Fish Futures

For years, fish has been touted to Americans as the food that keeps the Japanese trim and their hearts hardy. Every nutrition textbook lists fish -- specifically fatty, cold water ocean fish, like salmon, mackerel, sardines, and herring -- as the best sources of omega-3 essential fatty acids and protein.

These days, you can't buy a diet book without reading about the restorative properties of omega-3s. In "The Healthy Kitchen," Andrew Weil and Rosie Daley, Oprah's favorite chef, recommend fish every other day, especially salmon. Omega-3 act as an anti-inflammatory against autoimmune disease, builds bones, staves off depression ("Prozac of the deep," some call it), and steadies the rhythm of the heart, and that's the short list. In April, two more long-term studies, reported in the New England Journal of Medicine and the Journal of the American Medical Association, announced that eating omega-3-rich fish at least once a week significantly cuts the chance of your keeling over from a clogged ticker.

The fervor for fish coincides with the bad rep meat and poultry have taken on over the last decade. Since at least four children died and more than 700 people fell ill from eating contaminated hamburgers at Jack in the Box during the winter of 1992-93, meat and poultry have been associated with a gang of bacterial "superbugs" carried mainly by livestock feces. Then came Mad Cow disease.

"Our fish orders shot up when Mad Cow came out," says Emeryville restaurateur Adam Weig. Far and away, the fish that customers want is salmon.

"I can't buy enough of it," says Ted Iijima, fish manager at the Berkeley Bowl grocery, as he scours the pre-dawn San Francisco docks for salmon a week before Mother's Day. "Come winter, for the first time, I'm going to buy salmon that's been frozen during the season," he confides almost sotto voce. "The people in Berkeley, especially, want to know, 'Is this fish wild or farmed? How much mercury is in it? Does it come from polluted waters?' The season'll be over, but my customers still want wild salmon."

Unfortunately, wild salmon aren't always in season, nor is there enough to go around. But that's not to worry. In the era of the global marketplace, there is a plan B: fish farms.

More than half of the salmon Americans eat is farmed, that is, not hunted and dragged flailing from the sea but raised docilely in giant sea cages floating in the ocean, where they grow big and fast on high protein diets, just like their feed lot and henhouse friends.

"The demand is going to increase and the world's ability to produce commercially caught fish has pretty much peaked," says Dan Swecker, secretary-treasurer of the Washington (State) Fish Growers Association and also a state senator. "The increased demand is going to have to be supplied by aquaculture" -- meaning farmed -- "products."

If he's right, and if it will, there's still the little matter of its record. Much of the nutritional benefit of wild fish is lost in the farmed variety because of their artificial diets. Proximity to farmed salmon has led to rampant disease and decline among native fish in every part of the world except the Pacific Northwest...so far. Meanwhile, genetically engineered salmon await FDA approval, part of the vast, uncontrolled biologic experiment in which we are all subjects. The dilemma is apparent: To fill an extraordinary demand built on genuine need, the multibillion dollar aquaculture industry has turned the carnivorous salmon into a plant eater, while changing its look, taste and nutritional value. The dilemma doesn't end there: If they ruin the seas to grow an inferior product, can you call it a solution?

Fat Farm

Dan Swecker is speaking over the phone from St. Petersburg, Florida, where he is attending a National Association of State Aquaculture Coordinators. World aquaculture is a bustling $56 billion-a-year global enterprise and salmon is a top performer. It's in 37 percent of all American food establishments, and more than 70 percent of the "white tablecloth" joints, more than any other fish.