Q&A with Paul Greenberg: 'seafood is not software'

In a wonderful new book called American Catch: The Fight for Our Local Seafood, journalist Paul Greenberg explores how and why Americans stopped eating our own seafood by telling the stories of three iconic American seafoods: eastern oysters, gulf shrimp, and Alaskan salmon.

Noting that fish and shellfish are today widely recognized by physicians as vital to our health, Greenberg writes:

By all rights this most healthy of food should be an American mainstay. The United States controls more ocean than any other country on earth. Our seafood-producing territory covers 2.8bn acres, more than twice as much real estate as we have set aside for landfood.

But in spite of our billions of acres of ocean, our 94,000 miles of coast, our 3.5m miles of rivers, a full 91% of the seafood Americans eat comes from abroad.

..It gets fishier still. While 91% of the seafood Americans eat is foreign, a third of the seafood that Americans catch gets sold to foreigners. By and large the fish and shellfish we are sending abroad are wild while the seafood we are importing is very often farmed.

...American consumers suffer from a deficit of American fish, but someone out there somewhere is eating our lunch.

Well, sure, but someone out there is also driving our cars, burning our oil and flying in our planes. Why shouldn’t we buy and sell seafood on global markets, too? And what does this mean for sustainability? To find out, I interviewed Paul Greenberg by email.

What’s wrong with the globalization of seafood? America imports many things (electronics, textiles, coffee, bananas) and exports others (cars, airplanes, software).

Seafood is not software. It represents ecological infrastructure, the underpinnings of a healthy environment. There needs to be, in my opinion, a positive feedback loop between clean healthy environments and clean healthy food.

Let’s take shellfish for example. Americans used to harvest about 2bn pounds of oysters per year. That’s when our nearshore was clean enough to eat from. Contrast that today where the oyster industry is at 14% of historical capacity. We still eat a lot of shellfish but now it’s shrimp not oysters, 90% of which are imported mostly from Asia.

As an American mussel producer put it to me things like oysters and mussels are the “economic argument for clean water.” If we developed a robust appetite for local mussels and oysters we would de facto have to develop a robust economic valuation for clean water.

Are we even more disconnected from the sources of our seafood than we are from everything else we eat? Should big retailers like Whole Foods and Walmart pay more attention to "local" in their seafood sustainability policies?

PG: Because our seafood supply is so internationalized with so much swapping back and forth and vast Asian processing hubs in the middle, I do believe we have less of an idea of where our seafood comes from than other foods out there. A fair portion of our Alaska salmon gets caught in Alaska, frozen, sent to China, defrosted, filleted and boned, refrozen and sent back to us twice frozen. Along the way there is so much opportunity for mixing up fish supplies. So yes, “local” is important.

But before we can even get to local, let’s at least try to get to “domestic.” Let’s clearly label fish and shellfish in the marketplace.

Let’s also try to address the funky labelling that happens to fish once it’s processed. A fish caught in China and processed in the US gets sold as a “product of the US.” Conversely a fish caught in the US and processed in China is a "product of China." And by the way, this whole “process our fish in China and get back" thing? I’d like to see less of that. I mean, do we really want to mix up our food supply with a country that executed its food and drug administration director because he took bribes that led to the tainting of the food supply?

Plus, as you write, there’s no need to import so much seafood. We used to grow and eat vast quantities of Eastern oysters. How is the effort to bring them back to New York coming along?

It’s made some real leaps in the last year. A key player in the book and in the effort is the New York Harbor School. Recently they launched something called the “Billion Oyster" project. You’re probably familiar with the "Million Trees" project. This is the same concept only underwater. In any case, using an oyster nursery on Governor’s Island as its center the school is gradually seeding oysters throughout the New York Bight. They hope to have a billion oysters in the water by 2035. They’ve already got a million in there. It might just work.

Is this example of what you call the “relocalization” of seafood? What do you mean by that, and why does it matter?

It means shortening the supply chain. The average distance a piece of imported seafood travels is over 5000 miles. In the process every time that seafood changes hands (and it changes hands a lot) a portion of value is transferred from the fisherman to the middleman.

If we could create supply chains that more directly connect fishermen to coastal communities I believe fishermen would make a better living, wouldn’t have to fish so hard to make ends meet and in the process might be more invested in protecting their nearby environment.

A great example of this is sea scallops. New England sea scallops have made a tremendous recovery in the last 20 years thanks to better management. New Bedford, Massachusetts is now the most profitable seaport in America. But a lot of that profit is going abroad with all the scallops we send to Asia.

Imagine how much more money could stay in New Bedford if we could get some of that value to fishermen through direct purchases?

I should note, by the way, that while we send a lot of wild sea scallops abroad, about half of the bay scallops (a different class of animals) we eat are farmed and come from China. And in a final twist to the fluted scallop story, a lot of the original seed stock for those scallops grown in China originally came from Martha’s Vineyard.

How are projects like the Delcambre Direct Seafood in Louisiana and the Iliamna Fish Company in Alaska trying to reconnect eaters with fishermen?

What we’re talking about here are what are called “community supported fisheries.” In the Iliamna model (which is the more usual case - you can find more at www.localcatch.org) people can buy a share in the catch before the fishing season starts. This gives fishermen some start up capital which, as in community supported agriculture coops, is key to launching a successful season.

You the consumer share some of the risks (if the harvest doesn’t pan out as anticipated you may take a hit in the fish you take home) but that strikes me as fair. Fishing is risky.

In the Delcambre Direct model, the idea is that a bunch of shrimpers in the Gulf are in touch with their communities via computer or mobile device while still at sea. They can message their community from the boat to let them know what’s coming in fresh that day. In short it kind of turns the whole idea of “catch of the day” into something that fits into today’s concept of a social network.

Do you think models like these are scalable?

They are scaleable community by community. Delcambre Direct worked in Delcambre and spawned several spinoffs in other communities around Louisiana. I think today there’s Vermillion Bay Direct and a couple others.

But to some degree maybe we don't want to scale it all too much. Maybe seafood should be small and local. The fact that the Darden Restaurant group is selling Red Lobster (just reported this week) may be an indication that the commodity model for seafood may have run its course.

What else worries you about imported seafood? Food safety? Just this week, I read again that the FDA inspects less than 2% of the seafood shipped from abroad. Environmental impact? You write in the book about the problems with shrimp farming in Vietnam. Social impact? The Guardian has reported that Asian slave labor has been deployed to produce prawns for buyers in the US and Europe.

The biggest problem with imported seafood is that there are so many small producers that it is simply impossible to inspect them all. Like everywhere there are good growers and bad growers and when you speak with the different certifying organizations they will assure you that the particular standard they have is sound and sustainable.

But it is spot checking at best, in my opinion. There need to be many many more inspectors on the ground.

Although, as you write, Americans have an “uneasy relationship with aquaculture,”, is properly managed US aquaculture part of the solution to our seafood deficit?

I believe it is. But let me qualify that. First, let’s try to figure out how we can keep as much US wild-caught seafood here. Once we’ve figured out that, if we still have a seafood deficit, then let’s address it accordingly.

Seeing as we export over 3bn pounds of seafood, I’m not convinced our seafood deficit is as dire as it’s portrayed.

After we count everything up if we still have a deficit, then yes, let’s address it with sound aquaculture. But let’s start from the bottom up and make mussels, clams, oysters and edible seaweeds the cornerstone from which we build our program. Because if you put a lot more shellfish in the water, evidence suggests that this will be good for other kinds of seafood too. Fish love hanging around shellfish. Some research suggests that the presence of an oyster reef can double the fish-carrying capacity of a stretch of bottom.

To me this seems like a win-win situation. More delicious shellfish to eat and more habitat for other fish we love.