Bren Smith

A perfect balance between personal storytelling and blueprint for a new way to harvest our seas that can create meaningful jobs while simultaneously combatting climate change.

A mind-bending look into an extraordinary world by a stunning and gifted story teller.

Bren Smith is a hero of ours—not just for his ingenious vertical farming of kelp and shellfish in the Thimble Islands, but for facing squarely the root causes of one crisis with many symptoms: climate change, desertification, obesity and hunger. This book shows us new ways to grow food and make a living that can both heal the planet and make life more satisfying.

What a remarkable book! Bren Smith has a (wild) life story to recount, a novel food-growing technique to describe, and a planet to help save. He’s a deft enough writer to pull it all off, with a wry joy that left me (more than usually) hopeful about our future.

Seaweed is the food of the future; it’s a powerhouse of nutrition and holds a world of untapped flavor and deliciousness. Bren’s underwater kelp farms can feed us for years to come and the more we eat, the more we also give back to the ocean. This book leads the way.

Part memoir, part treatise on the life of a professional fisherman, part manual for the future of eating worldwide, this unique book cannot help but make readers think long and hard about the fate of the earth as it faces the challenges of global warming and the outlook for feeding the planet. . . . Smith has now become a visionary leader in cultivating what may turn out to be a primary source of the world’s food. This is a book about a man as well as a book about an idea. . . . Readers will learn more about ocean farming here than they learned about whaling from Moby Dick, and will walk away with a handful of practical, tasty seaweed recipes to boot.

Smith is an articulate, very human ambassador for sustainable, ethical and environmentally beneficial mariculture, weaving his plea for changing the way we eat with solid proof of why it’s so necessary. He includes a global history here as well, spanning coastal cultures from China and Japan to Scotland and Atlantic Canada, all rich with best practices and viable traditions…If this new age of ‘climate cuisine’ needs an introduction, Eat Like a Fish is surely it.

A thoughtful . . . eco-agro-pescatorial manifesto. . . . [Smith] describes how he came to realize that overfishing, climate change, ocean acidification, and other forces are making it impossible to extract a living from the sea—at least the sea as it is now. Instead, he has been busily working a stretch of Long Island Sound, raising shellfish and kelp, both of which are restorative. . . . Smith harbors a big vision of lots of little oceanic farms producing tons of seaweed and hundreds of thousands of crustaceans per acre—an economic revolution, he ventures, that could create 50 million direct jobs and a whole host of related ones. The author is no purist—he allows that he has a weakness for McDonald’s fish sandwiches and once lived a life of ‘stealing, dealing, fighting’—but it’s clear that he’s found a place among the back-to-the-landers, foodies, and greenies whom he might have made fun of back in the day but whom he now sees as allies.