TED TALKS - Dan Barber: How I Fell in Love With a Fish

Rating: *****

This particular Ted Talks titled, How I Fell in Love With a Fish, satisfied everything I look for in a good article or video like this, it kept me interested, it was on a very concerning topic, the speaker was full of emotion, and finally it had spurts of comedy that made it all the better. This is a video that I’ve seen in the past and enjoyed back then, therefore, when the opportunity came to give it a review, I jumped at the chance.

The video consists of Barber telling us about his two love relationships with fish. It begins with Dan Barber disclosing a very serious problem for chefs about, how can they keep fish on their menus? With 90% of fishes such as, halibut, salmon, tuna etc., that are dead by being fished out in seas all over the world, Barber states that agricultural fish farming is the way of the future. Barber then states that agricultural fish farming isn’t very sustainable as it essentially takes 15 pounds of food to feed a fish farms for us to get 1 pound of fish to eat, and they are also very pollutant to the waters with numerous amounts of chemicals going in to the fishes food supply. However he then tells us about a fish farm in Spain ran by environmentalists that has all sort of fishes, and is humongous in size. The system itself is actually quite interesting as the fish actually are eating whatever they would eat in the wild, so they aren’t feeding these fishes. Flamingos come from 150 miles away just to eat these fishes, this is considered as a success. The water is so clean in this system, that water that comes from the local river, which is full of dirt and other chemicals, gets purified. But what are these fish farmers doing to make there farm so successful? Simple, nothing. Just letting mother nature, take care of everything, and make sure that no human activities harm the system.

This video was fascinating to me on many levels. It makes you think that if corporations were not so bent on making money, and didn’t over fish we could leave everything to mother nature and natural ecosystems to take care of. Rather than polluting waters and making all the fish we eat, living in these wastes. This video showed me that you can make a serious situation comical, and still get a point through your audience like myself. I essentially learned something that I think we should all know, if we let mother nature take care of things herself, like feeding an ecosystem, then the result will be better than a human ever could do in the long run.

This video was about 20 minutes in length, and to quote myself from before, it was informative, funny, and really intelligent. I really do recommend giving this video a watch, and see what you think about it.


How I Fell in Love With a Fish. Ted Talks. February 2010. Web. 15 May, 2011.
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/dan_barber_how_i_fell_in_love_with_a_fish.html