Nineteenth century menus may aid future fish stocks

OSLO - Americans scorned lobster until the 1880s, while the ancient Romans loved fish so much that their catches depleted the Mediterranean, according to a study that may give clues about how to restore damaged world fish stocks.

Picking through 200,000 US restaurant menus since the 1850s, schooner logs and archaeological sites, marine historians are finding that capricious human tastes have let some species thrive while other stocks have been over-fished for centuries.

"We can only model the future of the oceans based on past evidence," said Poul Holm, a Danish environmental researcher who is leading a team of about 80 experts in an international project on the History of Marine Animal Populations.

"We're trying to reconstruct the oceans as imaginatively as possible," he told Reuters, giving details of findings to be presented at a conference in Denmark from Monday to Thursday.

US restaurant menu prices back 150 years, for instance, chart sometimes inexplicable swings in tastes and prices of seafood including swordfish, lobster, abalone, oysters, halibut, haddock and sole.

"Back in the 1860s no one wanted to eat lobster," said Glenn Jones, a researcher at Texas A&M University at Galveston, who leads the menu project. Giant lobsters weighing 9 kg were common in New England.

Considered a trash food in Colonial times, a lobster meal cost about US$5 in the 1880s before surging to about US$25 in the 1920s, roughly matching 2005 levels, after it became a delicacy and stocks suffered.

Food was so scarce for the Pilgrim Fathers in the 1620s that they lamented they sometimes had to feed the spiny crustacean to guests. Servants in colonial times negotiated contracts to limit lobster meals to two a week.

And the size and number of huge vats used by the ancient Romans to make a popular fish soup indicate that they were overfishing many Mediterranean species 2,000 years ago, even though human populations were a fraction of 21st century levels.

"The Romans ate fish in vast quantities," Holm said. "Overfishing in medieval Europe was a very real problem in the days of William the Conqueror and Leonardo da Vinci."

"The impacts of early fisheries on pristine stocks can be quite severe," he said. Concentrations of small fish bones found in some Medieval rubbish dumps by the North Sea indicated that the big fish had already been caught and stocks were suffering.

Jones said the menu project revealed that some diners apparently like eating food simply because it is rare and costly. He said the data might encourage people to eat marine resources that put less pressure on stocks.

"Somebody sat down in front of these menus and made a choice," he told Reuters. "If people know more about what's going on in the seas they can make more informed decisions."

Abalone seashell, for instance, is now a delicacy in San Francisco restaurants costing about US$50-70 a meal but did not even appear on menus before the 1920s when it cost just US$7.

California banned commercial fishing of abalone in 1997 because of over-fishing and the molluscs are now imported from Australia and New Zealand.

The researchers said the report was not all doom and gloom. Fish stocks -- like in the Mediterranean or the North Sea -- had rebounded after periods of over-fishing.

But many of the world's fisheries are now in severe decline, such as once-plentiful cod off Canada. Among newer species coming under pressure are the Patagonian toothfish or the orange roughy off Australia.

- REUTERS