Left to right: Preparing garlic, butter, and parsley to sauté exotic periwinkle snails a pour of dry hard cider in the steaming shellfish forms the base of the sauce. But Paine, and chefs with a similar eat-’em-to-beat-’em spirit, see pickled, smoked, and beer-battered promise in the devil’s flesh. It also likely caused the extinction of three endemic fishes: the longjaw cisco, deepwater cisco, and blackfin cisco. Within decades of being accidentally introduced to some of the Great Lakes in 1919, the Atlantic and Mediterranean migrant was destroying commercial angling of trout and walleye in the region. One species he longs to add to his menu is the sea lamprey, a slimy, eel-like infiltrator that uses a circle of monstrous teeth to suck out the bodily fluids of its scaled prey. There are now 4,300 nonnative types of wildlife in the United States destructive enough for conservationists to label them as invasive. Even worse, these outlaws are responsible for roughly a third of extinctions over the past 500 years, including, in 2021, the loss of the Maui ʻākepa bird and a Hawaiian variety of flowering mint. Invasives have cost the world an estimated $1.3 trillion by ruining agricultural yields, undermining tourism, and hurting public health over the past half century. Whether it’s raccoon-size rodents called nutria using massive chompers to clear-cut Louisiana marshes into mud flats or shrubby Japanese knotweed smothering local flora up and down the East Coast, there are thousands of examples with people thoughtlessly introducing a species into a new environment, then battling to bring it under control. It’s a conflict humans brought upon themselves. On the other hand, it’s tasty, which prompted Paine to join a boundary-pushing trend that combines ethical eating with invasive-species warfare. The quick-growing European weed is notorious for pushing into Vermont forest understories and lacing the soil with a chemical that prevents native plants from germinating. Few diners realize, though, that when they lift a forkful of Paine’s salad, the peppery bite in the dressing comes from chopped sprigs of garlic mustard.