NYT Sunday Magazine has a really thought-provoking and disturbing article about how Norway, already by far the world’s largest source of farmed salmon, is well on its way to domesticating cod. Except that while salmon apparently was really easy to turn into the industrial chicken of the sea — that is, corn-pellet-eating, scaled repositories of yucky things like PCBs — cod and other large predator fish have resisted our colonizing ways for years.
Isn’t that good news? We won’t have to worry about over-fishing things like Chilean sea bass and we’ll be able to feed the world’s ever-increasing population with a nice healthy protein. Well, as seems to happen with most of Industrial Man’s attempts to improve on nature, it’s a wee bit more complicated. It’s kind of like me trying to take apart the vacuum cleaner several years ago, with one difference — when I put my machine back together, it no longer sucked.
Things we’ll have to look forward to in 2016, when the NYT reporter estimates that we could be eating more farmed seafood than wild:
- The entire reorganization and homogenization of the sea, just like the Midwest — preference to the breeds of fish that can survive this process, not necessarily the tastiest.
- Fish, at least farmed salmon, seem to escape a lot. and then they breed with wild fish, which may be changing the genetic composition of wild populations and could be partly responsible for the collapse of wild-salmon stocks around the world.
- Government development money for cod-farm fisheries means less money for resurrecting the dwindling stock of wild cod
- More bad stuff that you’ll have to read for yourself.
The article is depressing, but there was one bright spot: Karol Rzepkowski, the Norwegian version of Joel Salatin (of Polyface Farm in Virginia, also known as poster boy for sustainable farming). Someone who’s farming cod already, but farming them by taking cod directly from the wild, spawning them in captivity and replacing the breeding stock with new wild fish on a continuing basis. They’re even raised according to organic standards.
And then there’s everybody else — China, India and the countries of Southeast Asia, who are producing more aquacultured animals than everyone else combined. These are some of the most polluted countries in the world — you can just bet what extra treats end up in their fish.
So, it’s obvious fish farming is the way of the future and we’re powerless to resist it — except by not buying it, of course. But I have to ask: can’t this planet agree on a population growth strategy so that we don’t have to eradicate every animal species that we can’t turn into a corn-chugging microwaveable meal?
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