Four Fish Read online

  Until the 1990s both tra and tilapia remained “development” fish—Third World menu items that would have no real market impact in Europe or the United States. Partly this was because the fish had no brand identity in First World nations. (One aquaculturist told me that when he first heard the word “tilapia,” he thought it was a stomach disease.) But another major factor had to do with a phenomenon that plagues all freshwater-fish farmers, something known as “off-flavor.” Off-flavor occurs in stagnant fresh water when certain varieties of blue-green algae bloom and emit a compound called geosim, from the Greek geo, meaning “earth.” Fish inhabiting these blooms temporarily take on the taste of geosim, a harmless but earthy flavor that most diners find unpleasantly muddy. In fact, off-flavor is one of the key reasons that many consumers have stayed resistant to farmed fish. Any fish can develop off-flavor, though freshwater species are more susceptible to it. Mastering the problem turns out to be the key to producing a widely acceptable product.

  In the 1990s both tilapia and tra went through a revolution that transformed them from Third World to First World table fare. By 1994, tilapia, with their incredible fertility, had spread to Latin America. In a few instances, they were associated with the cocaine trade. South American Indians farming coca leaves in Colombia also came to farm tilapia. And while the coca crop was of paramount importance to drug lords operating in the region, tilapia could also serve their purposes. With millions of dollars of excess cash that needed to be laundered, they saw in tilapia an opportunity both to improve the lives of their growers and also to cleanse their drug take. There was an added benefit to coca growers. As one fish farmer told me, asking not to be identified by name for obvious reasons, “If you put a Gel-Pak of cocaine in a crate full of tilapia fillets, can a drug-sniffing dog find it? Nope.”

  What both tilapia farmers in Latin America and tra farmers and Vietnam realized was that if they managed to secure a constant supply of clear, flowing water, devoid of algal blooms, and if they fed their fish a diet of corn and soy instead of letting them subsist on waste and algae, they were able to control the off-flavor in their product. Instead of tasting like mud, tilapia and tra, by the late 1990s, tasted like nothing.

  “The thing people like about tilapia,” Picchietti told me, “is that it doesn’t taste like fish. We often like to say it’s the unfishy fish.” Which, if the example of cod is considered, might ultimately be what the world is looking for. In twenty years tilapia production has tripled from 2 billion to nearly 6 billion pounds annually and is anticipated to grow another 10 percent in the next year alone. It is a naturally abundant, flavor-neutral product that is versatile in the kitchen and easy on the wallet. Indeed, these very qualities (or lack of qualities) have now made tilapia scale the highest heights of cheap food. After developing a patent-pending marinade that gives tilapia a “taste like pollock,” HQ Sustainable Maritime Industries, a tilapia grower whose very robust production comes primarily from China, has concluded successful negotiations with one of the largest fast-food chains in the world. Although I cannot name the chain in these pages, suffice it to say it is likely that all of us will have the option of eating a fast-food tilapia sandwich in the not-too-distant future.

  The Aquaculture Dialogues is a series of eight working groups convened by the World Wildlife Fund with the goal of creating standards for the fish-farming industry. In 2008 I sat in on a session of the Tilapia Dialogue in Washington, D.C. Early on in the discussion a motion was put before the gathered assembly of tilapia farmers, nonprofit organizations, various and sundry scientists and onlookers like myself that from here forward, people in the tilapia industry should “seek to prevent the global spread of tilapia beyond its already established range.” A chuckle rippled around the room. “Too late!” a farmer from Pennsylvania said with a laugh. “Already happened,” said another.

  It is one of the great ironies of the modern-day seafood world that humanity is desperately trying to figure out a way to boost the numbers of one fish, cod, and, as an indirect result of the cod shortages, we are doing everything we can to keep another fish, tilapia, from multiplying and spreading too quickly. Tilapia is overstepping its ecological bounds in nearly every corner of the globe and is considered a most invasive species. The fish live mostly in fresh water, and freshwater bodies around the world are increasingly dominated by them. Tilapia can also adapt to more-saline conditions than most freshwater fish can tolerate, and as a result often find their way into brackish waters near river mouths.

  There is now an active effort to try to put the biological tilapia genie back in the bottle. In Australia a $16 million campaign has been launched to keep tilapia out of the island continent. There are considerable obstacles. Chinese immigrants consider it good luck before sitting down to a meal of fish to release a live fish into the water. Because they are so hardy and require so little oxygen, tilapia are perfectly suited to take advantage of this cultural tradition. They are often delivered live to Asian markets throughout the United States, Europe, and Oceania, and when they arrive, it is not uncommon for Chinese immigrants to drop one or two into a local lake or stream. From there it is just a matter of time before they proliferate at frightening speed and reach a biological maximum.

  In the United States and Europe, the ultimate range of tilapia has been restricted by a climatological zone. Tilapia die if water temperatures fall below fifty degrees Fahrenheit for more than a month, and so even when they are purposefully grown north of the Deep South in the summer, they die off when winter sets in. But winters are getting milder and shorter, and with each successively warm year tilapia inch a little bit farther north.

  Meanwhile in the ocean, climate change is causing shifts among all the gadiforms. The patterns of ocean currents and weather in general are slowly changing, and the gadiforms that we once depended on for our flavor-neutral white-flesh fish are drifting away from us. The huge schools of Alaska pollock, whether they are fished sustainably or not, are undergoing substantial changes, and there are some indications that they are moving out of the territorial waters of the United States and drifting over to the considerably less regulated coast of Russia.

  So we find ourselves, then, at the crossroads of change with all this “whitefish”—African tilapia spreading pell-mell around the world, Vietnamese tra inserting themselves into all kinds of markets for all kinds of fish, Alaska pollock and New Zealand hoki being presented to us as a “good” industrial wild fish but nevertheless declining alarmingly. And of course the fragile stocks of New England, Canadian, and European codfish hanging on to viability by the very tips of their barbels.

  If we are to choose one fish from these many candidate species to serve as the backbone of our whitefish needs, which one shall it be? Do we just take all of them and not worry about parsing them, put all of them down the tube marked “flaky white” and hope for the best?

  Looking across the different orders, families, genera, and ecosystems that these fish represent, at the risk of sounding shamanistic, it seems to me that nature is telling us something important about these fish and how we should use them. What it seems to be saying is that wild oceanic fish like cod and soon maybe pollock and hoki have vulnerabilities that make the industrial use of their flesh problematic. That indeed the very notion of “industrial fishing” may have to be reexamined. Perhaps in an earlier era, when the world population was a fifth of what it is today, when fishing gear was smaller and less intrusive, and when river and estuary systems produced a bounty of forage fish like herring, perhaps then a multinational industry could sit upon the vagaries of constantly fluctuating wild populations of cod, pollock, and hoki.

  But contemporary demand is so large that any natural system is going to be taxed when subject to humanity’s global appetite. The historical fragility of objective science in the face of the need to show corporate profits builds inherent conflicts into the system. With wild fisheries, when profit motives get too strong, even the soundest of scientific management schemes have a
tendency to bend under the weight of demand. Scientific bases, however, do not work if they are bent. If they are forced to bend, fish populations inevitably enter into a spiral of decline that can lead to genetic collapse and irreparable damage to a hugely important food system. If there is even the slightest chance that fishing could cause the collapse of a stock, it goes against humanity’s hope for long-term survival to continue the practice of industrial fishing.

  At the same time, nature seems be telling us, in the form of tra and tilapia, that we might have found an industrial fish that works. These fish can live side by side in our environment. They grow fast. They are hugely adaptable. Why would we bother with taming a fish like cod that is slow-growing, inefficient, and ultimately not suited to live in our mangers? It is a waste of time and money.

  If we must have an industrial fish, let us use a fish that works well in industrial processes and has a minimum of impact on the wild world. Both tra and tilapia are grown in fresh water, have no interaction with ocean fish, and eat primarily vegetarian feed. It is true, as the pollock industry’s Jim Gilmore protests, that more and more rain forest is being cut down to grow soy for tilapia and tra feed. But more than any other form of animal protein, tilapia and tra grow extremely fast and are extremely efficient in turning feed into flesh. Much more efficient than the chickens and pigs that would end up eating that same soy if the tra and tilapia didn’t.

  There is one last thing that nature is telling us, and it is telling us in the form of the white, loose flake of a wild codfish—the flesh of a cod that has, as Mark Kurlansky put it, “lived a cod’s life.” We should be fishers of cod, not farmers of cod. And if we are to be fishers of cod, we must meet cod on their terms. To understand what cod’s population dynamics are, we need to work with cod to build a long-term, stable relationship.

  Humans seem to have an innate drive to master other creatures. If we must master something, in the case of the cod, instead of mastering the simplistic closed system of industrial aquaculture, perhaps we should seek the ultimate proof of our intelligence—the complete mastery and understanding of a wild system, a form of mastery in which we gradually come to understand how much fishing ground we must leave fallow as marine protected areas, areas that serve as a kind of bank-account principal from which we will earn interest every year in the form of a harvestable catch.

  Let us learn how to revive the life cycles of river herring and other things cod eat. Let us learn, down to the last fish, how cod reproduce and survive in the wild and how their populations change over time. Such a mastery would include a hyperlocal fleet of knowledgeable small-scale fishermen harvesting from discrete populations of cod in as precise a way as possible. Such a fleet of fishermen might still get a small subsidy to make up for the cost of their effort, but it would be understood that any subsidy they receive is a fee for service, that they are stewards as well as catchers of fish, and if they fail in their stewardship role, they will lose the right to fish. In such a way, perhaps we can reconstruct a fishery where fish and fishermen are dependent upon one another, the way a flock and a herder require each other for survival.

  A fish caught by a fisherman with that kind of knowledge deserves to transcend its commoner heritage. Such a fish deserves to be knighted. Such a fish should be eaten with its flesh intact, not processed by a machine and turned into a fish stick. It should not be cheap. It should be treated kindly in the kitchen, its subtle flavors and pearly flake centerpieced, and admired even if it is a little bit dull on the palate. That kind of cod I would be happy to call COD. All caps.

  Tuna

  One Last Bite

  One of the appeals of growing up with fishing in your life is that as you mature, the possibilities expand. You can take on longer and longer trips at sea. Odd hours of the night become gradually more reasonable, and the fish you’re capable of catching are tougher, harder to find, and much bigger. By the time you reach adulthood, if you still have the fishing urge and a little bit of extra cash, the whole of the ocean can become your fishing grounds. It is only in midlife that you start to reach the last frontier of your fishing adventures: your own desire to keep fishing.

  In early September of 2001, I placed a phone call to the party fishing boat Explorer. “Thanks for calling the Explorer, Brooklyn’s rocket ship to the tuna,” the voice on the answering machine croaked. “The latest catches are: Monday night—fifteen tuna, Tuesday night— twenty-four tuna, Wednesday night—forty-seven tuna. Tell us the date you want to go, and Explorer will take you to the tuna.”

  It is a rare party boat that hunts tuna. Nowadays it usually takes a charter boat and upward of three thousand dollars in gasoline to speed over a hundred miles into the open ocean in pursuit of them. But there is a brief window from August through November when tuna venture close enough to the coast for a handful of party boats out of New York City to seek them and make the fish catchable by the common man.

  All summer I’d been thinking about tuna fishing, and I was waiting to see how the fall would shape up before committing to the trip. But one September morning it was so clear, sunny, and windless that I couldn’t imagine things turning for the worse. I left a message on the Explorer’s answering machine booking my trip for September 28.

  I was happily thinking about tuna when I left my apartment for jury duty downtown. As I turned onto Sixth Avenue in Manhattan, I noticed that the moon in the southern sky was a little more than half full. In two weeks’ time it would be full. A few days off the full moon is usually the best tuna time, and I realized, happily, that I had scheduled my trip for the best possible moment. I thought about this as I let my eyes drift past the moon over to the flaming hole that had appeared in the middle of the World Trade towers.

  I continued walking downtown. From a couple of miles away the hole looked big but not so big as to suggest anything more than an industrial fire of some sort. I had jury duty and did not want to get hit with the $250 fine for nonattendance. In twenty minutes I reached a gas station near the corner of Canal Street and Sixth Avenue. A large explosion rattled overhead. I turned to one of the taxi drivers filling up his tank at the gas station. “Yeah, that’s ’cause them two towers is connected underground, and, like, probably it’s like a gas line that blew up—that’s why there was that explosion in the other tower.” Sounded good to me. Didn’t want to get that jury-duty fine. I kept walking downtown.

  Passersby were now generally moving uptown in the opposite direction, and flecks of paper debris started to blow up the cobbled streets of SoHo. As I cut across on Lispenard Street and then merged south onto Broadway, trickles of people became clusters, which in turn started to resemble mobs. The hole in the World Trade Center that had seemed like an easily suturable scratch now appeared as it really was—a gigantic gash going deep into the heart of the building. Onward and downward I walked. Upward and northward walked the crowd. A cop finally stood in my path. “Buddy, where the hell you going?” he asked me. “I got jury duty,” I said, showing him my summons and pointing to the part about the $250 fine for nonattendance. The cop held up his hand in the manner of a bailiff.

  “Jury dismissed,” he said.

  I turned and joined the crowd moving uptown. By the time I reached the corner near my apartment on Eleventh Street, the World Trade towers had again become just a small silhouette in the middle distance. And then, suddenly, one dropped away and disappeared completely. Then the second vanished. And I went into my apartment and did not leave for two weeks.

  I barely slept during that time. The only companionship I had were the tuna Web sites I had discovered on the Internet. I joined the tuna discussion boards and tracked a satellite image of a warmwater eddy drifting north, up from the Carolinas. I found myself making lifting motions, trying to push the warm patch faster so that its arrival in New York waters would match my Explorer fishing date. Tuna in the western Atlantic follow the river of higher-temperature water in the Gulf Stream as it flows north from Florida up to Atlantic Canada. Eddies of warm
water break away from the main stem of the Gulf Stream and wend their way to the coast within range of the sportfishing fleet. A nearshore eddy bodes well for a good trip. Conversely, no eddy means no tuna.

  The eddy I was tracking did speed up, but so did the wind. Forecasts of light breezes and mild seas were revised to gales and swells. The day before my trip, I had a phone call.

  “This is the fishing boat Explorer,” an elderly woman’s voice announced.

  “You’re canceling the trip, aren’t you?” I said.

  “To be honest,” the voice said, “tomorrow is not looking good.” A long pause. “But if you wanna go tonight, the captain—my son, that is—he says the ocean’s gonna lay down.”

  “Is it definitely gonna lay down?”

  “My son says it’s gonna lay down,” she repeated.

  “Okay.”

  I filled my tuna bag with my fishing clothes, still rank from my last outing. I took every piece of food I had in my refrigerator and fried it. I put it all in my tuna cooler, loaded up my dead mother’s 1989 Cadillac Brougham, and headed off from my home in Manhattan to the last serious fishing port in New York City, Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn.

  At sunset Explorer’s engines rumbled to life. All the fishermen gathered at the stern and stared silently into its impressive wake. The wind was picking up. Some of the fishermen were nervous, but generally there was a deep, pagan faith in the captain’s predictions.

  “He said it’s gonna lay right down,” said one.

  “He said tomorrow’s gonna be like a lake,” said another as we began to steam out to sea.

  We passed the jetty at Breezy Point and started the difficult part of the hundred-mile journey to the ocean trench called the Hudson Canyon, or, by those familiar with it, just “the Canyon.” An underwater continuation of the Hudson River that dates back to the last Ice Age, the Canyon is nearly as deep as the Grand Canyon and one of largest ocean canyons in the world. Its roiling currents confuse baitfish and make it an attractive formation for tuna, bringing them in from their more distant wanderings.