On Food and Cooking

commercial fish in the world at or beyond the
level at which they can sustain themselves.
In addition to dangerously depleting its
target fish populations, modern fishing causes
collateral damage to other species, the
“bycatch” of undiscriminating nets and lines
that is simply discarded, and it can damage
ocean-bottom habitats. Fishing is also an
unpredictable, dangerous job, subject to the
uncertainties of weather and the hazards of
working at sea with heavy equipment. To this
highly problematic system of production,
there is an increasingly important alternative:
aquaculture, or fish farming, which in many
parts of the world goes back thousands of
years. Today in the United States, all of the
rainbow trout and nearly all of the catfish sold
are farmed on land in various kinds of ponds
and tanks. Norway pioneered the ocean
farming of Atlantic salmon in large offshore
pens in the 1960s; and today more than a third
of the salmon eaten in the world is farmed in