Near a Thousand Tables (17 page)

Like terrestrial hunting grounds, fisheries always tend to be overexploited. The only rational strategy for fishermen is to net as much as you can before a competitor beats you to it. The romantic image of the fisherman, most vividly and recently depicted in Sebastian Junger's bestseller
The Perfect Storm,
risking life, defying the elements, obsessive about his vocation, unremitting in the pursuit of his catch, is underlain by hardheaded realism. The impossibility of policing the seas effectively compounds the problem. The yield of the seas has increased nearly fortyfold in the twentieth century: the three billion tons landed, by John McNeill's calculations, exceed the entire catch of all
previous centuries combined
. The use of fish meal in fertilizers and animal feed makes fish a critical source of nourishment for the world, far in excess of the tonnage eaten by people. The litany of vanished and vanishing fisheries of the twentieth century can be explained by climatic change and the fluctuating migration patterns of fish, but overfishing is almost certainly the biggest and most pervasive cause. The Maine lobster—once so plentiful that early settlers caught them in abundance by reaching into the water at the edge of the shore—was regulated for conservation from the 1870s but the catch plunged from about 24 million pounds per annum to less than six million in 1913. The current revival is spectacular but insecure. Canada closed down its cod fishery in 1996 and Atlantic cod stocks are now believed to stand at only 10 percent of their historic average. Californian sardines and North Sea herrings have become rarities since the 1960s. The Japanese pilchard fishery was the world's largest in the 1930s—the Japanese pilchard is a variety of sardine,
Sardinops melanosticus—
but was fished almost to extinction by 1994, while the Namibian catch fell from half a million tons in 1965 to
zero in 1980
.

On land, when the supply of a hunted creature becomes critically low, one solution is to herd it: catch specimens, corral or concentrate them and breed from
them. The corresponding method for fish is pisciculture or aquaculture: fish “farming,” as it is called. It is really more closely analogous to herding terrestrial livestock than cultivating plants, though the term “farming” is justified by such usages as “pig farming” and “chicken farming,” particularly as the fish producers deploy intensive practices which bring yields even more spectacular than those of the most efficient battery methods for pork or poultry. Fish farming at sea has become a focus of hopes and fears for the future. In order to be commercially viable, fishing has to be predictable and concentrated in particular places. Almost all existing fisheries are coastal, confined to continental shelves where fish can feed, and their locations are determined by migration routes the fish choose for themselves: these can change—and, indeed, are changing now as climate fluctuates. However, nearly half of the world's marine food supply is caught in five areas: in the African Atlantic off Namibia and along a stretch of coast south of the Canary Islands, in the Indian Ocean off Somalia, and in the Pacific off California and Peru. Here the continental shelves fall away rapidly or the coasts dive clifflike into the ocean. Strong, persistent prevailing winds shoo the surface water away while cold currents well up, renewing a rich supply of nutrients which attract the fish. On the coast of Peru the anchovies are sometimes so thick that women and children can scoop them up by the hatful. Conditions like these are not easy to reproduce artificially.

Nevertheless, wherever fish farming can replace fish hunting it is bound to happen, or is happening already. What was said about shellfish farming above shows how ancient a practice it is; and there are even cases where large sea fish have been farmed since a past which may be as remote as the first era of mollusk farming. In the Philippines and some other Pacific islands milkfish cultivation is of indeterminate antiquity. The farmers obtain fry by digging holes on the beach at high tide and scooping the specimens out when
the tide falls
* The fish feed on sea moss and grow rapidly to about three or four feet in length, when they are ready for market. Carp, varieties of which can be fed with grass cuttings and plankton too small to interest most other species, lend themselves to similar production methods in freshwater ponds of a kind documented in China from the middle of the second millennium
B.C.
Shrimp and salmon in offshore farms, and carp, perch, eels and pink-fleshed trout in freshwater environments are all highly amenable to the same sort of treatment on an industrial scale. These are now the dominant species in global aquaculture. Five million tons of food came from fish farms in 1980. A generation later the figure was 25 million tons. China is the world leader in the movement, accounting for more than half the total production.
Deep-sea fish farms are now technically possible. The economics of the business make it certain that they will be developed.

In the wild, it takes a million eggs to produce a fish. Artificial fertilization can ensure that 80 percent of eggs are fertilized and that 60 percent turn into fish. Hormonal treatment can be used to boost the individual fertility of the egg producers. With the aid of oxidation, controlled water temperatures and artificial plankton, the fish grow faster and bigger than in the wild. Farmed salmon yield more than 800 tons per acre of surface water—fifteen times better than the yield from beef cattle. At seventy-five degrees Fahrenheit, sea bass grows twice as fast as in the naturally varying temperatures of its
usual habitat
. The growth offish farming therefore seems inevitable. The extinction of wild species will surely follow, because farmed fish are carriers of diseases which, thanks to their breeding or treatment, they can resist; but when communicated to the unimmunized populations outside the farmers' pens, they are sure to wreak havoc.

The fish farming “explosion” of our times has had a few feeble landward echoes—previously undomesticated land species, such as ostrich and some varieties of deer. Together these new efforts constitute a resumption of the herding revolution, which has been long interrupted. Herding for food on a large scale was the work of the remote antiquity of most societies, when cattle, sheep, goats, pigs and farmed fowl were brought—dare one say?—within the fold. We are reverting to truly ancient wisdom.

FOUR
 
The Edible Earth

“Why, O Earth, must you be so mean?
All this digging for a grain of corn!
Gifts should be cheerful, not so grudging.
Why such sweat and labour in farming?
What harm would it do you to give for toil?”
Earth when she hears this says with a smile:
“That wouldn't increase my glory greatly,
And your pride and glory would
vanish completely
!”

—RABINDRANATH TAGORE, PARTICLES, JOTTINGS, SPARKS, TRANSLATED BY WILLIAM RADICE

From his brimstone bed at break of day
A-walking the Devil is gone
To visit his snug little farm, the Earth,
And see how his stock goes on.

—COLERIDGE AND SOUTHEY,
THE DEVIL's THOUGHTS

T
he experience cannot be replicated in a “Mongolian barbecue” restaurant but Mongols really do cook in a firepot, made of metal, beaten thin to make the vessel light and transportable. A funnel in the middle lets smoke from the fire rise through. Water bubbles in the outer ring so fiercely that it takes only seconds to cook strips of meat—or heartwarming mutton fat, as Mongols generally prefer, in their climate of extremes, where the wind chills the steppe to forty degrees below zero in winter. Alternatively, a thin plate can be smeared with fat and laid on the fire to fry the viands. This is the food of nomads and the cuisine of the battle-ready,
recalling times when the campfire was the warriors' bond, when spears were skewers and shields were pots. It is food which seems to exclude farmers: sedentary folk, whom nomads are supposed to hate and fight.

The meat comes from the companions of the Mongols' transhumant lives: the horse, on the rare occasions when surplus horses are disposable or when an old one dies, or the fat-tailed sheep, which is one of the most inventive creations of nomad stockbreeders. This grotesque beast was documented in Arabia from antiquity and is still popular today, especially in the Steppelands and plateaus of the Middle East and Central Asia, wherever the nomads' culture is or has been preponderant. The sheep drags a cumbrous tail behind it, sometimes as broad as a beaver's. The loss of mobility can be serious—even to the point where a little cart has to be attached to the animal to make the tail transportable. The gain outweighs the inconvenience. For the meat of nomads' kine is journey-toughened and muscly, whereas tail fat is marvelously soft—a kind of instant oil which melts easily. Even if the nomad has no time to heat it, or no available kindling, it can be eaten raw and digested quickly. To concentrate this precious substance in a part of the animal which can be butchered without slaughter was an unbeatable blessing for people on the move.

Because there is no firewood over much of the steppeland, the Mongols traditionally cooked on fires of dung or fell back on the use of meats which could be processed without fire, by wind drying or by the characteristic method which has impressed and repelled European observers since the Middle Ages: a cut of meat is pressed under the horseman's saddle to be tenderized in the beast's sweat by the pounding of the ride. As a substitute for cooking, this procedure was recommended on good authority by a Croat captain who dined with Brillat-Savarin in 1815. “Mein Gott!” he exclaimed,

when we are in the field and feel hungry, we shoot down the first animal that comes our way, cut off a good hunk of flesh, salt it a little (for we always carry a supply of salt in our sabretache) and put it under the saddle, next to the horses back; then we gallop for a while, after which,

he added, “moving his jaws like a man tearing meat apart with his teeth,
'gnian gnian,
we
feed like princes
.'”

Most of the rest of the traditional repertoire of Mongol cuisine came from the milk of ewes and mares. The latter type of milk is literally vital: its high vitamin C content enables steppelanders to survive without access to the fruit and vegetables which are available to sedentary peoples. The herdsmen offer a vast
menu of dairy products—preparations of every imaginable consistency and degree of sweetness or acridity, but the most famous product of Mongols' dairying is koumiss, their ceremonial and celebratory drink According to the traditional recipe, mare's milk is stored in a sheepskin with a little rennet to induce fermentation, periodically shaken with a gentle motion and drunk while still slightly
pétillant.
The Masai of Kenya—another stockman nation—get 80 percent of their energy intake as milk. They are also notorious for their technique of drawing blood from their cattle on the trail and plugging the wound without having to halt. All long-range transhumance demands similar techniques. For blood, like milk, is nourishment yielded by kine on the hoof. Sedentary peoples, who prefer to cook blood before they consume it, treat as evidence of savagery or vampirism the nomad's habit of piercing a vein for a draft of blood; but it is a practical device for herdsmen on the move or for steppelanders short of fuel. For Mongol warfare it was strategic equipment: liberating raiding parties from logistical backup, contributing to the speed with which they surprised their enemies, enabling a vast empire to be cheaply policed.

On the face of it, this animal diet looks like the basis of a cuisine innocent of plant foods. It is not true, however, that nomadic herders despise the fruits of agriculture: their historic problem has been getting hold of them. Because grains and cultivated fruits and vegetables are alien in the nomads' environments, they are highly prized and often brought in at great cost, or—until the last three hundred years or so when sedentary societies have opened up a technology gap which nomad warfare could not close—they were wrested as tribute through war or the threat of war. Nomads' hostility to sedentary neighbors arises not from contempt for their culture, but greed to share its benefits. When Leo Africanus was entertained at a Targui camp in early sixteenth-century North Africa, he had a typical experience: he and his companions were served with millet bread but their hosts took only milk and meat—served roasted in slices with herbs