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In Pursuit of Singular Salmon: Paradoxes of Sustainability and the QualityCommodityKaren Héberta

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In Pursuit of Singular Salmon:Paradoxes of Sustainability and theQuality Commodity

KAREN HEBERT

Department of Anthropology and School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, Yale University,

New Haven, CT, USA

ABSTRACT New ways of accounting for natural resources, as well as for their producers

and consumers, inform efforts by Alaskan salmon fishers to service emerging markets

in sustainable goods. For much of the twentieth century, commercial fishers in the

rural Bristol Bay region of southwest Alaska harvested salmon as ‘poundage’, an

undifferentiated mass destined for transformation into relatively uniform products. In

more recent years, Alaska’s fishers and policymakers have sought to produce ‘quality’

salmon for new sectors as a way to boost its wild salmon industry, which is strong

biologically but has struggled economically with the proliferation of cheaper farmed

salmon. Quality salmon is not caught and canned for mass consumption, but ‘babied’

for upscale market segments through fish harvesting and processing practices like gentle

handling, bleeding, and chilling. Such standards present practical and conceptual

challenges for Bristol Bay producers given the ecology and longtime ethos of the

fishery, and expose a deeper paradox: In order for wild salmon to be made distinctive, it

must be remade to meet aesthetic and technical norms largely established by the farmed

salmon industry. This paradox reflects tensions within processes of commodification,

which are heightened as commodity-making, to draw on Michel Callon’s analysis,

comes to rely ever more saliently on generating singularity, the unique or personal. In

critical respects, singular salmon replicates the very economic forms to which it is

positioned as an alternative, and materializes novel social distinctions in sites of

production. The pursuit of new industry paradigms in Bristol Bay thus reveals the

predicaments of sustaining the fishery by making and marketing nature as a commodity.

KEY WORDS: Sustainability, commodification, quality, fisheries, resource management,

Alaska

Science as Culture

Vol. 19, No. 4, 553–581, December 2010

Correspondence Address: Karen Hebert, Department of Anthropology and School of Forestry & Environmental

Studies, Yale University, P.O. Box 208277, New Haven, CT 06520-8277, USA. Email: [email protected]

0950-5431 Print/1470-1189 Online/10/040553-29 # 2010 Process PressDOI: 10.1080/09505431.2010.519620

Downloaded By: [Hebert, Karen] At: 14:13 20 November 2010

Introduction

Each spring, the escalators at the Boston Convention Center descend from its

glass-and-steel concourse onto a floor teeming with seafood. At the annual

Boston Seafood Show, vast stretches of brightly colored booths promote products

sourced from around the world. Within the pavilions of the largest industry con-

glomerates, marketing materials boast offerings that run the gamut of edible

marine species and lay claim to networks of supply and sale that span the planet.

Across the breadth and diversity of the marketing messages in evidence at the

2009 trade show, the single most prominent pitch was sustainability.1 It seemed as

if every other display showcased corporate commitments to environmental steward-

ship, and painted a picture of a seafood circuit that looped, as one Korean company

brochure put it, ‘From the water / To the people / For the green life’. The prominence

of this sustainability rhetoric was itself a topic of conversation at the seafood

industry conference held in conjunction with the show, where a number of high-

profile sessions focused specifically on fisheries sustainability issues.

The rise of sustainability in seafood industry discussions comes at a time when

its material conditions of existence have never been more threatened, or more

scrutinized. Few assessments of the state of the world’s oceans and fisheries—

whether issued by academic analysts, government agencies, nongovernmental

organizations, or popular media outlets—fail to note a current or looming

‘crisis’. Not only have many of the world’s wild seafood populations been

seriously depleted by overfishing, but recent decades have also witnessed the

rapid growth of industrial aquaculture, or seafood farming, which has been

associated with a variety of environmental and social ills, including marine

habitat degradation, coastal dispossession, and chemical-laden seafood products.

Despite ongoing concern about risks of overfishing, some wild producers,

particularly those in fisheries hard-hit by price competition from cheaper

farmed alternatives, have seized upon the concept of sustainability to distinguish

their more costly catches from the oft-problematic products of aquaculture. ‘It’s

sustainable’, Virginia Seafood trade-show freebees declared, ‘So, go wild!’.

The great promise that this sustainability-centric marketing strategy would seem

to hold for wild fish producers is often confounded in practice, however. Visions of

the green life mobilized to sell specialty seafood are tightly interlinked with other

aesthetic and technical norms that shape the creation of niche-market goods—

specifications that tend to pose challenges for producers given the conditions and

configurations of many wild fisheries. In the pages ahead, I consider this predica-

ment as it is experienced in a wild salmon fishery in Bristol Bay, Alaska, where

commercial fishers strive to transform sustainable catches into ‘quality’ salmon

suitable for high-end retail outlets. An instance of what scholars have identified

as a more general ‘quality turn’ across agro-food industries (Murdoch et al.,

2000; Goodman, 2003), these new salmon products join a growing array of specialty

or alternative foods, goods differentiated from mass-market manufacture through

notions like organic, local, artisanal, wild, and sustainable. The conceptual and

554 K. Hebert


practical difficulties that ensue as fishers attempt to reconfigure their work to service

these expanding markets point to changing modes of accounting for resources, as

well as for those who produce and consume them.

In examining the dilemmas of sustaining Alaska’s salmon fishery by making and

marketing nature as a commodity, this paper traces a shift in how nature is measured

and endowed with meaning. More specifically, it considers how concepts devel-

oped to promote sustainable resource management relate to those generated by

the growth of niche markets for environmental products. Meanings and measures

of sustainability have long been figured in terms of resource proliferation, particu-

larly in the volume-oriented fishery of Bristol Bay. For most of the past century, the

region’s fishers have harvested salmon as ‘poundage’, an undifferentiated mass

destined for transformation into relatively uniform products. The techniques and

aims enlisted the pursuit of poundage differ considerably from those that inform

quality initiatives, however. Quality salmon are not caught and canned for mass

consumption, but ‘babied’ for upscale market segments through fish harvesting

and processing practices like gentle handling, bleeding, and chilling. How does a

focus on resource magnitudes, so central to the concept of sustainability, square

with the emphasis on exclusiveness evident in the new markets in which sustain-

ability is valorized? And how might growing production for such markets

change the way sustainability itself is imagined?

I suggest that the fraught dynamics that surround quality salmon production in

Bristol Bay point to a deeper paradox: In order for wild salmon to be made distinctive,

and set apart from farmed salmon in particular, it must be remade to mirror a model

largely established by the farmed salmon industry. This paradox, I argue, is an

expression of much broader tensions at play in processes of commodification,

which are heightened as commodity-making comes to depend ever more saliently

on modes of differentiation whose purpose is to generate singularity, the unique or

personal as opposed to the interchangeable and fungible. Here, I employ a concept

of singularity that draws upon its usage in the anthropological literature on commodi-

fication (e.g., Appadurai, 1986b) as well as its development in recent work by Michel

Callon (2002, p. 201). Although processes of singularization are often presumed to

run counter to commoditization (Kopytoff, 1986), the industry experience I detail

pushes us to reconsider the assumption that making things singular is somehow

opposed to making things fungible. I show how singular products are created

across both consumption and production contexts through the pursuit of distinction,

in Bourdieu’s sense (1984), which ultimately serves to remake quality salmon as

simultaneously differentiated from and more similar to the output of aquaculture.

The paper thus demonstrates how at least some apparent alternatives to mass-

market exchange emerge not in opposition to but in step with commodity logics.

In exploring the seeming contradictions that arise as new markets premised on

scarcity and distinction truck in sustainability, the paper illuminates dynamics

at the heart of capitalist market competition, particularly in its contemporary

form. The next section expands the theoretical underpinnings of this argument,

In Pursuit of Singular Salmon 555


linking Callon’s work on singularity to his concept of qualification, which helps

account for how products themselves are formed as they are measured and

given meaning through efforts to distinguish them from competing goods. The

subsequent section considers how salmon sustainability gains its shape through

the historical development of particular modes of accounting for the resource. It

describes how salmon’s continued abundance became central to Alaska’s consti-

tution as a US state, and details how state-managed regulatory regimes have been

directed toward the dual biological and commercial goal of enduring volumes,

which serves as a conceptual and material measure for salmon sustainability.

The paper then turns to examine initiatives to transform wild salmon into a singu-

lar niche-market good, drawing particular attention to an emergent commodity aes-

thetics organized under the rubric of quality. In so doing, I detail how the promotion

of wild salmon as quality shifts the terms through which salmon is defined, and

spurs transformations to production that rub uncomfortably against the ecology

and existing industry ethos of the Bristol Bay fishery. The paper closes by returning

to questions of calculation and the commodity, suggesting that the tensions it

locates within processes of commodification not only set the stage for the predica-

ments that arise alongside quality initiatives in Bristol Bay, but also inform the

changing ways in which sustainability is conceptualized and pursued more broadly.

Singularization in the Economy of Qualities

The transformations afoot in the Alaska salmon industry are illustrative of the

more sweeping shifts that Callon and his coauthors, Cecile Meadel and Vololona

Rabehariosa, have theorized as the rise of a new ‘economy of qualities’ (2002). As

several commentators have noted (e.g. Whatmore et al., 2003, p. 389), the quality

turn in agro-food sectors offers a prime example of the emergent economic order

that Callon depicts, which is characterized by an elaboration and intensification in

the way market goods are distinguished, or ‘qualified’, by an ever-growing array

of fine-grained selling points. For example, whereas salmon in past decades was

churned out almost entirely in bulk form—as nearly generic cans lining supermar-

ket shelves, or vast shipments of fish frozen whole—it now increasingly takes the

shape of specialized packages that might be set apart as high in Omega-3 fatty

acids, medically documented to promote heart health; certified as sustainably

harvested by the nonprofit Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) organization;

labeled as a quality product subject to the most rigorous of inspections; or

caught by fishing families in Alaska Native communities, among other qualifiers.

In this section, I build the case for understanding such refashionings in terms of

Callon’s notion of qualification, which is closely linked in his analysis to the

production of singularity within highly differentiated markets.

As set forth by Callon et al., market competition in the new economy relies

heavily on what they term ‘the singularization of products’, the means by which

certain goods are differentiated from others and made ready for tailoring and

556 K. Hebert


attachment to particular consumers (2002, p. 194). Although the object of such

efforts is to establish uniqueness, the process entails the elaboration of an under-

lying similitude as well. ‘Defining a good’, Callon et al. write, ‘means positioning

it in a space of goods, in a system of differences and similarities, of distinct yet

connected categories’ (2002, p. 198).

Callon draws upon economist Edward Chamberlin’s description of the ‘double

movement’ of market competition in order to characterize the paradoxical con-

ditions that result, which he paraphrases as follows:

On the one hand, it leads to a singularization of the good (so that it is distin-

guished from other goods and satisfies a demand that other goods cannot

meet). On the other hand, it makes the good comparable to existing goods,

so that new markets are constructed through the extension and renewal of

existing ones. Different and singular, singular and comparable, such is the

paradoxical nature of the economic goods constituting the dynamics of

markets (Callon et al., 2002, p. 201).

As later sections will detail, these market dynamics have particular consequences for

the production of nature (Smith, 1984), and for sustainable salmon more specifically.

Callon’s observations also draw attention to how the classifications that consti-

tute goods themselves are derived. The qualities upon which qualification depends

are not pre-existing facts that are simply observed and communicated in the course

of marketing, but are instead features that are actively brought into being as par-

ticular traits are ‘attributed, stabilized, objectified and arranged’, often through

processes requiring significant ‘metrological work’ (Callon et al., 2002, p. 199).

‘The fact that a wine is syrupy, that it matures with age, that it has a high or

low alcohol content, that it comes from the Medoc region or Touraine are all

properties that will be used to characterize it but which, to be identified and

objectified, require the implementation of certified tests and the realization of

codified measurements’,

Callon et al. point out. Which measures inform the shifting meanings that charac-

terize the salmon resource, and what kinds of metrological work do these entail?

The following section provides an overview of how salmon sustainability has been

brought into being over the course of the history and operations of the Alaska

commercial salmon fishery.

Constituting Sustainable Salmon

Historicizing Alaskan Abundance

The sustainability of wild salmon is conceptualized in terms of abundance over

time, ongoing volumes that become manifest—and measurable—in large returns



and high catches. The Pacific salmon that come back from maturation on the high

seas to the fresh waters of their birth in Alaska comprise its annual summer runs, or

returns. Because most salmon fishing occurs within near-shore waters, as fish

converge to ascend rivers or enter lakes to spawn, salmon is a resource subject to

state jurisdiction in the US, where state waters extend three miles offshore.

Alaska’s salmon populations are managed by its Department of Fish and Game.

In contrast to other stretches of the North Pacific, wild salmon populations are

reasonably strong across most of Alaska at present. No salmon stocks in Alaska

are considered threatened or endangered, whereas independent monitoring

bodies list numerous endangered populations throughout Russia, Japan, Canada,

and the US Pacific Northwest (e.g. State of the Salmon, 2010). Major conservation

and sustainability organizations like the MSC and the International Union for

the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) assemble additional data in their efforts to

account for worldwide salmon populations and fishing practices, which provide

further measures of Alaska salmon abundance. The MSC has for some time

certified all Alaska salmon fisheries as sustainable, and its products eligible to

bear the MSC eco-label (MSC, 2009). When the IUCN recently added the

sockeye salmon, Oncorhynchus nerka, to its ‘Red List’ of threatened species

around the world, its news releases indicated that ‘[t]he sockeye’s remaining

strongholds are mainly in Alaska, including a thriving sockeye subpopulation in

the Bristol Bay region’ (Rand et al., 2008).

Yet abundance has not been the uninterrupted condition of these stocks.

Alaska’s immense runs were aggressively pursued by vying Pacific Coast

salmon canning interests starting in the late nineteenth century, after they had

depleted stocks in large salmon-producing river systems in California, Oregon,

Washington, and British Columbia. As a result of intensifying exploitation by

commercial packers in the years to follow, Alaska’s salmon population also

dwindled, experiencing marked declines during many decades of the twentieth

century. By the mid-1950s, Alaska salmon fisheries were at an all-time low.

Instead of serving as a counterpoint to wild salmon struggles in the Pacific North-

west as it is often marshaled to do today, the Alaskan case was generally framed as

an even more powerful story of the overexploitation and rapacious destruction of a

once-plentiful natural resource.

Residents of what was then the US Territory of Alaska blamed the resource

collapse on the fisheries’ mismanagement by the federal government and domina-

tion by absentee cartels. It was in fact this narrative, popularized by Territorial

Governor Ernest Gruening in his aspirational bestseller The State of Alaska

(1954), that rallied Alaskans in the campaign for statehood, granted in 1959.

As a result of these pitched political battles over natural resource control,

Alaska’s State Constitution, which took effect when it joined the union, explicitly

mandates that Alaska’s fisheries, along with its other ‘replenishable resources’, be

‘utilized, developed, and maintained on the sustained yield principle’ (The State of

Alaska, 2008).

558 K. Hebert


Making and Measuring Sustained Yields

Although the Alaska Constitution was unique among US states in setting resource

management for sustained yields as a formal directive (Harrison, 2002, pp. 127–

128), regulations promoting the return of salmon in great numbers and with

weighty poundage—yields at once biological and economic—have a somewhat

longer history. Conservation measures calling for the limitation of salmon

harvest in Bristol Bay were proposed as early as the turn of the twentieth

century. A crash in Bristol Bay sockeye in the summer of 1919, the first major

run failure documented in the region, ultimately provoked the passage of the

federal White Act of 1924, which set various limits on fishing for the purposes

of shoring up returns (King, 2003, p. 6).

In operating under some form of biological management and government regu-

lation, however weak, in the early part of the twentieth century, Pacific salmon

fisheries were atypical of fisheries more generally. It was not until the 1950s,

economist James E. Wilen (2000) notes, that there was any real consensus that

fisheries, and fishing itself, should be actively managed, especially since many

stocks seemed healthy. The post-war expansion of shipbuilding and high seas

trawling changed this, contributing to a global fishing boom, broad evidence of

declining stocks, and the intellectual development of modern fisheries manage-

ment models (Wilen, 2000, p. 307).

In the years following World War II, given failing Alaska salmon populations and

requests by the processing industry for scientific research on the subject, University

of Washington fisheries biologists initiated studies of salmon and its management in

Alaska (Woodby et al., 2005, p. 4). After statehood, the Alaska Department of Fish

and Game implemented a science-based fisheries management system using the

principles set forth by research director W. F. Thompson, which continues to this

day in modified form (Woodby et al., 2005, p. 4). This system is premised on

setting goals for ‘escapement’, the number of fish intended to escape harvest or pre-

dation to reach spawning grounds, with the idea that allowing for a given amount of

escapement ensures enough fish spawn so as to reproduce or even expand the exist-

ing run. Setting escapement goals depends on counting the constituent members of

given salmon populations and calculating the number of fish needed to sustain the

run based on knowledge of the stock in question. These numbers are then used along

with other information as a basis for setting harvest ‘openings’, the time periods in

which commercial fishing is legally permitted. By and large, Alaska salmon fish-

eries have been managed historically by Fish and Game biologists for the goal of

‘maximum sustained yield’, or ‘the greatest average annual yield from a salmon

stock’ (ADF&G and Alaska Board of Fisheries, 2001, p. 8).

As such details confirm, catches of maximum volume year after year are the

intended ends of the state salmon program. According to program boosters, the

key to achieving this goal, largely equated with salmon sustainability, is intensive

scientific management, which assumes fishing regulations derived through



biological research along with their vigilant enforcement. The basis for this man-

agement science is population measurement, in which data are gathered through

metrics involving timing, duration, number, and weight. Fish and Game biologists

generate the figures that underpin escapement numbers by collecting and coordi-

nating information gleaned from a variety of sources, including visual surveys,

aerial assessments, and sonar readings. They also rely on the harvest data com-

piled by processing companies, figured in poundage, in order to set fishing

effort in any particular district. As in the scientifically managed natural resource

industries in which discourses of sustainability first developed (see Scott, 1998;

Rajan, 2006; Holzl, 2010), contemporary fisheries sustainability policies depend

heavily on measuring modes and metrics (e.g. Jones, 2009, p. 1). The wild

salmon that range across the North Pacific and flood Bristol Bay waters each

summer qualify as sustainable to the extent that they can be made visible and

measured en masse.

Situating Bristol Bay

Bristol Bay is legendary in fishing circles because it is home to the largest sockeye

salmon populations in the world. Located approximately 150 miles southwest of

Anchorage along the Bering Sea, the Bay is formed from the outflow of several

large rivers, the basis for its voluminous wild salmon runs and its commercial

fishing districts (Figure 1). The rural region is largely roadless and is not connected

to the Alaska road system, so transport to, from, and even within the area takes place

mostly by air and sea. All five species of Pacific salmon found in Alaska return to

Bristol Bay waters, but the sockeye (or red) salmon comprises the majority of its

catch. Since sockeye is the commercially important species for which the

Alaskan industry is best known, the Bay is often considered Alaska’s ‘flagship’

salmon fishery (Troll in Link et al., 2003, p. 24). I have conducted ongoing

ethnographic and historical research in the region and on its fishing industry

since 2002, with a primary period of fieldwork from 2002 to 2004.

Bristol Bay’s salmon has been harvested by diverse groups of aboriginal

inhabitants for millennia, and even more heavily exploited by commercial

salmon packers since the industry’s beginnings in the region in the late nineteenth

century. Commercial fishing remains the economic mainstay of the predominantly

Alaska Native region today (Duffield et al., 2007, pp. 5, 10). In 2009, 32.36

million salmon were harvested in Bristol Bay, with an estimated value to harvest-

ers of $129.47 million (ADF&G, 2010a). Fishing in the region is done with nets

that ensnare salmon by the gills (Figure 2), and is structured by a statewide salmon

fishing permit system established in the early 1970s, which organizes participation

among a fleet comprised of owner-operators. The salmon industry employs area

residents in harvesting, processing, and support sectors, as well as thousands of

seasonal workers who travel to the region from elsewhere in Alaska, the US,

and across the world.

560 K. Hebert


Despite the fishery’s certification as sustainable by independent auditors and its

continued economic importance for the Bristol Bay region and beyond, it has

experienced a marked economic decline since the early 1990s. Although

salmon farming has been illegal in Alaska since the late 1980s, the practice

expanded exponentially overseas during this same period. From 1980 to 2001

alone, worldwide farmed salmon output increased tenfold, far surpassing wild

salmon production and quadrupling the total global salmon supply (Bjorndal

et al., 2003, p. 2). Largely as a result of this burgeoning supply, salmon prices

fell precipitously (Knapp et al., 2007, p. x). The glut of cheap salmon reverberated

in downward-spiraling salmon earnings for wild salmon fishers, processing com-

panies, and rural communities. Although the industry outlook has improved since

its lows in the early 2000s, with salmon prices in 2010 inching towards their

highest since the downturn, Alaska salmon prices and fishery earnings remain

depressed in comparison to historic levels.

The industry slump brought especially difficult hardships to Bristol Bay fishers

and area residents, since the region was one of the hardest hit statewide. The

fishery was dependent on markets where price competition with farmed salmon

had been most intense, and it had not yet made inroads into more lucrative

Figure 1. Bristol Bay Area commercial salmon fishing districts.Credit: Copyright Alaska Department of Fish and Game. Used with permission.



markets, as upcoming sections will detail. But, the severity of the downturn also

sparked enthusiasm about possibilities for industry transformation. While many of

the proposals for economic recovery developed and debated for Alaska salmon

fisheries in the early 2000s called for restructuring designs familiar to fisheries

and a range of other industries—including those involving worker downsizing,

fleet consolidation, and forms of resource privatization—the ones that were

most readily pursued by producers and policymakers alike embraced appeals to

‘reinvent’ the industry to meet new production paradigms. These centered on

generating wild salmon for quality markets.

Reimagining a Wild Resource

During a slushy southwest Alaskan spring in 2004, far from the floor of the Boston

Seafood Show, commercial fishers from across the Bristol Bay region carefully

scrutinized some of the very salmon products that would later make the rounds

at industry trade shows. The fishers had assembled for a workshop organized by

rural development officials on the heels of the industry downturn, designed to

help area harvesters produce and position their salmon for more profitable

sectors. Sponsored by the local Bristol Bay campus of the University of Alaska

and a community extension office of the Alaska Sea Grant program, the three-

day event was intended to provide key information about seafood processing to

those hoping to sell their catch directly to retailers and consumers. There was a

Figure 2. Salmon fishing in Bristol Bay. Credit: Photo by Karen Hebert.

562 K. Hebert


great deal of local interest at the time in this entrepreneurial prospect of ‘doing it

yourself’ instead of or in addition to selling to the major Bristol Bay fish buyers,

inheritors of the salmon packing cartels of earlier eras. For this reason—and

because the meeting organizers had secured grant funds to cover travel and per

diem expenses for a number of fishers from around the region—the workshop

turnout was significant. Nearly 50 people had signed up to participate in the

meeting, which featured presentations by experts flown in from across the state,

including seafood technologists, economic development consultants, transpor-

tation specialists, and marketing analysts.

During one workshop lunch session, participants studied and sampled an array

of salmon products displayed at the meeting venue, a space that was ordinarily

used as the town bingo hall (Figure 3). These particular salmon packages were

positioned by the presenters as exemplary products that spoke to current

market trends. Few area residents had much familiarity with items like these,

since little of the sort could be found in the local supermarkets or village

stores they frequented on a regular basis, and their own salmon came from sub-

sistence nets and backyard smokehouses. But the producers seemed energized by

the prospect of transforming their catch into attention-grabbing items like the

samples, which cast wild salmon as sustainable, healthful, and socially respon-

sible in contradistinction to farmed fish. Several workshop participants expressed

admiration for ‘eye-catching’ package graphics, which included text, images,

and logos that announced contents to be ‘Wild Caught from the Pure Clear

Waters of Alaska’.

Figure 3. Sampling salmon products at the workshop. Credit: Photo by Liz Brown.



The industry experts in attendance provided further fuel for this excitement and

sense of promise. One presenter, the proprietor of a small but successful meat and

fish processing business, regaled the group with stories from major food trade

shows in Boston and Anaheim, California, which hosts the Annual Natural Pro-

ducts Expo West. A local fisherman who had trained at this processor’s Ancho-

rage-area facility described his visit to a DC show in which he’d seen throngs

lined up at a booth promoting wild Alaska salmon fillets produced for high-end

domestic markets. In his remarks to the group, the processing executive drew

upon his experience serving the booming organic and health food sectors to

confirm workshop participants’ hopes that, ‘the market is there—it’s unbelievable

how they are talking about wild salmon these days’. ‘But’, he was quick to add, ‘it

has to be quality’.

As both a vision of industry improvement and an increasingly consequential

production imperative, quality quickly became the mantra of the workshop.

‘Quality, quality, quality’, the presenter repeated in another attempt to sum up

the direction in which the salmon market was heading. In workshop conversations

and Q&A sessions, participants joined presenters in expressing the conviction that,

as one participant passionately averred, ‘quality is what’s going to get us a price’.

The Quest for Quality

Characterizing Quality

Those at the workshop were not alone in their enthusiastic embrace of quality as a

potential solution to salmon industry woes. Academic efforts by economists and

rural development specialists to address the downturn have often hinged on

quality and its promotion: ‘Can Quality Revitalize the Alaskan Salmon Industry?’

asks one such report (Babcock and Weninger, 2004). But what concept of quality

inspires these efforts? This section examines the conceptual categories and corpor-

eal characteristics that define quality salmon, identifying tensions between its

objective and subjective determinants, broad visions of goodness and narrower

industry parameters, and the images of wildness it conjures as opposed to the

production transformations necessary to market fish as such.

Quality concerns have long been central in industrial manufacturing and

management, especially in light of the gaps in trust that often accompany the

geographical and social distance between far-flung producers and consumers.

This is no doubt only more the case with respect to food, and seafood in particular

given its perishability and susceptibility to spoilage. The century-old salmon

cannery facility that anchors the Bristol Bay hub community of Dillingham to

this day, for instance, profited in earlier eras by mass-producing ‘Double Q’

brand canned salmon, whose name stood for Quality and Quantity. But the new-

found preoccupation with quality in the Alaska salmon industry reflects a host of

novel concerns as well.

564 K. Hebert


Perhaps because of the range of these concerns, the notion of quality that

underlies the recent turn in the salmon industry is often as ambiguous as it is ubi-

quitous, as has been documented in other agro-food contexts. Scholars have

recorded an array of different and sometimes even contradictory ideas deployed

under the rubric (Ilbery and Kneafsey, 2000). In the surimi (imitation crab) indus-

try, for example, Becky Mansfield notes that, ‘quality itself is conceptualized as

either real and objective, or discursive and subjective’, either ‘a physical reality

based on measurable characteristics’, or ‘purely a social construction of what

people like’ (2003, p. 10). Although quality is a judgment made by people

about things, these definitional inconsistencies hint that quality lies in a ‘difficult

realm, which is neither wholly subjective nor quite objective’, as Arjun Appadurai

proposes of value (1986a, p. 3).

Typical industry parlance favors a quite narrow and technical meaning of

quality, however. Even as the notion of quality invoked in salmon discussions

can gesture to an indeterminate array of positive associations, it generally

points much more closely to particular characteristics that can be quantified,

measured, or otherwise assessed in industry practice. Within salmon circles, the

term is most often used to refer to very concrete fish features, notably the

absence of blemishes in the flesh like bruising or gaping, along with the harvesting

and processing practices that help create this appearance, including fish chilling,

bleeding, and gentle handling. When industry analysts and participants speak

about pursuing quality, then, they refer foremost to the introduction, expansion,

or improvement of these production practices, along with the special marketing

efforts they would seem to facilitate. In essence, striving for salmon quality sets

as its goal the transformation of fish with perceived defects (Figure 4) into

corporeal realizations of a picture of fleshly perfection (Figure 5).

Whereas quality may have been shorthand for botulism-free in the days when

Double Q canned salmon first hit the market, it references a distinctly different

set of specifications today. As Liz Brown and Gilbert Sylvia argue, the sort of

Figure 4. Salmon with bruising and gaping.Credit: Alaska Sea Grant College Program, University of Alaska Fairbanks.



seafood quality that now aims to ‘improve profits and create new market opportu-

nities’ entails ‘more than safe and wholesome food’ (1994, p. 9). Although salmon

quality is not defined by visual markers alone—mushy flesh or high bacterial

counts, for example, are certain quality killers—its discursive and material con-

struction nevertheless tends to emphasize traits perceptible to the eye. In the

tight, transparent packages behind which vacuum-sealed, de-boned fillets often

gleam on upscale retail shelves, salmon surfaces constitute a key site for

product differentiation.

At the workshop, participants learned that very little Bristol Bay fish at the time

was ending up in packages like these, and that the region had actually developed a

reputation for poor quality, despite having what everyone acknowledged as ‘beau-

tiful’ wild fish. Fishers were informed that the region’s salmon was often set apart

from both wild and farmed competitors not primarily by marks of distinction like

its high fat content or deep ruby color, but because it was much more likely to

exhibit bruised, gaping, or mushy flesh by the time it reached wholesalers, retai-

lers, and consumers. These features suggest rougher handling and a lack of prompt

or sustained bleeding and chilling.

Presenters made it clear that unlike some other Alaskan regions—for example,

the Copper River region of south-central Alaska, which had managed to forge

inroads into more lucrative specialty markets for fresh and frozen fillets, like

‘white tablecloth’ Seattle restaurants—Bristol Bay was almost exclusively gener-

ating mass-market salmon in great volumes for low prices. At the time of the

workshop, the Bay’s biggest outputs included older product forms like frozen

H&G (headed and gutted) fish sent primarily to Japan, and canned sockeye,

which often wound up in British supermarkets. The bingo hall heard a collective

gasp, followed by disgusted grunts and disapproving clucks, when it was

announced that as little as 2–3% of Bay fish wound up in fast-growing and

more profitable domestic markets, according to one presenter’s estimate.

In the face of the rapid devaluation of certain forms of more mass-market

salmon production, quality operates as both a shifting signifier for diverse aspira-

tions and a more specific set of new social and technical norms. The differences

Figure 5. Quality salmon. Credit: Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute (ASMI).

566 K. Hebert


encompassed by these varying senses of quality lead to a paradox of sorts: quality

in its narrower sense is simultaneously both a requirement of quality in its broader

vein as well as a source of contradiction. Throughout the workshop, presenters

insisted that ‘quality has to come first’, that only quality fish could be effectively

niche-marketed as wild, sustainable, distinctive, or pure in the ways that seemed

so promising to industry participants. However, the parameters associated with

quality demand a great deal of regimentation and monitoring of fish flesh and

human labor alike, procedures that are often at odds with the images of unfettered

wildness and artisanal food preparation that broader visions of quality tend to

embrace.

Creating Quality

In a variety of contexts—from outreach efforts in rural communities like the

workshop, to training sessions sponsored by seafood processing companies—

fishers are frequently reminded of the importance of quality and their own

role in its creation. The following paragraphs detail how the push for quality

transforms quotidian industry practice. While many quality production guide-

lines call for more dramatic structural changes to boats and fishing operations,

such as the installation of RSW (refrigerated sea water) systems costing tens

of thousands of dollars, most of them place even greater emphasis on the

incorporation of attentive carefulness into everyday moments of fishing work.

In the words of one presenter at the Bristol Bay workshop, quality entails first

and foremost ‘taking good care of fish’.

The instructions found in educational materials developed for fishers in quality

harvesting techniques provide innumerable examples of this directive. For

instance, one such training program (Figure 6), freely available for fishers on

the website of the state-run seafood marketing agency, relays extensive

recommendations for bodily comportment, which apply to both salmon and its

harvesters. These include the ever-popular ‘fish should not be thrown, but rather

lifted by the head to avoid breaking blood vessels, which causes bruising’, and

‘be careful when you walk to avoid stepping on fish’. Fishers are reminded to

always chill their fish immediately upon capture, ‘deliver fish as soon as possible’,

and ‘keep brailer loads to less than 800 pounds’—that is, not to stuff too many

salmon into the bags used to store caught fish on vessels and transfer them to

processors. Detailed instructions on proper boat cleaning are also given, which

fishers are advised to perform after every delivery.

Across these different guidelines, the quality harvesting practices that fishers

are either instructed to perform or, not uncommonly, seek to cultivate themselves

are marked by a heightened awareness of each fish as a unique item destined

for consumption. In fact, fishers are often exhorted to perform their work by

imagining themselves in the embodied position of end consumers, to engage

with their catch not as an input for mass production, but as a particular object



that will ultimately wind up at the center of another person’s dinner plate.

Quality techniques thus require fishers to pay attention to salmon as individual

bodies amidst the great volumes, which calls for them to monitor and readjust

their own bodily dispositions in turn. One Bristol Bay fisherman who sells his

catch directly to high-end consumers tells them that he ‘babies’ his salmon,

and indeed he lays down a special foam pad beneath his net to soften each

fish’s fall to the aluminum deck.

As this special treatment suggests, quality handling practices are closely tied

to a heightened sense of the delicacy of the salmon substance itself. In the online

training program, fishers are told that gentle and infrequent handling of their

catch is critical, because ‘with each handling the fish become more fragile’.

This fragility is depicted as a delicate fineness that makes salmon desirable:

‘This more delicate musculature accounts in part for its appeal’, the training

informs. As figured by quality discourse, salmon is reminiscent of Bourdieu’s

(1984) characterization of upper-class food, which conveys a distance from

necessity, a preference for quality over quantity, and aesthetic stylization. This

stylization of taste or refinement of manners (Elias, 1994) does not merely

affect the bodily dispositions of those who consume salmon, however, but

becomes projected back onto producers as well. In both spirit and specifications,

the highly self-conscious manipulation that defines quality aesthetics, sensibil-

ities, and embodied action could not be further from the Bristol Bay fishing of

the past.

Figure 6. Quality handling practices: guidelines for harvesters.Credit: Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute (ASMI).

568 K. Hebert


Quality and Quantity

The Pursuit of Poundage

Despite the attractions of quality, its production presents particular challenges in

Bristol Bay, where the focus has long been on quantity. Not only is Bristol Bay

unquestionably a ‘volume’ fishery in the language of the business, but it is also

home to an especially compressed fishing season. It is a textbook case of what

biologists call a ‘pulse’ fishery, since the majority of its tens of millions of

salmon enter area waters in a single surge that takes place over about a two-

week stretch each summer. Numbers themselves can hardly convey the drama

of the staggering biological phenomenon, or the frantic, round-the-clock exertion

of Bristol Bay fishing. Here, I consider how large catches have contributed to an

industry ethos and organization that valorizes volume, and makes the turn to

quality production fraught with practical and conceptual difficulties.

Strong peak season returns beckon with the promise of big earnings, but they

have long complicated fishing practice and industry operations in Bristol Bay.

Fishing can be challenging given such volumes, as boats and skiffs become less

maneuverable with heavy loads and more susceptible to being ‘swamped’,

flooded and maybe even sunk by rising waves or upending tides. At some point

during peak season, area fish processors find themselves ‘plugged’, with more

fish on hand than the plant is able to process. Plant managers work furiously to

ship fish to other facilities across Alaska, and processing workers toil at all

hours to transform the perishable matter into more shelf-stable forms before

massive amounts spoil.

Such hurdles have only given more weight to the pursuit of ‘poundage’.

Throughout the Bay’s history, successful fishers, or ‘highliners’, made money

and gained status by harvesting vast quantities of fish (Figure 7). During industry

boom days, brimming bags of fish were exchanged for sacks of bills. Such a fluid

transfiguration of fish into money gave rise to boat names like ‘Cash Flow’ and

‘Net Income’, where surges of salmon were explicitly equated with floods of

financial returns. It has also prompted imagery and talk through which fish are rep-

resented as monetary units. For instance, one young crewman described how he

had always wanted to apply his artistic talents to the side of his father’s boat,

where he envisioned a scene of dollar bills caught in a gillnet. Another teenage

fisherman once told me that he motivated himself to keep picking fish out of

the net by thinking of each salmon as a bill—though he noted that the bill’s

dollar amount had declined a good deal in recent years.

The homology of fish and cash and the emphasis on volume this underscores has

furthered aspects of the competitive bravado long associated with Bay fishing.

Individual boats are in close proximity when fishers deliver their catch to proces-

sing vessels (Figure 8). While waiting for their turn to deliver, fishers’ eyes often

dart to the boats of those in line before them as they suss out others’ catches,

closely monitoring bags of fish as they are hoisted up by hydraulic cranes and



made visible for all to see. Most brailer bags are constructed to hold about 1,000

pounds of fish. I was always amazed at how quickly fishers seemed to be able to

assess the weight of each bag, calculate total poundage, and recall their estimates

of others’ catches days and even weeks later.

Figure 8. Salmon being delivered. Credit: Photo by Karen Hebert.

Figure 7. Bristol Bay highliners. Credit: Photo by Warren Johnson.

570 K. Hebert


For most of the fishery’s history, highliners’ status was materialized by their

weighty deliveries, which were posted on a constantly updated list on cannery

walls. The fisher with the largest total catch volume was celebrated as ‘top

boat’ in the fleet or even in the Bay, an honor that is still aggressively pursued

by a select few and spread by word of mouth. On the private, scrambled radio

channels that networks of fishers use to share information, there is always much

conversation—infused with a palpable undercurrent of competition—about how

many ‘bags’ everyone is getting, referring to 1,000-pound units. Multiple

fishers in the same radio group expressed to me that they often felt ‘bad’ or

‘depressed’ about their own fishing performance when they heard how many

bags others had gotten on a given drift. One said that he would actually turn off

his radio from time to time so as not to feel worse.

The Changing Value of Volume

The resource management goal of maximum sustainable yield that dominated the

industry since at least statehood harmonizes quite well with an ethos celebratory of

overflowing volumes, which is evident among commercial fishery participants to

this day. The above snapshot of life on the fishing grounds reveals the extent to

which the Bristol Bay industry remains organized both structurally and culturally

around quantity output despite the excitement about quality as a source of industry

salvation. Although the seafood processing companies that buy fishers’ catches

offer financial incentives for chilled fish, like price bonuses, they still pay for

fish by the pound, an arrangement that serves to perpetuate the longtime emphasis

on quantity. Moreover, large catch volumes are often doubly rewarded by pro-

cessors, most of whom offer added financial incentives to the top-producing

boats in their fleet, like a ‘production bonus’ or the waiver of significant fees.

Yet in an era increasingly ruled by quality, the Bay’s volumes have begun to

seem as much a curse as a blessing. Longtime ideals like bursting brailer bags

are fast becoming associated with the industry’s undoing, given that weighty

deliveries are more likely to leave fish bruised. These marks reflect certain hand-

ling practices as well as some of the more intractable challenges of Bay fishing,

logistical conundrums posed not only by its enormous volumes and compressed

season, but also by the high energy costs and minimal infrastructure of the

remote location, which constitute hurdles for fish chilling and brisk transport

schedules.

In order to combat the Bay’s reputation for poor quality, the major seafood pro-

cessors have started to incorporate a suite of quality-oriented stipulations and

inducements into standard industry practice. Many processing companies have

instituted 600- to 900-pound brailer bag weight limits, for example, and have

begun to cut prices for salmon delivered in overweight bags. Yet these layered

penalties and incentives do not always lend themselves to coherence or fairness.

More than a few fishers have expressed the suspicion that processors are



coming to use quality provisions simply as an excuse to justify reduced prices for

catches. Many bemoan the mixed messages they associate with current processor

policies—as when companies award production bonuses at the same time they

attribute low prices to poor-quality deliveries.

Quality and quantity are not mutually exclusive, of course: the more quality

salmon fishers can produce, the greater their income is likely to be. But in every-

day industry practice, the often-competing pressures for these divergent goals are

met with distinct production styles, which rely on and valorize different fishing

techniques and results. Although fishers shift between them—sometimes even

from one moment to the next, as when they select a few fish from a large drift

to ice and bleed for sale or processing as quality—their reflection on the difficulty

they have at times in doing so is evidence of the divergent sensibilities that accom-

pany the dissimilar strategies and technologies. I have heard those fishing for

quality, for instance, talk about how it ‘kills’ them to pull up their nets to make

a delivery while others are still ‘loading up’, to willingly give up competing

with others to catch more fish in order to attend to those already caught.

Fishers’ adoption of quality practices is thus subverted by their own attachment

to quantity production styles, concrete processor policies, and the material con-

ditions of fishing in Bristol Bay. Yet the neglect of quality in industry operations

is often cast as a moral failure as much as an economic one, as the following

section describes.

Accounting for Quality’s Moral Meanings

It is not as if the fishers with whom I worked dismissed many of the quality ideals

promoted by training programs and certain processors, but the circumstances of

work in Bristol Bay often presented hurdles to their implementation. Given

such conundrums, fishers expressed varying and at times conflicted responses to

quality directives, as well as to their own personal feelings about how salmon

should be caught and handled in light of current market configurations. In the

height of the season, when fish surge onto boats at breakneck speed, bulging

through nets, twisting around lines, and spilling over onto every square inch of

deck, ‘gentle’ handling is near impossible. At moments like these, when

mangled salmon are chucked violently across fish holds into burgeoning brailers,

any concern over product quality is usually greeted with some sort of scoffing

mutter about how ‘it’s just going into a can, anyway’. I was even instructed

during one fishing stint to throw every bit of mangled matter—like the ripped-

off pieces of fish faces and gills—into brailers rather than overboard as a way

to boost poundage.

Yet it is exactly such strategies of volume production that contemporary indus-

try consultants cast as the ‘bad attitudes’ that lead to ‘rough handling; poor or no

chilling; and in some cases, dirty, unsanitary handling conditions’ (Doyle, 1992,

p. 2). Here, the ‘rough’ and ‘dirty’ practices of unruly fishers are implicitly

572 K. Hebert


juxtaposed to the refined delicacy of the ideal quality product, and perhaps to its

consumers as well. As Lawrence Busch and Keiko Tanaka argue with respect to

food grading and standards in particular, the ‘rites of passage’ that establish a pro-

duct’s ‘goodness’ are simultaneously tests of both nature and people: ‘For

example, if Farmer John’s harvest fails to make the minimum grade, it is discarded

as a “poor crop” and Farmer John is judged as a “poor farmer”’ (1996, p. 8).

Indeed, there is often an easy movement between evaluations of poor quality

fish and accusations of poor quality fishers, a fact not lost on one fisher at the work-

shop who said she was ‘embarrassed’ and ‘ashamed’ to deliver battered fish—or

another who grumbled that he was ‘tired of being told we have a bad product’.

Given quality production parameters, the rites of passage by which Bristol Bay

fish would be transformed are premised on new ways of accounting for both

salmon and its harvesters. The measured care with which individual fish are

handled for particular retail segments sets apart certain producers—as a pro-

gress-embracing class of ‘quality-conscious fishermen’, a phrase now employed

in Alaska salmon industry settings (e.g. Alaska Quality Seafood, 2010).

Whether the rites of passage succeed or fail, in Callon’s words, ‘the distinction

of products and social distinction are part of the same movement’ (Callon et al.,

2002, p. 212), which in this case applies to producers as well as consumers.

Calculation and the Commodity

The longtime focus on the amassment of fish as entwined biological and commer-

cial goals has not disappeared with recent market shifts. However, in an unex-

pected twist, the emergence of salmon sustainability—its enduring volumes—as

a promotional tool has also been accompanied by greater attention paid to fish

as singularities. This encompasses both the degree to which individual fish

bodies are assessed for indices of quality, as well as the broader way in which

salmon commodities are qualified as distinctive through such means. Below, I

consider how this seeming irony speaks not merely to the individuation of

production and consumption in highly differentiated capitalist markets, but also

to tensions contained in the very idea of the commodity, a concept that holds

within it two quite different senses.

As Appadurai clarifies, ‘in most modern analyses of economy (outside anthro-

pology), the meaning of the term commodity has narrowed to reflect only on part

of the heritage of Marx and the early political economists’ (1986a, p. 7). In this

paper, I adopt the more expansive social-theoretical usage, which frames the com-

modity as an item produced for market exchange broadly. In contrast, ‘the word

“commodity” is used in neoclassical economics only to refer to a special subclass

of primary goods and no longer plays a central analytic role’ (Appadurai, 1986a,

p. 7). It is in fact this neoclassical usage that Alaskan salmon producers explicitly

draw upon in their own efforts to characterize the predicaments they encounter in

the face of changing markets.



In discussions of Alaska salmon sales, being ‘just a commodity’ signals

cheap prices, low profit margins, and, in light of aquaculture’s ongoing expan-

sion, limited growth potential. In fact, the express goal of official state salmon

promotions can be seen as ‘try[ing] to take a lot out of the commodity stream

and elevate it to a higher price’, as a representative of the state-run seafood

marketing agency informed participants at the workshop. Meeting presenters

emphasized that fishers needed to distinguish their product so that it would

not have to compete in the marketplace as mere unqualified ‘salmon’, which

could be generated much more cheaply by aquaculture concerns. Indeed, the

kinds of qualifications admired by many in Bristol Bay, which highlight the

unique properties of area salmon, are generated precisely in order to differen-

tiate wild Alaska fish from its mass-market others. As one workshop presenter

framed the challenge, putting himself in fishers’ shoes in order to articulate

it: ‘I know that I have to differentiate my product so I am out of this commod-

ity trap’.

Such visions for rescuing at least some Alaska salmon and its fishers from the

downward-spiraling margins of mass goods adopt the neoclassical definition of

the ‘commodity’ described above. ‘A comparatively homogeneous product that

can typically be bought in bulk’, according to the dictionary of The Economist

magazine, the ‘commodity’, ‘usually refers to a raw material—oil, cotton,

cocoa, silver—but can also describe a manufactured product used to make other

things, for example, microchips used in personal computers’ (Economist.Com,

2010b). From this perspective, ‘the process of becoming a commodity’ can be

exemplified as follows:

Micro–chips, for example, started out as a specialised technical innovation,

costing a lot and earning their makers a high PROFIT on each chip. Now

chips are largely homogeneous: the same chip can be used for many

things, and any manufacturer willing to invest in some fairly standardised

equipment can make them. As a result, COMPETITION is fierce and

PRICES and profit margins are low (Economist.Com, 2010a).

Seeking relief from fierce competition and low profit margins, Bristol Bay fishers

voiced little objection to workshop presenters’ exhortations to escape the ‘com-

modity trap’ and rise above the ‘commodity stream’.2

By attempting to transform their catch into quality salmon suitable for specialty

markets, these producers are indeed fighting ‘commoditization’ as described by

both The Economist and workshop presenters. However, fishers’ efforts to singu-

larize their salmon entail their adhering to more rigorous handling standards, pro-

moting consistency in fishing practices and products across the fleet, and

developing regional and personal salmon brands with some degree of proprietary

control. Such acts speak to broader dynamics whereby matter and labor are made

into fungible objects through processes of standardization, homogenization,

574 K. Hebert


simplification, property-making, and even what has been termed ‘resourcification’

(Luke, 2003), the transformation of nature and beyond into a standing reserve for

commodity raw materials. In almost all cases, efforts to remake salmon as quality

constitute attempts to expand the dimensions of fish and its production conditions

that can be made into objects of economic value and incorporated into the saleable

good itself.

The salmon Bristol Bay fishers are striving to produce thus complicates easy

analytical divisions between the singularized and the commoditized. Specialty

salmon products are successfully positioned to the extent that they play with,

step over, and even subvert the boundaries of these and related categories.

Insofar as quality salmon is designed so as to obscure its origins in industrial

production and destination in mass consumption, it partakes in the dynamics

that literary critic John Frow associates with ‘designer’ products more generally,

which ‘build originality, scarcity, and authenticity deep into mass production’

(1997, p. 62). Quality salmon is also akin to other branded commodities, as

analyzed by Robert J. Foster, such as ‘not cola, but Coca Colaw’ (2008, p. 9).

As Foster notes, these branded goods lend force to Marx’s famous observation

of the unexpected strangeness of the commodity, which at first seems so straight-

forward: ‘Their vendors mark them as singular and incomparable (“Accept no

substitutes!”) in order to enhance their desirability and exchangeability, that is,

their substitution for money and, by this very same token, all other commodities’

(2008, pp. 9–10).

In seeking to escape the commodity trap of mass-market salmon prices, then,

Bristol Bay producers fall into a commodity trap of another sort, given the

degree to which market differentiation depends on the simultaneous production

of more fundamental comparability. Even as quality production is pursued so as

to distinguish wild salmon from farmed salmon, it reconfigures wild fish in

ways fundamentally informed by the success of aquaculture. Significantly, the

specifications normally associated with quality—a highly regular appearance,

for example, and an unblemished presentation—were largely developed as

market norms by the aquaculture industry as it vastly expanded the availability,

affordability, and consumption of salmon products.

In sharp contrast to the production conditions that characterize most wild fish-

eries, especially those in Bristol Bay, salmon in aquaculture operations are reared

together in net pens, from which they can be selected for processing once they

have reached a standard and roughly comparable size without ever having to be

captured (Knapp, 2005). A host of quality features are thus more easily achieved

in farmed salmon operations, where many quality-making techniques are folded

into the basic production process itself. In a paradoxical fashion, then, quality

initiatives actually work to make wild salmon more visually similar to farmed

fish at the same time their ultimate purpose is to establish essential differences

among various salmon products and substantiate the singularity of wild

Alaska fish.



The Changing Shape of Sustainability

Despite the very different qualities foregrounded in salmon’s identity as a sustain-

able resource and a quality commodity, the latest developments in Alaska fisheries

management suggest a further unanticipated consequence: that the pursuit of these

ends is increasingly operationalized in unexpectedly similar and mutually reinfor-

cing ways. Specifically, a number of features of quality commodity production

have come to inform how fishery sustainability is figured and achieved. For

one, quality imperatives are becoming integrated into fisheries management and

regulatory decisions. Because quality has been regarded as such a promising

vehicle for industry recovery, the state fisheries regulatory board that sets regu-

lations to ensure salmon sustainability increasingly cites quality improvement

as a rationale for its decisions. Since 2002, any proposal for fisheries regulatory

change must now explicitly address its bearing on quality by responding to the

question ‘Will the Quality of the Resource Harvested or Products Produced be

Improved?’ (Marcotte, 2009). Answers have become increasingly critical as

quality promotion more clearly motivates and informs regulatory action.

In addition, at the same time that Alaska salmon continues to be managed for its

sustained amassment, the regulatory authority of the maximum sustained yield

model has been tempered in recent years, inflected by concerns that mirror

quality paradigms. The industry downturn provided renewed interest in market-

oriented fisheries management regimes that were first envisioned decades ago but

never implemented (e.g. Crutchfield and Pontecorvo, 1969). These entail the

restructuring of fishing practice away from goals defined in biological terms to

those established by economic ones instead—that is, to harvest numbers set for

achieving maximum resource rents, not maximum salmon. Proponents of this

approach advocate determining catch volumes according to a concept of

‘maximum economic yield’, which typically involves the harvest of fewer fish

than catches set by the criterion of biological sustainability alone. They note that

this management regime would fit together nicely with quality production designs.

Even the rhetoric of careful attentiveness that characterizes quality is now

echoed in sustainability discourses. Just as industry experts often cast quality

harvesting techniques as ‘taking good care of fish’, Alaskan fisheries authorities

portray sustainability as an act of caretaking. In announcing the recent re-

certification of Alaskan commercial salmon fisheries as sustainable by the

MSC, a Fish and Game official explained that, ‘The MSC label helps Alaska’s

salmon harvesters and processors tell people around the world that Alaska takes

good care of our marine and freshwater environments, while providing millions

of wild fish to health conscious consumers’ (ADF&G, 2010b). This discursive

resonance speaks to a broader socio-historical shift explored by Dean Bavington

(2010a, 2010b), who argues that fish have gone from being figured as animals to

be hunted to populations to be managed—and, with the expansion of aquaculture,

property to be husbanded through attentive stewardship.

576 K. Hebert


Conclusion

This paper has explored how wild salmon is refashioned into a novel commodity

through new forms of calculation and control. For much of the twentieth century,

Bristol Bay commercial fishers pursued salmon as ‘poundage’, an undifferentiated

mass destined for transformation into relatively uniform products and continued

cash flow. The industry’s economic difficulties since the early 1990s have

prompted growing efforts to reorganize the fishery to produce quality salmon

for more profitable niche markets in environmentally and socially responsible

goods. This emphasis on quality reflects an emerging commodity aesthetic

whereby salmon are not caught and canned for mass consumption, but ‘babied’

for upscale market segments through altered harvesting and processing practices.

In the preceding discussion, I review the practical and conceptual predicaments

this new commercial order poses for rural producers, and consider the hurdles

fishers face in their attempts to reconfigure the local industry to meet novel pro-

duction paradigms. I detail how quality parameters tend to run counter to the long-

time ethos of Bristol Bay fishing, not to mention many of its basic ecological

conditions. The biggest obstacles in remaking the industry to service new

markets in sustainable products thus involve some of the same features that con-

stitute the sustainability of the wild resource in the first place: the seasonality and

unpredictability of its hard-to-control pulse.

The paper further suggests that the tensions it traces reflect the divergent qual-

ities through which natural resource sustainability and high-end environmental

products have been conceptualized and constructed, meanings and measures

that foreground volume on the one hand and exclusivity on the other. However,

the degree to which quality production binds together pursuits of massification

and distinctiveness points to more fundamental paradoxes embedded in processes

of commodification itself, particularly in its present-day form. Drawing on

Callon’s theorization of the role of singularization in contemporary market com-

petition, the paper locates self-reproducing tensions between homogeneity and

singularity, iterability and uniqueness, and identity and difference at the heart

of commodity-making. It argues that the phenomenon Appadurai describes as

generating ‘the most interesting’ sorts of economic goods, ‘the more or less

permanent commoditizing of singularities’ (1986a, p. 17), does not merely

account for singular salmon, but also helps illuminate current features of capitalist

dynamics more generally.

In remaking sustainable natural resources into the stuff of specialty markets,

quality production comes to take on features that run counter to the very visions

of wildness it is oriented to sell. As much as the descriptors associated with the

so-called quality turn may speak to practices that reject agro-industrial modes

of food production, an analysis of changing salmon manufacture in Bristol Bay

suggests that the processes of qualification that underlie such distinctions can

reproduce key elements of the economic forms that they are intended to oppose.



This supports Frow’s assessment that the pursuit of exclusive commodities are

snarled in paradox in that they depend on the types of production that they

would appear to eschew, and can even be destructive of the very expressions of

authenticity or otherness they would purport to celebrate (1997, pp. 73, 101).

This has implications across sites of production and consumption. Fishers are

increasingly pushed and pulled to think of their catch not as an undifferentiated

mass of ‘Cash Flow’ or ‘Net Income’, but as particular fish that must each be

treated carefully and individually, in a way that already anticipates their place

as the object of another’s dinner and desire. At the same time, the inordinate

amount of attentive labor that is required for quality production is mobilized so

as to make its own transformative work invisible, as if fish have leapt straight

from the sea onto the dinner plate. In this way, quality wild salmon is positioned

as nature that springs forth unmediated when it is in fact a product of labor pains-

takingly remade in an image of nature forged to a significant degree by the market

successes of industrial aquaculture. Here, we see how means of accounting for

social distinctions formulated in consumption contexts become embedded in the

corporeal form of resource products and embodied by producers, if often in

fraught fashion.

Such details should not be taken to suggest that the turn to quality is a misstep

for Bristol Bay fishers, however. Across the sweep of global production sites rep-

resented on the floor of the Boston Seafood Show, Alaska salmon fisheries are

indeed set apart from the mass. Given worldwide trends of declining wild fish

populations and growing fisheries rationalization efforts, which tend to consoli-

date resource access and profits in the hands of a few powerful producers or cor-

porate interests, it is not everywhere that small owner-operators fish commercially

on reasonably healthy wild stocks. But the Alaska salmon fisheries’ economic

struggles have drawn attention to the fact that such indices of sustainability

may not be enough in and of themselves to sustain the coastal communities

that depend on continuing industry income. Given these circumstances, salmon

producers’ hopes about the promise of qualification as a means of spurring econ-

omic turnaround seem more than merely understandable. In fact, the modest

improvements in fish prices and industry earnings that have been experienced

even in Bristol Bay over the past few years may well be due at least in part

to the ramping up of quality production and marketing efforts (Knapp, 2006).

Nevertheless, producers’ pursuit of sustainability in the form of singular

salmon remains punctuated by even more enduring paradoxes, as this paper has

sought to make plain.

Acknowledgements

This paper draws upon research supported by grants from the Wenner-Gren Foun-

dation, the National Science Foundation’s Office of Polar Programs, and the Uni-

versity of Michigan’s National Poverty Center, Institute for Labor and Industrial

578 K. Hebert


Relations, Rackham Graduate School, and Department of Anthropology. Earlier

drafts benefited from the comments of participants in Yale’s Agrarian Studies

Program and ‘Nature’s Accountability: Aggregation and Governmentality in the

History of Sustainability’, a workshop sponsored by the German Historical

Institute. I would like to thank especially Sabine Hohler, Rafael Ziegler,

Science as Culture editor Les Levidow, and two anonymous reviewers for their

comments. Michael Hathaway and Josh Kaplan also offered valuable suggestions.

I remain indebted to the many people who contributed to the dissertation from

which this paper emerges, especially those in Bristol Bay. Any errors or over-

sights, of course, are entirely my own.

Notes

1In Fresh: A Perishable History (2009), Susanne Freidberg begins a chapter on fish with a tour

through the same International Boston Seafood Show, where she finds ubiquitous claims to

freshness. As this paper elaborates, proclamations of sustainability are increasingly used in

close connection with other popular seafood industry signifiers.2Being a commodity is not always a commercial curse, of course. At the same time that fishers

are struggling to make their salmon more than ‘just a commodity’, mining development in

Bristol Bay is being pursued with great vigor precisely because of heightened market prices

for primary products. While the ‘stunning boom in just about every commodity market’

(Romero, 2006) reported in recent years may have cooled somewhat, Bristol Bay remains

the site of an intense battle over mineral development: The proposed Pebble Mine, sited in

an area of gold, copper, and molybdenum deposits amid the Bay’s headwaters, would

become, if built, one of the largest open-pit mines in North America.

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