Saving Seafood

Nutrition

Baked, then boiled: Why one Maine restaurant is sedating lobsters with marijuana smoke

September 20, 2018 — Lobsters in one Maine restaurant go out in a blaze of glory once they hit the pot. The owner of a lobster joint is sedating her crustaceans with marijuana smoke before cooking them — which she says gives them a blissfully humane death.

Charlotte Gill, owner of Charlotte’s Legendary Lobster Pound in Southwest Harbor, told the Portland Press Herald that she had been looking for a way to reduce suffering of her signature menu item. She experimented with blowing marijuana smoke into a tank with one lobster, Roscoe (basically, she hot-boxed him). When Gill returned him to a tank with the other lobsters without his claw bands, she says, he was less aggressive. Gill has a medical marijuana license.

She plans to offer it as an option for customers who want their lobsters to be baked before they’re boiled. But that doesn’t mean the customer will get stoned from their dinner.

“THC breaks down completely by 392 degrees, therefore we will use both steam as well as a heat process that will expose the meat to 420-degree extended temperature, in order to ensure there is no possibility of carry-over effect,” Gill told the Press Herald. So while some might see it as a humane death for the lobster, others might think it’s a waste of perfectly good weed.

Chefs and scientists have long pondered the question of whether lobsters feel pain. Experiments have shown that crustaceans are responsive to stimuli that cause pain, like heat, but it is unclear whether this is a reflex or a pain response from their nervous systems. It’s also unclear whether cannabis has the same pain-relieving effect on lobsters that it has on humans.

Read the full story at The Washington Post

The Eel Deal: This D.C. Restaurant Serves Up Eel From The Chesapeake

September 14, 2018 — Eels are misunderstood. They’re slimy, and look like snakes—which makes it hard for some people to stomach the thought of eating one. But eel season is ramping up at one D.C. restaurant, where the chef serves eels caught in the Chesapeake Bay.

Despite appearances, eels are fish. They breathe through gills and move using two long fins—one down their back, another along their bellies. The two fins meet to form a tail.

At seafood restaurant The Salt Line, chef Kyle Bailey is happy to offer eel to his customers.

“They’re available and I want that because I don’t see them anywhere else in town, and I would love to be the restaurant that has something that nobody else has,” Bailey says.

Bailey’s eels are provided by Dock-to-Dish, a restaurant-supported fishery program in the Washington region. It allows chefs to trace the fish they get back to the dock they came from.

From Kent Island To The Salt Line

The source of Bailey’s eels is Troy Wilkins, one of a couple dozen Maryland watermen who fish for the elusive, yet abundant creatures on a regular basis.

On a recent day, Wilkins sails near Kent Island in the Chesapeake. From the deck of his fishing boat, the Misty Tango, he reels in two-foot-long, cylindrical eel pots one by one.

Several pots come up nearly full. Roughly a dozen greenish-brown eels writhe around inside the pots before he dumps them into a holding tank. Some eels are big, about four or five pounds. Others are much smaller.

Read the full story at DCist

 

How New England’s Jonah Crab Turned From Garbage To Delicacy

September 6, 2018 — The Jonah crab is a medium-sized crab, ranging from brownish to reddish to greyish, boasting big claws tipped with black. During the winter, when most of the year’s crabs are caught along the Atlantic coast from Maine down to Rhode Island, it has an exceedingly hard shell, requiring a hammer or a saw to open. It’s mostly served as a plate of the large claws, with someone else taking care of scoring and cracking them open for the customer.

If this reminds you of Florida’s famed stone crab, which sells for about $30 a pound, you’re on the right track; the two species are very similar in appearance and even flavor. And yet until just a few years ago, the Jonah crab cost about $0.50 a pound. Or it was free. “Lobstermen would pull them up and in most cases have no idea what to do with the things, so they’d usually just throw them back,” says Bryan Holden, a partner at Luke’s Lobster who’s been right at the forefront of the Jonah crab’s transformation. (Luke is his brother.)

Jonah crabs are attracted to the same bait as lobsters, and are equally as flummoxed by lobster traps, so for decades, they were simply a bycatch. Maybe the lobstermen would bring them home themselves, or sell them for basically nothing to the small seafood shacks that spring up along any coast. Until about four years ago, there was no Jonah crab industry: few were processing it, and hardly anyone besides those who make their living from the sea in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Maine had even heard of it.

Read the full story at Modern Farmer

Fish oil pills during pregnancy may lead to stronger, healthier children

September 5, 2018 — Taking fish oil supplements during pregnancy might translate into healthier growth in children during their first six years of life, a new study suggests.

“This study highlights the fact that in utero exposure can have a profound effect on the fetus that lasts through childhood,” said Dr. Jennifer Wu, an obstetrician-gynecologist from Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City.

“For the past decade, the importance of fish oil and the omega-3 fatty acids have been stressed to patients,” explained Wu, who was not involved in the study.

“The use of fish oil in the latter part of the pregnancy has an impact on bone and muscle mass. Though these children are larger, they do not have increased rates of obesity,” Wu added.

In the study, the researchers followed 736 pregnant women in Denmark who took either fish oil or olive oil supplements daily from week 24 of their pregnancy until one week after they gave birth.

Read the full story at United Press International

 

‘Laxative of the sea’ being passed off as premium fish in Canada

August 29, 2018 — Canadian consumers forking out for seafood are not getting what they pay for. What masquerades as sea bass, cod or wild salmon could be a far cheaper catfish, pollock or even a fish dubbed “the laxative of the sea”, according to a national report from advocacy organization Oceana Canada.

That poses a serious risk to consumers’ pockets — and public health.

Roughly 44 per cent of fish were incorrectly labelled, the report found. What’s more, 60 per cent of the roughly 400 samples collected from retailers in Vancouver, Victoria, Toronto, Ottawa and Halifax were found to carry potential health risks.

Instead of butterfish, consumers have been eating escolar — an oily fish that has been called “the laxative of the sea” and can cause diarrhea, vomiting and other stomach problems — which is banned in several countries, such as Japan, South Korea and Italy. Escolar was also a substitute for white tuna.

This, researchers say, is rampant seafood fraud, defined as any activity that misrepresents the seafood being purchased.

Read the full story at The Star Vancouver

High seas fisheries play limited role in feeding the world

August 14, 2018 — A recent study undertaken by a team of fisheries and social scientists found that fishing fleets operating outside of national waters contributed to less than 3 per cent of the world’s seafood supply.

Scientists from Dalhousie University, New York University and National Geographic paired a global database of marine catches developed by researchers at the University of British Colombia with a seafood trade database maintained by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation. They analysed the data, considering the amount of fish and marine invertebrates produced by marine capture fisheries and comparing it to those produced by freshwater fisheries and aquaculture.

The team found that a much lower volume of seafood was produced by the high seas fisheries, with most of the catch destined for upscale EU, US and Asian markets. China and Taiwan account for one-third of the total high seas catch.

Lead author Laurenne Schiller, PhD student at Dalhousie University said: “I think many people have the misconception that because the area is so large, the high seas must be contributing a massive supply of food to the world, but that’s just not the case. Only a handful of countries are fishing in the high seas and the fish they catch are not feeding those most in need”.

The findings of this study are against the common misconception that high seas fisheries are important for food security. Less than 40 species are targeted by fisheries in the high seas, and only one species, the Antarctic toothfish, is exclusively caught in this are of the ocean. Marketed as Chilean sea bass, this fish can easily sell for over $50 per kilogram.

Read the full story at New Food

The History of Atlantic Sea Scallops

August 13, 2018 — When it comes to shellfish, oysters get all the glory. It’s understandable, since they’ve played a significant role in the history of cuisine. But scallops? Those beautiful bivalves are a bit of a culinary mystery.

Despite their current popularity, you might be surprised to learn that scallops were often more prized for their aesthetically-pleasing shells than the rich, sweet flavor of their meat. But these days, it seems like almost every fine dining establishment with seafood on the menu has its own take on them, from ceviche to pan-seared to provencal. What’s more, East Coast scallop fisheries are positively booming.

But it hasn’t always been this way.

Underappreciated Treasures of the Deep

As you may know, the earliest settlers in what we now know as New England had access to a bounty of seafood. From fish to eel to a wide variety of shellfish, they had their pick of oceanic delights. By the time the Pilgrims arrived on the shores of Cape Cod in the 1600s, Europeans had been fishing for cod on nearby George’s Bank (a.k.a. St. George’s Bank) for well over a century.

Wild Atlantic scallops, which grew prodigiously in those cold northern waters, were also inevitably harvested for food. However, they weren’t considered highly desirable. Food historian Sandy Oliver, author of “Saltwater Foodways” and “Maine Home Cooking,” explains, “Scallops and mussels…ranked far below oysters, clams, and lobsters. Since scallops have a funny sweet taste, it didn’t line up with what people liked back then.”

But tastes change, and an appreciation for scallops in the U.S. gradually increased throughout the 19th century. One of the earliest known written recipes for cooking scallops, which called for lightly sauteeing or stewing them, was published in 1846 in “Miss Beecher’s Domestic Receipt Book.” Over the following decades, recipes for fried, boiled, steamed, stuffed, and pickled scallops began to appear more often in cookbooks. By the 1920s-30s, they had become a regular part of the American diet, especially in coastal communities.

By the mid-20th century, dishes like Coquille St. Jacques, which features scallops served in the shell with butter, cream, cheese, shallots, and herbs, appeared on the menus of French restaurants in cities nationwide. Meanwhile, fried scallops could often be found (and still can) at seaside clam shacks and other casual dining spots.

Read the full story at Chowhound

For Infants With Rare And Scary Disorder, FDA Approval Of Fish Oil Could Be Life Saving

August 7, 2018 — The following is excerpted from a story published by WGBH:

The FDA approved a drug last month that provides nutrition to children born with a scary condition. That approval is the result of 16 years of work by doctors and researchers at Children’s Hospital in Boston.

When Gib Brogan’s daughter Ellie was born, he says at first everything seemed perfect. But things changed quickly.

“Soon after she was born, early, early one morning, she got very ill. She started vomiting dark green,” Brogan said.

Ellie was rushed to the neonatal ICU, where doctors quickly realized something was very wrong.

“They told us she had short bowel syndrome. She was missing 90 percent of her small intestine and 30 percent of her large intestine,” Brogan said.

The NIH says short bowel syndrome affects about three out of every million people. Ellie had surgery to connect her intestines, but there wasn’t enough there to really work right.

“On that first day the surgeon told us that she can be fed by I.V., but there is a bit of a race that comes when you feed an infant through an I.V.,” Brogan said.

That race is to get them eating regularly as soon as possible. Because while you can feed newborns through an I.V, over an extended period of time, the fat that they’re given, which comes from soybean oil, can damage their livers, meaning they’ll likely need a transplant.

By the time Ellie was transferred to Boston Children’s Hospital, at just a few weeks old, she already had the yellowed skin and eyes of jaundice — a sign of liver damage.

“And one day we were sitting at Children’s and a doctor knocked on the door and he came in and said, ‘My name is Dr. Mark Puder. I have something I’d like to talk to you about,'” Brogan remembered.

“And I approached the family,” Puder said, “because we had developed something in the laboratory that we’d already given to some patients and had reversed that liver injury.”

“He sat down and he told us that there were a little over 20 kids that they tried using fish oil with,” Brogan said, “and that in that limited number of kids they had seen great things with their livers — that the damage had not progressed, and in some cases it had cleared up.”

The Brogans agreed to be part of the trial. And it worked.

Read and listen to the full story at WGBH

It’s Summertime – And New England’s Seafood Shacks Are Now Open

July 16, 2018 — We may be biased, but there is no better destination for summer road trips than the New England coast. The scenery is gorgeous and the seafood is at its prime, so locals and tourists alike pack in cars in search of the quintessential summer shack experience! Take note that reservations and fancy pants aren’t required for this journey, just a little bit of patience (for the inevitable traffic) and a passion for getting your hands on some of the best seafood around.

Below is by no means a comprehensive list, just a little something to get your mouth watering, and your seafood road trips started! So pack up the car – those lobster rolls are waiting for you.

Chauncey Creek Lobster Pier, located in Kittery, will enliven your senses. From the moment you step out of your car and smell the salty air, to when you finally set in to devouring your seafood platter, you feel as if you caught your food yourself and are eating it on a boat floating down the eponymous creek.

The picnic tables -on a deck located directly on Chauncey Creek- offer a variety of seating, from completely covered to full sunshine. And it’s a BYOB establishment, so you’ll often see people tables with coolers full of food and drinks they’ve brought to enjoy in addition to their heaping plates of steamers and lobster.

Read the full story at WGBH

Fish Oil May Protect the Youngest Hearts

June 8, 2018 — Omega-3 fatty acids — good fats found in fish — can boost the heart health of adults, but a new study suggests that babies might also stand to benefit from them.

In the study from Australia, infants were given a daily fish oil supplement or a placebo from birth to 6 months. When they were 5 years old, researchers found that the children who had been given fish oil had smaller waists than the youngsters who were given a placebo. A larger waist circumference is a known risk factor for heart disease, according to the American Heart Association.

The researchers also found that boys given fish oil supplements in infancy had less circulating insulin in their bodies and less resistance to insulin when they were 5, though the study could only show an association between the two. Insulin is a hormone that carries sugars from the foods you eat into your cells to be used as fuel. Insulin resistance and higher levels of insulin play a role in the development of type 2 diabetes.

“It seems that using fish oil could help decrease waist circumference, which by itself, is a major cardiometabolic risk factor. But we can’t say for sure yet whether this will last,” said pediatric endocrinologist Dr. Siham Accacha. She was not involved in the study, but reviewed its findings.

“I’m also not sure why the insulin findings were only in boys. At age 5, there are no pubertal hormones, but obviously there was something there,” said Accacha, director of the pediatric diabetes program at NYU Winthrop Hospital in Mineola, N.Y.

Read the full story at U.S. News