Tuna meltdown: is there an alternative? | Environment | The Observer
Numbers of bluefin tuna are so low that the species is heading for
extinction. But there is hope for this magnificent red-fleshed,
warm-blooded fish. Salvation may come in the form of Kona Kampachi,
which is abundant and has the sushi bite of bluefin. Isn't it time we
changed the menu and got tuna off the hook?
Seriola rivoliana or Almaco jack, which Neil Sims markets as Kona Kampachi. Photograph: Michael Patrick O'Neill /Alamy
Whale carpaccio – 130 kroners." Thus read the lead starter on the menu in an upscale Norwegian restaurant where I was dining on a winter evening not long ago. Eight slices of whale arranged raw on a plate for the reasonable price of about £13. I have to admit that the prospect of ordering it was intriguing. A near global commercial whaling moratorium has been in effect since 1986, with only Norway, Iceland and Japan refusing to stop. I had never been to a country that still practised whaling, and I had certainly never seen whale on a menu. What would whale taste like, I wondered. Would it be fatty and chewy like beef, or would it have the loose, flaky texture of fish that don't need dense muscles to resist the pull of gravity? Would it be served like prosciutto, with a thin slice of Parmesan cheese? Or, since carpaccio is an Italian dish, would it be more appropriate merely to drizzle olive oil over the whale's buttery sheen?
These were the thoughts that made my mouth water as the waitress approached my table. But when she asked me in blunt Nordic style if I'd like to "try the whale", all at once my 21st-century foodie curiosity wilted. "No," I said, "I'll have the mussels."
I would like to be able to say that I did not "try the whale" because of some superior moral quality I possessed. But which animals we think of as food and which we think of as living creatures is highly contextual. My conception that a whale was somehow too good to eat comes from a historical process that predates me by nearly two centuries, a process that has yet to happen with fish.
A couple of years afterwards the New York Times asked me to write an opinion essay on whether people should continue to eat fish. I considered this question for a long time and conferred with people on both sides of the issue. In the end I decided to try to track a middle course, saying that yes, we should still eat fish, that it was important that we still regard the ocean as a living source of food and not just a place to spill our oil and dump our garbage. However, I stipulated that a few basic guidelines should be followed to find a balance between human desire and ocean sustainability.
I covered the usual topics one comes across at sustainable-seafood conventions: that one should favour fish caught by small-scale hook-and-line fishers because of the lower impact on seabeds and underwater reefs. That when choosing aquacultured fish one should choose vegetarian fish, like tilapia and carp, because of the lower strain they put on marine food webs. When it came to tuna, though, I offered no triangulation whatsoever, because in my view there simply was no compromise possible. "Don't eat the big fish," I declared toward the end of the article. "Dining on a 500lb bluefin tuna is the seafood equivalent of driving a Hummer."
But two weeks after making my high-minded pronouncements, I found myself at a family dinner party at an upscale restaurant. The first-course choice on the prix fixe menu was either a mini-sirloin steak or bluefin tuna carpaccio. It would seem the choice should have been simple. I had my principles, and I had expressed them quite publicly.
But unlike the earlier moment in Norway when I successfully kept myself from ordering whale carpaccio, this time, nearly without hesitation, I chose the bluefin. I quickly scarfed it down and nearly forgot about the delicious paper-thin slices after they had been washed away with a glass of pinot grigio. I turned to my 12-year-old daughter, who had ordered the sirloin steak, and asked her ho
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