Eat the City(73)
Miguel Miles remembers going pro very young, catching crayfish in a bucket from the pond in Central Park for a man who offered him a dime for every dozen. “The other kids would come see what I caught, and they would say, ‘Can I get that, can I get that?’ ” says Miguel, a window installer, wearing a wifebeater, shorts, athletic socks, and no shoes. Soon he would toss into the water whatever container he could find—a crate or an empty garbage can—and pull out crayfish to bring to his mother to make a cream crayfish stew, says Miguel. “Turns out just like lobster.”
By the mid-1970s, when Miguel and his friends were fishing, levels of PCBs, mercury, dioxin, and pesticides in New York Harbor were often hundreds of percent higher than the benchmark that would harm fish. People avoided the waters. There’s a kind of cycle of decline, in which people stop fishing because the waters are dirty, and then, with fewer people monitoring the waters, they get dirtier.
By the 1980s, there was a kind of backlash against fishing altogether. Fish markets hung posters to reassure customers that their catch was not from local waters but from distant, cleaner places. Meanwhile, people complained that fishers on bridges lassoed boaters, hooked joggers, and even in one instance took out a woman’s eye. A fishing line wrapped around the neck of a woman passing under the bridge to City Island in a small boat. “I was nearly hanged,” she said. “We want to end the chaos on the city’s bridges,” said a politician. Yet whenever the city tried to stop fishing—building impenetrable rails on the bridges, fencing off waterfront areas—people kept figuring out ways to access water.
MOST of the city’s waters are olive-colored and turbid. You can’t see fish. Maybe that’s why it can be difficult to fathom exactly what is wrong with them—or to understand why eating them can hurt us.
The Clean Water Act of 1972 slowed the dumping of pollutants, but the existing pollution hasn’t disappeared—instead, it entered the food chain. Plankton—microscopic plants and animals—absorb chemicals from the water through their cell membranes. An Atlantic silverside eats plankton that contain tiny amounts of mercury and PCBs. A striped bass eats many of these silversides over its lifetime, accumulating the mercury of each one in its body. The toxins tend to remain in body tissue, meaning that the more plankton a small fish eats, the more small fish a big fish eats, and the more mercury and PCBs the big fish contains. Fish can be contaminated at levels hundreds of times higher than what is found in the surrounding water. When people cast out and catch a fish in New York City waters, take it home, fry it up, and eat it, they absorb most of the contaminants the fish contained.
It’s an issue of choice, officials say. Government advises; people choose. The problem is that study after study has shown that many subsistence fishers are not aware of the risks. “I think if we do not reach out in every way possible,” a citizen representative told a city council hearing in 2002, “we are in serious danger.” Since then, with budget cutbacks, educational campaigns have been scaled back.
“I’ve been eating East River fish all my life, and I never get sick,” fishers will say, not realizing that the danger of PCBs and mercury is a long-term accumulation that can lead to serious illness, not a short-term stomachache. “I clean the fish really well,” they assure, failing to address the chemicals bound up in the fish’s very flesh. Some people say the regulations are so complicated—they change from year to year for specific fish, and differ for adjacent bodies of water, or sometimes even in one body of water that straddles state lines—that it’s hard to believe they mean anything.
A pilot study by the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in Manhattan found that blood and hair samples from local fishermen in a fishing club who eat their fish show elevated levels of PCBs, dioxins, chlordane, DDT, and mercury. Those who ate more fish had higher levels of toxins. But no local study has closely examined the physical impact on those most vulnerable: poor people, many of them immigrants, who eat dinner after dinner of fried fish, fish stew, crab curry, all summer long.
The pollutants are stored in the fish’s fatty tissue and in its filter organs, such as the liver and pancreas. To avoid toxins, you want to get rid of fat. Skin the fish, because fat clings to skin’s underside. Remove any lingering clumps and globs. Don’t fry a local fish or throw chunks of it into soup or stew, where the fat cooks with the meat. Instead, grill or broil the fish so the fat drips away. In many cuisines, the yellowish substance in a cooked crab, often called the mustard, is considered a delicacy—but it’s the crab’s hepatopancreas, the organ that filters impurities from the crab’s blood. Its flavor may be distinct and delicious, but it is a concentrate of chemical contaminants. Don’t eat it. Pull it out before you cook it, and after you boil the crab, dump out the liquid.
Yet every sunny summer day, unaware of these risks, people travel to the edges of the city to fish. A New York City subway car full of people on their way to the beach on the weekend has a light, happy sound: children’s voices, laughter, a cell phone playing music—it’s like the beach has come to the train. You know it’s the beach stop because of who stands up to get out: little girls wearing bathing suits with running shoes and carrying neon pails stuffed with plastic octopuses and sea horses, teenage tough boys with gold teeth and knuckle rings spelling BRONX, carrying pink inner tubes. If you look closely, you will almost always see old men with a handful of rods and a pail of bait and a cooler now full of cold drinks but later to transport the catch of the day.