Saving Seafood

Meet the Star of Sushi-Con: A 400-Pound Tuna

September 30, 2024 — “It’s coming! It’s coming!” someone yelled. It was before dawn on a recent Sunday, and a dozen men in matching navy-blue T-shirts were waiting by a loading dock in Manhattan for the headliner of Sushi-Con, which bills itself as the largest expo of Japanese cuisine in the United States.

A truck backed into the brightly lit bay. The rear doors opened and a white Styrofoam box appeared, roughly the shape of a coffin and nearly as wide as the truck itself. Written at one end was the word “head.” Inside was a 399-pound bluefin tuna, a fish that when prepared as sushi can be among the most expensive forms of seafood in the world.

Sangsu Choe, a manager at True World Foods, a wholesaler of sushi-related products and a co-sponsor of the event, began waving his arms and directing. “Take it easy! Don’t rush,” he yelled as the men tried to move the box with a manual forklift. Several times, the white container, now more than six feet in the air, teetered and appeared close to crashing to the ground. Everyone shouted and laid their hands on it to steady it.

The eagerly awaited fish had left Barcelona on Friday morning packed in ice. It spent a night and a day in a New Jersey warehouse before arriving at the Metropolitan Pavilion in Chelsea, the site of the $120-a-ticket event.

Part trade show and part consumer-facing forum, the event has taken place four times since 2018. This was the first year it had been branded Sushi-Con. True World Foods was sponsoring it with Noble Fresh Cart, a start-up developing a direct-to-consumer delivery service for sushi-grade fish. The all-you-can-eat event featured over 50 vendors offering samples of their fish and other products. Though the cuisine is Japanese, the fish came from all over the world.

But only one was the star of the “Ultimate Tuna Cutting Show,” the main event where the bluefin tuna, roughly the size of a torpedo and with shimmering silver scales, would be carved up and served to the gathered attendees.

Read the full article at The New York Times

A Restaurant’s Sales Pitch: Know Your Lobster

August 25, 2016 — It was a steamy summer day in New York in 2009 when Luke Holden, an investment banker, had a craving for a lobster roll. Not just any lobster roll, though. He longed for the “fresh off the docks” taste he enjoyed growing up in Cape Elizabeth, Me.

After an exhaustive search on New York’s streets, he came up dissatisfied and disappointed.

“Every lobster was served over a white tablecloth, extremely expensive, drowning in mayo and diluted with celery,” he said. “I wondered why all the great chefs in this city had screwed this up so badly.”

So that year, Mr. Holden decided to open an authentic Maine lobster shack in Manhattan. To replicate that fresh taste that he remembered, he would need to oversee, track and, where possible, own every step in the process.

Today, he owns 19 Luke’s Lobster restaurants, two food trucks and a lobster tail cart in the United States, and five shacks in Japan.

He holds an ownership stake in a co-op of Maine fishermen, which allows him to track where and how the lobsters are caught, and control the quality, freshness and pricing. He also owns the processing plant, Cape Seafood, that packages and prepares the lobsters for his restaurants.

“We’re able to trace every pound of seafood we serve back to the harbor where it was sustainably caught and to support fishermen we know and trust,” Mr. Holden said. “There’s no middleman in that whole chain.”

This might seem obsessive. But in business, it’s called a vertical integration strategy.

Read the full story at The New York Times

Waters Surrounding New York City Contain At Least 165 Million Plastic Particles — Making Its Way Into the Food Supply

February 13, 2016 — The waterways surrounding New York City are a soup of plastic, ranging from discarded takeout containers down to tiny beads that end up in the food supply, according to a new report by an environmental group.

The study, by the group NY/NJ Baykeeper, estimated there are at least 165 million plastic particles floating in New York Harbor and nearby waters at any given time.

The report was based on samples collected by trawlers that plied the city’s East River, the mouth of the Hudson River and New Jersey’s Passaic River and Raritan Bay between March and August 2015.

The average concentration of plastics was 256,322 particles per square kilometer, according to the report.

To maybe nobody’s surprise, the highest concentration, 556,484 particles per square kilometer, was found in New York City’s East River, which separates Manhattan from Brooklyn and Queens and is known for its floating filth.

“It just goes to show you big problems need big solutions,” said Sandra Meola, a spokeswoman for Baykeeper.

The New York-New Jersey study was modeled on a pioneering study of the Great Lakes conducted by Sherri Mason, a chemistry professor at the State University of New York in Fredonia.

That study found plastics pollution in all five lakes, with the highest concentration in Lakes Erie and Ontario, which are ringed by urban centers and industry.

Read the full story at the New York Daily News

Trader Joe’s tuna fish cans are underfilled: lawsuit

January 5, 2016 — Fish lovers have slapped Trader Joe’s with a class-action lawsuit accusing the grocery store of “cheating” customers by not filling their 5-ounce cans of tuna all the way.

The lawsuit, filed Tuesday in Manhattan federal court, says tests by a US government lab found that the cans of various Trader Joe’s tuna brands actually contain less than 3 ounces of the fish and that “every lot tested, and nearly every single can, was underfilled in violation of the federally mandated minimum standard of fill.”

One test found that 24 cans of Trader Joe’s Albacore Tuna in Water Half Salt contained, on average, just 2.43 ounces of pressed cake tuna — 24.8 percent below 3.23 ounces, the federally mandated minimum standard of fill.

Read the full story at the New York Post