The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food (36 page)

The next morning, Lisa, Miguel, and I were to meet the mayor at a bar along the docks of Barbate. The wind blew swirls of debris around the empty, brick-lined streets. Boats rattled against the shore. The decision about fishing for the day would be made at 10 a.m., but the mayor had arranged a breakfast meeting with Diego Crespo Sevilla, an owner of four
almadraba
boats who controls one of the major sections of the nets.

The bar was nearly empty, with just a few old-time fishermen clutching espressos and dangling cigarettes, and crumpled tapas receipts littering the floor from the night before. Black-and-white photos of the 1940s and ’50s lined the walls, a shrine to past glories. The left side honored the bullfight—matadors brandishing swords, wounded bulls succumbing tragically. A set of pictures depicting the
almadraba
was on the right: enormous white waves framing heroic fishermen as they lorded over bloody and bludgeoned tuna. The montages told the same story—man’s victory over nature—but as I faced the old tuna fishermen standing in the morning’s empty bar, there was
a feeling, as strong and undeniable as that stench of old fish, that neither side had won.

The mayor arrived, followed shortly thereafter by Diego, both men shaking hands with the old-timers as they made their way over.

The mayor introduced us. “Diego, say hello to my friends. They have come to experience the great
almadraba
. They await your—”

Diego ignored him and shook our hands. “We’ll know in a few minutes about the decision, but I can tell you it doesn’t look good,” he said authoritatively. “I believe the winds are getting worse every year.”

“Not good for the
almadraba
, but quite beneficial for the windsurfers,” the mayor offered, careful to weigh the feelings of another one of his constituencies.

Diego’s physique suggested a taste for sherry and idle afternoons by the dock, but he carried himself like a seasoned businessman, remote and elusive. In lieu of a suit, he was dressed in khakis, a sky-blue Polo sweater, and loafers without socks. I asked him if the closing of the
almadraba
during the height of the season meant economic hardship for the fishermen.

“As of today, we’re at 78 percent of the quota for the season,” he said. “The
almadraba
could run for at least another month, maybe more, but all we have is one or two more days of fishing and we’ll be done.” The bartender served Diego’s espresso, refusing to take his money. At this, the mayor looked peeved. “When I was a kid, there were seventeen
almadrabas
along the Spanish coast,” Diego explained. “We’re down to just four.”

“And we are stopping this madness at four!” the mayor broke in, dropping his cup heavily on the bar and getting the attention of the men at the tables. “We must defend what’s left with everything we have.”

Diego again ignored him. “It’s a very passive art, the
almadraba
, so it’s tough to predict, and to synthesize. But the trend has been way, way down.”

Forty years ago, the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT, pronounced
eye-cat
) was formed to oversee and manage the dwindling tuna stocks. Perhaps a committee representing
forty-eight member nations, with unequal influence and conflicting demands, was doomed to fail. Either way, it has failed spectacularly. (Carl Safina proposed several years ago that ICCAT be renamed the
International Conspiracy to Catch All Tuna.) To this day, ICCAT’s own scientists suggest quotas that the committee openly ignores, often doubling the recommendation. It’s an organization that can’t rule, exactly, but it can, and does, use rules to ruin.

I asked what Diego thought of ICCAT’s work.

“ICCAT is a fine organization,” the mayor volunteered. “Very nice people. I will say to you that, while ICCAT’s been accused of lots of things, what’s never been debated is that they are trying. But my God, they have helped make a mess of things.”

Diego waved his hand. “There are two things to keep in mind here. First, ICCAT’s numbers, inflated as they can be, are not obeyed. If the countries had obeyed even those ridiculous quotas, I think we would have been fine. But Spain overfishes. France overfishes. Libya—”

“Libya!” The mayor rolled his eyes and threw up his hands.

“Libya overfishes,” Diego continued. “You see, the
almadraba
is the last of the honest fishing. Because it has to be. Inspectors meet us on the docks. They count the fish we’re unloading. We have nothing to hide, because we cannot hide anything.” The mayor grabbed the pockets of his trousers and pulled them inside out, showing what it meant to hide nothing. “Out at sea, the Japanese helicopters meet them on the boat. Or the boats dock in Vietnam—in Vietnam, they couldn’t care less about counting the number of tuna caught.”

Miguel, who had been listening attentively, neatly summarized the situation. “The
almadraba
is the best information source about the state of the stocks. It’s a living lobotomy of what’s happening in the ocean.”

“Perfecto,” the mayor declared. “It’s like taking the temperature of the ocean.”

I asked if it wasn’t true that some biologists, like Carl Safina, had more or
less predicted fifteen years ago what that temperature would be in fifteen years.

Diego was quick to reply. “Doctor Safina wrote
Song for the Blue Ocean
before tuna farming. It had just been invented. He couldn’t possibly have predicted how awful the situation would become. This is the second thing to keep in mind,” he said, wiping his mouth neatly with a paper napkin and searching my eyes for any trace that this was sinking in. “The farms are sealing the fate of tuna.”

Diego explained that the bulk of farmed tuna is not coming from eggs. It is from tuna caught in the sea at an average of thirty-five pounds and fattened on these farms until they double in weight. The practice not only does nothing to save nature’s dwindling stock, but it hastens the decline. Bluefin are removed from the wild before they have the chance to spawn.
*

He told us that tuna farming is worse than industrial tuna trawlers, an argument that at first I thought might be far-fetched. It was not. “The way you fish tuna, even on the large boats, is that after the fish are caught, the boat needs to unload. Catch, unload, go back out—there’s a natural resting period. For the farms, they bring out enormous nets, drag schools of tuna into the farms, and then go out and drag in another school. There’s no recovery time.”

The mayor: “Again, madness.”

“We should perhaps not call these places tuna farms,” Miguel said. “They aren’t farms. Farming is a closed system. If you’re talking about fish, you
hatch them, you grow them, you feed them. The tuna farms are just for finishing.”

I had never thought of farmed tuna as similar to American-style grain-fed beef, and yet Miguel was right. We remove cattle from ranches and fatten them quickly on exorbitant grain diets before their slaughter. We don’t call the confinement beef operations “farms,” because they aren’t farms; they’re feedlots.

Diego answered his phone, excusing himself for a conference call on the final decision about the
almadraba.

I asked Miguel if he had ever tasted farmed bluefin. Once, he said, and he didn’t care for it. My experience was the same. The difference in flavor is not unlike the difference between confinement-raised Iberian pigs and the real thing. The fat, abundant because of acorns, never fully incorporates in the muscle without the exercise required to forage. Tuna raised in pens have a similar kind of fat—abundant but not well dispersed. Muscle activation is key to distributing the fat and carrying the flavor, whether it’s a pork chop or a porterhouse—or a loin of tuna.

“Muscle activity is of course very important,” Miguel said. “Stress is just as important. Maybe more. How the fat is distributed is one thing, but stress affects the
kind
of fat. The flavor of the fat from a stressed fish is very different.

“I see it with our own fish—especially the mullet I spoke to you about yesterday. At Veta la Palma, they must be the least stressed fish in world.” Lisa laughed. “No, it’s true,” Miguel continued. “They enter Veta la Palma of their own will, because they are hungry and they know the estuary is a healthy environment. This is very important. We don’t take them from the ocean and put them into our system. They come because they want to be there. And they are of course safe from predators—except some species of birds—but otherwise we’re like a nursery. They feast on the abundant health of the system and in the process help maintain the health of the system. Sometimes I get the feeling they know all this and reward us with flavor.” I could have been speaking to Placido about his hams, or Eduardo about his livers.

Diego returned and shook his head apologetically. “I’m very sorry,” he said.

“
Levante!
” the mayor cried, throwing up his hands.

The consolation prize: Diego and the mayor took us to a museum. They led us into a sleek, modern building, out of step with old Barbate and aggressively contemporary in a way that screamed tourist attraction. It is the first, and probably the last, museum in the world dedicated to the
almadraba.

The wisdom of such a major investment was lost on me—and, to be honest, it made me kind of sad, too. We seemed to be the only visitors, for one thing. And judging by the generous greeting of the docents, it felt like we were the first in a long time. I somehow doubted that an
almadraba
museum would draw even one more visitor to Barbate. We were standing in what may soon become a mausoleum to bluefin.

We passed a display of the tuna netting, a thick, woven web of rope. Diego stretched one of the holes to demonstrate the wisdom of the system. “You see? Smaller tuna are free.” Diego swam his other hand slowly through the hole, and then did it again, with the neat efficiency of a stewardess demonstrating how to fasten your seat belt. “Only the older fish get trapped. An eighty-year-old woman doesn’t have the potential for so many babies, does she? It’s the same with tuna.”

A film played in a small room, where I saw the only other museum visitors—a Japanese couple with their young son—sit silently and stare up as a giant bluefin filled the screen. We learned about bluefin in the tone of a “Did You Know?” kindergarten lesson. I mostly did not know.

I didn’t know, for example, that tuna can grow up to twelve feet and weigh on average 550 pounds. Or that they can live for thirty years. I didn’t know that, like sharks, if tuna stop swimming, they suffocate, making them machines of motion. I didn’t know that their dark red flesh, coveted by chefs for
its meaty flavor, is the product of blood supply to the muscles. Unlike most fish, bluefin are warm-blooded and can also thermoregulate, adjusting their body temperature so they’re always warmer than the surrounding waters. Warm blood is key, because it means their bodies expend less energy as they hunt for food, which they do at speeds of up to thirty miles per hour.

As we left the museum, I asked Diego about the legend Pepe had recounted about the larger bluefin entering the nets to satisfy their belly itch.

“Pepe?” he said, smiling. “No, that’s crazy, of course. It’s a fable.” He put his hand on my arm and stopped me in the parking lot. “Do you want to know why the tuna come to the nets?” I assured him I did. “They come because they’ve had a great life. They’ve reproduced. They’ve eaten well. They’ve traveled. Now they want to die a dignified death. They know they will be treated with respect. Dignity in death is important to bluefin, because they are so dignified in life.”

There’s a black-and-white photo I remember seeing as a young boy, of a group of men standing over a slaughtered buffalo, rifles slung over their shoulders, expressions smug. You can’t help but look at it and wonder:
What were they thinking?

In
Song for the Blue Ocean
, Safina compares the massacre of sixty million buffalo that once roamed America’s prairies (and supported Native American cultures for centuries) to the present-day destructive hunt for bluefin tuna. The comparison struck home a few years ago when I saw a photo of a record-breaking bluefin tuna just off a Japanese auction block. Around it stood a half-dozen fishmongers, all of them wearing that same self-satisfied look. Our greedy appetites made for the buffalo’s quick decimation; we’ve effectively done the same to tuna.

Carl’s prediction came to mind as Lisa and I stood in front of Baelo Claudia, a Roman ruin just to the west of Barbate in Tarifa, another important
almadraba
town along the southern coast. Dinner that evening would be at Aponiente, where we would learn of the “revolutionary new idea” Ángel had been working on with Veta la Palma. Distracted by the promise of Ángel’s food, and uninterested in another lesson in history, I arrived at Baelo Claudia in the wrong frame of mind. It didn’t take long for it to change. Having parked the car and walked just a few steps past a beach walkway, we came to the spectacular—and the spectacularly discordant—sight of the ruins, the remains of a 2,200-year-old salting factory for preserving the
almadraba
tuna. The industrial-size factory—enormous columns, salt basins, large, coffin-like drying areas—was surrounded by more relics of a once prosperous port town for the Roman Empire. It all looked like the backdrop for the production of a Classical drama.