Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food
Paul Greenberg
Language: English
Pages: 304
ISBN: 014311946X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
"A necessary book for anyone truly interested in what we take from the sea to eat, and how, and why." -Sam Sifton, The New York Times Book Review.
Writer and life-long fisherman Paul Greenberg takes us on a journey, examining the four fish that dominate our menus: salmon, sea bass, cod, and tuna. Investigating the forces that get fish to our dinner tables, Greenberg reveals our damaged relationship with the ocean and its inhabitants. Just three decades ago, nearly everything we ate from the sea was wild. Today, rampant overfishing and an unprecedented biotech revolution have brought us to a point where wild and farmed fish occupy equal parts of a complex marketplace. Four Fish offers a way for us to move toward a future in which healthy and sustainable seafood is the rule rather than the exception.
Substantial financial resources of my father and cajole him into taking me fishing on the Viking Starship party boat out of Montauk, where we would steam miles and miles offshore in search of codfish. Before self-sufficiency became trendy and “locavorism” a catch-word, I learned how to make my pastime “sustainable.” Season by season I would take my surplus catch to the parking lot of my junior high and sell my fish out of the trunk of my mother’s Cordoba for a dollar a pound. The miserably paid.
Antifreeze genes that allow fish to survive in subzero-temperature water. But, as Stotish wrote, “Once the research progressed, they also realized that these interesting proteins had other potential applications.” The antifreeze-gene research looked promising for a number of different medical, food, and cosmetic uses, and that research was spun off into a separate enterprise. But perhaps the most lucrative thing the initial antifreeze research pointed to was faster growth. Stotish continued, “We.
Previous night’s storm. It looked just like a house Thanasis knew well, the house of an acquaintance named Claudatos, who lived on a promontory overlooking his home harbor. “My God,” Thanasis whispered, “could that actually be Claudatos’s house?” He waved and shouted, and soon Claudatos himself emerged onto the portico, waving back, the morning sun glinting pleasantly off his bald head. The wind, like some kind of Athena-driven lackey god, had blown the boat safely back to Cephalonia. Thanasis.
Particularly with gadiforms. When the act was passed, Georges Bank and Gulf of Maine cod stocks were at 12 percent of what fisheries scientists thought of as “rebuilt.” Haddock, another gadiform, were even worse off. The result of the act and its unusual deadlines are impressive: it gave regulators the ability to impose the drastic measure of closing fishing grounds entirely should the rebuilding targets not be met on an annual basis. Ten years after the act’s passage, Gulf of Maine codfish are.
Into codfish more closely, I was to come to realize that my baseline was considerably shifted from what nature had initially provided. It turns out that codfish on Georges Bank and other offshore areas are populations of last resort—the head office of the cod operation with all its subsidiary franchises removed. And to a large extent the future of our codfish populations comes down to the question of whether humans can reconstruct a memory of the pattern of abundance and apply it to the future.