Much of what I know about seafood I’ve learned from Paul Greenberg. Paul is an acquaintance and a gifted writer whose new book, called American Catch: The Fight for Our Local Seafood, looks at three iconic American seafood species: New York oysters, Gulf shrimp and Alaska salmon. It’s a sequel of sorts to his previous book, Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food, which I blogged about in 2010.
In the introduction to the new book, Paul describes the impact of globalization on the seafood that we catch and eat in the US:
By all rights this most healthy of food should be an American mainstay. The United States controls more ocean than any other country on earth. Our seafood-producing territory covers 2.8bn acres, more than twice as much real estate as we have set aside for landfood.
But in spite of our billions of acres of ocean, our 94,000 miles of coast, our 3.5m miles of rivers, a full 91% of the seafood Americans eat comes from abroad.
..It gets fishier still. While 91% of the seafood Americans eat is foreign, a third of the seafood that Americans catch gets sold to foreigners. By and large the fish and shellfish we are sending abroad are wild while the seafood we are importing is very often farmed.
…American consumers suffer from a deficit of American fish, but someone out there somewhere is eating our lunch.
Last week, I interviewed Paul by email for Guardian Sustainable Business. I asked him why trade in seafood differs from the global exchange of other goods, the prospects for restoring oysters to New York harbor and a couple of intriguing experiments with community-supported fisheries. You can read his responses here.
There’s encouraging news in Paul’s fish stories. Alaska’s salmon fishermen are in the midst of what could be a successful effort to protect the world’s most productive salmon fishery from Pebble Mine a massive gold and copper mine near Bristol Bay. (The EPA moved to block the mine last week.) Meantime, nonprofit groups in New York are laboring to bring back the oysters that were once plentiful up and down the east coast.
A lifelong fisherman, Paul brings to these stories and obvious passion for his subject and a zest for adventure. (He uncovers and consumes a New York oyster from the muddy waters of the East River.) More than passion, though, goes into a book like American Catch. In the acknowledgements, I learned that Paul’s editor put him through seven drafts of the manuscript. The result, a rarity in this world of 24-7 news, instant analysis, and blogging on the run, is a work of journalism that delivers both insight and enormous pleasure.