Saturday, May 17, 2008
Rebecca Romaine's biggest concern was how to make her farm-bred catfish taste like nothing. Then came a fateful phone call.
Feb 12, 2004 | There was no denying that something was very wrong with the catfish. As Rebecca Romaine, vice president of American Global Fisheries, surveyed the endless rows of manmade ponds, uniform and aligned and all reflecting a milky sky, she knew she would have to solve the taste issue.
There was a drizzle coming on, and Rebecca was cold and wanted to be back in Chicago, where it also might be cold and drizzly -- but there, at least, she would not be listening to Zhang Xiaomei's constant humming. Rebecca was touring the grounds of a fish farm outside Qingdao, on the east coast of China, and by now her partners here, the men and women of Great Fish Processing -- formerly Great Wall Fish Processing -- should have known that there was something wrong with these fish. She knew, and they should know, that Americans would not want their fish this way. She'd tasted the catfish from these farms and they tasted muddy, messy, pungent -- like silt and riverbed, like cat and like fish. Everyone knew Americans didn't like their fish to taste like fish; they wanted it to taste like nothing. And these fish did not taste like nothing. These fish tasted like themselves, and this was a problem.
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A more pressing problem was Xiaomei's humming. She hummed when she was nervous and hummed when she was happy and always she hummed American hip-hop, or selections from the Eagles' Greatest Hits. She hummed almost imperceptibly, though always passionately. Rebecca had many times been in meetings, on phone calls, on inspections and during negotiations, when she would begin to hear a faint buzzing sound, arrhythmic, like a fly caught in a jar. Most times she would find Xiaomei sitting next to her, trying to seem quiet and inconspicuous, while almost cross-eyed, humming. Xiaomei was her guide and translator on these trips, an extremely intelligent woman, whom she loved like a niece, who spoke six languages and a dozen dialects, who could keep the contents of every conceivable daily fish-related business report in her head simultaneously and who seemed to be able to read, see through and accommodate every business associate they encountered. But smart as she was, she did the humming, and didn't think anyone could hear her humming, and as often as not, didn't even know she was humming. At the moment, as Rebecca was looking out over the field of ponds, Xiaomei was humming something by Mary J. Blige.
"Xiaomei!" Rebecca said, laughing.
"Yes, Rebecca."
She'd snapped out of the trance and was blinking rapidly.
"The humming."
"Was I?"
"You were."
The world's wild-harvest fisheries were depleted and depleting more every year, couldn't keep up with demand, and thus the world of fish farming, or "aquaculture," was burgeoning, and would only grow larger as the exploitation of the oceans and waterways ran its course. The Chinese had been farming carp in enclosed pens since the 10th century Tang Dynasty, but that had been primarily for the emperor's consumption. Now things were getting serious.
Though decried by some environmentalists, aquaculture was still developing, was yielding promising results all over the globe -- though China was by far the leader in the field -- and for some reason Rebecca was farming catfish in China, when even she admitted that there seemed to already be enough catfish in the world to meet demand. With aquaculture, everywhere there were problems, and chief among them for Rebecca Romaine was just how to make these fish, born and bred in artificial conditions, taste like nothing.
Fish farming had its critics, those who said that you can never create a normal, healthy, edible and safe fish in conditions like this. But Rebecca had faith in the possibility. Exactly how to make a catfish, an ugly fish, a not-always-tasty fish that has the appearance of a bottom feeder, taste good, to taste like it wasn't, indeed, a bottom feeder, was the problem.
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Fishing was in Rebecca's family, had been for four generations, though they were originally from Peoria. That story is a long story to tell, and won't be told here, not now.
Rebecca (and her father and grandfather before her) traveled the globe personally and by phone, inspecting and ordering fish from local fishermen and fisheries and governments, arranging for the processing of these fish, and then selling the processed fish all over the world, to nations and restaurants and frozen-fish companies, Gorton's and Mrs. Paul's. Rebecca Romaine was 45. For 12 years now -- though not consecutively -- she'd been doing this, from when she was 24 to 32, and then again from age 41 to now, when she was 45. In between, she'd had two children, Dale and Cletus, and served two terms as an Illinois state senator.
Did she miss politics? Rarely. Sometimes. Often. Never. Always. It depended on what aspect of it you mentioned. She missed the campaigning sometimes, the town-hall meetings, the small groups in libraries and gas station parking lots. For some reason she missed the budget meetings. She missed actually being able to bring some funds back to her district, the 59th, representing Benton, Eldorado, Marion, Cairo, Equality, Mounds, Mound City -- the southernmost part of the state. She missed, as much as anything, not having to shower three and four times a day, to remove the smell fish in her hair, in her clothes, on her skin. Now, at the end of most of her days, she'd take her watch off and the smell of sweat and fish and fish feed and fish guts would suddenly leap out from her wrist like a genie -- people nearby would turn their heads, surprised, aghast.
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