NPR · 3 hours ago

Blue Catfish Devastating Chesapeake Bay Served on School Menus

In the Chesapeake Bay, an ecological crisis has found one of its most unlikely solutions: a second-grader's lunch tray. Blue catfish, introduced to Mid-Atlantic rivers in the 1970s for recreational fishing, have spread to every tidal tributary in Maryland, crowding out native crabs and fish and upending the livelihoods of watermen whose families have worked these waters for generations. A school food services director named Beth Brewster responded to the problem not with alarm but with curiosity, setting her chefs loose on a recipe until they landed on the "catty patty" - a crabcake-style fish sandwich that kids now request by name. "It tastes so good because it eats everything we love," Brewster says of the catfish, capturing something almost poetic in the reversal: the invader undone, in part, by the same appetite it embodies. What the story quietly reveals is how much can shift when the right person decides that a problem is also an invitation.