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.

This book should be essential reading. It has had very little press coverage since it's publication (at least in the U.K.) and I only found out about it after Ben Macintyre's editorial on Tuna fishing during which he recommended it. The subject matter is the overfishing of Salmon, Cod, Seabass and Tuna and the history of how these four fish became the frontline of humanity's marine dietry requirements. But make no mistake - this isn't purely an academic look at declining stocks. Nor is it a hysterical propaganda advocating the complete stop on all commercial fishing. Paul Greenberg's book is accessible to everyone and is a very measured, facsinating and important read. He is obviously a lover of the sea and all that is in it but - having spend a number of years fishing himself - he has a balanced and realistic view on the problem of the increase in the human population and it's effect on fish stocks. He looks at the fish farming industries and their effect not just from a stock point of view but also an ecological one. He debates differing ideas on prolonging the stock of these fish (and others) and has his own very valid thoughts on our future role as herders of fish stocks rather than blindly plundering what is there. The chapter on bluefin Tuna is chilling - but then it should be. But even here Greenberg looks at what we can do to assist stocks and alternative sustainable solutions rather than suggesting an unrealistic ban on all tuna fishing. Lively, witty, entertaining, sometimes sad but with an infective positive outlook from the planet's last wild food source - this is a great book and definitely worth reading.

Livro muito bem escrito, muito leve, apesar de tratar de assunto grave, a depleção dos estoques pesqueiros dos oceanos, pela humanidade. Inspirador, fornece sementes de esperança, através de relatos de pessoas bem intencionadas e empenhadas na causa. Autor lúcido, brilhante, e bem intencionado.

"Four fish", das sind Lachs, Thunfisch, Barbe und Kabeljau. Auf der Suche nach Fischen auf aktuellen (amerikanischen) Fischmärkten stellte der Autor fest, dass diese vier Fischarten fast alle anderen, vielleicht auch mehr lokalen Fischsorten verdrängt hatten. Offensichtlich hat die Fischerei die Tendenz, die meisten Wildarten duch einige wenige "domestizierte" Fische zu ersetzen. Sind Lachs, Thunfisch, Barbe und Kabeljau also dabei, so etwas wie Kuh, Schwein, Schaf und Ziege der Meere zu werden? Der Autor geht dieser Frage in vier Kapiteln nach; jedes einem der vier Fische gewidmet. Jedes Kapitel beginnt mit einem persönlichen Erlebnis des Autors, einer persönlichen Beziehung zu dem jeweiligen Fisch. Das Buch ist also keineswegs trocken, sondern spannend und unterhaltsam geschrieben. Man würde es am liebsten in einem Zug durchlesen. Anschließend kommt ein historischer Abriss, warum der Fisch zu einem der Lieblinge der Fischindustrie wurde, welche Probleme es dabei gab und noch gibt und welche Aussichten der Fisch in der Zukunft hat. Die Wahl jedes einzelnen der vier Fische wird kritisch hinterfragt und Alternativen aufgezeigt. Man lernt so auf unterhaltsame Art enorm viel über den aktuellen Stand der Fischzucht und der Meere. Der Autor ist selbst passionierter (Amateur-)Fischer und schreibt immer wieder von seinen eigenen Erlebnissen des Fischens. Er übernimmt also nicht einfach die Rolle eines Fischschützers. Vielmehr gibt er eine weitgehend neutrale Bestandsaufnahme, die die Situation der Fische von verschiedenen Seiten zeigt. Am Ende gibt er aber klare Empfehlungen, wie sich unser Verhältnis zu Fischen und ihrer Zucht entwickeln müsste, damit wir auch in Zukunft noch Wild- und nicht nur domestizierte Fische erleben können. Wenn es um den (Blauflossen-)Thunfisch geht, geht er sogar so weit, ein völliges und dauerhaftes Fangverbot ähnlich wie für Wale zu empfehlen. "Four fish" steht in bester Tradition von Mark Kurlanskys Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World .

This book is largely about the history and current status of the fishing and farming of what are perhaps the four most popular species of food fish: salmon, sea bass, cod, and tuna. The author starts off as an interested sports fisherman who also enjoys seafood. A passionate fisherman in his childhood and youth, he returns to it later in life as a journalist to examine more closely how and why the fish we eat gets to our plates. Now, there isn't that much technical information on either the fish or the fishing methods. Mostly, this is a book about the sustainability of the four fish mentioned. The author takes the sensible stand that we should be concerned with conservation and minimizing harm to fish stocks, but he certainly isn't a hard-core eco-warrior. Indeed, he goes fishing for, and catches, just about all the species mentioned in this book. Certainly, he eats them all. But perhaps that's why this book was interesting to read. It's full of important messages, but it's not so much preachy as it is a narrative of his own discoveries. The "preaching" is simply facts that he discovered that are pretty clear to anyone remotely interested in a responsible truth. That's probably why I'm giving this book five stars- it made a book about four fish quite interesting to read. Because the truth is we are increasing our demand for fresh seafood at the same time as global stocks are declining. Fish farming (for most species) doesn't seem to be the answer. That means we'll have to ask ourselves some hard questions sooner or later. If not, we'll end up repeating the sad story of the cod. Much of what's written in this book won't be terribly new to people who know anything about seafood (e.g., big commercial fisherman are bad, Japan's appetite for seafood is problematic, conservation efforts across countries are incredibly challenging, don't let industry regulate itself, etc.). Instead, this book aims to leave the reader more thoughtful about the fish they eat, where they come from, and what likely needs to be done to save them. I'm all for fishing and I strongly support small-scale fishermen, but clearly if we don't seriously reconsider the path we're going down with fishing, something is going to give. And that something is going to be the last few stocks of wild fish.

Do you eat fish? Do you like reading? Do you give two $#!t$ where your food comes from and care out the planet even in the least? Read this book! It's well written, interesting and will get you thinking.