A national swordfish boycott supported by some of America’s most prominent restaurants seems to have had the desired effect, raising hopes among environmentalists for similar success stories with other fast-disappearing fish.
This month, the National Marine Fisheries Service issued stringent new regulations on swordfishing in American waters. The move was designed to give swordfish, severely depleted by modern fishing fleets, a chance to recover in numbers by protecting their nursery areas.
“We talked loudly enough to bring the problem on to a lot of people’s radar screens,” said Rick Bayless of Chicago’s upscale Frontera Grill and Topolobampo restaurants. “It’s really wonderful to feel like you have taken part in something that is going to do some good in helping the ecosystem recover in the long term.”
With the new protections in place, diners will again be able to order swordfish in restaurants that honored the boycott–though likely at a higher price because of the restrictions.
But the problem of overfishing doesn’t end with just one politically sensitive species.
Rising health consciousness over the last 20 years in the U.S. and Europe has made seafood trendy and much in demand on restaurant menus and food market counters. At the same time, fishing techniques have become devastatingly effective, draining the ocean’s supplies of fish that for centuries have been the fishmonger’s stock in trade.
As species such as swordfish, Atlantic cod, flounder, haddock, Dover sole and shrimp disappear, fishermen begin to search the oceans for equally tasty replacements.
That explains how slimeheads and Patagonian toothfish began showing up on menus everywhere.
You might recognize those two fish better as, respectively, orange roughy and Chilean sea bass. Savvy salesmen invented their more palatable new names, perhaps the best-known examples of a marketing phenomenon aimed at creating a global taste for plentiful yet formerly ignored “trash fish.”
The problem is, such efforts often succeed so well that those fish, too, turn scarce.
“We created voracious markets for orange roughy and Chilean sea bass,” Bayless said, “and as a result caused them to be overfished and left their populations devastated in the wild.
“We have to do better than we have done with those two fish.”
Most of the species suffering from diminished populations because of human demand tend to be the biggest of the predators, such as swordfish. Marine scientists fear that as fishermen cast ever wider nets for replacement species, they are dipping too low into the food chain, which also could have dire global consequences.
Daniel Pauly, a biologist at the University of British Columbia, has been doing some eyebrow-raising research recently that indicates people have been consuming ever more simple forms of marine life. He cites the boom in calamari, made from squid, as an example.
“Calamari used to be considered fish bait by most people; now it is a very chic item for dinner,” said Pauly. “We’ve gone through all the big predator fish; now we are going through the prey of the predators.
“If you draw a food pyramid with big predator fish on top, the calamari is down in the middle somewhere. If we start destroying marine populations lower on the pyramid, naturally everything on top is going to crumble. You cannot fish out the prey.”
At the core of the problem of overfishing is the fact that commercial fishermen, employing highly effective technologies such as electronic fish locators, satellite navigation, temperature-depth gauges and highly refined fishing techniques and gear, simply have become too proficient.
If overfishing of so many species continues unabated, marine scientists fear not only that fishermen will fish themselves out of existence but that the ocean will become an underwater wasteland.
“Yuppie markets in the West have become almost insatiable since people have dropped grease, fat and potatoes from their diets, now that they know fish is good for the heart,” Pauly said. “Every time a new fish is introduced and becomes popular, like orange roughy, the ecosystem gets whacked.”
When orange roughy was known as the slimehead, of course, it was in no danger at all. Only when it was rebranded did the fish became commercially viable.
Such has been the fate of many a formerly forgotten yet perfectly delicious fish. All it took was a less offputting name to place them on our plates.
“The history of turning trash fish into desirable commodities is an interesting one,” said Steve Murawski, a National Marine Fisheries Service biologist at the agency’s research labs in Woods Hole, Mass. In the 1970s, for example, the species formerly known as goosefish was reintroduced as monkfish.
“Prior to Julia Child featuring it on one of her shows, it was nothing. You couldn’t give it away,” Murawski said. “Now it is one of our favorites. Japanese pay dollars in amounts of telephone numbers for a pound of monkfish livers, and the French pay premium prices for their tails.
“Dogfish is a [3-foot] shark, thrown away when it was caught by accident with other, more desirable fish. Now it’s sometimes called cape shark and is in big demand. It’s a staple for British fish and chip shops, and it is a great delicacy in Germany, the smoked belly flaps being a very popular appetizer in bars there.”
The New Zealand fish industry began in the 1980s to explore marketing possibilities for the slimehead, a 16-inch, deep-dwelling fish in southern oceans. Easy to catch as they mass in schools in spawning season, they are very tasty creatures.
Realizing slimehead as a name was a drawback, the New Zealand Marketing Board, which earlier had great success in exporting Chinese gooseberries after renaming them kiwi fruit, dubbed the fish orange roughy.
At least that name has some basis in fact, as the creature belongs to a group of fish known as roughy and it turns from a reddish tinge to orange after it dies.
How marketers in the early 1990s turned the Patagonian toothfish into Chilean sea bass is more mystifying.
“First of all, it isn’t a bass,” Murawski said. “And it is found only very peripherally in Chilean seas.”
A six-foot, 100-pound fish, the toothfish also lives in deep southern ocean waters. Though undeniably delicious, until it got the Chilean sea bass moniker it was of virtually no interest as food to anything but sperm whales and elephant seals.
Now its popularity has placed it in real danger from overfishing, just like the swordfish.
Environmentalists and scientists hope to break this cycle by better understanding, monitoring and controlling the global market in seafood. They have found a powerful ally in high-profile restaurateurs whose newfound celebrity status wields considerable influence.
Since 1993, Bayless has chaired the national Chefs Collaborative, an environmentally conscious organization of restaurant cooks with 1,500 members. Besides endorsing the swordfish boycott, the group has worked to get restaurants to broaden their seafood menus.
“The collaborative wants chefs to look around,” said Bayless, “to talk to their suppliers more carefully about what kinds of fish are plentiful and what are not, and to offer a wide variety of fish on their menus so that we aren’t constantly overusing certain species, like swordfish.
“We are doing a joint project right now with the Packard Foundation to put together a guide for chefs, showing what fish are underutilized and plentiful, showing them how they can be prepared as fine restaurant fare.”
Bayless was an early conscript to the swordfish campaign, which was the brainchild of two national environmental groups: the National Resources Defense Council and SeaWeb, primarily an informational agency heavily supported by the Pew Charitable Trust.
In the 1960s, said SeaWeb executive director Vikki Spruill, the average swordfish caught weighed 266 pounds. By the 1990s it was just 90 pounds. Female swordfish must reach 150 pounds before they can give birth, meaning that most swordfish are caught before they reproduce, a recipe for certain disaster according to Spruill.
The “Give Swordfish a Break” campaign publicized the plight of the species by enlisting chefs like Bayless to refuse to put swordfish on their menus.
The campaign was more popular in East Coast restaurants than in Chicago, where many restaurateurs continued to sell the extremely popular fish. But several notable Chicago area chefs did join Bayless in the boycott, including Michael Altenberg of Evanston’s Campagnola, and Joel Findlay at Geneva’s 302 West, and customers took notice.
“The public sometimes seems to be more aware than the chefs seem to be,” said Findlay. “About four months ago we found a swordfish supply we felt was from an abundant, unthreatened Pacific Ocean fishing ground and offered it one weekend on our menu. We used to sell 100 pounds of it on a weekend, but our customers weren’t buying it this time.”
Activists don’t want to halt fishing or stop people from eating fish. But they are asking for the public to be more discriminating, to avoid seafood that has been overfished. They also seek more stringent quotas and controls on the fishing industry, giving overfished species a chance to recover.
“We picked swordfish for our campaign,” said Spruill, “because we knew it appealed to a lot of consumers. But there are a lot of other fish in the same or even worse shape.”
The new federal rules ban swordfishing in nursery and spawning areas off Florida’s Atlantic coast and parts of the Gulf of Mexico year round, and off the Carolina and Georgia coasts from February through April. Last year the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas also imposed stricter quotas on the annual catch in other Atlantic waters.
“We haven’t thought of the ocean as an environment that could be exhausted, but it has limits, and we are pushing the limits,” Spruill said. “The message is that we need consumers to make better choices about the seafood they eat to demand better management of this.”
The global nature of the fish industry makes it difficult to monitor and control. More than any other food commodity, seafood moves daily from virtually every corner of the earth to the other side of the world. Americans export $2 billion in seafood annually and import $9 billion.
“The flow is heaviest from Africa and Southeast Asia to Europe and America,” said Pauly. “It is a big export industry, sometimes the only export industry, for some of the poorest nations. From an international perspective, it is hard to regulate something like that.”
Mark Giorgianis, a salesman for Chicago’s oldest fishmonger, Plitt Seafood, says he can already see what the next trendy seafood will be.
Two freshwater fish, he said, basa from Vietnam’s Mekong River delta region and the Lake Victoria perch from east Africa, both a delight to chefs, first appeared in the U.S. just months ago and seem destined for widespread popularity.
In the meantime, swordfish dishes are likely to return even in those restaurants that supported the boycott.
“I will put swordfish on my menus again from time to time now that the ban is lifted, but only on rare occasions,” said Bayless. “It probably will be much more expensive with the new fishing restrictions, because it will be available in much smaller quantities than it was previously.”
