Book Review: Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food

"The passion to save bluefin [tuna] is as strong the one to kill them, and these dual passions are often contained within the body of a single fisherman."

I certainly go to a lot of aquariums, more than most people, I'm sure, but I still have to admit, I'm fairly ignorant about fish.  I can recognize the species most commonly kept in zoos and aquariums, and maybe tell you a little about those, but that's about it.  Other than that, whether it's the ecological sense or the culinary one, I don't give them too much thought.  Like most people, to me, fish tend to be... well, fish.

In truth, "fish" is a term that covers an enormous number of species, many of which have played an outsized role in our history, culture, and nutrition.  Nature writer Paul Greenberg explores the importance of fish in our lives in Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food.  The four fish in question are the salmon, sea bass, cod, and tuna, which in turn represent humanity's constant quest for new food fishes, from the rivers that are seasonally invaded by spawning salmon to the deep ocean haunts of giant tuna.  With each fish, he takes us through a familiar saga: first, seeming abundance, then increasingly sophisticated exploitation, then a sudden realization of rarity, and finally a scramble to save (or at least salvage) whatever is left.

From an ecological or economic perspective alone, Greenberg's book is interesting in how it presents issues of sustainability and resource management.  A zoo or aquarium professional, however, will likely be the most intrigued by the frequent discussion of aquaculture.  Each of the four fishes that the author introduces us to is the subject of some efforts to rear and raise it in captivity, from the heavily industrialized farming of salmon along cold coastlines from Norway to Chile to the nascent (and apparently not especially successful) efforts to raise tuna, voracious, slow-growing oceanic predators.  Most of Greenberg's interest lays in the question of what options are best for the environment and most sustainable in the long run - how many pounds of feed to produce how many pounds of edible fish.  I find it most interesting to hear about the challenges being overcome to keep, breed, and raise the fish.  After all, public aquariums are continually striving to boost the sustainability of their fish collections, and what is aquaculture other than aquarium keeping on an industrial scale?

Greenberg doesn't just limit himself to the four namesake fishes of this book, though they do serve as a helpful framework for understand our interactions with fish.  He introduces us to a host of other species, including some which, it stands to reason, might be better candidates for domestication and consumption that many of those that we are accustomed to, tilapia and barramundi among them.   Sustainability isn't just a concern for the human kitchen, after all - it also has implications for zoos.  Many of our animals, such as penguins, otters, and crocodilians, are eaters of fish, and species selection serves as another front on which we could strive towards better environmental sustainability.   I was happy to see that Greenberg did, on several occasions, mention the Seafood Watch program of the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

I don't cook fish too often myself (the results of a horrifyingly bad experience with some herring in the early days of my career, when I was looking for the cheapest eats possible).  I do sometimes order it when I go out to restaurants, though.  When I went to the grocery store last, I found myself browsing the seafood section, not so much to buy anything, but to see how what I saw there matched up with Greenberg's book - the species selection, the dichotomy of wild-caught and farm-raised.  Fish, as the subtitle reminds us, are some of the last food items that we eat that are removed from the wild on a large scale.  If we want there to be fish for us to eat in the future, we need to start paying attention to what's on our plate - and to how it gets there.

Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food at Amazon.com