“…Today, one company—Omega Protein—has a monopoly on the menhaden ‘reduction industry.’ Every year, it sweeps billions of fish from the sea, grinds them up, and turns them into animal feed, fertilizer, and oil used in everything from linoleum to health food supplements.
“The massive harvest wouldn’t be such a problem if menhaden were only good for making lipstick and soap. But they are crucial to the diet of bigger fish and they filter the waters of the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, playing an essential dual role in marine ecology perhaps unmatched anywhere on the planet. As their numbers have plummeted, fish and birds dependent on them have been decimated, toxic algae have begun to choke our bays and seas. In Franklin’s vibrant prose, the decline of a once ubiquitous fish becomes an adventure story, an exploration of the U.S. political economy, a groundbreaking history of America’s emerging ecological consciousness, and an inspiring vision of a growing alliance between environmentalists and recreational anglers.”
The book was very well written. A lot of people read it, and a lot of people believed everything that Franklin wrote, even though he had no scientific background at all. His academic degree was in English, which he first taught as an assistant professor, later associate professor, at Stanford University. He was also something of a radical, who helped to set up a European network of deserters from the U.S. military during the Viet Nam war, founded a group that later became the Revolutionary Communist Party, and was ultimately fired from Stamford after inciting students to shut down the school’s computer facility and encouraging them to “resist police efforts.”
Both his lack of scientific training and his radical background arguably colored his book which, in my view, contained a few factual errors and definitely had anti-corporate undertones. But those flaws seem to have only made some of his readers more fervent, and helped to create what I might deem “The Cult of the Menhaden,” a group of people who truly believe that menhaden really are “the most important fish in the sea,” and who are inclined to blame any decline in fish, bird, or marine mammal populations on a menhaden shortage, and then blame such alleged shortage in the menhaden reduction fishery, even though the last stock assessment, released three years ago, found that the Atlantic menhaden population is above the target reference point, and an October 2024 assessment revealed that the Gulf menhaden stock was also doing well.