For Author Paul Greenberg – So Much Ocean, So Little Domestic Fish

Paul Greenberg

According to author Paul Greenberg, Americans only eat about 15 pounds of seafood per year, half of the global average. Photo: Ed Lallo/Newsroom Ink

by Ed Lallo/Gulf Seafood News

Fish Frying

Americans want our seafood cheap and easy. Photo: Ed Lallo/Newsroom Ink

According to author Paul Greenberg, Americans only eat about 15 pounds of seafood per year, half of the global average. While other countries are willing to pay top dollar, he says “Americans want our seafood cheap and easy”.  At a recent event held on the shores of Lake Pontchartrain, The James Beard Award winning author of “Four Fish” set down with Gulf Seafood News to discuss seafood, especially Gulf Seafood.

Sponsored by the Walton Family Foundation, the regular contributor to the New York Times was at New Orleans’s Bucktown docks to draw attention to the new partnership between the dock’s fishermen and two Louisiana Sea Grant web portals facilitating the direct retail purchase of seafood, Louisiana Direct Seafood and Southshore Direct Seafood.

Greenberg’s new book, “American Catch“, tells the story of three U.S. fisheries; New York oysters, Alaska salmon and Gulf of Mexico shrimp.

American Consumer

“This country controls 2.8 billion acres of ocean, more ocean than any country on earth. Yet more than 85 percent of our seafood is imported,” he explained. “I wanted to write a book that looked at why this is happening what is happening to our local resources.”

Family Seafood

How seafood is supplied to consumers has changed drastically. As recently as 50 years ago seafood bought by consumers was wild, today half of what is eaten in the U.S. is farmed. Photo: Ed Lallo/Newsroom Ink

“Here in the Gulf we still have a healthy population of shrimp, but they are subject to price completion from products coming from overseas,” he explained. “I think it is important that consumers understand that there is a difference between a wild well managed fishery, and a farmed product.”

How seafood is supplied to consumers has changed drastically. As recently as 50 years ago seafood bought by consumers was wild, today half of what is eaten in the U.S. is farmed. Greenberg says he is not against aquaculture, but if a local wild caught product is available we should eat it and employ American fishermen while doing it, especially in the Gulf.

The author emphasizes that American seafood has been taken out of the hands of the experts and put into the hands of the traders. Fish markets have been banished from the center of our cities and sequestered to a corner of our supermarkets. “This process aids in all of the facelessness and commodification of seafood,” he said.

Bycatch

For every pound of wild shrimp caught in the United States, two pounds of bycatch—seafood caught unintentionally— is sent back to the sea.

Bucktown_098

One solution to bycatch is simply to eat it. “Flounder, black drum, and blue crab—all delicious catch often snatched by shrimping nets, thrown overboard and wasted,” Greenberg said. Photo: Ed Lallo/Newsroom Ink

“We should be eating all of the bycatch that’s coming out of the shrimp industry,” Greenberg said. “Bycatch is something fishery managers need to address. Over the course of the last 20 years we have brought bycatch numbers down due to better net technology. There are fishermen out there like Louisiana’s Lance Nacio who watches his numbers very carefully.”

One solution to bycatch is simply to eat it. “We should be eating all of the bycatch that’s coming out of the shrimp industry. Flounder, black drum, and blue crab—all delicious catch often snatched by shrimping nets, thrown overboard and wasted,” he said.

Greenberg strongly believes there are creative solutions for bycatch. He praises the efforts of Jim Gossen at Sysco Louisiana Seafood, a board member of the Gulf Seafood Institute, who has started a total catch program where bycatch is brought to market. “Not to long ago black drum, one of the most popular fish being served on white tablecloth restaurants across the US, was considered bycatch,” he said.

He sees an importance in educating chefs on the possibilities it has for customers that look for dishes beyond traditional fish.

“At a recent dinner at Mia’s in Providence, RI we served a single shrimp on a plate ringed around by bycatch,” he said. “In the hands a creative chef, that plentiful bycatch is nutritious and delicious.”

Most Popular Seafood

According the to best selling author, the top six seafood’s consumed in America are:

  1. Shrimp – Americans consume more shrimp than tuna and salmon combined
  2. Canned Tuna
  3. Salmon
  4. Alaska Pollock
  5. Tilapia
  6. Panasius Catfish
Greenberg4

Greenberg feels imported seafood has made our country “food insecure”. Photo: Ed Lallo/Newsroom Ink

Greenberg feels imported seafood has made our country “food insecure”, especially the offshoring of butchering and packaging work to other countries.

“One of the reason we have these mainline species like tuna, like salmon, is because the butchering skills of processors has shrunk,” he explained. “They know how to deal with just a certain number of carcasses efficiently. We have to adapt both technologically with our cutting skills, but we also have to adapt culinary attitude to accept things as they are. You are never going to make a croaker into a codfish. It is what it is.”

According to the New York author, while Americans wring their hands about sustainability, other nations are surging ahead by insisting upon whole fresh fish, “fish that is actually quite fishy”.

American and Gulf Seafood

Greenberg agrees that one of the major obstacles to American’s eating more seafood, including Gulf seafood, is cost, especially for the every growing number of financially strapped lower and middle class.

Greenberg3

Bucktown_023 Greenberg realizes that Gulf seafood has been under intense pressure and scrutiny since the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill. Photo: Ed Lallo/Newsroom Ink

“We have to be open to alternative species that can come in at a lower costs, especially some of these bycatch species,” Greenberg said. “We have a fish in the Northeast called the sea robin, now rebranded as the Atlantic gurnard. This is a trash fish. It is a perfectly good fish that goes for pennies on the pound. It is about widening the American pallet, embracing a lot of fish that we are not used to and being prepared to pay the price when we want higher end species.”

Greenberg realizes that Gulf seafood has been under intense pressure and scrutiny since the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill, especially the oyster industry.

“I know the oyster situation somewhat in the Gulf,” he said. “I was in Louisiana in 2011 and saw the fresh water inundation ordered by the governor. I am not sure if it kept the oil off, but it sure did kill a lot of oysters. We are in a rebuilding phase, and need to take some of the pressure off of wild stocks. I think the purposed Gulf mega hatchery is a good idea.”

He cites a similar situation on the east coast with the Connecticut based New England Shellfish Co-operative. “It has been a major engine for reseeding oyster farms all up and down the east coast. Natural reproduction is great, but at some point it doesn’t hurt to give Mother Nature a boost. The spat is going to help to reseed some of these wild reefs,” he explained.

Bucktown_023

Like the rejuvenated waters of Lake Pontchartrain and the docks at Bucktown, Greenberg believes the U.S. and Gulf fishing industries can also undergo rejuvenation. Photo: Ed Lallo/Newsroom Ink

Gulf oysters also are a good poster child for the “great war” that exists in this country between ‘land food’ and “sea food”. Oysters represent clean water, where you have oysters you have clean water.

“A lot of fresh water is getting syphoned off for municipal use, but also for agriculture,” Greenberg explained about oysters in Apalachicola Bay that are failing to reproduce because of lack of fresh water flowing into the bay. “We need to stop giving land food such a privileged position. We need to think more holistically to get more seafood into our diet, and sometimes that means doing things like letting Apalachicola get enough fresh water to keep viable fisheries like oyster beds. This is a really great nutritious product, not to mention what it does to your love life.”

He feels seafood is a good thing to have in a diet to replace a lot of the land food that is often filled with GMO’s and herbicides, especially when it comes to pregnant moms and their newborns.

“It is true that mothers and children need to watch their mercury consumption but it is important to remember that mercury is not a poison, it is a dosage issue. There are numerous fish out there that is safe for pregnant moms and young children, like herring, Gulf shrimp, anchovies, Gulf oysters, Gulf tuna and mussels. It is one thing to mess around with your own health, but no one wants to mess around with the health of a child,” he said.

Like the rejuvenated waters of Lake Pontchartrain and the docks at Bucktown, Greenberg believes the U.S. and Gulf fishing industries can also undergo rejuvenation. The key, “Buy local. Pay the money, it is going to support your local fisherman,” he said.

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About the Author

About the Author: Ed Lallo is the editor of Gulf Seafood News and CEO of Newsroom Ink, an online brand journalism agency. He is also owner of Lallo Photography based in Chapel Hill, NC. .

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