A fish is an exquisite and fascinating creature: a stunning answer to the question of how to live in the sea, one which has been honed by evolution over hundreds of millions of years. Fishmeal is all of that but dried, squashed, and ground up into powder. It's also astonishingly rich in protein: between 50 and 70 percent by weight. And in 1950, farmers were just waking up to its potential. And so the world bought fishmeal as fast as Chile and Peru could haul anchovetas out of the Humboldt Current, while the lessons from California about the long-term consequences were completely ignored. Between 1950 and 1973, world fish harvests tripled, but the amount of fish directly consumed by humans stayed the same. The rest went to fishmeal, as a supplemental food for livestock, and this became an essential ingredient for modern industrial farming. Britain imported all that it could get and by 1960 half of all fishmeal was being used as pig food. With the addition of industrial farming methods and antibiotics, farmers could grow more pigs more quickly, in less space and for less money. By 1960, Peru was the world's top producer of fishmeal, and in 1964 it caught 40 percent of the entire global fish harvest. When overfishing and environmental conditions caused Peru's fish harvest to collapse in 1972, shutting down the fishmeal supply, the price of British bacon doubled almost immediately. And so the extraordinary consequence of upwelling water along the coast of South America isn't just that it has produced a huge marine ecosystem in a relatively tiny area. It's that it has provided the biological bounty to feed pigs and chickens (and increasingly, farmed fish grown in other countries) all over the world. Those animals were raised to feed humans, who were probably blissfully unaware of the marine source of their protein, and also its colossal cost to the natural environment.
_ Helen Czerki, The Blue Machine: How the Ocean Works, 2023
