Other News Archives - Saving Seafood

Dead & Company Raise More Than $1 Million at Backyard Benefit For Oceana

July 10, 2018 — The following is excerpted from a story originally published in Billboard, covering a charity concert hosted by Dead & Company, a collaborative effort between remaining Grateful Dead members and John Mayer.

On Saturday night (July 7), Dead & Company played to 30,000 fans at Los Angeles’ Dodger Stadium. Less than 24 hours later, they played to 200 equally passionate fans at a backyard benefit Sunday night (July 8) high in the Hollywood Hills for Oceana, an environmental organization dedicated to preserving the world’s oceans.

“Going from a stadium to a house party is a very interesting dynamic, but the point is a musician is privileged to be a musician and musicians should give back that privilege,” said drummer Mickey Hart immediately after Dead & Co.’s 65-minute show. “In general, you gotta defend the treasures. One of them is the oceans and you have to defend it however you can. You have to fight the evil that’s in the White House now with everything you have. So any night I can raise a million dollars is a good night.”

To be more precise, the evening, dubbed “Rock Under the Stars,” raised more than $1.1 million and drew more than 120 Deadheads from all over the world, who paid $5,000 each to see the former members of the Grateful Dead play their smallest gig in decades, as well as actors Jeff Goldblum, Ed Begley Jr. and Dean Norris, actress Kelly Lynch, Academy Award-nominated composer Thomas Newman, film producer Roger Birnbaum, producer/screenwriter Mitch Glazer, and the band’s attorney Eric Greenspan, who promoted a Grateful Dead show when he was in college in the ‘70s.

“We get asked to do a million of these things,” Cahill said, adding that “Rock Under the Stars” was Dead & Co.’s first private charity event since forming in 2015. In addition to the Grateful Dead’s Hart, guitarist Bob Weir and drummer Bill Kreutzmann, Dead & Company includes guitarist John Mayer, bassist Oteil Burbridge and keyboardist Jeff Chimenti. “They’ve very focused on the health of our oceans,” Cahill continued. “Bill lives in Hawaii, Bob lives on the water. Oceana really resonated with them.”

“We don’t do that many [benefits],” especially house parties. It seemed like the right thing to do at the right time. The oceans are really in need,” Hart said, adding that Dead & Co. have voter registration booths at every show and through that effort, the notoriously philanthropic band hopes to register thousands of people for the 2018 mid-term elections and beyond. “We’ve been registering people at every show for years,” he said. “The kids, everybody, just have to realize how important it is. You’ve got to get up off your asses and pull that lever.”

Read the full story at Billboard

Bob Jones to retire from Southeastern Fisheries Association after five decades

June 28, 2018 — Bob Jones, the longtime executive director of the Southeastern Fisheries Association (SFA), will retire at the end of 2018, the Gulf Seafood Foundation announced.

Jones’ career serving Gulf of Mexico fisheries in the United States has spanned five decades, beginning when he was a boy growing up in Florida gillnetting for shrimp. As a teenager, Jones worked in St. Augustine on a shrimp boat and as a live bait fisherman – stations that would eventually inspire him to hone his fishing industry chops by traveling across the southeast region of the United States to meet with fishermen and wholesalers.

Jones reportedly “knew it all” back in 1964, when he was first hired by the Southeastern Fisheries Association. His story changed drastically, however, as he spent more time with the organization, he said, getting to know the harvesters, packers, processors, distributors, and restaurants committed to preserving the fisheries resources around the Gulf and beyond.

During Jones’ storied tenure leading the Southeastern Fisheries Association – a non-profit fisheries trade association focused on defending, protecting, and enhancing the commercial fishing industry in the southeastern United States – he spearheaded an influential red snapper tagging program in the South Atlantic and lead the Florida Seafood Marketing program (funded through a self-imposed fee on wholesale seafood dealers and fishermen) to success, keeping king and Spanish mackerel available to the market and establishing the Tortugas shrimp nursery off of Key West.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

2018 Seafood Expo Global broke attendance and exhibitor records

June 15, 2018 — Diversified Communications, the producer of Seafood Expo Global and Seafood Processing Global, announced on Thursday, 14 June that its 2018 edition of the event set attendance and exhibitor records.

SEG/SPG took place 24 to 26 April, 2018, in Brussels, Belgium, and the largest ever in the event’s 26-year history, Diversified reported. A total of 29,130 buyers and sellers were in attendance from 152 countries, while 1,946 exhibiting companies from 78 countries showcased their seafood products, equipment, and services at the expo. The total exhibitor space occupied in the Brussels Expo exhibit space was 39,322 net square meters, including 72 national and regional pavilions.

“It is incredible to see this event growing year over year,” Diversified Communications Group Vice President Liz Plizga said. “Not only have we expanded the event in terms of exhibit space, but we again reached a record high in the number of visitors who came to the event. This shows the ongoing importance of the business value that both buyers and suppliers in the global seafood industry find in this event.”

Read the full story at Seafood Source

There’s Something Fishy About U.S.-Canada Trade Wars

June 15, 2018 — If U.S. politicians’ love affair with tariffs seems novel, it’s really the latest installment in an on-again, off-again romance. And it’s one that has been much more passionate in the past. In the decades after the Civil War, the “tariff question” was the biggest issue in American elections. On everything from wool to sugar, the U.S. government slapped steep fees on goods passing through its borders. These tariffs protected domestic industry and paid the government’s bills.

But sometimes tariffs also led to trade wars with America’s neighbor to the north. Today, America and Canada fight over dairy and aluminum. In the late 19th century, they fought over frozen herring—and these trade wars meant real violence. When T. Aubrey Byrne alighted from his train in Gloucester, Massachusetts, on the last day of 1894, he stepped into the middle of one such war.

Depending on who you asked, Byrne was either the Treasury’s best special agent, a man who had saved the government fortunes by uncovering massive smuggling rings—or he was a failed ranch hand and ex-newspaperman, a paranoiac who saw fraud in others’ honest toil. But his superiors at Treasury approved of the job he’d done breaking up operations to illicitly import sugar and Chinese laborers. Now Byrne sniffed another conspiracy: a plot by merchants and captains in Gloucester, the capital of New England fishing, to avoid taxes on fish from Newfoundland.

Every winter, a fleet from Gloucester sailed to the island—still a British colony—to fill their holds with frozen herring. At less than a cent apiece, herring would be eaten by humans or used as bait for the more lucrative cod and halibut fisheries. Starting with one entrepreneurial vessel in 1855, by the 1890s almost 100 ships each year went to Newfoundland from Gloucester. And each year tens of millions of spawning herring swam into the bay only to sail out of it.

Read the full story at The Atlantic

McDonald’s Came Out With A Card Game Based On The Filet-O-Fish

June 13, 2018 — Love it or hate it, the Filet-O-Fish is one of McDonald’s most recognizable items. Kanye West raps about it, President Trump eats two of them at a time, and now, there’s a card game devoted to it. McDonald’s released ‘Reel It In’ online this week, and the purpose is way more noble than you might think.

The kids’ game was created to teach kids about sustainable fishing practices, as well as highlight McDonald’s environmental efforts. According to the company, every single Filet-O-Fish sandwich is made with Marine Stewardship Council-certified wild-caught Alaska pollock.

What that means is that during the catch process, the fishery McDonald’s sources from avoids catching fish that aren’t the desired type (this is called bycatch). The fishery also makes use of the entire fish for other purposes so that there is zero waste.

Read the full story at Delish

Southeastern Fisheries Association Executive Director Bob Jones Retiring At the End of 2018

June 11, 2018 — SEAFOOD NEWS — Bob Jones, Executive Director of the Southeastern Fisheries Association, is stepping down after 54 years leading the organization. SFA confirmed that Jones will be retiring at the end of 2018.

Jones served as an original member of the Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council in 1976, serving as vice-chairman from 1976-1980, and chairman in 1981. In addition, he also served on the U.S. State Department’s Ocean Affairs Advisory Committee when the Magnuson-Stevens was created. He celebrated his 50 years working with SFA in May 2014.

“On behalf of the Board of Directors, I want to thank Bob for his open and honest interactions in the seafood industry over the past 54 years,” SFA President Peter Jarvis said in a statement. “Under Bob’s leadership, SFA has maintained respect for seeking the truth and presenting the facts. We are deeply grateful to Bob for his contributions to the fishing industry and his love of the Rule of Law.”

According to SFA, Jones “plans to stay involved with the seafood industry in the area of food safety, consumer fraud and promoting equal access to the nation’s fisheries for non-fishermen, especially seniors.”

SFA’s Board of Directors is currently searching for qualified candidates to becomes the next Executive Director. Jones will continue to lead SFA during this transition.

How Do You Move a Shark? Very Carefully.

May 16, 2018 — In the open ocean, the sand tiger shark has been known to migrate more than 1,500 miles.

Moving a shark 100 yards across a construction site at the New York Aquarium to its gleaming new home is a different kind of undertaking altogether: an elaborately choreographed production requiring cranes, trucks, canvas slings and people in wet suits willing to grapple with animals with big scary teeth.

As a misty drizzle fell on Coney Island last Thursday morning, the shark movers gathered for a final safety meeting.

A senior animal keeper, Nicole Ethier, gave out marching orders like a football coach diagraming a complicated play. “Shane and Geoff, you guys will turn around and block the shark,” she said. “If the shark gets spooked and takes off, you’re going to have to start blocking.”

Geoff Gersh, a volunteer diver, was unruffled. He had encountered sharks while diving in the Bahamas. “As long as you don’t agitate it or give it any reason to feel threatened, they don’t want anything to do with you,” he said.

Minutes later, he and his colleagues stood in formation in shin-deep water in a tank of slowly circling sharks: sand tigers, sandbar sharks and a nurse shark. Some of them were nearly 9 feet long. All of them were agitated and had reason to feel threatened.

Read the full story at the New York Times

Orange is the New Black for Gulf Fishermen

April 17, 2018 — In the fashion world “orange is the new black,” but for the Gulf seafood industry “orange” is helping those affected by hurricanes the previous year, and others, put their businesses back into the “black.”

The Gulf Seafood Foundation’s orange “Helping Hands” gloves are starting to appear everywhere across the Gulf of Mexico. The gloves are turing up on shrimpers, oystermen, crabbers, processors, James Beard Award winning chefs, politicians and seafood aficionados determined to keep Gulf seafood on the plates across America, and around the world.

“It’s a simple concept,” said Gulf Seafood Foundation Chairman Jim Gossen. “A mere $5.00 buys a pair of work gloves used every day in the seafood industry. The organization continues to distribute the first 900 pair, and a second order is in the works. Every dollar we collect in donations goes to buying these gloves.”

Read the full story at Gulf Seafood News

New Film Highlights Fishing Industry from Fishermen’s Point of View

April 4, 2018 — “The family fishermen are going the way of family farmers,” says one man interviewed in “Dead in the Water,” the new documentary film by Southern California filmmaker David Wittkower showing at Harbor Theater in Boothbay Harbor on Monday, April 9. Shot in New England coastal towns, the film chronicles the struggles of New England fishermen to remain viable in an age of what some might deem excessive federal regulation of the ground-fishing industry.

“It’s a film from the point of view of the fishermen,” Wittkower said in a recent phone interview from his home in Woodland Hills, Calif. “The government regulations have been so tight on fishermen … that they can’t make a living anymore.

“I wanted to show this industry from the human side.”

Increased regulations have driven up costs for fishermen so much that “a three-man boat went down to a one-man boat,” he said. “The amount of work that one man has to do is amazing.”

Running a one-man boat in the ocean can be dangerous. “In the film, someone says that 87 percent of fishermen in the U.S. are suffering from PTSD,” said Wittkower.

“This film opens the door for the world to see how difficult and dangerous the life of a fisherman is. On top of that, the impact of misguided federal regulations on fishermen has never been presented as powerfully as it is in ‘Dead in the Water,’” said John Bell, the former mayor of Gloucester, Mass., in a recent press release for the movie.

“Dead in the Water” was released last November in Rockport, Mass., Wittkower’s hometown, and has since shown in other Massachusetts coastal towns – Cape Cod, New Bedford, and Gloucester, whose declining fishing industry is chronicled in the film.

Read the full story at the Lincoln County News

Pic of author in front of ship fuels fish oil photo flap

March 26, 2018 — REEDVILLE, Va. — A group that works with commercial fishermen is questioning why an author posed for a picture while sitting on a jet ski near a vessel in the Chesapeake Bay, rather than ask to come on board.

Paul Greenberg has written a new book, “The Omega Principle,” about omega-3 fatty acids. He tweeted the picture Friday in front of a vessel used by Omega Protein, the Atlantic’s largest menhaden harvester. Menhaden are small fish used for omega-3 fish oil supplements.

D.C.-based group Saving Seafood works with Omega and other harvesters on government and public relations. It says there was no reason for Greenberg to “endanger himself or the crew.”

Read the full story at the San Francisco Chronicle