The Future of Wild Fish

A must-read for anyone truly interested in what we take from the sea to eat is Paul Greenberg’s  Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food.

The book provides valuable information about making intelligent choices when we’re confronted by the confusing and contradictory offerings at the fish counter.

Four Fish tells the story of four “archetypes of fish flesh:” salmon, sea bass, cod and tuna. These are the species that humans are attempting to master one way or another, either by managing wild populations or by domesticating them as we do with hogs, poultry, sheep and cattle.

The four fish he has chosen to focus on mark distinct steps in the grim worldwide decline of the favorite species of fish that people like to eat and human attempts to improve it.

Salmon are tough, lightening fast, capable of migrating thousands of miles over oceans and up seething rivers, but they cannot tolerate the encroachment of civilization. When people come with their farm fields, dams, and mills, salmon begin to disappear. So we’ve tried to tame them and raise them in pens—never mind that it would be hard to pick a species whose natural traits make it less suitable for domestication.

Sea bass live near the shore and were among the first saltwater fish humans caught for food. Now, they too, survive primarily on fish farms.

Cod, with its white flaky meat, was the first fish harvested on an industrial scale, creating a template for the factory ships that rove the high seas. Today, cod stocks everywhere are depleted and in some cases nearly extinct. Instead of turning to farming, fishermen have moved their voracious attention to other mild, white-fleshed species, such as Chilean sea bass and Alaskan pollock.

And lastly, with Atlantic bluefin tuna populations on the brink of collapse and regulators failing to take the obvious conservation steps, the chapter on tuna exploitation is particularly timely.

Noting that there are only enough mature Atlantic bluefin left to give 43 million sushi lovers “one last bite,” Greenberg calls the quest for tuna the “last great gold rush of wild food.”

What can be done? Greenberg travels the world in search of answers. He visits native Yupik salmon fishermen at the mouth of Alaska’s Yukon River and then whisks off to Norway to interview one of the unrepentant founders of modern salmon aquaculture, stopping off in New Brunswick to interview a scientist who is trying to make raising salmon less harmful to the environment. He visits fish farmers in Greece, Scotland, Hawaii, and Vietnam.

Greenberg takes a refreshingly balanced approach to the aquaculture-versus-wild-caught debate, making it clear that there are good and bad ways to do both. The wild species we choose for farming should be efficient feeders, not reliant on massive quantities of fishmeal and fish oil produced from fully exploited wild stocks of anchovies and herring. They should be adaptable, and their presence should not spread disease to wild stocks. For wild fish, he suggests drastically reducing fishing and creating no-catch sanctuaries in important areas of the ocean ecosystem.

In the end, the message of Four Fish is that eating the last wild food is a privilege that we should not take for granted.