February 19, 2020 — For some home cooks, fish can be intimidating, expensive, easy to overcook, and polarizing. That might explain why the average American consumed just 16 pounds of seafood in 2017, compared to 92 pounds of chicken and 57 pounds of beef.
But former South Philly science teacher and Princeton post-doc fellow Talia Young sees fish differently. While she has devoted much of her academic career to studying fish, fisheries, and food supply chains, she’s also a lifelong consumer of seafood; as a Chinese American kid growing up in New York City, she routinely ate jellyfish, whole fish, shrimp, and crab.
“In my experience in working-class communities,” she says, “it’s a thing that people eat even if they’re really cash-strapped.”
So Young was surprised at a 2016 fisheries conference when a fisherman stood up and said to the crowd, “‘Americans only know how to eat cod and salmon fillets, and we need to teach them how to eat other kinds of fish.’”