From China, The Future of Fish | Hacker News Reader

From China, The Future of Fish

businessweek.com

44 pointscwan25 comments

From an ecological point of view this is good news.

Unlike almost all food fish (which need to eat meat), tilapia eat plants.

Almost all animals - except fish - eaten by humans eat plants, and now fish will join the list.

By eating plants they are eating much lower on the food chain, this significantly reduces the impact and resources needed to grow the animal.

I think most meaty fish food comes from by catch. naturally that can't replace fishing, but it's not like they compete with is for cows.

Here's a crazy idea

instead of eating fish, eat soy-and-corn mixture

Tilapia also eat algae. Are you going to suggest we eat that too?

we could call it nori or agar

http://www.botgard.ucla.edu/html/botanytextbooks/economicbot...

Chinese aquaculture is different from what you'd expect from a western / european / north american aquaculture operation.

The food pellets that the fish eat contains antibiotics to stop disease, and estrogen/progesterone (via excess birth control pills rejected for human use from the large pharma factories) in order to make the fish grow faster.

The fish grow in a chemical bath - containing both the minimally treated waste water from semiconductor / electronics manufacturing, as well as what's needed to counteract those chemicals.

Don't believe me? If food companies in China can put melamine in baby powder in order to save a few cents, what makes you think they care about what they give to the fish?

Comparing another case with another company isn't really the proof you need to make people believe you. Once you provide proof of your actual claims we can all honestly believe you.

>Americans keep ordering more

I hate statements like this, because they ignore the influence of what's being offered. If the fish are higher profit, many businesses will start selling them instead of better things which make them less money.

>A decade ago, few Americans ate tilapia. ... Then demand surged in the wake of the Atlantic cod fishery collapse.

Which caused Atlantic cod prices to skyrocket, I'd bet (I don't remember). Similar to how the oil spill caused shrimp prices to skyrocket.

None of which implies anything about demand, merely supply. But "Americans keep ordering more" states a change in demand. "American companies keep ordering more" might be more accurate. Inundate the market with something non-offensive, and you're assured better sales than before.

edit:

Hah!

>"China's track record in certain areas isn't perfect," says Bill Mardon ... He singles out Chinese processors' use of a glaze ... contains carbon monoxide, which preserves the color ... and can ... look fresher than it is.

You mean like beef in America?

What surprises me most about this article is that the author was able to gain some visibility (sugarcoated or not) into this industry, in China no less.

Slaughterhouses and meat processors in the US, in particular, are notoriously opaque about their operations in a way that would make Apple's practices seem lenient by comparison.

One of the reasons might be that there are a couple of publicly traded 'aquaculture' companies in China that are kind of desperate to show that they aren't frauds.

One is mentioned in the article, HQ Sustainable Marine.

So typically if investors show up to these small companies, they will try to do whatever they can to take them around their factories and show that the business is real.

I read that through but still don't get why "environmentalists hate it"? Wouldn't farmed fish be preferable, environmentally, than continuing to trawl the ocean?

The values prescribed to things by economists and environmentalists rarely align.

From my understanding (admittedly, limited) both ocean trawling and aquaculture are both unsustainable.

Over-fishing isn't sustainable, but that's what we're doing at the moment. Aquaculture uses 'earth' resources to farm fish, which includes fossil fuel expenditure for feeding and transport (based on current energy networks). It also produces waste products in the form of environmentally deleterious nitrogen-rich effluent which is out-flowed into the wider ecosystem.

An economist might label that a better proposition. Generally less depleting of a finite resource... more 'taming' a resource and using other resources to enable that.

An environmentalist would label both destructive (and while they're at it, the farming of methane emitting grain-fed animals for food is equally destructive compared to just eating the grains instead).

Me personally? I'm going to continue to eat meat. Irrationally (from an economists perspective) I don't think I can enjoy eating ocean caught fish anymore though... it seems like we're really approaching the limits on harvesting that resource more than any other today.

Farm-raised fish seem somewhat on the same scale of "bad for the environment" as eating steak (so I'm 'selfishly' ok with that).

The fact that these fish don't have Omega-3 oils or are described as 'the tofu of fish'? ...makes me think we should probably just eat tofu instead.

Some farmed fish requires fish to feed them, which is unsustainable in itself when you're feeding N pounds of other fish to produce 1 pound of the edible type.

See: http://www.nicholas.duke.edu/thegreengrok/farmedfish-pnas092...

Recently, I've seen more of a shift to grains, but that reduces the nutritional value of the fish.

Why would shifting to grains reduce the nutritional value of the fish? Is cat more nutritious than lamb?

Fish feed consists of small, less desirable fish such as sardines and mackerel. These are rich in omega-3, so shifting to grains reduces the quantity available in the fish.

OK I get it. You didn't mean the nutritional value of a pound of fish.

There are several reasons environmentalists hate aquaculture which may or may not apply here:

- Most aquaculture is not disconnected from natural waterways (sometime its a caged area in a natural waterway). This means depleting resources and waste dumping which hurts the natural ecology.

- The problems of high density farming: genetic diversity issues, antibiotic use / superbug breeding grounds / diseases

- Fish farms use feed made from by-catch creating some incentive for it.

- It can "look wrong." This may cause people to look for reasons.

On the other hand, aquaculture can be a self sufficient facility in the desert that deals with filters etc or even produces vegetables as a by product. I think relatively few aquaculture businesses actually operate like this, but many could be. The two biggest species (by far if you measure by weight) in aquaculture are tilapia (mild white fish for Americans) & carp (strong oild fish for Chinese). Both of these are easy (high density, grain eating, hardy etc.) freshwater species and would be easy to make eco friendly.

*As a hobby many people do aquaponics. They grow plants hydroponically using bacteria to convert the ammonia from fish waste into plant food. Tilapia are a popular choice. I'm not sure if this particular approach is most commercially viable, but it works as a proof of concept for environmentally sound tilapia growing. It sounds like a lot of fun.

Print version: http://www.businessweek.com/print/magazine/content/10_44/b42...

I just cooked this for dinner less than an hour ago. It's really not a bad fish. It's no Chilean Sea Bass, but it's light, never gamey, and you can eat it without worrying about it going extinct.

I'd still take catfish over it pretty much every time if they were of equal quality, but you're often able to get tilapia that is considerably fresher.

I tried it back during my first trip to Sichuan in 2005. Luofeiyu, everyone seems to eat it there, at least in the rural part of Sichuan where I was. It was especially awesome barbecued with Sichuan spices. I think I liked it so much because it tasted unlike any fish I've ever had before. I used to live in Vancouver, so I like my fish. :)

Tilapia and catfish are good fish to be eating over their carnivorous cousins (food input vs. food output), but the specifics of farm raising have something to do with an individual fish's greenness.

In the end, I hope that we push up production of tilapia here in the US, and I'm excited by programs that blend simple aquaculture with more traditional green growing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qZPwBPAqks (Will Allen is a boss!).

Good article. My wife and I just got back from China and I noticed in the food markets that almost all seafood is sold live. Our guide said that is what consumers there demand.

That has a lot to do with the way they prepare most of their seafood dishes - steaming with mild seasoning. And since most people don't have access to ovens at home in China, steaming and pan frying are pretty much the only ways they do fish. They don't mind bony little fish so long the flesh tastes right which is crucial for steaming applications. That's why they demand live seafood. Us Americans on the other hand, when we think of fish, we think of fillets, with all sorts of crusts and glaze and whatnot, which often overwhelm the subtle taste of the fish itself.

There was an episode of dirty jobs at a tilapia farm. The farm rotated Chilean sea bass, carp, and tilapia through pools as the tilapia basically cleaned the bass waste. They were using the excess water to irrigate plants in a desert at the end.

update here is the video link: http://videos.howstuffworks.com/discovery/30832-dirty-jobs-s...

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