[A-List] From Ocean to Plate

[Bill Totten <shimogamo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

A Posthumous Migration

by Sarah Murray

Orion magazine (November / December 2007)


For ordinary humans, the extraordinary migration of salmon is difficult
to imagine. Take Chinook salmon. Some of these fish swim from the
Columbia River up to Canada and beyond, covering up to sixteen miles a
day. Calculated as body lengths per second, that would be the equivalent
of a human swimming more than 160 miles a day - fast enough to
circumnavigate the equator in 150 days. Migrating fish also cover vast
distances. In its trans-Pacific migration, a tagged bluefin tuna was
found to have covered an amazing twenty-five thousand miles - a distance
greater than the Earth's circumference.

If the mileage clocked by these fish sounds impressive, it is nothing
compared to the journeys some of them take after their death. In the
case of salmon, it is all because of their pin bones - dozens of tiny
bones not connected to the rest of the fish's skeleton that cannot be
dealt with by filleting machines. Pin bones must be extracted by hand
using tweezers or small pliers. It is a laborious process that when
carried out in North America or Europe is costly. Not in China, though,
with its low wages and high productivity.

Here is a typical journey for a Norwegian salmon destined for sale in a
supermarket in America or Europe: Once harvested, the fish is frozen and
packed into boxes that are loaded onto a small feeder vessel in a
Norwegian fishing harbor. From here, the fish sails to Rotterdam or
Hamburg, where it will change ships and end up on a large international
container vessel bound for China, traveling at a temperature of minus
twenty-three degrees Celsius all the way.

Thousands of miles and about a month later, the fish arrives in China,
often ending up in Qingdao, a large port city on the tip of the Shandong
Peninsula of China's northeast coast that is home to several hundred
fish-processing centers. After being unloaded from the vessel, the "raw
material" is trucked to a fish-processing center on an industrial park.
At this smart new facility with vast cold storage, the salmon is
defrosted and moved out to the factory floor. In a large, neon-lit
industrial space are ranks of tables, each with dozens of brightly
colored plastic trays on top of them. Standing at the tables, dressed in
white coats and caps and wearing latex gloves and cotton masks, are
hundreds of factory workers - most of them young women from rural
villages. Using nimble fingers and small scalpels, they swiftly skin the
salmon, remove its bones, and cut it into the exact portions specified
by a Western supermarket chain on the other side of the world. Once the
fish is filleted and in pieces, it is refrozen, packed onto a ship, and
sent back to Europe or the United States. By the time it reaches the
supermarket, our "fresh" salmon may have been traveling for an
astonishing two months.

_____

Adapted from Moveable Feasts: From Ancient Rome to the 21st Century, the
Incredible Journeys of the Food We Eat, published by St Martin's Press
in November 2007 and used here by permission.

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Telephone: 413-528-4422

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