Thierry Chopin

The industrialization of fishing

August 8, 2010

I’m just back from a week at the Delaware shore where we ate lots of fish, as we always do at the beach. This is more of an emotional than a logical decision–crabs are about the only locally caught seafood–but the beach towns have plenty of seafood restaurants and fish markets, perhaps a relic from the day when the local catch was more plentiful. The fact is, fish markets in Bethany Beach look pretty much like markets everywhere; they are as likely to sell salmon farmed in Chile or “previously frozen” tuna as they are to offer anything caught nearby.

This is no accident, as I learned during my vacation from reading Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food (Penguin, $25.95) by Paul Greenberg. No, it’s not exactly beach reading, but Four Fish is carefully-reported, well-written, insightful and surprisingly entertaining. A lifelong fisherman who writes for the Sunday Times magazine, Greenberg chronicles the history of four of the most popular fish on western menus–salmon, cod, sea bass and tuna–and explores the daunting question of whether fish, whether caught in the wild or farmed, can provide healthy protein in large quantities for the billions of people who enjoy seafood. How, in other words, can we catch or farm fish in a sustainable way, one that doesn’t deplete the supply or pollute the oceans? [click to continue…]

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The high cost of cheap food

May 20, 2010

hamburger-and-fries-l“We have very, very expensive food in this country.”

“It’s just that the prices are cheap.”

So said Paul Hawken, the environmentalist, entrepreneur and author, in a speech that began Cooking for Solutions, a conference on food and the environment, accompanied by lots of marvelous eating and drinking, this week at the Monterey Bay Aquarium in Monterey, CA.

The American industrial food system, he said, is bad for the planet, bad for farmworkers and bad for consumers.  “How did we make destroying our land, our children and our health a big business?” Hawken asked.

This was not an upbeat way to start the two-day event, but it’s hard to argue with his analysis. Big Ag produces lots of food–particularly grain and meat–at very cheap prices. According to USDA (cited by Bryan Walsh in this terrific article in TIME), Americans spend less than 10% of their incomes on food, down from 18% in 1966. Farm price supports, cheap fossil fuels and vast amounts of water all drive down the price of food.

And the true social and environmental costs? Let’s tally them. They include millions of tons of fertilizer that runs into rivers and the Gulf of Mexico, created an oxygen-starved dead zone that kills of sea life. Hog and chicken waste that contaminate waterways and the Chesapeake Bay. Overuse of antibiotics on animals that helps create antibiotic-resistant bacteria. If you care about animals, there’s the horror of confined animal feeding operations, or CAFOs. We’ve got food safety risks. Tons of global warming pollution. And, oh yeah, an epidemic of obesity, which, again according to TIME, adds $147 billion (that’s billion with a B) a year to our medical bills.

Ugh. And so, for the rest of day, scientists, activists, academics and a sprinkling of farmers and food company executives such as Gary Hirshberg of Stonyfield Farm and Margaret Wittenberg of Whole Foods Market talked about how to make our food system more sustainable.

Here are a just a few highlights: [click to continue…]

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