East Coast author defending salmon, speaking out against Alaska's Pebble Mine

The future of food is a subject writer Paul Greenberg has explored extensively in his NYTimes bestselling book, called Four Fish. It’s also something that interests him deeply as a lifelong fisherman. He grew up in Connecticut, where he discovered this passion as a youngster.

KPLU’s Bellamy Pailthorp invited him into our studios for an interview about his last book, as well as a new one he's been researching in the Pacific Northwest. (You can hear the interview by clicking on the "Listen" icon above. )

Greenberg's last book explores the history of four kinds of fish.  In it, Greenberg describes how humans have "industrialized" then.

Those fish are:

• salmon
• bass
• cod
• tuna

He's working on a new book, called The Fish Next Door, which will be out sometime next year. Researching it has taken him all over the Pacific Northwest, with extensive work investigating the proposal by big mining companies to dig for gold, copper and molybdenum in Alaska. 

Greenberg thinks allowing the so-called "Pebble Mine"  would be a big mistake.

"Do we want food?  Or do we want minerals?" Greenberg asks in his interview on KPLU. "All throughout the United States, this question, this choice, of sustainable fishing grounds that exist on all the coasts, versus energy and mineral extraction ... is going to the the major fight of the next century."

Greenberg is in town this week for the Chef’s Collaborative Sustainable Food Summit taking place in Seattle. It’s a national meeting of top chefs, interested in local and ‘ecologically correct’ food.