Saving Seafood

Nutrition

Aquaculture drives aquatic food yields to new high

June 30, 2022 — The production of wild and farm-raised fish, shellfish and algae reached record levels in 2020, and future increases could be vital to fighting world hunger, the Food and Agriculture Organization said Wednesday.

Driven by sustained growth in aquaculture,  and aquatic farming together hauled in 214 million tonnes, the UN agency said in a report.

The total first-sale value of 2020 production topped $400 million, with $265 million coming from aquaculture, a sector poised for further expansion.

These trend lines are good news for a world facing price hikes and  due to the war in Ukraine, disrupted supply chains, and inflation.

Read the full story from Phys.org

 

New England waters are teeming with fish species. The problem is we eat too few of them.

June 22, 2022 — Jared Auerbach stands with a box of monkfish livers at his feet. They are pale pink and streaked with blood, each one packed in plastic and nestled on ice.

Behind him on the processing floor at the Boston Fish Pier, an ice machine releases an avalanche of cubes at two-minute intervals. Dozens of gloved and aproned workers mill about, offloading, packing, and filleting. They work with the usual suspects: blue mesh bags of oysters, live scallops, and lobsters with banded claws in plastic crates.

But plenty of other local species fill the floor. There’s the monkfish, of course, plus a box of conch. There are halibut bellies and skate wings and whole black sea bass.

“On our busiest day, we unloaded 376 different boats,” says Auerbach, who founded fish distributor Red’s Best in 2008 to connect fishermen with wholesalers and retailers. He deals that catch around the world — to buyers as close as the Boston Public Market and as far as South Korea.

The shellfish stand a good chance of staying within New England, he says, finding a home at a local restaurant or fish market. But the finfish may still have a long journey ahead of them.

Read the full story at The Boston Globe

Why everyone should eat more ugly seafood

June 13, 2022 — Monkfish are low in calories and fat, packed with vitamins and have dense, firm flesh, which makes them relatively easy to cook. They can be cut into chunks, marinated with egg whites, cornflour and seasonings, then briefly blanched in boiling water. Monkfish tail can even be stir-fried without breaking apart, as more delicate fish tend to do. In fact, there is only one problem with monkfish: they are hideous.

With their bulging eyes and wide mouths lined with rows of sharp teeth, they are nightmarish. In Dutch monkfish are called zeeduivel (“sea-devil”); fishermen who caught them used to throw them back. They are still usually sold without their heads, but the days of chucking them overboard are long gone. Japanese diners love the fatty liver; while Italians may still derisively call them “toad tails”, that does not stop them from eating the fish. Fishermen’s associations have been encouraging others to overcome their aversion and eat more monkfish, as well as other unsightly creatures—the better to ensure more diverse, sustainable fisheries.

Read the full story at The Economist

Bumble Bee targets younger consumers with new marketing campaign

April 13, 2022 — Bumble Bee Seafoods is debuting a “Good For You” advertising campaign designed to “recruit the next generation of tuna lovers by dispelling category perceptions and inspiring new usage ideas,” the San Diego, California, U.S.A.-based company said in a press release.

The company’s new campaign “offers a simple, memorable expression of not only the culinary and nutrition story behind tuna, but also an acknowledgement of the amazing authenticity behind the people who love what tuna does for them.”

Read the full story at SeafoodSource

 

‘There’s no fish that you can’t make delicious’

April 6, 2022 — Walking into Fearless Fish, a small market in Providence specializing in local seafood, is like walking into Tiffany’s. The showcases dazzle the eye.

There’s familiar fare, like Atlantic salmon, haddock, and sea scallops. There’s also a riveting range of fish that are relatively mysterious, curios like scup, butterfish, pollack, Acadian redfish, conger eel, and monkfish. While abundant in our waters, these so-called “underutilized” species — less known to New Englanders, less tasted, less in demand — are often exported to countries that apparently appreciate them much more than we do.

Most of the region’s Atlantic dogfish, for instance, goes to England for fish and chips. “It’s crazy,” said Chris Cronin, the chef at Union Flats Seafood in New Bedford, who prefers “unique” fish to the familiar. “Dogfish is pretty mild, slightly sweet with a flakey texture comparable to haddock. It takes on other flavors, and I like to serve it with citrus notes.”

Since Fearless Fish opened in early 2019, owner Stuart Meltzer’s main aim has been to try and broaden the consumer palate. “We want to help people become more confident, to try new fish,” he said one noontime, as mostly younger customers streamed through the door. The pandemic-driven interest in local foods has been good for sales, he noted, inspiring more daring in home kitchens. Skate piccata? Roasted mackerel with chimichurri? The store’s online recipes and cooking lessons help to demystify lesser-known fish, as does its disclosure of catch site and means. “Fluke, Pt. Judith, dragger.” “Monkfish, Gulf of Maine, dragger.”

“It’s important to me, and shared by customers, that the product is local,” said Meltzer.

Read the full story at the Boston Globe

FDA warns about norovirus-contaminated Canadian oysters in the US

April 5, 2022 — The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is warning about raw oysters from Canada involved in a norovirus outbreak that has sickened nearly 300 Canadians.

Potentially contaminated raw oysters harvested in the south and central parts of Baynes Sound, British Columbia, Canada, were distributed to restaurants and retailers in the U.S. states of California, Colorado, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, Nevada, New York, Oregon, Texas, and Washington, the FDA said in a press release.

Read the full story at SeafoodSource

More plant-based seafood analogs debut in North America

February 11, 2022 — Current Foods’ addition of plant-based tuna and salmon analogs and a new partnership between Above Foods and Umiami represent the latest plant-based seafood analog offerings available in the North American market.

San Francisco, California, U.S.A.-based Current Foods, formerly Kuleana, is rebranding itself as it enters the direct-to-consumer market with sushi-grade, plant-based, and ready-to-eat seafood.

Read the full story at SeafoodSource

 

High School Students Bring Seafood to Low-Income Consumers

January 6, 2022 — Based in Philadelphia, Fishadelphia is a pilot community seafood program that was awarded a Saltonstall-Kennedy (S-K) Grant in 2020. It was designed to connect low-income consumers in Northern Philadelphia with neighboring New Jersey harvesters. This project promotes improved business practices, increased market demand for U.S. commercial fish species, and keeping working waterfronts viable.

Grants are critical to the fishing industry. Traditional funding can be hard to obtain for smaller seafood programs, but that’s where the S-K program can help. These grants help bridge that gap and support projects that are outside of the mainstream lending arena.

Since 1980, the S-K Grants program has helped turn ideas into reality. In 2018, Dr. Talia Young started this project while a Smith Conservation Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton University. Her goal was to connect the fishing communities with the eating communities in the city.

“This is a cool project and one that I’m happy to highlight because it supports community participation that contributes to the promotion of U.S. seafood. This provides fresh seafood to underserved communities, and increases the customer base for our working waterfronts, which aligns with the goals of the S-K grant program,” said Nicole MacDonald, Regional S-K Grant Manager at the Greater Atlantic Regional Fisheries Office.

Take a Closer Look

Fishadelphia in essence is a de facto retail fish market with students running the show. The whole idea is to make new connections by promoting, developing, and marketing local seafood to low-income people of color. The diverse team consists of middle school, high school, and college students, family, teachers, seafood harvesters, and marine biologists. The program is creative and paves the way for expansion. It serves as a model for other communities struggling to incorporate healthy seafood into their diets. It’s not surprising MacDonald thinks that this project is “cool”—because it is.

Read the full story from NOAA Fisheries

How This Hawaiian Fish Went From “Trash” To Sustainable Food Source

December 13, 2021 — On a Sunday afternoon in Honolulu, a school of shoppers swirl around an island of metal and ice covered in freshly caught local fish of all colors and sizes. Between rows of akule, tai snapper, and opelu there are piles of five to six inch long snapper gleaming bright yellow with baby blue stripes, caught off the west coast of O’ahu, called taʻape. The army of workers behind the counter at Brian’s Seafood Market unload more as each stack depletes, topping them with white laminated signs that say, “New Catch” or “Sale.” Some simply say, “Fresh Ta’ape” with different prices attached to denote different sizes. On the backside of the counter workers pass over full bags, freshly scaled and gutted, for customers to bring home to their family or mom-and-pop restaurant to fry whole and serve with chili sauce and shoyu.

Brian’s is only one of a handful of markets, so far, that sell this fish. Taʻape (in Tahitian), also known as blue-striped snapper, was once thought to be a “trash fish” in Hawaiʻi. Some locals would catch or spear these one to two pound reef fish to bring home for dinner, while most fishermen would throw them back. In recent years that stigma has started to shift as conservationists and local chefs began touting taʻape as a sustainable food source.

“Residents and visitors of Hawaii eat a lot of seafood, approximately 12.6 more pounds per capita than the U.S. as a whole,” the University of Hawaiʻi reported. Since taʻape is an invasive species, catching them for consumption provides an opportunity for fishers to help protect reefs, earn income and improve food security. It also offers chefs a delicious, more affordable option for their menus.

The issue with popularizing an unpopular fish however, is that most people do not know enough about it yet to feel comfortable selling or eating it. This is slowly changing as local chefs increase demand and word gets out.

Read the full story at Forbes

Walmart chooses Pacific Island Tuna for its in-house brand

October 6, 2021 — A partnership between the Republic of the Marshall Islands and The Nature Conservancy will supply canned tuna to Walmart stores for the store’s Great Value brand across the United States.

The new joint venture, dubbed Pacific Island Tuna (PIT), is “designed to transform the global canned tuna supply chain,” according to a Nature Conservancy announcement. The new business model is intended to give Pacific islanders the ability to benefit from their tuna resources by directing 100 percent of long-term net profits back to them while utilizing a sustainable model of fishing and production.

Read the full story at SeafoodSource