4 fish
It has been some time since I have started to read this book:
He selected the four fish that are coming to dominate the modern seafood market and are visible footprints: salmon, sea bass, cod, and tuna.
He tried to learn more about them and gives us general information about the way they have been produced.
It has examples and facts about how people started to use them and how they have turned to be the most important fish in the world.
I liked the way he ends the book, giving us the precious value of having a fish to eat:
Fish: a crop, harvested from the sea that magically grew itself back every year.
A crop that never required planting.
The historical vocabulary around fish echoes this sentiment.
Think in the word “seafood”: how many genera and species are described by these two opaque syllables?
Equivalents in other cultures are no less vague or misleading.
In most of the Western European languages seafood is “sea fruit”.
These expressions imply that the ocean’s denizens are vegetative, arbitrary, and free of charge.
Wild fish did not come into this world just to be our food.
They came into this world to pursue their own individual destinies.
If we hunt them and eat them, we must hunt them with care and eat them with the fullness of our appreciation.
We must come to understand that eating the last wild food is, above all, a privilege.
I share some parts that I considered useful information to understand why nowadays we can eat these fish everywhere in the world.
And why these four species?
There is no any special reason.
Not a perspective of efficiency in the resources use.
Not a global strategy to feed the people.
They just became more profitable to produce with the time.
And they are more and more appreciated by the consumers.
Habits spread all over the world and people just decide what fish do they want to eat.
Voilá!?
Which one have you never tried?
Which one do you know how it is produced?
Salmon
The initial selection of farmed Atlantic salmon took place from fish drawn from forty different river systems.
Every salmon river has its own unique set of challenges to which fish must adapt. …
And because salmon, unlike cattle and sheep, can produce many thousands of offspring in the course of their lives, once favourable individuals were found, just a few matriarchs and patriarchs could form the basis of a whole new race of highly productive fish.
In other words, within just 7 generations – 40 years – the Norwegians were able to double the growth rate of salmon – something that had taken thirty generations and sixty years of applied breeding, not to mention an unknowable amount of Neolithic-era undocumented selection, with cattle and sheep.
In an unimproved state, farmed salmon require as much as 6 pounds of wild fish, ground up and turned into pellet feed to produce one pound of edible flesh.
Selectively bred salmon, meanwhile, have reached a point where less than three pounds of wild fish can produce a pound of salmon.
And as salmon continue to be bred into a more and more efficient consumer of marine protein, that ratio is likely to drop.
When tamed salmon escape into the wild (as they do in the millions every year) they risk displacing a self-sustaining wild fish population with a domesticated race that is not capable of surviving without human support.
Salmo domesticus has been bred to eat a lot and grow fast in a controlled environment, but it has lost many of the fierce, determined traits that make a wild salmon able to swim against powerful currents, withstand fluctuations in temperature, and spawn in a river besieged by predators.
Sea bass
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.
Cod
Cod also have a tendency to store oil in their liver rather than in their flesh.
Since oil in the flesh determines the speed at which flesh putrifies when frozen or dried, cod and other gadiforms can be stored for great lengths of time.
Gadiforms are therefore the perfect industrial fish: they are common, mild, and easily recast as different kinds of food products.
In the entire history of fishing probably never occurred that it is scientists who find fish first, make recommendations, and then model the methods of a would-be fishing.
In real life it is fishermen, knowledgeable hunters who know their prey most fully, who find fish first.
And when fishermen find a new stock of fish that has never been measured, they fish it and fish it damn hard before regulation can be put in place.
Neither fishermen nor managers have the knowledge they need to manage a complex thing like a marine coastal ecosystem – they need to work together.
People in cod cultures talk about the texture, not the flavour of the cod.
The texture was the thing that was off with the farmed fish and it is a bout muscle.
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 flavours and pearly flake centerpieced, and admired even if it is a little bit dull on the palate.
Tuna
We should still eat fish, that it was important that we still regard the ocean as a living source of food and not just a place to dump our garbage.
However, I stipulated that a few basic guidelines should be followed to find a balance between human desire and ocean sustainability.
I covered the usual topics one comes across at sustainable-seafood conventions: that one should favour fish caught by small-scale hook-and-line fishers because of the lower impact on sea beds and underwater reefs.
That when choosing aquacultured fish one should choose vegetarian fish, like tilapia and carp, because of the lower strain they put on marine food webs.
When it came to tuna, though, I offered no triangulation whatsoever, because in my view there simply was no compromise possible – do not eat big fish.
Japanese have a very short tradition of eating Bluefin.
Before the American occupation of Japan, Japanese preferred lean fish and meats and found the Bluefin too fatty to stomach.
It was only after the American occupation and the subsequent introduction of fatty beef into the Japanese diet that a taste for the fatty “toro” belly of Bluefin started to become fashionable.