October 9, 2023

"A squid ship is a bustling, bright, messy place. The scene on deck looks like a mechanic’s garage where an oil change has gone terribly wrong."

"Scores of fishing lines extend into the water, each bearing specialized hooks operated by automated reels. When they pull a squid on board, it squirts warm, viscous ink, which coats the walls and floors. Deep-sea squid have high levels of ammonia, which they use for buoyancy, and a smell hangs in the air. The hardest labor generally happens at night, from 5 p.m. until 7 a.m. Hundreds of bowling-ball-size light bulbs hang on racks on both sides of the vessel, enticing the squid up from the depths. The blinding glow of the bulbs, visible more than a hundred miles away, makes the surrounding blackness feel otherworldly. 'Our minds got tested,' Anhar said...."

Squid fishing, or jigging, in particular, has grown with American appetites. Until the early seventies, Americans consumed squid in tiny amounts, mostly at niche restaurants on the coasts. But as overfishing depleted fish stocks the federal government encouraged fishermen to shift their focus to squid, whose stocks were still robust. In 1974, a business-school student named Paul Kalikstein published a master’s thesis asserting that Americans would prefer squid if it were breaded and fried. Promoters suggested calling it “calamari,” the Italian word, which made it sound more like a gourmet dish. (“Squid” is thought to be a sailors’ variant of “squirt,” a reference to squid ink.) By the nineties, chain restaurants across the Midwest were serving squid. Today, Americans eat a hundred thousand tons a year.... 
[China] divulges little information about its [distant-water] vessels.... I spent the past four years... visiting the fleet’s ships in their largest fishing grounds.... When permitted, I boarded vessels to talk to the crew or pulled alongside them to interview officers by radio. In many instances, the Chinese ships got spooked, pulled up their gear, and fled. When this happened, I trailed them in a skiff to get close enough to throw aboard plastic bottles weighed down with rice, containing a pen, cigarettes, hard candy, and interview questions. On several occasions, deckhands wrote replies, providing phone numbers for family back home, and then threw the bottles back into the water....

19 comments:

rehajm said...

I am uncertain if the agenda is to criticize the working conditions of the boats, to stoke fears of the Chinese fishing in international waters or to make me a vegetarian. A bit more focus to your propaganda, please…

Regarding the first two, the Chinese are different than American liberals- they think and act differently and probably won’t change in the face of your peer pressure and American liberal propaganda tactics. The Chinese are very much not your peers…

…regarding the last I like to eat animals and my species has a history of omnivorous behavior and I’d like it to continue. Yes, killing animals for food can seem ugly and barbaric but 1- please see the beginning of this sentence and 2- the other members of the food chain will not stop killing other animals because American liberals are applying peer pressure with a strategy of leading by example. The other animals are very much not your peers…

rehajm said...

Fish are always eating other fish. If fish could scream, the ocean would be loud as shit. You would not want to submerge your head, nothing but fish going "Ahhh, fuck! I thought I looked like that rock!

- Mitch Hedberg

re Pete said...

"Oh the foes will rise

With the sleep still in their eyes

And they’ll jerk from their beds and think they’re dreamin’

But they’ll pinch themselves and squeal

And know that it’s for real

The hour when the ship comes in"

Kate said...

The pull-quote title, "a squid ship", led me to expect a post about the Air Force's opinion of a Navy destroyer. Sad face when I see it's about fishing.

I'm as omnivore as the next person, but the squid population has nothing to fear from me.

Fritz said...

Back in grad school, a Mexican grad student I knew had a side business with a Japanese squid fishing company. To make a very long, and sometimes amusing story very short, one night he and I went out on a squid boat in Santa Rosalia, B.C. It was kind of fun, but very different from most fishing. I don't remember the squid ink being that big a deal.

Aggie said...

Once you see a factory ship, your views of Chinese commerce forever change. They ply their trade in far-off places, where enforcement is just a notional aggravation. The ship pulls in and deploys its work boats, which steam off, pulling out the nets. The ship scrapes every living thing from the water column, it all gets dragged back to the ship, every single wiggling thing. Then it gets processed for the protein. It's like watching a giant mechanical plague of locusts come swarming through your local waters, leaving a stripped ocean behind.

Working a barge rig in the Mediterranean once, the lights from the drilling rig would attract all the little squiddies at night, and if the evening tide was low, the barge's sunken top deck would emerge from the waters, full of little hand-sized squid, which we could then collect with a bucket. Fresh calamari, yum!

Tofu King said...

Of course the food section in the Sunday Times will paint a different picture as they lavish praise on some young chef and the innovative ways she prepares calamari.

mikee said...

The Chinese will also lead the way in development of Soylent Green, when the squid and jellyfish and krill are all overfished and gone.

Dear corrupt left, go F yourselves said...

I hate China.

pacwest said...

Instead of climate change we should be working on saving our oceans. Fish farms have been a short term solution, but sooner or later a widespread disease is going to rip through the pens and the scramble to overfish the oceans, which is happening anyway, is going to be a big problem.

MayBee said...

From my apartment in Hong Kong, I saw the cuttlefish (same family as squid) boat lights out in the bay every night. It was very pretty.

Joe Smith said...

"The blinding glow of the bulbs, visible more than a hundred miles away..."

After a quick search:

"If you're a person with normal vision acuity — a rating of 20/20 — and you gaze horizontally from around 5 feet (152.4 centimeters) above the ground, you can see about 3 miles (5 kilometers) into the distance, which is the point at which the Earth's curvature bends away so that the surface is no longer in view."

So you can see the glow from a hundred miles? Maybe from a mountain top or from the air...

rcocean said...

This is "Free trade" and "Globalization" at work. These two policies, plus mass migration of the 3rd world to the 1st world is driving us into enviromental disaster.

But the so-called "enviromentalists" and "Greens" only want to disucss climate change. That's also the agenda of the rich and the billionaire class. Even Mitt Romney wants to fight climate chnage.

BTW, maybe some Chinese reporter can investigate working conditions in US packing plants or sweat shops that are full of illegals working for a pittance.

n.n said...

Affordability and availability in productivity or labor arbitrage.

MadisonMan said...

One Summer long ago, I was driving on a road in southern Rhode Island. I drove over what I later read was (accidentally dumped) squid waste. It was absolutely the worst smell I've ever encountered.

Rusty said...

"Squid Ship" would be a great name for a punk band.

JaimeRoberto said...

"thesis asserting that Americans would prefer squid if it were breaded and fried."

Personally I prefer it grilled like they do in Croatia.

mikee said...

Joe Smith: The glow of lights goes up into the sky. Recalculate your observational possibities considering a one, two, three mile high glow from bright lights on an otherwise very dark sea.

Joe Smith said...

"Joe Smith: The glow of lights goes up into the sky. Recalculate your observational possibities considering a one, two, three mile high glow from bright lights on an otherwise very dark sea."

I understand this. But it would be incredibly inefficient to let light escape upward instead of directing it down toward the water.

I still don't believe it.