Four Fish
A journey from the ocean to your plate
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
Whether it's wild or farmed, fresh or tinned, in batter or a bento box, we're eating more fish than ever before. But what's the story behind the fish on your plate?
Award-winning writer and lifelong fisherman Paul Greenberg takes us on a compelling journey through the oceans, investigating the fish we eat the most: salmon, sea bass, cod and tuna. He visits Norwegian mega farms that grow millions of salmon a year, encounters an air-breathing fish in Vietnam that could be the most productive food fish on earth, travels to Alaska to see the only Fair Trade fishing company in the world, meets a Polish-speaking Shetlander who may have saved the cod and almost sinks to the bottom of the ocean searching for an alternative to endangered bluefin tuna.
From barramundi to whiting, trevally and snapper, Four Fish answers the questions many of us ask: which fish can I eat without worrying? What's the difference between wild, farmed and organic? And what is the future of seafood – will there be anything left to eat if we continue as we have?
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'Greenberg writes with tremendous knowledge and passion to tell the engrossing story of the impact of history, geography and politics on our seafood, and offers a clear-eyed manifesto for the future of fish.' Financial Times
'As Paul Greenberg observes in a sharp and occasionally lyrical book, we are at a significant moment: farmed fish now make up around half of all the fish consumed by humans.' The Economist
'That there's another side to the aquaculture issue, and that some of the best minds in world science are trained on it is made clear in Paul Greenberg's accessible and enlightening Four Fish... But it's not Greenberg's way to preach; he's happier letting the facts speak for themselves. There's some fairly hard-core science in Four Fish, but it's so skilfully interleaved with the narrative that you absorb it without pain.' The Guardian
'Important and stimulating….a necessary book for anyone truly interested in what we take from the sea to eat, and how, and why.' The New York Times Book Review
'A lively and informative read.' The San Francisco Chronicle
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this unusually entertaining and nuanced investigation into global fisheries, New York Times seafood writer Greenberg examines our historical relationship with wild fish. In the early 2000s, Greenberg, reviving his childhood fishing habit, discovered that four fish salmon, tuna, bass, and cod "dominate the modern seafood market" and that "each is an archive of a particular, epochal shift": e.g., cod, fished farther offshore, "herald the era of industrial fishing"; and tuna, "the stateless fish, difficult to regulate and subject to the last great gold rush of wild food... challeng us to reevaluate whether fish are at their root expendable seafood or wildlife desperately in need of our compassion." He found that as wild fisheries are overexploited, prospective fish farmers are likely to ignore practical criteria for domestication hardiness, freely breeding, and needing minimal care instead picking traditionally eaten wild-caught species like sea bass "a failure in every category." Greenberg contends that ocean life is essential to feeding a growing human population and that rational humans should seek to sustainably farm fish that can "stand up to industrial-sized husbandry" while maintaining functioning wild food systems.
