Bottomfeeder
A Seafood Lover's Journey to the End of the Food Chain
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3.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Just when opting for omega-three-rich seafood is recognized as one of the healthiest dietary choices a person can make, the news seems to be full of stories about mercury-laden tuna, shrimp contaminated with antibiotics and collapsing fish stocks. In a world of endangered cod, pirate-caught Chilean sea bass and sealice-infested salmon, can we really continue to order the catch of the day in good conscience?
Bottomfeeder is a seafood lover’s round-the-world quest for a truly decent meal. From strip mall Red Lobsters to the rotary sushi bars of Tokyo, Taras Grescoe travels to the end of the seafood supply chain and back. He pulls up lobster traps in Nova Scotia, grills three-star Michelin chefs in Manhattan and visits British Columbia’s salmon farms with a guerrilla ecologist. Sampling poisonous pufferfish in Japan and live, drunken shrimp in China, Grescoe discovers how out-of-control pollution, unregulated fishing practices and global warming are affecting the fish that end up on our plates.
Bottomfeeder is a balanced and practical guide to eating—the first book, in fact, to provide readers with a clear explanation of how to choose the best fish for our environment and our bodies.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this whirlwind, worldwide tour of fisheries, Grescoe (The Devil's Picnic) whiplashes readers from ecological devastation to edible ecstasy and back again. In disturbing detail, he depicts the "turbid and murky" Chesapeake Bay, where, with overharvested oysters too few to do their filtering job, fish are infested with the "cell from hell," a micro-organism that eats their flesh and exposes their guts. He describes how Indian shrimp farms treated with pesticides, antibiotics and diesel oil are destroying protective mangroves, ecosystems and villages, and portrays the fate of sharks a collapsing fishery finned for the Chinese delicacy shark-fin soup: "living sharks have their pectoral and dorsal fins cut from their bodies with heated metal blades.... The sharks are kicked back into the ocean, alive and bleeding; it can take them days to die." But these horrific scenes are interspersed with delectable meals of succulent Portuguese sardines with "fat-jeweled juices" or a luscious breakfast of bluefin tuna sashimi, "cool and moist... halfway between a demi-sel Breton butter and an unctuous steak tartare"; the latter is a dish that, due to the fish's endangered status, Grescoe decides he won't enjoy again. The book ends on a cautiously optimistic note: scientists know what steps are needed to save the fisheries and the ocean; we just need the political will to follow through. Grescoe provides a helpful list of which fish to eat: "no, never," "depends, sometimes" and "absolutely, always."
