Courtesy of Chef Parola
Chef Philippe Parola's message is to reduce waste and help the environment through cuisine, by finding ways to prepare and serve invasive species like nutria, wild boar, and Asian carp.
If the audience recently crowding the main branch of the Baton Rouge library is any indication, the time for Chef Philippe Parola's message has come. “Invasive species like wild boar, nutria, and Asian carp have become a major environmental and economic issue in our state,” he told the standing-room only crowd attending his “How to Cook and Eat Wild Hog” class. “I encourage you to eat these species as a healthy source of protein, vitamins, and minerals.” Afterwards, Chef Parola served his rapt audience wild boar gumbo and autographed copies of his book, Can’t Beat ‘Em Eat ‘Em: Featuring 40 Invasive Species with Recipes.
For the French chef, it’s more than a gimmick. It’s a call to arms. He points out that the subtropical climate of Louisiana’s “Sportsman’s Paradise” is an ideal environment in which these species can thrive. The most harmful of them have cost the state up to $120 million each year, decimating native species in their wake.
His simple solution? “Stop the waste. Eat the problem.”
With a growing world population and a diminishing food supply, Parola argues we shouldn’t waste the often-delicious protein that exists in abundance, and at the detriment of our environment.
For the past ten years, Chef Parola has made his way around the state speaking to anyone who will listen, serving up recipes such as nutria tacos, fox squirrel ravigote, and pigeon stew. His take on jambalaya, called “invasalaya”, includes a trio of nutria hind quarters, wild boar backstrap, and Canada goose breast. And it’s not just invasive animals he’d like to see on our Louisiana plates. His books includes such recipes as dandelion salad, kudzu pie, and knotweed garlic butter.
Parola’s work with invasive species dates back to the 1980s when the Department of Wildlife and Fisheries’ efforts twenty years prior to restore the diminishing alligator population were a little too successful. There were so many gators in the waterways that they had become a nuisance. “Managing their population without a commercial market for hides meant killing animals purely for population control,” Parola said. “Yet, even when the alligator hide was used, I realized the alligator meat had gone to waste. That made me mad.”
Parola accepted a challenge from a fellow chef to create recipes that featured alligator meat as a delicacy. He did just that but struggled in those pre-Internet days to get the word out to other chefs and restaurants. Eventually though, others took up his cause and alligator rose to the stardom on Louisiana restaurant menus it enjoys today.
Currently, there are reportedly over two million alligators in Louisiana native habitats and another million on managed farms. Alligator meat is a multi-million dollar business in Louisiana, Florida, and other states and alligator populations are under control. “The same can happen with nutria, wild boar, apple snail, and Asian carp,” Parola said.
“We live in a state where thousands of hunters and trappers know how to kill and process animals. They can be killing those delicious and nutritious wild boar and processing them into sausage and bacon. Wild boar on any restaurant menu would be a hit. We could create ongoing jobs for hunters and trappers, a new food source for local populations, improvement to local economies, and get these invasive species under control.” —Chef Philippe Parola
Parola’s relationship to food as a natural resource goes back even further, though—to his childhood in the French countryside during the 1960s. Orphaned at a young age and placed with a foster family on a farm, Parola grew up harvesting produce and game from the surrounding woods and waterways to bring home for the family table.
“What you have to realize is that France was still rebuilding from World War II,” he said. “We didn’t have grocery stores, just one grocery truck that came around once a week. We’d buy flour and other necessities, but the majority of what we ate, we had to hunt, fish, trap, and forage.”
Parola recalls spending many happy hours cooking with his foster mother and grandmother. At the age of fourteen he became a chef apprentice, and by seventeen he was completing gourmet internships. Drawn to the United States where there was a high-paying demand for French chefs, he made his way to New Orleans where he worked at the historic restaurant, La Louisiane.
Having worked in restaurants throughout Paris, Parola immediately took to the Crescent City’s big-city pace. Later, when he accepted a job in Baton Rouge, the state capitol felt like a little country town. He was already planning his next move, this time to Japan—where there was a French cuisine movement underway—when he discovered Louisiana fishing and hunting, and knew he wasn’t going anywhere.
What followed was over forty years of culinary success, including cooking for two U.S. presidents, owning his own restaurant and culinary school in Baton Rouge, Philippe's, working as a restaurant consultant, and making many appearances on national television and in national and international magazines. “I’ve enjoyed such a rich life in Louisiana that I feel like I owe it to the state to make a difference where I can,” Parola said.
To illustrate the impact chefs and foodways can have on the Louisiana environment, Parola turns to the historic effects of Paul Prudhomme’s blackened redfish. “The demand for redfish was suddenly so great that they were almost wiped out—with that one recipe. Now, imagine if nutria was in as big a demand.”
Nutria, he points out, is a highly undervalued protein here in Louisiana, with a taste he describes as similar to that of dark meat turkey. “They’re strictly vegetarian and because they live off the stems and roots of plants, they contain some of the highest protein of any red meat.”
Another major Louisiana invasive species is the South American apple snail, which first appeared in Louisiana waterways in 2006, believed to have been washed out of home aquariums during Hurricane Katrina. Reproducing at a rapid pace, apple snails are now taking over swamps, rivers, ponds, and lakes in thirty Louisiana parishes, decimating native vegetation, and leaving nothing for native species to eat. “And when they die, their shells cover the soil at the bottom of the river, so the vegetation dies down there too,” Parola said.
But that same snail is a delicacy in many countries. His solution, which he outlines in his book as well as on popular YouTube videos, is to go out into the waterways where apple snails can be easily removed from vegetation, brought home, and cooked. His recipe, Apple Snail Provençale, includes chicken broth, tomato sauce, Italian breadcrumbs, onion, garlic, butter, and parmesan cheese. “In a couple hours, you go from the invasive apple snail to the gourmet apple snail,” Parola said.
Then there is the case of Louisiana’s out-of-control wild boar population. Parola thinks the government’s current solutions to the problem are a regrettable waste of resources. These solutions include sharpshooting the boars from government helicopters and leaving them to rot where they fall or placing poisoned cubes of Jello for the boars to eat, which also poisons other wildlife in the vicinity.
“We live in a state where thousands of hunters and trappers know how to kill and process animals,” he said. “They can be killing those delicious and nutritious wild boar and processing them into sausage and bacon. Wild boar on any restaurant menu would be a hit. We could create ongoing jobs for hunters and trappers, a new food source for local populations, improvement to local economies, and get these invasive species under control.”
In the meantime, one chef continues his crusade to get the message out. “We’ll never eradicate these species,” he said. “But we can control them so they can live in harmony with our native wildlife by turning them into food, and maybe medicine, that can be good for humanity. •
Learn more about Chef Parola and his message at cantbeatemeatem.us, and click here to try some of his recipes for yourself.
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