Bestselling author of Four Fish Paul Greenberg looks to New York
oysters, gulf shrimp, and Alaskan salmon to tell the surprising story of
why Americans no longer eat from local waters
In 2005, the United States imported twelve billion dollars' worth of
seafood, nearly double what we had imported ten years earlier. During
that same period, our seafood exports rose by a third. In American
Catch, our foremost fish expert Paul Greenberg looks to New York
oysters, gulf shrimp, and Alaskan salmon to reveal how it came to be
that 91 percent of the seafood Americans eat is foreign.
As recently as 1928 the average New Yorker ate six hundred local oysters
a year. Today, the only edible oysters lie outside city limits. Looking
at the trail of environmental desecration, Greenberg comes to view the
New York City oyster as a reminder of what is lost when local waters are
not valued as a food source. To understand the complications of our
current moment, Greenberg visits the Gulf of Mexico. He arrives
expecting to learn of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill's lingering
effects on shrimpers, but instead finds that the more immediate threat
to business comes from overseas. Asian farmed shrimp--cheap, abundant,
and a perfect vehicle for the frying and sauces Americans love--have
flooded the American market.
Finally, Greenberg visits Bristol Bay, Alaska, home to the biggest wild
salmon run left in the world. A pristine, productive fishery, Bristol
Bay is now at great risk: The proposed Pebble Mine project directly
endangers the sockeye salmon's habitat. In his search to discover why
this precious renewable resource isn't better protected, Greenberg
discovers a shocking truth: 70 percent of all Alaskan salmon is sent out
of the country, much of it to Asia. Sockeye salmon is arguably the most
nutritionally dense animal protein on the planet, yet Americans are
shipping it abroad.
Despite the challenges, hope abounds. In New York, Greenberg connects
with an oyster restoration project with a vision for how the bivalves
might save the city from rising tides; in the gulf, shrimpers band
together to offer local catch direct to consumers. And in Bristol Bay,
fishermen, environmentalists, and local Alaskans gather to roadblock
Pebble Mine. In American Catch Paul Greenberg proposes there is a way
to break the current destructive patterns of consumption and return the
American catch back to American consumers.
