SHOULD we care that industrial production and globalized trade are doing to our marine life what it has done to our land and agricultural life? It is and I think we should.
Decimation was the practice and indifference was the attitude we used to eliminate the bison from the western Canadian prairie. Then we applied industrial principles to the cod fishery on the Grand Banks with the same attitudes and results.
The common Friday dinner of fish and chips used to be made with cod and halibut. Now it’s mostly made of pollock. More than three million tons of Alaska pollock are caught annually in the North Pacific, mostly in the Bering Sea. Half of it is caught by the American fishing fleet using factory freezer trawlers.
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In addition to fish and chips, you’ll also find pollock in fish sticks, imitation crab meat, Chinese fish balls and many other fish formulations. If you choose the fish option at Dairy Queen, Arby’s, Burger King or McDonalds, you’ll probably end up eating pollock.
Since pollock can grow to more than one metre in length and weigh more than 20 kilograms, you might wonder how it can be transformed into so many different shapes and flavours.
The reason is because most pollock is made into surimi, a Japanese-style fish slurry. The fish is cleaned, rinsed to remove the smell and then pulverized into a gelatinous paste. It is then mixed with additives like starch, egg white, salt, vegetable oil, sorbitol and soy protein. Different seasonings are added depending on where in the world it will be eaten.
To prevent it from spoiling in cold storage, sugar is added (up to 15 percent), which can make it a problem for diabetics. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, fish surimi contains 15 percent protein, 6.85 percent carbohydrates, almost no fat and 76 percent water.
Some people think we are being clever by finding new uses for fish species we ignored previously. On the other hand, the need for new uses has been created by a disregard for the consequences of current fishing practice.
Our search for new species is called “fishing down the food web” because we are taking the food from the mouths of larger fish and mammals. This is causing all kinds of marine behaviour we have never seen before. Dolphins have been observed attacking seals for the first time. Killer whales have been feeding on otters.
Fishing down the food web means we are also taking the immature members of those same larger species, thus doubling the fatal consequences.
David Pauly of the Fisheries Centre at the University of British Columbia likens this practice to “eating our seed corn.” He argues that if we continue with the logic of feeding farther and farther down the food web, eventually we will be forced to figure out how to take plankton and turn it into plankton surimi so we can make imitation varieties of all the fish species we used to have, but have no longer.
We are all part of the web of life – you, me, the salmon, cod, whales and kelp. We are all dependent on each other for oxygen, nutrients, food and life. If we continue our practice of decimation and indifference, eventually we will do to ourselves what we have done to the rest of Creation.
Christopher Lind writes frequently in the area of ethics and economics. He is director of the Toronto School of Theology.
