Billion-Dollar Fish: The Untold Story of Alaska Pollock
It’s the most common fish on America’s tables and in its fast-food restaurants, but few know much about the origins and marketing of Alaska pollock. Netted by fishermen in the Bering Sea, Alaska pollock has done for Pacific fisheries what cod once did for the Atlantic. Ground and processed, Alaska pollock becomes surimi, which goes to table as imitation crabmeat. Cut into shapes, it appears in supermarket freezers as fish sticks and at fast-food restaurants as fish sandwich filling, prized for its “neutral,” nonfishy taste. Biologist Bailey served as an inspector on a Japanese fishing trawler, and this experience led him on a quest to learn as much as possible about this sea creature currently so vital to the world’s tables. He finds pollock populations to be extraordinarily resilient but nevertheless vulnerable to overfishing. Bailey traces the history of fishery regulation back to the seventeenth century, and he tries to identify parallel problems and solutions encountered by the Atlantic cod industries’ boom and bust. --Mark Knoblauch