Where We Live: Fishing At The End Of The Line?

While most of our food is grown--usually far away--under tightly controlled conditions, most of the fish we eat is still captured by men and women who take enormous risks.  Throughout the world, that livlihood has been threatened, with only a few major fishing ports left on our shores.

But while the fisherman's story for survivial is compelling, so is the story of the fish themselves.  Some scientists predict a pending catastrophe of overfishing.

Today, Where We Live, three fish stories: the men who catch them, the business that draws them out to sea, and the crisis that threatens an industry worth billions.

Program notes from Where We Blog by John Dankosky – Two pretty remarkable books and a scary film inspired our conversation about fish today on Where We Live.

During my trip down the Pacific Coast Highway last summer, Sasha Issenberg’sThe Sushi Economy was my reading material.  It chronicles the amazing transformation of blue fin tuna from unappetizing “junk fish” meant for cat food to one of the world’s most prized, most expensive, and most endangered delicacies.

It struck a nerve, because a big chunk of that trip was spent hanging out in the working port of Newport, Oregon.  It’s a place where fishermen still go out and bring back albacore, oysters and crabs.  As I ate fresh, wonderful food there that had come back on boats only hours earlier, I felt this amazing disconnect from most of the fish I eat – which is frozen, then flown halfway around the world.  That’s what The Sushi Economy is all about – disconnected dinner.

While in Newport,  I may have been thinking about my disconnect from the food, but I became more connected to the people who go and hunt it.

The guys who Nugent profiles – to a man – can’t stand the scientists, the “greenies” who tell them how much they can and can’t fish.It’s no wonder that The Deadliest Catch has become such a hit, because it tells one of our most primal stories.  Those stories are the heart of Rory Nugent’s Down at the Docks. It introduces us to the fishermen who make New Bedford, Massachusetts America’s biggest fishing fleet.

These are guys who wouldn’t even be swayed by Rupert Murray’s film, The End of the Line, about our coming fishing catastrophe.  It shows that our current fishing trends will wipe out fish stocks within 50 years.

Murray shared his personal guide for eating fish in a sustainable way:  Eat small fish, not the big ones like tuna and swordfish.

A guy who understands how to choose the right fish to eat is Chef Bun Lai, ofMiya’s Sushi in New Haven.  It’s said to be the “only restaurant in the northeastern United States to serve what’s called “sustainable sushi,” made only with fish that aren’t endangered by over-fishing.”  (Read more here, in Greg Hladky’s excellent Advocate article about eating endangered species) Lai told Hladky:

“We were really thinking about better ways to eat that weren’t commercial.  So many commercial practices are bad for the environment.”