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Last month, to little fanfare, a thinktank called the Earth Policy Institute announced that humankind is on the verge of crossing a remarkable threshold: For the first time in history, we’ll soon be eating more farmed fish than wild-caught seafood.

American eaters are notoriously disconnected from our seafood’s origins, which is why McDonald’s can get away with offering a sandwich as nondescript as Filet-O-Fish (it’s Alaskan pollock, in case you were wondering) and seafood restaurants can cavalierly swap tilefish for red snapper. Still, even accounting for the fact that most farmed fish are grown in the black box that is China, I’m astounded by how quietly our diets have shifted, and by how anonymous most farmed seafood species remain.

We all know what cows and chickens look like, but can anyone reading this pick out a tilapia from a lineup? How many people have ever seen a salmon or shrimp farm? What the heck is barramundi? Branzino? Pangasius?

Though our eating habits are evolving rapidly, most consumers are flying blind. For every sophisticated pescatarian with a color-coded seafood card and a hankering for line-caught Pacific cod, there are a dozen other fish-eaters who buy what’s cheap and convenient — which is completely understandable when time is short and the kids are hungry. ­­ But this also means we’ve paid little attention to the ascent of aquaculture, even as it has overtaken our markets and groceries.

Of course, aquaculture’s rise is only half the story. The other half is that wild fisheries catches have been stagnant at about 90 million tons per year for the last three decades, even as worldwide fishing effort has increased. As the Earth Policy Institute report puts it, “The bottom line is that getting much more food from natural systems may not be possible.” Treating the ocean like a dumping ground for oil, plastic, and sewage probably hasn’t helped, either — just a hunch..

With the high seas unable to keep pace with escalating seafood demand, it’s no wonder that farmed fish has stepped into the breach.

But aquaculture’s takeover is problematic on many levels. Many fish farming operations are certifiable environmental disasters, none worse than salmon farms: all those crammed-in fish spread disease, produce waste like nobody’s business, and escape from their pens to compete and breed with wild fish, weakening their gene pool. And in what crazy world does it make sense to use five pounds of delicious, Omega-3-rich sardines to grow a single pound of pallid salmon meat?

Wild fish are a lot tastier and more diverse, too — if you live in the northeast, would you rather feast on a smorgasbord of swordfish, flounder, cod, croaker, tuna, porgy, mackerel and striper, or force down a hunk of tilapia every day for the rest of your life?

But farmed fish isn’t going anywhere, and it would be shortsighted to discount any potential source of protein on a planet that will soon be inhabited by 9 billion very hungry humans. What’s more, as aquaculture has matured, it’s also gotten cleaner. Raising fish in land-based tanks instead of ocean pens, feeding them vegetable matter instead of wild forage fish, and growing several species together in polycultures are just a few of the techniques through which aquaculture is expediting its own rise.

Still, in Alaska, where I’m living for the summer, singing the praises of farmed fish will get you shoved off the dock. I’ve seen the bumper sticker “Friends don’t let friends eat farmed salmon” more than once. Alaskans don’t hate farmed fish because of what aquaculture does to the environment — they hate farmed fish because of what aquaculture has done to fishermen.

In Bristol Bay, the distant corner of western Alaska that’s host to the world’s greatest sockeye salmon runs, fishermen told me repeatedly that the explosion of farmed salmon had proved disastrous for their business. There was a time, said Tom, a thirty-year industry veteran, that Bristol Bay’s fishermen got almost two dollars a pound for their catch — until cheap, low-quality farmed salmon hit the market and undercut their wares.

“2003 was the year it really hit rock bottom,” Tom told me, flipping through a well-worn journal in which he’d tabulated three decades of prices and catches. “We were probably getting forty cents a pound. Just about everybody in Bristol Bay was losing money.”

Fishermen aren’t the only ones to suffer when markets crash. Every fisherman is a small business: he (or she) employs two or three crewmen, and his boat helps prop up a vast, interconnected marine economy. The marine supply storeowner, the ice vendor, the fuel vendor, and dozens of other local entrepreneurs depend on the business of fishermen; without them, vibrant waterfronts degrade into ghostly, rotting pilings.

When the Canadian government shut down collapsed cod fisheries in Newfoundland and Labrador in 1992, for example, 10% of the population fled inland. The fish haven’t come back, and neither have the communities. And while fishermen often get blamed for facilitating their own demise through overfishing, they’re just responding to perverse government regulations and subsidies and the demands of global markets. Hate the game, not the player.

Fortunately, consumers are gradually learning to distinguish between the facsimile that is farmed salmon and the delicious, wild-caught, genuine article. Prices have rebounded: most of the fishermen I spoke with in Bristol Bay were getting somewhere between $1.30 and $1.50 per pound. That’s enough to keep salmon fishermen well in the black — although it makes you wonder exactly whom you’re enriching when you pay $19.99 per pound at a seafood counter.

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These wild Alaskan sockeye salmon didn’t make it back to their home rivers to spawn, but never fear: Bristol Bay’s fisheries are some of the world’s most sustainable.  

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A Bristol Bay fisherman prepares to cut fillets from the first sockeye salmon of his season.

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Not every sockeye salmon caught in Bristol Bay makes its way to market — after all, fishermen have to eat, too.

 

Ben Goldfarb is a freelance writer and the former editor of Sage Magazine. This is the first installment of Fish for Thought, a monthly column about the seafood we eat and the men and women who catch, grow, and harvest it for us. 

by John Eller

We need supplies enough to sustain two people for three weeks at sea on an eighteen-foot commercial fishing boat. AC VALUE CENTER: Food and Liquor, in Cordova, Alaska serves the far edges of The Last Frontier state. The industrial supermarket’s minimal lighting shines on unreflective concrete floors. Commercial-sized boxes of cereal and instant noodles fill the matte shelves. A collection of cardboard boxes is piled behind the idle cashiers. The store brings to mind a trading depot in remote outposts during the Gold Rush, but with modernized foodstuffs instead of salted moose meat on hooks and rough-hewn drums of flour and sugar.

Brian and I originally bonded at a gym in Texas where we spent six months bemoaning our romantic foibles and the cost of East Coast schools—I wanted to study writing, he had applied to MIT. We were two skinny kids who could never seem to beef up, regardless of how many pounds we loaded onto the bench-press. Our vegetarian diets probably had something to do with this. Then, suddenly, Brian left for Alaska, my home state, to fish. He said he wouldn’t return until he’d saved enough to build his own music recording studio and buy a house. After two years of working halibut longlines in the spring, salmon seiners in the summer, and diving for sea cucumbers in the fall and winter, he was still broke. Worse: he was in debt. He called to offer me a job. I agreed to be a deckhand because he promised a minimum of five thousand dollars, regardless of how the season turned out. I figured this would be a nice pillow to ease my impending move to New York City.

“Let’s get ‘er done.” Brian grabs an oversized cart and leads us into the produce section of AC VALUE. “Remember, food is my dime, so go bananas.” His broad shoulders and paunch make me wonder what he’s been eating. Clearly, it takes more than tofu tacos to power the salmon industry. I knew this when I signed up, but I still want my leafy greens.

Alaskans rely on pricey California produce most of the year, vegetables grown with surgical precision yet aged by the long trek up the ALCAN Highway. I can see the three-thousand-mile journey in waxed yet pallid Red Delicious Apples sold for three dollars apiece. The nectarines look like old peaches. The broccoli crowns shipped in refrigerated semis to Anchorage, then barged in to Cordova, are yellowish, and five bucks a bunch.

Brian loads Yukon Gold potatoes, yellow onions, and green bananas—staples—into the cart. Space is limited so I defer to the captain.

“How about cherry tomatoes?” I ask, holding up a quart.

“Meh, we’ll buy a few cases of V8.”

The poor-looking, expensive produce is nothing like the Matanuska Valley vegetables I saw at the Alaska State Fair as a kid: cabbages that weighed as much as I did; a fifteen-hundred-pound pumpkin that I wanted to carve into a Jack O Lantern fort; or rutabaga and zucchinis bigger than watermelons. The long days and combination of volcanic and glacial sediment contribute to these record-breaking show-veggies. But the midnight sun lasts only a few months, and as the winter solstice looms it’s impossible to grow a single clover, let alone forty-pound kale plants.

I sneak a bag of Brussels sprouts into the cart before we move away from produce.

We file through wide aisles, loading cases of ramen, peanut butter, and cereal. Brian grabs dozens of Chef Boyardee cans: Overstuffed Beef Stromboli, Mini Dinosaurs with Meat Balls, Beefaroni (with whole wheat pasta), Cheesy Nacho Rotini.

“Hey buddy, I’m a pescatarian,” I say.

“Tuna’s down on the right.”

“But we can eat salmon, right?”

“Yeah, technically, we can. But we probably won’t. Takes too much time.”

“I like cooking.”

“And I like quantum mechanics.” The former science geek is dead earnest. “But we came here to kill salmon, not play Julia Child on a pirate ship. Get a lot of tuna.” Brian’s principle aim in food shopping seems to be to fit in as many calories per cubic inch as possible. Is this how all people in remote, industrial regions think about food? The North Slope oilfield workers I’ve met over the years embody a similar approach: food is good and all but mostly it’s just fuel.

We top the cart off with canned green beans and refried beans, peaches, pears and pineapple in thick syrup, spray cheese, an eight-pound sack of pistachios and forty single-serving bags of Chocolate Lover’s trail mix, lots of Baby Wipes and hand sanitizer, two gallons of Folgers, two cases of single-serving instant oatmeal, and a fifth of whiskey to sip before sleep on rough seas.

As I load the groceries onto the conveyor belt, I wonder if I’ll finally grow thicker, like Brian. We file out of AC VALUE with boxes of food, our fuel.

John Emrys Eller is a student, writer, chef and builder. He eats words like this for breakfast.