Not my lunch, of course. I'm more of a beef jerky kind of guy. Zebra mussels are the little shelled creatures from the Caspian and Black seas that hitched a ride to the Great Lakes in the ballast of a freighter during the first Bush administration. Since then, they've spread across Michigan waterways, clinging to the bottoms of boats and clogging pipes. So far, biologists have come up with no practical method of eradicating the pests, or even slowing their progress.
Mussels are a delicacy served in fancy restaurants.
There is a web site devoted to the consumption of mussels. Anyone with a pound of butter and a rowboat can get in on the ground floor of the state's hottest new industry. Perhaps it doesn't have the cache of Oakland County's Automation Alley, but Michigan's Slug Belt could be more profitable in the end. This isn't your father's scum-sucking slug. Sure, people may laugh at first.