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Well, thank you, everyone, for coming. Were honored to have Paul Greenberg in town in all sorts of things, but thank you so much for making the time for us here at the bookstore. Greenberg my pleasure. applause greenberg so im working on another book right now, tentatively titled the omega principland its a book about omega3 fatty acids. And so as part of that grand experiment, on september 1, 2015, i had my blood drawn, and then i stopped eating landfood meat. And for the last year, ive been eating seafood every single day, sometimes for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and a snack, so its just been. You look great. Greenberg well, thank you, i. laughter greenberg i feel great. Thats what we call in medicine a. So this is a passage from the third chapter of american catch. Passing up to a bluff, i looked down on the isolated settlement, and thought that once upon a time, a little 17thcentury village called New Amsterdam must have looked quite a bit like this a modest place, with its face turned toward the sea, where the fisherman and the fishmonger were an integral part of daily life. And where seafood held its own with land food in nearly every regard. What kind of Society Might we have formed had we not, as melville wrote in moby dick, become landsmen, tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks . What if instead we had become what melville called a society fixed in ocean reveries . Greenberg all right reel, reel, reel, reel, reel. Okay, hes on there. Greenberg ive always loved this moment, when the fish reveals itself out of the mystery of the ocean. It feels like youve been given something precious. Greenberg i caught a king after all these years all right, skunk is off the boat. Greenberg the skunk is off the boat. The triumphant moment. Oh, to be a fish, right . Some of the happiest days of my life have been these little celebrations that come after figuring out where a fish is, how it lives, and how to catch it. And when you eat what you catch, you feel as if youre eating the sea itself. A fisherman is always on the hunt for the fishiest places, and few are fishier than here, on the coast of peru. It was the middle of the night, in november springtime in the Southern Hemisphere when i boarded tmaricielo with captain juan castro. Why is the nighttime better for the fish . Greenberg oh, so youre, like, looking for the glitter on the surface of the water. Greenberg this is what id come to see one of the worlds great explosions of life, the opening of the largest fishery in the world. Peruvian anchoveta a little fish, for sure. But some years, perus anchovy catch is bigger than all the fish caught in u. S. Waters combined, but almost no one eats them. When i was a kid, the most sort of romantic thing in the world for me was going fishing in the early morning. And that moment, just as dawn was starting to break and you felt the excitement of the world coming alive again, thats really the feeling that i had on the boat. I have never been in a place where i have seen so much life in one place. I am looking out, like, theres one, two, three. I dont know, five dozen seals, sea lions, all schooling up around these anchoveta. You have got huge flocks of birds, terns, gannets, petrels, all kinds of birds diving in, doing their own thing, and then you got this big net just full of anchoveta. I think the last pull, they had ten tons in a single pull. I think theyre going to have this bigger one this time. I mean, all with this incredibly, like, nutritious fish that if people only ate it, could probably be a very good way to use this resource, but unfortunately, like, 99 of it goes into fish meal and fish oil and gets sent to china. This is called a reduction fishery. Altogether, around the world, as much as 25 or more of all fish caught are poured into processing plants to be ground up and boiled down, turned into oil, and dried into fish meal. Years ago they were just used for fertilizer. Then they were fed to pigs and chickens and even your pet cat. But now fish like these peruvian anchovies are turned into feed for whats called aquaculture fish farming. Theyre fed to americas favorite fish, Atlantic Salmon. I think that must have started in the 80s, and then, you know, the big salmon industry in europe and in north america. Then they brought the salmon down to chile, and then the whole thing started going up because people loved salmon. And then they realized fish meal was a really good feed for the salmon, and they started using and taking more and more and more of the supply. And thats when all of the industry went into fish meal producing for feed, for aquaculture. Greenberg i think of Patricia Majluf as the anchovy lady, because at conferences shes always handing out little cans of anchovies. All right, so do we just scoop it up and eat it . If you can fit the whole thing. Greenberg she says we should all be eating more anchovies instead of sending so many off to china or norway to feed farmed salmon. But the aquaculture industry depends on these little fish. So do you think its fair to say that there wouldnt even be this global aquaculture industry if it werent for the peruvian anchoveta . We supply 30 of it, so a very large component of it. It probably wouldnt be as big as it is. Greenberg right. Because its the best food for aquaculture. Greenberg but peruvian anchoveta are also supposed to be great food for us. Theyre unusually rich in omega3 fatty acids, and thats what im writing my latest book about. So i wanted to see where all those little fish get pulverized, reduced, and eventually poured into a capsule. Dave matthews, a big canadian whos built ten of these fish Oil Refineries around the world, has seen it become a very big business. For peru, its very big, and for the rest of the world, its even more important, because 25 to 30 of the anchovy oil, which is high in omega3 content is really only located in peru. Greenberg its all built on the promise of a magical pill to cure the ailments of middle age, and big dave is a big believer. My cholesterols extremely low lower than my wifes, and she eats healthier than i do and my Blood Pressures extremely low. Greenberg and it does affect your Blood Pressure . Yeah. Greenberg because i have slightly elevated Blood Pressure. Okay, so you need to be two to three grams of omega3 a day. Greenberg okay. I did the arithmetic on daves prescription. Thats as many as six giant pills of fish oil id have to swallow each and every day. Those are the capsules that up to 20 million americans take as a supplement. But im not a pillpopper, and i wanted to get right to the source. So i came to pisco to see an anchovy canning factory. This is the essence of what im looking for. But the omega3s in this oil are active compounds that spoil fast. So they have to get the anchovies in the can quickly. The supplement industry has the same problem. A poorly processed fish oil capsule can rot just like a fish. And a rotten, oxidized capsule does nothing for your health. Which is why im staying away from the capsules. Id rather get my omega3s from oily fish. That means, i was told in peru, four filets a day for my daily dose. Yes. playing traditional music i can also get it here. This is my kind of fish shack. That looks good. And there we have it, flounder milanese. speaking spanish laughing speaking spanish greenberg peruvians share my passion for seafood, but they arent worrying about omega3s. Theyre getting theirs from lots of other fishes. And it turns out, they dont care that much about anchoveta. speaking spanish greenberg meanwhile, i cant help but wonder if thered be more and bigger local fish like these if this socalled reduction fishery wasnt taking so many tons of forage fish out of the food chain all in order to feed farmed fish somewhere far away. In fact, this particular year, the anchoveta season almost didnt open. Even though this looks like a lot of fish, this is a year of scarcity. Its an el nino year. The water is warmer, less productive. And the estimates of available adult fish in the water are way down, well below the five Million Metric Tons needed to open the fishery. If it were up to you, would you have opened the fishery this year . Not at all, not at all. The survey that was done to evaluate the population came back with only 3. 38 million tons. And you normally need to have five million tons of adults to be able to fish. And of those 3. 38, only two millions were spawning adults. The industry said, oh, thats not right. That number must be wrong. Greenberg so they counted again. To count it again, count it again until you find it. Greenberg counting it until you get the number that you want. Exactly. And we just got a copy of a report that was sent back kind of informing the ministry what they were going to do for the last count, and they said, at the request of the industry, we did this. At the request of the industry, we did that. Greenberg the biggest guy in the industry, however, says they didnt put pressure on the government. And what about the sort of accusations that the quotas too high . That you shouldnt have even opened the anchoveta season this year because were in an el nino year, that we risk crashing the population like we did in the 70s if we fish . Do you agree with that . No. I was in the 70s. What happened in the 70s was during the military government, and they, for economic reasons, they allow us to catch and we overcatch. Greenberg they let you catch whatever you wanted. And were you ever, like, hey, stop catching so many fish i mean, did you ever want to stop in. We really didnt know how much fish were in the ocean. This year, they founded 3. 28, 200, 3. 3, lets say. Greenberg 3. 3 Million Metric Tons. Million. But we were not able to check the whole section of the anchovy habitat. What the minister decided its not the industry, the minister decided to check it again. Greenberg and youre 100 confident that they have the right. Yes. Greenberg but within weeks, the Government Agency that surveys the fishery decided to stop the season early, because they were taking too many small juvenile fish. Thats why peru has a reputation as a wellmanaged fishery. Still, over the years, the biomass has been reduced. And its nothing like what it was before humans muscled their way into this ecosystem. Its too easy, though, to say that the fishing industry is bad and the conservationists are good. Everyones doing a job. Everyone has their point of view. The only point of reference i have is the past. And what the past tells me is that once upon a time, the same kind of fishery existed off california cannery row in monterey. And it got hit by an el ninolike event, and the people kept fishing. And that fishery crashed in the 1950s and its never really come back. All the boats, all the factories disappeared. And a lot of them were bought, and shipped here to peru. I started writing my new book to explore the connection between the health of oceans and our own health especially, i have to admit, my health. The kid who loved to fish is now a middleaged man. Ive got slightly elevated Blood Pressure, ive got cholesterol issues, i have depression issues, i have sleep issues, and i dont like it. In fact, i hate it. So i started to listen to the soft purr of the omega3 industry. This is everything theyre supposed to fix. They say its what makes your joints more youthful, your brain quicker, your heart more resilient. A kind of elixir, if you believe in that sort of thing. But im not sure what i believe. So i thought, what if i did a study of one and ate only fish, every meal every day, for a year . What would happen . Were jewish, right . Somebody was asking me, like, do we believe in heaven . Not really, right . Well, im, yeah. Greenberg we dont have to go into it. But all im saying is, is that this omega thing to me feels a little bit like the promise of the afterlife, like, you wont know it till youre there. Yeah. Greenberg and we wont know about the omega3 thing till were. Well, 50 of people dont know they have Heart Disease until they suddenly die. Greenberg you want to hear the first line of the book . Yeah. Greenberg here, ill tell you. A little while back, i learned from an. Sorry, a little while back, i learned from an eminent cardiologist that half of all patients first report Heart Disease to their doctors by dropping dead. Youre right, yeah. Greenberg i have no intention of doing that. So i began my year of eating fish. Sometimes esther and luke would join me. But mostly id be on my fishy own. Tonight, its tomato anchovy sauce over pasta. Ooh, its hot. Greenberg and some little snapper blues luke and i just caught. There are some of the oiliest fish around, rich in omega3s. Yeah, it looks really good. Im really excited about the snappers. Greenberg over the weeks and months to come, id keep at it every meal. phone camera clicking a smoked mackerel on a bagel. Wild sockeye from alaska. Grilled yellowfin nicoise. Teriyaki farmed salmon. A new kind of shrimp, grown indoors in a warehouse upstate. All of them tell a story, where they came from and how they ended up on my plate. When i was a kid, my parents divorced when i was about three years old and my dad pretty much disappeared from my daytoday life. Id see him only on the weekends. For some strange reason, fishing was something that i did to fill that empty space. And i spent a lot of time just disappearing. You know, a day wasnt just a day, a day was an exploration of a river and the fish that were in it. When i got older, you know, youre always, as a fisherman, looking for that next great body of water, and for me, that next great body of water was the sea. Carl safina is a friend, a naturalist and a writer. Hes also a fisherman. So when did you first. You know, you grew up fishing. You grew up fishing on long island and around here. When did you first notice that there was an overfishing situation . When i was studying sea birds in the early 80s, i was in a boat pretty much every day for several months of the year, and i was also doing a lot of fishing, and i could see that pretty much everything was declining. Greenberg as boys casting our lines, we didnt understand the impact of the great postwar age of industrial fishing, when the worlds fleets pushed right up to our coastlines. The fish were just progressively fished out and fished out. In the 70s, ships from the ussr, from other european countries, came to our shores. Whatever we hadnt fished out by then, they fished out, and they did that rapidly. And then we had, we put this law in effect that said, okay, no foreigners, were going to claim it out to 200 miles. Greenberg and did that fix things . Uh, no, we allowed everybody to say, hey, those boats, we should have boats like those, and we subsidized the construction of large fishing boats that couldnt exist in a, you know, actual capitalist system because they werent catching the fish to make those kinds of profits. But the taxpayer subsidized them. So then they completely, completely demolished the fish. By the 1980s, everything was basically shot. Greenberg but heres an amazing thing about the ocean if you leave it alone, stop abusing it, it can heal itself. And pretty quickly, too. Compared to most problems, overfishing is quaintly simple. You just dont kill them faster than they can breed, and they will start to get more of them. Its not complicated. Greenberg carl was part of a group who legally defined overfishing and helped get the u. S. Congress to pass the 1996 Sustainable Fisheries act. So after hundreds of years, fish by fish, american waters began slowly starting to recover. I was shocked that it worked. And we had a massive success on that, and a lot of those fish that were just declining and declining and declining, they stopped declining because the laws changed and the limits changed and a lot of them are now more abundant than they were when i was a kid. Greenberg weve defined overfishing, weve identified where its happening, and weve set a timeline for rebuilding. That seems like a pretty straightforward thing. Why cant they do that in southeast asia, where all these fish are coming from . Why cant we just, why cant that just be the default . That should be the default, but it cant be the default because most places do not have the rule of law. They cant make rules well. They cant enforce rules. Theres a lot of corruption, theres almost no political will. I mean, i think most of the rest of the world is largely a total mess. Greenberg in carls and my lifetime, the worlds industrial fishing fleet has expanded into every corner of the ocean, scouring every current and canyon with sonar and trawl, ships large enough to net a half a Million Pounds in a day. Over four million vessels, twice as many as necessary, catch the fish that are left. And so much of that fish, caught both legitimately and illegally, ends up on americas shore. We are the secondlargest consumer of seafood in the world. Every year, when the big players descend on the boston seafood show, they talk a lot about sustainability. But they dont advertise the fact that collectively, the fishing businesses of the world remove 80 to 90 Million Metric Tons of Marine Wildlife from the sea every year, the equivalent of the human weight of china. And no one is promoting the fact that a piece of fish in an american restaurant travels an average of 5,000 miles before you get to take a bite. Thank you so much. Up to 90 of the fish we eat in this country comes from abroad. Meanwhile, we send about a third of wh