L’agronuvola che rispetta le coltivazioni

di Luca Dello Iacovo

Superati i confini urbani di Tokyo i campi di riso scolpiscono il paesaggio inquadrato dai finestrini del treno superveloce Skinkansen. In Giappone sono 6,7 milioni le famiglie impegnate nell’agricoltura secondo le rilevazioni del ministero degli Affari interni. Il progressivo invecchiamento della popolazione ha aperto interrogativi sulla trasmissione della tradizione imprenditoriale ereditata dalle coltivazioni. La domanda è come trasmettere conoscenze alle generazioni più giovani. E la risposta arriva dall’agrocloud. In dieci luoghi è attivo un progetto sperimentale per il monitoraggio in tempo reale: gli operatori nei campi fotografano le piante attraverso un’applicazione installata su un cellulare e inviano le immagini per ricevere consigli e assistenza, ad esempio per affrontare fitopatologie. Inoltre, una rete di dispositivi grandi quanto una chiavetta usb e disseminati sul terreno rileva i valori di umidità, temperatura e irraggiamento del sole sulla superficie di microaree, fino a ricostruire una mappa dettagliata e dinamica. Sono informazioni inviate attraverso i network di telefonia mobile di terza generazione e archiviate in banche dati: le infrastrutture nella nuvola informatica diventano piattaforme per simulazioni e analisi dell’efficienza gestionale, con un livello di dettaglio finora impossibile. Per adesso l’agrocloud è un’iniziativa in fase di test, elaborata da Fujitsu negli ultimi tre anni: entro il 2012 è previsto il primo sbarco sul mercato locale. In Giappone il fatturato derivante dai prodotti coltivati, secondo il ministero dell’Agricoltura, è di 8mila miliardi di yen, equivalenti a circa 80 miliardi di euro: il 37,5% deriva da sovvenzioni pubbliche.
Gli agrodati sono un ulteriore tassello dell’universo di big data che non ha ancora una definizione univoca: secondo Forrester research, ad esempio, big data significa analizzare «petabyte di informazioni strutturate e non strutturate ad alta velocità», dove un petabyte corrisponde a un miliardo di megabyte. A generarli sono sensori, social network, aziende, istituzioni pubbliche, cittadini. È una sfida raccolta dai colossi globali dell’hitech che supera i confini del settore business per rispondere alle esigenze della società, a partire dall’integrazione con la nuvola informatica di salute, agroindustria e reti intelligenti per la gestione dell’energia (smart grid). Diventa, a cascata, un’occasione di sviluppo per una filiera di piccole e medie imprese locali. Osserva Martin Schulz, direttore del Fujitsu research institute: «Anche una Silicon Valley giapponese potrà beneficiarne attraverso startup e venture business».
È una frontiera aperta. «Per analizzare big data serve un livello superiore di computing», ricorda Claus-Peter Unterberger, chief marketing officer di Fujitsu technology solutions. Al momento il supercomputer K ospitato a Kobe è il primo nella classifica dei Top500 al mondo. Ha raggiunto il 30% dell’operatività prevista: prima dell’estate sarà completato lo sviluppo dell’infrastruttura software. «Ha richiesto una squadra di circa trenta persone impegnate per 6-7 anni», spiega Tadashi Watanabe, project leader del centro R&D del Riken institute, equivalente del Cnr in Italia. È raffreddato da un sistema idraulico in grado di gestire mille tonnellate di acqua al giorno: la temperatura operativa nelle sale del supercomputer è di trenta gradi. La potenza di calcolo di dieci petaflop sarà accessibile anche all’esterno per le aziende, ad esempio durante la progettazione di automobili o nella ricerca farmaceutica. Big data riguarda l’immediato presente: resta un nodo aperto nella business intelligence di aziende medie e grandi. Dove è in rapido cambiamento il perimetro dell’ufficio a partire dalla diffusione dell’abitudine di lavorare su dispositivi mobili come cellulari e tablet utilizzati anche nel tempo libero, descritta dall’acronimo byod, «bring your own device». Che contribuisce all’espansione di big data.

Via ilsole24ore

2011 TEDxManhattan Fellow: Artist Stefani Bardin

Artist Stefani Bardin, TEDxManhattan 2011 Fellow, shows us her latest project — using a “smartpill” to reveal how we digest differently processed foods.

Stefani produces videos and immersive, interactive installations that explores the influences of corporate culture and industrial food production. Her current project works with gastroenterologist Dr. Braden Kuo at Harvard University where they just completed the first ever clinical study to use the M2A™ and SmartPill devices that look at how the human body responds to processed versus whole foods. She is an Honorary Resident at Eyebeam Art +Technology Center in New York and teaches in the School of Art, Media and Technology at Parsons The New School for Design and in the Food Studies Program at The New School for Public Engagement.

The Data That Proves Breakfast Is The Most Important Meal Of The Day

Yes, yes. It sounds like your mother nagging. But after crunching the data of thousands of users and their meals, the Eatery app discovered the truth: Skip breakfast and you’re going to eat worse food for the rest of the day, and more of it.

Don’t scoff: Breakfast really is important. If you replace it with a cup of coffee (or nothing at all), you’ll eat worse throughout the day than if you had taken the time to pour yourself a bowl of cereal, make some eggs, or even just grab an apple. The information comes from Massive Health’s Eatery iPhone app, which allows users to take pictures of their food, rate it based on perceived healthiness, and then rate other people’s photos. Massive Health extracted its data from hundreds of thousands of users.

Did you skip breakfast today? If you did, you are probably already thinking about lunch. You’re probably pretty hungry. And so you’re going to eat a lot. In fact, you’re going to eat 4.9% more food at lunch. The longer you wait, the more you’re going to eat. Do that every day and it starts to add up:

And what will that food be? Probably something not so good for you. Eatery found that, regardless of whether or not you eat breakfast, you eat worse and worse throughout the day. Lunch is worse than breakfast, and dinner is worse than lunch (and don’t even ask about snacking):

But breakfast is a good way to mitigate that. Eat a good breakfast and you start making better food decisions for the entire day–even late into the night.

The bottom line: People who eat breakfast are 12.3% healthier throughout the day than those who don’t, and people who don’t eat breakfast eat 6.8% more food throughout the day. Still not sold? Check out the full infographic below.

Via fastCoDesign

STREET FOOD MANIFESTO #1

October 21st from 7pm | RADIO presents STREET FOOD MANIFESTO #1

Street Food Manifesto – Starts of Friday the 21st of october and will grow and evolve until the end of december

TourDeFork in collaboration with Essen Taste magazine will be trying to analyze and asses the modern interpretation of street food, by accumulating, categorizing and extrapolating individual food products from their original context, whilst trying to apply a set of rules from their Street Food Manifesto – in order to determine what may be classified as street food and what cannot, emphasizing the theory that street food it’s not what, where or with who you eat it, but how.

www.essentaste.com

Friday 21 october | o19.00 — 22.00
RADIO Via Pestalozzi, 4 Milano
guest: Linda Troni / food designer
live: LËK SÈN [SENEGAL]
street food menù
PDF

Salsicce e hamburger in provetta Le staminali contro la fame nel mondo

Entro sei mesi il primo wurstel in provetta. All’inizio sarà pallido e molliccio. «Ma miglioreremo colore e sapore»

LONDRA – La prima salsiccia in provetta sarà pronta entro sei mesi. Per ora l’aspetto non è dei più invitanti, pallida e molliccia, ma gli scienziati sono convinti che riusciranno presto a farla assomigliare a quella vera. E’ la rivoluzione che il mondo aspettava. Con l’arrivo della carne artificiale si potrebbe risolvere il problema della fame, ridurre in modo consistente l’inquinamento atmosferico e evitare inutili sofferenze agli animali.

ASPETTANDO L’HAMBURGER – Il prodotto è stato creato attraverso la coltivazione di migliaia di cellule staminali animali che sono stimolate a produrre tessuti muscolari. Il primo esperimento è stato fatto con i maiali ed entro un anno dovrebbe arrivare anche l’hamburger. Mentre la produzione di bistecche e filetti appare più complicata. Nei supermercati, comunque, la carne artificiale la troveremo solo in un futuro lontano: tra dieci o quindici anni. Il professor Mark Post della Maastricht University, che guida la ricerca, ha spiegato che per ora i costi sono esorbitanti: più di 220 mila euro per un hamburger. Ma una volta prodotta su scala industriale il prezzo potrebbe non essere diverso da quello che paghiamo oggi dal macellaio.

SENZA SANGUE, SAPORE INCERTO – Al momento il tessuto che è stato creato ha un aspetto grigio e molliccio: «Il colore – ha spiegato Post – è dovuto al fatto che non c’è presenza di sangue e molta poco mioglobina, la proteina che contiene il ferro. Ma stiamo cercando un modo per dare un aspetto rosso al prodotto». I grossi dubbi, però, sono sul sapore. Per ora nessuno ha assaggiato la salsiccia in vitro perché la legge vieta di consumare materiale creato in laboratorio da tessuti animali. Alcuni scienziati hanno assicurato che risolveranno il problema creando un nutrimento sintetico per le cellule staminali che darà il gusto della vera carne.

LOTTA ALLA FAME – L’Organizzazione Mondiale per la Sanità ha previsto che il consumo di carne raddoppierà entro il 2050. Un dato che, secondo il professor Post, «rende il nostro prodotto l’unica strada possibile per ridurre la mancanza di cibo visto il costante aumento della popolazione». Secondo alcuni ricercatori con 10 cellule di muscolo di maiale si potrebbero avere 50mila tonnellate di carne in due mesi. Se diremo addio alla fiorentina, dunque, sarà per una buona causa: sconfiggere la fame nel mondo.

via corriere.it

Il super pomo d’oro

Day Tripper

Hofman, right, cultivates mushrooms.

By ROBERT STONE
NY Times Published: December 24, 2008

In the circles where LSD eventually thrived, the moment of its discovery was more cherished than even the famous intersection of a fine English apple with Isaac Newton’s inquiring mind, the comic cosmic instant that gave us gravity. According to legend, Dr. Albert Hofmann, a research chemist at the Sandoz pharmaceutical company, fell from his bicycle in April 1943 on his way home through the streets of Basel, Switzerland, after accidently dosing himself with LSD at the laboratory. The story presented another example of enlightenment as trickster. As a narrative it was very fondly regarded because so many of us imagined a clueless botanist pedaling over the cobblestones with the clockwork Helvetian order dissolving under him.

At Sandoz, Hofmann specialized in the investigation of naturally occurring compounds that might make useful medicines. Among these was a rye fungus called ergot, known principally as the cause of a grim disease called St. Anthony’s Fire, which resulted in gangrene and convulsions. Ergot had one positive effect: in appropriate doses it facilitated childbirth. Hofmann set out to find whether there might be further therapeutic applications for ergot derivatives. Indeed, he discovered some for Sandoz, including Hydergine, a medication that, among other things, enhances memory function in the elderly. Most famously, of course, Hofmann’s ergot experiments synthesized D-lysergic acid diethylamide tartrate, LSD. On April 16, 1943, he apparently absorbed a minuscule amount of the lysergic acid he was synthesizing through his fingertips. He went home (he doesn’t say how) and subsequently submitted a report to Sandoz. This reads in part:

“At home I lay down and sank into a not unpleasant intoxicatedlike condition, characterized by an extremely stimulated imagination.”

A few days later at work, Hofmann decided to adopt the Romantic methods of Stevenson’s celebrated Dr. Jekyll. His experimental notes commence: ‘4/19/43 16:20 0.5 cc of 1/2 promil aqueous solution of diethylamide tartrate orally = .25 mg tartrate.” By 1700 hours he was reporting other symptoms along with a “desire to laugh.”

The laughter was Mr. Hyde’s, not Dr. Jekyll’s, because for most of this occasion Hofmann was in the grip of what less cultivated experimenters would later call a bummer.

“A demon had invaded me, had taken possession of my body, mind and soul. . . . It was the demon that scornfully triumphed over my will.”

Hofmann did make the journey home by bicycle, with the help of an assistant. Contrary to legend, there is no record of his falling. As the hours of Hofmann’s investigation passed, he felt progressively better. In the morning “everything glistened and sparkled.”

On the basis of Hofmann’s report, three other officials of Sandoz sampled LSD. A psychiatric researcher at the University of Zurich, Dr. Werner Stoll, repeated the experiment, and Sandoz came to the conclusion that modified LSD-25 was a psychotropic compound that was nontoxic and could have enormous use as a psychiatric aid. A decision was made to make LSD available after the war to research institutes and physicians as an experimental drug.

Hofmann was by no means a technocratic philistine. The amazing mystical elements activated by this strange fungoid compound were of particular interest to him, though he says he never imagined mere recreational inebriation as a goal for users. He did, however, anticipate self-experimentation by “writers, painters, musicians and other intellectuals.” By people, in other words, as respectably educated folk used to say, “who possessed the background.”

How could Hofmann, swathed in the cultural Gemütlichkeit of Switzerland, understand that shortly — in America in the ’60s — we were all, all of us, going to be writers, painters, musicians and other intellectuals?

Actually Hofmann soon had his eye on America and its discontents. He associated “abuse” of LSD with what he called “materialism, alienation from nature through industrialization and increasing urbanization, lack of satisfaction . . . a mechanized, lifeless working world, ennui and purposelessness in a wealthy, saturated society.”

Hofmann was a wise man, however, and no more judgmental than any scientist should be, and in his writings on the subject he treats the hippie acid culture with grandfatherly moderation. Meeting Timothy Leary, a figure who arguably turned his magic medicine into a social threat, he remonstrated firmly with him, tried hard to see Leary’s ineffable good points and afterward called him “a charming personage.”

As a highly valued executive researcher at Sandoz (now part of Novartis), he traveled the world to study psychotropic compounds. With his wife he went to Mexico to sample psychedelics at their practical source, as administered by the curanderos and curanderas of the Sierra Mazateca. It was Hofmann who succeeded in synthesizing psilocybin from the “magic mushroom” of the Mazatecas. He also isolated a compound similar to LSD from another Native American botanic sacramental, the ololiuhqui vine. As a scientist he was fascinated by the ritual practiced by the ancient Greeks at Eleusis each fall. These rites, honoring the grain goddess Demeter, celebrated antiquity’s most profound mystery cult. Initiates described an intense life-changing experience in the course of the nighttime ceremonies. Hofmann believed that one of the components of the sacred kykeon, the potion distributed to adepts, was a barley extract containing ergot.

Hofmann was close to many of the artists and thinkers who shared his fascination with varieties of perception. He corresponded with Aldous Huxley and was also a friend of the German mystic and novelist Ernst Jünger. He came to know prominent members of the American Beat generation, including Allen Ginsberg, whom he met in California in 1977. Hofmann never approved of mass intoxication or drug use in adolescence. Contrary to assertions, however, he did not regret his discovery. No great scientist known to history can have been less fanatical or more serene. He was always a humanist committed to the spirit.

Over his long life, Hofmann took LSD many times. He developed a personal mysticism involving nature, for which he had a lifelong passion. One thing this very tolerant man decried in the Western drive for facile satisfaction was an alienation from the outdoors. The use of LSD made him more and more conscious of it. In nature he saw “a miraculous, powerful, unfathomable reality.”

Via

The Burger Lab: Revisiting the Myth of The 12-Year Old McDonald’s Burger That Just Won’t Rot (Testing Results!)

[Photographs: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt]

A few weeks back, I started an experiment designed to prove or disprove whether or not the magic, non-decomposing McDonald’s hamburgers that have been making their way around the internet are indeed worthy of disgust or even interest.

By way of introduction, allow myself to quote myself. This is from myprevious article:

Back in 2008, Karen Hanrahan, of the blog Best of Mother Earth posted a picture of a hamburger that she uses as a prop for a class she teaches on how to help parents keep their children away from junk food… The hamburger she’s been using as a prop is the same plain McDonald’s hamburger she’s been using for what’s now going on 14 years. It looks pretty much identical to how it did the day she bought it, and she’s not had to use any means of preservation. The burger travels with her, and sits at room temperature.Now Karen is neither the first nor last to document this very same phenomenon. Artist Sally Davies photographs her 137 day-old hamburger every day for her Happy Meal Art Project. Nonna Joann has chosen to store her happy meal for a year on her blog rather than feed it to her kids. Dozens of other examples exist, and most of them come to the same conclusion: McDonald’s hamburgers don’t rot.

The problem with coming to that conclusion, of course, is that if you are a believer in science (and I certainly hope you are!), in order to make a conclusion, you must first start with a few observable premises as a starting point with which you form a theorem, followed by a reasonably rigorous experiment with controls built in place to verify the validity of that theorem.

Thus far, I haven’t located a single source that treats this McDonald’s hamburger phenomenon in this fashion. Instead, most rely on speculation, specious reasoning, and downright obtuseness to arrive at the conclusion that a McDonald’s burger “is a chemical food[, with] absolutely no nutrition.”

As I said before, that kind of conclusion is both sensationalistic and specious, and has no place in any of the respectable academic circles which A Hamburger Today would like to consider itself an upstanding member of.

The Theory Behind the Burger

Things we know so far:

1. A plain McDonald’s Hamburger, when left out in the open air, does not mold or decompose.
2. In order for mold to grow, a few things need to be present: mold spores, air, moisture, and a reasonably hospitable climate

Given those two facts, there are a number of theories as to why a McDonald’s burger might not rot:

1. There is some kind of chemical preservative in the beef and/or bun and/or the wrapping that is not found in a normal burger and/or bun that creates an inhospitable environment for mold to grow.
2. The high salt level of a McDonald’s burger is preventing the burger from rotting.
3. The small size of a McDonald’s hamburger is allowing it to dehydrate fast enough that there is not enough moisture present for mold to grow
4. There are no mold spores present on McDonald’s hamburgers, nor in the air in and around where the burgers were stored.
5. There is no air in the the environment where the McDonald’s hamburgers were stored

There’s mold everywhere.

Of these theories, we can immediately eliminate 5, for reasons too obvious to enumerate. As for number 4, it’s probably true that there are no live molds on a hamburger when you first receive it, as they are cooked on an extremely hot griddle from both sides to an internal temperature of at least 165°F—hot enough to destroy any mold. But in the air where they were stored? Most likely there’s mold present. There’s mold everywhere.

Theory 1 is the one most often concluded in the various blogs out there, but there doesn’t seem to be strong evidence one way or the other. If we are to believe packaging and nutrition labeling (and I see no reason not to), there are preservatives in a McDonald’s bun, but no more than in your average loaf of bread from the supermarket. A regular loaf of supermarket bread certainly rots, so why not the McD’s? Their beef is also (according to them) 100% ground beef, so nothing funny going on there, is there?

In order for any test to be considered valid, you need to include a control. Something in which you already know whether or not the variable being tested is present.

In the case of these burgers, that means testing a McDonald’s burger against a burger that is absolutely known not to contain anything but beef. The only way to do this, of course, is to cook it myself from natural beef ground at home.

I decided to design a series of tests in order to ascertain the likeliness of each one of these separate scenarios (with the exception of the no-air theory, which frankly, doesn’t hold wind—get it?). Here’s what I had in mind:

• Sample 1: A plain McDonald’s hamburger stored on a plate in the open air outside of its wrapper.
• Sample 2: A plain burger made from home-ground fresh all-natural chuck of the exact dimensions as the McDonald’s burger, on a standard store-bought toasted bun.
• Sample 3: A plain burger with a home-ground patty, but a McDonald’s bun.
• Sample 4: A plain burger with a McDonald’s patty on a store-bought bun.*
• Sample 5: A plain McDonald’s burger stored in its original packaging.
• Sample 6: A plain McDonald’s burger made without any salt, stored in the open air.
• Sample 7: A plain McDonald’s Quarter Pounder, stored in the open air.
• Sample 8: A homemade burger the exact dimension of a McDonald’s Quarter Pounder.
• Sample 9:A plain McDonald’s Angus Third Pounder, stored in the open air

*To read about the fascinating manner in which I procured these plain patties, please refer to the original post.

You may notice that my protocols have been slightly expanded since I first laid them out to you a few weeks ago. That’s due to several good ideas in the comments section which I incorporated into my testing the day after the initial publication.

Every day, I monitored the progress of the burgers, weighing each one, and carefully checking for spots of mold growth or other indications of decay. The burgers were left in the open air, but handled only with clean kitchen tools or through clean plastic bags (no direct contact with my hands until the last day).

At this point, it’s been 25 days, 23 calm, cool, and collected discussions with my wife about whether that smell in the apartment is coming from the burgers or from the dog, and 16 nights spent sleeping on the couch in the aftermath of those calm, cool, and collected discussions. Asides from my mother, my wife is the fiercest discusser I know.

Frankly, I’m glad this damn experiment is over. On to the results.

The Results

Well, well, well. Turns out that not only did the regular McDonald’s burgers not rot, but the home-ground burgers did not rot either. Samples one through five had shrunk a bit (especially the beef patties), but they showed no signs of decomposition. What does this mean?

It means that there’s nothing that strange about a McDonald’s burger not rotting. Any burger of the same shape will act the same way. The real question is, why?

Well, here’s another piece of evidence: Burger number 6, made with no salt, did not rot either, indicating that the salt level has nothing to do with it.

And then we get to the burgers that did show some signs of decay.

Take a look at both the homemade and the McDonald’s Quarter Pounder patties:

Very interesting indeed. Sure, there’s a slight difference in the actual amount of mold grown, and the homemade patty on the right seems to have shrunk more than the actual Quarter Pounder on the left (I blame that mostly on the way the patties were formed), but on the whole, the results are remarkably similar. That a Quarter Pounder grows mold but a regular-sized McDonald’s burger doesn’t is some pretty strong evidence in support of Theory 3 from above. Because of the larger size of a Quarter Pounder, it simply takes longer to dehydrate, giving mold more of a chance to grow.

We can prove this by examining the weight charts between the regular burger and the Quarter Pounder. Take a look:

This chart represents the amount of weight lost from the burgers through evaporation every day (both starting weights have been normalized to 1). As you can see, by the end of 2 weeks, both the regular burgers and the Quarter Pounders ended up losing about 31% of their total weight and are pretty much stable. They are essentially burger-jerky. A completely dehydrated product that will never rot, as without moisture, nothing can survive.

93% of the moisture loss in a regular burger occurs within the first three days

Now the interesting part of the charts is during the first 4 days. As you can see, the blue line representing the regular burger dips down much more precipitously than the red line representing the Quarter Pounder. In fact, 93% of the moisture loss in a regular burger occurs within the first three days, which means that unless mold gets a chance to grow within that time frame, it’s pretty much never going to grow.

The Quarter Pounder, on the other hand, takes a full 7 days to dehydrate to the same degree. It’s during this extra three day period that the mold growth began to appear (and of course, once the burger had dehydrated sufficiently, the mold growth stopped—the burger looked the same on day 14 as they did on day 7). For the record, the Angus Third Pounder also showed a similar degree of mold growth in the same time frame.

So Can It Mold?

So we’ve pretty much cleared up all of the confusion, but a keen scientist will notice that one question remains to be answered. We’ve proven that neither a McDonald’s burger nor a regular home-made burger will rot given certain specific conditions, but are there conditions we can create that will cause it to rot, and more importantly, will the McDonald’s burger rot as fast as the homemade burger?

The final two burgers I tested were a McDonald’s burger and a regular homemade burger of the same dimensions placed in plastic zipper-lock bags side by side. Hopefully the bag would trap in enough moisture. The question: Would they rot?

Indeed they do. Within a week, both burgers were nearly covered in little white spots of mold, eventually turning into the green and black spotted beast you see above.

The Conclusion

how do you think beef jerky is made?

So there we have it! Pretty strong evidence in favor of Theory 3: the burger doesn’t rot because it’s small size and relatively large surface area help it to lose moisture very fast. Without moisture, there’s no mold or bacterial growth. Of course, that the meat is pretty much sterile to begin with due to the high cooking temperature helps things along as well. It’s not really surprising. Humans have known about this phenomenon for thousands of years. After all, how do you think beef jerky is made?

Now don’t get me wrong—I don’t have a dog in this fight either way. I really couldn’t care less whether or not the McDonald’s burger rotted or didn’t. I don’t often eat their burgers, and will continue to not often eat their burgers. My problem is not with McDonald’s. My problem is with bad science.

For all of you McDonald’s haters out there: Don’t worry. There are still plenty of reasons to dislike the company! But for now, I hope you’ll have it my way and put aside your beef with their beef.

via

Paper Breakfast

Paper Donut

Will All the Wild Fish Be Gone by 2048?

Paul Greenberg, author of Four Fish, talks about including fish in discussions of sustainable food.

Fish are not like bison or farm-raised cattle. They’re out of sight—in floating net pens, spawning on coastal shelves, or swimming through unregulated offshore waters. So when you hear about collapsing tuna stocks, underwater feedlots, or certified sustainable salmon, it’s hard to appreciate what’s actually going on with the world’s fisheries because because fish are found in unseeable reaches of the world.

In his book Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food, the journalist Paul Greenberg combs the ocean to examine the fish that most frequently end up on our dinner table: salmon, bass, cod, and tuna. He argues that wild-caught fish should be thought of as game with a specific place of origin rather than a fish stick—and that smart aquaculture should raise the pork, beef, goat, and mutton of the seas without replicating the ecological messiness created by agriculture.

The book’s been out two weeks and already it’s being received as the a must-read food politics book to read of the year. I spoke with Greenberg from New York.

GOOD: When it comes to sustainable food, why do fish tend to get overlooked?

PAUL GREENBERG: Fish has been excluded from the food reform movement because most people just don’t know how to deal with it. Fish and fishing are very complicated and most people don’t have a visceral feel for these wild animals. In the back of my mind and the minds of many fishermen, we know that cod are in bad shape. At the same time, we know American striped bass have been doing better of late.

G: So you can’t generalize and say that all wild fish are going to be gone by 2048?

PG: I get tired of the doom and gloom. Individual species are not in danger of extinction. What is in danger is abundance. We have a wild food system that yields 90 million tons annually—the equivalent of the human weight of China. You can say that’s egregious or you can say that’s kind of amazing that the world is capable of sustaining (at least on a slowly declining curve) that much wild food on an annual basis. These are not lions and tigers, where we’re down to individuals that we count on safari. As hunter-gatherers, we can still have a balanced relationship with fish.

G: In other words, there’s an incredible bounty but also an incredible, growing demand.

PG: Right. If you go by what some Western countries are saying, like the British Health Ministry, which recommend two servings of fish per person per week, we wouldn’t have much fish left. Certain reductions have to happen, especially with larger fish like bluefin tuna and swordfish. Since the end of World War II, niche fish have become everyday fish. The Atlantic salmon, a fish that never had the potential to become the everyday fish of the Western world, has done just that.

G: Why hasn’t aquaculture and the so-called Blue Revolution successfully farmed these fish ecologically in great quantity?

PG: It’s a huge financial investment to domesticate an animal—there are problems of reproduction, feed, juvenile rearing, and disease management. We tend to look at fish that yield a significant profit at the end of their research and development period, like Atlantic salmon. “If we tame this sucker, we can get our money back.” Same goes for branzino and bluefin tuna. Those fish tend to be raised in monoculture to get it to market as quickly as possible, so it tends to disregard the collateral problems associated with farming. That said, there are green-blue revolutionaries out there developing different ways of culturing fish, like integrated multi-tropic aquaculture.

G: You also point to other models for sustainable fishing, like Kwik’pak, which sells Fair Trade-certified fish.

PG: It’s a native owned and operated company that brands and sells premium King salmon. Unfortunately, there have been really terrible King salmon returns to the Yukon. It would be great if everyone was like Kwik’pak, but there’s tons of salmon fishing in Alaska. So if I were to point to a fishery that has some signs of a being a game-changer, it would be the Cape Cod Hook Fishermen’s Association. It’s a foot in the door for sustainable fishing for Georges Bank, where you have a damaged population of cod fish that is slowly coming back to life under the stewardship of a small fleet that tries to use hook and line —they’re trying to fish an entire fishing ground in a sustainable way. That’s the thing. You have to look at the entire fishery.

G: Do you think more fish should have this terroir of the sea?

PG: I do. Maybe it should be called merroir. People forget that fish are wild animals, and need to be treated as wild game and not industrial products. I’m not advocating for everyone to get out there with spears, but you have to tone down the industrial effort against wild animals. If you take cod and mash it up into a fish stick, who the heck going to respect that?

G: But salmon haven’t traditionally been valued over the human activities that destroy them, like logging. Is that true for all these fish archetypes?

PG: Salmon is really the one that suffers the most from environmental degradation, but fish have never been a valuable enough commodity to consider them before we do something. Just look at the oil exploration in the Gulf of Mexico. It’s the biggest pelagic spawning ground for bluefin and swordfish. Instead of food security, we went for energy security—just like we threw up dams in the Northwest to harvest hydropower. We’re heading headlong into development of coastal shelves for oil. And who knows if the Gulf will ever recover.

G: At one point in the book, you quote Daniel Pauly, who says the power of consumer choice is a pleasant notion, but it doesn’t really adequately address the problems.

PG: I applaud the Monterey Bay Aquarium for getting people to think about choices. Awareness is a first step and seafood guides are a good step. But people carry around the card, and say, “Check, chose the right fish, did my job for the ocean.” But they didn’t. That one person didn’t eat a fish that someone else, somewhere else, with less ethics, is going to eat. In addition to choosing the right fish, people need to communicate with retailers directly. It’s the large aggregate that needs to change.

G: What are some of the other things that we can do?

PG: There are meta-level goals. The big one is the establishment of marine protected areas. Ninety-nine percent of the ocean is unprotected from fishing, whereas around 10 percent of land in the United States is protected. There needs to be equal protection for the oceans. As far as management of the high seas is concerned, scientific committees are often powerless; two years ago, the bluefin tuna quota was double what the scientists recommended.

An inversion has to take place, where the best available science dictates what nation-states can divvy up. If I were the czar of fisheries, I would urge nations to think about what they really need. How much should we get through aquaculture and wild capture? And the fish we choose for aquaculture shouldn’t be the ones we catch in the wild. Let farmed tilapia be the industrial fish. Let’s have wild cod, which is difficult to farm, and let’s not fish it so hard. I think we need to differentiate the wild world from the farmed world—to create mass produced fish and sensitively managed wild fish.

You can buy Greenberg’s book here and follow him on Twitter @4fishgreenberg.

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