Hope in the Water: "Changing the Menu" (Intuitive Content, PBS, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, July 3) I watched a couple more science shows on KPBS. One was the third and last episode of the mini-series Hope in the Water, “Changing the Menu.” As usual with this series, they brought in a major celebrity to host it and appear as a guest in the second segment, though instead of Martha Stewart or World Central Kitchen founder José Andrés, this time the host was Shailene Woodley, star of the Divergent movies, who also got to join the crew featured in the middle segment of this three-segment show. The opening segment was about “Fishadelphia,” a public-private partnership in Philadelphia designed to get lower-income people access to seafood that would usually be beyond their means. The overall title of this episode, “Changing the Menu,” referred to doing ad campaigns and other PR programs either to get people to eat fish and other seafoods they don’t already consume or to get people to use all, or nearly all, of the fish they do eat instead of throwing much of it away. In the first segment the rarely consumed fish the folks at Fishadelphia are trying to get more Philadelphians to eat is dogfish. While they don’t seem to have thought of trying to change the name the way shark meat (which is quite good, by the way!) was retitled “greyfish” and an agricultural products board in Canada came up with the name “canola” for a vegetable oil because the plant it’s extracted from has the off-putting name “rapeseed”, the dogfish shown on TV (which my husband Charles tells me is actually a species of shark) looks good enough I might want to try some sometime.

A number of the people shown on this program weren’t identified by name, including a fascinating grey-haired, dreadlocked Black woman who was shown deep-frying breaded dogfish filets and a young woman who was introduced only as an immigrant from Colombia. The second segment, the one Woodley was involved in, dealt with the California sea urchin harvest. It seems that in 2013 California’s coastlines were attacked by “The Blob,” an unusually big zone of ultra-hot weather that, among other things, led to a skyrocketing population of sea urchins along the California coast. People like sea diver Stephanie Mutz who had been used to snorkeling off the coast of Santa Barbara now found they could no longer do that because sea urchins were monopolizing the entire ocean floor and expanding up the rocks and taking over. A number of divers were going down to thin out the herd, but the problem is there are actually two kinds of sea urchins and they differ radically in their commercial viability. It seems that sea urchins contain something called “uma” in Japanese restaurants and kitchens, which is literally their gonads, which are considered quite the delicacy in the country that gave the world sushi. Red sea urchins are the larger species and contain bigger umas, Unfortunately, the ones that are invading the California coastline are the smaller purple kind, who have only teeny-tiny umas and are therefore commercially useless. Enter the Cultured Abalone Farm, an enterprise in Santa Barbara that grows abalone in giant tanks. It’s run by Devin Spencer and Doug Bush, and Bush was interviewed for this program and explains that both abalone and sea urchins feed on the same food: kelp. (Kelp featured prominently in show two, though in that episode they were being farmed by Alaska Native Dune Lankard and were being pushed for direct human consumption instead of food for something else.)

The idea seemed to be that if they could grow purple sea urchins and expand the size of their “roe” (as their gonads are called, though “roe” usually means fish eggs; caviar is sturgeon roe), purple sea urchins could become as viable a commercial product as their red brethren. This would in turn increase California’s kelp population, since as there are more sea urchins there are fewer kelp for the sea urchins to eat. The third segment took place in Iceland, of all locations, and dealt with the cod industry, on which Icelanders have relied for centuries for much of their diet. (That seems to happen to you when you live on an island, or a series of islands; it’s also not surprising that people in Japan, Britain, Ireland and New Zealand eat a lot of seafood.) The cod business nearly collapsed in the early 2000’s due to overfishing, and one quite remarkable guest – who was, regrettably, unidentified in the credits (or at least if he was, I didn’t “get” him) but who said he was a former economist who was working to revive Iceland’s fishing industry – co-founded an organization called “100% Fish” which, as its name suggests, is devoted to getting people to use all of the fish they catch instead of just cooking and eating the filets and throwing the rest away. Earlier we’d seen that intriguing Black woman chef boiling the heads of dogfish and extracting meat from them, and in Iceland they’re researching the myriad ways besides food they can use dead cod. It seems that cod are rich in the hair and skin protein collagen, and therefore cod corpses have the potential to be used in the manufacture of beauty products, including those anti-aging creams that get advertised incessantly on television these days. They can also be used for skin grafts on humans. And of course Icelanders have for years been eating the dried skins of cod and various game fish as a snack, much the way we Americans munch on potato chips!

There was even a brief reference to the three Cod Wars Britain and Iceland fought in the 1950’s and 1970’s. According to Google, “The Cod Wars were a historic series of clashes with the United Kingdom over fishing rights. Locally, Icelanders refer to this period of dispute as Þorskastríðin, ‘the cod strife,’ or Landhelgisstríðin, ‘the wars for the territorial waters.’ The events occurred in various chapters: 1958–1961, 1972–73 and 1975–76.” Apparently Iceland won and was able to protect their fishing rights against their bigger competitor. The whole Hope in the Water series was a welcome relief from the gloom-’n’-doom most contemporary discussions about the environment assume and offered, dare I say it, hope that we can be a little more creative in how we use the world’s resources and figure out how to feed our growing human population.