Four fish, no fish

A new book about endangered fish species

By Culinate staff

August 2, 2010

The latest book in the endangered-fish genre, Four Fish, comes from New Yorker Paul Greenberg. A closer look at four popular edible fish — salmon, cod, tuna, and sea bass — the book rings alarms about the future of fish on the planet, a future that may not include wild fish at all. (An excerpt from the tuna section recently appeared in the New York Times, which also reviewed the book yesterday.) Check out NPR’s recent interview with Greenberg, in which he reveals some amazing stats about global fish hauls:

The global catch right now in the world is 90 million tons. It’s equivalent to the human weight of China removed from the sea every year. A third of that is what they call forage fish — herring, anchovies, little things like that. And incidentally, the weight of all of those taken out of the sea every year would be the equivalent of the human weight of the United States taken out every year.