as the next trendy menu staple. (He runs a website called Eat the Invaders devoted to the cause.) “When I first put the idea out there, I have to say, the response was crickets. Some people thought it was funny, but there wasn’t much interest,” he says. Now, though, he’s been heartened by people interested in foraging and the locavore movement starting to embrace invasive plants and animals as well.
Amy Yang has watched this more mainstream interest develop firsthand. Instead of having to order copi online like she did at the beginning of her fixation on the fish—or heading down to Kentucky to shoot it with a bow herself—now she can head to Dirk’s, a fishmonger a few blocks from her apartment. Even though it’s still very much a niche product, she’s also seen copi make an appearance at larger grocery stores, like 88 Marketplace in Chicago’s Chinatown.
Meanwhile, Kevin Irons is already seeing this campaign make a difference in how many copi fill the local rivers. It’s a slow process, but there are certain locations where the fishing push has already significantly cut down on the population.
In the upper Illinois River, for instance, the population went down a whopping 97 percent, and native fish have already started getting plumper. Farther down south, where the numbers are much larger, they’re already removing millions of pounds a year; as the fishing and processing infrastructure builds back up, the industry will be able to take an even more aggressive approach.
“We’ve seen this model being replicated throughout the Midwest and South, in Tennessee, Kentucky, Arkansas, and Missouri,” Irons says. “This is a fabulous no-brainer.”
