Four Fish

by Paul Greenberg

  “Okay, cut to 1992,” my brother, the writer of horror films like Halloween H20 and the Stephen King adaptation 1408, continued. “I’d just moved to Los Angeles. After a lot of peer pressure, I finally agreed to go to our local sushi restaurant to try some. I ordered a regular tuna roll, thinking I would do my hold-my-breath-and-swallow-it-whole thing. But when it arrived, I immediately noticed something different—it didn’t smell ‘fishy.’ I dipped a piece in soy sauce mixed with a little wasabi, put the damn thing in my mouth, and chewed. Man, it was like that great moment in the film Ratatouille, where the evil food critic tries the eponymous dish and is suddenly transfigured. The raw tuna tasted nothing like cooked fish. Pun intended, I was hooked.”

  What my brother tasted was a biochemical phenomenon that can be experienced with many high-speed, fatty fish but which is particularly true of tuna. Hard-swimming fish like tuna use large amounts of a chemical called adenosine triphosphate (ATP) to store and expend energy. After death ATP is converted to inosine monophosphate (IMP), a chemical associated with the “fifth” flavor Japanese call umami, or “tastiness.” It is a flavor that even non-fish eaters find pleasant on the tongue. When cooked, however, IMP breaks down and combines with other chemicals present in fish flesh and produces flavors that people like my brother find unpalatable. In addition, the odors that might be emitted by not-so-fresh fish are neutralized in Japanese sushi techniques by soy, ginger, and wasabi.

  The global rise of sushi combined with the international failure to formulate a functional multination fishing agreement around tuna has led to progressive declines in many tuna stocks, the worst of which has been the decline of the two intermingling stocks of Atlantic bluefin tuna: the Western stock, which spawns in the Gulf of Mexico, and the Eastern stock, which breeds in the Mediterranean. Atlantic bluefin are the biggest and slowest-growing of the tunas; the Western stock can take more than seven years to reach sexual maturity and considerably longer to become “giants”—that is, the five-hundred-plus-pound spawners that many biologists feel are the key reproductive engines of bluefin populations. Since it is the giant spawners that are the primary targets of exploitation, their numbers have crashed. Fishermen always appreciated giant bluefin as animals—as fighters on the line or as evaders of harpoons. But the rapid growth in giant bluefin price, from pennies to hundreds of dollars a pound, created a different kind of appreciation. Today the passion to save bluefin is as strong as the one to kill them, and these dual passions are often contained within the body of a single fisherman.

  “I love these fish,” a commercial bluefin-tuna harpooner told the reporter John Seabrook in a 1994 issue of Harper’s Magazine. “But I love to catch them. God, I love to catch them. And I know you need some kind of catch limits because I’d catch all of them if I could.” As bluefin get more and more valuable on the marketplace (prices for a single fish have topped $150,000) the commercial fishermen who pursue them get more and more twisted in their behavior—a bit like Tolkien’s Gollum pursuing the ring. They are endlessly attractive to fishermen when present but can leave fishermen holding massive bills for fuel, bait, and gear when they vanish. It sometimes seems as if a Gandalf of fisheries management is needed to work up an incantation that would save the fisherman from the destructive relationship he has with the great fish, the one that tempts him to destroy the very profession that would sustain him.

  The bluefin conservation advocates, often former tuna fishermen who have been able to pull themselves away from the lure of tuna’s silver-ingot bodies and marbled-sirloin flesh, have tried all manner of spells to get those who eat tuna or those officials who legislate over them to somehow sit up and take similar notice—to abstain from eating them or to pass enforceable regulation for the sake of their preciousness. It is this often-futile battle that is the most telling part of the tuna fishery today. It is the battle with ourselves. A battle between the altruism toward other species that we know we can muster and the primitive greed that lies beneath our relationship with the creatures of the sea.

  And yet it is a battle that has been fought and won before, against high odds. Looking back over the history of the ocean, we can see that there is one order of sea creatures bigger than tuna that has earned our empathy and, more important, our protective resolve, rising up from the background of marine life to become a superstar of conservation, on a par with the tiger and the elephant. It is to this example we must look if we are to fix our tuna problem once and for all.

  Whale Carpaccio—130 Kroners.” Thus read the lead appetizer on the menu before me in an upscale Norwegian restaurant where I was dining on a recent winter evening. Eight slices of whale arranged raw on a plate for the reasonable price of about twenty U.S. dollars. I have to admit that the prospect of ordering it was intriguing. I had never been to a country that still practiced 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 Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese? Or, since carpaccio is an Italian dish and Italians avoid mixing cheese and seafood, 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 took the pen from behind her ear and asked me in blunt Nordic style if I’d like to “try the whale,” all at once my twenty-first-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.

  Up until 1756, when the French zoologist Jacques Brisson published Le Regne Animal Divisé en IX Classes (The Nine Classes of the Animal Kingdom), whales were thought of by both the scientific and the lay communities as just very big fish. It was only when the father of taxonomy, Carl Linnaeus, in the tenth edition of his Systema Naturae, confirmed Brisson’s definition of whales as nonfish that a certain ennoblement of those animals started to occur. When Linnaeus went a step further and classified whales as mammals, that rankled Brisson, who suspected Linnaeus of overstepping the realms of scientific acceptability and trying to disguise his plagiarism of Brisson’s findings in an outlandish hypothesis. But Linnaeus was steadfast in his beliefs, asserting that whales “by good right and just title according to the law of nature” deserved to be classed with mammals.

  Mammalian or not, the fact that “cetaceans,” as the group would later be named, were not fish was well established within the scientific community by the end of the eighteenth century. By the new century’s turn, the idea that they were fish would start to sound downright preposterous to any self-respecting scientist. “This order of animals,” the English zoologist John Hunter wrote in the early 1800s, “has nothing peculiar to fish except living in the same element.” Yet even with Linnaeus’s and other major scientists’ imprimatur, it took many decades for the general public to accept the fact that whales were different and somehow special. Nowhere was this more evident than in the 1818 New York trial of Maurice v. Judd.

  Brilliantly reexamined by D. Graham Burnett in his 2007 book Trying Leviathan, the Maurice affair exposed the broad rift that existed and still exists between the measured findings of scientists and the “common sense” of the everyday consumer. By all rights the facts of the case should have buried it forever within the mountains of records in the New York legal system. The suit came about because of a new development in seafood regulation. Early in the nineteenth century, the state legislature of New York began requiring that all fish oil be inspected in order to allow better grading and to reduce the tendency of
oil merchants to disguise one type of fish oil as another. In the case of Maurice v. Judd, Maurice (an inspector) had fined Samuel Judd (a candle maker) seventy-five dollars for buying three barrels of fish oil that had not been inspected. Judd refused to pay the fine, insisting that he had bought not “fish oil” but rather “whale oil” and that furthermore whales were not fish.

  This somewhat trivial dispute might have been banged away by the thud of a less patient judge’s gavel, but instead the trial became a media circus, in part because of a colorful array of witnesses that included a whaler by the name of Preserved Fish, but mostly because of the participation of Samuel Mitchill, an Enlightenment naturalist and New York City’s most famous scientist. For two days Mitchill sparred with William Sampson, a respected and often wily prosecutor, trying to establish the great differences between whales and fish: That whales were warm-blooded. That they breathed air. That they lacked scales. And, in a moment that shocked the standing-room-only crowd, Mitchill declared that “a whale is no more a fish than a man.”

  But in spite of Mitchill’s depth of knowledge and his standing in New York society, his careful explanations ended up confusing and even enraging the trial’s jury. After a short deliberation, the jury returned a verdict that slapped down a hundred years of careful scientific investigations. A whale, the jury foreman announced to the assembled crowd of journalists, gossipmongers, and wharf dwellers, was in fact a fish.

  The press taunted Mitchill for days afterward. “Pray sir, how goes it with whale oil now?” wrote New York’s Evening Post. “Is it oil of fish, or of flesh, or of red herring?”

  Yet while Mitchill’s reputation certainly suffered after the humiliation of the trial, the whale’s standing began to rise. The trial lingered in the popular unconscious, and the first inklings that suggested that the whale merited exceptional consideration began appearing in print. A sperm whale’s ramming and sinking of the whale ship Essex (the inspiration for the novel Moby-Dick) in 1820, just two years after Maurice v. Judd, gave the impression that whales had agency and had identified humans as their enemies. And in the 1820s, the common practice of harpooning a whale calf and waiting for mothers to gather around it so that multiple kills could take place was criticized publicly. The idea that whales even had intelligence was broached. In Trying Leviathan, Burnett relates how a book called A Whale’s Biography came out in 1849 and the following year in Honolulu the newspaper the Friend ran a letter to the editor from “Polar Whale,” address “Anadir Sea, North Pacific,” in which the cetacean writer identified himself as hailing from “an old Greenland family” and “pleaded for ‘friends and allies’ to ‘arise and revenge our wrongs’ lest ignominious extinction descend upon his ‘race.’ ”

  But these flashes of sympathy were negligible compared to the ruthless expansion of the whaling industry and the effect that expansion had on a naturally sensitive order of animals. It is an essential truth of ecology that big animals tend to be the scarcest because of the scope of resources they must command. They are kings of sorts, considerably less numerous than commoners. Local populations of whales were therefore easily extirpated. And when they were, whaling fleets journeyed to the far extremes of the globe in search of untapped schools. When even those far-flung populations started to show declines, humans may have for the first time gotten a glimpse of their destructive potential. Whereas once the seas seemed inexhaustible, the decline of whales on a global basis showed that it was indeed possible to overexploit the oceans and drive a creature (and an industry) to commercial extinction.

  Ultimately, though, it was not just whales’ scarcity that led to the end of the first era of whaling; rather, it was the appearance of cheaper, more easily obtainable whale-oil substitutes that changed the rules of the market and spared the remnant populations of “oily” whales. Petroleum oils made sperm-whale products commercially irrelevant long before they were made illegal in the early 1970s.

  What is more significant, though, to a discussion of the future of fish, particularly big fish like tuna, is what happened during what is known as whaling’s second era—the time during which humans moved from using whale oil to light their lamps to using whale oil and other whale parts for a much wider scope of applications, including fertilizer, lipstick, brake fluid, and even human food.

  This second phase of whale exploitation began in the 1870s. During this more aggressive phase, steam- and later diesel-powered vessels, explosively launched harpoons, and compressed air flotation devices were developed that enabled whalers to hunt a whole new range of very large, even more naturally scarce species. Before these inventions came along, blue whales and fin whales were too fast to catch and would sink to the bottom if killed. After these technological breakthroughs, the largest creatures ever to live on earth were killed instantly with exploding grenade tips, secured to artificial flotation devices, and brought to market—giant rafts of fat and protein fit for a range of industrial purposes. Postwar Europe was particularly drawn to the use of whales. Indeed, if you are from Europe and born before 1960, no matter how much of an environmentalist you may consider yourself, there is a high likelihood that you have eaten whale. In the 1940s and ’50s, while European agriculture was still recovering from World War II, whale fat was regularly rendered and put into margarine and other oil-requiring foodstuffs. Even if you abstained from margarine, there was a good chance that whale still made it into your body indirectly—the meat and bones of whales were used as fertilizer to grow vegetables.

  There were even bigger plans for whales. Increasingly, as postcolonial unrest and Cold War competition for favor in emergent African, South American, and Asian nations grew, significant attention was paid to figuring out a way to alleviate hunger in those countries. Before the agricultural advancements of the Green Revolution came online, economists feared that the world was on the brink of a Malthusian collision of population growth and food shortages. Some agronomists suggested that whales could become a significant protein source for the impoverished Third World. Collaborations between nuclear scientists and marine biologists were even proposed whereby tropical atolls, blown up by nuclear testing, could be used as giant corrals for the commercial farming of whales.

  But all this optimism about the potential of whales was quickly checked by the reality of the drastic decline in whale populations. By the 1930s, cetacean numbers were so low as to provoke three successive international agreements. By the time these agreements were raised up to the level of a convention in 1947, participating nations deemed that these measures were necessary in order “to provide for the proper conservation of whale stocks and thus make possible the orderly development of the whaling industry.”

  It is important to note here that nowhere in the convention that led to the creation of the International Whaling Commission was there mention of conservation of whales for the sake of their special-ness. Rather, as with all things from the sea in earlier days, conservation was seen as necessary for the sake of future exploitation. Just as opposition to slavery was once argued from an economic point of view, the antiwhaling movement had its origins in financial motives. Like abolitionism, it had to develop a second, moral prerogative to spur an appropriate response from man. And, as with abolitionism, the debate took place around the issue of intelligence.

  The beginnings of whale conservation for the whale’s sake alone dribbled out of studies of whale communication. Dr. Roger S. Payne is a Harvard-trained biologist who did his preliminary work on echolocation in bats and owls. But a desire to enter the field of conservation biology led him to apply to the sea what he had formerly studied on dry land. “I wasn’t doing anything that was directly related to problems that I, as a biologist, am deeply and bitterly aware of,” he recalled, “which have to do with the destruction of the wild world by people. So I thought, if all you’ve had in training is the chance to work on the acoustic worlds of animals, what animal could I work on that needs my help?”

  Along with the researcher Scott McVay, Payne began
studying the “songs” of humpback whales and over time developed a theory that not only do whales communicate with one another in a complex and ever-evolving way, but that in certain species (blue whales and fin whales) whale song could be transmitted across the entire breadth of an ocean. The theory was alternately embraced and attacked within the scientific community, but in 1970, when Payne released an LP entitled Songs of the Humpback Whale, the public itself became the greatest adjudicator of whether or not whales were intelligent. The album, which was followed by a sequel that included jazz “duets” between a humpback whale and the saxophonist Paul Winter, sold 10 million copies and today is still the biggest-selling wildlife recording of all time. Payne’s whale-song recordings went on to underscore numerous popular ballads, including John Denver singles and David Crosby and Graham Nash’s 1975 Wind on the Water album.

  Other researchers, like the New Zealander Paul Spong, who had developed a series of communication experiments with two killer whales named Skana and Hyak, brought the whale-conservation movement into the political arena. Spurning the classic noncommittal stance that scientists are supposed to take in relation to politics, Spong banded together with early anti-nuclear-testing activists and helped form Greenpeace. According to Rex Weyler, an early Greenpeace member and unofficial historian of the organization, it all came down to the little inflatable boat and the big Soviet whaling ships. “I would suggest,” Wexler wrote me, “that the precise moment the Save the Whales movement entered the popular unconscious would be July 1, 1975.” On that day images of a small Greenpeace Zodiac poised between a breaching whale and a Soviet commercial whaling vessel in the Southern Ocean were broadcast around the world by Walter Cronkite on CBS News and on other major media outlets. That image remains to this day the enduring image of the Save the Whales movement and one that helped to create a substantial conservation lobby within the International Whaling Commission.