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Fishing for Gold: The Story of Alabama's Catfish Industry. By Karni R. Perez. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006. xv + 263 pp. Maps, illustrations, appendix, bibliography, index. Paper, $22.95. ISBN: 0-817-35344-5.
Reviewed by Robert S. Davis
Aquaculture, or fish farming, has a history going back thousands of years in Asia, but it is a relatively new phenomenon in America. Before the arrival of dams, pollution, and commercial fishing on an industrial scale, individual fishermen could supply most of the market in the United States for freshwater fish and seafood. Preservation technology, industrial food processing, and better transportation created a fish-farming industry around 1900 that failed to achieve widespread success in this country. Federally supported experiments in the catfish industry began in Kansas and continued throughout the Midwest from 1881 to modern times. The idea of fish production for direct human consumption had a revival after World War II, chiefly in the form of a few large operations in the Mississippi Delta.
Alabama's catfish-farming industry did not begin until around 1960, when, according to Kami R. Perez, it "succeeded beyond many people's wildest dreams" (p. xi). From 1982 to 2003, state land devoted to this product grew from 8,200 acres to some 25,000 acres, causing catfish to increase in value as part of the fish sold in the United States from 11 percent to 21 percent (p. 222). Thousands of small operations have sprung up all across the state, but the industry hub remains where it began, in...