May 1, 2013 — UMass Dartmouth students sampled four seafood species often described as under-appreciated by conservation groups and which a Plymouth company is trying to bring into university dining halls.
"They're fish (that) consumers should know more. They've never really been marketed here," said Keith Flett, founder and CEO of Open Ocean Trading, a Plymouth firm hoping to bring "focus fish" — Flett does not like the more colloquial term "trash fish" — into university and school dining halls.
The species — pollock, hake, redfish and dogfish were featured at Tuesday's taste test — are popular overseas in many cases but still lag behind cod and haddock in the U.S. But as cod quotas take a beating and prices rise on other fish, advocates think it's time for a cultural shift toward lesser-eaten species.
"Fishermen haven't had to rely on these lesser-known species to support their businesses" in the past, said Tim Fitzgerald, who directs the Environmental Defense Fund's sustainable fisheries program.
Fitzgerald called the alternative species a potential "economic windfall" for fishermen besieged by falling quotas for staple fish, noting that quotas for redfish or dogfish are higher than those for cod or haddock.
Read the full story at the New Bedford Standard-Times