CATFISH AND THE DELTA: Confederate Fish Farming...

CATFISH AND THE DELTA: Confederate Fish Farming in the Mississippi Delta by Richard Schweid (Ten Speed Press: $9.95). Raising grain-fed catfish in artificial ponds has become America’s most successful aquiculture industry: Consumption of catfish in the United States has risen from nearly nothing in 1965 to 400 million pounds in 1990. Most of these fish were raised in Sunflower and Humphreys counties in Mississippi, where catfish have supplanted cotton as the most valuable crop. Schweid spent several months in the area, talking with the people and studying the 10-acre ponds that may hold 60,000 market-sized fish. He soon realized that the boom in aquiculture had preserved racial divisions that have been erased in the other parts of the South. The owners of the ponds, processing plants and feed companies are almost all white; the men who tend the ponds and the women who prepare the fish are almost all black, working for low hourly wages with no benefits. The local private “academies” were created as bastions of de facto segregation. Schweid makes every effort to present the evidence dispassionately, and this telling study will make readers think twice before ordering blackened catfish again.