Four Fish: A Journey From the Ocean to Your Plate
As long as we can’t see it, it isn’t there. This is the kind of infantile logic, applied to the largely invisible destruction of our seas, that Paul Greenberg addresses in this really excellent book.
Through a forensic exploration of the overexploitation of four of the most commercially popular fish – tuna, salmon, sea bass and cod – he makes the invisible visible with a narrative which manages to be scientifically sound and emotionally engaging.
The thesis is simple; the oceans are our last wild habitat and fish our last wild food. Yet we continue to exploit this resource, as if it were “a crop…that magically grew itself back every year. A crop that never required planting.”
Even as we begin to recognise the problem, our ‘solutions’ get it wrong. We began to farm these four big fish not out of altruism and not because they were appropriate for farming, but because they were in demand, and therefore profitable. Little thought was given to how these large marine predators would respond to confinement.
Indeed most fish farmers’ time and money is spent ‘fixing’ the problems of trying to tame the ‘tigers of the sea’ including disease, pollution, stress and reduced fertility. Our favourite farmed fish are also fed fishmeal – ground up fish harvested from fully exploited wild stocks of anchovies and herring – further perpetuating the cycle of marine destruction.
But this is a book about solutions as well as problems and in his quest for answers Greenberg literally travels the world – from Alaska and Norway to Greece, Scotland, Hawaii and Vietnam.
There are farmed species less dependent on food from the sea, and more well-adapted to domestication such as barramundi, tra and tilapia and eating more of these could allow overexploited wild stocks to recover.
However, Greenberg’s ultimate view is that the only effective way to prevent extinction is a global ban on fishing wild stocks and a conservation status that re-defines fish not as ‘food’ but as ‘wildlife’. It’s a challenging point of view, but may be the only hope for preserving the last wild food on earth and the biodiversity of our oceans.
Four Fish: A journey from the ocean to your plate
Paul Greenberg Allen Lane
Paperback
£14.99
- This review was published in Geographical magazine circa October 2010
