Exporting Carp From US to China

choi

Arian Lampo-Flores, Catchy Idea: To Battle Asian Carp, Send Them to Asia; Entrepreneurs search for marketing hooks for invasive species; 'Kentucky White Fish.' Wall Street Journal, Jan 30, 2014 (front page).
online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304027204579332674266477290

Quote:

"Unlike Americans, who often consider carp too bony, people there [in Asia] fancy the fish. Last year, the 58-year-old Chinese-American businesswoman opened Two Rivers Fisheries 两河渔业股份有限公司 in this small town near the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers. So far, she says she has shipped a half-million pounds of frozen Asian carp to China. There, carp is generally farmed and tastes like mud, Ms [Angie] Yu 安吉 于 says. She hawks her product as 'Kentucky white fish' that is 'wild-caught.'

"Asian carp, which can grow as large as 100 pounds * * * cracking the [China's] market is tough. Transportation costs are high. Consumers are accustomed to buying fresh, not frozen, fish. 'They keep telling me, "Your fish is dead,"' says Richard Yang of Big River Fish Corporation in Griggsville, Ill., which exports carp to China and elsewhere. Also, Chinese people like to buy a medium-size whole fish they can eat in one meal, he says, 'but ours is like a monster.' * * * A big seller is carp heads, which Chinese people eat steamed with soy sauce, ginger and hot chili peppers. 'People go crazy over the head,' he says. It 'has a lot of edible stuff inside.'

Note:
(a) Wickliffe, Kentucky
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickliffe,_Kentucky
(a city; The population was 688 at the 2010 census; on the east bank of the Mississippi River, about two miles south of its confluence with the Ohio River)
(b) Fisherman Byron "Mann is no fan of Asian carp. 'It has just about ruined the buffalo fish industry in the Mississippi,' he says."

Ictiobus
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ictiobus

is a genus, not a species.
(c) "When [Ms Yu] learned Icelandic fishermen would extract the eggs [roe] and toss the rest of the fish, she sniffed opportunity. There was just one problem: though lumpfish meat tastes good, she says, the skin is thick and hard to remove. One day, Ms Yu tried the skin and she says she discovered it tasted like sea cucumber, a delicacy in China. That became the selling point. As demand soared, shipments of lumpfish from Iceland to China jumped to 2,500 tons in 2012 from 75 tons in 2009"

lumpsucker
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lumpsucker
(or lumpfish; Cyclopterus lumpus; section 1 Physical description)

(d) "Some [American] restaurateurs have tried to turn it [carp] into a high-end delicacy, with mixed success. Fin-International in New Orleans uses carp to make fish cakes, spiced with ingredients like peppercorns and habanero chilies, aimed at Southeast Asian communities."
(i) habanero
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habanero
([originally] comes from the Amazonas region; "Upon its discovery by Spaniards, the habanero chili was rapidly disseminated to other adequate climate areas of the world, to the point that 18th-century taxonomists mistook China for its place of origin and called it 'Capsicum chinense' ('the Chinese pepper')")
(ii) habanero (n; American Spanish (chile) habanero, literally, Havanan chili; First Known Use 1987)
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/habanero
(iii) Havana
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Havana
(Spanish: La Habana; sectin 1 Etymology)
(iv) Spanish English dictionary:
* Habanero (from (La) Habana + -ero): "(adj): related to Havana; (n): an inhabitant or native of Havana"
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/habanero
* chile (noun masculine; fFrom Classical Nahuatl chīlli “pepper”): "chili"
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/chile
(v) The country Chile has an etymology dictinct from that of Chili pepper (both the country and the pepper are spelled exactly the same in Spanish, and yet the last letters of the two are different in English).