Charles Clover

Born :

August 22, 1958

The Romans believed that what no man controls, no man can own. Justinian, writing in the sixth century AD, said that the air, flowing water, the sea and the seashore were common to all.

air writing men

Domesticated salmon, after several generations, are fat, listless things that are good at putting on weight, not swimming up fast-moving rivers. When they get into a river and breed with wild fish, they can damage the wild fish's prospects of surviving to reproduce.

swimming rivers moving

Celebrity chefs are the leaders in the field of food, and we are the led. Why should the leaders of chemical businesses be held responsible for polluting the marine environment with a few grams of effluent, which is sublethal to marine species, while celebrity chefs are turning out endangered fish at several dozen tables a night without enduring a syllable of criticism?

marine sea night

The availability of fish is a food security issue. We need to stop our first world fleets taking fish from the mouths of the poor. The EU fleet goes all up and down the coast of Africa. The same thing goes on in the Pacific.

food-security poor world

I believe citizens are beginning to realize that their birthright, a healthy ecosystem, has been stolen, and they want it back.

ecosystems healthy believe

Increasingly, we will be faced with a choice: whether to keep the oceans for wild fish or farmed fish. Farming domesticated species in close proximity with wild fish will mean that domesticated fish always win. Nobody in the world of policy appears to be asking what is best for society, wild fish or farmed fish. And what sort of farmed fish, anyway? Were this question to be asked, and answered honestly, we might find that our interests lay in prioritizing wild fish and making their ecosystems more productive by leaving them alone enough of the time.

ocean winning mean

I have never seen a food writer mention this, but all shrimp imported into the United States must first be washed in chlorine bleach to kill bugs. What this does for the taste, I do not know, but I think we should be told.

united-states doe thinking

You can cruise the world's millions of omega-3 Web sites without encountering any reflections about where these prized fatty acids are coming from and at what social or environmental cost. For some people, what goes into their bodies has become an overriding obsession. Perhaps we are witnessing a successor to the Me Generation--namely, the Don't Care About the Rest of the World as Long as I Have a Spa and Some Omega-3 Fatty Acids Generation. Let's call it the Omega-3 Generation for short. Or is that thought just too depressing?

fatty-acids depressing reflection

Fish farming, even with conventional techniques, changes fish within a few generations from an animal like a wild buffalo or a wildebeest to the equivalent of a domestic cow.

cows change animal