Farmable, sustainable tuna?
Fish is delicious when fresh, but its quality is more fragile than ripe strawberries. I try not to think about how much fish must get thrown away daily at Reading Terminal Market alone. Overfishing has decimated edible fish populations around the world, and farmed fish is decimating the population of stuff we don’t bother eating. (Luckily, my beloved oysters are sustainably farmable, and still on the Monterey Bay safe list.)
But now an fisherman-turned-fish-emperor in Adelaide, Australia thinks he can farm bluefin tuna, and even better, feed it a sustainable diet of… wheat? The Bloomberg article on him offers some tidbits on how they hope to make it work, but also contextualizes it by talking about what he used to do.
He was a tuna rancher. He would catch little tuna, and pen them up in the ocean, and fatten them up, and then sell them to Japan in the off season. This practice has hastily accelerated the decline of the tuna population. Before, the quotas would encourage people to throw back the small ones. Once you could fatten them up for the big bucks, the population of immature tuna in the wild plummeted, and the whole species is at risk.
So, he decided to channel his blood money back into tuna farming, or, more specifically, tuna mating. He tried everything — mood music, sexy lingerie, low lighting — until finally settling on hormone harpoons. No joke on that last bit. And he has finally gotten them to spawn in captivity.
I wish him the best of luck, truly, and perhaps someday, he will manage to turn carnivorous fish into omnivores, at least. But for me, these articles hammer home that the big steak fish should not be thought of as some simple meat substitute, but as Mark Bittman does, “as a treat”.
