Demon Fish

by Juliet Eilperin

  In the most telling rebuke, the Mayo Clinic oncologist Charles L. Loprinzi and scientists in the North Central Cancer Treatment Group designed and conducted a rigorous test of whether shark cartilage improves the health of patients with breast and colorectal cancer. The study—a randomized, placebo-controlled, double-blind trial—showed the patients taking shark cartilage enjoyed neither an improvement in their condition nor a significant boost in their quality of life. In some cases, the patients taking the pills saw their quality of life deteriorate. The authors wrote in the July 1, 2005, issue of Cancer, the American Cancer Society’s peer-reviewed journal, “Shark cartilage did not demonstrate any efficacy in patients with advanced breast or colorectal cancers.”

  While sharks possess a range of fascinating properties, they cannot stave off human mortality or aging. To suggest otherwise merely perpetuates the sorts of myths that have surrounded this fish for centuries.

  Some U.S. fishermen used to make careers out of satisfying Americans’ demand for shark, but the market they used to cater to has virtually disappeared. No career better exemplifies this arc than that of Eric Sander, a Daytona Beach, Florida, fisherman who has been intrigued by sharks since he was a little boy. A graduate of the University of South Florida with a natural sciences degree, he started working as a mate on a charter boat out of Daytona in the early 1980s. During the wintertime the charter-boat operations switched to commercial fishing in order to make up for the lull in tourism. They usually focused on bringing in snapper, grouper, and king mackerel, the sorts of fish that commanded the highest market prices. The charter boats would unload their catches at the end of the day on a dock near a few local restaurants, and on the rare occasions when they had snagged a shark by mistake, Sander remembers, it would draw a crowd. “You could drop all the amberjack and mackerel you want; if you dropped a big shark on the dock, everybody came down to your boat.” Still, it was just for show: nobody was interested in buying the sandbar or blacktip shark the charter-boat operators were plunking down upon their return.

  In 1983, Sander and his brother decided to strike out on their own and start commercial fishing full-time. They bought their own thirty-two-foot boat, christened it Jawsome, and headed out to make a living. They began setting longlines for king mackerel and other species and, on occasion, found themselves pulling up sharks. At the same time, federal fisheries managers were trying to ease up the pressure on groupers, and they started putting out literature on how sharks could appeal to restaurants that were seeking to broaden their menu offerings. Sander and his brother went to work outfitting the Jawsome for the task.

  “We kind of jerry-rigged a longline system, and, lo and behold, we could sell sharks,” Sander recalls, adding they relied on a hand crank to pull up the line. “In 1984 we went full-time shark fishing. We had tremendous success.”

  In the first year, the two fishermen brought in fifty thousand pounds of shark. “Everybody was watching us,” he says. And within a matter of months, other fishing operations started imitating them. A fleet blossomed in Daytona Beach, supplying a steady local market with meat and fins. While selling the meat covered the fishermen’s operating costs, the fins represented pure profit.

  “It wouldn’t have been as attractive if that money for the fins wasn’t there. That was bonus money, gravy money,” Sander relates. The price of fins kept going up, from $4 a pound to $9, to $10 and $12, and beyond. The shark fin dealers would gather on the dock, and the fishermen would have their choice of buyers.

  By the late 1990s, however, the shark catches began to dwindle, and Sander noticed. He thought it might be time to go “up the hill,” or start working onshore. After a Florida marine patrol officer saw him sorting fins on the dock, enforcement officers hired Sander as a consultant to nab illegal shark traders. He now works full-time for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission as regional coordinator for its Marine Recreational Fisheries Statistical Survey, asking anglers dockside what they’ve been catching.

  Sander knows many shark populations have been declining off the Atlantic coast: he’s seen it himself, and he emphasizes, “They’re not just another commodity. They serve an important function in the ocean.” But even though he regularly helps enforcement officers spot illegally caught sharks, he doesn’t see himself as someone on a mission to save the animal he once hunted. Sander still sees it as a fish that might as well be on the menu of Daytona Beach restaurants.

  For Sander, working enforcement is just another job, not some sort of moral mission. “I’m not really concerned with it. I’m out of the industry; I have been since 1998,” he offers. “I’m not looking to make things right and restore it back to the level that it’s been before.”

  From a practical perspective, it would be nearly impossible to bring the American shark fishery back to pre-exploitation levels. At this point, shark products have become relegated to a niche market, which provides enough of a commercial incentive to keep a relatively low level of fishing active off U.S. shores. There are shark teeth in South Carolina road stop knickknack stores, mako shark on the list of regular menu offerings at Atlantic Seafood Company in an Atlanta strip mall. They remain a banal relic, an allusion to an ancient seafaring lifestyle that is rapidly disappearing. As the sharks disappear, so does our connection to the sea.

  ——

  In Kesennuma City in Japan, one entrepreneur has spent the last half century seeking a middle way when it comes to the shark trade. Kesennuma is a relatively small port in a country that defines itself as a seafaring nation: fewer than seventy thousand people live there, and the city’s fish market lands close to $30 million worth of fish a year. But its residents have taken full advantage of the region’s fertile fishing grounds—Japanese call its jagged coastline the Rias Coast, referring to its sawtooth-like shape, and it straddles two separate bays—for centuries. And the Pacific coast’s riches continue to define the city’s identity and economy.

  Three hundred years ago Kesennuma fishermen ventured out in small wooden boats to catch sharks, a time-consuming and dangerous process that helped sustain the local population. Now the city is a lively port where fishing and tourism rank as the biggest moneymakers. As fishing vessels became more mechanized and sophisticated, area fishermen started targeting more lucrative species, such as tuna and Pacific saury, rather than focusing on sharks. But using sharp hooks attached to long lines of rope, they caught plenty of sharks anyway. And that gave Kasumasa Murata a major business opportunity.

  Kasumasa Murata grew up far from here in western Japan, on Kyushu Island. But more than fifty years ago he married his wife, Yoneko, a Kesennuma native, and moved to her hometown. At the time Murata came here, the Japanese government was happy to help finance small industrial ventures in the fishing sector, and he decided the other merchants in Kesennuma were missing a possible source of income when they merely sliced off the fins from the sharks piling up on the city’s dock and threw the rest away. “Shark fin in Kesennuma has been world famous, but other parts of the body have not been utilized very well,” he says, sipping cold buckwheat tea in his fish market office. While fishermen in other countries still hack off the fin and throw the shark’s body overboard, he adds, “that’s not our style. I don’t think that’s good for the natural resource. Once we catch a shark, we utilize every part of the body.”

  Murata is not exaggerating. Since 1959 he has built up a small but efficient processing operation, a few minutes’ drive from the port where the sharks come in each morning. The aging entrepreneur purchases half of all the fish that arrive at the dock all day, including most of the sharks: blue, mako, and salmon are the ones that swim off the coast here. A handful of workers immediately slice off the sharks’ fins, which are still worth close to ten times as much as the rest of their bodies, before the remaining flesh is carted off to Murata’s processing plant. The long, tubular bodies are placed in a watery holding pond for roughly six hours, to leach out the ammonia that dominates a shark’s body once it’s be
en killed.

  The tiny factory Murata runs resembles a sausage-making plant more than anything else, with a touch of the assembly-line feel of an automobile factory. Each of the sharks goes through the identical process. A couple of employees skin them and place these skins into thirty-three-pound containers to be frozen, so they can be shipped to a separate facility and made into leather. Then they take out their cartilage spines, tossing them into a large, rectangular plastic bucket that is destined for yet another plant, where its contents can be dried and turned into a medicinal powder. The remaining shark meat is fed through multiple conveyers so it can be washed, sliced, and turned into light pink tubular noodles destined for a massive mixing bowl. (“It’s pure stainless steel,” Murata notes with pride as he takes me on a tour of his plant, pointing to the array of gleaming machines. “It is the best in Japan.”) As the shark meat swirls around in the mixer, Murata’s employees add the specific seasonings that his customers request. Some want sugar, others salt, and a few want some of each. Finally, workers smooth the shark paste that has been formed through this process into twenty-two-pound metal trays that they cover in bright blue saran wrap. It’s ready for freezing in one of the building’s cold-storage units, where it will wait until the trucks come each morning to ship it to different customers across Japan.

  There is no waste in this efficient enterprise. Even the least-desirable shark meat becomes feed for cows, and the other shark by-products fetch an attractive price. The factory’s main office includes a glassed-in display of shark leather items such as card holders, belts, purses, and pumps, all of which sell in the hundreds of dollars. Murata, who wears a black shark-leather belt himself, boasts that he has shipped the leather (which goes under the name KSP, or Kesennuma Shark Products) to as far away as Hermès in Paris. He emphasizes that by maximizing what he gets out of each shark, he’s supporting his community and avoiding an ecological disaster at the same time. “Without taking care of the natural resource, we cannot survive, and we cannot make the town prosperous.”

  It’s unclear how sustainable this sort of fishing is: while the central government ordered the town to slash its eighty-boat fishing fleet by 25 percent in the spring of 2008, and Murata says the fishermen take pains to avoid areas where they know juvenile sharks swim, that is likely not enough to ensure the sharks here survive. Mako sharks are already vulnerable to extinction, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, and scientists believe it’s important to protect older, more fecund females that will produce more offspring than younger females.

  While there are other shark processors in town, Murata—who also heads the Kesennuma fish market cooperative—is comfortable with his position of influence here. He bustles around his plant with cheerful authority and speaks glowingly of the financial model that helped propel Japan to global economic prominence in the 1970s and 1980s. He is nearing retirement but has two sons working in the business, and is optimistic about shark fishing’s future here.

  Though tuna brings in roughly 30 percent more revenue than shark in Kesennuma, the animal continues to help define the city and its food culture. The local shark museum, located right next to the fish market, includes examples of small, tame sharks visitors can pet as well as a battered diving cage they can enter. The city’s restaurants advertise shark’s fin sushi and shark sashimi on their menus as local delicacies, something that’s rarely seen in other cities. Kesennuma was the first Japanese city to join the Slow Food movement, and the Miyagi Prefecture government has started touting shark as an integral part of the global push to eat locally. Its promotional literature, complete with the inevitable cartoon figures, highlights shark’s nutritional virtues. “Rich in collagen and 6 times as much DHA as tuna!” the pamphlet shouts, referring to docosahexaenoic acid, an omega-3 fatty acid. The handout provides examples of the many shark preparations visitors and residents alike can savor, including shark burgers and shark stew. But even with the local government’s help, businessmen like Murata face a major challenge at the moment. The Japanese, proud members of a marine nation, are eating less fish.

  Yutaka Aoki, director of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ Fishery Division within its Economic Affairs Bureau, flips through the government document before him. His eyes scanning bar graph after bar graph, he finally finds what he wants to show me. “Here it is,” he declares, pointing to a chart of how Japanese protein consumption has evolved over time. For hundreds of years fish has occupied a central place in the country’s diet, but cheap meat imports have begun to change that. In 2007, for the first time since the government has begun keeping statistics about citizens’ daily eating habits, people reported eating an equal amount of fish and meat. A year later meat had edged out fish, by a tenth of a pound on a daily basis.

  “The fishery agency is a little concerned about the change in lifestyle,” Aoki admits. “Small children prefer meat.” The Japanese government sees this transition to a more meat-based diet as a challenge on several fronts. It represents an assault on traditional culture. It is helping fuel a weight gain among the nation’s youth. And it threatens what Aoki calls the nation’s “food security.” Few nations rival Japan for its ability to take fish out of the sea, but when it comes to supplying beef, pork, and chicken, most of it comes from countries such as the United States and Australia. Miyagi Prefecture is not the only institution to launch a fish-related public relations campaign; the central government has launched a drive to convince people that fish eating is key. But it may not work fast enough to help the fish-paste industry that Kasumasa Murata supplies.

  Just like shark fishing in Kesennuma, Japanese fish paste has a long and storied history. Back in A.D. 1115, a minister for the emperor who hailed from the Fujiwara clan built a large house and held a party to celebrate his new home. According to the menu, he served a steamed loaf of fish paste cut into slices. Since it was wrapped around a piece of bamboo and took on the shape of the ear of a bulrush, or kama, it became known as kamaboko.12 With the minister’s culinary act, fish paste joined the ranks of traditional Japanese cuisine. To this day, the Japanese emperor and empress serve red and white kamaboko at official banquets.

  But globalization, along with the depletion of fish stocks, has transformed Japanese fish paste over the years. Years ago a dozen regions across the country had their own distinctive form of fish paste, featuring different forms and species of fish. The rural Aomori Prefecture made chikuwa, a tube of paste hollowed out in the center lying on a wooden board. They made it out of the small dogfish sharks they caught, but their catch plummeted in the mid-1950s (most likely because dogfish mature so late and have a long gestation period for their pups). At first, Aomori fishermen switched to catching dogfish sharks off Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost island. But that population dipped, and now they import many of the key ingredients from British Columbia.

  A classic fish cake, hanpen, has also changed with time. It acquired its name not from its shape but from the chef who created it, Hanpei.13 During the Edo period (which began in 1603), residents of what later became Tokyo caught spotted sharks in Edo Bay and made them into this pillowy white fish cake. No one fishes anymore in what is now called Tokyo Bay, and much of the fish in hanpen comes from pollack caught in Hokkaido or elsewhere.

  Shigeo Sugie, who heads the fish-paste cooperative at Tokyo’s Tsukiji Market, spends much of his time thinking about the future of fish paste. (Like Murata, he wears two hats: he is, according to his formal business card, president and “food meister” of Neo Foods Company, a fish-paste producer.) Sugie, with his jet-black hair and the ready smile of a door-to-door salesman, looks as if he would fit better into 1950s America than modern-day Japan. But he is firmly entrenched in one of the most impressive global-trading operations: his office abuts the world’s largest wholesale fish and seafood market, a bustling expanse with twenty-five hundred mechanized trolleys zipping around 760 stalls. There are five wholesalers dealing with shark meat paste, though this pales in comparison w
ith the three hundred tuna wholesalers who operate in Tsukiji every day. Still, these men, along with other fish-paste sellers, are Sugie’s constituency, and he’s doing his best to represent them.

  The problem, according to Sugie, is the vast array of food choices Japanese consumers now have. Like Aoki, he has watched meat consumption rise in recent years. “Unfortunately, the demand for fish paste in the market has decreased these days,” Sugie allows. “As we have a lot of different types of food available in Japan, fish paste has come to be picked up less.” While Japan’s royal families may still serve it at their dinner parties, most average Japanese families do not.

  The loss of fish cake’s regional character isn’t helping, now that fish paste comes from just a handful of sources: frozen pollack supplies half the fish-cake market, while most of the rest comes from fish imported from Southeast Asia. A few stalls in Tsukiji Market still sell hanpen made from shark meat, and Sugie says the viscosity of cartilaginous fish makes all the difference. “It’s like marshmallow,” he murmurs appreciatively as we sample the fish cake at the Tskugon store’s stall. It’s an apt description, because the cake is light and fluffy and features the kind of give that a marshmallow has. Like every other shark dish, it’s the texture that defines it, since the product itself is essentially tasteless. Only after I dip the hanpen into a seafood broth does it gain a noticeable flavor and become a tasty snack.