To Market, to Market

Joseph E. Taylor III

I like to believe that my consumer choices are rational decisions, but somewhere deep down inside I know that they are more like prayers. This is partly because of my work on the Salish Sea, which I can gaze upon from my university office, but my doubts have been honed by my relationship to another inland sea: the San Francisco Bay. I have been immersed in salt water since childhood, but my most instructive interactions have happened recently in a Berkeley fish market. The staff recall an era when buyers and sellers knew each other as neighbours. Their open banter conveys information about the fate of local fish and fishing seasons, and their cases confirm the quality they tout. When my turn comes, a mutual interrogation begins:

“How can I help you?”

“The rockfish looks good, but I have a couple questions.”

“Fire away.”

“Where was it caught, and is it fresh or fresh frozen?”

“It came out of Bodega. It’s probably fresh.”

I favour this shop because they handle fish well and they openly acknowledge what they do not know. I want to make informed decisions, and nothing irritates me like a seller blowing smoke.

I may be a historian, but I also know fish. Every boyhood summer, my brothers and I feasted on salmon, rockfish, ling cod, crabs, mussels, and clams. We harvested with glee the land and waters around Pacific City, Oregon. We immersed ourselves in the intimate details of nature until our great aunt learned that the Forest Service sprayed the hills with dichlorophenoxyacetic acid and tricholorophenoxyacetic acid, better known as 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T. Unlike Vegas, what happened in the forest did not stay there. Herbicides washed into streams, estuaries, and the sea. The following year we stopped picking marionberries, huckleberries, and blackberries for the same reason, and ever since, I have reflexively thought about the ecology of what I eat.

I also fished commercially. In fact, but for one very bad fishing season and a careening drunk driver, I might have captained a boat in the Bering Sea. At least, that was my vector until the mid-1980s. Thus I have a peculiar understanding of fish, markets, and sellers. I killed and sold more than my fair share of fish; I know how fishers and merchants handle fish and the truth; and I am fascinated by how persistent organic pollutants (POPs) move through food webs. My knowledge and pickiness probably make me a fish monger’s nightmare customer.

Learning that the rockfish was offloaded in Bodega, short for Bodega Bay, raises red flags. Bodega Bay is a lovely town in western Sonoma County. The port is modest, the fishing boats small. The seller is surely correct that the rockfish wasn’t flash frozen, because that requires larger ships, but Bodega is hours from Berkeley. Best case scenario: the rockfish was caught yesterday afternoon, so it’s been on ice at least twenty-four hours. Most fish flesh needs a day to set, but after three days—which is likely, having come out of Bodega—the flesh will get rubbery. Ironically, Salish Sea markets rely on larger, more distant fleets, so the flesh quality of the flash-frozen fish they sell is more consistent.

More concerning is my suspicion that, because the Bodega fleet is small, captains work the San Francisco Bay plume. The bay is scenic but riddled with Superfund sites. Its waters, sediments, flora, and fauna are laced with 150 years of industrial and military wastes. As with the Salish Sea, locavorism is a marker of poverty and a menu of POPs, heavy metals, and other Very Bad Things. And like forest herbicides, pollutants in the bay flow through the Golden Gate and out onto the fishing grounds of boats from Bodega Bay. One perverse appeal of my Berkeley fish market is that it helps me avoid eating too locally. By contrast I know little about the provenience of fish sold in British Columbia, and the average fish counter, staffed by apathetic attendants and labelled in disingenuous ways, is an ecological black box.

With the rockfish eliminated, I shift my interrogation to a higher-priced choice: “I see the salmon is certified. Do you know which port it came from in Alaska?”

“Port? No, but it’s from Bristol.”

“Bristol” is Bristol Bay in western Alaska. Local salmon runs are mind-bogglingly large and well managed. These emblems of wild nature mature in the Bering Sea and Alaska gyre and spawn far from industrialization, but they are hardly pure. The mining conglomerate Rio Tinto is proposing a potentially devastating mine near Lake Iliamna, worrying environmentalists about future pollution, but the fish that spawn in Iliamna and the other lakes and streams of Bristol Bay are already compromised. The problem is mercury. While each salmon bioaccumulates only tiny quantities of the heavy metal during its ocean sojourns, collectively the salmon deposit huge amounts in the sediments of lakes where they spawn and die by the millions each year. This mercury is biotransported from the same seas that also nurture salmon from as far away as the Lena, Amur, Fraser, and Columbia Rivers. And like those other watersheds, Bristol Bay’s streams and lakes are natural toxic dumps, produced by global ecological chains. I favour markets that help me obtain fish from beyond the Salish Sea and San Francisco Bay, but no place stands outside the POP ecosystem.

Certification labels capture none of this complexity. The buying guides of the Blue Ocean Institute, Marine Stewardship Council, and Monterey Bay Aquarium tell us important things about species and stocks, but their information is coarse-grained and their guides are as much about luring consumers as educating them. Moreover, none of these organizations do quality control well. This I learned the hard way. When our daughter was conceived, her mom and I learned to think of wombs as ecosystems, and when our baby was diagnosed with autism and digestive disorders, we learned to patrol what went into her body. We discovered that consumer guides are less useful than medical journals for understanding how POPs bioaccumulate in adipose tissues, cross the placental barrier, and pass to infants through breast milk. We also learned that research published in chemistry and biology journals is far more useful for understanding the nature of the nature we consume than anything gleaned from a pocket guide or phone app.

All this runs through my head as I ponder the sockeye fillet in the display case. “Nothing is perfect,” I tell myself. Then I tell the counterperson, “I’ll take the salmon.” We do the deal, but even this relatively transparent fish market feels a bit like a postindustrial wilderness. Every fish counter contains nature that is simultaneously from nowhere and everywhere, and no consumer has sufficient knowledge. Even my decades of experience on the water and in libraries feels inadequate to parse all the questions that inhere in fish bodies. Even my purchases are acts of faith that transcend empirical evidence. No label or counterperson can tell us all that we need to know when we head to the market.