Salmon: A Red Herring

by Cooking Sections

176 pages, Paperback

Published September 1, 2020

Reviews

[Marc · Rating 4 out of 5]

This first book released by isolarii, perhaps, first needs a word about format and intent...

From the website: "isolarii are island books—singular worlds, encapsulated. Together, they assemble disparate writers, artists, filmmakers and architects to help us navigate the world anew." And from the back of this book: "isolarii revives an extinct literary genre---the Renaissance 'island books'---to form an archipelago of today's most avant-garde groups and figures. each book is an island: an act of preservation or a point of orientation."

Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe make up the "spatial practioners" known as Cooking Sections. "They explore the systems that organise the world through food." And the basis for this book is best captured in Hans Ulrich Obrist's foreword exchange with the research-based duo:

"...the book maps this story. Our protagonist is farmed salmon, but as it emerges in the form of a little house sparrow that actually turned salmon, the color.
[DFP]: This is a real story that we heard about on the Isle of Skye, a sparrow whose feathers turned from brown to pink...
[AS]: It kickstarted our investigation—a kind of molecular thread that we pursue across the pages of the book, from Mexico to Norilsk, through species of all sorts.
[DFP]: In a healthy ecosystem, wild salmon eat shrimp and krill— these tiny organisms gift salmon their distinctive pink hue. In salmon farms, disrupted ecosystems, salmon would not naturally turn pink—they would be gray. And so color is artificially fed to them, according to a color-chart called the SalmoFan."

In a sense this book is about our relationship to color and consumption, but in a broader sense it touches on one of the things that makes capitalism and the current global market so hard to critique: The production costs and socially/environmentally-destructive processes are hidden/displaced from the points of purchase/consumption. You, most likely, do not watch your food get killed. You, most likely, do not deal with the water and air impacted near large fisheries or farms. Most likely, you never think about or see your trash again once it is picked up on trash day. Not just the negative impacts, but the entire infrastructure necessary to produce and maintain our modern day consumption habits is rendered virtually invisible.

Salmon: A Red Herring traces how color that may have once indicated healthy or natural/wild fish/food has been fetishized and commodified to the point that consumers now expect products with such specific, consistent coloring that artificial means are required. And these interventions so singularly pursue their color goals that harm to living organisms (human and animal) seem secondary. Keep in mind that this "book" is about the size of a standard deck of playing cards and yet it manages to take us through so much history and so many tangential connections that it is rather astounding. From the sheep/wool industry in Skye displacing humans who would then turn to Salmon fishing, to the expectation of German consumers that their egg yolks be orange, industry and color become so intertwined as to reverse the dynamic so that color is now the static element through which biology passes/bends toward.

Whether you're commercially coloring your fish with Carophyll or hearkening back to the 1950s to get that wonderfully "universal" white skin tone standard set by Shirley cards, you'll see our consumer relationship to color is as complicated and unsustainable as most of our cultural practices that have reached an economy of scale. From the way this books colored pages run through the full range of salmon coloring to the dire questions it raises, you'll find this to be one of the most wonderfully disturbing of contemporary reads. Artistic activism is sounding the alarm bells if only we could find the unmute button.
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A FEW NEW-TO-ME WORDS
otolith | vaterite | unheimlich

[Eric · Rating 5 out of 5]

Salmon: A Red Herring, the first in a series of miniaturized, palm-of-the-hand "island" books from publishers isolarii, is a brilliant sheaf -- an essay collection all about our metamorphosing chromatosphere -- a collection of synesthetic texts that boldly mines the varieties of ecological devastation carried out under the myopic guise of human ingenuity. Probably most impressive is the apparent effortlessness with which co-authors Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe illuminate and grant us access to the profoundly complex weave of issues -- past, present, and impending -- offered up on today's menu aboard Spaceship Earth.

[Nick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Such a great look at how and why the food we consume is the way it is - probably going to get me to stop eating salmon again. Also comically sized which made me 😁

[Tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

A short but wide-ranging and deep account of (primarily) the colors of the animals and fish we eat, with a focus on salmon, illustrating the extent to which color and coloring has affected trade, industrialization, animal and human rights, and now a dy(e)ing planet. Readers of Cabinet may be reminded of two of the magazine’s ongoing features—“Color” and “Gestation,” columns on the cultural significance and uses of colors and foods—which in Salmon are mashed together and made even more complex by the interconnectedness of cultural and industrial practices as they impinge on both the nature world and our understanding of what “natural” things “should” look like.

A dizzying set of associations and their moral implications for humanity and its relationship to itself and the natural world make for a profound meditation on the planetary consequences of cultural practices. Highly recommended.

[Eileen Sheats · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great first issue. I love the way the book itself resembles a salmon and depicts the changing of the color from the healthy pink to the grey-yellow at the end and the cover is silver like a salmon skin. Very creative. Learned so much - I keep telling everybody about the story of how indigo and indian yellow were created from cow urine and cows were fed this specific type of leaf and nothing else in order to get them to always urinate and maximize production of the color. Also about how oranges in Florida are green on the outside and dyed orange to match consumer expectations. Excited to see what comes next from these folks!

[nadaannuha · Rating 5 out of 5]

Everything about Salmon and the reality about huge industries are surprising but not really at this point. Very interesting read and beautifully designed book. Apart from it being mini pocket-sized book, the sprayed edges is honestly what intrigues me the most and really love reading the part where it says that the book is intentionally colored different hues of [Salmon]!

[Amy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Exceptionally well-done little book. Deceptively small and diminutive, with its colored pages it might look like one of those fluffy, general tiny books that used to be showcased in those revolving stalls at B&N, the sort of thing one would buy and stick in as a stocking stuffer, for a laugh. But this is a serious little book about how color can show (and conceal) the ravages of human industry on the environment, the land, human bodies, and on cultures.

It’s going to be very hard to eat salmon now.

[David Macpherson · Rating 4 out of 5]

The concept of animals and color is fascinating and the book did a nice job of it for most of the time, though there were sections that felt more tangential to the main thrust. My one issue was the salmon colored pages. I really didn't like reading on a salmon colored page. It made the reading more immersive, but I struggled with getting the words right on the page.

[Jaime Samson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I learned so so much!