Tuna meltdown: is there an alternative?
Numbers of bluefin tuna are so low that the species is heading for extinction. But there is hope for this magnificent red-fleshed, warm-blooded fish. Salvation may come in the form of Kona Kampachi, which is abundant and has the sushi bite of bluefin. Isn't it time we changed the menu and got tuna off the hook?
Whale carpaccio – 130 kroners." Thus read the lead starter on the menu in an upscale Norwegian restaurant where I was dining on a winter evening not long ago. Eight slices of whale arranged raw on a plate for the reasonable price of about £13. I have to admit that the prospect of ordering it was intriguing. A near global commercial whaling moratorium has been in effect since 1986, with only Norway, Iceland and Japan refusing to stop. I had never been to a country that still practised whaling, and I had certainly never seen whale on a menu. What would whale taste like, I wondered. Would it be fatty and chewy like beef, or would it have the loose, flaky texture of fish that don't need dense muscles to resist the pull of gravity? Would it be served like prosciutto, with a thin slice of Parmesan cheese? Or, since carpaccio is an Italian dish, would it be more appropriate merely to drizzle olive oil over the whale's buttery sheen?
These were the thoughts that made my mouth water as the waitress approached my table. But when she asked me in blunt Nordic style if I'd like to "try the whale", all at once my 21st-century foodie curiosity wilted. "No," I said, "I'll have the mussels."
I would like to be able to say that I did not "try the whale" because of some superior moral quality I possessed. But which animals we think of as food and which we think of as living creatures is highly contextual. My conception that a whale was somehow too good to eat comes from a historical process that predates me by nearly two centuries, a process that has yet to happen with fish.
A couple of years afterwards the New York Times asked me to write an opinion essay on whether people should continue to eat fish. I considered this question for a long time and conferred with people on both sides of the issue. In the end I decided to try to track a middle course, saying that yes, we should still eat fish, that it was important that we still regard the ocean as a living source of food and not just a place to spill our oil and dump our garbage. However, I stipulated that a few basic guidelines should be followed to find a balance between human desire and ocean sustainability.
I covered the usual topics one comes across at sustainable-seafood conventions: that one should favour fish caught by small-scale hook-and-line fishers because of the lower impact on seabeds and underwater reefs. That when choosing aquacultured fish one should choose vegetarian fish, like tilapia and carp, because of the lower strain they put on marine food webs. When it came to tuna, though, I offered no triangulation whatsoever, because in my view there simply was no compromise possible. "Don't eat the big fish," I declared toward the end of the article. "Dining on a 500lb bluefin tuna is the seafood equivalent of driving a Hummer."
But two weeks after making my high-minded pronouncements, I found myself at a family dinner party at an upscale restaurant. The first-course choice on the prix fixe menu was either a mini-sirloin steak or bluefin tuna carpaccio. It would seem the choice should have been simple. I had my principles, and I had expressed them quite publicly.
But unlike the earlier moment in Norway when I successfully kept myself from ordering whale carpaccio, this time, nearly without hesitation, I chose the bluefin. I quickly scarfed it down and nearly forgot about the delicious paper-thin slices after they had been washed away with a glass of pinot grigio. I turned to my 12-year-old daughter, who had ordered the sirloin steak, and asked her how her food was. She had just read my article in draft form. "Hypocrite," she said coolly.
In the modern world whales are simply not considered food, while bluefin tuna are judged an acceptable delicacy. But based on population numbers and the international regulatory structures in place for each kind of animal, whale carpaccio is the carpaccio of choice. The whale on my menu at that restaurant in Bergen, Norway was most probably a minke whale, an animal whose population in the wild, after the moratorium was put in place, has grown to more than a quarter of a million animals (estimates vary widely, with some putting the population at close to 1m). Norwegians continue to conduct "scientific whaling" for research purposes. Some of those research subjects end up in restaurants as whale carpaccio.
But judging Norway's dubious moral position on whales becomes increasingly problematic when those countries doing the judging are nations that fish bluefin tuna. The most pessimistic estimates indicate that the population of Atlantic bluefin may have already imploded beyond the point of recovery. Even before the British Petroleum oil spill fouled one of the world's only two Atlantic bluefin spawning grounds in the Gulf of Mexico, some scientists put the total number of ecologically critical 12-year-old-plus bluefin mega-spawners in the western stock at a mere 9,000 animals, or in food terms about 43m individual slices of sashimi.
And whereas only three countries still hunt whales commercially, every year dozens of fishing nations gear up to hunt bluefin when the eastern stock arrives from North America and passes through the Strait of Gibraltar in an increasingly fruitless quest to spawn in the Mediterranean. Fishermen are fond of claiming the Mediterranean bluefin fishery is "highly regulated", yet in 2007 every single member nation violated catch limits set by a kind of International Whaling Commission of tuna, called the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT). In 2008 catch quotas were set at double what biologists on ICCAT's scientific committee recommended.
Fishmongers examine tuna at Tokyo’s Tsukiji fish market earlier this year. One fish weighing 512lb was sold for $178,000. Photograph: Jiji Press/AFP/Getty Images Bluefin, then, represent a very whale-like dilemma. They are big. As such, they are ecologically limited in their populations. Even before they were commercially fished, they were never anywhere near as plentiful as cod, salmon or sea bass. Like whales, whose migrations carry them sometimes from pole to pole, tuna are far-ranging and committed to no single nation. Their transience is intractable and indeed imperative to the continuation of their life cycles. They are in many respects an unmanageable fish.
Other, smaller tuna – the longfin albacore that make up the bulk of the tinned-tuna fishery and yellowfin – may be more manageable (they grow faster, spawn earlier, and have slightly less far-flung peregrinations). But if the bluefin go bust, the other species are next in line. They are sure to face increasing fishing pressure from a broader range of nations.
In the past two decades, conservationists have pushed multiple times to list the bluefin in Appendix One of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Flora and Fauna, or Cites – a status achieved by tigers, rhinos and giant pandas, and a change that would end the international trade in bluefin, theoretically putting an end to their export to their primary market, Japan. But every time this option is put forth the bluefin-hunting countries prevail.
At the most recent Cites convention held this past spring in Doha, Qatar, both the European Union and the United States backed a Cites listing for Atlantic bluefin for the first time. Nevertheless the usual dynamic came to pass: one wealthy nation nominated the species for Cites inclusion (this time around it was Monaco). Afterward a host of poorer nations torpedoed the motion in collaboration with Japan. This despite the fact that a cessation of international trade in bluefin is probably the only thing that can halt the fish's decline – a whale-like scenario in which nobody would be able to profit from the animal, at least until the species has a few years to rebuild its numbers. Some tuna advocates are coming to the conclusion that a different tack has to be taken, one that would try to convert bluefin from a wild animal into a domesticated creature, one that would allow us to grow all the tuna we'd ever need.
BLUEFIN have been "farmed" on tuna "ranches" in the Mediterranean since the late 1990s – a practice which today removes more wild young fish from the sea than traditional capture fisheries. Some success has also been achieved in "closing the life cycle" of bluefin, and at least two companies are engaged in trying to fully domesticate the fish for the farm. But bluefin swim at a lightning pace and may require as much as 15lb of wild forage fish to produce a single pound of tuna. If tuna farming ever scales up to the size of salmon farming, then the wild oceans will surely pay the price.
In addition, there is little evidence to suggest that taming a species saves its wild forebear. Tiger farms in China have not halted tiger declines in the wild. The example of whales again rises. As the science historian D Graham Burnett points out in a forthcoming book on the Save the Whales movement, collaborations between American nuclear scientists and marine biologists were once proposed in the 1960s whereby tropical atolls, levelled by nuclear testing, could be used as giant corrals for the commercial farming of cetaceans. But fortunately for the whale – and I think for us, too – we have come to see the whale not as something we fish for, not as something we farm, but as something we appreciate and maybe empathise with. Instead of expanding our stomachs or our wallets, whales have expanded our consciousness, our very humanity.
So we have to ask ourselves: is bluefin tuna really so special that no substitute will do? Japanese defenders of the bluefin trade cite the long cultural tradition of tuna sushi in Japan. But when you look at it in a historical context, the Japanese have a very short tradition of eating bluefin. Before the American occupation of Japan, the Japanese preferred lean fish and meats and found the bluefin too fatty to stomach. It was only after the Second World War and the subsequent introduction of fatty beef into the Japanese diet that a taste for the fatty "otoro" belly of bluefin started to become fashionable. If the Japanese adapted to a higher-fat diet in less than half a century, can we not shift gears again and adapt to a sustainable diet in the same period of time?
It was in answer to these questions that I set out trying to discover a truly thick-fleshed farmed fish that could fulfil the steaky category most seafood diners now expect to see on a menu. A fish that had the "bite" of tuna but might have a footprint more akin to that of a barramundi or a sea bream.
And so I found myself in a dive boat three miles off the coast of the Big Island of Hawaii, motoring across the cerulean blue of the South Pacific with a tall, highly optimistic Australian named Neil Sims. Eventually we neared the site of Sims's farm – a huge underwater ziggurat that is the centre of his company Kona Blue.
It had been a long time since I'd scuba dived, and even when I'd first learned in college my skills had been rudimentary at best. We were now about to embark on what is called in scuba a "blue-water dive" – a plunge into the open ocean, hovering over a depth of nearly 300ft of water. Because such a dive does not take place above a coral reef, a seawall or any other structure, a blue-water dive is extremely scary. There are no perceivable reference points that allow the diver to determine depth. If the diver is, like me, inexperienced, he can freak out, lose his bearings, fail to establish neutral buoyancy with his buoyancy- compensator vest and find himself sinking unstoppably. If this happens, the diver will surely die. Either he will be crushed like a tin can at the bottom or, because he sank so low that he did not have adequate oxygen to surface slowly and decompress, oxygen will boil out of his blood and block his veins and arteries when he dashes to the surface. I was busy trying to keep cool and not betray the fact that I was scared shitless.
This all crumpled when Sims patted me on the back, looked me in the eye and said: "Got your wetsuit on backwards, mate."
Sims was flying in the face of convention when it came to his selection of fish. Up until very recently, most of the fish that we've chosen for our consumption and domestication have been accidents. We have taken those species because we knew them as wild game and then found that they fit well into our culinary and economic niches. We seldom considered their biological profiles or whether they gelled well with conditions that humankind could provide them.
Norway selected Atlantic salmon as its target farmed fish because the demise of wild temperate-zone rivers around the Northern Hemisphere was a common plight. Most Americans or Europeans had a distant memory of wild salmon, but practically no one had access to a reliable supply of it. Farmed salmon reclaimed that lost memory.
Israelis chose to pursue the domestication of the European sea bass because it was known in nearly all countries of the Mediterranean and because it was so overfished that it fetched a high price.
Cod became the first global fish commodity, mainly because it took well to preserving – dried cod lasts for years and could be shipped around the globe even on the slowest of ocean-going vessels. But when farmed, cod is expensive and slow-growing – disastrous as an aquaculture product.
But Sims came to aquaculture through environmental zeal, not with the intention of making a buck. And it was his direct personal experience with the limitations of fisheries management that convinced him that fish farming was a better choice than fish catching.
Sims began his career in the remote Cook Islands of the South Pacific. There he was responsible for managing a giant snail called a trochus that produces an attractive pearly shell, valuable to native jewellers. Over half a decade, he implemented numerous management strategies. Nothing worked – not even shortening the harvest season drastically. The day after one season ended, he came across a bare-chested Polynesian elder who had pulled his dugout canoe on to the beach. Sims looked inside the boat and saw it filled with trochus.
''I yelled at him,'' Sims remembers. ''Then he yelled at me. He started to cry. Then I started to cry, and then the old bugger finally says: 'Why? Why did you close the season? There are still some left!'''
This moment prompted him to look beyond fishing, to an entirely different approach.
A chain of events led him to Hawaii, where there were small government grants available for research into marine aquaculture. "People were trying out the Hawaiian fish called moi. It's a niche species, really. And they were also trying milkfish and mullet." None of these species, Sims felt, truly addressed the niche that needed to be filled by sustainability – the niche of thick-fleshed predators such as tuna.
It was at this point that Sims decided to turn the equation of aquaculture on its head. Instead of finding a fish that people knew, that was scarce and that had an established market, Sims wanted to find a fish that was right for aquaculture, whether or not it was known.
Eventually Sims came across a fish that previously had no market value whatsoever. Seriola rivoliana, known as the Almaco jack or the kahala in Hawaii, is a speedy, firm-fleshed bluewater species of the same family of fish as yellowtail and amberjack. Kahala are only distantly related to tuna and do not have their ruby-red colour, but they still have the thick, dense flesh of tuna and could easily pass for white albacore if prepared as sushi.
Another important factor about kahala is that they were never fished commercially and are hence quite abundant. In their wild form kahala can carry ciguatera poison – a toxin sometimes deadly to humans that kahala ingest when they feed around coral reefs. But when kahala are isolated away from reefs and fed a traditional aquaculture diet of soy and fishmeal, they are ciguatera-free. And because the wild population of kahala is large and healthy, they are unlikely to be severely damaged through interaction with farmed populations. Moreover, farmed kahala have a good feed-conversion ratio. Without any selective breeding whatsoever, the amount of fish required to produce a pound of kahala ranges from 1.6-to-1 to 2-to-1, which is 10 times better than the feed-conversion ratio for bluefin tuna. Feed trials beginning this summer will introduce pellets made from recycled fish discards that contain no directly harvested forage fish at all.
Even better, unlike bluefin, which require a tremendous investment in spawning technology, kahala are naturally fecund. When I asked Sims later if he uses industry-standard practices like hormone pellets or photo-period manipulation to get the fish to spawn, he responded cheekily. "No, we do not use any hormones or environmental manipulation. We tried soft music and candlelight and a little wine, and it worked just as well without. So we kept the wine for ourselves." Kahala breed constantly, sometimes weekly, throughout the year. They are, in short, the sushi fish we should have chosen from the start.
The problem is no one quite knows what they are. Neil Sims and a marketing team have decided to call the fish "Kona Kampachi" – Kona for its point of origin and kampachi based on a similar fish that is consumed in Japan. A sushi chef I later asked about the fish complained: "Well, you know, Kona Kampachi – that's an artificial name. Kampachi is kampachi, and it is from Japan." And like all aquaculturists, Sims does have dreams of grandeur beyond what might be biologically correct. He has proposed expanding his farm away from Hawaii to the shores of Mexico – a practice I don't support because of the obvious problem of introducing a non-native species to a new environment.
But expansion or not, the fish as an aquaculture animal has real benefits. Diving into the waters around Kailua-Kona, watching Sims up ahead of me, I felt the sensation of a whole different world emerging before me. I glided down, down, down, past the beautiful fish swimming in unison in their net pen. The site of these pens had been chosen carefully and was far enough from coastal areas to mitigate the impact on the seaside; regular monitoring has shown the seabed beneath the cages to be in better shape than seabeds beneath inshore salmon cages. Down and down I drifted. From below I looked up at the cage, seeing how little it looked in relation to the bigness of the ocean.
Suddenly I saw a human hand reach over in front of me and grab my diving vest. In the silent communication that happens underwater, I could read the grave concern in Sims's eyes. He looked at me wide-eyed and pointed down. I glanced below and saw the huge, gaping maw of the lifeless ocean beneath me. I had incorrectly set my buoyancy compensator, my human swim bladder, and if he hadn't grabbed me, I would have been well on my way to sinking into the 300ft trench below. Sims expertly inflated my vest. I began to float easily, and my breathing quieted.
Sims waved me over to the side of the net pen. I floated above him silently, close enough to see that the fish actually seemed to recognise him. In what he'd later describe to me as the "rock-star effect", the fish crowded to be close to him, expecting from him some kind of deliverance or gift or both. Sims spread his arms out wide and seemed to take in their adulation.
Kona Kampachi has a fat content more than 30% higher than most tuna. It retails for around £12-15 a pound in fillet form and to date has a tenuous foot in the market. Production reached more than a million pounds in 2008. After a hiatus during most of 2009 and the first part of 2010 while Sims reconfigured his cages, the product was reintroduced in July with even more capacity. The fish does not have the rich ruby colour of tuna (a colour often enhanced artificially by "gassing" tuna with carbon monoxide), but it is an extremely pleasant sushi experience – it satisfies the sashimi yen for the firm musculature of a fast-swimming pelagic fish.
And for those who would still favour tuna, Sims is quick to point out the essential imbalance between humans and those great fish. "Is tuna farming really going to be able to sate the panting palates all around the planet? We certainly cannot do it on the backs of wild bluefin or wild yellowfin any more than we could sustainably feed the world with wild woolly mammoths."
Kona Kampachi is slowly getting a reputation. But as the world tries to emerge from financial crisis, money for ventures such as Kona Blue may dry up. Can we embrace a whole new set of species that we don't know intimately? Can true sustainability rise above the noise of so many pretenders to that name? Can we come to an understanding of which fish work for us and which fish don't?
I would hope so. I'd hope that these traits, these characteristics, become the traits and characteristics we desire most. Our survival and the survival of the wild ocean may depend on it. I took one more look at Sims floating below me with arms outstretched, his kahala finning in the current, each one mutely appraising this conductor of an all-too-silent concert. The only sound was the whir of bubbles boiling by my ears up toward the silver mirror of the surface above.
The Atlantic Bluefin tuna are among the fastest, most powerful fish in the world. Even the most confirmed enemy of "intelligent design" theories can have a hard time imagining the forebears of these great fish inching slowly down an epochs-long evolutionary course to become modern tuna. They seem like deus ex machina incarnate, or rather machina ex deo – a machine from God.
How else could a fish develop a sextant-like ''pineal window'' in the top of its head that scientists say enables it to navigate over thousands of miles? How else could a fish develop a propulsion system whereby a whip-thin crescent tail vibrates at fantastic speeds, shooting the bluefin forward at speeds that can reach 40mph? And how else would a fish appear within a mostly cold-blooded phylum that can use its metabolic heat to raise its body temperature far above that of the surrounding water, allowing it to traverse the frigid seas of the subarctic?
Yes, bluefin tuna are warm-blooded.
Bluefin can be extremely large – in excess of 14ft and 1,500lb – but for those of us who have held them alive, their smooth hard-shell skins barely containing the surging muscle power within, they are something bigger than the space they occupy. All fish are a distinctly different colour when alive than when dead on ice in a seafood market. But with tuna the shift from alive to dead seems more profound. Sometimes fresh out of the water with their backs pulsing neon blue and their bellies gleaming pink-silver iridescence, they seem like the very ocean itself.
And in a way they are. If salmon led us out of our Neolithic caves in the highlands down to the mouths of rivers, if sea bass and other coastal fish led us from the safety of shore to the reefs and rocks that surround the coasts, and if cod led us beyond the sight of land to the edges of the continental shelves, tuna have taken us over the precipice of the continental shelves into the abyss of the open sea – the final frontier of fishing, and the place where the wildest things in the world are making the last argument for the importance of an untamed ocean.
We now face a battle between the altruism toward other species that we know we can muster and the primitive greed that lies beneath our relationship with the creatures of the sea. And yet it is a battle that has been fought and won before, against high odds. Looking back over the history of the ocean, we can see that there is one order of sea creatures bigger than tuna that has earned our empathy and, more important, our protective resolve, rising up from the background of marine life to become a superstar of conservation, on a par with the tiger and the elephant. Perhaps we will never come to feel about tuna the way we have come to feel about whales, but it is to this example we must look if we are to fix our tuna problem once and for all.
Four Fish: A Journey from the Ocean to Your Plate (Allen Lane, £14.99) by Paul Greenberg is out now
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