“Fish is the only grub left that scientists haven’t been able to get their hands on and improve. The flounder you eat today hasn’t got any more damned vitamins in it than the flounder your great-great-grandaddy ate, and it tastes the same. Everything else has been improved and improved and improved to such an extent that it ain’t fit to eat.” -a Fulton Fish Market, denizen, in Old Man Mr. Flood by Joseph Mitchell, 1944
And this is how Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food by Paul Greenberg begins.
Think about it. When you go out to eat or shop for seafood at your vendor of choice, what are your choices? There are four fish that reign above all other ones. They are: cod, salmon, sea bass and tuna. It’s possible that if one does not know better, one could think those are the only fish that exist in the world because we are rarely offered anything else.
Monterey Bay Aquarium provides a Seafood Watch Guide you can browse to see which seafood is safe and best to eat at that time. Also available as a printable pocket guide, it can tell you which fish are your best choices, good alternatives as well as ones to avoid. After reading Four Fish, it appears we are not paying enough attention to such important things. If we aren’t careful, these four will end up on the avoid list because they will be so low in numbers.
Within this book, Greenberg also takes us on a mini history lesson. In early times, it was unnecessary to think of preserving wild food. People didn’t even think that we had the potential to harm the world. In present day, the situation is very different. We eat, live, breathe, dispose and do as we please. While we are not doing what needs to be done to preserve our oceans, we are very aware of the consequences. Hopefully, we follow the advisement of Four Fish and change our course before it’s too late.
Paul Greenberg, author of James Beard Award bestseller Four Fish -Quinn
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