The story revealed the systematic practice of cheating farm labor contract workers of their wages, to keep costs low. Outsourcing labor to contracting companies also allows farm businesses to distance themselves from the practice, which has prompted law suits as well as state and federal actions. McMillan told the story by focusing on 75-year-old Ignacio Villalobos, who has been a farmworker his entire life and who is a plaintiff in one of these law suits.

The story took several months to report, requiring multiple trips to southern California and many hours of interviews with farmworkers, government and industry officials, and legal advocates. The project took patience and tenacity, qualities which are frequently lacking in a time of highly constrained resources and constant deadlines. This is exactly FERN’s strength—to engage in the kind of in-depth work that is too often ignored and underfunded. The story took a significant commitment from FERN, but we always believed in its importance. We are honored that the story received this recognition.

Aside from McMillan’s exceptional reporting, we could not have done this story without our partner, The American Prospect. The Prospect brought editorial resources to the project to augment our own and the constant collaboration showed the value of our model. We’d like to thank Kit Rachlis, the Prospect’s Editor-in-Chief, and his team for helping us to marshal the story to completion.

“The exploitation of farm labor has long been one of the great scandals of American society—it dates back at least to the beginning of the 20th century—and persists to this day,” said Rachlis. “Tracie’s piece looks at one of its most insidious practices—institutionalized wage theft—and shows its devastating effect on people’s lives. At once intimate, authoritative, and moving, the article ranks as one of the best the Prospect has ever published, and I’m enormously proud to have such a good partner as FERN.”

In the story, farmworker justice advocate, Greg Schell, is quoted as saying:  “When I came out of law school, my hope was some day, I’d see farmworkers approach the economic mainstream. The things that made their employment so unusual—contractors, wage theft—would disappear, and they’d look more like the general workforce … That has happened, but it’s happened in the wrong direction. What’s happened is the general population is looking more like farmworkers.”

McMillian’s story is about a hidden labor sector of our society but it is also a cautionary tale—and one especially relevant for our times.

Expect more stories of this caliber in the future.

“The low doses kill many bacteria,” Estabrook writes, “But some develop mutations that make them immune to the same drugs that once destroyed them.” Eighty percent of all antibiotics in the U.S. are used in livestock production.

The story comes out on the heels of a new study by Consumer Reports that shows that antibiotic-free turkey is less likely to be contaminated with resistant-bacteria. The findings strongly suggest that the routine use of antibiotics in animal production has led to increased antibiotics resistance when the drugs are used to treat human illnesses. In addition, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) released updated consumer advice this week, in which its scientists discussed the connection between treated animals and resistant strains of bacteria in humans.

Estabrook reports that incidences of MRSA, or resistant infections of Staphylococcus aureus, in the U.S. more than doubled between 1999 and 2005, from 127,000 to 280,000, and MRSA-related deaths rose from 11,200 to 17,200. He pointed out that a study published in 2011 showed that MRSA, which has been found on livestock farms that use antibiotics, was getting into meat. Researchers analyzed 136 samples of beef, poultry and pork from 36 supermarkets in California, Illinois, Florida, Arizona and Washington, D.C. Nearly one-quarter of the samples tested positive for MRSA.

Estabrook notes that a recent study tested the farmers of large hog operations for MRSA. Not one of those who avoided antibiotics tested positive, while nearly half the farmers who routinely used antibiotics on their pigs carried resistant bacteria. Not everyone who carries the resistant bacteria gets sick, however, and the article points out that proper cooking of meat will kill bacteria.

“Perhaps it’s no coincidence that while the quantity of antibiotics administered to humans has remained stable, the amount fed to livestock has soared,” he writes. According to the FDA records, antibiotic use on farms grew from about 18 million pounds in 1999 to nearly 30 million pounds in 2011.

The piece notes a seminal 1976 study, which showed that low doses of antibiotics bred E. coli resistance in chickens and also among the farmers that raised them. A year later, the FDA announced plans for a ban on feeding livestock low doses of antibiotics, but it never came to pass.

In Denmark, Estabrook explains, incidences of resistant bacteria fell dramatically in both people and animals after low-dose antibiotic usage in livestock production was banned in 2000. Meanwhile, pork production rose. The European Union banned sub-therapeutic use of antibiotics in livestock production in 2006.

In the U.S., Congresswoman Louise Slaughter, a Democrat from upstate New York and a microbiologist by training, has repeatedly tried to legislate limits on the use of the drugs in animals, without success.

You can read the full report here at Eating Well and also here on our Web site.

Last fall I flew halfway across the country to go grocery shopping with Everly Macario. We set out from her second-story apartment in Hyde Park near the University of Chicago and walked to the supermarket to buy a couple of rib steaks that Macario planned to serve to her husband and two children, ages 7 and 13. Macario, who is 46, holds a doctorate in public health from Harvard University and has spent decades as a consultant, working to prevent deaths from chronic conditions such as cancer and cardiac disease.

Yet she believes that what she buys—or more accurately, refuses to buy—in the supermarket is the most important action she takes, not only for her family’s health but for the health of every person in this country. “I am determined that no product from an animal that has been fed antibiotics will ever enter my home,” she said as we walked along the meat counter peering at beef, poultry and pork. “I look for labels that read ‘certified organic,’ ‘no antibiotics’ or ‘raised without antibiotics.’”

It’s not the antibiotics themselves that are troubling: animals pass the drugs through their systems long before they are slaughtered and animal products are tested for traces of antibiotics. What really worries Macario is the increasing wave of antibiotic-resistant bacteria that might be traveling on her food.

Macario has reason to be vigilant. Her 18-month-old son, Simon, died in 2004 from an infection known as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (or MRSA, pronounced “mersa”). Simon was a husky, happy toddler. On his first birthday, Macario marveled to her husband that the baby had never been sick. Then one morning the boy awoke with, in Macario’s words, a “blood-curdling shriek.” Rushed to the hospital, Simon was put on a heart-lung machine. “The doctors administered every available antibiotic,” she said. “It didn’t work. The bacteria were resistant to all of the medication.” In less than 24 hours he was dead. “The bacteria released toxins that destroyed his vital organs,” Macario said.

No one knows how Simon contracted the bacteria. He had never been to a hospital, once thought to be the primary incubators of MRSA. He had a robust immune system. He wasn’t in child care. He had no cuts through which the bacteria could infect him. The germs that killed him were “community-acquired” MRSA-CA, meaning that he came in contact with them through everyday living, as opposed to “hospital-acquired” MRSA, a strain that is associated with medical centers and nursing homes.

While it remains unclear how MRSA infected Simon, what is known is that these antibiotic‑resistant bacteria are on the rise. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the incidence of MRSA in the United States more than doubled between 1999 and 2005, from 127,000 to 280,000, and MRSA-related deaths rose from 11,200 to 17,200. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that while the quantity of antibiotics given to humans has remained stable, the amount fed to livestock has soared. According to Food and Drug Administration records, antibiotic use on farms grew from about 18 million pounds in 1999 to nearly 30 million pounds in 2011.

Today 80 percent of the antibiotics used in the United States are fed to livestock. Theirs is a diet laced with low “subtherapeutic” doses of antibiotics, not to cure illness but to make the animals grow faster and survive cramped living conditions. The low doses kill many bacteria, but some develop mutations that make them immune to the same drugs that once destroyed them.

“It is very hard to prove that a specific antibiotic given to an animal for food production led to the development of a resistant bacterium in a specific patient,” said Stuart Levy, M.D., president of the Alliance for the Prudent Use of Antibiotics and a professor at Tufts University School of Medicine. “But it is a truism that antibiotic use leads to resistance, and the more antibiotics you use, the more resistance you get.”

By avoiding foods from animals that have been fed antibiotics, Macario believes she is doing more than just protecting her family from direct exposure to these “superbugs.” She is attacking the plague at its source.

That Which Does Not Kill Me…

It’s hard to imagine that until World War II, infectious diseases such as pneumonia and tuberculosis were dreaded killers in this country. Beginning with the introduction of penicillin in the 1940s, these scourges could finally be cured with antibiotics. It was nothing short of a miracle. But scientists have always been aware that the miraculous antibiotics could become useless if they were underdosed and failed to knock out an infection completely. Bacteria are reproductive dynamos; a single Staph can divide every 30 minutes, meaning that one resistant bacterium is able to erupt into a colony of more than 1 million in less than a day. In the presence of a nonlethal dose of antibiotics, bacteria can mutate to become resistant, breeding a new strain. Which is exactly what began to happen on farms across the U.S.

In the early 1950s, drug companies began marketing antibiotics for livestock after studies showed that low doses of penicillin, tetracycline, bacitracin and other drugs used to cure infections in humans made animals grow more quickly. Unfortunately, within two decades there was persuasive scientific evidence that the low-dose antibiotics were a recipe for disaster. In a seminal 1976 study, Levy administered small amounts of the antibiotic tetracycline to a flock of chickens. Soon, the chickens were carrying E. coli bacteria that were resistant not only to tetracycline, but to other antibiotics as well. Within weeks, the farmers who tended those birds also carried resistant bacteria.

A year later (1977), the Food and Drug Administration, the federal agency mandated to protect Americans’ health, announced plans to ban feeding livestock low doses of antibiotics, which, according to the FDA, had not been “shown safe for widespread, subtherapeutic use.” But bowing to pressure from legislators and agribusiness, the FDA failed to act on its recommendation, even after the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Academy of Sciences, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the World Health Organization identified subtherapeutic use of antibiotics as a human health issue. More than 30 years later, when the Natural Resources Defense Council and other groups sued in 2011, the FDA revoked its recommendation and said that a “voluntary” effort would be more effective.

Hog Heaven, Hog Hell

If there is a ground zero for the abuse of antibiotics in the United States, it’s probably Iowa, where hogs outnumber humans seven to one. During the 90-minute drive up I-35 from Des Moines to visit one farm, I was rarely out of sight of rows of long, low barns—each home to at least 2,000 pigs confined shoulder-to-shoulder in pens—known as CAFOs (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations). In 2009, Tara Smith, Ph.D., a researcher at the University of Iowa, published a study that found that nearly half of the hogs at two large Iowa farms carried MRSA. More worrisome, 45 percent of the workers at those farms harbored the bacteria.

A study published in 2011 by the Translational Genomics Research Institute showed that MRSA was finding its way into our meats. Researchers analyzed 136 samples of beef, poultry and pork from 36 supermarkets in California, Illinois, Florida, Arizona and Washington, D.C. Nearly one-quarter of the samples tested positive for MRSA.

A Plague of New Superbugs

And it’s not only MRSA. During studies that lasted from 2005 to 2012, Amee Manges, a researcher at McGill University, found that supermarket chicken in Ontario and Quebec carriedE. coli bacteria that bore a close genetic relation to strains that caused stubborn, drug-resistant urinary tract infections in 350 women she examined in Montreal. In 2011, antibiotic-resistantSalmonella in ground turkey sold by Cargill sickened 136 consumers in 35 states, killing one. An examination of pork chops and ground pork published by Consumer Reports in 2012 showed that almost two-thirds of samples tested positive for resistant Yersinia enterocolitica, a bacterium that causes food poisoning. Some meat was also contaminated with drug-resistant Salmonella, Staphylococcus and Listeria. While cooking meat properly will kill bacteria, every year thousands of people are sickened by them, and for some (especially the very young, the very old and those with weak immune systems) the illnesses can be fatal.

“We are calling on retailers and grocery stores… to commit to stopping these practices and stocking only meat that was raised without feeding antibiotics to healthy animals,” Jean Halloran, director of food policy initiatives at the Consumers Union, said in a statement accompanying the release of the report.

Companies that sell the drugs used on livestock deny that there is a connection between resistant bacteria found in animals and humans. “There isn’t sufficient data to draw the conclusions drawn by Consumer Reports that attribute resistant bacteria in pork to the animals receiving antibiotics,” said Ron Phillips, vice president for legislative and public affairs at the Animal Health Institute, a trade group representing Bayer, Merck and other pharmaceutical companies. “Resistant bacteria are out there and can come from a lot of different sources. In fact, there have been numerous studies over the past decade that have examined potential pathways for antibiotic-resistant material to transfer from animals to humans.”

Phillips contends: “Several of these assessments have been done on different kinds of antibiotics and each and every one of them, including one performed by the FDA itself, have come to the conclusion that there is a vanishingly small level of risk.”

But it is virtually impossible to find a microbiologist unaffiliated with industry who agrees with him. “There are decades of evidence linking antibiotic use in food production with the emergence of drug resistance,” said Lance B. Price, a professor at George Washington University’s School of Public Health and Health Services. “There’s very clear, sound science showing that the multi-drug-resistant strains emerged from drug use in food animal production then spread to humans. Anyone saying that there’s no data is either deceiving themselves or lying.”

Price led a team of 33 researchers from 19 countries who tracked the origins and evolution of Staphassociated with pigs and other meat animals. They discovered a nonresistant strain of Staph that originated in humans and was transmitted to livestock. There, it quickly became resistant to antibiotics and was passed back to humans as a virulent form of MRSA, according to a paper they published in 2012.

A Better Solution?

So could keeping antibiotics off the farm keep humans out of the hospital? In 2009, Tara Smith of the University of Iowa sought to answer that question. As part of the study, she took nasal swabs from Sarah Willis, Willis’s 11-year-old daughter, mother and father and their farm workers to test for MRSA. Smith was interested in the family because Sarah’s father, Paul Willis, founded Niman Ranch’s pork collective in the late 1990s. The operation has since grown to include more than 500 family farmers. Niman farmers never administer antibiotics to livestock nor do they confine their animals in CAFOs. On the day I visited Sarah Willis, the pigs on her family’s 800-acre property were playing chase with each other or snoozing in the late-autumn sunshine of their paddocks—a rare sight in Iowa.

Smith also tested nine other farmers who did not use antibiotics. And she tested nine farmers who did administer the drugs to their animals. The results? Even though all the farmers in her tests ran large, commercial pig operations, not one of the producers who avoided antibiotics tested positive for MRSA, while nearly half the farmers who routinely used antibiotics on their pigs carried resistant bacteria. In other words, avoiding the drugs on the farm might be one way of reducing the prevalence of these virulent strains.

The findings resonated with Sarah Willis. One of those pig CAFOs is less than a mile from her house. In 2011, there were seven cases of MRSA in her daughter’s school district. It took two rounds of antibiotic treatment to cure the youngsters. “I avoid meat raised on antibiotics due to health concerns,” Willis said. “But it’s more important to me that I am voting with my dollars. I would rather spend my money on food that is raised responsibly.”

The real tragedy of subtherapeutic antibiotic use is that it is unnecessary. Before joining Niman, Paul Willis administered antibiotics to his hogs. “And we had more health problems with our animals then than now,” he said, when Sarah and I met him at a cafe. “Going antibiotic-free is not only good for people, but animals as well.” Studies in Denmark, a major pork-producing country that banned subtherapeutic antibiotics in 2000 (followed by the rest of the European Union in 2006), confirm Paul Willis’s observations. In Denmark, incidences of resistant bacteria fell dramatically, in both people and animals, after the ban. Pork production rose.

A Demand for Drug-Free

For Willis, though, “it was a customer issue. My biggest customers pushed for the animals to be free from antibiotics, so I banned drugs.” Companies that now refuse to sell meat produced with antibiotics include Whole Foods Market and Chipotle Mexican Grill, and the list is growing. Hyatt Hotels now offers antibiotic-free options at all its restaurants. At a time when sales of most meat and poultry products are flat, antibiotic-free-meat sales are climbing at a rate of 10 to 15 percent annually and sales from antibiotic-free pork alone now approach $500 million a year, according to Kevin Kimle, a faculty member in the economics department at Iowa State University.

Everly Macario is convinced that conscientious shoppers are the key to boosting those numbers. “If we buy only antibiotic-free meat, then demand for conventional meat will drop and more farmers will stop drugging their animals. It’s something every shopper can do.” She does not stop at shopping: Macario helped found the MRSA Research Center at the University of Chicago Medical Center. She also became the leader of Supermoms Against Superbugs, which met with food-policy legislators in Washington, D.C., in 2012 to discuss ways to keep antibiotics viable.

But to date, there has been no solid progress. Congresswoman Louise Slaughter, a Democrat from upstate New York and a microbiologist by training, has repeatedly tried to legislate limits on the use of the drugs in animals, without success. In an email, Slaughter said, “With the threat of antibiotic resistance higher than ever, I will once again introduce the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act at the start of the 113th Congress. As the science continues to make clear, there is no more time for delay.”

Macario is frustrated. But while the FDA stonewalls and Congress dithers in the face of intense lobbying from agribusiness and pharmaceutical companies, there is one way to effect change.

“I love meat,” Macario said during our visit to the supermarket. “I crave it. I’m originally from Argentina. My grandfather raised cattle.” At the store, Macario zeroed in on Rain Crow Ranch grass-fed steaks. The package was not labeled “antibiotic-free,” but Macario had researched the company and its farms and was confident that they never used antibiotics. The steaks, at $21.99 a pound, were pricier than the same cuts raised with antibiotics (though the Consumer Reports survey found that many antibiotic-free meats cost the same or in some cases less). All the other meats, dairy products and eggs she chose had similar assurances of avoiding antibiotics.

“When I shop for food, I always try to remember what one consumer advocate in Washington told me,” Macario said. “Congress and big agricultural interests are scared to death of moms.”

This story was originally publish in Eating Well.

“Tuna is the oil of the Western and Central Pacific with the region’s stock worth $5.5 billion,” writes Service. “As unregulated fishing collapses tuna stocks elsewhere and global demand for tuna grows, the value of the fish here continues to climb. One Pacific bluefin recently sold in Japan for $1.76 million, and over the past four years, the cost of tuna licenses in this region shot from $400 per day to $6,000.”

According to data released in January, blue fin will soon be effectively extinct in the North Pacific. “Everyone will tell you,” Service writes, quoting Palau President Thomas Remengesau Jr., “that at the rate we’re going, there won’t be any big eye tuna or bluefin in the near future.”

The report details the various ways these nations are managing their fisheries — from limiting the number of boats and the length of time they are allowed to fish, to making rules about how fishing is conducted and protecting fish on their migration path in open waters. These rules have been both radical and effective, and yet they might not go far enough to protect the tuna.

“Palau and her neighbors have a strong set of rules, but that’s only half the battle,” reports Service. “There is still the issue of illegal and unregulated boats simply stealing fish; there is still the issue of who controls the high seas. The PNA has closed off nearby international waters to its licensees, but that doesn’t stop others from illegally fishing there, and the PNA has no authority to stop them. Worse, even if the PNA had the authority, they don’t have the resources. Palau, for example, polices a quarter million square miles of its own territorial waters as well as the high seas pockets they helped create. All with a patrol ‘fleet’ of one.”

Service details how pirates are able to subvert these kinds of rules in unprotected areas of the high seas, which she experiences first hand as a passenger on a Greenpeace boat currently assisting Palau in its efforts. Service also details that INTERPOL announced recently that it plans to tackle fish “laundering,” the practice of illegally moving caught tuna between boats to disguise its origins. This effort would mean that a fleet with actual authority to enforce high seas law would, for the first time, patrol international waters.

You can read the full report here at Slate and here on our Web site.

A couple of positive pieces of news came our way in March and they show how far FERN has come in a little more than a year.

First, Tracie McMillan’s story, “As Common As Dirt,” about wage theft suffered by California farmworkers, was nominated for a James Beard Award (PDF)–the Oscars of the food world. We produced this story in partnership with The American Prospect magazine in September 2012, offering an in-depth look at the chronic exploitation of farm workers. McMillan is one of three finalists for the politics, policy, and environment award, which will be announced by the James Beard Foundation in May.

These two exciting developments came just ahead of a FERN fundraiser in San Francisco, where author Michael Pollan gave his first public reading from his soon-to-be-released book, Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation. Pollan also spoke of the importance of FERN and its work to an audience of more than 60 people.

Chief among the water board’s 15 recommendations is a fee on fertilizers, considered the major source of nitrate contamination. The report also recommends a point-of-sale fee on agricultural products and a water-use fee. The new fees would be used to offset the cost of building water systems in communities affected by nitrate-tainted drinking water.

The report’s most critical recommendation is to create funding to “ensure all Californians, including those in [disadvantaged communities], have access to safe drinking water.”

“There just isn’t a stable, long-term funding source,” said Jonathan Bishop, chief deputy director of the water resources board in an interview with the Fresno Bee.

The water board’s report comes on the heels of a study on nitrate contamination published last March by the University of California at Davis. According to the UC Davis study, nearly 10 percent of the 2.6 million people living in the Tulare Lake Basin and Salinas Valley might be drinking nitrate-contaminated water. If nothing is done to stem the problem, the report warned, those at risk for health and financial problems may number nearly 80 percent by 2050.

High levels of nitrates in drinking water have been linked to a potentially fatal blood disorder called “blue baby syndrome,” reproductive disorders and cancer. Enacting fees on fertilizers was one of the suggestions made in the UC Davis report. Read FERN’s coverage of the report here.

While clean water advocates praised the report, reaction from the agriculture industry has so far been muted. In an interview in the Monterey Herald, Monterey County Farm Bureau Executive Director Norm Groot said additional fees and regulations would burden what he called a “struggling” industry. Local farmers, said Groot, had been “bracing” for a fertilizer fee. “I doubt ag can afford another tax,” he told the Herald.

Western Growers, an agriculture trade association, said while it supports some of the water board’s recommendations, the fee on fertilizers and point-of-sale fee were among those that “cause serious concern.”

“[T]he level of effort and vast expansion of programs this report has outlined will require a substantial increase in funds,” wrote Dave Puglia, Western Growers vice president for government affairs and communications, in a statement.

Meanwhile, lawmakers in the Democrat-controlled Legislature have introduced nine bills aimed at tackling the state’s drinking water crisis.

“So the return of the herring run is cause for celebration — and offers a chance to help save the fish by eating them,” Finn reports. “Environmental scientists say that instead of feeding herring (and other ‘forage fish,’ such as sardines and anchovies) to farmed fish in the form of fish meal, we should eat them ourselves.”

“We use local herring to educate ourselves and our customers about the bay,” said Curtis DiFede, co-owner and chef at Oenotri Restaurant in Napa tells Finn. “Our local herring is not as fatty as from the North Pacific. It’s more mild and lean, and really delicious.”

Until now, Finn explains, most of the herring has been fed to farmed fish in the form of fish meal. However producing 1 pound of farmed salmon takes 3 pounds of wild forage fish, and 1 pound of ranched tuna can take 15 pounds of forage fish to produce.

Finn writes, “Scientists like Geoff Shester of the nonprofit group Oceana argue that eating these small fish, which have short life spans and reproduce quickly, is more environmentally friendly than eating carnivorous farmed fish or large fish that breed later in life, like swordfish and tuna.”

“Everything from humpback whales to crabs rely on these, so we monitor (the herring) closely,” says Thomas Greiner, environmental scientist for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.

Bay Area chefs believe that if we eat what comes from the bay, it makes us more aware of its health. For more on the local restaurants serving up herring, go here. For the full report on our site, go here.

The San Francisco Bay is a frenzy of rapturous seagulls, cormorants so gorged they can barely take flight, sea lions bellowing and porpoises spinning.

The herring have returned to spawn.

Humans are getting in on the action, too. A herring festival last weekend in Sausalito offered tastings of various preparations, and chefs all around the Bay Area are serving the omega-3-rich fish in a smorgasbord of dishes, with the catch expected to remain plentiful into March.

In San Francisco, Bar Tartine has offered the fish creamed on sprouted rye, and Rich Table has served it pickled over Douglas fir levain with honey and buckwheat. Waterbar makes a warm local herring salad with potato puree and citrus, and Delfina combines the fish with citrus after curing it.

Smoked and pickled

Curtis DiFede, co-owner and chef at Oenotri Restaurant in Napa, says the house smoked and pickled herring is one of the most popular items on the menu.

“We use local herring to educate ourselves and our customers about the bay. Our local herring is not as fatty as from the North Pacific. It’s more mild and lean, and really delicious.”

Paul Canales, co-owner and chef at Duende, preserves herring eggs in salt to make a bottarga and serves it over a crudo of white sea bass. Says Canales, “Herring is so versatile. You can pickle it, smoke it, cook it fresh and use the roe. There’s a short season, so it’s a celebration of the bounty happening right now.”

Local herring on menus is fairly new. The fish were popular during the Gold Rush, and consumption peaked during World War I when they were canned. New immigrants fished them for subsistence until the 1950s, but after that the fish went largely ignored.

In 1972, California herring fishing got a major boost when the Russians banned the Japanese from an important herring ground.

Japanese traditionally eat herring roe, or kazunoko, at the start of a new year because it symbolizes prosperity. The Japanese turned to the United States, setting off a “silver rush” in San Francisco and Tomales bays and leading to fishing limits in 1973. Since then, local herring has been harvested mostly for its high-priced roe, with the rest made into fertilizer and fish meal fed to pigs, chickens, pets and farmed fish.

About four years ago, however, the fishery collapsed. As The Chronicle’s Peter Fimrite reported on Jan. 24, warm water and lack of food caused a catastrophic population decline and, in 2009, forced the state to close the season.

So the return of the herring run is cause for celebration – and offers a chance to help save the fish by eating them.

Environmental scientists say that instead of feeding herring (and other “forage fish,” such as sardines and anchovies) to farmed fish in the form of fish meal, we should eat them ourselves.

Herring, caught in San Francisco Bay, are usually turned into fish meal and fed to farmed fish. But in the Bay Area, restaurants are serving up the small fish–a dining choice that scientists say could help save the species. Photo by Martin Reed.

To produce 1 pound of farmed salmon, it takes 3 pounds of wild forage fish, and 1 pound of ranched tuna can take 15 pounds of forage fish to produce. Scientists like Geoff Shester of the nonprofit group Oceana argue that eating these small fish, which have short life spans and reproduce quickly, is more environmentally friendly than eating carnivorous farmed fish or large fish that breed later in life, like swordfish and tuna.

Says Shester, “We’d be using more of the fish (not just the roe), and it would be a higher-value product, which ultimately would benefit our local herring fishermen.”

“Everything from humpback whales to crabs rely on these, so we monitor (the herring) closely,” says Thomas Greiner, environmental scientist for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.

This year, the catch quota is 4.7 percent of the total bay population – a number, says Greiner, that is “conservative and sustainable.”

Bay Area chefs believe that if we eat what comes from the bay, it makes us more aware of its health. “When that oil tanker hit the Bay Bridge in January, herring was the first thing I thought of,” says Douglas Bernstein, chef at Fish Restaurant in Sausalito.

Bernstein lived in Denmark, a herring-loving country, where he developed a taste for the fish. “We ate it for breakfast most mornings. Here, people just aren’t used to it.”

But that’s changing, he says. At Fish’s retail market, the staff hands out samples of their pickled and smoked herring, both of which quickly sell out. “Pickling and smoking stretches out the season,” Bernstein says.

Fish Restaurant, among many others, participated in the inaugural Sausalito Herring Festival on Feb. 9. Along with herring tastings, there were filleting and smoking demonstrations, and biologists were on hand to talk about the natural history of the fish.

Steady supply is tricky

Both TwoXSea in Sausalito and Monterey Fish sell herring to stores and restaurants, but because the fish arrive in such enormous schools and for such a short season, getting a steady supply can be tricky.

Still, several Bay Area retailers are carrying fresh herring, including Monterey Fish and Tokyo Fish in Berkeley; Bi-Rite Market and Avedano’s in San Francisco; Fish in Sausalito; and Crystal Springs Fish and Poultry in San Mateo. Prices range from $2.95 to $5 per pound.

Bi-Rite and Fish also sell their own house-pickled herring, and Fish sells its house-smoked herring. As with any fish, it’s best to call ahead to ensure availability.

Herring is also one fish that aficionados can catch themselves. One way to learn how to do this is by taking a Sea Forager tour with Kirk Lombard.

During herring season, he has an e-mail system set up to tell groups where to meet him to see schools of herring.

“The herring are abundant and easy to catch,” he says. “It’s so life-affirming to be out there among the animals. And if you catch a fish yourself, it always tastes better.”

In early January, scientists released jaw-dropping data showing that bluefin tuna in the North Pacific will soon be “functionally extinct.” A favorite of Japanese sushi lovers, Pacific bluefin is now so overfished, they said, that only 4 percent of its population remains. Earlier this month, a single bluefin sold for $1.7 million at Tokyo’s Tsukiji fish market.

Tuna, America’s favorite fish, is in decline around the world, sending prices up and boats on longer voyages to chase the lucrative fish. But one corner of the Western Pacific holds the last healthy tuna stock on the planet, and a group of eight Pacific Islands is determined to keep it that way.

The eight island-nations control 5.5 million square miles of tuna grounds worth an estimated $5 billion. These waters attract legal and illegal fishers from as far away as Taiwan. Skipjack tuna from this region ends up in cans on America’s grocery store shelves.

The challenge is enforcement. One of the island-nations, Palau, has only one patrol boat to protect nearly a quarter-million square miles of ocean from illegal fishing.

Listen to the story of Palau’s struggle to protect its tuna, from PRI’s The World.

Encounters on the High Seas

Palau and its neighbors battle a wide range of illegal and destructive fishing practices, from “tuna laundering”—the practice of transferring caught tuna to a refrigerator vessel, which hides the origins of the catch—to purse-seining, a fishing method that is legal but scoops up all marine life including those that are in decline.

In this slide show, Palau’s marine police track and encounter miscreants in the territorial and international waters around the island.

A Rogue Plan

In response to the threat to their livelihood, the eight island-nations, collectively called “the PNA” for Parties to the Nauru Agreement, have developed a controversial tactic for protecting their “blue economy:” Tuna boats that seek a license to fish in the PNA’s waters must agree not to fish in the open ocean between the island nations—international waters where the PNA actually has no jurisdiction.

This illustration sums up the PNA’s rogue plan.