June 25, 2014 — Why the locavore movement’s next big step is seafood.
When conscientious omnivores swept the U.S. food scene with their locavore antics, the focus was largely on the land. But if local beets and beef are key for our farming system, surely our neighborhood oysters can do as much or more for our coasts, health, and appetites. That is, if we can learn to love them: While putting away more than 100 pounds of red meat and poultry a year, the average American only manages to swallow about 15 pounds of seafood.
It wasn’t always this way, says writer and proficient pescavore Paul Greenberg. Greenberg is the author of the acclaimed Four Fish, a look at four key food fish – tuna, salmon, cod, and seabass – as well as a new book, American Catch, out this week from Penguin Press.
“A lot of people have had really bad fish experiences — and if you have a bad fish experience, chances are you’re not going to eat fish again,” Greenberg told Grist. In American Catch, Greenberg sets out to wake Americans up to the incredible wealth of local seafood that we export, undervalue, undermine, pollute, or otherwise ignore, while chowing down on tasteless tilapia or all-you-can-eat shrimp from farms in Asia. Something like 86 percent of America’s seafood intake is imported (most of that is farmed), while we send away most of our own wild-caught fish. For a country with 94,000 miles of coast, that’s literally crazy.
Greenberg builds his argument around a trio of American seafoods — New York’s bygone oysters, Louisiana’s at-risk shrimp, and Alaska’s pristine sockeye salmon — as the ghosts of seafood past, present, and future come to reckon with us seafood Scrooges. Who knows? Maybe tomorrow we’ll all feast snout-to-tail on red snapper.
Read the full story at Grist.org