Four Fish (7 page)

S
tarvation is a phenomenon still very much alive in the memories of the Yupik nation, particularly the memories of tribal elders. True, the younger generation has grown up accustomed to having access to frozen packages of chicken parts and ground chuck from the lower forty-eight, but grandparents still recall a time when the only thing that got you through the winter was salmon.

A day after our processed meat-for-wild salmon swap on the Yukon River, Ray Waska drove me two hours upriver to his family’s fish camp. There Laurie Waska, the seventy-five-year-old matriarch of the Waska clan, put me to work breaking down four hundred pounds of salmon. The camp consisted of a tidy blue house at the center of a clearing, a corrugated-steel smoking shed, and a four-legged corrugated-steel canopy under which Laurie and I sat. Dozens of grandchildren, some directly related, some adopted, ran around in the grass and mud.

Using a fan-shaped
ulaaq
—a fish-cutting knife—fashioned from the blade of an old circular saw, Laurie got to work on the salmon. Opposite from the way a commercial fish cutter would work, she started her filleting at the bottom of the animal, making a slit on either side of its anal fin and then hewing the meat upward toward the top. The fillets were smooth, orange, and flawless. If subsistence fishing doesn’t pan out, Laurie could probably make a good living behind the counter at Zabar’s or any other premium New York retail salmon outfit.

When I gave it a go, I was extremely conscious of her staring at me
.
In this subsistence environment, I was trying to fillet as close to the bone as possible. Laurie frowned at what I had done and took the
ulaaq
away from me.

“Too much meat,” she said.

“I was trying not to waste.”

“Too much meat.”

I tried to do another salmon following her instructions, angling the
ulaaq
up as I cut to make a fillet about an inch and a half thick. A thinner fillet, it turns out, is better for smoking and drying. It is moisture that ultimately causes rot, and a thinner cut will allow water to work its way out of the flesh. Laurie picked up another
ulaaq,
and we worked silently in tandem. She did three salmon for every one of mine.

“That one’s pretty good, isn’t it?” I said, holding up my second fish.

“It’ll dry
.
”She stared down at the pink-orange mess of meat and bones that accumulated at our feet. We were literally up to our ankles in lox.

The inherent seasonality of wild salmon, the handful of weeks of extreme salmon abundance followed by months and months of no salmon at all, is a problem with which both Native American subsistence fishermen and Western salmon entrepreneurs have always had to contend. The Yupik address the problem by building smoking and drying sheds. Nonnative Alaskans, however, dealt with the problem by putting salmon into a can.

Before salmon farming was invented, most people did not have access to fresh salmon. Pollution and dams had ruined any salmon river that was unfortunate enough to be near a large human population center. Industrialized human societies and wild salmon have, with very few exceptions, never found a way to live harmoniously in proximity to one another. And so in the prefarming days, the only way wild salmon could reach the majority of consumers was in a can from Alaska.

To this day the majority of the salmon infrastructure in Alaska revolves around canning. You can see this in any of the small towns up and down the coast of the state. Over the course of the last century, entire factories were built at the mouths of rivers with huge vacuum tubes extending from their roofs down into the holds of waiting tender boats that in turn gather up salmon from the smaller skiffs working the river. From the wildest of provenances, the fish are converted into sliced orange chunks and amalgamated together on palates of unlabeled “bright stacks” at the backs of the riverside factories. They are differentiated only when an order comes in from one of the big canning marketers, at which point they are reincarnated as Bumble Bee, Icy Point, or Ocean Beauty.

The only choice that middle-class homemakers had for years was canned wild salmon, baked by our grandmothers into all sorts of horrendous casseroles and croquettes. Farmed salmon changed all that. Unlike canned salmon, which may sit on shelves for years at a time, most farmed salmon comes to rest on ice before our eyes at the seafood counter within forty-eight hours of its death. Moreover, unlike wild salmon, which traditionally came to market only during specific seasons usually only a few months long, farmed salmon is available fresh year-round. And as the Norwegian (and later Chilean and Canadian) breeders increased the feed efficiency of farmed salmon, the price became lower and lower—so low that today it is comparable with the price the oil tanker’s galley cook paid for the ground chuck he traded with Ray Waska out on the Yukon
.

But there was a strain of people who most decidedly did not like farmed salmon. Many of farmed salmon’s detractors were keepers of the vestigial recollection of wild salmon that was slipping away from human memory. People who had sportfished for salmon, perhaps, or those who during the 1970s environmental movements had become familiar with Native American folktales of the wild salmon runs that had been lost. There were also owners of coastal property, particularly in Maine and Washington State, who did not like the look and the smell of salmon farming that began creeping up the coasts of Canada and the northern U.S. coastal states in the late 1980s and early ’90s.

Fish farming in its first incarnations is almost always a privatization of a public resource—a mad-dash grab for ocean farming sites that previously belonged to no one. And the more efficient salmon farming became, the more environmentally problematic the industry became. The increased efficiency of improved, selectively bred salmon caused the fish to flood onto the market. Prices plunged. Farmers desperately opted to expand and grow more total pounds to compensate for the loss in per-pound revenue. Good farming sites with strong currents and clean water became rare. Farms were sited with poor water circulation and often in proximity to passageways for dwindling runs of wild salmon. As density of salmon farms increased, nitrogen wastes built up, causing algae to bloom and die and, in the process, deoxygenate the water. Overcrowding of farms attracted parasites, like a bloodsucking creature called a sea louse, which has been shown to be transferable from farmed populations to wild salmon runs. Diseases like infectious salmon anemia were born, first in Chile and then in the rest of the world, wiping out whole farms in a week. Diseases and pollution are classic problems associated with any kind of animal husbandry, but in the case of salmon farming all of this occurred within the context of a wild environment. And above and beyond all that, there was the essential feed equation that to many environmentalists didn’t make sense: why use three pounds of wild fish as feed in order to generate just one pound of farmed salmon?

But while all these problems were significant, each one was hard to quantify. No one quite knew how many wild salmon were suffering as a result of farming operations. No one quite knew how much waste was building up in coastal waterways. No one knew if the continued harvest of wild “forage” fish for salmon feed would do long-term damage to marine ecosystems. Aquaculture facilities when viewed from land are innocuous-looking, a daisy chain of a dozen or so hoops with nets hanging below, floating in a flat plain nearly even with the water. There is a fishy smell at feeding time, and water can grow cloudy in extreme concentrations, but to the untrained eye the effects seem minimal. Nonprofits and coastal advocates flailed their arms and tried to get public attention, but no one seemed to take notice. In the early 2000s, however, a different approach was launched that drew on the experience of earlier food reform movements. Looking back on the commercial success of his 1906 meat-packing-industry exposé
The Jungle
, the best-selling Socialist author Upton Sinclair once lamented, “I aimed at the public’s heart and by accident I hit it in the stomach.” Taking a page from Sinclair, marine conservationists realized that the way they could bring attention to the problems with the salmon industry was to aim for the public’s stomach directly.

 

 

 

D
avid Carpenter is a gentle-eyed, white-haired physician whose offices are in a Legoland-style spur off the main campus of the University at Albany, smack in the shadow of General Electric, viewed by environmentalists as one of the most serious polluters of New York State’s Hudson River.

Carpenter’s training is in medicine and public health, but over the years his research has focused on toxicology and his advice has been sought out in relation to polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, a by-product of the manufacture of electric insulators, flame retardants, and, most recently, computer chips. Over the course of the twentieth century, General Electric’s plant on the Mid-Hudson River had discharged over a million pounds of PCBs into the river. In the 1960s it was discovered that those PCBs had entered the aquatic food chain and passed on into wild fish. Striped bass, a fish that spawns in the Hudson, was one of the first indicator species for PCB pollution and was largely responsible for the U.S. government’s lowering the PCB contamination threshold on fish from five parts per billion to two parts per billion. But PCB contamination has spread beyond the rivers into the ocean at large. “What we are seeing is the overall contamination of the oceans and the food web within the oceans,” Carpenter wrote me recently. “The rivers have contaminated the oceans, and the PCBs are getting bioconcentrated within the ocean food web.”

Carpenter had on numerous occasions testified about the ill effects of PCBs, which include liver enlargement, memory loss, and fetus mutations. Most devastatingly of all, Carpenter’s research showed that PCBs were a tremendously difficult compound to flush from the human body. The same inertness that made PCBs an ideal flame retardant and insulator made them equally impervious to human enzymes that try to cleave and eliminate them from the body. “The average half-life of a quantity of PCB,” Carpenter told me, “is ten years.” In other words, ten years are required to remove half of a quantity of PCB contamination from the human body. A person who ingests a sizable quantity of PCBs in his teens will likely be carrying around at least some of the chemical until he dies
.
No PCBs have been manufactured in the United States since 1977, but their legacy lives on in the fatty tissue of Americans.

In 2002 the issue of PCB contamination began to draw the interest of a major U.S. foundation called the Pew Charitable Trusts. For the preceding decade, Pew staff had been tracking the environmental impact of salmon farming but were frustrated by the failure of the public to understand the scope of the problems associated with these operations. Pollution, the spread of disease and sea lice to wild populations, the genetic mixing of farmed and wild populations, the grinding up of wild fish into salmon feed—none of it seemed to grab the popular imagination. As Joshua Reichert, the managing director of Pew’s Environment Group, told me, “The public as a whole doesn’t care much about the problems associated with the farming of marine fish.” None of these issues, Reichert said, “seemed to affect people in the way that they approached farmed salmon and wild salmon or their proclivity to buy one or the other.” Even worse, Reichert felt, consumers seemed to perceive salmon farming as a net gain for the environment. “The public has been led to believe that the production of farmed fish actually lessens pressure on wild stocks,” said Reichert, “and we did not believe that to be the case. In fact, we believe the opposite is true.” It was consumers’ lack of information about farmed fish and their general failure to understand the bigger ecological issues around domesticating salmon that drove Reichert and his staff to start seeing if farmed salmon had a connection to something consumers
did
care about: their own health.

Reichert and others at Pew had heard reports that several samples of farmed salmon had shown higher levels of PCBs than wild salmon. Based on these initial hints, they decided to commission the largest study ever undertaken of farmed and wild salmon, with Ronald Hites at the University of Indiana leading the research in conjunction with David Carpenter.

When Hites, Carpenter, and other members of the study examined the flesh of salmon from around the world, they found that there was an overall difference in PCB contamination between farmed salmon and wild salmon. This is not due to any kind of genetic engineering or because the water that farmed salmon swim in is in some way polluted; contamination in salmon comes from what salmon eat. PCB pollution occurs all over the world, particularly in the Northern Hemisphere. PCBs enter the food chain when microscopic plankton absorb the chemical across their cell membranes. Small fish then eat the plankton and, because PCBs are not easily flushed from body tissue, retain increasingly greater amounts of PCBs the more plankton they eat. When small fish are ground up into feed pellets for salmon, PCBs are again transferred further up the food chain. Just as the little fish “bioconcentrated” PCBs in their flesh when they ate plankton, salmon bioconcentrate PCBs even more when they eat small fish. Generally speaking, PCB concentrations are amplified with every step up the food chain.