num_pages: 320
description: INVESTIGATIVE REPORTERS &amp; EDITORS Book Award Finalist 2014Greenbergs breezy engaging style weaves history politics environmental policy and marine biology. -- New YorkerIn American Catch  award-winning author Paul Greenberg takes the same skills that won him acclaim in Four Fish to uncover the tragic unraveling of the nations seafood supplytelling the surprising story of why Americans stopped eating from their own waters.In 2005 the United States imported five billion pounds of seafood nearly double what we imported twenty years earlier. Bizarrely during that same period our seafood exports quadrupled. American Catch examines New York oysters Gulf shrimp and Alaskan salmon to reveal how it came to be that 91 percent of the seafood Americans eat is foreign.In the 1920s the average New Yorker ate six hundred local oysters a year. Today the only edible oysters lie outside city limits. Following the trail of environmental desecration Greenberg comes to view the New York City oyster as a reminder of what is lost when local waters are not valued as a food source.Farther south a different catastrophe threatens another seafood-rich environment. When Greenberg visits the Gulf of Mexico he arrives expecting to learn of the Deepwater Horizon oil spills lingering effects on shrimpers but instead finds that the more immediate threat to business comes from overseas. Asian-farmed shrimpcheap abundant and a perfect vehicle for the frying and sauces Americans lovehave flooded the American market.Finally Greenberg visits Bristol Bay Alaska home to the biggest wild sockeye salmon run left in the world. A pristine productive fishery Bristol Bay is now at great The proposed Pebble Mine project could undermine the very spawning grounds that make this great run possible. In his search to discover why this precious renewable resource isnt better protected Greenberg encounters a shocking the great majority of Alaskan salmon is sent out of the country much of it to Asia. Sockeye salmon is one of the most nutritionally dense animal proteins on the planet yet Americans are shipping it abroad.Despite the challenges hope abounds. In New York Greenberg connects an oyster restoration project with a vision for how the bivalves might save the city from rising tides. In the Gulf shrimpers band together to offer local catch direct to consumers. And in Bristol Bay fishermen environmentalists and local Alaskans gather to roadblock Pebble Mine. With American Catch  Paul Greenberg proposes a way to break the current destructive patterns of consumption and return American catch back to American eaters.The Washington Americans need to eat more American seafood. Its a point [Greenberg] makes compellingly clear in his new book American The Fight for our Local Seafood ... Greenberg had at least one me .Jane Brody New York Times Excellent .The Los Angeles TimesIf this makes it sound like American Catch is another of those dry haranguing issue-driven books that you read mostly out of obligation you neednt worry. While Greenberg has a firm grasp of the facts he also has a storytellers knack for framing them in an entertaining way .The Guardian (UK)A wonderful new bookTom This is on the top of my summer reading list. A Fast Food Nation for fish.
language: English
title: American Catch: The Fight for Our Local Seafood
publisher: Penguin Press