Too Smart for the Supermarket?

As author Richard Schweid notes in his introduction to Life on the Octopus Farm, “Octopus is a texture/taste food, highly pleasing to both senses, and it is not difficult to prepare.” Those characteristics have made octopus popular in cuisines around the world, creating a level of demand that naturally inspires interest in farming it — but that’s easier said than done. This complex creature is not readily suited to being bred on a mass scale, and many humans, entranced by its remarkable intelligence, are horrified by the idea.

The book explores both these issues and delivers fascinating portraits of the people trying to make octopus farming a reality. Readers who relish the taste of octopus and those who cried at My Octopus Teacher will both find food for thought in Life on the Octopus Farm.

Richard Schweid, a Nashville native who resides primarily in Barcelona, is the author of 10 previous nonfiction books, including The Caring Class and Invisible Nation. He answered questions from Chapter 16 by email.

Chapter 16: Your 2014 book Octopus is a detailed survey of octopus facts and lore, including the animal’s long history as a food source. What drew you back to this deep dive on octopus farming?

Richard Schweid: While researching the 2014 book — a natural history of octopus — I found a reference to an octopus farm managed by a cooperative of Mayan women in Sisal, on the Yucatan peninsula. In 2010, I spent a couple months there working with the cooperative and learning about octopus from the farm’s director, Dr. Carlos Rosas, a marine biologist. The narrative of those months did not work in the 2014 book, so I put it aside. Then, in 2022, the Spanish seafood giant Nueva Pescanova announced they were going to start an octopus farm and aimed to bring a million pounds to the international market by 2025 (although in July 2026 they announced the corporation was giving up the project without ever having farmed a single octopus). This motivated me in 2023 to go back to Sisal and see what had happened there in the intervening 13 years and to write a book about efforts around the world to develop octopus aquaculture.

Chapter 16: The new book has a cast of vivid characters, especially the folks in Sisal, Mexico, who struggle to get their small operation going despite many setbacks. Is Life on the Octopus Farm ultimately a story about people as much as food production?

Schweid: I hope so, particularly the part about the Mayan women and men involved in the cooperative endeavor in Sisal. They were kind enough to take me into their lives and afford me a glimpse of numerous facets of life in a small Yucatecan fishing village, as well as teaching me about what’s involved in trying to farm octopus. In Japan, I was fascinated by the role octopus plays in the cuisine and the way it is incorporated in the quotidian lives of people. There, it’s a comfort food, something that just about everyone eats regularly and which can be bought from convenience stores and stalls on the street. To do without octopus in Japan would be like doing without beef in the U.S., so for the past six decades they have continued trying (and failing) to develop a commercial octopus aquaculture.

Chapter 16: A recurring question throughout Life on the Octopus Farm is whether it’s ethical to farm such an intelligent wild animal for food, and you outline arguments on both sides. Have you resolved that question for yourself?

Schweid: Obviously, if a person does not eat meat for ethical reasons, octopus farming is not going to be okay. For meat eaters, like myself, it’s more complicated. When I began the book, I felt that it was definitely not a good idea to farm an asocial invertebrate with an extraordinary cognitive ability, equal to that of mammals like cats and dogs, in order to provide one more source of meat for well-to-do consumers.

As I researched, however, I began to see it was a more nuanced question than I had initially assumed. I learned that female octopuses of the species we eat — Octopus vulgaris, the common octopus — produce 100,000 eggs and that when they hatch 95% of them are eaten by marine predators before they reach two months old. Farming would allow these many, many animals to grow to maturity. In addition, the feed-to-meat conversion rate of octopuses is much more efficient than pork, beef, or chicken, making it more environmentally sustainable than other livestock that we farm. It’s also worth considering that the meat is high in healthy protein and omega-3s, contains no harmful fat, and has an excellent taste and texture.

All that said, however, I lean toward the idea that if farmed octopus is not used to alleviate global food insecurity, and instead serves as just another product aimed at a high-end market, it is not ethical and should not be done.

Chapter 16: There are many positive elements in the book, but an underlying theme of loss seems inescapable: declining fisheries, climate change, the long history of profit-driven environmental destruction. Do you see human efforts to adapt to loss — such as farming seafood — as hopeful developments or sad necessities?

Schweid: As someone who is fond of eating fish and seafood, I see aquaculture as a necessity because of the decline in wild populations. In 2022, for the first time (and each year since) more farmed fish and seafood were eaten than what were caught in the wild. One thing the growth of aquaculture has done is increase the amount of protein available to families with limited food budgets. Tilapia, for instance, is grown on many small fish farms and sold at accessible prices in many parts of the world. While its taste is a little bland, and it has its own set of environmental problems, its nutritional value is important in places that are poor in nutrition. All farmed fish and seafood can have detrimental environmental effects, from waste to disease to what they are fed, but this is also true, of course, for other kinds of livestock. Whether in the end the benefits of fish and seafood aquacultures outweigh the negatives remains to be seen and will ultimately depend on the attitudes of the humans who farm them: Will care be taken to do a sound, sustainable job, or will the only thing that matters be producing the most profit possible?

Chapter 16: Life on the Octopus Farm travels from Mexico to Spain to Japan to North Africa. It highlights the global reality of the 21st-century food supply, which exists alongside the consumer fascination with local foods and small producers. What does local cuisine mean now when so much of our food is industrially farmed or shipped from half a world away?

Schweid: Local cuisine is still important and valued. I immediately think of fried green tomatoes, or grits in the South, scrapple in Pennsylvania, eggplant parmesan grinders in New England, pan con tomate in Barcelona, takoyaki in Japan, etc. Every region of the world still has its own local foods, thank goodness.

However, it’s also true that the global market can suck up local foods and transform them into something that’s out of reach for the people who originally ate them. The price of octopus, once a cheap, everyday food in Japan, is rising year after year. The same is true in Spain with elvers, baby eels that used to be eaten and sometimes even used to slop the pigs because they were so plentiful and cheap. Now they run about $100 a serving. Or lobster, which was so common in colonial New England that people got tired of eating it every day, but is now so expensive that the people who fish for it cannot afford to serve it to their own families.

Chapter 16: In addition to food, you’ve covered many disparate topics in your work: cars, cockroaches, immortality, homelessness, and more. What’s grabbing your attention these days?

Schweid: Memory. Maybe because I’m getting old (or already got there, I can’t remember, ha-ha), but the question of how we create, store, and retrieve memories seems fascinating to me. There’s certainly a book there — probably many books — and while I’m not sure I’m the right person to write it, I’d surely like to try.