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Interview with Journalist and Author Paul Greenberg

Beyond Seafood, the "Last Wild Food"

SeaWeb: Why do you choose to write about ocean issues, and fishing issues, in particular?

Paul Greenberg: I grew up sport fishing and it has always been something close to my heart. It was the way I formed a bond with my father. My parents divorced when I was pretty young and my dad used to take me fishing, so it has always had a strong emotional connection for me. Above that, I just love the sea as a natural place; it’s a place that puts me at peace. When I started to hear about overfishing issues, the change of species that has been occurring over the years and the commercial and sport loss of certain species that I remember catching as a kid, it disturbed me to see my peaceful place become this battleground of the future. I’d like to see it get restored to a place of peace again.

SW: Why did you decide to focus on these four fish—salmon, bass, cod and tuna—in your book? What does each represent?

PG: There have been a lot of “fish in danger” books that have come out over the years, … but what I thought is that there is a tendency for these books to stay in a marine conservation echo-chamber, and they don’t reach the larger foodie world out there that, as we’ve seen in land food, is actually causing some real changes.

When I was choosing which fish to look at, I decided to examine the fish people knew about in the marketplace. I consider myself a fish guy, and we fish people love the world of fish and the diversity of it all, but the average consumer tends to look at things much more simplistically: They see a small diversity of fish in the marketplace as being enough to satisfy them.

If you look at any seafood menu, for example, there are always these four flesh archetypes that seem to appear: there’s always something light and flaky, traditionally something like cod, that is deep-friend; then people want to see something that is a little meatier that can stand up to broiling, and that’s where you have fish that are called bass or snapper; nowadays people also want something pink and succulent that they can bake or smoke, that’s salmon; finally, with the rise of sushi in the last 20 to 30 years, tuna has become the market driver, and that’s what we use for sushi and for the grilling of a large, steak of fish. What I was trying to do was bring the consumer into the more diverse world of oceans by looking at the somewhat simplified view they have of the fish on their plate.

Farmed salmon, such as the ones seen here in Chile during processing, are carnivorous and require substantial amounts of fishmeal to grow to maturity. Paul Greenberg

SW: What are the biggest problems with farming salmon, and what steps are aquaculturists taking to address them?

PG: The main problem with salmon is that it tends to be farmed in places where wild salmon exist. If Atlantic salmon populations were in decent shape, this might not be such an issue. But when you talk about wild Atlantic salmon, you’re talking about a fish that is commercially extinct. Anytime you see Scottish, Irish, Norwegian or Nova Scotian salmon in the marketplace, it’s all farmed. The reason is that wild Atlantic salmon went into very steep decline in the 1950s that prompted domestication.

Other issues around farmed salmon are the feed question—many people put forth that we should not be farming carnivorous fish at all. They ask “Why are we taking many pounds of little forage fish from the sea and then feeding them to salmon?”

But you can’t always just throw rocks at the salmon farmers because they are trying to fix things. They’ve been trying to make their fish more efficient through selective breeding and also through better feeding techniques. They’re feeding them less fishmeal—the diet of a contemporary Atlantic salmon has much more soy and other non-fish products in it. So the per fish efficiency has gone up greatly. But at the same time, salmon farming has expanded so much that whatever gains we’ve achieved on a per fish basis, we’ve lost in terms of the overall footprint of salmon.

SW: How much of the bass purchased by consumers is wild versus farmed?

PG: There are many fish our there called “bass,” but what I chose to focus in on was the European sea bass, also called the branzino, loup de mer, bar or robalo in the marketplace. That was the next fish that came online as an aquaculture fish. I call it the Rosetta Stone fish because when we cracked the code on that one, it opened up the potential to crack the code on many other marine fish. Aquaculture has not always been a bad thing for fish called bass. Striped bass, or rockfish as they call it in the mid-Atlantic, was in a very steep decline until the mid-1980s. In 1982, there were five million stripers left, and now there are about 55 million because of the fishing moratorium and because of aquaculture; 60 percent of the market today of striped bass is farmed.

A seafood processor handles frozen Chilean sea bass. Paul Greenberg

Unlike salmon, which are grown next to wild populations, the farmed striped bass is a hybrid between a striped bass and a white bass that is largely sterile and is grown in freshwater ponds away from wild stocks, so there isn’t any disease transfer issue. The farmed striped bass has actually filled a very important culinary niche of the 15- to 18-inch fish that fits on a plate and that you grill whole. The rise of that farmed product, I believe, has taken a lot of the pressure off of the impetus to harvest undersized striped bass [in the wild]. Before [farmed] striped bass came into the market, people did eat 18-inch and 19-inch [wild] striped bass and they were some of the more valuable fish on the market. But now that you have this farmed product that does pretty much everything that the wild fish used to do on the plate, now there’s no pressure to catch those smaller fish.

SW: Populations of Atlantic cod, once a plentiful staple, collapsed in the 1990s. What was the cause for the collapse and what is the current state of wild cod populations?

PG: The flesh archetype in the case of cod is a low-fat, flaky fish that can be used for a number of industrial food purposes, such as fish sticks and filet-o-fish sandwiches. Cod played that role for many years. But now Atlantic cod stocks are way down, and they don’t really serve their industrial purpose anymore. The fish that have started to serve that purpose in their place has largely been Alaska pollock. We harvest about three billion pounds of Alaska pollock a year. It’s used for everything from fish sticks to filet-o-fish sandwiches, and also for fake crab.

Now the question remains going forward, will Alaska pollock be able to stand up to the same sort of industrial fishing pressure that cod buckled under. In the book, I throw out that it may not be able to and that maybe we should be looking at a fish like tilapia, a freshwater aquaculture species that is extremely productive and breeds quickly and, in fact, is serving a lot of industrial purposes already. If we need an industrial fish, maybe tilapia is the fish.

SW: Tuna, particularly bluefin tuna, are often cited as being most at risk from overfishing. Why is that, and what steps should be taken to bring populations back?

PG: The bluefin story is a few things combined: First of all, they’re relatively slow growing; it takes about seven years to grow a mature bluefin tuna. Secondly, they never were that numerous to being with, relative to other fish stocks out there. But the main thing that’s really hurting bluefin is the number of nations that fish them and the difficulty in regulating a multi-party fishing agreement. Bluefin cross the Atlantic, they enter the Mediterranean Sea, and you have all of these different fishing nations hitting them really hard from a number of different angles. In fairness to the tuna industry, quotas have been reduced and the catch has been lowered, but they were hit so hard in the 80s and 90s that the stocks need a break.

I, personally, would like to see a moratorium. … Maybe we’ll never get people to accept a moratorium, but maybe what we could impose is fishing closures on the spawning grounds of the Atlantic bluefin in the Mediterranean and in the Gulf of Mexico, combined with very small quotas for the next few years.

Bluefin tuna, such as the one seen here being tagged, are a challenging species to farm because of their large migratory ranges and high metabolism. Paul Greenberg

SW: What challenges are there in taming open-ocean or migratory fish, such as cod and tuna, and how widely domesticated and farmed are they right now?

PG: The Norwegians have been trying to farm cod for more than a decade now, and there is actually a commercially farmed cod industry out there. Cod’s main difficulty is that morphologically it’s not great as an aquaculture fish. They have very big heads and they grow relatively slowly—it takes 2 to 3 years to bring a codfish to market—so cod is not the best choice for aquaculture.

Bluefin tuna is a much more challenging fish than cod, and most of it has to do with their very high metabolism. They are warm-blooded and they swim hard. Trying to grow tuna is like trying to get an ultramarathon runner to gain weight while running the race. With tuna, the real challenge is how do you get them to change their diet and lifestyle to fit the farm? There have been a lot of attempts to try to do it. The Japanese have closed the life cycle of Pacific bluefin and are now marketing it as Kindai tuna. They’re coming along with both Atlantic bluefin and Southern bluefin as potential aquaculture species as well. My personal opinion is that they’re not good aquaculture species and maybe we should put our efforts elsewhere. To ranch bluefin tuna and grow them out, they require close to 15 pounds of wild fish to make a pound of farmed tuna. With those kind of equations, trying to ramp tuna farming up to the scale of salmon ecologically presents a lot of problems that we might not want to force upon an already crowded, resource-stretched world.

SW: What was the most surprising thing you discovered while writing this book?

PG: When I got into writing about aquaculture, I had always assumed that the aquaculturists were the bad guys and the wild fish people were the good guys. What I was surprised to see was that there is a lot of bad practice in aquaculture, but that there were a handful of people out there that came to fish farming as ecologists and thought of aquaculture as a chance to take pressure off wild fish stocks and also come up with methods, approaches and even species that could make the aquaculture model work for the world.

SW: What are you hoping people will learn from your book?

PG: I would like readers to think about the fish on their plate as an animal, and as a wild animal if they’re eating wild fish. They’re eating a wild animal. It’s not seafood that they’re eating; it’s like game. Fish shouldn’t be thought of in the same way as farmed chicken or beef. If you’re eating wild fish, you’re eating game, and game needs to be appreciated as something precious and valuable that needs to be respected and not just turned into a fish stick. I don’t want people to stop eating fish, but I want them to respect it more, eat it more sparingly and also get engaged with the process of fixing our oceans. It’s not enough just to choose the right fish, you have to fight the right fight. And there are a number of good fights out there that people could fight to save fish.

Laura Strauss Paul Greenberg is the author of “Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food” and a regular contributor to The New York Times’ Magazine, Book Review and Opinion Page. He also writes for National Geographic Magazine, GQ, Vogue and other publications. In the last four years, he has been a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow, a W. K. Kellogg Foundation Food and Society Policy Fellow and a writer-in-residence at the Bogliasco Foundation's Liguria Study Center near Genoa, Italy. His 2002 novel “Leaving Katya” was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection. Prior to becoming a full-time writer, Greenberg ran international television production and training programs for the nonprofit organization Internews. Working in the countries of the former Soviet Union and the former Yugoslavia, Greenberg designed and implemented journalism curricula for television and radio professionals and oversaw the production of conflict-resolution television series. A graduate in Russian Studies from Brown University, Greenberg speaks Russian and French. To purchase "Four Fish," go to SeaWeb's Amazon Bookstore >>

Interview conducted by Alex Danoff, Media Assistant, SeaWeb