Four Fish Read online

  The economics will only get worse. Feed costs are surging, and prices for sea bass are collapsing. The reputation of the European sea bass itself is also suffering. “I think both chefs and diners alike view it as a utilitarian fish,” Jay Rayner, the food critic at the UK newspaper the Observer, wrote to me. “It stands up well to almost any accompaniment without over-dominating the plate.” The holiday fish that was once a centerpiece of ancient Romans has become a day laborer that works to compete with side dishes. And the wages are not good. This makes Thanasis pull at his long white hair, wondering whether it makes sense to continue this strange adventure that he began in 1982. The world needs food, he insists, and the people who are hiking up costs on him are not thinking wisely about the future.

  “When these accountants from these companies call me and tell me they are raising their prices on me again, I look forward to the day when they will have nothing to eat. That will be some kind of day. And you know what I’ll say at that point? I’ll say, ‘Eat your computer. Eat it. Eat it right now.’ ”

  Socrates,” I asked, “how do you tell a wild sea bass from a farmed sea bass?” I was at a restaurant northeast of Athens with representatives of Selonda, the second-largest sea bass farmer in Greece. A grilled, whole European sea bass lay on a plate before us. Socrates Panopoulos, a hatchery manager of the Greek-owned company, let his junior scientists answer first.

  “The liver,” one biologist proposed. “If the liver is dark red, it means the fish is eating a low-fat diet and is probably wild.”

  “But, Kostas,” Socrates replied, “they have taken out the guts. What are we to do?”

  “Maybe the otolith?” another scientist suggested.

  “Ah,” said Socrates, “the otolith.”

  He worked a knife into the fish’s head and removed the pearly ear bone. Then, using his glass as a primitive magnifier, he counted the otolith’s layers, which accrue like rings in a tree. “I see four,” Socrates said, “and they are uneven. This fish is four years old and wild.”

  I had purchased this wild sea bass, to test the Selonda scientists’ know-how, at the Central Fish Market of Athens, where one can still find a separate display for “wild” sea bass and where such wild fish sell at three to five times the price of their farmed equivalents. Whereas there was no such thing as a farmed sea bass forty years ago, today there are nearly ten times as many sea bass grown as caught. Around 180 million pounds of farmed sea bass are put on ice yearly, compared to just under 10 million pounds of wild fish. But as Yonathan Zohar pointed out to me on my return from Greece, even the supposedly wild fish may be radically less wild than they were half a century ago.

  “There is no doubt in my mind,” Zohar wrote me from his lab in Baltimore, “that the so-called wild sea bass are escapees from the cages. We can confirm this via DNA tests.” Whereas three genetically distinct populations of sea bass once inhabited the Mediterranean—an Eastern, Western, and an Atlantic stock—now the Western stock, developed primarily by the French, probably predominates, even outside fish farms. “Fish of Greece, Fish of the Sun” may be the motto under which Greek sea bass are sold to the world, but these fish are, genetically anyway, fish of France.

  The taming of the sea bass has brought both good and bad things to the world. Indeed it needs to be held up for analysis as we chart the way forward. By the standard metrics of domestication, the sea bass was not the best choice to be the first ocean perciform in our mangers. It is difficult to breed, it is hard to nurture past its larval stages, and it requires more wild fish as feed than it ultimately yields at harvest. If we were truly desperate to come up with a better source of food to “feed the world,” we would have chosen something else.

  But look at the environment in which the project was conceived. The reasons the Israelis, the French, the Italians, and the Greeks chose the sea bass were as much based on profit as they were on finding something to alleviate hunger. When they set out to tame the sea bass, their goal was not to turn a holiday fish into a weekday fish; rather, in the fashion of the Green Revolution fantasies of the day, they imagined the fish as part of a year-round holiday. When the idea of farming sea bass was first hatched, no one could have foreseen that they would be so successful as to cause a massive collapse in price and return on investment.

  We must also keep in mind that the European sea bass was the Rosetta stone of fish—the animal that unlocked the secrets of development for every major commercial species of ocean fish in the world. Its cuneiform is the shape of hormonal chemicals, the dietary needs of juveniles, the light intensity of the winter sun—all the factors that were once the exclusive secrets of the primeval Mediterranean salt marsh during the halcyon days. Secrets scores of millions of years old. And these secrets turn out to be strangely common to the vast order Perciformes. With some modifications here and there, the sea bass template of breeding and rearing seems to work for most of the fish we eat.

  And now remains the question of what to do with those secrets. Do we use them to decode more and more species and create a whole parallel domesticated world of fish, a man-made sea within a wild one, exclusively for human use, regardless of what effect it might have on a wild population? Or do we develop species and farming methodologies that take into consideration both their impact on the natural world and their benefit to humanity? The domestication of any animal is always difficult and brings with it a host of complications and potential diseases. It should never be taken lightly.

  If there is one person who has taken in all the lessons of the Israelis, the French, the Italians, and the Greeks in their quest to tame the European sea bass over the course of the last quarter century, it is Josh Goldman, an earnest, limpid-eyed fish farmer in his mid-forties who installed himself near his old college town in the bucolic Pioneer Valley of western Massachusetts. Not a fish person by habit, Goldman came to fish farming through his training as an ecologist. He saw in fish farming a great ecological promise. Ecological theorists posited in the 1970s that aquaculture, done right, had the potential to achieve the most elusive goal of animal husbandry—to produce one pound of flesh for less than a pound of feed. Because they don’t swim against gravity or raise their body temperatures, fish require substantially less energy than do land animals. If done right, farmed fish, food scientists believed, could solve the world’s protein problems with a snap of the fingers.

  But Goldman watched in dismay throughout the 1980s and ’90s as, one by one, first with salmon and then with the European sea bass, aquaculture sullied its reputation and became cast in the public mind as a dirty industry with a net protein loss for the world. European sea bass, like salmon, require as much as three pounds of feed for every pound of flesh they produce.

  It was in trying to right this equation that Goldman decided to invert the processes of artificial selection. Instead of looking for a known and popular fish, a holiday fish, and trying to tame it and make money off its reputation, Goldman decided to find a fish that was a natural partner for humans. “I remember I was in a used-book store back in the early 1990s, and I came across a book by the legendary British fisheries genetic scientist Colin Purdom,” Goldman told me on a crisp fall day, the leaves on the trees almost palpably turning to crimson through the window behind him. “Purdom made this argument. He said before you start a domestication program, you need to understand what nature has been up to, starting with as large a selection from the wild as possible in order to understand and hopefully benefit from the enormous diversity that’s out there. I realized we were spending all this money trying to solve some really difficult reproductive and breeding problems. But in our focus on these issues we never asked fundamental questions about the species itself before choosing it. What does it eat? What are its fundamental behaviors? How fast does it grow?”

  These questions launched Goldman on an epic global quest. He abandoned an early project with the striped bass that he had been raising because he found that they failed two of Galton’s criteria.1. They did not b
reed freely—they spawned only once a year around the April full moon and are very difficult to breed in captivity.

  2. They hated being handled by humans, thrashing in their nets, shredding their scales, and often fatally wounding themselves.

  Goldman tested over fifty different species, looking further and further afield, each time finding some fatal flaw in the fish he investigated. But finally, at the dawn of the new millennium, he met an energetic Australian entrepreneur named Stewart Graham, who introduced him to a Southeast Asian fish that met all of Goldman’s criteria. Colonial-era Britons had named the fish the Asian sea bass, but it was even more distant from the European sea bass genetically than any of the other American basses.

  The fish was known locally in Australia by its Aboriginal name, barramundi. And its natural environment was almost a replication of what humans typically create when they make fish farms. Whereas sea bass and striped bass spawn in fresh water and live their adult lives in the open saltwater sea, barramundi are catadromous and do the exact opposite. Living this way means they migrate into fresh water in summer and often get stuck in billabongs, areas of rivers that get cut off and become stagnant during dry seasons. In an odd way what billabongs resemble most are big, natural aquaculture tanks. Whereas the striped bass thrashes like a banshee when confined, the barramundi is docile and compliant and takes well to handling. Barramundi are, under the right conditions, wildly fertile, spawning throughout the year. They have adapted huge gills for anoxic environments, which makes them highly disease-resistant. Finally, and most important, they can live mostly on vegetarian feed, which means they are less reliant on fish meal and oil than are other carnivorous species. They are also therefore less prone to contamination from tainted feed—the less fish feed in an animal’s diet, the lower the chances that the harvested fish will have unacceptable PCB contamination. At the same time, barramundi can do something almost no other fish can do—they can make the omega-3 fatty acids from vegetarian oils.

  “Aquaculture’s promise and its central challenge,” Goldman told me, “is to dramatically increase the world’s fish supply while using an essentially fixed amount of wild fish in feed. Given the projections that fish farms will need to double their output to keep pace with demand over the next ten years, there is a pressing need to make far better use of these limited natural ingredients so that we don’t continue to drain the world’s oceans in the process of trying to keep pace with demand.”

  Again, it is the barramundi’s natural history and life cycle that make the fish a potential net marine protein gain for the world. Because barramundi live in fresh water and spawn in salt water, they must quickly synthesize enough omega-3s to pass on to their eggs when they migrate to the sea and spawn. In aquaculture only a small amount of fish oil and meal needs to be given to barramundis as part of a “finishing diet,” as it is called in the industry.

  But Goldman would never have been able to bring the barramundi into a tamed environment without the groundwork laid by the European sea bass pioneers. Without the live-feed techniques of the French and the Dutch, they would have starved as juveniles. Without the hormone implants developed by Zohar and the Israelis, the barramundi’s breeding would never have been completely regularized to allow a steady, consistent crop. Without the scaling-up of the Greeks, Goldman would never have been able to imagine the advantages of large-scale production.

  And it is large-scale production that he’s going for. In Turners Falls he and his partners have created the biggest “recirculating aquaculture system” in the world. These Asian barramundi, a most exotic species, never have any contact with the living ocean. Dozens of house-size tanks in four different airplane-hangar-size rooms (each named after a different Australian city—Adelaide, Brisbane, Canberra, and Darwin) draw water from wells fed by the Connecticut River, constantly recirculating and cleaning it, making a completely sterile environment where the fish grow fast and seldom suffer disease.

  So at Turners Falls, Massachusetts, the site of one of the more tragic fish extirpations in contemporary history, the place where Connecticut River salmon were wiped off the face of the earth with a single dam, the possible reinvention of fish as food as we know it could be happening. An animal has been chosen specifically for its small ecological footprint and its natural tendency to adapt to human culture. A fish that could fulfill all the Green Revolution promises of the early days of ocean aquaculture. One that would truly generate more fish for the world than it would consume. One that could actually take pressure off wild stocks of similar species and cause humans to lessen their impact on the ocean overall.

  There’s only one problem. Unfortunately, no one in the West seems to know what a barramundi is. Goldman has recently taken his eco-friendly recirculating fish farming technology to central Vietnam to produce frozen barramundi for the U.S. and European markets. In Asia, production of the fish is increasing. Around 90 million pounds of it are grown annually, not just by Goldman but by farmers in China, Australia, Indonesia, and elsewhere. In Europe and the United States, though, most consumers remain reliant on aquaculture species that eat too much and carry too large an environmental burden.

  Perhaps Goldman should take one more page from the history of the Mediterranean and look for a name that people will recognize. Knowing what I know now about fish—how they brand themselves, how humans come to accept them—I might call the barramundi something else. I might call it by the name that colonial Britons imposed. A name that for whatever reason has made its way into our consciousness as indicative of a “good” fish. Why not call it “Asian sea bass”?

  Cod

  The Return of the Commoner

  The transformation of salmon and sea bass from kingly and holiday wild fish into everyday farmed variants is a trend that continues with different animals around the globe. Using the technologies developed for the domestication of the European sea bass, many other high-value species that typically fetch in excess of fifteen dollars a pound—like sturgeon, grouper, and even bluefin tuna, as we shall see later—are all at various stages of being tamed. Ultimately, though, these are niche fish for niche markets, developed, at least initially, to compensate for local population declines or extirpations that occurred during the first big local fish crashes of the 1970s and ’80s. But what do you do when you start to lose not the holiday fish but the workaday fish, the fish upon which average people rely for their daily meal, the one that should sell at around the same price as chicken? The fish whose very abundance is its most notable characteristic?

  In the spring of the year 2000, a book that spoke to these questions started working its way around my family’s small circle, passing first from my brother, who had brought it over from England, on to me and then to my aunt and uncle. The book was by a onetime commercial fisherman-turned-journalist named Mark Kurlansky and was called simply Cod. It is considered to be the first of what the publishing industry would come to call “the microhistory,” in which human social evolution is traced through a single commodity. In Kurlansky’s case that thing was Gadus morhua, or the Atlantic cod, a species whose flaky white flesh nourished humanity from medieval times through the discovery of the Americas and on into the industrial era. If the European sea bass is the epitome of the specialty fish, then cod, as Kurlansky made clear, represented the opposite: sheer abundance and commonness. Enough abundance to help grow the human population of the Western world twentyfold.

  Different members of my family appreciated different elements of the book Cod. My aunt liked how Kurlansky had delved into medieval cookbooks and reproduced weird recipes for cod livers and swim bladders, or “sounds.” My brother (an early Dungeons & Dragons adopter and Yale medieval-studies major) enjoyed the bit about how Basque fishermen may have discovered America long before Columbus, but kept it a secret because they didn’t want to share their good cod-fishing spot with other nations.

  But for me, I fixated on the story of the loss of abundance that lay at the center of the book. The loss of abu
ndance and the greedy privatization, monopolization, and industrialization of fishing that caused it. How, after a series of technological advancements, huge corporations overwhelmed smaller artisanal fishing fleets with giant factory ships and obliterated one population of cod after another. Just as the Italians had turned to dynamite when sea bass stocks became thin in the Mediterranean, industrial fishing fleets—first in the North Sea, then off Iceland and over to the shoals off Nova Scotia and on down south into New England—got progressively more destructive.

  Large bottom-dragging nets, or trawls, grew larger and larger and became equipped with “rock hopper” attachments that allowed factory ships to penetrate into the last craggy redoubts of codfish banks—offshore upwellings of fertility where codfish congregated to do their annual mating and spawning. And all along, fishing efforts grew with the support of scientists who claimed that codfish populations could not be overfished—that overfishing wasn’t really a provable scientific concept. The heavy fishing was ramped up even more when the U.S. government dumped $800 million in subsidies to build up the American fishing fleet in the late 1970s and early ’80s.

  Cod concludes with the federal government’s finally closing the greatest New England fishing grounds, Georges Bank, to commercial cod fishing in 1994, the very grounds that gave Cape Cod its name. “Is it really all over?” Kurlansky lamented of the dry-docked Massachusetts cod fishermen at the conclusion of his moving, epic book. “Are these last gatherers of food from the wild to be phased out? Is this the last of wild food? Is our last physical tie to untamed nature to become an obscure delicacy like the occasional pheasant?”