Salon.com > Paul Greenberg

Why are we still eating bluefin tuna?

Sat, 19 Nov 2011 15:00:00 +0000

If you eat fish regularly, you've probably grown used to regularly being told by conservation groups — or that slightly irritating, politically correct friend — that certain fish shouldn't be eaten: American striped bass, Atlantic swordfish, Chilean sea bass and Caspian sturgeon have all been the focus of vocal consumer and chef boycotts. Happily, some of these campaigns have been effective in helping fish populations recover. But amid all the sustainable seafood media noise, we've somehow managed to let the biggest and arguably most beautiful fish of all slip away.

The Atlantic bluefin tuna — an animal that reaches 1,500 pounds, swims at 40 miles per hour, heats its blood 20 degrees above ambient and crosses the breadth of the ocean — is in serious trouble. The western, American stock has declined by about 80 percent and the Mediterranean-spawned population by about 70 percent. Even after the fish garnered a series of major PR hits (such as campaigns by Greenpeace and Sea Shepherds to liberate netted tuna in the Mediterranean last year and my subsequent New York Times Magazine cover story), the bluefin remains persistently present on menus around the country and around the world.

How to fix fish farms

Thu, 20 Oct 2011 15:15:00 +0000

My brother, in a mad dash to get dinner on the table, once made a crucial error. Instead of reaching for his stepdaughter's plastic Barbie plate that neatly defined the space for vegetables, carbs and protein, he put down three overlapping portions of the three unlike items. When he presented this intimate arrangement to my niece, bedlam ensued. Tears poured down. Fists pounded. Dinner, The Sequel, soon followed, with food properly meted out to their respective containers. With calm finally restored, my niece let forth one of our more memorable family utterances. “Keep the food separate” she said. “That’s my motto.”

As it turns out, this has may have to become the motto for the fish-farming industry.

Falling in love as the USSR crumbled

Sun, 21 Aug 2011 23:01:00 +0000

"I saw you in my dream last night," my ex-wife said, touching my arm when we happened upon each other in downtown Manhattan the other day. She spoke as if continuing a conversation only recently interrupted. In fact, the last time we'd talked intimately was two decades ago, back when the Soviet Union had crumbled to dust.

"Mm hmm, yes, I saw you in my dream," she repeated, her Russian accent faded now to a passable American. "Very clearly I saw you. And you were dead."

Like many intelligent Russians who came of age during the closing act of the USSR, my ex-wife was a kind of stand-up comedian in reverse. Just as the talented comic artfully sets up a punch line, so too could she expertly build toward a release of sorts. But the punch line was never a joke. It was instead an opening up of a psychic trap door, showing foolish Americans that beneath their feet was not the security of a prosperous and powerful nation, but rather the void of the impending destruction that awaits us all. When your superpower homeland has been blown apart into 15 compromised statelets it's comforting to keep in your pocket that great transnational equalizer: death.

An engineered salmon’s fishy agenda

Thu, 02 Jun 2011 14:01:00 +0000

For those who follow the theater of food politics, particularly the underwater portion of the drama, AquaBounty's AquAdvantage genetically engineered salmon has played something of leading role for two decades, dating back to the 1990s when the fish was first conceived. The AquAdvantage salmon, in case you haven't heard about it, is an Atlantic salmon with a (much larger) Chinook salmon growth gene inserted into its DNA. This is coupled with a promoter from a third fish, an ocean pout, that keeps that growth gene more or less permanently in the "on" position. This makes for a fish that grows faster than an unmodified salmon -- something which its creators hail as a key to providing more fish for the world and easing the crisis in over-fishing.

I have long opposed the AquAdvantage salmon, taking pretty familiar positions that any member of the local/organic/wild food community would recognize: Positions that include the fear that the fish will escape and contaminate wild populations of salmon, and that the fish requires much wasteful transport since it would be cloned in Canada, grown in Panama and then flown back to the U.S. for consumption. But at a recent lecture when I was laying out these old chestnuts, it suddenly occurred to me that the non-fishy public might be missing one monumental fact about the AquAdvantage salmon, with all its attendant risks: