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Are you ready to eat lower on the ocean's food chain?
Taras Grescoe's new book, Bottomfeeder, is being touted as the Fast Food Nation of the seafood industry. And that certainly captures some of the feel of the book; it is a muckracking journey, and in Grescoe's telling there's plenty of muck (full of jellyfish, algae, tiny plastic "nurdles" and ground-up fish meal) to rake. But it's also a passionate manifesto with one overarching plea: humans should eat much less from the carnivorous top of the aquatic food chain (think tuna, swordfish, salmon and cod) and much more from the small, fast-growing bottom (think sardines, herring, mackerel and whiting).
Over the course of more than a year, Grescoe circled the globe to figure out where the seafood on our plates is coming from -- and what in turn that seafood is doing to those places. Traveling from Thai shrimp farms to Chesapeake Oyster beds to Medditeranean algae blooms, he argues that, for too long, we have eaten too much of the wrong fish, and have fished them the wrong way.
It's a story that combines many of the topics we've done over the last few months in one big salty mess. There are invasive species (we should eat them, Grescoe has argued). There are echoes of our meat show, with an aquatic twist: that if increasingly we know the name of our ranchers, perhaps it's time to learn the names of our fishing boats (or at the very least where they're fishing). And of course there's salmon.
Are you on board with Grescoe's plan? Are you ready to reduce your consumption of steaky fish in exchange for sardine salad sandwiches and kippered herring? Are you already asking your fishmonger (or your waiter) where your fish came from, and how it was caught, and how many of its relatives are still out there? Are you going to start?
GUESTS:
Taras Grescoe: Author of Bottomfeeder: How to Eat Ethically in a World of Vanishing Seafood and The Devil's Picnic, among other books
John Connelly: President of the National Fisheries Institute
UPDATE: Monday, June 23, 10:01 AM. The definition of "nurdles" according to Taras Grescoe: "tiny bits of plastic that get swallowed by jellyfish and salps, to be passed up the food chain to larger fish." He says the exfoliating beads in body scrubs are partially to blame.
Tagged as: fishing · food · locavore · ocean · salmon · sustainable oregon
Photo credit: visulogik / Flickr / Creative Commons
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Hello!, Steinbecks ?Cannery Row? was about that fishery and that California fishery is now essentially extinct!
The Loggers of Oregon ate huge amounts of sardines, you can see that in their trash dumps AKA to anthropologists as kitchen middens.
I have not read the book but I have been taking notice of the scientific reports about the oceans and it looks to me that people are strip-mining the oceans like Big Coal strip-mines the earth.
But killing off the oceans fisheries one by one is not the same as using up all the coal, a dead resource; eventually the fisheries will collapse, and maybe the salmon this year is an indicator, but when the ocean fishes collapse, well the great Dust Bowl will probably look small by comparison.
Soylent green? -
I suspect I'm one of Grescoe's primary targets - I have eaten a tuna sandwich for lunch every work day, five days a week, for the last ten years (light tuna, not white).
I'm willing to change but if that means eating sardines or herring instead then I'll probably just go vegan. -
This sounds like a very interesting book.
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Two stories and a question: An Eastern Washington farmer I know who grew up in the Great Depression still eats canned sardines as a luxury comfort food.
The best sandwich I ever ate was a was made with tinned pilchards under a baobab tree in Swaziland, southern Africa when hitchhiking with a Swazi friend way out into the country on a hot day to visit his mother.
Question: Is pilchard (the name of Bob the Builder's cat, btw) the British name for something Americans call something else, or a different fish? Also, does the kind of oil used to pack tinned fish matter for health? -
Oh, the guy asking about shrimp reminded me: in the late 1970s I worked in a shrimp repackaging plant in Boston. Our main job each day was to soak tons and tons of defrosted Pacific shrimp in plastic garbage cans filled with chicken brine, to give them a flavor.
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Cool site, i will come back here, regards
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