Day Thirty-Six: Thoughts on Fish and a Substitute Workout

Just before the project started for Team Fantastic Carrot, a long article ran in the NYT Magazine, excerpted from a book that's just out: Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food by Paul Greenberg. The upshot: of the 23 types of commercially fished tuna, 7 are depleted and an additional 9 are threatened. Some pertinent info:

Until the modern era, the response to wild-game decline has been a primitive one: widespread destruction of the animals that can’t stand up to our hunting followed by the selection of a handful of ones that we can tame. Out of the many mammals that our forebears ate before the last ice age, humans selected four — cows, pigs, sheep and goats — to be their principal meats. Out of all the many birds that darkened the primeval skies, humans chose four — chickens, turkeys, ducks and geese — to be their poultry.

And indeed, this is a process that is taking shape rapidly with fish. Atlantic salmon are now commercially extinct throughout almost the entirety of their range but have become one of the most widely farmed fish in the world.

...

As fisheries decline globally, more and more countries are trying to replace their wild fish with farmed ones. Today 30 million tons of small forage fish are removed from the oceans yearly, with the majority of it going to feed farmed fish. If we end up farming bluefin on the same scale as we now farm salmon, the tuna, with its poor feed-conversion rate, may end up taking the food of the remaining wild fish that we haven’t yet got around to catching.

It's not just tuna. Cod, halibut, haddock, swordfish, marlin, skate--according to a recent New Yorker article (prompted by the same book plus two other recent ones on the subject), calculations are that large carnivorous wild fish have declined by 90% in the last 50 years. We're emptying the oceans fast. Basically, most of the fish you can buy at sushi restaurants or in the grocery store are neither caught nor farmed sustainably.

Of course, once the project started, we were instructed to eat lean animal protein, with fish at the top of the hierarchy of healthiness. I've been eating too much cheap tuna out of cans, finding it convenient but not delicious, and thinking all the while that I'm contributing to this culture of wild overfishing. And the farmed salmon or catfish fillets I buy aren't that much more sustainable. What to do about it? I'm trying to switch mostly to chicken, although I don't think a single source of protein is all that good. I'm jealous that Naty and Ramiro live near a lake and have access to local fish that they know doesn't come from giant purse-seiners. Probably, after this project, fish will drop mostly out of my diet again.

(Dusk on Victoria Peak)

In less global but equally frustrating news, a technical glitch meant that this week's workout sheets haven't come through yet (and it's currently after 8 pm for me). Instead of whatever today's workout should have been, I climbed Victoria Peak. My apartment is about halfway up from the harbor, but there was still a good 30 minutes at a 15-40% grade, followed by another couple of hours of flat walking combined with 15 minutes of staring at the view and the walk back down. All told, my legs got a good working out, as did the cardiovascular system. I may do some arm exercises and 8-minute abs to round it out, but no promises.