Word: tuna
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Fish That Became Too Popular Tuna has been eaten for thousands of years. The Greeks sliced, salted and pickled it, and Mediterranean bluefin was a staple of the Roman soldier's lunch box. But modern Japan's taste for the fish, coupled with rising demand in the U.S., Europe and China, has driven the Atlantic bluefin to become "the poster child of overfishing worldwide," says Monterey's Sutton. The number of breeding tuna in the eastern Atlantic has plunged over 74% since the late 1950s, with the steepest drop occurring in the past 10 years, while the western population dropped...
...Spanish port of Cartagena, hundreds of seagulls swarm the same patch of water six days a week, waiting for a boat to arrive and uncoil a long, plastic tube into the water. As sardines and mackerel are pumped into the deep, the water begins to churn. Hundreds of bluefin tuna, circling in vast cages beneath the water's surface, duke it out for their daily meal. This is a tuna ranch, a method that started in the Mediterranean in 1996 and now dominates the Atlantic bluefin industry. Today there are 70 registered ranches in the Mediterranean alone (and more...
...Tuna-ranching has proven to be a good way to do business - too good, some argue. In recent years, many boats have joined in the lucrative business of taking fish to ranches like these, sometimes netting more tuna than they're allowed to, or catching underage fish that have not had the chance to spawn. "Fattening is the motor that drives overfishing," says Sebastian Losado, oceans policy adviser for Greenpeace in Madrid. Oversight of this kind of illegal fishing - and more generally, stewardship of the fish - has proven weak. Last November, the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas...
...lovers of tuna. In Tokyo's upmarket Okusawa suburb, the lunch crowd at the sushi restaurant Irifune has thinned out. Katsumi Honda, Irifune's owner and head sushi chef, rhythmically chops blocks of pink and red flesh behind a counter. Now 68, Honda remembers how, as a boy, his first bite of Japanese hon maguro, or bluefin, inspired him to become a chef. For Honda, it's the only tuna there is. "Once you experience our natural maguro, you cannot go to a conveyor-belt sushi place anymore," he says. In 2001, when the yen was still rolling, Honda helped...
...Beyond Bluefin As majestic and imperiled as it might be, all the world's bluefin catch accounts for less than 3% of the tuna that people eat. For the $175 that a plate of Honda's maguro runs to, you can buy half a year's supply of canned tuna from the Ocean Canning Corp. in General Santos. Inside Ocean Canning's processing plant, rows of men and women in blue smocks skin, bone and pack thousands of fish into cans sent to customers in Europe. Outside, dozens more would-be workers line up at the cannery's office, applications...