Raising Hake

Frenchmen call it saumon blanc and eat it with gusto. To the British, it is the fish in their beloved fish 'n' chips. On the U.S.'s West Coast, however, it goes by the unappetizing name of hake, and what little of it fishermen have caught has been ground into fish meal for poultry feed.

Soon West Coast fishermen are going to be raising much more hake. Sonar soundings conducted by the Interior Department's Bureau of Commercial Fisheries have detected vast schools of hake in the usually unfished mid-waters between the ocean surface and the bottom.

One school was a prodigious 20 miles long by three miles wide. Some estimates place the West Coast hake population as high as 6 billion, which is quite a rake of hake.

To help harvest it, the bureau has developed outsized, bag-shaped trawling nets and telemetry gear that help pinpoint the schools, which swarm at depths of 300 ft. to 600 ft. Two commercial trawlers recently began using the gear, have been pulling up enormous catches of as much as 120,000 lbs. Last week the bureau offered to outfit a dozen more ships with the equipment, which is worth $14,000, in return for permission to conduct further experiments on board the vessels.

Most of the West Coast catch will still end up as fish meal, at least for the time being. A company called Pacific Protein Inc. is spending $1,000,000 to build a processing plant at Aberdeen, Wash., for that purpose. Pacific Protein President John Stevens would like eventually to use hake in making fish-protein concentrate, an almost tasteless powder of reputedly wondrous nutritional value. A half ounce of FPC, as it is called, is said to be capable of providing a child with his daily need for animal protein at a fraction of a cent.

The Federal Food and Drug Administration has not yet decided whether or not to certify FPC as fit for human consumption, because the fish are not cleaned before processing; FPC enthusiasts reply by pointing out that the FDA has not banned chocolate-coated bumblebees and grasshoppers, though they also are consumed without cleaning. Last summer the National Academy of Sciences concluded that FPC made from hake is safe, and this month Interior Secretary Stewart Udall filed a petition requesting FDA approval. Next month the Senate will begin subcommittee hearings on a bill sponsored by Washington's Senator Warren Magnuson and Alaska's Senator E. L. Bartlett that calls for spending $5 million to build five plants to produce and experiment with FPC.

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