Eat Like A Fish: My Adventures as a Fisherman Turned Restorative Ocean Farmer

2019, Alfred A. Knopf

Bren Smith had me at “restorative ocean farmer.”

Sometime early in or before my junior year of high school, The New York Times Magazine published a feature on “The Great Books” curriculum, where students read primary sources on Western thought rather than taking survey courses. The idea immediately struck me as highly appealing, and from that point on, I envisioned my future undergraduate experience reading the Great Books at St. John’s College in Annapolis, studying Plato and the other Greek greats.

Before any of that were to unfold, however, during my senior year of high school, I submitted a quote for my yearbook page. Still stoked on the idea of the Great Books, I pulled mine from the St. John’s College admissions catalogue. It highlighted the importance of a liberal arts education. “To be a farmer, nothing; to know why one might wish to be a farmer— everything.”

So far, being a gardener in New York City’s Central Park is as close to being a farmer as I have gotten, although I would be lying if I didn’t admit to being wildly excited about learning all an armchair ocean farmer needs to know, so I naturally tucked into Eat Like a Fish with great delight.

Being in the middle of The Big Move, unlike usual, I am reporting on this memoir prior to having finished reading it, but I’d like to share my thoughts just the same.

Smith has had one heck of an interesting life trajectory. Born in Newfoundland (Newfoundland— it doesn’t get much better than that) to well-educated parents, both Michigan alumni, Smith started life as a hockey-playing kid who landed his first fish at age four. When the family relocated to suburban New England against his will, young Smith’s life fell apart. Kids at school couldn’t understand his Newfie accent, and his learning disabilities made school a struggle. He dropped out at age 14, and while it seems to defy child labor laws, Smith went to work as a janitor in a hospital. From there he embarked on a life of fights, drugs, drink, and all around hard living that eventually took him to Alaska, reconnecting with his love of the sea and becoming a commercial fisherman.

Smith is a complex figure, passionate about fishing and unstinting in his belief that nothing beats hauling up a fish-filled net but cognizant of the decimated wild fish stock. Smith knows that fishing as the world once knew it, no long exists.

Smith is a man of contradictions. He spends his life on the water but cannot swim. He dropped out of high school yet graduated from Cornell Law. His inquiring mind and passionate soul reeled this reader right in.

The politics of food are fraught with nuance, especially as the planet’s population continues to spiral. Aside from Smith’s thrilling origin story, so far, Eat Like a Fish is not necessarily easy territory. Facing the world’s problems never is. However, getting a glimpse of the facts and their dirty realities while in the hands of someone with innovative solutions like Smith, who feels that restorative ocean farming with sea vegetables and water cleaning crops like mussels and oysters, rather than fishing, is the solution, gives hope.

Full disclosure, I am the type of reader easily swayed by a good argument. Last summer I read Michael Polan’s book on psychedelics, How to Change Your Mind and was ready to start dropping acid. Months before, I read Gary Taubes’ The Case Against Sugar and rethought (briefly) my relationship with that substance.

The point is, great reads take our minds to foreign lands and make us think differently, if only briefly, leaving an indelible impression.

Right now, half way through Eat Like a Fish, I am ready to buy a boat and lease 10 acres of water for cultivation. Is there anything more exciting than dreams like that?

St. John’s College in 1978 was not for me (too many hippies, I thought) and instead I started out as a philosophy major at Mount Holyoke, eventually ending up in the Italian Language and Literature lane. Despite that switch in plans, what didn’t change was my belief that the purpose of education was not to fill students with content but to teach them how to think. Reading continues to do that for me.

Paging ahead through the final section of Eat Like a Fish, I see recipes for kelp and other sea vegetables. Like with veganism, I aspire to the idea but suspect my follow through will be naught, but who knows?