Reprinted with permission from the November issue of the Ester Republic.

As we walked through the front door of my almost-in-law’s home, my then-still-fiancée and I were greeted with crisis. “Theas no moah fresh sablefish, only frozen,” I heard my caterer proclaim as a cordless phone was thrust into my hand. I recognized his Cape Cod accent right away. The development was a disappointment, to be sure, but probably not a crisis. Sablefish is delicious, cheap, and responsibly fished under a community-based system of management. Frozen wouldn’t be as tasty, and would be harder for the chef to work with, but purchasing the frozen sablefish for the event, I mused, would be the ultimate display of commitment to supporting a local, responsible food resource.

My caterer, however, had a different idea. Remember the Tyson pen? “Frozen will taste horrible,” he proclaimed – “You want Barramundi. Its cheap, tastes like Chilean sea bass, and tops all the ‘sustainability’ lists.” Sigh. “No,” I responded, “we’re not going with a farmed fish.” I asked him to find out what other options were available from local waters and get back to me.

I could feel his confusion and frustration across the phone. The oceans are over fished, and Barramundi is the switch-grass of renewabl aquaculture – efficient, inexpensive, and if it lives up to the hype, sustainable. A freshwater fish originally from Australia, Barramundi has recently been featured in the Boston Globe, on NPR, even on Food Network’s quirky show Iron Chef. It is free of many of the problems associated with farming Atlantic salmon, like the risk of exposing wild fisheries to disease and biological contamination. Australis Aquiculture, LLC (an Australian company with farming facilities in Massachusetts) produces the fish in indoor facilities; they recycle close to 100% of their water, and even provide their waste fish manure to local farmers. All in all, it is very possibly the best-conceived aquaculture solution so far.

And why not farm fish? China has been doing it since 1500 BC. The Romans and Egyptians did it before that. I’ll even open a potential can of worms here and proclaim that I believe aquaculture must play a role in the food future of our world. After all, Americans ate 16½ pounds of fish in 2006, for a total of 4.9 billion pounds. Roughly 80% of that was imported, mostly from Asia and more recently Mexico. How that figure breaks down in terms of wild versus farm-raised is unclear, but there is little doubt that at present levels of production, such consumption is unsustainable, and there is not a sufficient terrestrial source of food to take its place.

Yet, our society lives in the house of neoclassical economics and worships at the church of techno-optimism. We are told to ignore the fact that we have depleted over 90% of the ocean’s large fish in the last 50 years. We are told that we must assume, have faith, and act as if there will always be fish at the grocery store. Then and only then will divine market forces give rise to technological innovations capable of providing fish for the 8 billion world-citizens of tomorrow. Admittedly it is market forces that have allowed companies like Australis to make these technological achievements and to flourish.But it is also market forces that will lead companies like Australis to make decisions that ultimately destroy the community economies and food systems around them. Not because of a problem inherent to the concept of aquaculture, but in the industrial approach to it.

Just as industrial agriculture has laid waste to the people and places of rural America, industrial aquaculture is well on its way to destroying what remains of our nation’s small fishing communities. The cheap prices of farmed fish leads consumers who often don’t recognize the difference between wild and farmed, to believe that fish should be cheap – that there is in fact no global seafood crisis. That perception cripples the sales of and demand for wild fish, making it even harder for local fisherman to make their living. The industrial model also favors outsourcing and globalization, so in the fishing communities of Downeast Maine, for instance, where many salmon farms have sprung up (all owned by one or two companies, mind you), locals are hard-pressed to get decent wage-paying jobs in the new industry. Need people to make and repair nets? They do it cheaper in Canada. Need truck drivers? UPS has way better rates.

Indeed many of the industry’s strongest proponents believe that the future of the world’s seafood consumption lies in the complete abandonment of wild fisheries in favor for farmed stocks. So what do all those people then do for a living? Local fisheries are perhaps the last major holdout against industrial consolidation, and fishing communities are the last vestige of Rockwell’s America. Are we that comfortable with abandoning that America in favor of companies like Tyson producing all of our chicken and fish too?

I know that unlike my caterer friend, there’s not much need to tell an audience of Alaskans why fish farms are bad news. I think, perhaps, that what I want to say, to shout at the top of my lungs in fact, is that there is actually a lot of potential in fish farming. Industrial aquaculture may not solve the problems of communities and their fisheries, but that doesn’t mean some other kind of aquaculture won’t. I challenge the industrious out there to find a new model, one where farmed fish can provide a community with an additional source for nutritional as well as economic security, in tandem with healthy, wild fisheries.

For the wedding, we ended up paying a much higher price for the last few pounds of available locally-caught Pacific salmon. Turns out the frozen sablefish ran out too.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 3rd, 2007 at 10:38 am and is filed under Food, Sustainability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.