This is hailed as a breakthrough by fish breeders, but as Greenberg observes, these salmon have been reared at the cost of the nine billion pounds of wild fish that have been caught and ground into pellets to feed them. In the US, thanks to ruthless overfishing of the waters off Greenland by the Scandinavians in the 1960s, 'there is no longer a popular memory of wild Atlantic salmon as food'.Īt the same time, the world now produces more than three billion pounds of farmed salmon annually, in countries as distant as Norway, Chile and Canada.

'With wild fish we have chosen, time after time, to ignore the fundamental limits the laws of nature place on eco-systems and have consistently removed more fish than can be replaced by natural processes. What we have seen, he writes of sea-fish in general, is a wave of psychological denial of staggering scope. With that abundance now in catastrophic decline, Four Fish is an examination of the present-day state of salmon, sea-bass, cod and tuna, and the strategies for their conservation. He thought of the sea as 'a vessel of desires and mystery, a place of abundance I did not need to question'.

Encouraged by his mother, who sensed in the pursuit 'a masculine, character-building quality', Greenberg learned to fish in Long Island Sound. That there's another side to the aquaculture issue, and that some of the best minds in world science are trained on it is made clear in Paul Greenberg's accessible and enlightening Four Fish. If other people wanted to put this stuff in their mouths, fine. Where wild salmon had made epic journeys, growing to adulthood in the ocean before battling up-river to spawn, these zombie-fish had spent their lives in cages, ingesting a murky backwash of growth-pellets and their own faeces. As an angler, I knew what healthy salmon looked like – streamlined bars of silver, full-finned, hard with muscle – and the spongy cadavers I had begun to see on certain supermarket and fishmonger's slabs, with their stunted fins, deformed gill-covers, and artificially pink flesh, were anything but healthy.

If I had been wary about eating farmed fish up to that point, I was doubly so thereafter. A few years ago, as part of a journalistic assignment, I was crossing the North Sea by nuclear submarine, and just before I was put ashore on the west coast of Scotland, the vessel voided its waste tanks into the waters of the inlet, along whose shoreline extended a salmon farm.

Paul greenberg fish