Ethical Seafood Reading (or Why to Learn to Love Sardines)

I've been reading a pretty fascinating book lately. It's called Bottomfeeder and is written by Taras Grescoe, an author I have come to esteem both for his thorough coverage of his subject as well as his wildly entertaining stories. Bottomfeeder reminds me of Fast Food Nation, which I loved years ago, but this time the book is a sweeping survey of our oceans, their bounty, and how we have been systematically destroying them. It's entirely gripping, containing within the fascinating stories an arsenal of startling and convincing facts that will leave you convinced that the management of our seas is a situation in dire need of urgent help - unless you don't mind eating jellyfish for dinner, which is all we'll be left with before long if things proceed as they've been.

Grescoe focuses each chapter around a different subject. He writes the stories of how the wormy and hideous monkfish came to be hip and trendy in fancy New York restaurant, the loss of the Chesapeake Bay's original keystone species, the Amercian oyster, and the subsequent toxic algae blooms that have stifled its once-teeming waters, and the loss of the North Atlantic cod fishery and how the enormous market for fish and chips contributed to it, supplied by corporations that see the ocean as a source of income and not a way of life for millions of fishermen. He goes to Marseille to search for the real recipe for Bouillabaise and finds it close to impossible to replicate with today's measly catch from the Mediterranean.

Then he's off to Portugal, where he feasts on grilled sardines, my new personal favorite for their affordability and their bottomfeeder status. (Grescoe says we ought to be eating these healthful bottomfeeders ourselves, instead of grinding them up for feed in fish farms, and I agree.) But by far the most fascinating chapter I've read thus far has been the one on aquaculture and shrimp farms. I hope you get a chance to read this book yourself, but if you don't, at least heed this advice: Never, ever do you want to eat farmed shrimp. His myriad stories will surely convince you, but I'll just tell you that farmed shrimp are pretty much poison in every way - for you the consumer, for the villages they exist in, and the waters they invade with their toxic effluence.

Ignorant indifference on the part of the seafood consumer is one of the biggest reasons the oceans have become so compromised, and it really takes more than toting around the Monterey Bay's Watch Card to make yourself an informed consumer. If you eat seafood at all, you owe it to yourself to read this book. Let's understand a little better the crises that are going on out in the oceans, and learn what we are buying, where it came from, and how it was caught. Demanding this information from fish sellers is the first step on the road to our oceans' recovery, so please start asking. And check out Bottomfeeder, it truly is a great read!

(Grescoe also wrote a stellar article on salmon in the New York Times in June.)