My backyard family farm adventure…. started with a thoughtful friend saying something I had never heard before: “Eat vegetarian fish.” Upon thinking about this, my world unraveled. Eventually it raveled again. (Is “raveled” the opposite of “unraveled”?) Well anyway, it came back together again leading to the idea of a Backyard Family Farm Kit. While still in its early chapters, I would like to bring this possibility to your attention.
In the summer of 2007, I visited my friend Jesse Ausabel on Cape Cod to discuss building open libraries in the digital age, but as I was leaving I asked him about the state of life in the seas. He is a good person to ask this particular question because he started a project in the year 2000 to count all the fish in the sea, called the Census of Marine Life. As if that weren’t hard enough, he wanted to know how these populations change over a decade. The project now involves thousands of people from 80 countries. It is from this project that we have seen a stream of stories about the virtual disappearance of different kinds of fish, such as the Atlantic Bluefin Tuna.
When I was growing up, tuna was the “chicken of the sea.” Now it is being massively overfished. As Jesse put it, it is a bad time for any fish that is either large or delicious. Almost all fish that are large or delicious are in serious decline; many populations are down over 90% from a century ago. Jesse Ausabel is the kind of scientist who thinks hard about what he says and one of those people who, if I listen carefully enough, and I think hard enough about what he says, it leads to more interesting insights. The problem, he said, is that people are eating too much fish. From a personal perspective, I remember when I was growing up that salmon and lox were expensive delicacies but now they are served in vast quantity. Salmon has been available for under $5 a pound at Wal-Mart. Jesse said that commercial fishermen are now “hoovering up the seas” with vast trawling nets.
Always the technology optimist, I asked about farmed fish. I had heard of problems with the vast salmon farms off the coast of Chile — the environmental impact of the fish waste, the problems with the farmed fish escaping and affecting the native populations, the antibiotics used on diseased farmed fish thereby exposing unprotected native fish to diseases and wiping them out… But I had recently been fed some fish presented by a dot-com millionaire from some venture he was funding to farm fish in pens in the deep Pacific Ocean and this was touted as a great solution. Can we find our way through this overfishing wild fish problem with farmed fish?
He said farming fish might work, but he pointed out a problem that I had never heard of before — he said that most farmed fish eaten in the United States are carnivorous. They eat other fish. These other fish, such as anchovies, herring, and sardines, are generally caught in the wild to be fed to the farmed fish. So now we are harvesting wild feeder fish for the farms. Diminishing those wild fish populations ripples through other wild fish populations, and we have the problem he was talking about. Three pounds of feeder fish are used to fatten a salmon by one pound. And a 3-pound fish yields roughly one pound of fillet. Therefore, approximately nine pounds of sardines are needed to make one pound of fish fillet in the supermarket. Jesse said that either we have to trick our carnivorous fish into eating tofu (soybean flavored with fish) or, as he put it, we have to “eat vegetarian fish”.
I was puzzled. I had not heard someone ever talk about vegetarian fish before. He said that carp, catfish, scallops, tilapia and others are vegetarians — instead of eating other fish, they eat algae or other kinds of muck that is lower on the food chain. Farming these types of fish might have other problems, but they won’t eat the world out of wild fish. I thought about the land animals we eat, and that they are all vegetarians — cows, chickens, pigs, and turkeys. There are some people that eat dogs and cats, which are carnivorous, but they’re not the majority. This was intriguing to me.
So I started to learn more about the food I eat. I read Fast Food Nation, Omnivore’s Dilemma, and Grow More Vegetables; watched SuperSize Me, Future of Food, King Corn, Drop of Life, Raw for 30 Days, and An Inconvenient Truth. The issues being raised are large, but seemingly interrelated. Excess corn production, deforestation, global warming, obesity, oil dependency, clean water shortages, and depletion of the soils. Our decision-making structures over the last century have led to vast increases in population and ecological strain.
The commoditization of food and the mass farming of the “green revolution” may have created much more food, but it also may have had an unattended consequence. Most of us have lost touch with where our food comes from and how our choices in our supermarkets lead to rippling effects that are reshaping the biosphere. Most of the grains we eat in the United States come from almost unpopulated farms that many of us will never see except from thirty thousand feet in the air. The vegetables and tubers come from farms that employ migrant workers that most of us will never meet. In other words, we do not grow our own food nor do we know who does, which could be a reason many of us eat too much and many unhealthy foods.
Maybe we could change that. Maybe we could get back in direct contact with food production by developing a locally self-sustainable food system that would not require a radically different lifestyle from that we have come to enjoy. Inspired by the experiments in the 1980’s at the New Alchemy Institute on Cape Cod, I wondered: Could we make a “backyard family farm” that would feed a family of three in an ecological and economical way?