Goodbye rohu, hello Chilean sea bass: the real price of the fish we eat

By Paul Greenberg Editor’s Note: The fish we get to eat at many high-end restaurants in India are no longer the fish we grew up with — bekti, pomfret, kingfish, rohu_. In India, restaurants often served “fish curry” or “fish tandoori” without even specifying the kind of fish. You just knew it was a common local variety. But now you can do fish name-dropping. When Indigo in Mumbai revamped its menu recently, it proudly announced Chilean sea bass, yellow fin tuna and reef cod. Olive Bar and Kitchen serves Chilean sea bass and Norwegian salmon. But what does it mean we are casting our nets ever further and ever wider to find those fish? Paul Greenberg has written about fish for the_ New York Times_,_ National Geographic and other publications and is the author of the bestselling book Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food which will be out in India at the end of August as The Fish on Your Plate: Why we eat what we eat from the sea_._ Why do we eat what we eat from the sea? The truth is that for the better part of human existence, we tended to put a particular fish on our plates because it happened to be the fish that was closest at hand. Even after centuries of global commerce, fish remained stubbornly local — they were eaten by the people who had caught them or by those who lived not too far from the people who had done the job. But things are changing. And fast. Despite warnings about mercury and PCBs, the world nearly doubled its per person fish consumption from 20 pounds per year in the 1960s to 36 pounds in 2005. Of course Indians still have their local favourites — their pomfrets and seer fish, their chanos chanos and mandeli, fish that might be sampled during a seaside vacation or in the kitchen of an older matriarch. But look at the menus of some of India’s trendier restaurants and you will see fish starting to appear that reveal a much bigger story than India’s particular culinary trends. Let’s take four of them — salmon, Chilean sea bass, tuna, and tilapia. They tell the tale of the very limits of the ocean and the alternatives to traditional fishing humanity is bent on exploiting. Salmon – from the river to the sea Salmon come first in the story of the ocean’s shift because they are the fish that has proven most sensitive to the changes humans have wrought. In their wild form, salmon are born in rivers, migrate to sea and then return to those same rivers to reproduce. The kind of rivers that salmon need, clear, cold, free-flowing, are becoming a rarity in the West. A 500-year river-damming spree in Europe and North America has led to a dramatic contraction of salmon-kind’s range to the point where salmon are now almost commercially extinct in the Atlantic ocean i.e. too few in number for humans to consider it worthwhile to fish them. [caption id=“attachment_49425” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“A 500-year river-damming spree in Europe and North America has led to a contraction of salmon-kind’s range to the point where salmon are now almost commercially extinct. Christopher Furlong/Getty Images”]  [/caption] But, there is a flipside to salmon’s failure in the wild — their impressive success on the farm. Salmon hatch out of a large nutrient-rich egg. Unlike other fish, larval salmon can live off their egg sac for many days and then transition easily onto industrially produced feed. Add to that a salmon breeding programme launched in the 1970s and ’80s and you have perhaps the most successful farmed fish in the history of fish. Today’s selectively bred Atlantic salmon now grow twice as fast with half the feed as their wild forebears. All this has led to an explosion in Atlantic salmon farming. They are now farmed on every continent save Antarctica and account for 3.3 billion pounds a year. A few years hence there might even be genetically engineered salmon that grow even faster. Chilean sea bass – to the edge of the continental shelves But while farmed creatures like salmon and tilapia now account for half of the world’s seafood (up from less then 10% 60 years ago), fish farming is only half the story. The other half is the spread of large-scale “industrial” fishing to the southern hemisphere. Another new fish to Indian menus, the Chilean sea bass, is a telling example of this phenomenon. Chilean sea bass were first caught commercially when small-scale Chilean fishers were pushed off their ancestral grounds by large European factory fishing fleets in the 1970s. With nowhere else to go, the artisan fishers explored the much deeper waters of the continental slopes and began catching large quantities of a two-metre-long fish they had never seen before. Unbeknownst to them, the fish had been classified by researchers as dissotichus eleganoides and named in English “Patagonian toothfish”. The artisan anglers decided to call them “bacalao de profundidad” or “cod of the deep”. American traders renamed them yet again, calling them “Chilean sea bass” since they found that the new fish substituted well for California white sea bass and American striped bass (two “bass” species that had been tragically over-fished in the US). This is the name that won the market, especially when it was mentioned in the 1993 global blockbuster Jurassic Park. Chilean sea bass had an additional quality that made them loved in the West. They lack a flotation organ most other fish have called a “swim bladder” — a tissue balloon fish inflate or deflate to help them float or sink. Lacking a swim bladder, Chilean sea bass secrete oil directly into their flesh to help them float. The abundance of oil in the Chilean sea bass’s flesh makes them very difficult to overcook and dry out — an advantage for service in cruise lines and hotel buffet trays where a fish can sit for hours. Continue reading on next page Tuna – into the abyss of the open sea The ranging of international fleets over previously untapped waters pursuing things like Chilean sea bass has caused much consternation in the countries of the Global South and more rigid enforcement of territorial fishing rights. This in turn has led humanity to the last frontier in fishing which is expressed on the Indian seafood menu by one other fish: tuna. By the rules of the United Nations Law of the Sea, countries control their waters out to 200 nautical miles. But tuna could care less about such distinctions. Yellowfin, bluefin and bigeye tuna regularly cross international borders, traversing whole oceans, often ending up in the no man’s land called the “High Seas”. The High Seas are that portion of the oceans beyond 200 nautical miles owned by no one, fishable by anyone, with very little regulation in place to stop a free-for-all. The number of fish caught in the High Seas has increased by a factor of 10 in the last half century and a lot of those High Seas fish are tuna. Atlantic Bluefin tuna is on every single “do not eat” seafood card from every wildlife conservation organisation there is but the global consumption has only increased, especially in Japan. Bluefin, which take seven years to reach maturity and much longer to become a 500 pound giant are the most threatened. But if the bluefin goes bust, the yellowfin and the bigeye tuna are next in line. Tilapia – back to the pond Tilapia of course have been eaten in India much longer than tuna and unlike tuna they are actually grown locally throughout the country. But most Indians don’t realise that the particular tilapia they eat are not native to the subcontinent. Most Indian tilapia are from the Nile Riverbasin and were spread throughout Asia by the Peace Corps and other foreign aid organisations. Like salmon, tilapia have certain biological traits that make them work on the farm. They grow extremely fast, can adapt to a variety of water conditions, and eat almost anything. Indeed one of the things that made early Peace Corps workers so excited about tilapia was that villagers could basically throw a tilapia into an algae-infested pond and watch while the fish consumed the algae and converted it into protein-rich flesh. The only hitch is that fish fed on an algae diet will end up having an unpleasant muddy taste (“off-flavour” as it’s called in the fish farming industry) and so nowadays tilapia, especially in the West, are being fed on corn and soy, a diet that makes tilapia taste much more like, well, nothing. A nothingness the globalised fish market values. For what better canvas to express a country’s specific spices and flavours than a white plane of protein that carries with it no cultural flavor baggage at all? Thanks to its positively neutral quality, tilapia is now the second most consumed farmed fish in the world, bested only by carp. Four fish And so there you have it, four fish for the enterprising Indian diner: salmon, Chilean sea bass, tuna, and tilapia. Whether this is a good or bad thing for the sea, is still unclear. We know according to a study by the World Bank that the world fishing fleet is twice as large as is necessary to catch the fish we currently catch. Developing nations might balk if they are told by other nations that they cannot catch a particular fish because its stock is depleted, but if a species declines continuously over time like the Atlantic bluefin tuna, the only “fair” thing to do is close the fishery. The farming of fish like salmon and tilapia could relieve fishing pressure on wild stocks but farming can also cause environmental degradation and spur the decline of the very wild fish we were trying to preserve. The descendants of selectively bred Atlantic salmon have been showing up in the Canadian Pacific and some claim they have spread farm-borne diseases to wild salmon populations. Fishing on a more diverse range of species from the Global South and the High Seas like Chilean sea bass and tuna could be a way of easing pressure on highly depleted coastal stocks of the Northern Hemisphere and the Indian Ocean. But these far flung fishing grounds are hard to monitor and regulate and could suffer fisheries implosions of their own. What is clear is that as Indians sit down at table with these four fish they are joining a global conversation about food politics. If trends continue, sooner or later, we’ll all be eating the same fish. Let us hope there will be enough for everyone.