In Pursuit of Singular Salmon: Paradoxes of Sustainability and the Quality Commodity

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.