I’m a big fan of Mark Bittman. I’ve been reading him since his Cook’s Illustrated days in the early ‘90s; I consider his weekly “Minimalist” column in The New York Times invaluable; and several of his cookbooks sit, stained and dogeared, on my shelf. Bittman made a career by slicing through pretensions about cooking as an art best left to professionals or the leisure class. Long before it became fashionable, Bittman demonstrated that cooking from scratch can be a quotidian activity. All it takes, he has preached again and again, is a few decent ingredients, some basic kitchen equipment, and some quite learnable skills and principles. (Here’s a classic Bittman piece on how to outfit a high-functioning home kitchen without blowing $500 on a single pan.) The importance of such thinking is immense. Farmers markets, CSAs, and other sustainable-food institutions could not have arisen over the past two decades without a growing horde of people who feel empowered to cook. The farm-to-plate trend might have peaked long ago, if people felt that cooking meant 20-ingredient, epic recipes that required the use of $150 chef’s knives. Bittman has been an important figure in debunking that myth—and done so without nudging people to rely on packaged, processed foods in their cooking, as certain TV cooking-show stars have.
Further, I salute Bittman’s recent critiques of the industrial food system, summed up in his book Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating.
For all of these reasons, it pains me to call him out on something in his recent Minimalist column, which features a delicious-sounding recipe for fruit salsa with red snapper—one of the most endangered species in U.S. waters. I know I sound like a former smoker now spewing hellfire and damnation at the unsaved. (My conversion moment was reading Teras Grescoe’s Bottomfeeder.) But I believe that influental food writers, especially ones concerned with conscious eating, need to start educating the public about the dismal state of the oceans.
A couple of weeks ago, I chided Bittman’s colleague, NYT culture editor and sometime food writer Sam Sifton, for something similar. But even though Sifton published a recipe calling for endangered fish, he at least made distinctions. Sifton explicitly went looking for “fresh” fish caught “out in the cold waters off Montauk.” There’s an implicit message here: buy what’s in season from your local fishermen—a generally much more sustainable way to go about things than buying what turns up at the supermarket from industrial fisheries. Of course, lots of folks in the U.S. don’t live near the sea or have access to local fishermen—hence my ire at Sifton for not raising sustainability issues.
Bittman, however, makes no distinctions about snapper. According to the National Marine Fisheries Service, the red snapper fishery streches from North Carolina, around the Florida coast, and all the way down the Gulf of Mexico. They can live upwards of 50 years. Here’s the bad news: the breeding population of red snapper stands at 6 percent of target size in the Gulf, and 3 percent off the Atlantic coast of southern states. In other words, if present trends continue, we could be the last generation that gets to eat this admittedly delicious fish.
Collapse of a fishery
Source: National Marine Fisheries Service
Bittman calls for red snapper in his recipe without comment. In the accompanying article, he makes this remark: “I have served xec [a Mayan fruit] with poached shrimp, sautéed skate, grilled swordfish and roast tuna. They were all terrific.”
And all problematic. Take shrimp—once a seasonal treat, now everyday fare for Americans. A few years ago, shrimp surpassed canned tuna as the most-consumed U.S. seafood product. “Today, 90 percent of our shrimp—more than 1 billion pounds a year—come from foreign farms,” writes Jim Carrier in an excellent recent piece in Orion. In Bottomfeeder, Teras Grescoe puts it like this: “The simple fact is, if you’re eating cheap shrimp today, it almost certainly comes from a turbid, pesticide- and antibiotic-filled, virus-laden pond in the tropical climes of one of the world’s poorest nations.” Lest anyone think otherwise, these factory farms contribute to poverty in the nations that house them, as Grescoe demonstrates; they privatize and cut down highly productive mangrove forests that once sustained fishing communities, leaving fetid dead zones in their wake.
Skate? Don’t go there. Here is Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch:
Skates have been severely overfished and most are caught with bottom trawls, which result in high levels of accidental catch and substantial damage to the seafloor.
Swordfish can be a good choice, according to Monterey Bay, but people should be aware that it’s a top feeder that bioaccumulates alarming amounts of mercury.
As for tuna, most species (excluding bluefin) are okay to eat in terms of sustainability, but, like swordfish, tuna tends to carry a heavy mercury load. (Environmental Defense has a list of fish to watch out for in terms of mercury and PCBs).
My point is: at this point, societies need to make serious decisions about what seafood is consumed and how we farm it. If we don’t, we risk losing the sea as a vital food resource. Influential food writers can’t force the issue themselves—ultimately, we’ll need coordinated government action across the globe—but they have considerable power to point consumers in the right direction The time has come to use it.
Doing so needn’t mean turning every article on seafood into a lecture on fishery trouble. Seafood Watch offers a robust resource for making sound distinctions when cosndering which fish to buy—including alternatives to red snapper.
More NYC farmers markets accept food stamps and sales soar
So long and thanks for all the fish
Comments
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Erik Hoffner Posted 12:11 pm
08 Apr 2009
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amazingdrx Posted 8:02 pm
08 Apr 2009
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PermieWriter Posted 8:51 pm
08 Apr 2009
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Mark Bittman Posted 8:17 am
09 Apr 2009
For those
who are interested in more of my thinking on this subject:
I do believe that there is a way in which we can achieve decent management systems and establish sustainable fisheries, and that's happening in isolated places throughout the world (as I noted in this piece in the Times a few months ago), but obviously that day is not here. Right now we have to be careful about what fish we chose, and in this piece I was not. (I thank Mr. Philpott for the gentle and even encouraging way in which he pointed this out.)
Seafood Watch, however, is managed by scientists - not cooks. (I use it, I recommend it, I even like it, but it has very definite limits.) If you look at "best
choices" column on their site much of the fish is farm-raised, and much of the remainder is impossible to find in the real world. (Imagine: "Is that cod Pacific line caught?" What would the fishmonger respond? If he even knew the answer, would he be likely to
say "No, it's from the Atlantic, caught off Iceland by trawler?")
In the recipe in question, the most viable alternative fish on that list – for my taste – is mackerel. Though I like mackerel, many people do not. Furthermore, it's sometimes high in mercury, so there, perhaps, is a reason it's not overfished, and a good reason not to recommend it. If I were to use that list as a guidepost to suggesting the best possible fish at every turn, there would be a rotor of omething like mackerel, sardines, herring, anchovies, squid (I do not either tuna or swordfish is sustainable at present, even though many people do) … and repeat.
But if enough people were to heed that advice, even those fish might soon be in short supply. I remember the disappearance of redfish, orange roughy, haddock and cod of course, and every other fish which was in "abundant" supply 20 years ago. There is not enough fish to go around without good management practices. (Striped bass was "lucky" enough to be contaminated by PCBs, so there was a near-complete ban fishing for a while, or it would have been endangered or even extinct by now.)
Equally important is the suggestion on the part of many that we choose farm-raised alternatives. But currently most of the aquaculture of fish and shrimp (not mollusks, however, in general) has nearly every disadvantage of industrially-raised chicken: it's cruel, it fouls the environment, it gobbles up resources better used elsewhere, it does not have as good a nutritional profile as the wild stuff (not that there is wild chicken, but there are wild birds), and, relatively speaking, it tastes lousy. I'd rather eat tofu than tilapia, and I practice that. I'm also trying not to use farmed fish in any recipe I write.
None of this addresses my error; it merely reinforces that there is very little fish that is a) safe, b) worth eating, c) in currently adequate supply (which does not imply that that supply will be adequate a year from now).
It's not simple. I write mainly about cooking. On the one hand I encourage people to cook at home, to use simple ingredients, to make conscious choices. On the other, I usually note – or try to - which choices are best from not only the flavor but the environmental perspective. Still, I no longer write "1 chicken, preferably free-range," because I hope that most readers have gotten that message or can figure that out without me. Nor do I feel it's up to me to tell people that there's mercury in tuna. Some responsibility for sustainability and health – general "goodness" - must rest with the individual.
Again,this is not to excuse what happened in my column this week. I'm happy to be called out for that kind of sloppiness, I realize people take my words seriously, I'm glad they do, and I have to write as if that matters.
Look for a bigger piece in the Times addressing these issues in the not-too-distant
future.-Mark Bittman
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Erik Hoffner Posted 10:56 am
09 Apr 2009
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PermieWriter Posted 8:40 am
09 Apr 2009
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Tim Fitzgerald Posted 10:05 am
09 Apr 2009
I think I've rambled on long enough. Again, thanks to you both for keeping the light on this issue.
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Linus_Cello Posted 12:23 pm
09 Apr 2009
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Tom Philpott Posted 12:59 pm
09 Apr 2009
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Mark A Powell Posted 1:01 pm
09 Apr 2009
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spaceshaper Posted 4:55 am
10 Apr 2009
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Mark A Powell Posted 1:19 pm
09 Apr 2009
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Tim Fitzgerald Posted 1:42 pm
09 Apr 2009
list, unfortunately most of the product in the market comes from the
fisheries ranked red. Sad, I know.Going
back to the red snapper example, we might also point out that more fish
are taken by recreational fishers (numbering several million) than
commercial boats (maybe 1000?). An individual rec fisher might not have
a large impact on his/her own - and even use 'sustainable' fishing
gears - yet collectively they have a significant impact on the
population. This is just another illustration of how scale can be
deceiving.
Finally, the key word in Pauly's Bottomfeeder quote is 'access'.
Nations without maritime sovereignty like the United States often
fall victim to foreign fishing fleets (which as you rightly pointed
out, have no incentive to conserve the resource). However, if you assign
or dedicate access to that resource - either through individual quotas,
fishing cooperatives, or area-based management, then you're effectively
creating a steward which tends to act accordingly. This is what recently happened with Gulf red snapper and it's starting to pay dividends.
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spaceshaper Posted 5:34 am
10 Apr 2009
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Tom Philpott Posted 7:14 am
10 Apr 2009
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Mark A Powell Posted 1:26 pm
09 Apr 2009
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Mark A Powell Posted 9:34 am
10 Apr 2009
The critiques of "big" boat fisheries are typically a self-serving narrative that defines "others" as the problem instead of oneself, with the definition of "big" adapted to suit the us/them narrative that elevates local underdogs into hero status. It also serves to create a simple framing that allows simple shortcuts in thinking through a decision like which fish to buy (buy the one from small fisheries). It's convenient, but wrong to say small-scale fisheries are inherently more sustainable because they're small-scale.
A "big" boat in New England would be a "small" boat in Alaska. And a "big" boat in Mexico would be a "small" boat in New England. And so on. The size of "big" changes, but the narrative remains the same. Everything was fine in my fishery until those darn "big" boats moved in and destroyed everything.
The Steller's sea cow and great auk were both driven to extinction centuries ago by small-scale over exploitation. Like the handline fishing that depleted cod off Nova Scotia in the 1850s, defining these problems as being caused by "industrial" exploitation by "big" operations would be defying common sense to defend the ideology that small is beautiful in fisheries.
What's needed instead is analysis of the sustainability of fisheries and solutions tailored to the problems, not "small is beautiful" ideology masquerading as analysis.
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Mark A Powell Posted 10:05 am
10 Apr 2009
"Because of the overlap of ubiquitous small-scale fisheries with newly documented high-use areas in coastal waters worldwide, our case study suggests that small-scale fisheries may be among the greatest current threats to non-target megafauna."
This is from
http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0001041
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spaceshaper Posted 12:34 pm
10 Apr 2009
The big industrials are another matter. Your first link above says it all: "This long time series of abundance estimates shows that the cod stocks have declined about 90% just in the past 50 years." Certainly the article continues to track the beginning of the decline to the mid-nineteenth century but this just indicates that cod was the target of one of the first big industrialized export fisheries, i.e. fishing for non-local markets. The Beverly schooners and dories were serving not the immediate hinterland of the home port but were already supplying much more distant markets with what had become a commodity export. By the 1850's large-scale exploitation of North Atlantic cod was propping up the slave economies of the Caribbean as well as the growth of industrializing European cities. The 90% depletion in the last half-century is an indication of the swiftly accelerating rate of fishery abuse with the adoption of powerful diesel engines and refrigerated factory-ship processing deployed in the service of global marketing and distribution systems.
Your second link is actually a speculation about bycatch problems, not of direct target population depletion per se. This is by no mean an issue to ignore but it has no direct bearing on target fish scarcity.
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Geoff Shester Posted 4:17 pm
10 Apr 2009
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