Fish Documentary

[Janne Evers]

Alifelong fisherman, Greenberg began casting lines with his father when he was just five years old. From a young age, he says, he began to understand that overfishing carried far-reaching environmental implications.

Your research took you all around the world, from Peru, to Norway, to Alaska and even the waters of the Long Island Sound where you first learned to fish. What did you learn about our overfishing problem, and what does the future look like for aquaculture, which is controversial in its own right.

Aside from some of these policy considerations, are there broader questions we should be asking as a society about our relationship to the ocean and whether we can catch seafood in a more responsible way?

Passing up to a bluff, I looked down on the isolated settlement and thought that once upon a time, a little 17th century village called New Amsterdam must have looked quite a bit like this, a modest place with its face turned toward the sea where the fisherman and the fishmonger were an integral part of daily life and where seafood held its own with land food in nearly every regard.

[voice-over] This is called a reduction fishery. Altogether, around the world, as much as 25 percent or more of all fish caught are poured into processing plants to be ground up and boiled down, turned into oil and dried into fish meal.

PAUL GREENBERG: Carl was part of a group who legally defined overfishing and helped get the U.S. Congress to pass the 1996 Sustainable Fisheries Act. So after hundreds of years, fish by fish, American waters began slowly starting to recover.

CARL SAFINA: I was shocked that it worked. And we had a massive success on that, and a lot of those fish that were just declining and declining and declining, they stopped declining because the laws changed and the limits changed, and a lot of them are now more abundant than they were when I was a kid.

And no one is promoting the fact that a piece of fish in an American restaurant travels an average of 5,000 miles before you get to take a bite. Up to 90 percent of the fish we eat in this country comes from abroad. Meanwhile, we send about a third of what we catch to other countries.

MAN AT SEAFOOD SHOW: Well, we need a sustainable white fish replacement for grouper, snapper, sea bass, which are really the premium species that tend to be the most overfished. The consumers increasingly get it that aquaculture in a sustainable, fully traceable and actually very low-carbon way to get your protein.

PAUL GREENBERG: [voice-over] One way American catfish farmers have tried to fend off the Asian competition is by making a film like this about fish farming conditions in the Mekong delta in Vietnam.

TED AMES, Maine Center for Coastal Fisheries: The tendency of the growers was to overstock, overfeed, trash the area they were in, infestations of sea lice, and they move on. [crosstalk]

DANIEL PAULY, University of British Columbia: Actually, I think that aquaculture can be an enemy of fisheries. Aquaculture, to sell its product, has to generate a demand for fish in general. And the Midwest has begun to eat fish in a way that it was not eating, consuming fish before.

KURT ODDEKALV: And when I started, the list was like this. And today, the list is like this because the more they try to fight nature, the more nature fights back. And it comes new diseases every year, a whole line of them.

We have an issue with escaped salmon that mixes with the wild. We have an issue with sea lice, which is also affecting the wild salmon. We have the overall pollution. Those are the major issues that I have with salmon farming.

PAUL GREENBERG: The Vosso salmon, which for millennia returned to these home waters, was the biggest of all Atlantic salmon. Now, like many other salmon runs in Norway, there are more escaped farmed fish in this river than wild salmon and the Vosso salmon is threatened with extinction.

[voice-over] I fell in love with the ocean because it was the last great wild place where you can find the last wild food. Is this the shape of the ocean to come, selectively bred rainbow trout, an invasive species not even native to Norway, taking up residence here by the millions so that people all over the world can eat the same domesticated thing?

PAUL GREENBERG: [voice-over] Steven Damato is a co-founder of Blue Circle Foods. This is the tiny island of Kvaroy, near the Arctic Circle. Only 70 people live here. This is where Damato believes you can see where salmon farming should be headed.

STEVEN DAMATO: Oh, site locations were based on convenience, not on any science on what it was doing to the environment. Escapes was, you know, not looked at as a big deal. Sea lice were, you know, thought of as a problem that eventually would go away. And then nobody cared about how much protein you were using to make protein.

PAUL GREENBERG: [voice-over] This is what it looks like after 18 months of growth compared to a conventionally farmed fish, a six-and-a-half-pound salmon compared to one less than three pounds, a fish which has now been approved by the FDA.

[voice-over] We debate, we argue, we disagree. Meanwhile, we keep eating more fish. The U.N. says we just hit an all-time high, double the amount per person than when I was a kid. That global consumption means even more overfishing.

BREN SMITH, Founder, GreenWave: I was born and raised in Newfoundland, in the fisher there. And I fished Gloucester and Lynn, Massachusetts, Grand Banks. And then I was in Alaska for a lot of years.

PAUL GREENBERG: [voice-over] Beneath the buoys on a network of ropes he grows kelp, mussels, clams and oysters. The shell fish clean up the ocean by soaking up nitrogen, phosphorous and carbon. A three-acre farm like this, he says, can be set up for as little as $10,000.

BREN SMITH: Industrial aquaculture, it went exactly the wrong way in its first stages. So just as land-based agriculture was starting to rethink what new models of farming, of distributed networked food production would look like, industrial aquaculture went in and made all the same mistakes.

PAUL GREENBERG: [voice-over] The hypothesis that Dr. Dyerberg and his supervisor, Dr. Hans Bang, drew from their study of Inuit seal hunters has largely driven the billion-dollar fish oil supplement business.

PAUL GREENBERG: [voice-over] After Greenland, Dyerberg did a lot of good work, including a successful campaign against trans fats. But his omega-3 findings leave many questions. Other researchers have connected omega-3s to brain health, joint health, cancer prevention. But none of the nearly 30,000 studies have revealed anything unequivocal.

PAUL GREENBERG: [voice-over] But then Alaskans realized they had to make the rest of the country care. They shouted out loud from up north how good their fish was. And instead of sticking them in cans, they made elegant fillets.

JOHN SKEELE: This is the irony of the thing. People started to eat more salmon Now people got used to eating salmon, and they decided they want wild, so our market started to come back.

Alaska shows what a well-managed fishery can produce, but also what it takes to protect this resource. Beneath this land are billions in copper and gold, coal and gas. Here are all the documented salmon streams of Alaska. And here in red are all the active mining claims in the watersheds of those rivers.

PAUL GREENBERG: Alaska is a kind of jewel, with all its facets still sparkling, where 200 million salmon can be caught each and every year, and all the connections are in place from ocean to river to fish to forest, just as they have been for millennia.

FISH WAR, a documentary film produced by Northwest Treaty Tribes Media and North Forty Productions, will have its world premiere at the Seattle International Film Festival at 5 p.m. Saturday, May 11, with an additional matinee screening at 1 p.m. Sunday, May 12.

According to The Guardian, individuals from the International Marine Mammal Project, Lancaster University, and Oceana all say their portrayals in the film misrepresented their stances on topics like dolphin-safe tuna and sustainable fishing. Seaspiracy also claims that at our current rate of overfishing, the oceans could be empty of fish by 2048. That claim is based on a 2006 study that, according to its own author, is too outdated to be taken seriously today.

Racing Extinction also contends that human consumption of land-based meat and dairy products is a major force behind the methane emissions driving climate change and that it threatens the ocean more than overfishing does.

How has your week gone? We've been holding up quite well, and I'm enjoying the challenge of making nutritious and delicious meals from the pantry and freezer, while being conscious of the need to use my food wisely.

This last week's dinners were lentil soup with spinach, chicken grain bowls, pork stir-fry, and broccoli mac and cheese. Our freezer is full of vegetables, fruits, and meats as well as homemade sauces I made last summer. Our pantry contains flour, beans, rice, dried fruit, oatmeal, and a variety of oils and vinegars.

Even if we work our way through the fresh food in the refrigerator, we'll still have plenty to keep the wolf from the door.

As many of you are, I'm sure, we're watching a ton of news. Last night, though, I needed a break and found Taco Chronicles on Netflix. This is a six-part documentary about different styles of tacos found throughout Mexico. The Netflix original series is in Spanish, but there are English subtitles.

Each episode is only about a half hour and focuses on one region of Mexico and one style of taco. I watched the first two -- "Pastor" and "Carnitas" -- and here are my thoughts.

From a viewer's perspective: Taco Chronicles will absolutely make you crave tacos and perhaps a trip to Mexico. We meet restaurant and food stand owners and see them dishing up delicious-looking tacos to their customers. We also learn a little bit about the history of each type of taco and get a peek at how they are made.

We're not, however, given recipes or instructions for reproducing the tacos from the featured cooks. Note too that, though we visit a number of taco stands and restaurants in each episode, Taco Chronicles doesn't provide many details for planning your next vacation. The episodes I watched were enjoyable, and I definitely learned something, but I wasn't tempted to immediately binge-watch the rest of the series.

From a filming perspective: To my unprofessional eyes, Taco Chronicles was well edited and nicely filmed. The food shots are lovely, and the people we meet are definitely passionate about their tacos.

Recommendation: If you have some time to kill and a Netflix subscription, give Taco Chronicles a shot. Just go in with the idea that the series is more a celebration of all things taco than it is travel guide, restaurant review, or cooking show.

Here's the trailer. Note that Netflix provides English subtitles but I was unable to find an embeddable trailer that included those subtitles.

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