Chris Higgins
TED Talk: How I Fell in Love with a Fish
by Chris Higgins - March 11, 2010 - 2:12 PM

“I’ve known a lot of fish in my life. I’ve loved only two.” So chef/scholar Dan Barber begins a talk about fish sustainability, fish farming, and how we can keep fish on the menu. It’s actually a really funny talk for such a serious issue — Barber relates a series of stories about his search for a sustainable fish. It’s smart, it’s funny, and Barber knows his fish.

Discussed: fishing as “clear-cutting” the ocean, many fish farms pollute and are inefficient (15:1 ratio of fish food to tuna by weight), “sustainable proteins,” feeding chicken to fish, falling out of love with a fish, romantic love with a new fish, Spanish fish farming, phytoplankton, zooplankton, a farm that doesn’t feed its animals, a 300-mile roundtrip commute for birds, delicious fish skin, and how to feed the world.

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Comments (4)

  1. Great post! My friends always call me a hippie for not eating seafood unless it’s MSC-certified, which basically means never eating seafood.

    Anybody see the article on CNN today about a California restaurant knowingly serving endangered whale meat to customers? *shudder*

    posted by ab on 3-11-2010 at 2:31 pm

  2. My Brother in Law is starting a small scale aquponics?? system – where the waste water from the fish is used to grow vegatables.

    The vegtables grow soil-less – the waste water from the fish is circulated among the roots. The vegtables remove the excess nitrogen from the water, and then the clean water is sent back to the fish tank.

    The way he has it set up every 4 to 6 weeks he harvests the largest fish and adds the same number of hatchlings to the tank – currently its small scale so he only havests about 10 fish every time. I think he is growning perch. He was growing lettuce over the winter but I think is switching to tomatos for the summer but almost any crop can be grown this way.

    He is now working with local restaurants to sell his fish and vegtables to – if he finds enough people interested he will ramp up his set up but currently it feeds his family.

    posted by beth on 3-11-2010 at 2:55 pm

  3. i saw this post and immediately thought of south park’s take on kanye west’s ego in the episode “fishsticks” after his vma interruption last year.

    posted by john m on 3-11-2010 at 10:16 pm

  4. We are every bit as concerned about fish in the Northwest as anywhere. But sustainability is now the practice for our NW salmon fishery, as is restoration of salmon habitat in this region.

    At http://www.SeattleSmokehouse.com we only offer wild salmon, due to the clear polution effects of salmon farming in the Pacific. This selectivity differs greatly from farmed Atlantic salmon sources, or from South American salmon products prevalent in the USA, due to what else…cheap prices.

    And Washington is showing the way for sustainable practices that will allow future chefs and our grandchildren to continue to enjoy this remarkable fish.

    posted by fishman on 4-2-2010 at 7:49 pm

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