Bottomfeeder
How to Eat Ethically in a World of Vanishing Seafood
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4,5 • 2 đánh giá
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- 11,99 US$
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- 11,99 US$
Lời Giới Thiệu Của Nhà Xuất Bản
Dividing his sensibilities between Epicureanism and ethics, Taras Grescoe set out on a nine-month, world-wide search for a delicious-and humane-plate of seafood. Along the way, he explains the cultural and commercial implications of fish production on our environment, our health, and our seas. At once entertaining and illuminating, Bottomfeeder is a thoroughly enjoyable narrative about the world's cuisines and an examination of the fishing and farming practices we take too easily for granted.
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."
