{"id":32023,"date":"2020-08-24T00:01:32","date_gmt":"2020-08-24T07:01:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/?post_type=custom_features&p=32023"},"modified":"2022-01-31T10:54:55","modified_gmt":"2022-01-31T18:54:55","slug":"how-to-stop-worrying-and-love-farmed-fish","status":"publish","type":"custom_features","link":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/features\/how-to-stop-worrying-and-love-farmed-fish\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Stop Worrying and Love Farmed Fish"},"content":{"rendered":"
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This article is also available in audio format. Listen now,\u00a0download<\/a>, or subscribe to \u201cHakai Magazine Audio Edition\u201d through your favorite podcast app.<\/em><\/p>\n\nhttps:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/How_to_Stop_Worrying_and_Love_Farmed_Fish.mp3<\/a><\/audio>\n<\/div>\n

It\u2019s November, and a tinseled Christmas tree graces the restaurant\u2019s entrance. Lacquered wood and golden accents lend the interior a modest refinement, evoking the romance of the steamship terminal once housed in this building overlooking Victoria, British Columbia\u2019s inner harbor. On normal evenings, the menu offers an array of seafood from the Pacific: Saltspring Island mussels, BC rock crab, halibut, and oysters. Tonight, however, is different. The restaurant has closed for a private event, and farmed Atlantic salmon is the star.<\/p>\n

The event, staged by the BC Salmon Farmers Association, is a night of networking and carousing aided by the open bar. Throughout the restaurant, guests line up at food stations to sample the industry\u2019s product. At one, a member of an elite cooking team, which plans to travel to Germany in February to compete in the Culinary Olympics, dramatically chars a raw fillet with a blowtorch.<\/p>\n

Across the restaurant, fact sheets from the association highlight the overall CAN $1.5-billion contribution that salmon farming now makes to the BC economy\u2014more than any other sector in the province\u2019s huge seafood industry. Tonight, in tacit acknowledgment of this, British Columbia\u2019s minister of agriculture is on hand to tout the \u201cspirit of collaboration\u201d between government and industry. In addition, one of Canada\u2019s best-known chefs, Ned Bell, flits between the food stations and the kitchen, before picking up a mike.<\/p>\n

\u201cHow\u2019s everybody doing tonight?\u201d Bell asks. A wiry man in a chef coat, he knows how to stir up a crowd. In both the culinary world and the seafood industry, he\u2019s a celebrity: author of the sustainable seafood cookbook Lure<\/em>; executive chef at the Vancouver Club, a swanky private club near the city\u2019s cruise ship terminal; contestant on Iron Chef Canada<\/em>; advocate who brought attention to ocean conservation by biking across Canada, an 8,700-kilometer journey that took 72 days. \u201cWe are obviously eating some delicious food,\u201d Bell continues. Whoops go out and a woman hollers: \u201cYeah we are!\u201d<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a>

A cook prepares a farmed salmon dish at an event put on by the BC Salmon Farmers Association, in November 2019. Photo courtesy of the BC Salmon Farmers Association<\/p><\/div>\n

Beyond the restaurant walls, however, many take a darker view of the industry. Alexandra Morton, an independent biologist and vocal critic of salmon farming in British Columbia, has dubbed this sector \u201cthe Corporation\u201d and accused it of \u201cusing the power of the oceans as a sewer to raise a nomadic fish in a pen.\u201d Others raise concerns about the industry\u2019s goals and rapid growth. \u201cThey think that salmon is going to feed the world,\u201d says Corey Peet, a former sustainability director of the Smart Catch program at the James Beard Foundation, in New York City, New York. \u201cIt\u2019s not, nor should we want it to.\u201d In Asia, Peet explains, fish have been grown domestically\u2014and cheaply\u2014for decades. Reared in fishponds by small-scale commercial ventures, freshwater species like tilapia, carp, and catfish already feed the world. \u201cIt\u2019s us who are slow to catch up,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

In the Pacific Northwest, detractors often point to the spotty environmental record of farmed salmon. In the late summer of 2017, for example, an estimated 243,000 to 263,000 captive Atlantic salmon spilled out into Puget Sound east of Victoria. The fish belonged to a Canadian company, Cooke Aquaculture. A year before the spill, Cooke bought a farm near Bellingham, Washington, with net pens showing their age: corroded infrastructure, weak moorings, nets laden with marine life. When one of the pens finally collapsed, its nets weighed more than five times what they should have. Initially, Cooke blamed the failure on high tides driven by the solar eclipse. The tides that day were normal.<\/p>\n

Fishers managed to recapture less than a quarter of these fish, and researchers later tested a small sample of them. The team\u2019s study, published in 2019, suggests that nearly all the salmon in the spill were infected with piscine orthoreovirus, or PRV, a virus linked to a disease that causes inflammation of the heart tissue and other serious conditions. A less malignant strain of PRV occurs naturally in the Pacific, but since the Atlantic strain has been transmitted through water during experiments, some observers fear it could infect native salmon species. This is the last thing the region\u2019s declining wild stocks need.<\/p>\n

\"collapsed<\/a>

When an open-net pen collapsed at a salmon farm near Cypress Island, Washington, in 2017, it released over 200,000 non-native fish into Puget Sound. Photo by David Bergvall\/Washington State Department of Natural Resources via AP Images<\/p><\/div>\n

And yet struggling wild fisheries are the very reason why the call for aquaculture has grown more urgent in recent years. Over 90 percent of the world\u2019s oceans are currently overfished or fished to capacity\u2014a looming crisis in global food supplies. The problem is further compounded by skyrocketing human populations. In 30 years, the world will exceed nine billion people, so the demand for animal protein will only increase. Farmed fish, more than any terrestrial livestock, can sustainably meet that demand. Whereas a cow needs eight kilograms of feed to produce one kilogram of meat, a farmed fish on average requires just 1.5 kilograms.<\/p>\n

\u201cAquaculture done the right way in the right location at the right scale is absolutely one of the most efficient forms of protein production on the planet,\u201d Peet says. \u201cYou simply can\u2019t argue with that.\u201d But the public debate around aquaculture and its sustainability rages on. Stepping into the fray are the people who make their livelihood from seafood and who now hope to change skeptical minds.<\/p>\n

Increasingly, chefs, whose voices are trusted by the public, are leading the charge.<\/p>\n

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One of the first cooking shows to air on US television was hosted by James Beard, a portly, genial man whose bald head and seemingly aloof manner came across so poorly on camera that I Love to Eat<\/em> ended after less than a year, in 1947. By that time, Beard had released three cookbooks spanning appetizers, grilling, and fowl. His ninth book, James Beard\u2019s Fish Cookery<\/em>, from 1954, was the first to bear his name in the title.<\/p>\n

French cuisine had a marked influence on Beard\u2019s cooking (he was, after all, good friends with Julia Child). But for all his emulsions and bouquets garnis, he celebrated, most of all, food prepared simply. His recipes in Fish Cookery<\/em> reflect this ethos while honoring his upbringing in Oregon, where summer days were often spent catching crayfish with friends using nets, string, and ears of corn for bait. Beard wrote many variations for preparing sardines: grilled, fried, baked in puff pastry. But for him, sardines straight from the tin\u2014with a spray of lemon, served with a chilled glass of wine or beer\u2014were best.<\/p>\n

Beard spent the last part of his life in New York City\u2019s Greenwich Village, and since his death in 1985, the neighborhood has changed. Artist haven has become yuppie warren, yet his townhouse, which now houses the James Beard Foundation, reflects an older time. Mounted above the brownstone\u2019s entrance is a fixture resembling a gaslight. Inside, wallpaper is adorned with pineapples\u2014a universal symbol of hospitality. Upstairs, heavy curtains hang from the windows in what used to be Beard\u2019s library. Now, it\u2019s a dining room, where some of the foundation\u2019s 200 events are held annually.<\/p>\n

I had come to Manhattan to attend one of those events\u2014Three Cheers for Seafood!\u2014which would highlight sustainably caught and raised species, while headlining three culinary stars: Barton Seaver, a New England chef and cookbook author; Arizona-based chef Danielle Leoni; and Ned Bell.<\/p>\n

On the day of the event, I arrive hours before the guests. The chefs are already at work prepping their menus when I walk into the kitchen. Assisting them are two cooks, one of whom has tucked a big spoon, little spoon, and spreader into his breast pocket. When the foundation\u2019s culinary director arrives, she goes over potential allergens in the dishes. Leoni says she once had a diner claim an allergy to ice. Seaver says someone once complained his restaurant served ice that was too cold. When Bell arrives a little later after an errand, he says he wants real allergies, not preferences.<\/p>\n

\"portrait<\/a>

Since James Beard\u2019s death in 1985, the chef\u2019s home in New York City\u2019s Greenwich Village has served as the location for the James Beard Foundation. His former library now functions as a dining room and event space. Photo by Jess Mackie<\/p><\/div>\n

Seaver places a large fish on the counter. It\u2019s encased in plastic and looks like something that could have come from Costco. The species goes by the name kingfish or yellowtail, and the one on the counter comes from a land-based farm in the Netherlands\u2014Kingfish Zeeland. Seaver says the farm is pioneering the highest standards under the Aquaculture Stewardship Council. On top of using organic feed and being 100-percent renewably powered, Kingfish Zeeland also raises its fish with a recirculating aquaculture system (RAS). In such systems, fish are raised in water that\u2019s constantly recycled, filtered, and maintained at optimal oxygen levels and temperatures. By controlling for these factors, and by limiting exposure to sea lice, algae, and other potential contaminants frequently found in open-net pens, RAS is frequently considered the future of fish farming. Seaver frees the kingfish from its package, then begins trimming off its fat. He dices it into small cubes and hands me a few pieces to try. As fatty as foie gras, he boasts. It\u2019s pungent and slightly chewy.<\/p>\n

Next, I find myself smelling fish. From the fridge, Bell takes out a slab of sablefish that\u2019s covered in fennel and salt, drawing out the fish\u2019s moisture and giving it a slight sheen. The aroma is pleasant, sweet. Sablefish are native to the northeast Pacific, and Bell tells me it came from a farm called Gindara, which sits in a deep fjord at the tip of Vancouver Island, British Columbia. For a chef who grew up in Victoria and fondly recalls whipping bull kelp at his siblings on the beach, the fish is practically local.<\/p>\n

Ninety minutes before dinner, the waitstaff gather in the kitchen, notepads and pens in hand, awaiting instruction from the chefs. Seaver sets some ground rules. When describing the star component of each dish, don\u2019t use the word fishy<\/em>\u2014use robust<\/em>. \u201cWe all want you to eat more fish,\u201d Bell adds. In Canada and the United States, the average person eats 22 kilograms of seafood per year\u2014less than half of what\u2019s consumed in Norway (51 kilograms) and South Korea (55 kilograms). Given the nutritional density of fish, and its relatively small carbon footprint, Bell thinks fish deserves a bigger place on menus. For that reason, even dessert will feature some. Bell introduces the dish: a seaweed-laced brownie topped with birch syrup, cranberry jam made with the wine pairing, and Gindara sablefish that he cured and candied. \u201cWhy not experiment with people you\u2019re never going to see again?\u201d he quips.<\/p>\n

\"Chef<\/a>

Chef Ned Bell carefully places fillets of farmed sablefish atop seaweed-laced brownies at the Three Cheers for Seafood! event in Manhattan, New York. Photo courtesy of the James Beard Foundation<\/p><\/div>\n

The 50 or so guests begin trickling in just after 7 p.m. After greeting them in the foyer, the ma\u00eetre d\u2019 crosses their names off the list and points to a narrow corridor leading through the kitchen and into the room where the reception is starting. There, glasses of sparkling wine are poured. Hors d\u2019oeuvres are passed and awkwardly consumed. Then we relocate upstairs to the dining room, where a dozen or so tables await us. I sit down at a large round one, where four sets of silverware and three empty wine glasses are laid at each place setting. To my right is Seaver\u2019s wife, and to my left, two men who import seafood for a living, one of whom wears a slightly unbuttoned shirt beneath a gray suit, revealing a gold chain around his neck.<\/p>\n

Before dinner begins, a man from the James Beard Foundation stands up and gives a brief speech. He explains that no red-listed seafood\u2014as rated by the foundation\u2019s Smart Catch program\u2014will be served at the meal. Then, in what feels like rapid succession, the savory courses begin to arrive. Seaver\u2019s come out first: a vegetable medley spiked with anchovy, followed by a fillet of mackerel en saor. Both are served at room temperature. Soon, Bell\u2019s course lands in front of guests, steaming, and the room perks up. It\u2019s chinook\u2014\u201cthe king of all salmon,\u201d Bell told us earlier. This one comes from a Vancouver Island farm owned by Creative Salmon, which raises fish at densities low enough to achieve organic certification\u2014the first salmon farm in North America to do so. And since chinook is native to the northeast Pacific, it poses less risk to the environment than farmed Atlantic salmon. The next dish, Leoni\u2019s, is brazen: a shrimp and cod mixture encased in pork intestine. It perfectly embodies the chefs\u2019 zealous mission to get people to eat more seafood.<\/p>\n

\"Bell<\/a>

Bell drizzles birch syrup over his plated dessert. Photo courtesy of the James Beard Foundation<\/p><\/div>\n

After dessert, which is strangely divine and not too robust, the chefs come out of the kitchen. They briefly introduce themselves before taking questions. One person asks what the biggest hurdle is to making sustainable seafood choices. Confusion, Leoni says. Multiple certification programs, such as the Aquaculture Stewardship Council, have flooded the market, as have programs like the Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch that don\u2019t certify fish but instead rate it. None of them quite agree on what seafood you should eat. Then, there are the numerous names under which a single species can be marketed. Sablefish, for instance, also goes by black cod (not a member of the cod family) and butterfish (not to be confused with the butterfish that comes from the Atlantic). Frankly, it\u2019s tough to know what\u2019s what, much less what\u2019s sustainable.<\/p>\n

The chefs answer each question directly, but humbly. They\u2019re not scientists, they point out. It\u2019s a departure from how I saw them earlier. In the kitchen, the cooks had shown the chefs a kind of ritualistic respect; every request was answered with a \u201cYes, chef.\u201d But in the dining room, the chefs offer themselves simply as the folks who made dinner and cared a lot about how they did it.<\/p>\n

When the event\u2019s conviviality wanes around midnight, I leave. It\u2019s pouring outside, and for a few blocks I share an umbrella with one of the waitstaff. He\u2019s exhausted but energized, coming off the high of serving, of performing. And that\u2019s what the dinner was: a performance. Each 15-minute interval accounted for, each plate primped before its debut. Improvisation came only with the audience\u2019s questions, but even those covered familiar ground: microplastics, overfishing, sustainability.<\/p>\n

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Seafood is among the most globally traded foods in the world, with numerous links in supply chains that can stretch thousands of kilometers between fish farms and consumers. In this long-distance commerce, distinguishing good actors from bad can be difficult, especially when restaurants and seafood markets seldom have an opportunity to forge direct relationships with producers overseas. For fishmongers such as Fiona Lewis, who prides herself on sourcing the most sustainable seafood she can find, the solution to the problem lies in finding responsible wholesalers. \u201cMy trust has to be in who I\u2019m buying from,\u201d Lewis says.<\/p>\n

Her fish counter, The District Fishwife, in Washington, DC, puts a strong emphasis on farmed seafood. On the shop\u2019s website, in bold text, are the words: aquaculture is the fish of the future. \u201cThat\u2019s my slogan,\u201d Lewis says. \u201cIt\u2019s not a dirty word and it\u2019s something that we can all embrace\u2014when done well. There\u2019s always that caveat.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Fiona<\/a>

Fiona Lewis reaches for a fish in a display case at her shop, The District Fishwife, in Washington, DC. Photo courtesy of Fiona Lewis<\/p><\/div>\n

On a Sunday morning, I meet Lewis at her stall, a 37-square-meter space inside DC\u2019s Union Market. The brunch crowd has yet to arrive, and the food hall is mostly empty. I watch as Lewis and an employee stock the display cases with a variety of whole fish and fish fillets, crustaceans, bivalves, and a single gelatinous Spanish octopus.<\/p>\n

Lewis buys the majority of her seafood from three wholesalers. When she first opened in 2014, she set about searching for the right ones, which meant getting to know everyone in the wholesaling game and letting them know the kind of quality she was after. That meant building a relationship with her suppliers. \u201cYou guys send me something that isn\u2019t perfect, I\u2019m going to send it back,\u201d she told them.<\/p>\n

One of the people she works with regularly is Stephanie Pazzaglia, business development manager at J. J. McDonnell, a seafood wholesaler in Maryland. Pazzaglia takes the work of locating high-quality seafood seriously. \u201cWe really ask a ton of questions when it comes to how the fish are handled,\u201d she says. \u201cIf they\u2019re given any antibiotics, if they\u2019re chemical-free, how they\u2019re handled, what\u2019s their life span, how they\u2019re being fed. We ask a lot of questions because, honestly, most of our customers ask a lot of questions.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lewis\u2019s clientele can be inquisitive, too. If 10 people grill her about the ethics of farmed fish, she says, only nine of them can be convinced that what she sells is, indeed, ethical. Nothing will change the mind of the last one. Instead of buying fish that\u2019s been raised in a tank on land or a pen in the ocean, that person will walk over to the stall next door and buy a piece of meat\u2014a far more questionable choice when it comes to sustainability. After six years of conversations with customers, she\u2019s found their stances on farmed fish are seldom based on facts or careful consideration. \u201cThere\u2019s no actual narrative behind [them] other than, \u2018Oh, I heard it\u2019s really bad,\u2019\u201d Lewis says.<\/p>\n

\"Fiona<\/a>

Lewis poses next to a mound of shells covered in spat that\u2019s been loaded onto a boat. Later, the spat will be ferried out to the middle of the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland, where it will be seeded over a natural oyster bar. Photo by Erin Scott<\/p><\/div>\n

Yet when those people order salmon in a restaurant, she adds, they don\u2019t realize \u201cthat it\u2019s the same salmon they don\u2019t want to buy from me. Or probably not as good as the salmon that they\u2019re not buying from me.\u201d Lewis\u2019s fish often comes with a seal of approval from Seafood Watch, Ocean Wise, or some other ecolabel<\/a>, while the salmon people eat in a restaurant might be \u201csomething cheap from some dodgy farm out there that isn\u2019t doing the right thing.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAquaculture is the fish of the future,\u201d she continues. \u201cBut it has to be responsible aquaculture, not just any aquaculture.\u201d<\/p>\n

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For Lewis and others, the big question is how to shift the narrative and convince people that farmed fish is part of the solution, not the problem. Organizations that sort through seafood, certifying or rating the best, can help people make more informed choices, but still they\u2019re not the whole answer. Most people simply want to say, \u201cI trust that guy to produce my food,\u201d says Chris Anderson, a fisheries economist at the University of Washington. But getting to that point is difficult.<\/p>\n

Anderson recently teamed up with Jessica McCluney, a seafood consultant, on a project called Today\u2019s Farmed Fish<\/a>. In July of last year, students canvassed nearly a thousand people at farmers\u2019 markets in Seattle, Washington, about their meat and fish preferences. Shoppers were presented with surveys that got to the heart of the researchers\u2019 questions: do people prefer free-range over conventional? Are they willing to pay more for food certified by an ecolabel? Do they base these decisions around taste or the environment? The answers served as the study\u2019s baseline. Then, with the help of a Los Angeles\u2013based marketing firm, the team came up with four posters promoting farmed fish and ran the images past focus groups.<\/p>\n

The data from the focus groups suggested that people perceive fish as fragile creatures that are somehow more exposed to environmental pathogens and contaminants than terrestrial livestock are. So, the team developed posters showing fish in a clean blue ocean: one with a fish leaping out of the water, the other with fish schooling in an offshore cage. They \u201care really meant to say the fish are not swimming around in a bunch of fish poop,\u201d Anderson says.<\/p>\n

The other two posters showcased people. In one, a family poses, smiling, on a shore, with the words \u201cFrom our farm to your table\u201d floating above them. A bearded man appears in the other. He wears a red beanie in a nod to Jacques Cousteau\u2014or perhaps Bill Murray in The Life Aquatic<\/em> with Steve Zissou<\/em>. He holds two silvery fish in front of his face, their beady eyes covering his own. \u201cThe face of a new generation is sustainable farmed fish,\u201d the caption reads. When students returned to the farmers\u2019 markets with posters in hand, survey-takers found this image \u201cthe most impactful.\u201d By putting fish producers front and center in their messaging, the researchers found that negative attitudes toward farmed fish declined.<\/p>\n