100 Million Years of Food (10 page)

 

THE PARADOX OF FISH

Xin dung che mam tanh hoi.

Co mam co ruoc moi roi bua an.

Please don't turn up your nose at smelly fish sauce.

Only with fish sauce and pickled shrimp do you get a real meal.

—Vietnamese saying

My mother never returned to visit Vietnam after she emigrated to Canada, but half of my genes are from her, and so as my plane lands in Saigon, it is as if she has come back to the homeland, the ghost of her DNA expressed in my features—the same dry skin prone to eczema, the same thin hair—and behavioral tendencies, like an aversion to noise, crowds, and being rushed. I've booked a windowless third-story hotel room in gringo-grunge Pham Ngu Lao. The hotel driver who picks me up at the airport is initially taciturn, but when I tell him that I am writing a book about traditional food, he becomes animated in describing his Mekong Delta hometown specialty,
banh xeo
, a kind of pancake that features bean sprouts, assorted greens, and shrimp in a quick-fried rice-paper wrap.

“You say you're Vietnamese and you don't know
banh xeo
?” he exclaims.

It's been five years since I last passed through Saigon, and I struggle to decipher the driver's slippery southern Vietnamese patter, with its emasculated consonants. The streets in Saigon seem more vivid, more fluorescent, denser, busier, cleaner. They sprout at angles and places that I don't recognize.

Wishing to learn about Vietnam's famous fermented fish sauce, I surf the Internet at my hotel and come across an article about a fish sauce entrepreneur, Hang Thi Dao. As bratty boys growing up in Canada, when my brothers and I caught the stink of Vietnamese fermented fish sauce wafting from a pot bubbling on the stove, we would shriek like monkeys and flee to the basement. (Fermented soybean paste, brought out onto the table to season boiled pork and shrimp, was found even more repellant.) But that was more than thirty years ago; a lot can change in thirty years. I look up Hang on Facebook. It turns out that we have a mutual friend, so I send her an introductory message.

A few days later I board an airplane to Da Nang on the southern coast. From there, I catch a bus with Hang's earnest and polite younger brother. I buy him and myself a Vietnamese
banh mi
(submarine sandwich), oily processed meats set in cilantro, butter, pickled radish and carrots, in a paper-crisp baguette that shatters upon biting. The seating on the bus is cramped, and there's no air-conditioning on a humid July morning, but since Hang's brother peppers me with questions about society and economics, the time flies by.

We arrive at Hang's family home, where the low house faces the trucks and long-distance buses hurtling along Highway 1. Hang welcomes me with a broad, smiling, guileless face, as if we've been friends for decades. She proudly shows me a papaya tree in the backyard just starting to bear fruit. A sow grunts from the family pigsty while I wash off grime from the journey. Behind the house are the remnants of a long, crumbling runway, interspersed with patches of tough weeds. Located next to the demilitarized zone, the province of Quang Tri was bombed with the greatest proportion of ordnance during the Vietnam War, much of it still unexploded and a menace to the local populace.

Hang and her brother take me to a river where their father used to work as a fisherman. The fish, however, are mostly gone. Sand dredging destroyed their habitat, Hang explains. To satisfy the demands of construction work, machines were brought down to the river to extract sand. As a result, there were landslides, houses collapsed, and families were forced to migrate. Moreover, the riverbeds here used to be rich habitats for shrimp, mussels, and fish. Hang says that now all that remains in this river is water and sand. To compound difficulties, Central Vietnam is known as the poorest area of the country due to geographical bad luck: The summers are searing, while during the monsoon months, rains flood the land and cause havoc. The eldest of eight children, Hang remembers walking to school while other students rode by on bicycles, unwilling to associate with her because of her family's poverty. “My family didn't have a clock. I just got up when it was dark. Sometimes I arrived at school when no one was there,” she recalls. From the age of twelve, she helped her father fish on the river or sold the catch to farmers in the mountains. When farmers lacked cash, she bartered the fish and prawns for cassava, rice, sweet potatoes, and other produce. A hardworking student, Hang earned a scholarship to study agriculture in Hue and then another one for a master's degree in Australia in sustainable development. Inspired by a mentor who pointed out to her the value of Vietnamese traditional cuisine, Hang returned to Quang Tri to set up a new brand of fish sauce. Produced by the farmers and fishermen in her area without the use of artificial chemicals, it is bottled under the brand name of Bamboo Boat (Thuyen Nan), a reference to her humble past.

As the sun sets over the old runway, the sky transforms from vivid blue to searing violet, an intense pureness of color rarely witnessed in smog-wreathed East Asia. When we return from the river, Hang, her mother, and three of her brothers sit down to eat around a table set up in front of the house and the highway traffic rushing by. Arrayed about the table are the elements of a Central Vietnamese rural feast: fried fish, caramelized pork, squash soup with minnows, spicy pickled prawns, two kinds of pickled fish, a dish of tart greens, cucumbers, rice noodles, and the most extraordinary fish sauce I have had the pleasure of dipping my chopsticks into: thick, almost creamy, oozing with velvety flavors.

When the meal is over, the children hover at the edge of the highway, watching the trucks and buses, calling out to friends and neighbors. I settle down on one half of a wooden bed, Hang's oldest brother climbs onto the other side, and the mosquito net is secured for the night.

*   *   *

Fish and other small sea creatures comprise the lifeblood of coastal Vietnam. However, catches have been dwindling over the past few decades, and the Vietnamese are resorting to eating smaller fish. This means that more fishermen may end up relying on making fermented fish sauce to support their families. In the short term, this may give fishermen's families an alternative source of income—and give a boost to fermented fish sauce businesses like Hang's—but in the long term, the intensified pressure on populations of smaller fish may prove to be unsustainable. It's a disturbing scenario, especially for an already-poor country like Vietnam. Meanwhile, at a 2013 Tokyo fish market auction, a 490-pound bluefin tuna reeled in a $1.7 million bid; this translates into roughly $250 for a single one-ounce sushi serving of the behemoth's flesh. Tuna were once considered garbage fish by fishermen on the northeast coast of the United States, but now fish flesh has become the newest star on the nutritional stage, acclaimed for its stores of miraculous omega-3 fatty acids and vitamin D.
1

High-quality sushi is an orgasmic experience in its own right, but paradoxically, quite a few people would be happy to pass on a bite. As scholars have documented, taboos against eating fish were once observed among groups in Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Central Asia, Tibet, Mongolia, northern Thailand, many regions in Africa, England and Belgium in the Iron Age, Tasmania, and Fiji, as well as among the Norse in Greenland and North American Indian tribes like the Zuni, Hopi, Navajo, Apache, Crow, Kiowas, Comanche, and Niitsitapi (Blackfoot).
2
To all these traditional fish haters, we could add a few children and adults today. In my house, when we ate a lot of fish, my mother would sometimes mutter, “I'm eating so much fish, I'm becoming one!”

When asked why they avoided fish, people gave many answers: Fish looked like snakes; fish ate people's corpses and therefore eating fish would be equivalent to an act of cannibalism; water was sacred and therefore fish were sacred; fish were unclean; fish could not cry for help or mercy, so killing them was especially cruel; eating fish would cause one's teeth to fall out; most commonly, they said eating fish was simply disgusting. All of these explanations may have been quite real to the noneaters, but they still do not answer the question of why so many different people around the world felt (and feel) dire revulsion at the thought of dining on a source of animal protein and fat that happened to have fins instead of feet. To make matters more complicated, many people who avoid eating meat are often fine with eating fish.
3

The first drawback to eating fish that comes to mind may be the bones. Ingestion of fish bones carries the risk of piercing the esophagus or intestines, and triangular fish bones, such as those located around fish heads, can be tricky to extract from the esophagus. A second drawback is that fish meat is generally lean, and while that seems fine considering our current fat-abundant diets, too much protein in a diet can be an issue. Another concern is that top-of-the-food-chain tropical fish may accumulate toxins from a marine plankton (
Gambierdiscus toxicus
), which can cause ciguatera poisoning. Its symptoms—including nausea, intense vomiting, diarrhea, and paralysis may persist for several years, and it can lead to coma and even death. Worldwide, between ten thousand and fifty thousand people are poisoned by ciguatera toxins annually. Carnivorous fish may also accumulate toxins from feeding on plants, worms, mollusks, corals, and other toxic fish.
4
In recent decades, larger fish have also been noted for their tendencies to accumulate mercury, PCBs, and other toxins from human-made pollution in their flesh.

Ironically, other disadvantages of eating fish in traditional times may have stemmed from the very reasons that fish are now celebrated: omega-3 fatty acids and vitamin D. Cold-water deep-sea fish have bodies that are replete with omega-3 fatty acids, since the structural flexibility of these fatty acids allows the fish's body to compress and expand in response to changes in depth and pressure and maintain membrane fluidity in a cold environment.
5
Humans cannot synthesize omega-3 or omega-6 fatty acids from scratch.
6
If either is completely removed from the diets of children, growth is impaired. However, despite the fact that they are both essential, omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids often have opposing functions in the human body, with omega-3 generally decreasing inflammatory reactions (the sequence of pain, swelling, heat, and healing of wounds and infections) and omega-6 generally increasing inflammation.
7

A diet of wild or traditionally raised foods has a ratio of omega-3 to omega-6 of around 1:1, but over time, that balance has skewed toward a greater proportion of omega-6 fatty acids, particularly in industrialized countries, where omega-6 is common in cooking oils and processed foods. The dietary ratio of omega-3 to omega-6 has been estimated at 1:2 among rural South Asian Indians, 1:4 among the general Japanese population, 1:6 among urban Indians (South Asia), 1:8 among Australians and Belgians, 1:9 among twenty-something Japanese, and 1:10 among Americans. In 1909, omega-6-heavy vegetable oils combined did not make up even half a percent of calories consumed in the USA, but by 1999, they provided nearly 10 percent of all calories consumed, with soybean oil alone accounting for 7 percent. The major impetus for the newfound devotion to vegetable oils in the American diet was the decision by politicians and health authorities to shift their efforts to eliminating saturated fats, beginning in the late 1960s, as part of the assault on heart disease. Feeding livestock omega-6-rich seeds instead of grasses and insects and the longer shelf life of omega-6 fatty acids also helped swing the pendulum in favor of omega-6 fatty acids in Western diets. Diets replete with these roughneck omega-6 Rambos have been investigated for possibly delaying recovery from surgery and trauma and exacerbating autoimmune diseases, heart diseases, obesity, depression, and bipolar disorder.
8

On the negative side, high serum levels of omega-3 fatty acids have been associated with more aggressive prostate cancer. More worrisome for people in preindustrial societies, however, would have been the tendency for omega-3 fatty acids to increase bleeding incidents and bleeding time (omega-3 fatty acids are runny), a problem that the Inuit had to contend with.
9

Besides omega-3 fatty acids, the other reason fish are heralded as the new saviors of health food is that they tend to contain a lot of vitamin D from eating vitamin-D-replete plankton and algae. More vitamin D in the diet might seem like a good thing, but in traditional societies where people worked outside all day, they had all the vitamin D their bodies needed, and taking in more vitamin D could have led to vitamin D intoxication.
10
The Pacific Coast Indians ate a lot of salmon, but archaeologists observe that their children did not eat as much salmon as the adults, perhaps to avoid the effects of vitamin D poisoning, which include kidney stones, nausea, vomiting, headaches, constipation, and elevated levels of calcium in the blood.
11

Troublesome bones, overly lean flesh, and overdoses of marine toxins, vitamin D, and omega-3 fatty acids can explain some of the aversion that people have often demonstrated toward fish. But we need a theory of food taboos that can explain why fish become acceptable fare in some areas and not in others—fish avoidance was historically common among Bantu speakers in East and South Africa, but neighboring groups such as Bushmen and Hottentots were not necessarily put off by fish—and why other foods, such as meat, milk, and insects, are avoided by some and relished by others.
12

To solve this puzzle, consider the following problem: If you need to buy a shirt, which color should you select? There are two easy shortcuts to this problem: Buy the color that most people are currently wearing (the follow-the-crowd rule) or buy the color preferred by your favorite athlete or musician or any other public figure (the copy-your-idol rule). Either way, you leverage hidden information that your peers or idols may have about the cool thing to wear, so you won't look like a dork on the street, as many academics tend to do. (An ex-girlfriend once asked me, “Do you dress in the dark?”)