Food & Drink

The Fisher king

Christopher Toole teaches kids like Emily Carrera and Elijah Guerrier how to raise fish at home.

Christopher Toole teaches kids like Emily Carrera and Elijah Guerrier how to raise fish at home. (Rahav Segev / Photopass.com)

Christopher Toole teaches kids like Emily Carrera and Elijah Guerrier how to raise fish at home. (Rahav Segev / Photopass.com)

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Teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime. To that maxim, Christopher Toole might add a corollary: Teach that guy to farm-fish in his apartment, and things start to get interesting.

Toole is the visionary behind the Society for Aquaponic Values and Education, a Bronx-based nonprofit devoted to turning New Yorkers into urban fish farmers. For $5, he’ll sell you a minnow-size fingerling of his “Bronx Best Blue Tilapia,” and will tell you how to grow it to entree size with minimal space and equipment. “Our goal is to make this as easy and common as growing a tomato plant on your terrace,” says Toole, whose fish can be easily grown in a good-size fish tank.

A former banker who lives in Riverdale, Toole and his girlfriend, Anya Pozdeeva, have set up shop at the Point, a community center in the Hunts Point section of The Bronx. There they raise fish in a colony of 55-gallon tanks and plastic recycling bins, teach neighborhood kids, host meetup sessions and otherwise preach the gospel of aquaponics.

That term refers to a food- growing system combining aquaculture and hydroponics, whereby effluent from the tanked fish is used to fertilize produce grown in the water. The plants in turn filter the water for the fish.

“Aquaponics is about symbiosis,” says Toole, as he putters about a small room where fingerlings of various sizes circle in murky aquariums and a glass-walled mini-garden sprouts with basil, mint and cabbage.

An intense 47-year-old with a bushy gray beard, Toole speaks with the zeal of a missionary and the vocabulary of a leftist economist, answering questions with lengthy, rapid-fire explanations referencing economic systems, Marxist theory and “unlocked potential energy.”

As he pulls a wriggling 1-pounder from a blue bin, it’s hard to picture Toole at Morgan Stanley, but the Boston-area native spent years in finance after earning an economics degree from Tufts. In 2010, he was a vice president for Sovereign Bank when he developed a dot in his vision field, and a retinal problem was diagnosed.

Blaming job stress, Toole took some time off and found himself thinking about fish, a subject he’d been drawn to since spending childhood summers on Cape Cod.

“I started sketching plans out for an aquaponic system,” he says, and soon he quit his job to pursue his vision. He and Pozdeeva set up a small fish farm in the apartment they share with their 2-year-old and Pozdeeva’s 7-year-old son. They first tried growing barramundi, but settled on the hardy tilapia. When their operation grew, they moved it to the Point, where they get free space in exchange for educational sessions with local kids.

Toole says his own kids (he has two from a previous marriage) and thoughts “about the nastiness in our future” helped inspire his effort. In uncertain times, he sees value in self-sufficiency — as he puts it: “If the apocalypse was at hand, I’d want to know where the food was growing.”

Having put a dent in his savings, Toole is hoping to make his project sustainable. His income derives from selling fingerlings and female breeders via eBay and Craigslist. He counts some 1,000 sold so far.

He’s got lots of plans for expansion, such as a greenhouse built from tires that will house four shipping containers full of fish. Last December, he was invited to sell his wares at the New Amsterdam Market, and he hopes to return and connect with a clientele for whom “sustainable” and “local” are buzzwords.

In the meantime, he’s regularly enjoying the fruits of his own fishery. A mild white fish, tilapia is especially versatile, he notes, and the occasional barramundi is even better.

“Our barramundi,” he says, “are sushi grade.”