'The restaurants are all full'

...said Silvio Berlusconi a few days ago, alluding to the robust health of the Italian economy. One could laugh, were it not for the knowledge that such prosperity as many Italians have recently enjoyed has depended on eating the future -- stealing from children by loading them with debt.

A footnote to this farce: it appears Italian restaurants really are full...of dead song birds.  Traffic, the wildlife trade monitoring network, notes that a consignment recently intercepted on the way to those tables consisted of:

Eurasian Skylarks Alauda arvensis, Calandra Larks Melanocorypha calandra, Red-throated Pipits Anthus cervinus, Bluethroats Luscinia svecica, European Goldfinches Carduelis Carduelis, Fieldfares Turdus pilaris, Mistle Thrushes Turdus viscivorus, Reed Buntings Emberiza schoeniclus and White Wagtails Motacilla alba.

'Intolerable beauty'

Chris Jordan's photographs of the plastic in the stomachs of baby albatrosses on Midway atoll are, he says, an attempt to communicate what is "an incredible tragedy symbolic on many levels":

Before going out there we met with a group of Hawaiian elders and received their teachings from Hawaiian spiritual tradition..one of the women said to me ‘don’t think of the birds as being victims. She said in the Hawaiian tradition they are sentient beings intentionally bringing to themselves the garbage of the world as a way of passing on a message. And whether or not you accept that as being true, I thought it was fascinating this idea that there’s a message that is being transmitted through the death of these birds...

...It was a very bizarre experience to feel the aesthetic beauty of something so horrible and yet [it] can be a portal...If I took ugly photographs of a scary subject no one would want to look at them. So I think by presenting these things in a beautiful way it not only honors the complexity of the issue, it also draws the viewer into...a difficult conversation with himself that he might not otherwise be willing to have.

In a statement on his web site, Jordan says:

...The immense scale of our consumption can appear desolate, macabre, oddly comical and ironic, and even darkly beautiful; for me its consistent feature is a staggering complexity.

The pervasiveness of our consumerism holds a seductive kind of mob mentality. Collectively we are committing a vast and unsustainable act of taking, but we each are anonymous and no one is in charge or accountable for the consequences. I fear that in this process we are doing irreparable harm to our planet and to our individual spirits.

As an American consumer myself, I am in no position to finger wag; but I do know that when we reflect on a difficult question in the absence of an answer, our attention can turn inward, and in that space may exist the possibility of some evolution of thought or action. So my hope is that these photographs can serve as portals to a kind of cultural self-inquiry. It may not be the most comfortable terrain, but I have heard it said that in risking self-awareness, at least we know that we are awake.

All of this is convincing and useful. But we also need the phrase 'intolerable ugliness'.

Bye bye bluefin

Catches [of bluefin tuna] in 2008 were at three times the ICCAT limit, which is itself more than what its scientific advisers consider sustainable. "It's like the year before the collapse of the northern cod," says Dan Pauly.

More widely, a 2009 assessment of the state of commercial fisheries around the world found that 80 percent of fish stocks are either fully exploited, overexploited, or have collapsed (via Center for Biological Diversity).

Nar Fin

This summer, [the Icelandic company] Hvalur hf caught 125 fins [whales] - a huge expansion on previous years. The company's owner [Kristjan Loftsson] says he will export as much as 1,500 tonnes to Japan. This would substantially increase the amount of whalemeat in the Japanese market.

....The fin is globally listed as an endangered species.

-- BBC report

The cook, the deep, rare life and it's smothered

On the 'Menú Planetary Discovery':

The roulade of wild boar and açaí is already on the slates, the yuzu-confit crocodile is being laid down and topped with perfect quenelles of bullfrog & wild eucalyptus mousse and tarantula tempura are being carefully scattered across the bed of smoked bamboo shoots. At this precise moment the forest caterpillar and manzanilla jus should appear at your left elbow...

-- Aidan Brooks.

(hat tip: Brian Hayes)

Hungry ghosts

...When we are greedy, the psychoanalyst Harold Boris writes, we are in a state of mind in which we "wish and hope to have everything all the time"; greed "wants everything, nothing less will do", and so "it cannot be satisfied". Appetite, he writes in a useful distinction, is inherently satisfiable. So the excess of appetite we call greed is actually a form of despair. Greed turns up when we lose faith in our appetites, when what we need is not available. In this view it is not that appetite is excessive; it is that our fear of frustration is excessive. Excess is a sign of frustration; we are only excessive wherever there is a frustration we are unaware of, and a fear we cannot bear...

...Perhaps the bad news that greed brings us is not that we are insatiable animals that need to control themselves, but that we are frustrated animals who can't easily identify what we need, and who are terrified of the experience of frustration...

-- from Insatiable Creatures by Adam Phillips


Image: delicacies from the penis emporium.

Yuck or yum

From Jennifer Jacquet and David Beck at Guilty Planet:

Shame

Alain de Botton has been reported as saying "Ferrari drivers are incredibly vulnerable and need our love and sympathy".

Brandon Keim is less indulgent when it comes to the conspicuous consumption of Bluefin tuna:

this is the brutal truth: bluefin, which beyond their intrinsic value as living creatures happen to be one of the universe's more majestic species, a Platonic ideal of oceanic speed and grace, aren't being extinguished by our greed. They're being sacrificed to our vanity, pretension, and ostentation — the most pathetic of our vices.

Hat tip Pharyngula: Destroying beauty because you can afford it.

Organised crime

One of the striking allegations in End of the Line is that Mitsubishi is promoting the fishing of bluefin tuna to near extinction in order to profit from the large frozen stockpile of the animal that it has amassed. When bluefin have been wiped out, it is said, the price of those stocks will go through the roof. The corporation will then move on to allied species.

P.S. 11 June: Jennifer Jacquet looks forward to raising the profile of a Stop Eating Seafood movement.

Bad times just around the corner

By the end of the century, 100 million people across South East Asia could be on the march, looking for something to eat. Communities might be breaking down and economies destroyed.

It's billed as a worst-case scenario, but...it is not as bad as the future we're currently headed towards.

-- Ove Hoegh-Guldberg: BBC, Climate shifts, WWF.

It's as clear as crystal
From Bridlington to Bristol
That we can't save democracy and we don't much care.

-- Noel Coward

Blue thoughts

Will there come a point when the recovery of [Blue whales] butts up against the needs (for krill, for instance) of the world’s cresting human population?

-- asks Andy Revkin

Truth will trout

...no matter how much pain creatures we view as "food" are scientifically proven to experience, 94% of us will go on fuelling demand for them, sticking our fingers in our ears and yelling, "la la la, they taste nice, so shut up and let me eat them!"

-- Ariane Sherine.

Meat your maker

A genetic chimera probably conceived in the faecal mire of an industrial pigsty, suddenly threatens to give the whole world a fever

writes Mike Davis. This "lays bear the meat industry's monstrous power".

See also Tom Philpott (added 29 April: but don't jump to conclusions, says Merritt Clifton).

Last year in his letter to the president Michael Pollan highlighted feedlot meat as a major flaw in the U.S. agricultural system:

As Wendell Berry has tartly observed, to take animals off farms and put them on feedlots is to take an elegant solution -- animals replenishing the fertility that crops deplete -- and neatly divide it into two problems: a fertility problem on the farm and a pollution problem on the feedlot. The former problem is remedied with fossil-fuel fertilizer; the latter is remedied not at all.

Our common future

For North Sea cod - the touchstone stock for UK consumers - 93% of fish are caught before they can reproduce. Yes, you read that correctly - 93%.

-- Richard Black

If I had a hammer

Technology has come to be more diverse than the biosphere. [sic] In 1867, Karl Marx observed that there were 500 types of hammer made in Birmingham, England. In 1988, Donald Norman, a cognitive scientist at the University of California, San Diego, suggested that the average American encounters 20,000 different kinds of artifacts in everyday life, which would be more than the number of animals and plants that we can distinguish. And right now, there are about 1.5 million identified species on Earth — impressive, but nothing compared to the more than 7 million United States patents.

-- from Natural Happiness by Paul Bloom.

This a challenging start to an interesting article.  It's not clear, though, that diversity in the sense used here is a helpful way to compare things.  More useful, perhaps, to compare complexity.  What man made tool compares with a living cell?

'Eating tourism' boom

Spawning of reef fish in [the Coral Trangle] has declined 79 percent over the past 5 to 20 years, depending on location.

-- NYT reports work by Yvonne Sadovy et al.

Our ultimate success in preserving and restoring the oceans depends on a more inclusive ethic for the seas.

-- from Developing an Ocean Ethic by Peter J Auster et al

('Big fish', we have been reminded, 'save reefs')

No more num num

Faroe islanders told to stop eating 'toxic' whales

P.S. 5 Dec: The Icelanders and the Japanese are not put off, though.

Eat, eat, eat

GrrlScientist reviews Bottomfeeder: How to Eat Ethically in a World of Vanishing Seafood by Taras Grescoe.

Mark Bittman: A Seafood Snob Ponders the Future of Fish.

And "time is running out for Japan's obsession with the bluefin tuna."

Image: Bluefin tuna tail above a wash basin at the offices of the fisherman's union in Oma, Japan.

" 'Empty oceans' are here"

hat tip DotEarth

[See also Ocean "dead zones" spread]

Pimping the shark

Damien Hirst sells The Kingdom for £9.6m. Peter Conrad thinks this is cool. Eat your art out, Piero Manzoni.

(Meanwhile, a call for a clampdown on finning. See too Sharks short shock.)

P.S. 18 Sep: Clive Crook gets it.

P.S. 20 Oct: this.

Shark fins, probably heading for East Asian stomachs. About 100 million sharks are slaughtered every year. About thirty million of those are finned for soups etc. Photo: Oceana.