Eating for Beginners Page 20

  I thought of Charles Clover's question about the dying fishing industry: "Can we afford to be sentimental about fishermen if the price of having too many of them is the destruction of fish and the wonders of the ocean, which we are only just beginning to understand?" One of the people Clover interviewed answered him this way: "I grew up in an area of dairy farms, with small towns scattered every few miles apart ... Now agribusiness owns more than ninety percent of the farms and the little towns are either empty or gentrified by people who commute an hour each way to the city to work and shop. A rich interesting culture was lost, and no one blinked." His argument was that the same was happening in fishing communities, and from what Kevin was saying, he clearly agreed. I wondered out loud where we would get our fish if that happened.

  "You're going to get your fish from foreign countries," he said matter-of-factly. "The National Marine Fisheries Service crushes the domestic fisheries, and the imports just fill the vacuum. The more they regulate us, it just creates opportunities for others."

  I started to protest about overfishing and disappearing species, and to my surprise, Kevin didn't disagree. For someone who seemed antagonistic toward what he called "the fish regime," Kevin has spent an enormous amount of time working with regulators to develop rules that preserve both fish and the livelihood of fishermen. He's testified before Congress and is a member of the local division of his fisheries council, and he's helped scientists with their stock-assessment projects. As he told me, "I've always been drug into it, first just to sustain myself and then they get to know you." And even though the bureaucracy sometimes drove him nuts, he wasn't against it. "We need rules, but we need smart rules that make sense—steady supplies, smaller amounts. Good science is key to all of this, and moderation is key, no doubt about it, but you have to make the industry viable or [fishing's] not worth doing. It's a fine line."

  He wanted to make a profit, but he paid attention to more than just money. "We all like conservation, and we all want to have fish for tomorrow. We don't want to fish ourselves out of a job. We're the barometers of the ocean. If we see that we can't catch anything we know we're in trouble." Like Richard or Lucy or Elizabeth MacAlister wanting to preserve land, Kevin wanted to preserve the ocean, partly because he made his living from it but also because he was part of a community supported by fishing that he saw being slowly decimated. "Domestic production is being lost slowly but surely between overfishing and habitat degradation," he said. "But there are some species that have made comebacks, and the regulations don't take the restaurant business or the marketing into consideration. How can you have a product for a month and then it disappears?"

  This seemed to be another version of what Joe Angello had said about labeling. As with produce, applewood could take whatever fish a guy like Kevin brought in, but many other restaurants and stores couldn't because their menus and sales setups didn't change every day. This left small dayboat fishermen like Kevin at a disadvantage. More than any other part of the food chain I'd seen, fishing seemed imbalanced when it came to the needs of the consumers, the environment, and the producers (fishermen, in this case). It's been estimated that if we don't reverse overfishing trends very soon, the ocean will be virtually out of fish by 2048, and according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, about seventy-five percent of fish species are already either overfished or "fully exploited," and yet we consumers continue to demand vast quantities of fish even as fishermen—like farmers—sometimes struggle to stay solvent. Standing at the wheel of the Dana Christine, Kevin suddenly looked awfully isolated.

  ***

  We had been on the water for about two and a half hours by now—Mike was completely crashed in the sleeping area—and I was getting dozy. Behind us the stars still glowed, even as ahead of us the sun was starting to rise, brushing pink and orange streaks along the horizon. "I'm going to go down and grab a nap," Kevin said. "You can sleep, too, honey."

  And with that, I dropped my pen and pad to the floor, lay down on the bench, and passed out.

  When I woke up, it was broad daylight and we had dropped anchor. I wasn't quite sure who had been driving the boat while I, and presumably Kevin, slept—perhaps Mike had taken a turn—but now it was seven-thirty A.M. and Kevin and Mike were putting on their big boots, plastic pants, and hooded rain jackets in preparation for getting splashed out on deck. The boat, which had been chugging along smoothly before my nap, was now pitching violently from side to side at almost ninety degree angles to the water.

  "I think I'll take you up on that bucket," I said to Kevin, trying to sound very calm, as he tossed me a pair of plastic pants. He went outside to help Mike begin to bring in the net, which they located via a GPS attached to a buoy attached to a ground rope that led down to the net, and I went down to the sleeping area with the plastic pants and the bucket. As I struggled into the pants, my stomach pitched along with the boat. I barely got them on before I threw up.

  Goodbye, Dramamine.

  Then, because I was feeling what would turn out to be very temporarily half-decent, I headed out on deck to watch Kevin and Mike bring in the fish. After all, this was why I had come along. And what could be better when you're feeling sick than seeing a lot of dead fish?

  For a while, things went along (forgive me) swimmingly. Perched on the edge of the boat so I could throw up right into the water (I'm all for convenience), I watched Mike and Kevin begin to pull in their net by winding it around a large spindle, called a drum, on deck. The net was large mesh so smaller fish could swim through, and it lay along the ocean floor, held by weights, until they brought it up. ("You can fish anywhere from ten to forty fathoms," Kevin told me, "depending on what kind of boat you have and how much moxie you got.") In it were many monkfish and an occasional skate, which was Kevin's by-catch (skate are considered overfished, though catching certain species is not entirely banned by the NMFS). In order to empty the net, they had to stretch it open with one hand and wrestle each fish out of its web with the other. When the fish were free, Mike and Kevin threw them into large coolers lining the side of the boat.

  I've never particularly liked to eat monkfish, and now I felt totally justified. They were hideous, mud-colored beasts with huge heads, big lumpy tails, and pretty much nothing in between except for a weird little fin on each side that looked as if it had gotten caught midway through an evolutionary change from swimming to walking. They may have been called the poor man's lobster, but they sure didn't look like it, and it wasn't just my queasy stomach making me feel that way. Each fish was about one-third tail, and the rest of it seemed to be its awful head.

  Kevin brought one over to where I was sitting, half on the side of the boat, half on the deck in an effort to find a position that would make me feel even slightly less terrible. "Check out its mouth!" he said enthusiastically. And though the last thing I really wanted to do at that moment was look deep inside a disgusting, slimy creature, I was literally painfully aware that if I didn't do it then, I was probably not going to feel well enough to do it later on.

  Kevin pried open its mouth with some effort; the fish was clearly not interested in displaying its jagged little teeth for me. Steeling myself, I turned toward it and upon looking in discovered an intricate pale-pink-and-white architecture supporting all the ugly flesh and skin. The monkfish's huge head, as wide as the whole fish was long, was all mouth. Its interior, used to catch and hold prey as big as the fish itself, was clean and fresh looking and arched at the top like a miniature cathedral ceiling.

  "It's beautiful," I said, surprised and thus momentarily distracted from the roiling in my stomach.

  "You gotta watch out for the teeth, though," said Kevin. "Watch this." Mike came over and put his hand, sheathed in a thick rubber glove, into the pink space that lay beyond the rows of long sharp teeth. The monkfish instantly snapped on, digging deep into the glove. It took both of them to pry its mouth open again, after which Kevin threw the fish into a cooler and they went back to bringing up lengths of
net.

  After this little party trick was over, I excused myself and retreated to the cabin, where for the next hour and a half I lay on the floor with a plastic bucket, throwing up every few minutes, long past the point when it seemed humanly possible to throw up any more, and staring at the ceiling between eruptions. Kevin and Mike went about their business as though they did not have a limp author sprawled on their floor in huge plastic pants (great not only for fishing but for lying on a wet surface in agony). Every once in a while Kevin came in to check on me or look at a radar screen.

  "Don't feel funny, honey," he said, as I retched into the bucket mid-conversation. "You're doing great."

  This appraisal seemed fairly generous, seeing as I hadn't even been able to sit up in recent memory, but apparently Kevin considered my condition a mild case.

  "You don't want to know the things I've seen out here," he said on his fourth or fifth visit. "I've had people projectile vomiting out the cabin door. I've had cops crawling around on their hands and knees demanding I take them back to land when we were four hours out. I know a thousand captains I wouldn't go out with. I was surprised you didn't get sick sooner." I took this as the comfort it was intended to be and turned back to my bucket.

  We went over to one more fishery so Mike and Kevin could fill their allotted three thousand pounds of catch. Then they gutted all the fish, close to three hundred of them, out on deck. I rallied just enough to peek out the cabin door, still lying on my side, to see how they did it—slit the stomach, pull the guts out, put them in a bucket, dump it in the water when you're done. Then Kevin turned the boat homeward. It was eleven o'clock in the morning and there was nothing left to do but motor slowly for shore.

  "We'll probably gross about three thousand dollars on this trip," he said. "That's a good day, no lost gear. Seven hundred and fifty pounds of fish and we'd break even. We're the top-producing small boat on the East Coast—I caught three hundred fifty thousand pounds of fish last year, and some years I catch over four hundred thousand." (In addition to monkfish he fished for bluefish and weakfish, among others.)

  Even in my compromised state, I marveled at these numbers. Kevin had more to tell me. "There's a lot of luck involved and a lot of hard work. You have to have the fortitude and know where to go and have the gear ready. And the amount of hell, what time you're getting up—we're not going out there for fun. Some of those rides you're just beat to hell before you get there."

  For now, though, the hell part seemed to be over. "We'll use half the fuel we did going out," he said from his captain's chair, which seemed yards above my position on the floor, "and it will take twice as long. You'll feel better once we get moving again, and really, don't feel funny, honey. Even Mike got sick for the first few weeks he was out here."

  Mike, who had come in to get his lunch—the mere thought of someone eating made me throw up into the bucket one last time—nodded his head. He was clearly the silent partner. Then, looking at me thoughtfully, Kevin asked, "Are you going to write about this?"

  ***

  It was a long ride back. We pulled into the docks where the fish would be processed around four o'clock. Though I had, as Kevin promised, recovered considerably in the interim, my knees were shaking when I stepped onto the dock.

  "Feels pretty good, doesn't it?" he said with a big smile.

  "Yup," I said. With the ground beneath my feet, I felt about twenty pounds lighter and inestimably happier. Kevin drove me back to my car, and I managed to say goodbye without throwing up. As I got into the driver's seat, I wondered if I'd ever eat fish again.

  It wasn't for a few more hours, until I was on the New Jersey Turnpike headed home, that I could contemplate eating even anything that wasn't fish. I pulled over and bought water and a box of saltines, and said a little prayer of thanks when the first bite stayed down. Once I was on the road again, I could think a little more clearly about what I'd seen that day. We don't all get a daily email with information about our fish as David did (though maybe that's a business someone should start), and once I was home he was the first person I went to with my remaining questions.

  "'Dayboat' is not automatically good, there's more to it than that," he told me when I cornered him in a quiet moment at the restaurant the following week. "Dayboat really just means that the fish hasn't been frozen overnight; you can still catch cod and skate on a dayboat." (Atlantic cod is severely overfished.) He was right, of course, but at some point you have to make choices. Gill nets are considered environmentally damaging by the same people who put out the list David consults when buying fish, but applewood buys from a small Alaskan salmon harvester that uses them successfully, with a very low percentage of by-catch, in a sustainable fishery.

  And dayboat fishing had other attractions as well, the same attractions as supporting small farmers who were helping to keep their communities vibrant. "Buying local really helps the mom-and-pop and subsistence fishermen," Kevin had told me on the way out to the fishery. "We have a forty-two-foot boat and we're taking everything out with our own two hands. That's not the kind of operation that's going to sweep the ocean clean. We've proven that the monkfishery is very sustainable, but it's really hard."

  When I checked on this later, I discovered that after the monkfish population declined precipitously in the 1980s and 1990s, the NMFS put a management plan in place that allowed some fishing again by 2003; as of 2009, Atlantic monkfish were considered fully recovered and also a great fisheries-management success story. Meanwhile, the Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch tells consumers to avoid monkfish largely because of the methods typically used to catch it—bottom trawls and gill nets.

  When Kevin and I spoke some time after our boat trip, I mentioned this conflicting information. "I saw the other day someone had monkfish on the unsustainable list," he said, an edge of frustration in his voice. "I see all kinds of wrong stuff out there." And while it's true that he has a vested interest in considering monkfish sustainable, it's also true that he wants to make sure they don't disappear, so he fishes as responsibly as possible with nets that meet NMFS specifications for mesh size and with a reduced number of days at sea that limits how much he can catch; there's a big difference between his operation and a big commercial trawler. "The Fisheries Service is trying to bring all the species back," he had said when we were out on the water. "We'll get there eventually. I'm sure of that. These fisheries have to be rebuilt." I heard Richard in my head—"These little farms have to be farms again"—and figured that if Kevin had reason to be optimistic, so did I.

  As it turned out, I had more than just fish to be hopeful about. When I walked into our apartment after my day on the Dana Christine, still slightly woozy and convinced I would have to live on saltines for the rest of my life, but bursting with seafaring tales to tell Noah, he got his news in first.

  "Guess what Jules likes?"

  "What do you mean?" I said suspiciously. "Did you buy him a skateboard?"

  "No." Long, very pregnant pause. "Sausages."

  "You mean like meat sausages?"

  "Yeah," said Noah. "These little dry turkey sausages. Meat sausages."

  And just like that, I loved food again.

  ***

  We had had signs that Jules's stubbornness in the eating department was weakening. The first one had come about a month before I went fishing, at another child's birthday party. I was talking to a friend when I saw Noah approaching from across the room with a stricken look on his face.

  "Is something wrong?" I asked, scanning the room for a heap of broken child or some other disaster.

  "Jules just ate a bite of my pizza," Noah choked out.

  My friend gave him a peculiar look. "What do you mean ate a bite?" I asked.

  "I mean he bit down on my slice and took some of it in his mouth and didn't spit it out," Noah explained carefully, like one biologist telling another about the eating habits of a rare species.

  "I think I'll go get a cupcake," the friend said, leaving us to our baffled h
appiness. Having been burned before (remember his brief fling with salami?), I decided to take this possibly monumental development in stride.

  But whether it was because I refused to get excited or just because it was spring and things were thawing all around us, that bite of pizza turned out to be, if not the start of something big, at least the start of something different. In a single week that April, Jules tried wax beans (raw, of course, so they were crunchy), corn on the cob, and fresh green peas straight from the pod. When we went to the grocery store, he sat in the cart pointing at things he wanted to try, just the way all the books had said he was supposed to when he was one. He didn't eat most of them, but he had suddenly become aware of the variety of food that existed, and he was interested in it. Meat of any kind was still an issue, which was why Noah was so excited about the turkey sausages on Memorial Day weekend, but we were finally on our way.

  When we took Jules to the pediatrician for his regular checkup and told her he'd started trying new foods, she said, "That's odd. Most kids do it the other way. They eat anything until they're two and then start cutting back." (This was the same doctor who, when we reported that Jules's first word was "No," looked at us pityingly and said "You're in trouble.") Yes, it was odd, but oddness was what we had come to expect from him where food was concerned. Cautiously at first, we began to assume he would try something every once in a while, which was more than enough for us.

  New spring produce was abundant in the kitchen again, too. "It's starting!" David said happily the same week that Jules first ate beans, peas, and corn. "It's so exciting! You get so tired of all the yellows and browns and then everything goes green all at once." Something was in the air, and it smelled like new life. As the season shifted, so did the lives of everyone at applewood. Greg got married, Sarah decided to move back to her native Pittsburgh with her fiancé and become a private chef, and David hired a new grill man, who also happened to be a documentary filmmaker. One afternoon I arrived to find Laura hauling Sophie and Tatum's futon bed out of the office. They hadn't slept on it for months, since David and Laura had hired a babysitter to pick them up after school and stay with them at home until one parent or the other could get there, but this last vestige of the early days at applewood had lingered.