From NYTimes by Paul Greenberg
In 1982 a Chinese aquaculture scientist named Fusui Zhang journeyed to
Martha’s Vineyard in search of scallops.
The New England bay scallop had
recently been domesticated, and Dr. Zhang thought the Vineyard-grown
shellfish might do well in China. After a visit to Lagoon Pond in
Tisbury, he boxed up 120 scallops and spirited them away to his lab in
Qingdao.
During the journey 94 died.
But 26 thrived.
Thanks to them,
today China now grows millions of dollars of New England bay scallops, a
significant portion of which are exported back to the United States.
As
go scallops, so goes the nation.
According to the
National Marine Fisheries Service, even though the United States controls more ocean
than any other country, 86 percent of the seafood we consume is
imported.
But
it’s much fishier than that: While a majority of the seafood Americans
eat is foreign, a third of what Americans catch is sold to foreigners.
The
seafood industry, it turns out, is a great example of the swaps,
delete-and-replace maneuvers and other mechanisms that define so much of
the outsourced American economy; you can find similar, seemingly
inefficient phenomena in everything from textiles to technology.
The
difference with seafood, though, is that we’re talking about the
destruction and outsourcing of the very ecological infrastructure that
underpins the health of our coasts.
Let’s walk through these illogical
arrangements, course by course.
Appetizers: Half Shells for Cocktails
Our
most blatant seafood swap has been the abandonment of local American
oysters for imported Asian shrimp.
Once upon a time, most American
Atlantic estuaries (including the estuary we now call the New York
Bight) had vast reefs of wild oysters.
Many of these we destroyed by the
1800s through overharvesting.
But because oysters are so easy to
cultivate (they live off wild microalgae that they filter from the
water), a primitive form of oyster aquaculture arose up and down our
Atlantic coast.
Until
the 1920s the United States produced two billion pounds of oysters a
year.
The power of the oyster industry, however, was no match for the
urban sewage and industrial dumps of various chemical stews that
pummeled the coast at midcentury.
Atlantic oyster culture fell to just 1
percent of its historical capacity by 1970.
Just
as the half-shell appetizer was fading into obscurity, the shrimp
cocktail rose to replace it, thanks to a Japanese scientist named
Motosaku Fujinaga and the kuruma prawn.
Kurumas were favored in a
preparation known as “dancing shrimp,” a dish that involved the
consumption of a wiggling wild shrimp dipped in sake.
Dr. Fujinaga
figured out how to domesticate this pricey animal.
His graduate students
then fanned out across Asia and tamed other varieties of shrimp.
Today
shrimp, mostly farmed in Asia, is the most consumed seafood in the
United States: Americans eat nearly as much of it as the next two most
popular seafoods (canned tuna and salmon) combined. Notably, the amount
of shrimp we now eat is equivalent to our per capita oyster consumption a
century ago.
And
the Asian aquaculture juggernaut didn’t stop with shrimp.
In fact,
shrimp was a doorway into another seafood swap, which leads to the next
course.
Fish Sticks: Atlantic for Pacific
Most
seafood eaters know the sad story of the Atlantic cod.
The ill effects
of the postwar buildup of industrialized American fishing are epitomized
by that fish’s overexploitation: Gorton’s fish sticks and McDonald’s
Filets-o-Fish all once rode on the backs of billions of cod.
The codfish
populations of North America plummeted and have yet to return.
Just
as the North Atlantic was falling as a fish-stick producer, the Pacific
rose.
Beginning in the 1990s two new white fish started coming to us
from Asia: tilapia, which grows incredibly fast, and the Vietnamese
Pangasius catfish, which grows even faster (and can breathe air if its
ponds grow too crowded).
These two are now America’s fourth- and
sixth-most-consumed seafoods, respectively, according to the National
Fisheries Institute.
Alongside them, a fishery arose for an indigenous wild American Pacific fish called the Alaskan, or walleye,
pollock.
In just a few decades, pollock harvests went from negligible to
billions of pounds a year.
Pollock is now the fish in McDonald’s
Filet-o-Fish and the crab in the “fake crab” that Larry David discussed
mid-coitus on “Curb Your Enthusiasm.”
In fact, there is so much pollock
that we can’t seem to use it all: Every year more than 600 million
pounds is frozen into giant blocks and sent to the churning fish
processing plants of Asia, Germany and the Netherlands.
Sending
all this wild fish abroad and then importing farmed fish to replace it
is enough to make you want to take a stiff drink and go to bed.
But when
you wake up and reach for your bagel, surprise!
The fish swap will get
you again.
Lox: Wild for Farmed
There
was a time when “nova lox” was exactly that: wild Atlantic salmon (laks
in Norwegian) caught off Nova Scotia or elsewhere in the North
Atlantic.
But most wild Atlantic salmon populations have been fished to
commercial extinction, and today a majority of our lox comes from
selectively bred farmed salmon, with Chile our largest supplier.
This
is curious, given that salmon are not native to the Southern
Hemisphere.
But after Norwegian aquaculture companies took them there in
the ’80s, they became so numerous as to be considered an invasive
species.
The
prevalence of imported farmed salmon on our bagels is doubly curious
because the United States possesses all the wild salmon it could
possibly need.
Five species of Pacific salmon return to Alaskan rivers
every year, generating several hundred million pounds of fish flesh
every year.
Where does it all go?
Again,
abroad.
Increasingly to Asia.
Alaska, by far our biggest fish-producing
state, exports around three-quarters of its salmon.
To
make things triply strange, a portion of that salmon, after heading
across the Pacific, returns to us: Because foreign labor is so cheap,
many Alaskan salmon are caught in American waters, frozen, defrosted in
Asia, filleted and boned, refrozen and sent back to us.
Pollock also
make this Asian round trip, as do squid — and who knows what else?
When
you dig into the fish-trade data, things get murkier.
In its 2012
summary of the international fish trade, the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration noted, somewhat bizarrely, that its
definition of exports “may include merchandise of both domestic and
foreign origin.”
So,
for example, when fish sticks are cut from blocks of imported “white
fish” in an American facility and exported to a foreign country, they
are classified as American domestic production.
Meanwhile some of our
imports, as with an unknowable portion of our salmon, are taken from
American waters, reprocessed elsewhere and brought back home.
Do these
percentages cancel themselves out?
And
that’s my point.
Globalization, that unseen force that supposedly
eliminates inefficiencies through the magic of trade, has radically
disconnected us from our seafood supply.
Of
course, there is a place for the farming of shrimp, just as there is a
place for the farming of oysters.
There is a need for efficient
aquacultured species like tilapia and Pangasius, just as there is a need
to curb the overfishing of Atlantic cod.
There is even a place for
farmed Atlantic salmon, particularly if it can be raised so it doesn’t
affect wild salmon.
But
when trade so completely severs us from our coastal ecosystems, what
motivation have we to preserve them?
I’d argue that with so much farmed
salmon coming into the country, we turn a blind eye to projects like the
proposed Pebble Mine in Alaska, which would process 10 billion tons of
ore from a site next to the spawning grounds of the largest wild sockeye
salmon run on earth.
I’d
maintain that farmed shrimp inure us to the fact that the principal
rearing ground of Gulf shrimp, the Mississippi River Delta, is slipping
into the sea at a rate of a football field an hour.
I’d venture that if
we didn’t import so much farmed seafood we might develop a viable,
sustainable aquaculture sector of our own.
Currently the United States
languishes in 15th place in aquaculture, behind microscopic economies
like Egypt and Myanmar.
And I’d suggest that all this fish swapping
contributes to an often fraudulent seafood marketplace, where nearly
half of the oceanic products sold may be mislabeled.
We
can have no more intimate relationship with our environment than to eat
from it.
During the last century that intimacy has been lost, and with
it our pathway to one of the most healthful American foods.
It is our
obligation to reclaim this intimacy.
This requires us not just to eat
local seafood; it requires the establishment of a working relationship
with our marine environment.
It means, in short, making seafood not only
central to personal health, but critical to the larger health of the
nation.
