Stranded Fish
By Paul Greenberg, Safina Center Fellow
Two months into the COVID-19 shutdown an attractive box bearing Montauk's iconic lighthouse landed on my doorstep. The box had come from the one-time "restaurant supported fishery" called "Dock to Dish." Inside were 10 fillets of fluke, the likes of which I have never seen outside my own fishing cooler or a three-star eatery. In normal times the general public would simply have never gotten a look at them. It took a pandemic to make these fish available to a guy who just wanted to eat some good fish at home.
Fish in a box. Photo: Paul Greenberg
Inside the fish box. Photo: Paul Greenberg
Up until COVID-19 landed on our shores, something like 80% of all seafood sold in America was sold in restaurants. In part this is due to consumer uneasiness with cooking fish at home. But as we've seen in stories of mass livestock slaughter and dumped milk the other issue is economic inequality. Because of their ability buy in bulk and corner the market on the best product, restaurants and the wealthy patrons who frequented them had a lock on the best food America had to offer. And in the past two decades of the local food movement artisanal products became the most sought after. So when the pandemic hit and the wealthy couldn't find a way to get high quality food on to their plates much of it went to waste rather than to people who really needed it. With seafood the problem is compounded by other factors. More than a third of all seafood landed in America, often the very best we've got ends up bought by foreign dealers before it hits the dock and spirited away to the highest bidder. Meanwhile as real estate development has run rampant the American ability to both protect its coastal ecosystems and it's coastal fish processing sector has gone kaput. As one Gloucester fisherman lamented to me a few years back while I was writing my book American Catch "fish houses are getting turned into condominiums all the time. But you never see a condominium getting turned into a fish house."
But now, with COVID-19's perhaps fatal blow to the restaurant industry we're confronted with a disruption of the entire global seafood supply chain. And it just might be time to rethink how we get sustainably caught, high quality American seafood to average Americans. And make no mistake it is desperately needed. A landmark 2018 study of 25,000+ individuals published by Brigham and Women's Hospital found that African Americans, a group with historically high rates of cardiovascular disease and poor access to nutritious food, were able to reduce heart attacks rates a whopping 40% just by taking an omega-3 supplement. Were black Americans able to access affordable omega-3 rich more regularly, there would likely be a corresponding reduction heart-attack deaths.
For the moment some kind of compromise system is being tested out to tether the American consumer back to the American coast and its fishermen. One approach is restaurateur's Dan Barber's new venture resourcED (done cooperatively with Montauk's Dock to Dish). In this scenario, restaurant "boxes" are assembled from different producers and presented to the consumer as meal kits that can be prepared at home. For the moment paying patrons for these boxes are buoying up producers dedicated to a mission of sustainable fishing and farming and just barely keeping them from bankruptcy. Another scenario was that nice box of fluke on my doorstep. In addition to supplying fish for resourcED Dock to Dish tested out whether they could ship fresh fish directly to consumers rather than restaurants. But it remains unclear whether the already strained US postal system can handle another load of boxes.
Whatever the case it's clear that we need to rethink how Americans get their fish. There is so much more infrastructure that has to be figured out in order for sustainable fishing to find the consumers it now desperately needs. And there's even more to consider when we try to figure out how make that most nutritional food affordable for the people who need it most.