Trevor Corson - Articles

Sustainable Sushi: Coming Soon?

Tue, 16 Sep 2008 17:01:35 -0400

Gourmet.com, Food Politics

Most sushi chefs are behind the curve on the question of sustainability—but change is coming.

Seafood chefs around the U.S. are paying a lot more attention to sustainability and the environment these days, but one group of fish-wielding chefs has yet to jump on the bandwagon: sushi chefs. Considering the vast quantities of tuna, salmon, shrimp, eel, and other creatures from the sea that Americans gobble down in the form of sushi, this is a major omission. What’s worse, the global sushi trade relies heavily on fishing and farming methods that damage ecosystems and leave particularly massive carbon footprints.
Read the entire article ...

What Tiananmen Crushed in Me

Thu, 12 Jun 2008 19:53:04 -0400

The Christian Science Monitor, Opinion Page

As an American student in China, I saw idealism bloom—then get trampled.

NEW YORK—I was born in the final year of the 1960s, too late to identify with that decade of rebellion, idealism, and change. I grew up in an orderly American suburb and spent my teen years at a comfortable prep school, doing my homework and following the rules of the Reagan era. But the '60s had left their mark. When I received a scholarship to study in China for a year after graduating high school, my open-minded parents and politically liberal teachers encouraged me to go.
None of us realized I was on a collision course with history that would end in Tiananmen Square. In the two short years I would spend in China, I would witness one of the most dramatic, pivotal, and – for some unfortunate citizens – deadly moments in China's emergence as a modern nation. Though I had missed out on the student radicalism of the '60s in America, I was soon to see an even more intense flowering of student idealism – and a far more brutal response from the government.
When I arrived in Beijing in 1987, I moved into a dorm for foreigners on a college campus. Communist authorities didn't want us mingling with the Chinese students, but we did anyway, and it felt deliciously subversive. I'd studied the language in high school, and I made Chinese friends quickly. They were studying at one of China's most elite schools, yet they lived crammed eight to a bleak cell, with metal bunks stacked against the walls and a single naked light bulb overhead. The hallways felt like mine shafts, and the bare concrete bathrooms had no hot water.
I'd sit with them on their bunks, the air reeking of coal dust and unwashed hair, and we'd nibble sunflower seeds and sip tea. We'd swap stories about our two countries and philosophize about the differences between socialism and capitalism. The Chinese students would grow animated, voicing opinions on everything from the films "Love Story" and "Rambo" to American-style democratic ideals. They were frustrated by the harsh limitations of life in China, but also buoyant and hopeful about the future. Often someone would play guitar and sing.
I loved the hardscrabble, bohemian atmosphere, the sense of intellectual ferment, and the idealism in the air. I spoke English less and less, and identified more and more with Chinese campus life, so I decided to stay in Beijing another year.
During my second spring, in 1989, the debates in the dorms grew urgent. The Chinese students committed their ideas to paper, painting bold words in black ink on colored posters. They pasted their manifestos on campus walls across the city.
Soon the students were marching in the streets and waving banners. They occupied Tiananmen Square, singing and dancing in a Chinese version of Woodstock, but also forming political committees and conducting hunger strikes. The whole city came to a standstill, and across the country citizens demonstrated in solidarity. An entire nation was about to bloom.
I strolled the perimeter of Tiananmen Square, looking in. I assumed that I ought to join the demonstrations. Wasn't this what American campuses had been like in the 1960s? Shouldn't I participate in history? But something held me back. Maybe it was my Reagan-era upbringing. Maybe it was the realization that this was the Chinese students' rebellion, not mine.
One night in early June, the city echoed with shots from automatic weapons. Over the next few days guns blazed across Beijing, and columns of smoke billowed into the sky as the Army crushed the demonstrations. With tanks patrolling the streets, I was evacuated out of the country, along with most other foreigners.
That fall, I tried to restart my college years as a freshman at an American university. But I couldn't let go of Beijing. I found myself shocked at the wealth and comfort on display in America and appalled at the social stability that my classmates took for granted. I heaped criticism on them, destroying my chances of joining campus life in my own country. In a way, I'd finally achieved a youthful rebellion that was entirely my own. It left me feeling bitter, isolated, and confused.
Nearly two decades have passed, and I've come to terms with a lot since then. But there's still almost no one with whom I can share memories of the most formative and dramatic events of my life. Meanwhile, China's headlong rush to development and wealth has obliterated the Beijing I once knew, including much of my old campus. Most Chinese have buried the memory of Tiananmen. It's almost as if those heady days never happened.
Today I feel glad for Beijing, host for this summer's Olympics. I understand the pride that young Chinese feel in their country's impressive progress.
At the same time, I try to imagine what America would be like today if our government had crushed the student movements of the 1960s and obliterated them from history. As I reflect on what the death of idealism has cost me personally, I wonder what it could have cost an entire nation.

The foregoing text is copyright © 2008 by Trevor Corson. All rights reserved.

A Tale of Three Tuna

Sat, 1 Mar 2008 19:24:25 -0500

Dining Out Magazine (national syndication)

The future of sushi is in your hands.

Imagine sitting down at your favorite sushi bar. The chef reaches across the fish case and serves you three pieces of sushi. "Bluefin tuna," he says with a grin. The pink flesh of bluefin, marbled with fat, is considered by many connoisseurs to be the ultimate sushi delight.

These three pieces of bluefin look exactly alike, but the chef points at them and frowns. "Each of these tuna is different," he says. His gaze sweeps across the fish in his case. "Depending on what you eat," he continues, "you can save the future of sushi ... or destroy it. Your choice."

Most of us don't realize that we face such stark choices at the sushi bar, and most sushi chefs don't tell us these things. But industry and technology have, in fact, brought three radically different types of bluefin tuna to our tables. Which of these three types of bluefin we eat -- and more importantly, how much of them we eat -- could determine whether sushi as we know it survives.

Let's investigate these three types of bluefin tuna. The first piece is "wild-caught." This fish was harvested the old-fashioned way, from the open ocean by a fisherman. It might have been caught off Boston or Vietnam or in the Mediterranean, flown on ice to Tokyo for grading and pricing, and then flown to New York, L.A. or Kansas City.

But fishermen have caught so many wild bluefin that the species is in terrible danger. Scientists estimate that in some areas of the globe, 90 percent of bluefin have been wiped out. At an average sushi restaurant nowadays, it's becoming less likely that you'll encounter a wild-caught bluefin at all.

This brings us to the second piece of sushi. This bluefin tuna would be labeled "farmed." Sounds promising, right? Trouble is, this second fish -- like 99 percent of bluefin that are labeled "farmed" -- wasn't farmed at all. It was actually "ranched," a questionable technique that tuna entrepreneurs pioneered in the early 1990s.

Just like the first of our three tuna, this ranched variety began its life in the open ocean. Fishermen trapped a school of these fish in a huge net, but instead of killing them, they towed the net to a holding pen near shore. Then they fed the tuna a rich diet of frozen fish for a few months, until the bluefin had grown big and fat.

Unlike true farming, ranching does nothing to help stocks of wild bluefin. If anything, it worsens their plight, since the fish are often trapped at a younger age, before they've had a chance to do much mating. Ranching mostly just helps the ranchers, by reducing risk and generating a steady supply of pricey, pre-fattened fish.

And now to our third and final piece of sushi. It looks deceptively like the other two pieces, but it represents a new development in tuna science and technology.

Until recently, no one had actually managed to cultivate bluefin in captivity. The fish are edgy, enormous, and very fast swimmers. But after several decades of experimentation, biologists at Kinki University in Japan finally succeeded a few years ago. They sold the first of their true farm-raised bluefin to restaurants in Japan in 2004.

In the past few months, a very small number of sushi restaurants in the U.S. have begun to feature these fish as well, branded as "Kindai Tuna." Each of these bluefin arrives from Japan with a certificate stating that it was farmed in a healthy and environmentally friendly way.

Unfortunately, when it comes to most types of fish, farming has often caused as many problems as it has solved -- pollution, genetic alterations, and health risks, not to mention flesh that tastes bland. It remains to be seen whether true farmed bluefin turn out to be as sustainable and friendly as the farmers claim.

So which of the three pieces of bluefin on your plate should you choose? If you had to pick one, the third -- the true farmed variety (if you can find a restaurant that serves it) -- would, at least, take some of the pressure off the decimated populations of wild fish.

But here's another idea: When you sit down at the sushi bar, ask your chef what he'd recommend besides bluefin. What most sushi lovers don't realize is that tuna was never a traditional sushi fish in Japan in the first place—the red, fatty flesh was considered too cloying. It wasn't until the Japanese began to eat a more Westernized diet in the 20th century, with fattier foods and more red meat, that the cult of bluefin began.

A good sushi chef can introduce you to a flavorful array of more traditional fish that most Americans have never tasted; a few chefs have even made a point of removing bluefin from their menus. If you can't live without tuna, varieties such as yellowfin and bigeye are less threatened than bluefin. And if you insist on bluefin, save it for the occasional indulgence. Your choices make a difference, and by eating less bluefin, you’ll not only be helping the environment, you'll actually be getting a more authentic experience at the sushi bar.

The foregoing text is copyright © 2008 by Trevor Corson. All rights reserved.

Lobstermen Are Candidly Looking for Sex

Sun, 2 Sep 2007 09:24:45 -0400

Newsday, Opinion Page

Tail-notching and release of egg-laden females helped boost the crustacean's numbers in Maine; now the practice is coming to Long Island Sound, where a die-out eight years ago virtually eliminated lobster populations.

I'll come right out and admit it: I have the hots for an animal.
She's a curvaceous creature, with a tough exterior but tender and irresistible innards. I've been chasing tail among her kind for years. So have most of my former colleagues, the rugged, manly lobstermen of Maine.
What kind of sick people are you, you might ask, to have intimate relations with lady lobsters of childbearing age?
We're, um, conservationists. And now so are you.
That's right: This year, Maine's peculiar lobster preservation practices are being officially imported to Long Island Sound. It may sound like the arrival of something raunchy from the sticks, but don't worry, it's actually cutting-edge fisheries management. And after the death and destruction that the Sound's lobsters have suffered, a healthy obsession with sex might be just what the doctor ordered.
It's been eight sad years now since Mother Nature and mankind conspired to unleash a hellish calamity on the Sound's lobsters. Experts still debate the causes, but what we do know is that between 1998 and 2000, below the rippling surface, a "perfect storm" of fiendish forces swirled together in the depths - sweltering temperatures, oxygen depletion, hurricane rain, toxic pesticides and an infestation of nasty, parasitic amoebas. To this day, those events are known simply as The Die-Off. In the blink of an eye, crowds of helpless lobsters perished, and the Sound's lobster industry was wiped off the map.
Today, the few lobsters that remain in the Sound survive in a precarious situation. They live on the southern edge of the American lobster's range, in waters that are a bit too warm, secluded from the larger gene pool, their numbers decimated. Nearly a decade has passed with little improvement. Under these circumstances, importing the sex-obsessed habits of Maine lobstermen seems worth a try.
In Maine, when a lobsterman hauls in a trap, he looks up the lady lobsters' skirts. If he finds a female laden with eggs, he grasps her appreciatively with one hand, and with the other, reaches for his knife. With two swift thrusts, he slices a tiny triangular nick out of one of the flippers on her tail. The nick is shaped like a V, so he calls it a "V-notch." If you're visiting Maine, this term can be used in a sentence, such as: "She has a real nice V-notch."
When the lobsterman is finished cutting the notch, he gives his lady lobster a look full of longing, then slips her back into the sea.
Once she is notched, no fisherman can violate this lobster's right to life - even if she isn't bearing eggs next time she's caught. She's become a kind of fertility goddess, and the V-notch is her free pass to more procreation.
Outside of Maine, other lobstermen also toss back egg-bearing lobsters. But the peculiar act of marking a female lobster with a notch, to protect her beyond that initial pregnancy, is an invention unique to Maine's craggy coast.
So yes, I do find these nicely notched females rather arousing.
That's not simply because I'm excited by the idea of underwater hanky-panky. It's also because I worked for a couple of years on a Maine lobster boat. I witnessed this V-notching routine regularly, sometimes several times a day. And I saw the results, both through my own eyes, and through the eyes of scientists studying the lobster population.
Thanks to V-notching, the floor of the ocean in the Gulf of Maine is teeming with gangs of large mother lobsters. Many factors affect the health of a fishery, but lobstermen in Maine can take pride that their fishery has not lacked for a supply of fresh eggs.
While stocks of other sea life have been obliterated by overfishing, the lobster fishery in Maine has thus far replenished itself and been a story of sustainability.
Lobstermen in other American states and Canada have taken note. A few years back, lobstermen in Rhode Island began V-notching females in the hope of reviving the population there after a crash.
And now Connecticut lobstermen in Long Island Sound have decided to start V-notching - not just egg-bearing lobsters, but 60,000 lucky ladies, regardless of whether they're pregnant. The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, the combined federal and state governing body that administers regulations for the Northeast lobster fisheries, approved the plan last month. State funds have been designated to help in the effort, as will an army of high-school interns, who are scheduled to go out on the boats at the outset of the fall run in late October.
So far, lobstermen from New York aren't required to cut notches of their own. But everywhere, notched lobsters must be thrown back. Penalties for keeping them range from fines to confinement to license suspension.
Is this plan to boost the population of fertile females a cure-all? No, it's not. No plan could be, after what the lobsters of the Sound have suffered. But there are glimmers of hope. Lobstermen are reporting more baby lobsters at the eastern end of the Sound, and it's not a stretch to speculate that Rhode Island's V-notching program may have contributed to the improvement.
Another benefit of V-notching is that it's likely to populate the Sound with larger females - capable of producing eggs more often and in vastly greater quantities than smaller lobsters. A notch can prevent a lobster from ending up as dinner for a couple of years, allowing her time to grow.
A flaw inherent to V-notching is that each time the lobster sheds her shell to grow, the notch becomes less distinct. Eventually it will disappear. Many lobstermen in Maine re-cut a fading notch when they find one, to extend the lobster's grace period until the creature exceeds Maine's maximum size for legal consumption. Once there, the lobster is protected by the law forever and will continue making babies for decades. A similar size cap might be worth trying in Long Island Sound, too.
In the meantime, I hope Connecticut's young females are fruitful and that they multiply. And perhaps the lobstermen of New York, too, will discover the pleasure of grasping a tail, reaching for a knife and then commenting with admiration, "She has a real nice V-notch."

The foregoing text is copyright © 2007 by Trevor Corson. All rights reserved.

Sushi for Two

Sun, 15 Jul 2007 09:35:33 -0400

The New York Times, Op-Ed Page

With the depletion of bluefin tuna in our oceans now front-page news, people around the country have been sharing with me their confusions and fears about eating sushi. I think that we -- and our fish -- would benefit from a new deal for American sushi: a grand pact between chefs and customers to change the way we eat.
Lobbyists for the sushi and fishing industries insist that tuna is essential to sushi, and that controls on harvesting the fish would threaten traditional Japanese culture. But that's nonsense. Traditionally, the Japanese considered tuna unfit for sushi -- especially the fatty parts. Boiled shellfish, pickled mackerel and lean, light-fleshed snappers and flounders were most popular. Not until the Western diet influenced Japan in the 20th century did the Japanese start to value the red meat of tuna and fatty cuts of fish.
But the Japanese still value tradition. When I lived in Tokyo, eating sushi generally involved a trip to a tiny neighborhood sushi bar. The chef, like a good bartender, knew everyone by name and bantered with his customers while he worked. Instead of tables and menus, people sat at the bar and asked what was seasonal and most flavorful. The chef delivered a delightful variety -- unpretentious little fish with great character, crunchy clams, surprisingly tender octopus.
When sushi took root in the United States in the 1970s, a few Japanese chefs tried to educate Americans about the variety of seafood eaten in traditional sushi, and a few made the effort to recreate the neighborhood sushi bar, with its cheerful chatter, trusting relationships, lack of menus and reasonable prices.
But the dirty little secret of American sushi is that from the beginning, many Japanese chefs assumed that we could never appreciate the wide-ranging experience the way their Japanese customers did, so they didn't bother to educate us. Simple sushi took over, featuring the usual suspects: tuna, salmon, boiled shrimp.
Today, most Americans remain wary of the stern-faced sushi chef, and dare not sit at the bar -- we wouldn't know how to order or to control the bill. Many chefs, in turn, tell me that they're fed up with the way we Americans mishandle our sushi, so they don't bother to serve us the fun, flavorful and more peculiar toppings.
So Americans are stuck between chef-driven omakase meals at elite restaurants that cost a fortune and the cheap, predictable fare at our neighborhood places. Both extremes have deepened our dependence on tuna -- at the high end, on super-fatty cuts of rare bluefin; and at the low end, on tasteless red flesh that has often been frozen for months and treated with chemicals to preserve its color.
What we need isn't more tuna, but a renaissance in American sushi; to discover for ourselves -- and perhaps to remind the Japanese -- what sushi is all about. A trip to the neighborhood sushi bar should be a social exchange that celebrates, with a sense of balance and moderation, the wondrous variety of the sea.
I suggest that customers refuse to sit at a table or look at a menu. We should sit at the bar and ask the chef questions about everything -- what he wants to make us and how we should eat it. We should agree to turn our backs on our American addictions to tuna (for starters, try mackerel), globs of fake wasabi (let the chef add the appropriate amount), gallons of soy sauce (let the chef season the sushi if it needs seasoning) and chopsticks (use your fingers so the chef can pack the sushi loosely, as he would in Japan). Diners will be amazed at how following these simple rules can make a sushi chef your friend, and take you on new adventures in taste.
In return, the chefs, be they Japanese or not, must honor the sushi tradition and make the effort to educate us -- no more stoicism. They must also be willing to have a candid conversation about the budget before the meal; it's the only way American diners will be willing to surrender to the chef's suggestions. Sushi should never be cheap, but it also should never be exorbitant, because that makes it impossible to create a clientele of regulars.
Fraternizing with the chef may be a tough habit for Americans to take up. But we've had sushi here now for four decades, and it's time for a change -- both for our sake, and for the sake of the embattled tuna. Let the conversation across the sushi bar begin.

The foregoing text is copyright © 2007 by Trevor Corson. All rights reserved.
Link to the article on the New York Times website.

Lobster on Trial: Boiling Point

Sat, 1 Jul 2006 09:47:33 -0400

Boston Magazine

First it was veal. Then foie gras. Now animal rights activists, ethical eaters, and even Whole Foods executives are targeting a new evil -- your lobster dinner.

The terrorists struck in the middle of the night. The lobsterman's traps were piled in his boathouse by the shore, and his fishing boat moored nearby. His family had been catching lobsters for five generations. He was a single father, raising two sons, ages nine and eleven. The terrorists tore off the front of the building, smashed parts of the boat, ripped the traps to pieces, and released a crowd of live lobsters back into the sea.
"The war against the lobster industry has begun," the perpetrators announced in an e-mail. "We will attack anywhere, at any time." No animal should be boiled alive, they said. It was signed: the Lobster Liberation Front. In the two years since the incident, the attacks have spread to other harbors along the southern coast of England.
So far, the lobster war has not reached Cape Cod or Marblehead or Maine. But that seems only a matter of time. Sympathy for lobsters is clearly building. In 2003, a last-minute amendment prevented the government of Canada from passing an animal welfare law that would have made cooking a live lobster a crime, punishable by up to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine. This year the British and Scottish parliaments have considered expanding animal welfare laws to include crustaceans. Jurisdictions in Australia and New Zealand have already moved to grant lobsters greater protection. A town in Italy has outlawed the boiling of live lobsters, calling it "useless torture."
A U.S. Supreme Court justice has even considered the topic. In 1993, in a case dealing with ritual sacrifice of live animals by the descendants of a Nigerian Yoruba religious group, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wondered aloud if the boiling of live lobsters could be banned under the local ordinance.
Here in New England, boiling live lobsters is a tradition--the Yoruba have their rituals, and we have ours. But soon the innocent pleasure of dunking a steaming chunk of claw meat in butter could be considered unthinkably barbaric and taken away from us. Lobster love is going mainstream: Executives at Whole Foods Market, the largest purveyor of natural and organic foods in the nation, are re-evaluating the entire process of lobster acquisition, transport, and sale--from trap to table. If they can't find a way to treat live lobsters with compassion, the company's stores will stop selling them this summer.
For tens of thousands of years we knew, firsthand, where our food came from. During the past century, 99.9 percent of that experience has vanished. Lobster is one of the few foods that most Americans can still purchase alive and kicking. Apart from hunting and fishing, it is the last link between our kitchens and the great outdoors. What do we lose if we lose lobster?
• • •
I have always been an adventurous eater. I have eaten whale. I have eaten dog. I have sampled horse sashimi and poisonous blowfish. I have nibbled on squid while it was still squirming. But in recent years I have become more thoughtful about my food. Now I avoid certain things--namely, chicken and beef from the average supermarket.
I belong to a new demographic called ethical eaters. We join the Slow Food movement and buy books like Eating with Conscience, Portrait of a Burger as a Young Calf, and--one of this year's most talked about books--Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma. We want our food to have been happy in death. At the same time, we want it so fresh and unprocessed that it still tastes, and nourishes us, like it is full of life.
That's why I love buying live lobster. I am happy knowing that the lobster has lived at least six or seven years in the ocean. Most other meat at the store comes from a domesticated animal, and fish increasingly come from farms. Lobster is one of the last true free-range meats.
Usually I purchase my live lobsters when I am visiting Maine, but sometimes I buy them from Whole Foods. In general, I like shopping at Whole Foods for the same reasons I like buying live lobster. The store sells eggs, poultry, and meat from animals that live a more natural life than those on factory farms. When I pass the lobster tank at Whole Foods, I smile.
Apparently, many Americans--maybe most--do not share my sentiments. Karin Robertson, manager of the Fish Empathy Project at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), says she gets calls all the time from people who refuse to shop at Whole Foods because of the live lobster tanks. Robertson sees this as part of the global trend toward greater compassion for crustaceans. "We never would consider boiling a dog alive," she says.
At Whole Foods, the vice president for global communications and quality standards, Margaret Wittenberg, is well aware of all this. "For years," she tells me, "we've had a lot of customers questioning, 'why are you selling live lobsters?'" Last November, the company convened a special Lobster Task Force, and gave it seven months to decide what to do about those clawed monsters lurking in the company's stores.
• • •
Whole Foods, which now has 17 stores in the Boston area, is starting to pay a price for its phenomenal success. Ethical eaters want their food to come from local, small-scale, sustainable farmers. But Whole Foods is a huge corporation that gets much of its produce from distant, industrial-sized organic farms. So it's ironic that live lobster is the one item Whole Foods sells that's consistently produced by an industry composed almost entirely of model fishermen using environmentally friendly methods. Unlike corn and cows and chickens, live lobsters have not been processed into unrecognizable food products by faceless corporations. Yet it was these live lobsters that the company was now threatening to remove, all for the sake of appeasing ethical eaters.
Why? According to PETA's Robertson, the entire process of capturing, storing, transporting, and cooking lobsters is "so graphic, so painful, and so cruel" that it cannot possibly be accomplished in a humane fashion--period.
Of course, you'd expect PETA to say that. The fact is that trapping lobsters is as humane as fishing gets. The animals crawl into a wire cage, eat a free lunch, and sit around for a while. We know from video studies that many of the lobsters then climb right back out of the trap. We also know from scientific surveys that most lobstermen along the rocky coast from Gloucester to Downeast Maine release a lot of their lobsters back into the ocean--young ones, old ones, and ones with eggs--and that those animals continue to thrive and repopulate coastal waters, despite their elevator rides to the surface and their swims back to the bottom. (If you want to see cruel, witness an episode of lobster combat in the wild. It begins with the firing of chemical weapons loaded into jets of urine, and can end with fractured shells, amputated limbs, and sometimes merciless cannibalism.)
Lobster transport is similarly civilized. Because consumers have traditionally demanded that lobsters be kept alive, distributors already have a strong incentive to treat the animals with care. Nova Scotia-based Clearwater Seafoods, one of the top lobster distributors in North America, has constructed elaborate seawater condominiums at its three plants, tended by the company's own biologists, so that lobsters can rest in cool, stress-free solitude and regain energy before their trek to the consumer.
And storage? It is true that adult lobsters dislike spending much time together in close quarters--unless, of course, a male and female have completed their courtship dances and decide to move in together to mate. But lobsters communicate by smell instead of sound, and studies at the Marine Biological Laboratory on Cape Cod suggest that in crowded conditions, the lobsters' noses get desensitized to stimulation and they calm down and stop bothering one another. The tanks are also kept cold; the lobsters adapt by slowing their metabolism, reducing activity, and lowering their food intake, just as they do in the wild, which further reduces stress.
That leaves cooking. It's the thornier problem, and what most upsets people. There are reasons why lobsters have traditionally been boiled alive. First, they are hardy animals--unlike fish, they can survive out of water long enough to make it to the kitchen still kicking. Second, the flesh of lobsters is nearly impossible to extract prior to cooking. You can't fillet a dead lobster the way you can a dead fish, so why bother killing it before you cook it?
But if animal rights activists get their way, our traditional methods may disappear. In England, in response to the tightening of animal welfare laws, scientists have invented a new machine designed to kill lobsters with minimum pain prior to cooking. It is called the CrustaStun, and went into service in the United Kingdom last year. It comes in two sizes. The big one looks something like those zappers they put your suitcase in at the airport. Lobsters ride a conveyor belt into a 110-volt jolt that electrocutes them. The small version looks like a stainless-steel lobster coffin, and executes one animal at a time. Both get a humane stamp of approval.
• • •
The deliberations of Whole Foods' Lobster Task Force were wracked by uncertainty. In early May, a spokesperson from the company told me that the group would be making its final decision in a few days. One option that Wittenberg, the vice president for quality standards, was considering was for Whole Foods to buy all its lobsters from Clearwater--the folks with the lobster condos--in order to satisfy the new compassion standards. As an experiment, Whole Foods stores in New York City began installing condos of their own that allowed lobsters to hide in little pipes. Customers were fascinated; the company's seafood experts also noted the lobsters seemed happier. Whole Foods began installing similar condos in other locations, including all of its Boston-area stores.
Then, on May 9, the Lobster Task Force convened for its final meeting, at which new questions arose. According to a company spokesperson, Whole Foods was considering removing live lobsters from its stores after all. (By the time you read this, the company should have announced its final decision to the public.)
My guess is that Whole Foods will decide that selling live lobster is a lost cause. In 2005, the Maine Lobster Promotional Council commissioned a survey on people's attitudes toward lobster. Only 15 percent of Americans, mostly in the Northeast, qualified as "traditionalists" who wanted their lobsters alive. An equally small number, just 13 percent, objected to the retail sale of live lobsters for reasons of cruelty. For Whole Foods, the smart business decision is to target the silent majority--the 50 percent or so of Americans who would love to buy fresh lobster if only it were easier to prepare.
Maine entrepreneur John Hathaway is one of several people testing out a new technology that could function as a compromise. Hathaway used to sell traditional, steamed whole lobsters at his restaurant in Kennebunkport. A few years ago, he added lobster caesar salad to the menu and noticed far more tourists ordering that--it was less messy and more convenient. This spring, Hathaway opened a new business. Called Shucks Maine Lobster, it essentially consists of an 80,000-pound, 16-foot-tall machine that uses technology adapted from U.S. Army research, and is much scarier than a CrustaStun. Hathaway loads a wide vertical cylinder with 200 pounds of live lobster at a time. A steel, oval framework slides into place over the cylinder. He presses a button, massive pumps whir, and water inside the cylinder is compressed to a pressure more than five times that of the deepest ocean trenches. Without any heat, the lobsters die almost instantly and their meat separates from the shell. The lobsters are then hand shucked, vacuum sealed, and the packages re-pressurized to kill pathogens. The result: fresh, raw lobster meat with a refrigerated shelf life of up to 30 days and no additives or preservatives--similar to chicken. Chefs love the product, and supermarkets are currently considering it for retail sale.
• • •
In some ways, I welcome the end of boiling lobsters alive. I am with that Italian town--it is useless torture. But I also fear the impending loss of live lobster, and with it the end of a beloved New England tradition. I do not want to hand over my last chance to make moral choices about my dinner to a big corporation and its automated executioners. As much as I adore Whole Foods, the company trades on an ethical fiction: that we can be close to our food and far away from it at the same time.
So for now, I will continue to do what I have always done. I will put the live lobster on ice for 15 minutes to slow its metabolism and neural activity. Then I will give thanks to the lobster and thrust the point of my knife between its legs and cut down through the head, splitting the front half of its body. The animal will die instantly, and I can boil it without causing further pain. This method, while not for the squeamish, also gets a humane stamp of approval.

The foregoing text is copyright © 2006 by Trevor Corson. All rights reserved.
Link to the article on the Boston Magazine website.

Film: Lobsters Go to the Movies

Thu, 1 Jun 2006 10:06:50 -0400

Portland Magazine

In the movies, as in America, when a man really wants to impress a lady, he takes her out for a lobster dinner. But what’s so romantic about dining on a sea-dwelling cockroach the size of a cat? Well, for one thing, lobster is pricey, so it shows that the guy is willing to cough up some dough. But ripping apart a lobster also brings instant sensuality to a dinner date. Consider the scene in Flashdance when Michael Nouri takes Jennifer Beals out to a high-class restaurant. Nouri is thinking about money—he admits that when he was a dirt-poor kid, his ambition was to dine on lobster in places like this. But Beals, who is still poor, is thinking about sex. She performs fellatio on her chunk of lobster flesh, and Nouri groans and asks, “How’s the lobster?” “It sucks,” she says, grinning. He takes a deep breath. “Want some of mine?”
But Beals has nothing on Daryl Hannah. In Splash, Tom Hanks has fallen in love with a mermaid. Here is a woman who has every reason to be impressed by lobster—she lives underwater. But Hanks has not thought this one through. When Hannah bites into her lobster at the restaurant, she chomps directly through the shell with a thunderous crunch, as she would in the sea. Hanks looks around, horrified. He turns to the neighboring table. “She’s really hungry.”
Never mind eating lobster on a date—how about going out on a date with a lobster? Lobster romance goes bestial in a John Waters film called Multiple Maniacs. The character Divine finds ecstasy by fornicating on a couch with a seven-foot-long crustacean. At the climax Divine shouts, “Oh . . . lobster!” No kidding. John Waters probably didn’t know this, but Divine was enjoying double the pleasure, because lobsters are endowed with twice the male genitalia of humans.
In Love Actually, the Christmas play has too many kids and too few animals for the nativity scene, so a couple of them are cast as lobsters. But if you knew anything about lobster romance, introducing them into that film ruined the plot. Were humans to mate the way lobsters did, Emma Thompson, Keira Knightley, Laura Linney, Heike Makatsch, Lúcia Moniz, Elisha Cuthbert, and Denise Richards would all have slept with Hugh Grant, one after another. As prime minister, he was the highest ranking male.
Lobsters nearly get their revenge against humanity when Bill Cosby plays a CIA agent in Leonard Part 6, a stinker in which an evil genius brainwashes small animals into killing humans. Cosby is chained up in a dungeon when an army of lobsters claws its way through chinks in the walls and advances toward Cosby’s groin, pincers snapping. “Where’s your rubber bands, fellas?” Cosby yells. One of the lobsters rears its head and roars. At the last minute, Cosby scares them off with a stick of melting butter.
The lobster scene most people remember is from Annie Hall. Woody Allen tries to impress Diane Keaton, not by taking her out to a fancy restaurant, but by bringing home a bag of live lobsters to boil. Soon the lobsters are crawling around on the kitchen floor and Allen is fending them off with a chair. “I told you it’s a mistake to ever bring a live thing in the house!” he screams, and threatens to call the police. Finally Keaton asks if he’s going to put them in hot water or not. “What do you think I’m going to do,” Allen says, “take them to the movies?”

The foregoing text is copyright © 2006 by Trevor Corson. All rights reserved.

Spreading as Quietly as a Clam

Sun, 31 Jul 2005 16:49:21 -0400

The New York Times, Op-Ed Page, Long Island Edition

A thousand times more deadly than cyanide, red tide is coming to a clam near you.

Long Islanders have been harvesting shellfish for 4,000 years, and dining on fried clams is a tradition. But if you're eating clams this summer, consider yourself lucky. Red tide -- the enemy of clam lovers everywhere -- came farther south this summer than it has in decades. And now the deadly blight may be poised to colonize Long Island.
Back in May, scientists from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Cape Cod aboard the research ship Oceanus lowered a cluster of vials into the Massachusetts Bay and sucked up the first of several thousand water samples. Over the next 10 days, the scientists began beaming e-mail alerts to public-health officials around New England and at the United States Food and Drug Administration.
The Oceanus, the scientists soon realized, had sailed into what was possibly the worst outbreak of red tide in the history of the northeastern United States. Authorities from Boothbay Harbor to Montauk scrambled to check shellfish beds. In Maine and Massachusetts, beds were closed, and harvesters lost millions of dollars. Long Island was spared. But based on research at sea during recent weeks, the future for Long Island looks ominous.
The scientists studying this phenomenon don't actually use the term ''red tide,'' whose definition includes benign algae, too. Experts label this monster and its ilk a harmful algal bloom. And ''harmful'' is an understatement.
The critter that has been threatening clam lovers this summer is a type of plankton belonging to the genus Alexandrium. For most of us, plankton is little more than ocean dust. But under a microscope, it evokes a scene from ''Animal Planet'' -- or worse, ''Aliens.'' A cupful of coastal seawater can harbor horrific predators -- creatures with 10 legs, bulbous eyes and hairy antennas stalking their prey through a jungle of spiked, spindly and globular plants, all roiling through the water like an asteroid field.
What makes Alexandrium so dangerous is that it produces saxitoxin, a deadly nerve poison. A thousand times more powerful than cyanide or sarin gas, saxitoxin was said to be carried as a suicide pill by C.I.A. agents and spy-plane pilots who flew over Soviet territory in the 1950's. At the Pentagon, saxitoxin qualifies as a Schedule 1 Chemical Warfare Agent.
No one knows why Alexandrium produces saxitoxin, but the shellfish poisoning it causes has been known to humans for hundreds of years. Eat a contaminated clam and your respiratory system shuts down. The standard test for detecting Alexandrium is to inject a liquefied clam into a mouse and watch it die. For humans, if the victim is put on a respirator in time, chances of survival are good.
This summer, frantic crowds of Alexandrium inundated the Gulf of Maine. Not entirely plant, not entirely animal, composed of a single armored cell bundled around an oversized clot of DNA, each microscopic alga hurtles through the water by beating a flagellum in a groove around its waist. It trails a second flagellum as a rudder and veers toward nutrients and sunlight. When Alexandrium cells exhaust their supply of nutrients, they fling themselves into an orgy of wild sex. The result is a torrent of cysts -- spores that sink to the ocean floor and lie dormant in the sediment, to be awakened by a favorable spring.
In the past Alexandrium seldom ventured south of the Canadian border. But in 1972, a hurricane changed that, blowing a particularly vast bloom of Alexandrium unusually far to the south, colonizing the coast from the Bay of Fundy to Cape Cod. A tiny trickle of cells probably made it to Long Island, but not enough to cause trouble.
Now some scientists are wondering if Alexandrium's next trick will be to pour past Cape Cod and establish strong and troublesome new colonies off Long Island.
Like the spring of 1972, the spring this year was favorable. Lots of freshwater runoff carried extra nutrients into the ocean, and the winds from two northeasters distributed the bloom far and wide.
So when the Woods Hole researchers completed their work aboard the Oceanus, they dispatched a second ship south to see how far the bloom had traveled.
In mid-June, the scientists found a potent patch of Alexandrium hovering off Martha's Vineyard, just 60 miles from Montauk Point. They also found lots of sexually active Alexandrium on the verge of heading to the ocean floor to seed the bottom with cysts.
What that means is that even though Long Island has avoided an outbreak of red tide this summer, Alexandrium may have put down new roots in the neighborhood. This fall, the Woods Hole team members will be digging samples from the ocean floor between Martha's Vineyard and Montauk. If they find a high concentration of dormant cysts, that could mean that the area will, for the first time, have a serious outbreak of its own to worry about next spring. If the right winds were to blow such a bloom to the south and east, and if the frantically flagellating algae cells found enough nutrients, Long Island clam lovers could find themselves in trouble.
Globally, harmful algal blooms are expanding their reach by feeding on human pollution. Whether the byproducts of human habitation and industry -- mostly sewage and fertilizer -- could fuel an outbreak on Long Island is hard to say. Six years ago an unpredictable confluence of weather, oceanography and runoff in Long Island Sound gave an unusual amoeba the chance to kill lobsters in droves. Whether the primary causes were natural or manmade still isn't clear, but either way, the lobster die-off was a terrible surprise.
Maybe next year, or maybe a year or two after that, another storm could, in theory, carry trillions of flagellating algae into the clam flats of the Sound or Great South Bay. So be forewarned. And today, savor those clams.

The foregoing text is copyright © 2005 by Trevor Corson. All rights reserved.
Link to the article on the New York Times website.

Waiter! There’s a Federal Scientist in My Lobster Bisque!

Thu, 12 May 2005 21:52:34 -0400

The Wall Street Journal, Opinion Page

Conservation starts at home.

LITTLE CRANBERRY ISLAND, Maine -- Lobsterman Jack Merrill has been setting traps in the waters around this small island for 30 years. The busiest days of the summer season are still weeks away, so on a recent morning Mr. Merrill brought his aging boat in for repairs. In a workshop strewn with mechanical parts and hydraulic hoses, Mr. Merrill admired another lobsterman's new engine. "It might be time for me to upgrade, too," he said.
Mr. Merrill's boat is named the Bottom Dollar, but he can afford the new engine. These days many Maine lobstermen have been able to afford much more--bigger and faster boats; traps by the truckload. There is irony to all this commerce, because for 20 years federal officials warned that Gulf of Maine lobsters were in danger, and tried to impose regulations to prevent a crash.
The lobstermen fought back, and instead of disappearing, the lobster population exploded. The result is the greatest boom the Maine coast has ever seen. Lobster is now the third most valuable fishery in the U.S., and the industry pumps some half to three-quarters of a billion dollars into Maine's economy each year.
The state of Maine recognized that its lobstermen practiced their own conservation before such things were fashionable, so it vested them with a degree of self-governance through local councils. The federal government is another story.
• • •
Jack Merrill was a novice lobsterman when Congress passed the Fishery Conservation and Management Act in 1976. "Suddenly the feds had control over our fishery," he remembers. The new law was well-intentioned, and it gave U.S. waters needed protection from foreign fishing fleets. But it also empowered the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS). Armed with mathematical models, federal scientists began analyzing the lobster fishery in the Gulf of Maine and determined that too many lobsters were being caught before making eggs.
Mr. Merrill, great-grandson of a Maine governor, was philosophically and scientifically opposed to this federal encroachment. In college he'd studied marine biology; to him the NMFS science didn't seem accurate. For one thing, the calculations ignored the thousands of egg-producing female lobsters that lobstermen marked as breeders and threw back. Maine lobstermen had long prided themselves on this homegrown conservation practice.
As a vice president of the Maine Lobstermen's Association, Mr. Merrill spent the years after the passage of the 1976 law studying scientific reports, attending meetings and pleading with researchers to come aboard his boat to collect better data.
Local scientists eventually listened to Mr. Merrill and others and went to sea several years ago. Maine's chief lobster biologist, Carl Wilson, has spent countless hours riding the waves with Mr. Merrill aboard the Bottom Dollar and hundreds of other boats. "We've been able to document and quantify what the fishermen have been telling us all along," Mr. Wilson says.
• • •
But the federal government was focused on other fisheries, which were in deep trouble. In 1996, Congress passed the Sustainable Fisheries Act, setting even stricter guidelines on fisheries including lobster. At the time, however, Maine's lobster population was doing well. Catches were going up, and surveys showed that the stock of young lobsters and egg-producing breeders was on the rise. Yet under the new law, the NMFS ran its mathematical models and concluded, in spite of the evidence, that lobstermen needed to "rebuild" egg production.
To the lobstermen this wasn't simply absurd, it was Orwellian. The politest description Mr. Merrill can muster is "totally bogus." Lobstermen had no way to counter the federal assessment, and were forced into years of frustrating regulatory negotiations. For a time, conservationists at the Monterey Bay Aquarium even followed the feds' lead and, on their widely disseminated Seafood Watch list, advised consumers to avoid eating lobster altogether.
Last fall, an independent panel of highly regarded population-modeling biologists reviewed the NMFS science. The panel's conclusions are stunning: The models are unreliable, they depend on woefully inadequate data, and the NMFS management criteria should be abandoned. "There is no possibility," the panel wrote, "of using the models being considered, given the available data, to reasonably manage on this basis."
Lobstermen have a right to be furious, but blaming the NMFS misses the point. Congress gave the agency no choice but to implement the law with insufficient scientific resources. The real culprit here is ill-conceived and overly ambitious federal legislation, applied to a local industry that was doing a decent job of regulating itself.
The NMFS is now working with scientists in Maine and elsewhere to improve its models and data. While NMFS biologists see potential for progress, the committee of federal and Atlantic-state scientists who monitor the lobster stock has yet to adopt the improved methods. For now, the flawed management system the NMFS developed remains in use.
• • •
Meanwhile, the industry is perched on a precipice. Catches and traps have both risen to nearly three times their historical averages. "You cannot go up forever," says Mr. Merrill, voicing the opinion of many lobstermen. "There's got to be a drop-off."
Maine's commissioner of marine resources, George Lapointe, also worries that an ecological downswing could occur, and is crisscrossing the coast trying to jump-start a reduction in fishing effort while times are still good. He admits that it's a tough sell, because federal authorities have been "crying wolf for too long."
The lobstermen of Maine face a historic opportunity. They have proved that industry can be more sensible than federal regulators. But to keep the feds at bay, Maine's lobstermen must now prove that local governance can work. To do that, they must be sensible with their success.

The foregoing text is copyright © 2005 by Trevor Corson. All rights reserved.
Link to the article on the Wall Street Journal website.

Strait-jacket

Wed, 1 Dec 2004 21:24:17 -0500

The Atlantic Monthly

December elections could edge Taiwan closer to a symbolic declaration of independence—and the United States toward military conflict with China. There's one way out.

If the war on terror can be said to have a silver lining, it's that the United States has steered clear of conflict with China. Before 9/11 neoconservatives in Washington were more worried about an eventual war with Beijing than with Baghdad, and in 2001 the Pentagon declared China an emerging threat. But since 9/11 the government in Beijing has made common cause with the United States by squelching terrorist activity on China's western borders, and has cooperated with American efforts to contain North Korea. With global commerce fueling its stupendous economic growth, China is becoming integrated into the community of nations as never before—as best evidenced, perhaps, by Beijing's successful bid to host the 2008 Olympics.
This easing of tension has been especially welcome on the matter of Taiwan—the island that China still considers a renegade province. Trade and investment have blossomed so quickly across the Taiwan Strait that China has become Taiwan's largest export market, and also the destination for some $70 billion or more in Taiwanese capital. To some, these developments suggest that time is on the side of a peaceful solution to the problem of Taiwan's disputed status.
But the reality may be quite the opposite. In fact, a number of analysts in both America and East Asia believe that military conflict between China and Taiwan is not only likely but imminent. Just how imminent depends partly on the Taiwanese legislative elections scheduled for December 11. If pro-independence parties gain a majority in the legislature, the stage will be set for a confrontation, producing a hellish prospect for U.S. foreign policy: on top of its ongoing military commitment in the Middle East, the United States may face a Chinese attack against Taiwan, a fragile democracy that America has promised to help protect.
• • •
On some level, of course, the idea that China would actually attack Taiwan—rather than merely threaten to do so, as it has for years—makes no sense. Attacking would invite a military response from the United States, and even without American intervention, it's not clear that China's military is up to the task of seizing the island. China would also risk losing the trade relationships that drive its economic growth.
Nevertheless, the threat of a Chinese attack has loomed over Taiwan since at least 1972, when China's Premier Zhou Enlai, in negotiations with Richard Nixon, refused to renounce the use of force against the island. Subsequent Chinese leaders have reiterated the point. Vice-Premier Deng Xiaoping threatened the Carter Administration with an attack against Taiwan in 1978, and repeated the warning to U.S. officials during the 1980s. In 1995 China conducted military exercises near Taiwan, and President Jiang Zemin, in a major policy speech, reminded the world that China would use military force against the island if necessary.
"I don't think China wants to use force," Thomas Christensen, a professor of international affairs at Princeton University, told me recently. But he had just returned from his fourth trip to China in the past two years, and the mood he'd encountered while speaking privately with Chinese policy experts was decidedly pessimistic. "What I heard on several occasions," Christensen said, "is that you see a much more serious consideration of actual conflict with the United States over Taiwan."
The disagreement over Taiwan's status dates to 1949, when the Chinese Communists emerged victorious in China's bloody civil war and the vanquished Nationalists fled to the island. For years both sides clung to the notion that Taiwan was part of a larger China: the Communists hoped to finish the war and take the island; the Nationalists hoped to use it as a base from which to retake the mainland. After half a century under U.S. protection, few people in Taiwan still look to China for their national identity. But on the mainland a very different sort of evolution has occurred. In the late 1970s Deng Xiaoping began steering China away from communism toward capitalism, and subsequent Chinese leaders have justified their rule not with communist ideology but with the promise of making China prosperous and powerful. Bringing Taiwan back under the sway of the mainland—a prospect China calls "reunification"—would be a crucial sign that this promise had been fulfilled.
Yet China's leaders haven't indicated that they want to occupy Taiwan. Indeed, ever since Deng proposed a "one country, two systems" solution, in 1979, China has said that Taiwan could keep its own administration and even its military organs intact. More likely what they want is simply to prevent Taiwan from securing the legal independence that would end the promise of eventual reunification. "The Party needs to avoid humiliation on Taiwan more than it needs to gain a big victory on it," Christensen explains. A genuine sense of nationalism is involved, but the Chinese government also has domestic political motives: "The Communist elite worries that humiliation on that issue could provide a rallying point for people frustrated with the Party for other reasons." If they think their political survival is at stake, China's leaders may feel they have no choice but to go to war. Last year high-ranking Chinese military officials stated unequivocally that China was ready to use force against Taiwan, even at the cost of international censure, economic stagnation, and the loss of the Olympics.
• • •
So far the United States has managed to prevent conflict by pressuring Taiwan not to declare independence. But as Taiwan's democracy matures, America's ability to influence the island is fading.
In 2000 Chen Shui-bian, the candidate of the upstart Democratic Progressive Party, won election to the Taiwanese presidency. Chen was a former independence activist, and the DPP platform held that Taiwan should be considered a sovereign nation, independent of China. In March of this year Taiwan's voters re-elected Chen to a second term. The DPP has also picked up more than a third of the seats in the legislature; with its coalition partners it stands to gain a majority this month. Opinion polls in Taiwan show growing support for independence.
"The implications of this are really frightening for U.S. policy," Andrew Peterson, a young legal scholar who lived in Taiwan during the 2000 election, observes. In a recent article in The Washington Quarterly, Peterson spins out a scenario of brinkmanship by Taiwan. Chen is unlikely to make an outright declaration of independence. But if a legislative majority frees his hand and Washington can't rein him in, Chen may take provocative steps toward more aggressively asserting independence. Peterson outlines a variety of possibilities; many observers think the most likely first step would be a popular referendum to add the word "Taiwan" in parentheses to the island's outdated official name, Republic of China. Aware that this seemingly innocuous change, or one like it, could constitute a casus belli for Beijing, Taiwan's pro-independence forces are, Peterson thinks, poised to act quickly. They believe that the military balance of power still favors their protector, the United States, and that Beijing will feel constrained by international opinion until after the 2008 Olympics. In other words, Taiwan is willing to gamble, because it sees its window of opportunity closing.
But so does China. "The Chinese Communist Party is acutely aware of what's going on in Taiwan," Peterson says. "And I don't think they have any effective policy means to deal with it." Thomas Christensen agrees. "China has tried to use economic integration as a tool to change the minds of the Taiwan public," he says, "but that strategy has largely failed. Politically, Taiwan is getting further away, not closer."
Since 1949 China's leaders have often resorted to pre-emptive military strikes to halt trends not in the country's favor. Christensen ticks off the examples: in 1950 in Korea, in 1954 and 1958 in the Taiwan Strait, in 1962 against India, in 1969 against the Soviet Union, and in 1979 against Vietnam.
• • •
For the United States, deterring China from an outright invasion of Taiwan is straightforward. A Pentagon report earlier this year concluded that China would have great difficulty mounting an amphibious assault on the island any time in the next five years. But invading Taiwan is probably not China's goal. "The conflict isn't about territorial acquisition, it's about political identity," Christensen says. "That means China's leaders might think they can achieve their goals through coercion instead of invasion. As a result, the threshold for using force could be much lower." With limited military action China could pursue a different and more modest goal—for example, compelling Taiwan to agree simply to the idea of reunification, to be implemented at some distant date in the future.
Suppose Taiwan did change its name to "Republic of China (Taiwan)," and Beijing responded with force—what form would the attack take? Most observers focus on the missiles China has amassed across the strait. But there is another, less visible threat: submarines.
China's submarine fleet has suffered a number of serious accidents over the years, leading many analysts to dismiss the program as inept. But two experts at the U.S. Naval War College—Lyle Goldstein, a specialist in security studies, and William Murray, a research analyst and a former submarine officer in the U.S. Navy—report that China is pouring resources into the fleet, and could launch an undersea blockade that would cut off Taiwan's lifelines. "Taiwan imports almost every bit of energy it uses," Murray told me recently, "and those ships would be relatively easy to identify and force to turn around or, if they didn't, to sink."
Goldstein and Murray don't doubt that the U.S. Navy could ultimately break a submarine blockade. But such a blockade would create a critical difficulty for Washington. In the absence of an unambiguous missile barrage or invasion, an American President might have a harder time rallying support; the naval response required to neutralize the fifty or sixty submarines China could field around Taiwan would be vast and risky—especially if U.S. forces are still stretched thin in the Middle East. China could capitalize on nervousness in Taiwan and offer generous terms to end the confrontation. "Because this is a highly symbolic political issue," Goldstein told me, "China's demands are likely to be flexible." A simple promise by Taiwan to accept a vague version of the one-China principle might be sufficient to allow Beijing to claim victory.
But if Taiwan refused to negotiate, and the United States sought to defend the island, it would be facing a nuclear power; and even China's conventional diesel submarines would pose a threat. America's sub-hunting capabilities have atrophied since the Cold War, and although the Navy has begun to rebuild them, Goldstein and Murray aren't optimistic. The U.S. nuclear-powered sub fleet no longer operates diesel submarines even for training purposes, and there is evidence that U.S. commanders may be losing some of the skills required to combat these maneuverable and very quiet vessels. During war games last year the U.S. Pacific Fleet was taken by surprise when an Australian diesel submarine managed to "kill" a U.S. nuclear attack sub.
Moreover, China's submarines would be operating close to home, in shallow and complex waters that could put the larger U.S. subs at a disadvantage. Chinese hydrological-mapping vessels have been a frequent presence in the waters around Taiwan in recent years, prompting speculation that the Chinese navy is studying exactly where to hide its submarines in the event of a conflict. The "geography of the scenario," as Goldstein puts it, "allows an [inferior] submarine force to do some major damage."
American intervention against a Chinese blockade "could be a tremendous strategic, tactical, or operational disaster," Murray says. "Take your pick."
• • •
Soon after taking office, in 2001, President Bush announced that the United States would do "whatever it takes" to defend Taiwan. But would America actually be willing to sacrifice lives, submarines, and ships just so that Taiwan could add a word in parentheses to its name?
For decades the United States has balanced its Taiwan policy on a contradiction: support for Taiwan and its nascent democracy on the one hand, suppression of the island's national ambitions in order to please Beijing on the other. So far Washington has managed to deliver the right combination of deterrence and reassurance to both parties. But Taiwan's drive to secure legal independence puts the United States in an increasingly impossible position.
The fact that Taiwan has matured into a prosperous democracy suggests a solution, albeit a radical one: let the island defend itself. In 1998 a Cato Institute analysis proposed that the United States withdraw its pledge to protect Taiwan; in exchange it would lift all restrictions on arms sales, allowing Taiwan to buy the weapons necessary to deter a Chinese attack. This course would require delicate diplomacy, because it would infuriate both Taiwan and China: Taiwan would lose its security guarantee, and China would face a new Taiwanese arms buildup.
Bereft of American protection, however, Taiwan would be forced to face the consequences of upsetting the status quo. The immediate result would be a dramatic reduction in China's political fears, thus removing the incentive for a pre-emptive strike and buying both sides some time to move toward a peaceful solution. For Taiwan and its supporters in Washington, the idea may sound like a betrayal. But the best way to help Taiwan mature into a full-fledged democracy might simply be to ask its people to take responsibility for their actions.

The foregoing text is copyright © 2004 by Trevor Corson. All rights reserved.
Link to the article on the Atlantic Monthly website.

The Hues of Affirmative Action

Wed, 25 Jun 2003 12:07:29 -0400

The Christian Science Monitor, Opinion Page

Would minorities need affirmative action if whites weren’t getting it as well?

On Monday morning a friend phoned me with the news: The Supreme Court had ruled against the University of Michigan's quota-like system of assigning points to various factors, including race, in selecting undergraduates. At the same time, the court had upheld the admissions policy of Michigan's law school, affirming that race could still be taken into account.
The plaintiffs against the University of Michigan believed they were qualified to attend the school but had been rejected because they were white.
Minority students, perhaps less qualified, had presumably taken their place. The legal challenge gave weight to the primary criticisms of affirmative action: that it devalues the achievements of minorities and becomes a kind of reverse discrimination against whites.
My friend and I had to chuckle. He's black, and was rejected by the University of Michigan law school, too. In spite of that, he got into an even more prestigious law school and went on to become a successful international lawyer. I'm white and was rejected by the University of Michigan as an undergraduate. In spite of that, I got into Princeton University, where I went on to graduate at the top of my department.
My friend and I agreed that neither of us could possibly have been unqualified to attend Michigan -- and yet we were both rejected. I suggested that Michigan's decision against me might have been racial discrimination. Maybe I should have joined the lawsuit seeking to strike down affirmative action.
My case is a little more complicated, however, because Michigan wasn't the only school that rejected my application. Harvard and Yale did, too. So why did Princeton admit me when every other school I applied to didn't?
Here's a guess: My father went there. I suspect that I, like so many other white legacy children, benefited from a form of affirmative action at least as questionable as the one the Supreme Court held up to scrutiny.
But here's the funny part: Not only did I probably benefit from a form of affirmative action for whites, in the end, I also benefited from affirmative action for minorities. Indirectly, the kind of affirmative action that the Supreme Court upheld in the Michigan case helped me, a white person, become a productive member of society and get a job.
When I matriculated at Princeton, I had been living abroad and I was bursting with questions about what it means to reside in a country that doesn't completely accept you as its own. Members of minorities in the United States, of course, face similar issues. Princeton was a leader in affirmative action for minorities and had become a very different school from the one my father attended. A growing community of black students and professors at Princeton had produced the nation's premier African-American studies program.
Intrigued, I took several Af-Am classes and discovered that they addressed exactly the questions I'd been asking. The experience of African-Americans confronted head-on the most vital conundrums of modernity: the mixing of cultures and what it means to belong to a multiethnic nation. Even though I'm white, it was Af-Am at Princeton that taught me how to be an American and a global citizen.
Later, when I was looking for a job as an editor, I discovered that having an Ivy League school on your resume doesn't get you very far in journalism. But partly on the strength of my course work in African-American studies, I was hired by a magazine that covered international culture and ethnicity.
So I can't help feeling that affirmative action for minorities benefits whites, too. Many of America's most powerful corporations support affirmative action for the same reason. And my lawyer friend is unapologetic about the fact that discrimination against blacks, a wrong against our whole society, is partly set right by affirmative action.
All the same, the charge that affirmative action devalues the achievements of minorities and could discriminate against whites won't go away. Neither will the fact that legacy children like me, mostly white, continue to benefit unfairly from our own form of affirmative action. Maybe what the Supreme Court really needs to consider is whether affirmative action of the former type would be necessary without the latter.

The foregoing text is copyright © 2003 by Trevor Corson. All rights reserved.
Link to the article on the Christian Science Monitor website.

Perspective on the Threat of Terrorism

Tue, 26 Nov 2002 12:45:41 -0500

The Christian Science Monitor, Opinion Page

To all appearances, terrorism is on the rise. One need only think of the latest attacks in Bali and Moscow, not to mention New York, Washington, or Israel. But on a global scale the use of terror is in decline, not ascendancy. Innocent civilians in the 21st century have less to fear from terrorism than in the last century.
In the modern era, the use of terror has been inspired by evil or a degree of lunacy (one thinks of suicide bombers). But sadly, it has often been a rational choice as well. Attacks usually occur because the perpetrators perceive them as the only effective weapon they have for pursuing their goals. During World War I, sporadic terror bombing was used against civilians in every European capital city except Rome. By 1918, Britain had devised a theory for winning the war not by striking at German military installations, but by bombing civilians' homes.
In the years between the world wars, European military strategists perfected the concept of the "morale effect" -- a psychological form of attack achieved by terrorizing an enemy's civilians. During World War II, Britain officially adopted the morale effect to destroy Germany's will to fight, and bombed more than 100,000 civilians to death.
To its credit, the US at first limited itself to the precision bombing of military targets in Europe during World War II. In the Pacific, it was less restrained, but perhaps circumstances demanded it, since Japan had unleashed another type of terrorism in East Asia by massacring swaths of civilians on the ground, one person at a time. To end the war quickly, the US made the rational -- though morally difficult -- choice to terror-bomb Japanese civilians into surrender.
After World War II, the Soviet Union took terrorism to new levels. During the cold war, average Americans were at much greater risk from weapons of mass destruction than they are today. Again, the US made the probably necessary, though morally difficult, choice to respond by threatening the Soviet population in return with terror on a massive scale. It was a rational use of terrorism, though there was an element of suicidal lunacy to it.
By the 1970s, the US nuclear arsenal alone was capable of wiping out the entire population of the earth not just once, but 700 times.
Today, the threat of a radioactive bomb or chemical or biological attack looms over many cities around the world, and is particularly urgent in the US. The danger is frightening and real. But even this threat leaves civilians better off than they've been in the recent past. Nuclear arsenals have been dramatically reduced, and new technology allows the US military to commit itself once again to the precision bombing of military targets with impressive success. It appears that the minimization of civilian deaths is becoming a new international standard for warfare. In other words, terrorism is no longer an acceptable method of achieving results against an enemy.
This puts America's "war on terror" in a different light. The official rhetoric would have us believe that a war on terror is necessary because terror attacks are suddenly on the rise. In fact, a war on terror might be necessary, but for the opposite reason: Terrorism has been in decline, and now it needs to be eradicated.
Whether that can be accomplished may depend on whether would-be terrorists have rational choices to achieve their ends other than violence against innocent civilians.

The foregoing text is copyright © 2002 by Trevor Corson. All rights reserved.
Link to the article on the Christian Science Monitor website.

Film: John Q—Why Blacks Fear Organ Donation

Sun, 19 May 2002 12:51:14 -0400

The American Prospect

In the film John Q., Denzel Washington plays a working-class dad who holds a hospital emergency room at gunpoint to get a heart transplant for his nine-year-old son. The film's critique of health care in the United States is hard to miss: The poor lack the funds and often the insurance coverage needed for organ transplants. But there's also the unspoken, murkier theme of race, which raises some unsettling questions about our ability to prolong life. The surgeons, hospital officials, and happy heart recipients depicted in John Q. are all white; the hero and his family, denied the benefits of transplantation, are black.
In real life, race and organ transplantation are seldom mentioned in the same breath, but actually a complex international history links the two. For starters, heart transplantation was born in the land of apartheid. In 1967 the surgeon Christiaan Barnard performed the world's first heart transplant in South Africa. The following year, he transplanted the heart of a young man of mixed race into the body of an older white man from the professional class -- an operation for which Barnard is known as something of an anti-racist maverick.
But as anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes discovered in the 1990s while conducting fieldwork in South African morgues, blacks who lived under apartheid see Barnard's mixed-race operation as a terrifying precedent. Many of the black South Africans she interviewed told stories of young relatives who had died from poverty or violence under apartheid, and whose organs were transplanted into older, affluent whites without the donor family's consent. When Scheper-Hughes described modern transplant surgery to one elderly black woman, the informant drew a parallel to muti -- a form of witchcraft in which skulls, hearts, eyes, and genitals are taken from corpses to impart wealth, influence, or fertility. "These doctors," the woman said, "are witches just like our own."
Such fears would be preposterous in the United States, right? In fact, blacks and other minorities in this country display marked suspicion toward organ transplantation, and not just for the economic reasons John Q. encounters. Religion is often a factor. An extreme case is Louis Farrakhan, the minister of the black-nationalist group Nation of Islam, who has sometimes attributed white society's failure to stop black-on-black violence to the need for a steady supply of fresh organs. "When you're killing each other, they can't wait for you to die," Farrakhan asserted at a 1994 rally. "You've become good for parts."
Most black resistance to transplantation is less antagonistic than Farrakhan's. It can be genuinely spiritual, stemming from an African-American Christian belief that the body should remain whole after death. It also goes hand in hand with a general mistrust of the medical profession. Last summer, when the American Robert Tools received the world's first artificial heart, he was compelled to counter rumors that white doctors had used him as a guinea pig because he was black. "That's not true," Tools told The New York Times. "I came to them and I asked them to help me."
Clive O. Callender, one of a small number of black transplant surgeons in the United States and director of the Transplant Center at Howard University Hospital, has been working for decades to overcome reluctance on the part of blacks to donate and receive organs. He said, "They feel, if I am black and society has been discriminatory to me in life, why would it be any different in death?" For Callender, more transplantation is an indication of racial progress.
But now that blacks have begun to enter the transplantation mainstream, medical professionals -- who are mostly white -- are starting to question aspects of organ transplantation in a way that may vindicate some minority fears. For example, doctors are re-examining the medical and legal construct of "brain death" -- a concept that sanctioned Dr. Barnard's removal of a beating heart from a donor in 1967 and has underpinned much transplant surgery since. But Alan Shewmon, a neurologist at the University of California at Los Angeles who once approved of brain-death criteria, now thinks that the empirical evidence against them is clear: "Brain-dead patients are deeply comatose, very sick, and dying, but no more dead than many other patients who are severely disabled, very sick, and dying."
Renee Fox, a longtime expert in the social aspects of health care and a participant in the development of the artificial heart, shocked the field in the early 1990s by questioning the fairness of transplantation. "We have observed again and again," Fox wrote with her colleague Judith Swazey, "how specifically designated individuals have been privileged to obtain needed organs and funding for transplantation by wielding special emotional, media, political, and economic resources." For example, the public-relations skills of certain physicians have been shown to make a difference in securing access to organs, as has the affluence of recipients' families.
Indeed, the race to obtain organs in the United States is becoming increasingly competitive. Advocates for the outright buying and selling of organs have emerged; meanwhile, Pennsylvania recently became the first state to offer indirect monetary compensation for organ donation, and a bill has been floated in Utah that would provide a $ 10,000 tax credit to donors.
• • •
The experience of other countries can be both cautionary and instructive. After apartheid's end in South Africa, Nelson Mandela's government placed a moratorium on most heart transplants. The official rationale was that the operations squandered scarce medical resources. But given Scheper-Hughes's findings, it seems likely that black distrust of transplantation was a factor. In 1997, South Africa's Constitutional Court ruled against kidney transplants as well. But the result has been to shift organ transplantation primarily into the private sector, where only the wealthy can afford it.
Anxiety about transplantation remains widespread in many parts of the world besides South Africa. The harvesting of organs from executed criminals in Communist China may be the worst government-sanctioned abuse these days; but it's an issue in Brazil, too, where the state owns your corpse unless you've acquired a non-organ donor card. Poor people in India and the Philippines have sold kidneys to rich buyers from abroad.
An especially interesting case is Japan -- one of the world's most technologically advanced countries, but one of the most cautious on transplantation. Margaret Lock, an anthropologist at McGill University, attributes Japan's historical resistance -- to heart transplantation in particular -- to a mistrust of the medical profession, as well as an ethical and spiritual rejection of the notion that a person with a beating heart could be dead.
In 1968, just months after Dr. Barnard's pioneering procedure in South Africa, a Japanese surgeon attempted a similar operation. At first the transplant was deemed a victory for Japanese medicine, but soon it was revealed that the donor may not even have been brain dead and that the recipient's heart had been tampered with. The surgeon narrowly escaped prosecution on charges of murder. In 1997 the Japanese Parliament finally passed a law enabling individuals to donate their hearts by allowing them, in consultation with their families, to waive any murder charges against the surgeon. The first legal heart transplant in Japan was performed just three years ago.
• • •
When the father in John Q. decides to commit suicide so he can give his heart to his son, he elicits two reactions. A wealthy white surgeon admits that the proposal is unethical but eggs the father on. A street-smart black man -- the film's spiritual conscience -- draws the line and counsels John Q., instead, to relinquish the suicidal quest and reconcile himself to God's will.
Most parents would probably give their own life to save their child's. But in the context of organ transplantation, the decision to fight against fate at all costs is not a purely personal decision; it has social consequences, too. The demand for organs has become so intense that doctors at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center have developed a less stringent definition of brain death in order to harvest more hearts while they're still beating.
In this light, John Q.'s threat to kill innocent hostages so his son can survive looks more than a little ironic, and the old-fashioned African-American suspicion of transplantation starts to sound downright wise. One solution might be to follow Japan's lead and allow donors and recipients to choose the definition of death that best matches their own level of skepticism or spiritual comfort. Of course, that could lead to fewer organs and more John Q.'s.

The foregoing text is copyright © 2002 by Trevor Corson. All rights reserved.
Link to the article on the American Prospect website.