Four Fish

The medical industry recommends 2 servings of fish every week; preferably one fatty kind, like Salmon or Tuna, and another white fish. This, they say, is good for our health. If everyone on earth followed that advice, we would extirpate all edible fish from the ocean, and probably fresh water too. So ecology is against personal health. Historically, ecology always loses in such battles.

Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) predicted that the world will run out of foods to sustain human population. This famous Malthusian crisis became a fallacy. Industrial and green revolutions drastically increased human productivity and probably extended earth’s capacity for human population to essential infinity. (That is, we will have mastered space colonization before we run out of foods.) In term of food production, however, there is an interesting concept of “feed conversion ratio,” that certain foods are economically costlier to produce than others. If they are similar in terms of nutrition or to human palates, then it would be logical for us to choose those foods of better conversion ratio. Or, turning the question 180 degrees, if we are genetically engineering foods anyway, we should aim to make ones with better and better conversion ratio.

Paul Greenberg depicted the gloomy destinies for all four fish: Salmon, Bass, Cod, and Tuna. He loves Salmon and Tuna. They are beautiful animals, excellent in taste, and good for our health. Bass, to Paul, is a generic name for fishes of a similar shape and meat texture. Cod is supposed to be the epitome of ocean abundance. Human beings have long and loving relationships with all four fish for centuries. And, at the same time, we are destroying them, intentionally and systematically: people, Paul being one of them, simply enjoy hunting and eating those fish too much to stop. What to do?

Ban all industrial fishing. Fisheries shall be open only for “artisan fishermen” that are licensed and their catch limit controlled. For supermarket level consumption, turn to farm fish that have excellent conversion ratio, such as Tilapia.

Can wild- and farmed-form of any animal co-exist in this human-centric world? Yes, there are pigs and boar, farmed and wild turkeys, probably both farmed and wild rabbits too. Same could work for fish. Let’s see.

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