July 19, 2010 – Writer Paul Greenberg has been eating fish caught in local waters since he was a kid growing up in Connecticut. Most of the fish he caught himself — but occasionally, he would visit the fishmonger in his hometown and purchase wild fish, fresh from the sea.
But when he visited fish markets as an adult, he realized that the types of fish for sale had changed. Instead of a variety of wild-caught fish, Greenberg saw four varieties of fish — salmon, sea bass, cod and tuna — that seemed to consistently be on fishmongers' shelves, despite having little to do with the waters adjacent to his local fish market.
In his new book, Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food, Greenberg investigates how those four fish came to dominate the seafood market, and examines how the wild fish industry has changed in the past three decades as the business of fishing became more industrialized.