Eels by James Prosek
My rat­ing: 4 of 5 stars

I just fin­ished read­ing “Eels”. This book is on the order of Rachael Carson’s Silent Spring about the decline (pop­u­la­tions are down about 90% in the last 20 years!) of an impor­tant but mys­te­ri­ous global species of fish (yes, eels are fish), and the nat­ural his­tory and cul­tural sig­nif­i­cance of eels around the world from New Zealand to New England.

Did you know…

• eels are one of the few species that spawn in the ocean (nobody still knows exactly where they do it) and then die,
• the babies work their way back hun­dreds or thou­sands of miles to fresh water streams,
• they may live over 100 years before feel­ing the urge to spawn and are able to get back down the rivers to the ocean where they evi­dently ren­dezvous and start the cycle all over again,
• eels are able to take in enough oxy­gen through their skin so they can wrig­gle out of the water onto land to feed, or to cross over to another body of water.
• young eels just out of lar­val stage called glass eels are caught in the ocean near the sus­pected spawn­ing grounds, like in the Sar­gasso Sea, and
• cur­rently glass eels go for about $700/lb.
• the glass eel catch is mostly sold to eel farms in China that raise them until they are about 18″ long then sell them to Japan, US, Europe either live or frozen.

Here’s a good sum­mary of the sit­u­a­tion at the Tiny Green Bub­ble website:

Which do you enjoy more, eat­ing glass eel or hav­ing glass eel exist nat­u­rally in the world? If you answered the for­mer, than you are not French. Here’s the short ver­sion: Euro­pean coun­tries have been try­ing to set up a deal that would allow the dan­ger­ously low eel pop­u­la­tions to recover. By “dan­ger­ously low” we meant that eel pop­u­la­tion num­bers have declined by more than ninety per­cent in the past twenty years. How­ever, in France, fish­er­men have threat­ened to go on strike if the ban is put in place.

The ban is mod­eled after a vol­un­tary ban that Britain has imposed which entirely bans fish­ing for mature eels and puts a tight quota on glass eels, which are the tiny, translu­cent juve­nile eels that are born in mil­lions in the Sar­gasso Sea.

What’s the hold up? There’s a huge demand in China, who is rapidly begin­ning to have more pur­chas­ing power in the world than any­body else, for those glass eels. That’s dri­ven the price up to over a thou­sand euro per kilo (Yes, this is dou­ble con­ver­sion math. One kilo is 2.2 pounds. One euro is cur­rently about $1.4. So, four­teen hun­dred dol­lars a kilo, or about $700 per pound, more or less). That’s essen­tially the same price as cheap caviar. Or so we’re told.

Last year, the Con­ven­tion on Inter­na­tional Trade in Endan­gered Species called on trade in Euro­pean eels to be con­trolled, and the EU’s Sci­en­tific Review Group has rec­om­mended a com­plete ban on exports this win­ter. What’s the kicker? France is Europe’s largest eel exporter and the land of exotic food and fine wine has refused to sign the ban, result­ing in absolutely no quota as eel sea­son kicks off.

Of course, it’s not just the fish­er­men who are respon­si­ble for the unsus­tain­able eel fish­ing prac­tices. Japan­ese eel lovers typ­i­cally eat only indige­nous eels, but Chi­nese and Kore­ans import lit­er­ally mil­lions of Euro­pean glass eels, which they then grow to matu­rity before eating.

I’m con­flicted — read­ing this book made me want to go out for some Unagi (broiled eel sushi) which I really like, but also not want to con­tribute to the species decline. Oh well if they can make tofurkey maybe some­one will come up with tofeel.

View all my book review at GoodReads