How I fell in love with a fish - Dan Barber

So I've known a lot of fish in my life. I've loved only two. That first one was... it was more like a passionate affair. It was a beautiful fish, flavorful, textured, meaty; the best seller on the menu. What a fish! Even better, it was farm-raised to the supposed highest standards of sustainability, so you could feel good about selling it. I was in a relationship with this beauty for several months.

One day, the head of the company called and asked if I'd speak at an event about the farm sustainability. "Absolutely," I said. Here was a company trying to solve what's become this unimaginable problem for our chefs: how do we keep fish on our menus? For the past 50 years, we've been fishing the seas like we clear-cut forests. It's hard to overstate the destruction. Ninety percent of large fish, the ones we love—the tunas, the halibuts, the salmons, swordfish— are in collapse. There's nothing left. So, for better or for worse, aquaculture, fish farming, is giving a part of our future.

A lot of arguments against it: fish farms pollute; most of them do anyway, and they're inefficient. Take tuna; a major drawback is its feed conversion ratio of 15 to 1. That means it takes 15 pounds of wild fish to get you one pound of farmed tuna. Not very sustainable; it doesn't taste very good either. So here finally was a company trying to do it right. I wanted to support them.

The day before the event, I called the head of PR for the company. Let's call him Don. "Don," I said, "just to get the facts straight; you guys are famous for farming so far out to sea, you don't pollute?" "That's right," he said. "We're so far out the waste from our fish gets distributed, not concentrated." And then he added, "We're basically a world unto ourselves."

That feed conversion ratio? 2.5 to 1, he said; best in the business! "2.5 to 1, great!" I said. "Like 2.5... what do you feed?" "Sustainable proteins," he said. "Great," I said, got off the phone, and that night I was lying in bed, and I thought, "What the hell is a sustainable protein?"

So the next day, just before the event, I called Don. "Don, what are some examples of sustainable proteins?" He said he didn't know; he would ask around. Well, I got on the phone with a few people in the company; no one could give me a straight answer until finally, I got on the phone with the head biologist. Let's call him Don too. "Don," I said, "What are some examples of sustainable proteins?"

Well, he mentioned some algae, some fish meals, and then he said, "Chicken pellets." "Chicken pellets?" he said. "Yeah, feathered skin, bone meal scraps, dried and processed in the feed." "What percentage of your feed is chicken?" thinking, you know, two percent. "That's about 30 percent," he said. "I said Don, what's sustainable about feeding chicken to fish?" There was a long pause on the line, and he said, "There's just too much chicken in the world."

Okay, I fell out of love with this fish, not because I'm some self-righteous goody two-shoes foodie—I actually am now. I fell out of love with this fish because, I swear to God, after that conversation, the fish tasted like chicken.

This second fish? It's a different kind of love story. It's the romantic kind. The kind where the more you get to know your fish, the more you love the fish. I first ate it at a restaurant in southern Spain. A journalist friend had been talking about this fish for a long time; she kind of set us up. Okay, it came to the table a bright, almost shimmering white color. The chef had overcooked it, like twice over.

Okay, amazingly, it was still delicious! Who can make a fish taste good after it's been overcooked? I can't, but this guy can. Let's call him Miguel. Actually, his name is Miguel, and no, he didn't cook the fish; and he's not a chef, at least in the way that you and I understand it. He's a biologist at Vector La Palma. It's a fish farm in the southwestern corner of Spain. It's at the tip of the Guadalquivir River. Until the 1980s, the farm was in the hands of the Argentinians. They raised beef cattle on what was essentially wetlands. They did it by draining the land.

They built this intricate series of canals, and they pushed water off the land and out into the river. Well, they couldn't make it work—not economically. Ecologically, it was a disaster. It killed like 90% of the birds, which for this place is a lot of birds. So in 1982, a Spanish company with an environmental conscience purchased the land. What did they do? They reversed the flow of water; they literally flipped the switch. Instead of pushing water out, they used the channels to pull water back in. They flooded the canals and created a 27,000-acre fish pond—vast mullet, shrimp, eel.

In the process, Miguel and this company completely reversed the ecological destruction. The farm's incredible! I mean, you've never seen anything like this. You stare out at a horizon that is a million miles away, and all you see are flooded canals and this thick, rich marshland. I was there not long ago with Miguel. He's an amazing guy—like three parts Charles Darwin and one part Crocodile Dundee.

Okay, there we are, slogging through the wetland. You know I'm panting and sweating, mud up to my knees, and Miguel was calmly conducting a biology lecture. Here he's pointing out a rare black-shouldered kite; now he's mentioning the mineral needs of phytoplankton. And here, he sees a grouping pattern that reminds him of the Tanzanian giraffe. It turns out Miguel spent the better part of his career in Mikumi National Park in Africa.

I asked him how he became such an expert on fish. I said, "Fish? I didn't know anything about fish. I'm an expert in relationships." And then he's off launching into more talk about rare birds, and algae, and strange aquatic plants. And don't get me wrong; I was really fascinated! You know, the biotic community unplugged, it's kind of thing. You know, it's great, but I was in love and my head was swooning over that overcooked piece of delicious fish I had the night before.

So I interrupted. I said, "Miguel, what makes your fish taste so good?" He pointed at the algae. "I know, dude, the algae, the phytoplankton, the relationships; this is amazing, right? But what are your fish eating and what's the feed conversion ratio?" He goes on to tell me it's such a rich system that the fish are eating what they're eating in the wild—the plant biomass, the phytoplankton, zooplankton—it's what feeds the fish. The system is so healthy, it's totally self-renewing. There is no feed! Ever heard of a farm that doesn't feed its animals?

Later that day, I was driving around this property with Miguel, and I asked him, "For a place that seems so natural, unlike any fish or alligator farm I'd ever been at, how do you measure success?" Well, at that moment, it's as if a film director called for a set change, and we rounded the corner and saw the most amazing sight: thousands and thousands of pink flamingos—a literal pink carpet for as far as you could see.

"That's success," he said. "Look at their bellies pink; they're feasting." "But wait," I said, "aren't they feasting on your fish?" "Yes," he said. "We lose 20% of our fish and fish eggs to birds." Right? Well, last year, this property had 600,000 birds on it—more than 250 different species. It's become today the largest and one of the most important private bird sanctuaries in all of Europe.

I said, "Miguel, isn't a thriving bird population like the last thing you want on a fish farm?" He shook his head. "No," he said. "We farm extensively, not intensively. This is an ecological network. The flamingos eat the shrimp; the shrimp eat the phytoplankton, so the pinker the belly, the better the system."

Okay, so let's review: a farm that doesn't feed its animals, and a farm that measures its success on the health of its predators—a fish farm, but also a bird sanctuary. Oh, and by the way, those flamingos? They shouldn't even be there in the first place. They brood in a town 150 miles away, where the soil conditions are better for building nests. Every morning, they fly 150 miles into the farm and every evening they fly 150 miles back. They do that because they're able to follow the broken white line of Highway A92. No kidding!

You know, I was imagining a March of the Penguins thing. So I looked at Miguel and I said, "Miguel, do they fly 150 miles to the farm, and then do they fly 150 miles back at night? Do they do that for the children?" He looked at me like I just quoted a Whitney Houston song. He said, "No, they do it 'cause the food's better."

You know, I didn't mention the skin of my beloved fish, which was delicious. And I don't like fish skin! I don't like it seared; I don't like it crispy. It's that acrid, tar-like flavor. I almost never cook with it! Yet when I tasted it at that restaurant in southern Spain, it tasted not at all like fish skin; it tasted sweet and clean—like you were taking a bite of the ocean. I mentioned that to Miguel; he nodded. He said the skin acts like a sponge.

It's the last defense before anything enters the body; it evolved to soak up impurities, and then he added, "But our water has no impurities." Okay, a farm that doesn't feed its fish, a farm that measures success by the success of its predators. And then I realized, when he says a farm that has no impurities, he made a big understatement. Because the water that flows through that farm comes in from the Guadalquivir River.

It's a river that carries with it all the things that rivers tend to carry these days: chemical contaminants, pesticide runoff. And when it works its way through the system and leaves, the water is cleaner than when it entered! The system is so healthy it purifies the water. So not just a farm that doesn't feed its animals, not just a farm that measures the health of its success by the health of its predators, but a farm that's literally a water purification plant—not just for those fish, but for you and me as well! Because when that water leaves, it dumps out into the Atlantic.

Dropped in the ocean? I know, but I'll take it, and so should you. Because this love story, however romantic, is also instructive. You might say it's a recipe for the future of good food. Whether we're talking about bass or beef cattle, what we need now is a radically new conception of agriculture, one in which the food actually tastes good, right?

Look, for a lot of people, that's a bit too radical. We're not realists; us foodies— we're lovers! We love farmers' markets. We love small family farms. We talk about local food; we eat organic. And when you suggest these are the things that will ensure the future of good food, someone somewhere stands up and says, "Hey guy, I love pink flamingos, but how you gonna feed the world? How are you gonna feed the world?"

Can I be honest? I don't love that question—not because we already produce enough calories to more than feed the world—1 billion people will go hungry today, 1 billion—that's more than ever before. Because of gross inequalities in distribution, not tonnage. Now, I don't love this question because it's determined the logic of our food system for the last 50 years: feed grain to herbivores, pesticides to monocultures, chemicals to soil, chicken to fish.

And all along, agribusiness has simply asked, "If we're feeding more people more cheaply, how terrible could that be?" That's been the motivation, it's been the justification, it's been the business plan of American agriculture. We should call it what it is: a business in liquidation, a business that's quickly eroding ecological capital that makes that very production possible. That's not a business!

And is agriculture? Our breadbasket is threatened today not because of diminishing supply, but because of diminishing resources. Not by the latest combine and tractor invention, but by fertile land. Not by pumps, but by fresh water. Not by chainsaws, but by forests. And not by fishing boats and nets, but by fish in the sea.

Want to feed the world? Let's start by asking how am I gonna feed ourselves? Or better, how can we create conditions that enable every community to feed itself? To do that, don't look at the agribusiness model for the future. It's really old and it's tired. It's high on capital, chemistry, and machines, and it's never produced anything really good to eat.

Instead, let's look to the ecological model— that's the one that relies on 2 billion years of on-the-job experience. Look to Miguel—farmers like Miguel—farms that aren't worlds unto themselves, farms that restore instead of deplete, farms that farm extensively instead of just intensively. Farmers that are not just producers but experts in relationships because they're the ones that are experts in flavor! And if I'm going to be really honest, they are better chefs than I'll ever be.

You know, I'm okay with that because if that's the future of good food, it's going to be delicious. Thank you.

What does a machine know about itself? Can it know when it needs to be repaired and when it doesn't? In industries like manufacturing and energy, they're using predictive analytics to detect signs of trouble, helping some companies save millions on maintenance. Because machines seek help before they're broken and don't when they're not. That's what I'm working on—I'm an IBMer. Let's build a smarter planet.