100 Million Years of Food (30 page)

A trapper neighbor of my friend happens to have some frozen beaver leg sitting in a freezer from the previous fall. After soaking the leg in salt water overnight and slow-cooking it with wine and onions, I savor the dark, rich flavors of the meat. The meats from Kyle—bear sausage, moose, deer—also deluge me with a new palette of flavors. Once you start eating game and experience the variegated flavors, it is disappointing to go back to the blandness of supermarket meats.

The paradox behind my complex transaction in game meat and goodwill is that an animal that is enclosed by a fence, pumped with antibiotics, and fed grain that was doctored with insecticides, herbicides, and inorganic fertilizers is considered to be legal meat, but the animal on the other side of the fence, which by most measures is happier and healthier, has higher levels of omega-3 fatty acids, and is living in a more ecologically sustainable manner, cannot be bought or sold in a restaurant anywhere in most of North America.

It is very difficult to operate a restaurant serving native cuisine in North America, perhaps even more difficult than in Australia. In Ottawa, where museums enlighten visitors on everything from airplanes and trains to geology and the cultures of the First Nations, you might think a native-themed restaurant would be a hit. However, as I learned from Phoebe Blacksmith, buying elk or buffalo meat guarantees a stiff price markup that is passed on to the customer. I meet Phoebe on a rainy morning at a café. A Cree who is passionate about native Canadian cuisine, Phoebe (with her husband at the time) operated a restaurant called Sweetgrass in Ottawa's touristy downtown Byward Market area, serving native-themed dishes to curious customers. Over seven and a half years, it garnered favorable reviews, but the long hours took a toll. The couple divorced. Phoebe struggled for a year more on her own but arrived at work one day to find that she had been locked out—behind on rent. Phoebe was allowed to reenter the premises to claim perishable food. She packed it into her car, drove north, and crashed with relatives. She tried to open another restaurant to make use of the supplies left over from Sweetgrass, but the effort was futile. She declared bankruptcy; it took three long years to resolve the debts.

Phoebe still loves moose and goose meat; her mother gave birth to her while out in the bush during the spring goose hunt. Phoebe grew up eating everything the land had to offer, such as cranberries, chokeberries, strawberries, and crowberries. After Sweetgrass closed, Phoebe went back to the land where she grew up, a reserve on Mistassini, the largest freshwater lake in Quebec. “Picking berries on the land healed me,” she tells me. She got a call to teach native cooking at a college in northern Quebec, then went to the Cree community of Oujé-Bougoumou, population 725, to run a hotel-restaurant. Phoebe was appalled at the oily fries, burgers, and pizza that were staples on the menu and tried to get customers to eat buffalo meat. After the isolation and small-town gossip got to her, she moved back to Ottawa. Now she does catering, studies food hospitality and management at college, and dreams of opening a new food venture featuring native Canadian cuisine.

Hunters in North America are generally not in favor of the idea of allowing game to be sold. Recreational hunters fear that opening the markets to commercial hunting would mean more competition for game and hence less game available for them. Recreational hunters also worry that putting a dollar value on game meat would increase the temptation for poaching, which would further reduce game numbers. However, the ecological and nutritional benefits of a robust wildlife population are considerable; fare like deer, moose, beaver, bear, squirrel, and alligator could comprise an authentic Paleo diet of richly flavored meat, along with ecologically friendly sides like acorns, caterpillars, grasshoppers, and wild rice. But how can the benefits of wild foods be passed on to people in the United States and Canada who don't have the means, knowledge, or inclination to hunt or gather? Hunters in North America suggest that an attractive alternative is to move wild animals into domestic quarters; a second Agricultural Revolution, if you will, but this time done with more thought given to ecological and ethical consequences. At least, that's the hope, but the actual practice of moving wild animals from forests and oceans into confined quarters is fraught with challenges.

From an aerial photograph, you might think that the forests ringing Bearbrook Farm, on the outskirts of Ottawa, are maintained for timber or an adequate watershed, or perhaps for aesthetic reasons. It isn't until you drive down the long lane that bisects the farm and park your car at the end of the road that you finally spot the elk, skittish among the trees. Walter Henn, a tall, thick-boned fellow, manages Bearbrook Farm along with his wife Inge. While wind howls beyond the farmhouse doors, Walter tells me that as a consequence of the hardiness of the elk, bison, and deer that he rears, he doesn't have to medicate the animals with antibiotics; his animals never get sick.

“We concentrate on raising all of our animals as natural and humanely as possible. We don't use any chemicals on our farm. We do not use any chemicals for fertilizing. We only use manure for fertilizer. We do not use any chemicals for weed control. We clip all of the weeds. Most important of all, we let all of our animals run outside in their natural environment with the sun and wind and rain and everything.” This philosophy extends to a desire for people to see his farm up close. Walter continues, “We invite all of our customers to come and visit our farm and see for themselves how the animals are being kept and being fed and enjoying the natural outdoor environment. Most farmers would not want to invite visitors because they raise their animals in closed environments like cages and locked-up barns as opposed to the natural way. They're also concerned about possibly spreading a disease if they have half a million chickens in a couple of chicken coops. We don't mind visitors at all.”

I ask Walter if there are any special challenges in raising his animals.

“Buffalo and elk can be very temperamental, very challenging. You have to be careful not to enter the field without being on a tractor or staying on the outside of the fence because it's possible they could attack you. It's not normal for them to do it, but when they're under stress, when maybe they have a baby, they may charge you to protect a baby.”

Because he has forsworn the use of artificial fertilizers, insecticides, or herbicides, the maintenance requirements are lower, but the meat yields are also lower than could otherwise be gotten from an industrial operation, which relegates Bearbrook to the status of a hobby farm; that's ideal for Walter and his wife, an elderly couple in retirement. Walter's main impetus for farming elk and bison is that he wants to eat meat that is free of chemicals and naturally raised. At seventy-five years of age, he's not looking to scale up operations aggressively.

Bearbrook's grounds are visited by children and seniors who come to gawk at the elk, otherworldly bison, turkeys, chickens, and white-tailed deer (peacock are raised for ornamental purposes). Bearbrook Farm is employer, food production zone, recreation area, and ecosystem anchor, all rolled into one. Walter and his wife give people a chance to eat meat that closely resembles the local wildlife.

Walter came to Canada from Germany after he refused to be drafted into the army. He lost his father and three uncles to World War II, and he didn't want to learn how to kill people. Walter and his father-in-law were pioneers in establishing dairy herds in eastern Ontario, he says. He and his wife tried their hand at the supermarket, hotel, and restaurant equipment business, traveling the world to set up his equipment, and at one point opened a bed-and-breakfast. Viewed in the light of these many ventures, Bearbrook Farm is just another extraordinary chapter in the couple's career.

“Some people call me and my wife workaholics. We need to do things, to have a challenge before us, to have a reason to get up in the morning, to be active. We're not like some of those brain-dead people who go golfing. We don't believe in that. It's a waste of time for society when you could contribute something good and nice to mankind and the next generation. We call it our hobby because we love doing it.” If Walter had attempted to start Bearbrook Farm a few decades ago, he would have had to rely on word of mouth or advertisements in magazines and newspapers. Now the Internet is playing a new and important role, as orders for his game meats—in addition to the animals raised on the farm, Bearbrook also offers exotic meats like snake, crocodile, kangaroo, and camel—come in from many parts of the province. Technology is changing the face of commerce, and this seventy-five-year-old retiree is at the forefront of a new-yet-old way to raise food.

*   *   *

We are commonly advised these days to eat more fish, for the sake of omega-3 fatty acids that could lower our risks of coronary heart disease, allergic diseases, and depression, among other things. Americans eat more than twice as much salmon today as they did in 1990, but this increase has been accompanied by considerable controversy. In 1997, the United States went from being a net exporter to a net importer of salmon, despite opposition from American salmon farmers that resulted in tariffs on Norwegian and Chilean salmon. Rivers along the Atlantic coast once teemed with wild Atlantic salmon, but these fish have all but disappeared as an economic force, with major losses caused by damming of rivers, changes in water temperature, and other forms of habitat destruction. Although Alaska is the major producer of wild salmon in North America, nearly all of the increased numbers of salmon finding their way onto American dinner plates come from farmed salmon imported from Canada, Chile, and Norway.
16

To learn more about salmon aquaculture, I book a seat on a train from Halifax to Moncton, a small city on Canada's east coast. The train pulls into downtown Moncton two hours later; low, drab houses cling like barnacles to a grid of widely spaced roads. My host is there to meet me, beaming. Dounia is a marine scientist who specializes in lobsters. She did some shopping at the supermarket next to the train station while waiting for me.

“Is salmon okay for tonight?” she asks.

In all likelihood, Dounia's salmon purchase originated from Cooke Aquaculture. Salmon aquaculture was first developed in Norway starting around 1970, then brought over to North America in 1978 after a Canadian scientist observed its potential. In 1984, New Brunswick had five fish farms. High prices for salmon drove the expansion of the industry, so that by 1996 the number of fish farms had swollen to seventy-seven. However, Chilean-farmed salmon began to enter the U.S. market, and disease and parasite epidemics ravaged farmed salmon stocks. In an attempt by the New Brunswick provincial authorities to clean up the waters of the bays that held the salmon pens, operators were required to own at least two sites, to allow one site to lie fallow while the other site held the salmon. Given the additional expenses that this entailed, the salmon aquaculture business was consolidated into the hands of just a few operators. Cooke has become by far the largest player in east-coast Atlantic salmon, evolving from a single New Brunswick farm with five thousand salmon to a multimillion-dollar, multinational enterprise, raising salmon, bream, and sea bass in Canada, the United States, Chile, Spain, and Scotland.
17

Thierry Chopin, a professor from the University of New Brunswick who conducts research in cooperation with Cooke Aquaculture on making aquaculture more environmentally friendly, picks me up on a cheerful maritime blue morning and drives us to the gates of Cooke's hatchery. We step in and out of sterilization pools and scrub our hands with sanitizers repeatedly before entering. Salmon that are destined to be breeders swim in a spacious circular pool, with something of the leisurely atmosphere of a YMCA facility. Most of the salmon end up in outdoor, open-water pens for maturation—a highly controversial method, I have discovered.

We drive down to a small port and clamber into a boat with three Cooke employees. The boat motors out to a series of circular enclosures, a few hundred yards from shore. The nets of these enclosures hold thirty thousand to fifty thousand salmon per pen, depending on the size of the fish. Selectively bred to grow faster than wild Atlantic salmon, farmed salmon have been known to escape from their enclosures at certain facilities, through tears in the netting or accidental release into the surrounding waters during transfers. There are fears that escaped farm salmon could breed with local wild salmon, causing the gene pool to become weaker and pushing the wild stocks closer to extinction. In the outdoor pens, uneaten food and salmon feces drop onto the seafloor. One report estimated that the discharge of salmon feces into the Bay of Fundy from the aquaculture industry in 2005 was equivalent to the bowel movements of 93,450 people.
18

A mat of white bacteria thus gathers beneath the pens, polluting the water with sulfides and causing oxygen levels to drop; little except hardy worms may live in these toxic environments. In addition, the fish exist in such crowded conditions that they are more easily infested with sea lice parasites, causing unsightly blemishes. Since blemished flesh is shunned by customers, fish farm operators are compelled to treat the sea lice outbreaks with pesticides, which can be poisonous for nearby animals such as lobsters. The sea lice may also transfer infectious salmon anemia, a disease that can be fatal to salmon and has wiped out huge stocks of farmed New Brunswick salmon in past years. When the province paid out compensation to fish farm operators like Cooke, there was a public outcry against the misuse of public funds. Opinions among fishermen and Native groups are complex: some of them decry the pollution and competition from salmon aquaculture operations, but others work in the industry itself and rely on aquaculture for steady incomes. The controversy over salmon aquaculture is most vociferous in North America, particularly the Pacific Northwest, which has the largest concentration of salmon pens; in Chile and Norway, governments are more lenient toward salmon aquaculture, and there is more space available for salmon farming operations, easing tensions and increasing profitability.