Local coop revitalizes seafood demand and quality

This week on the Local Food Report….LISTEN TO THE FULL STORY.

Viki: Up next, the Local Food Report with Elspeth Hay. This week—a local seafood cooperative in Chatham. 

For decades now, we’ve been hearing about the broken nature of our New England seafood industry. As fisherman Brett Tolley of Harwich explains: 

Brett: So much of what we catch gets shipped or exported thousands of miles away. And so much of we eat locally comes from thousands of miles away. And it’s not unique to this area, it’s sort of a pattern around the entire United States. 

The average seafood consumed in the U.S. travels more than 5,000 miles from boat to plate. And these days, a lot of us know this. We’ve been hearing for years about the local species we should be eating—the ones boats here are actually landing—and there’ve been a host of cooking classes and dinners trying to get eaters excited about species like monkfish, dogfish, and black seabass. Yet for years now, it seems like very little has been changing. 

Brett: We've been catching our most abundant fish for decades and the bulk of it is not staying local, we don't get paid a fair price. And there's this vicious cycle where the quality of that fish does go down. 

The quality goes down because when fishing boats don’t get paid well for fish, they aren’t able to properly take care of it. Take dogfish, for example. 

Brett: Right now it costs more to have ice on your boat than it does what we're getting paid for dogfish at the docks. And so it's a disincentive to even put ice on the boat, right? And this has been happening for a long time. If you go down to the Chatham Fish Pier, you'll often see dogfish being landed with no ice, it's been sitting out in the sun and the quality just tanks immediately. 99.9% of all that fish is going toward an export market. And at the same time it's like one of the biggest like dis-marketing or like anti-marking programs for dogfish when people go down and see it.

Brett got sick of watching this happen again and again. So his family and a group of four other Chatham fishing families decided to try to break the cycle by forming a coop and selling their seafood directly to Cape Cod consumers through fish shares, schools, fish markets and grocery stores, including one where I often shop—the Wellfleet Marketplace. 

Brett: As you can see this is our display freezer area with some of our packs. We have black sea bass, monkfish burgers, smoked mackerel, skate wings, and then today we're dropping off some more monkfish medallions some mackerel filets which we're really excited about and some smoked bluefish. 

The coop also sells local bluefin tuna, scallops, and scup—and all the fish is frozen. Brett says deciding to invest in flash freezing technology was a tough decision, but one he thinks has been critical to helping both cooks and markets try new fish species, because it takes away the time pressure. 

Brett: I think for us what feels like the sweet spot that we're hitting on to help solve some of that, that big problem is that we are able to do two things at once, help create like a community support system to help educate folks for how to cook, about the fish, where it got caught, who caught it. And combine that with easy access to get the fish. 

This access really matters. I will admit that as someone who’s known about how important it is to eat our local under-loved fish species for a long time, I’m just now finding myself buying and cooking it regularly—not because I wasn’t willing to before, but because now is the first time it’s been convenient. Brett says he and the other fishing families that make up the Chatham Harvesters Seafood Coop are hearing this from a lot of locals, and that it feels really good to finally be feeding their own community. 

Brett: Kinda goes back to that like the story of so much of our catch leaving and going far far away serves in a way to make our fishermen or fishing families invisible a little bit, we’ve been “invisibilized” the way that the seafood supply chain has been operating and so there’s I think an emotional quality that we're feeling. As fishermen, as fishing families, that to have somebody locally express gratitude and say, thank you for this catch, it goes a long ways. 

For CAI’s Local Food Report, I’m Elspeth Hay.