100 Million Years of Food (31 page)

Although salmon aquaculture is new, aquaculture was known a thousand years ago to the Chinese, who raised carp in ponds, a practice that spread to Europe in the Middle Ages. Nowadays, basa and tra fish are raised in Southeast Asian ponds. Carp, basa, and tra are suitable fish to raise in ponds because they eat a broad variety of foods, including plant foods and human wastes, enabling recycling of valuable nutrients. Catfish have the same potential, and many are farmed in the States. All these fish, however, are challenging to export to Western markets because the fish have a muddy taste in their flesh, and the numerous small bones of carp make them difficult eating for people unaccustomed to the chore of picking out bones. On the other hand, once you develop a taste for carp and basa, they can be addictive. As I learned from living in China and Vietnam, Chinese people revere their carp, steamed or fried, bones be damned, and the Vietnamese simmer basa in soy sauce with ginger and garlic until it becomes pleasantly caramelized; the fat of the basa fish leaves a pleasant feel in the mouth alongside a dish of rice, never mind that these fish may have been fattened on human excrement in fish ponds.

Environmentalists would be far happier if salmon were raised in ponds that were inland instead of offshore, because the fish wastes and diseases would be contained more easily and escapees would be less of an issue. But raising a big fish like salmon in a pond is expensive: Salmon raised in recirculated water have a terrible taste, so rearing edible salmon requires either great quantities of freshwater or more extensive and expensive water treatment. Environmentalists counter by saying that open-water fish farms are polluting the oceans without paying, so it's only fair that aquaculture companies should bear these costs.

But it's not just the aquaculture companies who would absorb the costs—consumers would have to pay a premium for the privilege of eating salmon raised inland. The main reason that I sat down to a dinner of salmon with Dounia and her friends was that the salmon had been farmed and was therefore affordable. As a marine scientist working on lobsters, Dounia knew about the problems of farmed salmon, but she didn't have much choice. There was a fish market near her house, but it was only open when she was working. The same problem applies to sushi bars, which most commonly serve farmed salmon because it is easier to ship and keep fresh. Omega-3 fatty acids, which are easily damaged by heat and spoil quickly, are best obtained from fresh fish. Cooke Aquaculture prides itself on delivering fresh fish to consumers. The company's biggest asset is its proximity to the major consumer markets in eastern North America, cities like Toronto, Montreal, and New York City; the salmon that ends up on supermarket shelves arrives within forty-eight hours. For many chefs passionate about serving the freshest fish available, farmed salmon is the most popular option.

My tour continues to the Cooke fish-processing plant. The speed at which the salmon are processed is astonishing. The fish whiz along conveyer belts, and a well-groomed team pulls out fish parts when they face the wrong direction, jam up machines, or appear unsightly. After the heads are sliced off (the fish were killed by pneumatic gun after being pulled out of the pens), the bodies are sliced in half, the fins and bones are removed, the skin is descaled, and leftover bones are picked out by a platoon of workers. The workers (many of them are from the Philippines and Romania and were hired on guest worker programs) look a little grim: The noise in the plant is deafening, the air chilly, and the gorgeous weather outside a fantasy for workers on twelve-hour shifts, but these are valuable jobs, and the premises are exactingly clean. There is hardly any of the fishy smell one might expect with a fishmonger or fish factory.

Later that evening, two Cooke reps, Chuck Brown, the communications manager, and Michael Szemerda, a vice president at the location, sit down with Thierry and me over dinner. The seared salmon is among the best that I have ever tasted, smooth and free of fishy tang. The flesh is a pleasing pink, due to a food-coloring carotenoid called canthaxanthin that is added to farmed salmon feed (and also chicken feed, to give an orange pigment to egg yolk and chicken fat). Wild salmon are additive-free, obtaining their carotenoids from krill. Chuck and Michael acknowledge that their business model is not perfect and that better environmental measures have to be instituted. Monterey Bay Aquarium and SeaChoice, a Canadian seafood program, issue three levels of recommendations for seafood: Green = Best Choice, Yellow = Some Concern, Red = Avoid. Atlantic salmon is labeled Red: Avoid. The decision disappoints Michael, who grumbles, “They try to paint everything with the same brush. Some of the reasons why they mark you as Red have absolutely nothing to do with us. Someone in Chile grows Atlantic salmon, which is not something that's native to Chile, but Atlantic salmon is native to the east coast of Canada! Everyone gets a Red.”

Thierry runs a project with Cooke in an effort to mitigate environmental concerns. He grows seaweed near the salmon pens. The concept, known as IMTA (integrated multitrophic aquaculture), centers on the idea of putting together plants and aquatic animals that work symbiotically. Thierry's plan is that seaweed and mussels will absorb the fecal and food wastes from the fish pens, recycling the nutrients and also providing another marketable product. Thierry has his work cut out for him, however. Aside from industrial uses, such as providing carrageenans that are widely used as food thickeners and stabilizers, seaweed does not play a significant role in most Western diets—or not yet, at least. The new craze for sushi is gradually introducing Westerners to Japanese and Korean use of seaweed for crispy rice wrappers, sour and spicy salads, and heartening soups. Thierry points out that IMTA is more than just salmon, seaweed, and mussels; in theory, there are an infinite variety of plants and animals that could be usefully employed in conjunction with aquaculture, cleaning up the environment and providing food and other useful industrial products. Thierry believes IMTA could be done in closed-water systems as well.

Environmental groups are pushing hard to make aquaculture farms move their salmon operations inland. I drive out on a drizzly afternoon to meet with Inka Milewski, science advisor at the Conservation Council of New Brunswick, at her farm. Thin and thoughtful, she shows me pictures that she took of an abandoned fish farm: The seafloor beneath was covered in a filthy gray mat of bacteria; bubbles of sulphide gas streamed to the surface. Inka says inland fish farms are better than open-water fish pens, but she would prefer that there be no aquaculture at all. “We can't play God with nature,” she says emphatically. Indeed, some studies have observed that inland fish farms have just as great an environmental impact as open-water fish farms, or worse, due to the energy and water inputs necessary to sustain the inland farms.

But where does this leave us? If we go with a system like SeaChoice and carry around a card whenever we buy seafood, the criteria seem overwhelming. For instance, wild Alaskan salmon is labeled as good, but Atlantic salmon and farmed salmon anywhere are bad, except Coho land-farmed salmon from the United States, which is permissible, and wild salmon from the Pacific Coast, which is designated as Yellow, Some Concern. With cod, the criteria are even more obscure: Consumers are advised to avoid Atlantic cod (from Canada) and Pacific cod (from Russia and Japan), but Pacific longline-caught cod from Alaska is considered okay, while Pacific bottom-trawl cod from the United States or British Columbia carries the Some Concern warning. Whew! And those are just two items out of a list of thirty-four seafood species.

However, some sort of action is imperative if we want future generations to have the same opportunities to eat wild fish. Fish catches worldwide peaked in the late 1980s and have since declined. Scientists have pointed out an analogy with forests, in which developed countries were able to increase forest cover due to populations shifting from the countryside to towns and increased environmental awareness; similarly, developed countries have established relatively good control over fisheries within their borders, but the long-term prospects of fisheries in Africa, Latin America, and much of Asia are bleak.
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Consumer choice is a powerful tool in this regard. Fears of PCB and mercury contamination put a dent in appetites for salmon until the industry learned how to remove the pollutants. In a globalized marketplace, we can achieve better omega-3/omega-6 balance without devastating large fish stocks by selecting smaller animals within the aquatic food chain (such as smaller, bonier fish and jellyfish), by consuming more sustainable land-based animals that have better omega-3/omega-6 balances (like insects and free-ranging chickens that forage on insects), and replacing vegetable oils that are rich in omega-6 fatty acids, such as corn oil, with animal fats.

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We have considered the obstacles that people face in obtaining healthier meat and fish: the mental blocks that make game meat (and insects) unpalatable to many people, the laws preventing the sale of game in North America, the burdensome costs of raising wild animals like elk and salmon in confined spaces, the pollution that accompanies farmed salmon. A new frontier in agricultural science that aims to circumvent the risks of dwindling populations and disease is the widespread use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) to produce more robust and plentiful stocks of animals and plants. The use of salmon genetically modified to grow much faster is still in the exploratory phase and is being closely watched by environmental groups. GMOs are hotly contested in many places in the world, particularly outside North America. Is this reaction just knee-jerk fear, or are our neighbors in this world justified in their apprehension?

One might think that the most prudent attitude is that we don't know what the long-term consequences are of growing and eating GMO corn, soybean, rice, potatoes, cucumbers, tomatoes, sweet peppers, peas, and canola. Not enough studies have been done because these high-tech plants, which are more resistant to weed killers and pests, were only introduced starting in 1996.
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Unfortunately, as with nutritional research on soft drinks and milk, GMO studies conducted by scientists with connections to the industry tend to find no harmful effects, while scientists without such ties are more likely to observe adverse events.
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For instance, academic scientists in France discovered that rats fed with corn genetically modified to produce insecticides and withstand herbicides showed signs of toxicity in their kidneys and livers; in Italy, adverse genetic effects on embryos born from parental rats that ate herbicide-resistant genetically modified soybeans were observed; a team in Denmark found differences in weights of the small intestine, stomach, and pancreas in rats that ate rice genetically modified with an insecticidal gene spliced from kidney beans. Not exactly smoking guns, but given the history of industry interference in safety matters, such studies seem to argue for follow-up research and caution in releasing genetically modified foods to the public. Furthermore, weed resistance to Roundup, the herbicide developed by Monsanto, is spreading among American farms. China has seen increases in secondary pest infestations as a result of reliance on genetically modified cotton engineered to resist moths. Because the genetic modifications concocted by biotech scientists represent the most rapid instances of plant evolution and ecosystem alteration ever to have taken place on Earth, the sensible thing to do would be to conduct more tests on long-term safety and ban genetically modified foods in the interim, the approach adopted by Europe, Australia, and New Zealand.
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The United States, Canada, and other countries in the Americas have chosen a different route, the one heading to the hills of Profit. Genetically modified foods have risen to comprise a huge swath of American and Canadian agricultural production. After less than two decades, 93 percent of soy, 90 percent of corn, 95 percent of sugarbeet, 93 percent of rapeseed, and 30 percent of alfalfa crops are GMOs.
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Since soy and corn enter the food system through myriad ways, such as through high-fructose corn syrup and animal feed, virtually everyone in North America consumes GM foods on a daily basis. The U.S. and Canadian governments authorize biotech companies to conduct their own health studies and their farmers to sell GM foods in supermarkets without informing consumers. Americans and Canadians have overwhelmingly stated in polls that they want GM ingredients to be labeled as such; a poll in 2014 by
The New York Times
found 92 percent of respondents supported GM labeling.
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Health and agricultural regulatory bodies in both countries insist that GM foods are safe for consumers and the environment; therefore, there is no need to comply with public will or to foist the inconveniences (and sale losses) of GM labeling on food producers.

Who knows, the American and Canadian regulatory bodies may be right in the long run: GM foods may turn out to be benign or even beneficial to health and the environment, the magic bullet that solves the problem of world hunger, provides insecticide-free crops, and addresses nutritional deficiencies through genetic wizardry. However, in the face of united public opposition and the uncertainty concerning long-term biological and environmental effects, the paternalism of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Health Canada, and other regulatory bodies on the issue of GM labeling is a breathtaking affront. Connecticut and Maine have GM labeling regulations in place, but these are toothless: Both states require that neighboring states enact similar laws before any GM labeling happens.
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Vermont is set to become the first state in North America to require mandatory GM food labeling, if it can successfully face down court challenges from Big Agriculture.
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I fly out to visit a longtime friend at his farm east of Iowa City. When I arrive in my rental car at night, the setting seems blissfully idyllic, a cozy house set amid sweeping vistas of corn. Next day, the landscape looks more sci-fi set than country pastoral, with choppers and planes swooping low and pumping out pesticides and fertilizer over thousands of acres of GM corn and soybeans. The phalanxes of corn are tightly packed and stiffly uniform. Jon and his family corporation don't plant any corn for food on their holdings, almost three thousand acres—part of a larger trend in which almost half of the U.S. corn crop is reserved for ethanol production.
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