Once cod do spawn in captivity, all the techniques of feed and juvenile rearing that were invented by the European sea bass farmers are applied in very similar fashion. Enriched rotifers are fed to hatchlings, enriched artemia to the next size up, and, finally, feed pellets derived from fish meal are fed to the larger fish until they reach market weight. At Johnson’s, though, the standard fish meal of ground-up wild little fish had been replaced by “organic” fish meal approved by the Scottish Soil Association. In order to qualify as organic, fish meal must be derived from “off-cuts”—i.e, fins, bones, and other discarded parts of filleted commercially caught fish—the idea being that since these parts would have been discarded anyway, recycling them as fish meal extends the usefulness of the original wild-caught fish. But even though organic meal is in effect recycled fish, it is considerably more expensive than traditional fish feed, sometimes twice as expensive.
And so at Johnson’s, with all its attention to animal welfare and politically correct feeds, the price of production was considerable. Hoping to achieve an economy of scale, Johnson’s at the time of my visit was in the process of a massive ramp-up. The company had just built an airplane-hangar-size rearing facility in 2006, and when the juveniles raised in the airplane hangar were harvested in 2009, eight thousand tons of fish were anticipated—more than the current legal wild catch of Massachusetts’s Georges Bank. In order to reclaim costs on this tremendous investment of time, money, and resources, Johnson’s cod was set to sell at twenty dollars a pound, nearly double what wild-caught fish cost. But Rzepkowski presented the case as an environmental cause, not an economic one. “Aquaculture has the potential to apply the best practice with really no adverse effects to the environment,” he told me shortly before I left the Shetlands. “You can actually mass-produce a product in an environmentally benign fashion if you just apply some rational thought to it.”
Having the voice of wild-cod fishermen in one ear and cod aquaculturists in the other produced a certain dissonance, to say the least. Which was the right course for cod? A patient, carefully guided recovery with herder-fishermen gradually easing cod back to viability and onto the market? Or was such an approach an idealistic and unrealistic quest? Would the cycle of destruction that Mark Kurlansky showed to be so persistent in every cod stock in the world merely repeat itself if fishing continued? Would the world’s increasing need to have more and more millions of pounds of whitefish every year on a regular basis simply prove too much of a temptation? Would it be better instead to give up on the profession of fishing altogether and use disciplined, organic practices to bring a husbanded product to market that could be predictably and sustainably raised?
Even with the strongest arguments for taming cod, I felt an instinctual allegiance to the wild fish and a kind of passive hostility to the farmed version. But I was at a loss as to how to express what it was that I found amiss with what taxonomists might someday call
Gadus domesticus.
I felt the need for an outside opinion. Someone who would sit down at the table with me, taste the different versions of the fish, and weigh with me the pluses and minuses of both. And for this reason I decided to conduct an experiment. I e-mailed Karol Rzepkowski and asked him to send me two farmed codfish from the Shetlands. At the same time, I put in a request to Whole Foods for several fillets of fresh “sustainably caught” wild codfish. I also asked a Norwegian nonorganic cod-farming operation to send me their samples, as a control group. And then, with a little trepidation, I picked up the phone and invited Mark Kurlansky to lunch.
M
ark Kurlansky’s opinion is frequently sought out. In the seafood realm, coastal towns and seafood restaurants ask him to taste their fish, while in the literary world authors and editors hunt him down to blurb the multitude of single-word-titled books that have proliferated in
Cod
’s wake. “I like to help other writers out,” Kurlansky told me as I hurried to prepare the cod samples for our lunch, “but I don’t really want to
read
all these books. I just got sent one on pigeons. I don’t think I’m going to read the one on pigeons. I blurbed the one on rats. Do you realize how many of these books are coming out? There’s
Mauve,
the color that changed the world, and . . . you know, it’s just endless.”
But unlike many of those authors, Kurlansky came by the subject of
Cod
honestly. Long before he wrote about fish, he caught them for a living. His university education, in fact, owes its existence largely to a commercial trawler out of Gloucester, Massachusetts, that employed him during his high-school and college summers, when he caught cod day in and day out off Georges Bank. Also, unlike many commercial fishermen, who tend to avoid eating seafood, his family always included codfish as a regular part of their weekly diet. So much so that cod wasn’t even called cod at the dinner table. “We always called cod ‘fish,’ ” Kurlansky told me. “If I asked my mother what she was cooking for dinner, if it was cod, she’d just say ‘fish.’ ”
I let Kurlansky take a look at the Shetlands farmed codfish (I left one whole for this purpose). Opening my cooler, he reached in and grabbed the fish by its gill. He fingered the barbel under its chin—the tastebud-rich flap of skin that cod and other gadiforms use as an external tongue to taste the bottom as they swim along. Regarding the cod with some suspicion, he pulled on the barbel and looked it in the eye.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Just trying to see if it looks like a real cod.”
As Kurlansky continued to handle the cod, I went over and plated the fish that I had finished baking. Arranging them on the table in an arc so that I could remember which was which, I called Kurlansky to the table. He flaked them apart and smelled them as one would a fine wine. Putting down his fork, he made his assessments.
“Number one [the wild fish] had a good, loose flake. Like a textbook-perfect flake. Nice, but no taste. The second one [Norwegian conventionally farmed] had a very strong flavor. The flake was not good. There was a slight metallic taste, but it was not unpleasant. The third [Karol Rzepkowski’s Shetland organic-farmed] I found to have a very strong, unpleasant flavor. I’m not sure of what. It had an okay flake, not as okay as the first.”
Before revealing which was which, I asked him to pick a winner. “I might go with fish number one for the texture and the second for the flavor.” I pressed him to pick just one. “I might go with the second one,” he said finally. “Then again,” Kurlansky joked, throwing up his hands, “I might pick fish number four.”
When I at last revealed which fish was which, he gravitated back to the qualities of fish number one, the wild fish.
“The first one was exactly like a cod is supposed to be. I was just sort of amazed that it had no taste. But I guess cod is like that sometimes.”
The more he thought about it, the more he became focused on the texture.
“If you talk to people in cod cultures, what they talk about is the texture, not the flavor. I just find it so interesting that the texture was the thing that was off with the farmed fish. In hindsight, I think of course it’s about muscle. Those farmed fish aren’t living a cod’s life.”
The Kurlansky taste test, over and above the scoring, pointed to something that I had found disquieting when I’d visited Karol Rzepkowski’s cod-farming operation. Listening to Rzepkowski talk about rapacious overfishing, catch quotas, and the importance of an organic approach, I couldn’t help but notice how, though he was clearly very well intentioned, those intentions were being warped by the need to produce a sustainable business model. It was only after I bade good-bye to Kurlansky and reflected on the whole of my farmed- and wild-cod experience that I started to understand what it was that I found bothersome.
With all fish facing declines, scarcity can have a weird effect—it can become a kind of marketing tool. Even though cod should be so common that a person like Mrs. Kurlansky should call it simply “fish,” Rzepkowski saw the public perception of cod-in-trouble as a way of raising the animal’s profile, of making it somehow special and different, “COD” rather than just familiar old “fish.” Given the historical, biological, and economic roles that cod has played, I wasn’t quite sure that was the right role for the animal. Cod was most distinctly
not
a king, not a holiday fish; it was an everyday fish. And its lack of extreme abundance in the wild was something we needed to address and fix, not something we could merely replace with a farmed product.
And in the end, even though Rzepkowski had in his mind created a more sustainable model, his farmed codfish proved to be even more fragile than the wild fish of Georges Bank. The year after my visit to the Shetlands, Johnson Seafarms cod was rebranded as “No Catch,” and a bizarre series of advertisements followed. The Web site was particularly weird—on the site, Rzepkowski and his colleagues appeared as video faces set atop strange, Monty Pythonesque moving stick figures. Overfishing is cheekily reduced to a quick cartoon of a boat swooping in, grabbing a school of cod, and leaving a handful in return. The cod chew toys are shown in garish colors, and animated cod leap out of the water in great numbers with every click of the mouse.
But all the hype of the Johnson’s-turned-No Catch cod could not overcome one crucial problem with trying to farm cod commercially. Cod have a bony, oversize head that accommodates a giant, oversize mouth: a head and mouth designed for conditions where prey is even more abundant than the already very abundant predator. Cod evolved this morphology in order to swim slowly with mouth agape, always ready to vacuum in everything from lobsters to herring so long as not too much energy is expended. But the average Western consumer wants nothing to do with a cod’s head. Huge amounts of money in a cod-farming operation are thus uselessly invested in growing thousands of tons of cod heads that no one wants. This, combined with the fact that it takes an exceptionally long time in aquaculture terms—three years, as opposed to two or less with salmon or sea bass—to grow a mature cod, adds to the difficulties. With cod you just don’t get enough meat fast enough for your money.
Lastly—and this is the argument that conservation organizations like the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Monterey Bay Aquarium lodge against the taming of any large predatory fish, be it European sea bass or salmon—the final crop of farmed cod produces a net marine protein loss for the sea. No Catch may have been using by-products from fish processing for its animal feed, but those discards could be more effectively used in faster-growing, more efficient animals like barramundi. It might be too late to rid the world of carnivorous, feed-intensive, farmed salmon (the industry is too large, too dug in to simply end), but that does not mean we should necessarily bring yet another carnivorous, feed-intensive fish into domestication. In a world where marine protein is getting scarce, playing around with a species merely because that species is well known and well liked can no longer really be justified. The outputs and the inputs need to be considered with equal weight.
Things at No Catch started going downhill in 2008. The huge capital (mostly from all those petrodollars sloshing around the Shetlands community) slowed to a trickle, and the money needed to keep the airport hangar filled with young cod became too much.
Most aquaculture operations, especially those trying out new species, begin their lives as losing ventures, and then, slowly, some begin to make a little money. Johnson’s cod farm just couldn’t make up the price. By the winter of early 2008, the company was in receivership. There was hope for a while that somehow it would continue operation under different management. But even that fell apart beneath the weight of tens of millions of pounds sterling of debt. Soon the company was broken up and the codfish were slaughtered and sold at cost. The remainder of No Catch’s resources was divvied up among its competitors, with the majority going to Norway, where a more industrial form of codfish farming was trying to make its way to market.
The Norwegians may yet succeed with farmed cod. Production has increased yearly, and in Norway a point of price parity has been reached with wild and farmed versions of the species. But even though Norwegian cod are cheaper (the price of, say, sirloin versus No Catch’s filet mignon), what the world needs is something several orders of magnitude less expensive—the seafood equivalent of ground chuck. The world needs Mrs. Kurlansky’s “fish,” not “COD,” and people want to get “fish” at the prices they believe “fish” is worth. And for this the public has discovered that it has had to look for something else entirely.
F
inding a replacement for that classic “flake” of codfish that Mark Kurlansky so appreciated, something that
did
“live a cod’s life” and had the “mouth feel” that fish eaters would find familiar and that furthermore would freeze and travel well was not an easy task. Not only would the flake have to be right, but, more important, there would have to be a lot of that flake to go around. With farmed cod failing to meet either of those requirements and with wild cod now hemmed in by the Sustainable Fisheries Act, the industry, in the wake of the Georges Bank and Grand Banks collapses, would have to find another species altogether. But whatever species they lit upon, the big supermarket chains would have the problem of relentless regular demand to contend with.
The modern supermarket has a basic internal ecology that finds an equilibrium between what its suppliers can produce and what its customers can consume. Terrestrial food, for the most part, fits well into that equation. Purchase orders for meat and bread can be put in months in advance with the full confidence that the hoofed mammals and monocot plants that we grow to produce those commodities will be present in sufficient numbers when it comes time for orders to be completed. The essential inputs are known (feed, fertilizer, water, land), the risks (disease, drought, heat, cold) are increasingly calculable and addressable, and the outputs (pounds of feed needed to produce a pound of edible beef) are measurable down to a decimal place.