Review: October 2007

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To my knowledge, I have never eaten a menhaden, though it is the most common fish native to the East Coast of North America. Nor is there a trace of menhaden in those fish-oil pills I down every morning (according to the label, they contain only anchovies, sardines, and soybeans). In fact, according to H. Bruce Franklin, a cultural historian at Rutgers University–Newark, menhaden rarely make it directly to anyone's table: their bodies are riddled with bones, their flesh is saturated with a disagreeable-tasting oil, and, even to hard-nosed fishermen, they smell awful. Yet, paradoxically, they are one of the most heavily harvested and critically important of all marine species.

Click book covers for ordering information. As Franklin tells it, the commercial exploitation of menhaden began with the Mayflower landing in 1620. The Wampanoag Indians taught Puritan settlers that planting the seemingly useless fish along with seed corn would substantially increase the harvest. Organic fertilizer became increasingly essential as overfarming depleted New England soil, and within a century, farmers living near the coast were dumping menhaden by the thousands on each acre of their fields. Otherwise inedible, the menhaden had become an integral part of the American food chain.

By the middle of the 1800s, commercial menhaden fishing had become a growth industry. From Maine to North Carolina, huge rendering plants sprang up along the shore, grinding millions of bony carcasses into meal to spread across the wheat fields of an expanding nation. In the second half of the nineteenth century, menhaden factory ships began to take to the seas, scooping up vast schools of fish in mile-long nets. Menhaden ships could fill to capacity in a matter of days, reaping enormous profits for their owners.

Needless to say, the seemingly inexhaustible bounty did not last. It was about 1880 when the fishermen of Maine first began to notice the absence of menhaden, and the decline continues to this day. It was not immediately evident, however, that the species was in trouble. Improved harvesting methods, including the use of sonar, kept increasing the size of the menhaden catch. By the mid-1980s, 2.7 billion pounds of menhaden were caught each year, more than the combined catch of all other species of fish in the U.S. in both weight and numbers.

Today, of the fifteen states along the Atlantic coast, only Virginia and North Carolina permit industrial menhaden fishing. The industry has shrunk to one major company, Omega Protein, which maintains fleets in the Chesapeake Bay and the Gulf of Mexico. Its products are no longer major sources of raw materials for farming and manufacturing, but have dwindled to omega-3 supplements and feed for factory-farmed salmon.

Yet even one such company is too many, Franklin argues. As filter feeders that eat enormous amounts of microscopic plant life, menhaden underpin the food chain, preventing algal blooms in bays and harbors and providing food for the bluefish, stripers, and other edible fishes that grace the table. Their absence is sorely felt wherever industrial interests have harvested them.

Franklin's book is thus not merely an elegant and erudite study of a moribund industry, but an impassioned plea to return our ailing East Coast waters to a state of healthy equilibrium.