September 1, 2022 — Jared Auerbach reached into a pile of long, skinny razor clams, pulled one out and cracked it open.
Uh oh, I thought.
We were only 20 minutes into the interview and I had already eaten two raw scallops. They were delicious, like butter. But I was sure I’d soon be doubled over with food poisoning.
“I didn’t know you could eat razor clams,” I said. “How do you eat them?”
“What do you think my answer is going to be?” said Auerbach, gleefully slicing clam meat with his shucking knife. “Raw!”
He offered the knife, a flap of clam flesh dangling off the blade.
I ate it. It tasted like the ocean. (And no, I didn’t get sick.)
Following Auerbach through the packing floor of his seafood company, Red’s Best, is like chasing a kid through a candy shop — albeit a candy shop with buckets of monkfish livers, trays of squid tentacles and 50-pound bags of scallop meat.
Headquartered on Boston’s Fish Pier, Red’s Best buys more than 10 million pounds of seafood directly from hundreds of local fishermen every year, Auerbach said. The company supplies seafood to Harvard, Brown and UConn, as well as Beth Israel Hospital and Rhode Island public schools.
The morning I visited, I saw locally caught pollock, halibut and tuna. There were soft-shell clams, blood clams, razor clams and surf clams. They had black sea bass, Boston mackerel and other seafood that I had never, ever seen in a local grocery store.
That’s weird, right?
In my neighborhood big-chain grocery stores, I’ve seen fish from New Zealand, Thailand, Indonesia, Norway, Canada, Chile, China, Columbia and even Idaho. Hardly anything comes from local waters except shellfish.
That’s because American grocery stores sell mostly cheap, familiar fish.
“People are buying crappy fish, and they’re trying to force feed it to their kids. Like old, icky fish that doesn’t have any taste,” said Melissa Marshall, who runs Cape Ann Fresh Catch, a community supported fishery in Gloucester.
What does this mean for people in New England who want to eat local, climate-friendly, “not-crappy” fish? Let’s dive in.
The Numbers Tell A Story
- Americans eat about 19 pounds of seafood per capita each year.
- The majority of fish we eat is shrimp, salmon and canned tuna.
- The largest fishery in the U.S., by volume and value, is Alaska (worth $1.7 billion), but Massachusetts ranks second in value ($679 million) and Maine is third ($578 million).
- New Bedford, Massachusetts, has the highest valued catch of any single port in the country: $451 million. That’s thanks to sea scallops, which account for 84% of the value.
- Despite this bounty, between 70 to 85% of the seafood eaten in the U.S. is imported. And when it comes to shrimp, more than 90% is imported. (More about imported fish later.)
- The bright side: More than half of U.S. consumers say they’re willing to pay more for sustainable seafood.