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The Dead Sea: Taras Grescoe's Bottomfeeder
By Ivy Knight
Having immersed myself in the oceans of the future for the past few weeks I'm feeling very depressed. Taras Grescoe's
Bottomfeeder gives a view of the sea we rarely see. Pollution, ridiculously harmful fishing methods and our insatiable appetite for frozen fish sticks are joining together for a big showstopper in 2048. He writes, "A paper in the esteemed journal Nature reports that 90 percent of the population of top-level predators -among them tuna, sharks, marlin and swordfish- have already been caught. A team of ecologists makes headlines worldwide by predicting that, at their current rate of exploitation, all major fish stocks will collapse within our lifetimes; the world, in other words, will run out wild seafood by the year 2048."
The ocean may become a vast wasteland but it will still be populated by jellyfish and toxic algae, sea slugs and condom wrappers. Reading Bottomfeeder made me want to throw in the towel, or the lobster bib in this case, and hop on the vegan train again.
When the local grocery store labels farmed salmon fillets as wild or your neighbourhood chain restaurant offers unlimited shrimp for less than twenty bucks, while the sushi joint in the food court pumps out pre-packaged bluefin tuna rolls and says they're sustainable what are you supposed to do? How do you know what's right and wrong in order to make the right decision?
According to Grescoe we're supposed to ask a lot of questions. I'd like to take Boris Worm (the scientist, with a name only a mother could love, behind the 2048 prediction) to the supermarket with me on a shopping trip (as Grescoe did) or to the food court or the neighbourhood bistro. He could straighten out all these uninformed, underpaid twenty-somethings who don't have a clue when I ask them if something is sustainably fished. Are you kidding me? The tattooed kid behind the counter can tell you a girl's bra size from a mile away but do you honestly think he knows a thing about those scallops he's selling you?
The premise of the book is that we can save the oceans and the fish if we stop eating from the top of the oceanic food chain. Eat all the top dogs and the whole pyramid scheme crumbles leaving behind a big bloom of algae. With no fish to eat it "the algae bloom now grows unchecked. When it sinks to the bottom of the ocean, the decaying algae rots and releases deadly hydrogen sulfide, a toxic gas."
This creates a "dead zone" where nothing but jellyfish can live. "Scientists say 150 such zones, oxygen-free patches of ocean where no life can exist, regularly crop up from the South China Sea to the Oregon coast. Some of them are now as large as Ireland."
There's a lot of information in this book, all of it shocking. I think for the purposes of this article, rather than overwhelm you with too much information, I'll just focus on the three most popular creatures in the sea.
Let's start with tuna, bluefin tuna specifically. In Japan, sushi and sashimi used to be eaten only on special occasions, but in the affluent 1980's it became an everyday indulgence. The bluefin, which had sold for nickels a pound in 1970, was going for $18 a pound by 1990 thanks to sushi's global popularity. In 2006, 2,500 tonnes of bluefin were caught in the Mediterranean, a significant drop compared to 16,200 tonnes in 1996. Grescoe writes "the WWF has been calling for a three-year closure of the Atlantic and Mediterranean fisheries. Like the cod off European coasts, the bluefin tuna needs a break if it is going to survive." He quotes Barbara Block, a marine biologist at Stanford, "Our data show they spawn for the first time, on average, at close to eleven and a half years. We probably shouldn't be catching them until they're larger, until they've spawned at least twice. If they could set aside ninety, or even sixty, days every year for the bluefin to spawn without having to interact with fishing lines, there's a lot of evidence that we could actually help the stocks recover."
Later in the book Grescoe comes across bluefin tuna being sold at the Atlantic Superstore in Halifax, N.S. The most endangered fish in the sea is on sale! It's marked down from $19 a pound to $16.99.
It's very unlikely that you'd find real Kobe beef on sale in Halifax for $16.99 a pound. The rancher who sells Kobe beef is going to make sure he sells it for a price that corresponds with it's value. A side of Kobe beef would not get lost in the shuffle and sell for less than it's worth. But a bluefin tuna is a different thing. No one owns that bluefin, no one raised it and paid money to feed it and keep it healthy. That fish was wild and free and some clueless fisherman scooped him out of the ocean and sold him for whatever he could get. That fisherman doesn't care what happens to his catch as long as he gets paid. The majority of modern day fishing is now similar to shoveling coal into a furnace, mindless labour.
Not all fish are wild and free these days, a lot of them are growing up down on the farm. Let's move on now and check out the state of another great fish: the salmon.
"Twenty-three million Americans eat salmon at least once a month. In Great Britain, the farm-gate value of salmon routinely drops below one pound a kilogram - less than the price of chicken. What was once a seasonal delicacy has become the alternative to beef or poultry on a million inflight meals."
Grescoe takes us to B.C. where a farm with 200,000 salmon releases fecal matter equivalent to the untreated sewage from a city of 65,000 people. Then it's off to Norway where 80 percent of the fish in some rivers are of farmed origin, they not only compete for food with the wild salmon but nesting spots as well. "Fast-growing farmed salmon steal nesting spots from their wild cousins but then lay deformed, nonviable eggs."
He goes on to tell us that "Almost the entire salmon-farming industry on the west coast of Canada is now owned by three European multinationals."
"In Norway salmon farming has led to rampant waterborne diseases and the deliberate poisoning of entire rivers, and contributed to the virtual extinction of the native salmon population. That, many people believe, is why the Norwegians came to Canada in the first place: after ravaging their own coastline, they needed virgin territory to exploit."
These farms that provide the world with salmon, salmon that grows and marinates in its own feces and a cocktail of poisonous chemicals, are poisoning the water around them. The locals are seeing the Coho salmon stocks covered in pus-filled boils and rock sole and turbot with growths "that looked like palm trees sprouting out of their eyeballs", clams from beaches near the salmon farms are inedible, and the salmon themselves are covered in sea lice and bleeding from the eyeballs.
If you're still reading and haven't gone off to vomit somewhere, take a deep breath and read on.
In case you've ever wondered what farmed salmon are eating, Grescoe will fill you in. Salmon feed contains "poultry meal" which is made up of all the "nonfood parts" left over after processing factory farmed chickens. "chicken manure - a potentially rich source of tapeworms, salmonella and arsenic - is also a key ingredient in salmon feed."
They not only get to eat delicious chicken excrement but are also fed wild fish. That's right. The farmed fish are not only deforming and poisoning the wild fish, they're eating them too.
"About 30 million tones of wild fish - about a third of the world's total catch - goes toward making fish meal and oil, with anywhere from 3.1 to 4.9 million tonnes of that going directly to the farmed salmon industry. Farming salmon is akin to nourishing tigers and lions with beef and pork, and then butchering the great cats to make ground round."
Not all farmed fish is bad though, there are farms where smaller numbers of fish are grown and where chicken excrement isn't on the menu. They are just a bit hard to find. "The big problem in North America right now is the lack of a credible eco-label for organic salmon. There are no real standards for stocking densities, antibiotics, pesticides." says Grescoe.
Now if you plan to forgo that farmed salmon and get yourself some wild salmon consider this one last bit of info: "In a cross-country survey of American supermarkets, Consumer Reports found that 56 percent of salmon fillets - for which their researchers paid up to $15.62 a pound - were labeled as wild-caught when they were in fact farmed."
$15.62 a pound for farmed salmon fillets billed as wild-caught, or $16.99 a pound for endangered bluefin tuna, how about $14.99 for all-you-can-eat shrimp?
Red Lobster buys 44 million pounds of shrimp annually for its Endless Shrimp promotion and is now the largest single end-user of seafood in North America. Shrimp eat fish and squid meal, two pounds of wild fish flesh will get you on pound of farmed shrimp. (CP Aquaculture makes this shrimp food with a very special secret ingredient - shrimp heads. Let's see if cannibalism does for the shrimp industry what it did for the beef industry.)
The shrimp farmed in Thailand does not feed the farmer, the farmer sells his product for a pittance to Red Lobster and they in turn give some fat, greasy-chinned guy an unlimited feast and change back from his twenty-dollar bill.
"Shrimp aquaculture does not increase world food security: when shrimp are fattened with wild fish, the net amount of protein in the world can only decrease."
If you don't care about stupid things like the net amount of protein in the world and just want to eat that shrimp cocktail in peace then go ahead. Wait, just a second though, Grescoe has something to tell you first: "The simple fact is, if you are eating cheap shrimp today, it almost certainly comes form a turbid, pesticide and antibiotic-filled, virus-ridden pond in the tropical climes of one of the world's poorest countries."
Let's say you've got a rice paddy in Thailand, one day these shrimp farms come in and set up right next door. After about three years the chemicals eventually poison the water so badly that the shrimp farm needs to move on. Off they go to set up another farm down the coast while you are left with your rice paddy that is now a poisonous swamp, your animals dying, your family and neighbours sick with vomiting, dysentery and ulcers. Where you once caught wild fish and shrimp for your supper you must now come up with money to buy from a fishmonger. Oh, and the groundwater is contaminated and undrinkable so you have to walk two or three kilometers to get water.
In a section titled ‘All-You-Can-Eat-Antibiotics' we learn that researchers at Mississippi State bought thirteen brands of imported "ready-to-eat" (i.e. already cooked) shrimp and found 162 separate species of bacteria showing resistance to ten different antibiotics. "Their conclusion: consumers, particularly those with depressed immune systems are probably better off cooking ready-to-eat shrimp."
"Food safety experts have discovered that some people who believed they have shellfish allergies are actually exhibiting reactions, like itching and swelling, to antibiotic residues in farmed species," Grescoe tells us.
All righty then, anyone for sashimi?
We didn't even get into the effects of bottom-trawling, blast fishing, cyanide fishing (I'm serious! Fishing with cyanide!) but you can read all about that devastation when you get your own copy of the book. Bottomfeeder will tell you what other fish to avoid while giving you enough information that you won't have any choice but to do just that. At just over 300 pages this little book is encyclopaedic in its scope. "All told, I spent about a year travelling, and two years doing the research. There were a lot of interviews to transcribe, a lot of experts to consult—the learning curve was extremely steep." Grescoe has done a lot of the work for you, all you have to do is read the damn thing.
Next week I'll tell you how Taras Grescoe and some Toronto fish purveyors changed my mind about dropping fish from my personal menu.
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