Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future

by Elizabeth Kolbert

Finally, he concluded that the fish would have to be deboned by hand, but, since labor costs in the United States were prohibitively high, he would need to outsource. The cakes he’d brought to CarpFest had been made from fish caught in Louisiana. These had been frozen and shipped to Ho Chi Minh City. There, Parola related, the carp had been thawed, processed, vacuum-packed, refrozen, and put on another container ship, bound for New Orleans. In a concession to Americans’ anti-carp prejudice, he’d rechristened the fish “silverfin,” a term he’d had trademarked. It was hard to know how many miles Parola’s “silverfin” had traveled in their journey from fingerlings to finger food, but I figured it had to be at least twenty thousand. And that wasn’t counting the trip their ancestors had made to get to the United States in the first place. Did this really represent “the Asian Carp Solution”? I had my doubts. Still, when the cakes came my way, I took two of them. They were, indeed, quite tasty.