100 Million Years of Food, page 23
Hunters in North America are generally not in favor of the idea of allowing game to be sold. Recreational hunters fear that opening the markets to commercial hunting would mean more competition for game and hence less game available for them. Recreational hunters also worry that putting a dollar value on game meat would increase the temptation for poaching, which would further reduce game numbers. However, the ecological and nutritional benefits of a robust wildlife population are considerable; fare like deer, moose, beaver, bear, squirrel, and alligator could comprise an authentic Paleo diet of richly flavored meat, along with ecologically friendly sides like acorns, caterpillars, grasshoppers, and wild rice. But how can the benefits of wild foods be passed on to people in the United States and Canada who don’t have the means, knowledge, or inclination to hunt or gather? Hunters in North America suggest that an attractive alternative is to move wild animals into domestic quarters; a second Agricultural Revolution, if you will, but this time done with more thought given to ecological and ethical consequences. At least, that’s the hope, but the actual practice of moving wild animals from forests and oceans into confined quarters is fraught with challenges.
From an aerial photograph, you might think that the forests ringing Bearbrook Farm, on the outskirts of Ottawa, are maintained for timber or an adequate watershed, or perhaps for aesthetic reasons. It isn’t until you drive down the long lane that bisects the farm and park your car at the end of the road that you finally spot the elk, skittish among the trees. Walter Henn, a tall, thick-boned fellow, manages Bearbrook Farm along with his wife Inge. While wind howls beyond the farmhouse doors, Walter tells me that as a consequence of the hardiness of the elk, bison, and deer that he rears, he doesn’t have to medicate the animals with antibiotics; his animals never get sick.
“We concentrate on raising all of our animals as natural and humanely as possible. We don’t use any chemicals on our farm. We do not use any chemicals for fertilizing. We only use manure for fertilizer. We do not use any chemicals for weed control. We clip all of the weeds. Most important of all, we let all of our animals run outside in their natural environment with the sun and wind and rain and everything.” This philosophy extends to a desire for people to see his farm up close. Walter continues, “We invite all of our customers to come and visit our farm and see for themselves how the animals are being kept and being fed and enjoying the natural outdoor environment. Most farmers would not want to invite visitors because they raise their animals in closed environments like cages and locked-up barns as opposed to the natural way. They’re also concerned about possibly spreading a disease if they have half a million chickens in a couple of chicken coops. We don’t mind visitors at all.”
I ask Walter if there are any special challenges in raising his animals.
“Buffalo and elk can be very temperamental, very challenging. You have to be careful not to enter the field without being on a tractor or staying on the outside of the fence because it’s possible they could attack you. It’s not normal for them to do it, but when they’re under stress, when maybe they have a baby, they may charge you to protect a baby.”
Because he has forsworn the use of artificial fertilizers, insecticides, or herbicides, the maintenance requirements are lower, but the meat yields are also lower than could otherwise be gotten from an industrial operation, which relegates Bearbrook to the status of a hobby farm; that’s ideal for Walter and his wife, an elderly couple in retirement. Walter’s main impetus for farming elk and bison is that he wants to eat meat that is free of chemicals and naturally raised. At seventy-five years of age, he’s not looking to scale up operations aggressively.
Bearbrook’s grounds are visited by children and seniors who come to gawk at the elk, otherworldly bison, turkeys, chickens, and white-tailed deer (peacock are raised for ornamental purposes). Bearbrook Farm is employer, food production zone, recreation area, and ecosystem anchor, all rolled into one. Walter and his wife give people a chance to eat meat that closely resembles the local wildlife.
Walter came to Canada from Germany after he refused to be drafted into the army. He lost his father and three uncles to World War II, and he didn’t want to learn how to kill people. Walter and his father-in-law were pioneers in establishing dairy herds in eastern Ontario, he says. He and his wife tried their hand at the supermarket, hotel, and restaurant equipment business, traveling the world to set up his equipment, and at one point opened a bed-and-breakfast. Viewed in the light of these many ventures, Bearbrook Farm is just another extraordinary chapter in the couple’s career.
“Some people call me and my wife workaholics. We need to do things, to have a challenge before us, to have a reason to get up in the morning, to be active. We’re not like some of those brain-dead people who go golfing. We don’t believe in that. It’s a waste of time for society when you could contribute something good and nice to mankind and the next generation. We call it our hobby because we love doing it.” If Walter had attempted to start Bearbrook Farm a few decades ago, he would have had to rely on word of mouth or advertisements in magazines and newspapers. Now the Internet is playing a new and important role, as orders for his game meats—in addition to the animals raised on the farm, Bearbrook also offers exotic meats like snake, crocodile, kangaroo, and camel—come in from many parts of the province. Technology is changing the face of commerce, and this seventy-five-year-old retiree is at the forefront of a new-yet-old way to raise food.
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We are commonly advised these days to eat more fish, for the sake of omega-3 fatty acids that could lower our risks of coronary heart disease, allergic diseases, and depression, among other things. Americans eat more than twice as much salmon today as they did in 1990, but this increase has been accompanied by considerable controversy. In 1997, the United States went from being a net exporter to a net importer of salmon, despite opposition from American salmon farmers that resulted in tariffs on Norwegian and Chilean salmon. Rivers along the Atlantic coast once teemed with wild Atlantic salmon, but these fish have all but disappeared as an economic force, with major losses caused by damming of rivers, changes in water temperature, and other forms of habitat destruction. Although Alaska is the major producer of wild salmon in North America, nearly all of the increased numbers of salmon finding their way onto American dinner plates come from farmed salmon imported from Canada, Chile, and Norway.16
To learn more about salmon aquaculture, I book a seat on a train from Halifax to Moncton, a small city on Canada’s east coast. The train pulls into downtown Moncton two hours later; low, drab houses cling like barnacles to a grid of widely spaced roads. My host is there to meet me, beaming. Dounia is a marine scientist who specializes in lobsters. She did some shopping at the supermarket next to the train station while waiting for me.
“Is salmon okay for tonight?” she asks.
In all likelihood, Dounia’s salmon purchase originated from Cooke Aquaculture. Salmon aquaculture was first developed in Norway starting around 1970, then brought over to North America in 1978 after a Canadian scientist observed its potential. In 1984, New Brunswick had five fish farms. High prices for salmon drove the expansion of the industry, so that by 1996 the number of fish farms had swollen to seventy-seven. However, Chilean-farmed salmon began to enter the U.S. market, and disease and parasite epidemics ravaged farmed salmon stocks. In an attempt by the New Brunswick provincial authorities to clean up the waters of the bays that held the salmon pens, operators were required to own at least two sites, to allow one site to lie fallow while the other site held the salmon. Given the additional expenses that this entailed, the salmon aquaculture business was consolidated into the hands of just a few operators. Cooke has become by far the largest player in east-coast Atlantic salmon, evolving from a single New Brunswick farm with five thousand salmon to a multimillion-dollar, multinational enterprise, raising salmon, bream, and sea bass in Canada, the United States, Chile, Spain, and Scotland.17
Thierry Chopin, a professor from the University of New Brunswick who conducts research in cooperation with Cooke Aquaculture on making aquaculture more environmentally friendly, picks me up on a cheerful maritime blue morning and drives us to the gates of Cooke’s hatchery. We step in and out of sterilization pools and scrub our hands with sanitizers repeatedly before entering. Salmon that are destined to be breeders swim in a spacious circular pool, with something of the leisurely atmosphere of a YMCA facility. Most of the salmon end up in outdoor, open-water pens for maturation—a highly controversial method, I have discovered.
We drive down to a small port and clamber into a boat with three Cooke employees. The boat motors out to a series of circular enclosures, a few hundred yards from shore. The nets of these enclosures hold thirty thousand to fifty thousand salmon per pen, depending on the size of the fish. Selectively bred to grow faster than wild Atlantic salmon, farmed salmon have been known to escape from their enclosures at certain facilities, through tears in the netting or accidental release into the surrounding waters during transfers. There are fears that escaped farm salmon could breed with local wild salmon, causing the gene pool to become weaker and pushing the wild stocks closer to extinction. In the outdoor pens, uneaten food and salmon feces drop onto the seafloor. One report estimated that the discharge of salmon feces into the Bay of Fundy from the aquaculture industry in 2005 was equivalent to the bowel movements of 93,450 people.18
A mat of white bacteria thus gathers beneath the pens, polluting the water with sulfides and causing oxygen levels to drop; little except hardy worms may live in these toxic environments. In addition, the fish exist in such crowded conditions that they are more easily infested with sea lice parasites, causing unsightly blemishes. Since blemished flesh is shunned by customers, fish farm operators are compelled to treat the sea lice outbreaks with pesticides, which can be poisonous for nearby animals such as lobsters. The sea lice may also transfer infectious salmon anemia, a disease that can be fatal to salmon and has wiped out huge stocks of farmed New Brunswick salmon in past years. When the province paid out compensation to fish farm operators like Cooke, there was a public outcry against the misuse of public funds. Opinions among fishermen and Native groups are complex: some of them decry the pollution and competition from salmon aquaculture operations, but others work in the industry itself and rely on aquaculture for steady incomes. The controversy over salmon aquaculture is most vociferous in North America, particularly the Pacific Northwest, which has the largest concentration of salmon pens; in Chile and Norway, governments are more lenient toward salmon aquaculture, and there is more space available for salmon farming operations, easing tensions and increasing profitability.
Although salmon aquaculture is new, aquaculture was known a thousand years ago to the Chinese, who raised carp in ponds, a practice that spread to Europe in the Middle Ages. Nowadays, basa and tra fish are raised in Southeast Asian ponds. Carp, basa, and tra are suitable fish to raise in ponds because they eat a broad variety of foods, including plant foods and human wastes, enabling recycling of valuable nutrients. Catfish have the same potential, and many are farmed in the States. All these fish, however, are challenging to export to Western markets because the fish have a muddy taste in their flesh, and the numerous small bones of carp make them difficult eating for people unaccustomed to the chore of picking out bones. On the other hand, once you develop a taste for carp and basa, they can be addictive. As I learned from living in China and Vietnam, Chinese people revere their carp, steamed or fried, bones be damned, and the Vietnamese simmer basa in soy sauce with ginger and garlic until it becomes pleasantly caramelized; the fat of the basa fish leaves a pleasant feel in the mouth alongside a dish of rice, never mind that these fish may have been fattened on human excrement in fish ponds.
Environmentalists would be far happier if salmon were raised in ponds that were inland instead of offshore, because the fish wastes and diseases would be contained more easily and escapees would be less of an issue. But raising a big fish like salmon in a pond is expensive: Salmon raised in recirculated water have a terrible taste, so rearing edible salmon requires either great quantities of freshwater or more extensive and expensive water treatment. Environmentalists counter by saying that open-water fish farms are polluting the oceans without paying, so it’s only fair that aquaculture companies should bear these costs.
But it’s not just the aquaculture companies who would absorb the costs—consumers would have to pay a premium for the privilege of eating salmon raised inland. The main reason that I sat down to a dinner of salmon with Dounia and her friends was that the salmon had been farmed and was therefore affordable. As a marine scientist working on lobsters, Dounia knew about the problems of farmed salmon, but she didn’t have much choice. There was a fish market near her house, but it was only open when she was working. The same problem applies to sushi bars, which most commonly serve farmed salmon because it is easier to ship and keep fresh. Omega-3 fatty acids, which are easily damaged by heat and spoil quickly, are best obtained from fresh fish. Cooke Aquaculture prides itself on delivering fresh fish to consumers. The company’s biggest asset is its proximity to the major consumer markets in eastern North America, cities like Toronto, Montreal, and New York City; the salmon that ends up on supermarket shelves arrives within forty-eight hours. For many chefs passionate about serving the freshest fish available, farmed salmon is the most popular option.
My tour continues to the Cooke fish-processing plant. The speed at which the salmon are processed is astonishing. The fish whiz along conveyer belts, and a well-groomed team pulls out fish parts when they face the wrong direction, jam up machines, or appear unsightly. After the heads are sliced off (the fish were killed by pneumatic gun after being pulled out of the pens), the bodies are sliced in half, the fins and bones are removed, the skin is descaled, and leftover bones are picked out by a platoon of workers. The workers (many of them are from the Philippines and Romania and were hired on guest worker programs) look a little grim: The noise in the plant is deafening, the air chilly, and the gorgeous weather outside a fantasy for workers on twelve-hour shifts, but these are valuable jobs, and the premises are exactingly clean. There is hardly any of the fishy smell one might expect with a fishmonger or fish factory.
Later that evening, two Cooke reps, Chuck Brown, the communications manager, and Michael Szemerda, a vice president at the location, sit down with Thierry and me over dinner. The seared salmon is among the best that I have ever tasted, smooth and free of fishy tang. The flesh is a pleasing pink, due to a food-coloring carotenoid called canthaxanthin that is added to farmed salmon feed (and also chicken feed, to give an orange pigment to egg yolk and chicken fat). Wild salmon are additive-free, obtaining their carotenoids from krill. Chuck and Michael acknowledge that their business model is not perfect and that better environmental measures have to be instituted. Monterey Bay Aquarium and SeaChoice, a Canadian seafood program, issue three levels of recommendations for seafood: Green = Best Choice, Yellow = Some Concern, Red = Avoid. Atlantic salmon is labeled Red: Avoid. The decision disappoints Michael, who grumbles, “They try to paint everything with the same brush. Some of the reasons why they mark you as Red have absolutely nothing to do with us. Someone in Chile grows Atlantic salmon, which is not something that’s native to Chile, but Atlantic salmon is native to the east coast of Canada! Everyone gets a Red.”
Thierry runs a project with Cooke in an effort to mitigate environmental concerns. He grows seaweed near the salmon pens. The concept, known as IMTA (integrated multitrophic aquaculture), centers on the idea of putting together plants and aquatic animals that work symbiotically. Thierry’s plan is that seaweed and mussels will absorb the fecal and food wastes from the fish pens, recycling the nutrients and also providing another marketable product. Thierry has his work cut out for him, however. Aside from industrial uses, such as providing carrageenans that are widely used as food thickeners and stabilizers, seaweed does not play a significant role in most Western diets—or not yet, at least. The new craze for sushi is gradually introducing Westerners to Japanese and Korean use of seaweed for crispy rice wrappers, sour and spicy salads, and heartening soups. Thierry points out that IMTA is more than just salmon, seaweed, and mussels; in theory, there are an infinite variety of plants and animals that could be usefully employed in conjunction with aquaculture, cleaning up the environment and providing food and other useful industrial products. Thierry believes IMTA could be done in closed-water systems as well.
Environmental groups are pushing hard to make aquaculture farms move their salmon operations inland. I drive out on a drizzly afternoon to meet with Inka Milewski, science advisor at the Conservation Council of New Brunswick, at her farm. Thin and thoughtful, she shows me pictures that she took of an abandoned fish farm: The seafloor beneath was covered in a filthy gray mat of bacteria; bubbles of sulphide gas streamed to the surface. Inka says inland fish farms are better than open-water fish pens, but she would prefer that there be no aquaculture at all. “We can’t play God with nature,” she says emphatically. Indeed, some studies have observed that inland fish farms have just as great an environmental impact as open-water fish farms, or worse, due to the energy and water inputs necessary to sustain the inland farms.
But where does this leave us? If we go with a system like SeaChoice and carry around a card whenever we buy seafood, the criteria seem overwhelming. For instance, wild Alaskan salmon is labeled as good, but Atlantic salmon and farmed salmon anywhere are bad, except Coho land-farmed salmon from the United States, which is permissible, and wild salmon from the Pacific Coast, which is designated as Yellow, Some Concern. With cod, the criteria are even more obscure: Consumers are advised to avoid Atlantic cod (from Canada) and Pacific cod (from Russia and Japan), but Pacific longline-caught cod from Alaska is considered okay, while Pacific bottom-trawl cod from the United States or British Columbia carries the Some Concern warning. Whew! And those are just two items out of a list of thirty-four seafood species.
