Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food

To me the answer to how much fish is farmed vs caught wild was largely unkown to me before I picked up this book, but now I have a much better idea. In the recent years, books on sustainable farming have been fairly prolofic. Given general environmental concerns the desire to focus attention on bettering our farming techniques on land should be no surprise, but the focus offshore has been generally lacking. Four Fish is an illuminating book on the subject. The 4 Great fish the author considers are Salmon, Tuna, Bass and Cod. Each a fish with a fine history that is told. The book is split into a chapter on each fish. It starts with Salmon and goes into the history, biology and evolution and the actual salmon industry. It discusses life for the fisherman and it gets into the commercial farming industry. It then goes into Sea Bass and discusses how it came to be farmed and how the industry had challenges in fish infancy that were unique. It describes how the effect of the name bass creates a familiarity that affects consumption preferences. The book then gets into Cod and how it has past his former glory. He then questions the attempt to farm Cod despite its comfort food feel as it is an inefficient fish. The author starts to describe how perhaps replicating old preferences will do us more harm that finding better solutions. The author ends with the most wild of fish, the tuna. One gets a sense of the gradeur of the fish in both real qualities and economic price. One also is given an overview of the near impossibility of farming such a wild and energy using fish. The book concludes very clearly and sums up the work and discoveries he had made. Given the increasing need for food and constrained space, we need to get more efficient with farming under water. We need to be careful of the ecosystem, but at the same time realize that it can be a useful system to feed people from. We should be farming only those fish which properly balance the risks and rewards. Focusing on farming cod and tuna, who's energy in to energy out ratio's are too high doesnt make any sense and we should look at substitution candidates with better farming qualities. One is presented with a strong case for international recognition of the scarcity and thus need for protection of certain fish. A desire to enlighten the consumer is unrealistic and overfishing should be prevented by legislative cooperation. This is really a great overview of the fishing of some of our great catch. One is given both a great history of the fish as well as a sense of the importance of protecting them rationally.

Four Fish is a book about the future of fish by an angler journalist and writer, Paul Greenberg. How many fish do we need for our food, and how many are there in the sea? Paul Greenberg writes the future of human growth depends largely on how we manage our ocean, and a few basic guidelines should be followed to find a balance between human desire and ocean sustainability. We are still in the phase of awareness enlightening with fish, while fishing is still governed by primitivism rather than by rational thought. Though marine ecosystem itself has a tendency to rebuild themselves, the world fishing inflates to be twice as large as the ocean can support. 170 billion pounds of the world’s wild catch is equivalent in weight to the entire human population of China. When the number is decreased to less than 30 percent of population in the water, reasonable potential recovery of fish may become unstable and vulnerable. From old times human has taken great pain in domesticating wild creatures to fill up our appetite. The experience of human-controlled reproduction of Atlantic salmon is recorded first in France around the year 1400. Chile now becomes the second-largest salmon-producing nation in the world and produces hundreds of millions. There could be a genetically engineered salmon on the market within a few years. Episode of Sea-Monkey aroused my interest. To rear Sea-Monkey became popular in my childhood. I never imagined it was created to feed sea bass at that time. European sea bass, like salmon, require three pounds of feed for every pound of flesh they grow, while tuna require twenty pounds of forage for every pound of fish they produce. Fish farming has problems of waste management, disease, and industrial pollutants, like terrestrial animal husbandry. We are still not find suitable solution for fishing in the contemporary battles of the food reform and land-based environment movements. Our choices of fish as food should be large societal ones that require our careful attention and our active political engagement. Also, we need to take a precautionary approach to the very bottom of the oceanic food chain and exploit those animals only after models have been developed. Paul Greenberg advocates four very good, noble, and ultimately effective principles, that is, reduction in fishing, setting no-catch areas, global protection of unmanageable species and protecting bottom of the food chain, will rebuild the seas. In the presence of ominous human demand, where nearly doubled its per-person fish consumption in the last century, he suggests five principles in selecting domesticated animals from the sea to compensate huge gap between wild supply and growing human desire. Efficiency, non destructiveness to a wild system, limited in number, adaptability and polyculture. When we hunt wild fish and eat them, we hunt them with care and eat them with the fullness of our appreciation. What makes this book very realistic one is his daughter. When Paul Greenberg, who reveals negative comment on eating tuna, selected bluefin tuna carpaccio, she said coolly “Hypocrite” to him. When he noticed in her the sign of rationality and the logic of both catching and saving fish during fishing, he released bluefish into the ocean. Staring into the sea below, she asked “will it live?”

Human's view of the ocean so often seems to be directed by an out of sight out of mind mentality. Whether it is dumping pollution or over-harvesting. Greenberg successfully presents the issue of over-fishing on both an individual and global scale. Greenberg presents a fascinating history on the fishing industries of the four most popular food fish in the Western hemisphere, culminating most importantly on their precipitous decline and ecological impact. He approaches the subject as an individual fisherman and consumer, while also stressing the imperative for world governments to regulate the oceans. Along the way, he provides some hope by describing some fish species that do lend themselves to industrial scale mono-culture. In the end, he lays out principles for creating sustainable and responsible fisheries as well as the precepts for the type of global cooperation that would be required to prevent humans from eating these species into extinction. Greenberg says that individual consumer choices are not enough to sway the nets of commercial fisherman. He is also loathe to the question, "what kind of fish should we eat?". Given that his suggestion for large scale regulation is the answer, I'm not sure what he wants readers to take from the book. There are loads of positive facts and messages to choose from. Maybe it's s bit like your local fish counter where you're meant to pick whatever you find appealing.

Four Fish makes fish INTERESTING—and I don't even eat fish! The four fish that are investigated are the Tuna, the Salmon, the Bass, and the Cod—the four fish that dominate the menus at fancy restaurants and fast food chains and family dinner tables. The underlying premise is that globally we are overfishing. We are harvesting more fish every year than are produced. In some cases we have less than 10% of the fish that were there when commercial fishing started. This is obviously not sustainable. For each of the four fish, the book discusses what attempts are being made to solve the problem, and the pros and cons of each method. Some advanced genetic techniques are working to a degree (implants that release hormones so that fish will spawn yearlong and not just all at the same time once a year, and breeding fish that can gain weight at quadruple the rate of the original versions, etc). A lot of people have tried farming the fish, some species are more successful than others. Some of the fish are more sustainable than others, and Greenberg makes the case that we need to choose our “everyday” fish from the fish that are plentiful and easy to raise and which can turn a high percentage of their feed into pounds of meat, and to consider the other fish to be “special occasion” fish. For example, it can take over TWENTY pounds of feed for a bluefin tuna to produce one pound of meat. This is not a good trait for farmed fish, and it also makes tuna inappropriate as a main source of wild caught meals for us. Regular salmon takes up to six pounds of feed to produce a pound of flesh, while breeders have improved farmed salmon to the point where it takes as few as three pounds. This is obviously much better for the environment and the world of “fish as food”--and more sustainable. Yet, the amount of salmon consumed has doubled over the last 20 years, and we are not able to keep up with the demand. Sea bass also requires almost three pounds of feed for every pound of flesh. Another way to solve this problem would be to select the fish we eat based on how easy they are to farm, and how efficiently they turn feed into flesh—to enable us to have the 2.2 billion pounds of fish that is consumed annually without depleting the resources. Greenberg's book is compelling and concerning. Destined to become a classic like the iconic Cod!!

We who like to fish often focus on the fragile nature of the balance between keeping and releasing, of conserving both the fish and the environment they live in, of getting access and protecting our rights. I wonder how many of us understand the dire straits the fish of this world are in? This book doesn’t discuss flies or lures or trips to New Zealand for trophy brown trout. It expands the reader’s view to the broader picture, the crisis that faces the fish, the world and each of us. The author is not a hysterical zealot raging against the injustice of it all. Rather he presents a scientific and scholarly discussion of where we are all heading with regard to fish as a food source in a very readable and entertaining way. As we lobby to protect our recreation, we better also pay attention to this topic, as once our fish are needed to feed the world, priorities are bound to shift and we will be left with tofu and stories of the fishing that once was.

I enjoyed this book greatly, it was hard to put down at times and I never got to a point in the book where I got bored or wanted to skip ahead. It is somewhat if not plain out easier to eat local when it comes to land based food that is grown in front of us, a place we can see, touch, smell and visit. Fish on the other hand, are not easily visited by most, we cant see schools of fish while driving in a car or while on vacation the fish used to feed the human race on a grand scale is not visible. For the most part we have not domesticated and dwindled down the gene pool of fish as we have beef, pork, chicken, lamb, goat and turkeys. The ocean is still the "wild" frontier for good or for bad the fact that the ocean is still wild means that when humans take, we sometimes don't know when we have taken to much. As quoted in the book, "Do no harm," the Buddha spoke, "practice restraint according to the fundamental precepts. be moderate in eating...." [...]

While I am in agreement with the author's position, that was true before I read the book. The author mentions and draws information from several other authors that I had previously read. It is almost as if he is assuming we had read them as well. The problem is that he didn't expand on the work of those authors making this book only a readable "me too" work. The book is very dated in the fact that I looked up most of the people he mentions and interviews in the book and it seems like almost everyone of them are out of business now. Factually the book is very good and I did learn a couple of things by reading it. If this is your first book on this topic then it is a good read. If you have other books like those from Charles Clover and Mark Kurlansky it covers most of the ground these guys did in their books.

You don't have to be a fish lover to enjoy this book, although it wouldn't hurt. The four fish examined in author Paul Greenberg's book are Salmon, Cod, Sea Bass, and Tuna. Why these four? They are the four fish most likely to end up on your dinner plate. The goal of the book is to educate the reader on the pros and cons of wild versus domesticated fish. The author explores every conceivable viewpoint: farmed fish, the intermingling of farmed and domesticated fish, overfishing, genetic modification, fishing subsidies, catch limitations, no catch zones, regulations, etc. I'm not a sushi lover, but I did try a spicy tuna roll after reading the section on tuna. I also found myself watching the show Wicked Tuna. My takeaway after reading the book is that if we don't make some radical changes soon, we could find ourselves in a situation where the demand outstrips the supply. The author doesn't just spell out the many problems associated with demand and supply, he offers a number of well thought out solutions. One solution that made a lot of sense to me was switching to a fish more suitable to domestication called a Kona Kampache. My concern is that many of the solutions the author suggests require government oversight. The problem I see is when you have governments and legislators who believe that regulations are bad or when the people who are responsible for the regulations don't rely on science and fact when making their decisions. After finishing the book, I headed to a fancy seafood restaurant. I had the Ahi Tuna. My guest had the sea bass. Both were good. Both were expensive. No one has to worry about me consuming too much fish.