Your expert guide to sustainable seafood is here! Get ready to feel the salt spray, and tuck into a wide-ranging conversation about what's on your plate and the future of our ocean.
Seafood has been called our "last wild food." Humans have been enjoying seafood for a long time—over 2 million years. But in recent decades, how we catch and eat fish and shellfish has changed dramatically.
Even though it might not always seem like it when we are digging into a Po'Boy with so much fried shrimp that they’re falling out the ends—our oceans are not the endless bounty we once thought they were. The UN reports that 94% of global fish stocks are overfished. So if we want to keep loving our seafood and making sure there are still shrimpers, fishers, and oyster harvesters able to make a living along our coast, then we’ve got to think about sustainability.
We talk about the future of fish with one of the foremost seafood and ocean sustainability experts in the country, Paul Greenberg. And, Chef Jim Smith of the Hummingbird Way in Mobile gets us hungry to help save our seafood explaining how to eat it sustainably.
You'll find more about Paul Greenberg here, with links to his books, including his new release, A Third Term.
For more about Chef Jim Smith and his sustainability efforts, check out The Hummingbird Way. And check out our bonus episode with the extended interview with Jim.
This episode was hosted and reported by Carlyle Calhoun Despeaux and cohosted by Halle Parker. Johanna Zorn edited this episode. Our sound designer is Emily Jankowski and our theme music is by Jon Batiste. Our managing producer is Carlyle Calhoun Despeaux.
Sea Change is a WWNO and WRKF production. We are part of the NPR Podcast Network and distributed by PRX. To help others find our podcast, please hit subscribe wherever you get your podcasts!
Sea Change is made possible with major support from the Gulf Research Program of the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. WWNO’s Coastal Desk is supported by the Walton Family Foundation, the Meraux Foundation, and the Greater New Orleans Foundation.
You can reach the Sea Change team at seachange@wwno.org.
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TRANSCRIPT
CARLYLE: There are so many reasons I love October.
HALLE: Yeah me too. Halloween, pumpkin carving, if you’re a football fan, Saints are back.
CARLYLE: Totally…I can get down with gorging on Reese’s cups and Who Dat!…but my reasons are really all the seafood. October is perhaps THE BEST month for eating seafood on the Gulf Coast. Just ask Chef Jim Smith of Mobile’s The Humminbird Way Oyster Bar And because he was crowned King of American Seafood, he knows what he’s talking about.
October is a great time for one: the waters definitely begin to cool, which always helps out oysters. the fish that's available right now is, is awesome. (moving into these fall months, it’s really a great time to find seafood.)
CARLYLE: And another thing about October - it’s also National Seafood Month - just in time for gumbo weather..
we're doing a barracuda gumbo right now, which is a lot of fun. We're hitting the end of okra season, but you know, we're loaded with oysters, shrimp and barracuda as well as crab.
HALLE: If you’re a Sea Change listener, you probably know we’re blessed with shrimp here on the Gulf Coast – Almost three-quarters of shrimp caught in the US comes from the Gulf of Mexico. And - at the risk of making our listeners elsewhere envious - it’s not just one kind of shrimp either.
you know, I love the sort of the cleanliness of a white shrimp when they're in season, especially when it's sort of when you get those great roe shrimp. But the brown shrimp are currently really great. We're getting really big, uh, brown shrimp. if you're looking for the kind of shrimp that's a little bit more like a lobster, the, the, the royal reds are great.
CARLYLE: And then there’s our oysters…
wild oysters are great. It's awesome when we have them. Uh, you know, the farmed oysters are incredible and sort of the new frontier.
HALLE: But even though it might not always seem like it when we are digging into a po boy with so much fried shrimp that they’re falling out the ends…our oceans are not the endless bounty we once thought they were.
The UN reports that 94% of global fish stocks are overfished. So if we want to keep loving our seafood and making sure there are still shrimpers and fishers and oyster harvesters able to make a living along our coast, then we’ve got to think about sustainability.
CARLYLE: And I talked with Jim Smith not only because I wanted to hear about all the delicious dishes he’s cooking up, but also because he is a leading voice on seafood sustainability and travels the country talking about it. He's the national spokesperson for American Sustainable Seafood, Gulf Seafood,and even for NOAA the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
you know, humans, we don't always make the best decisions in protecting the stuff that we should care about. And that's a problem. And you know, it's up to people to be good stewards and to care about those conservation efforts.
HALLE: His restaurant, The Hummingbird Way, won the James Beard Smart Catch Leader Award. Which means it ranks as one of the nation’s top restaurants when it comes to serving environmentally sustainable seafood.
CARLYLE He cares deeply about the health of the ocean And he also has that southern quality of welcoming everyone into the conversation about why sustainability is important.
And. You know, I often talk to people all over the South and, you know, I'm not trying to sound like, like, like some hippie telling you to go hug trees, I'm just saying that, like, if you want to have, if you want to have, be able to tong those wild oysters next year, maybe you better cut back this year.
HALLE: In honor of National Seafood Month, today we are digging in. Sustainably of course.
I’m Halle Parker
And I’m Carlyle Calhoun and you're listening to Sea Change.
HALLE: Coming up, Carlyle talks with one of the foremost seafood and ocean sustainability experts in the country: Paul Greenberg. He’s written several books about how we catch and eat our seafood including Four Fish and the American Catch.
So sit back, feel the salt spray, and get ready to tuck into a far-ranging conversation about what's on your plate and the future of our ocean.
INTERVIEW
CARLYLE: One of the leading writers and thinkers on ocean sustainability and seafood is Paul Greenberg. He's the author of books including American Catch and the, he's the author of books including the American, he's the author of, he's the author of books including American Catch and the Omega Principle and the James Beard award-winning bestseller Four Fish.
Paul, you've spent your career dedicated to understanding our connection to the oceans through seafood. You've traveled the world researching, you've written a bunch of books about it. You even spent an entire year eating seafood for breakfast, lunch and dinner as an experiment. What got you interested in fish and seafood generally?
PAUL: Well, I think like a lot of people in your area, it really was fishing that drew me to it. sport fishing. I guess, you know, when I started to see my own personal fishing impacted, that's when I started looking at the fishing industry itself and try to understand what our place was and all that.
CARLYLE: you mean you were catching less fish, you were seeing things change just in the time since you'd started fishing?
PAUL: For sure. So I was born in 67, the ‘70s were really a period where you started to see more and more impacts from foreign fleets fishing in American waters. And this became more and more of a problem until, the Magnuson-Stevens Act. was passed and, also at the same time the United Nations Convention of the Law of the Sea, which created a lot of restrictions on foreign fleets.
So that was a real turning point, um, but up until then I certainly saw fish going down. year by year, and, you know, it was really depressing. So, that was something that I personally wanted to see if we could fix, and that's what probably led to my initial writing about the ocean.
CARLYLE: I guess if we can go back even further into history, how has our relationship with seafood and how we eat seafood changed, let's say, over the last hundred years or so in this country?
PAUL: Yeah. Well, a big, big shift has been, you know, a hundred years ago, everything we ate from the sea was wild. And in the last few years, um, we've reached the point where more than half of what we're eating from the sea is farmed. So that's really an epical, epical shift. Um, the other thing is that, our seafood has become much more globalized.
Even though the United States controls more ocean than almost any other country on Earth, more than 80 percent of our seafood is imported. I think a hundred years ago, it's fair to say, that if you were eating seafood in the United States, probably most of it was American caught. Um, you probably had it caught locally.
The other thing that's really driving things is, the conversion of the seafood market from local fish markets to supermarkets. So 50 or 60 years ago, most fish, I think something like 70 or 80 percent of all the fish sold were sold in local fish markets. And 20 to 30% in supermarkets. Now 80% of seafood we're eating is coming from supermarkets. A lot of it's coming in frozen. A lot of it's coming from abroad. So it is just a completely different kind of customer, uh, provider relationship that we're dealing with right now.
CARLYLE: And it's something I think about all the time, even in New Orleans, surrounded by one of the world's great estuaries. And, you know, Louisiana is the nation's second top seafood producer. It's still hard to find a fresh seafood market in the city.
PAUL: Yep. Sure is. Um, I remember when I was doing a lot more reporting down in Orleans, so many, people complaining to me that they were getting farmed shrimp in Louisiana restaurants, farmed catfish, certainly, and even worse, not catfish, not even catfish, um, Pangasius catfish from Vietnam, really, you know, came into this country in full swing in the in the 90s and really displaced a lot of local catfish farmers.
So it's just all these things that you would think should be endemic to Louisiana all have their sort of mirrored product in a farmed form that is oftentimes from abroad.
CARLYLE: Something that I think is really interesting that you've written about is that over 80 percent of the seafood we're eating in this country we're importing. But we're also still catching a lot of seafood here in the U. S. And we're a top 10 exporter of seafood. So can you explain why we're both importing and at the same time exporting so much seafood?
PAUL: Yeah, it's true. About anywhere from 30 to 40 percent of our seafood we do export that we catch here. And generally speaking, it seems like most of what we're exporting is wild. Um, and most of what we're importing is farmed. Um, there's a few reasons for that. One of them is that in this country, we just don't do a lot of, uh, aquaculture. We're something like 14th or 15th in the world in terms of overall tonnage of farmed seafood produced, that's lower than Myanmar, um, which, you know, you would think that we would be able to outdo Myanmar, but we don't.
The other thing is that even though we as a country have a pretty high seafood footprint in terms of the total amount of tons of seafood that we eat as a country. Individually, we don't eat a lot of seafood. the average American eats between 17 and 19 pounds of seafood per person per year. that's compared with 200 pounds of land food meat, chicken, mostly, uh, beef, pork, and so forth.
Whereas other countries, really eat a lot more per capita and really value seafood a lot more. I think. In France, you're talking about 60, 70 pounds of seafood per person per year. Some Asian countries, well over a hundred pounds. And, you know, you think about it when your primary protein is of a certain nature, you pay attention to it.
So I think in this country, where one of our primary proteins is beef, you know, there's a lot of talk of what is an Angus beef, is it free range, da, da, da, da. We, we, we think about it. 17, 19 pounds is not enough to really make you think about it and not enough to make you care about it that much. So that really, oftentimes we're just chasing low prices.
And if you want low prices, that's where you're going to get the imported farm stuff is going to sort of fit the bill, so to speak.
CARLYLE: And this is what a lot of your book, American Catch, The Fight for Local Seafood, is all about. Can you talk about what is the fight for local seafood? Who's fighting and what are they fighting against?
PAUL: Yeah, it's a good question. Um, I think a big fight is the local fishermen, fisher person themselves, to be recognized as not just lumped into some sort of vast commodity stream, but to be recognized for the fact that a, They're, they're going after a wild product, which is unique and B that it's expensive to do this. you know, if you're going to go out to sea in a small boat and catch fish for local market, that's a lot of responsibility on your shoulders, a lot of financial responsibility on your shoulders. So then turn around and, put it into the market. and for people to be able to recognize that it is, represents a different set of qualities than say a farm tilapia, that's a big struggle.
You know, tilapias, I'm sure you see in the supermarket, you know, 7, 8, 9 a pound. But then when you go to, you know, a proper seafood market, a good seafood market, and you look at what wild fish costs, it's almost always over 10 a pound. and sometimes can be over 20 pounds. So it's really, it's really a hard thing to do.
And you know, the other thing is that even though seafood is quite expensive, the X vessel price. can often be quite low. In other words, the price the fisherman gets in their hands. The average piece of seafood changes hands something like seven to eight times before it goes from hook to plate. And, um, in the process, of course, everyone takes their cut.
But I remember when I was reporting on the Alaska salmon industry, which is, you know, one of the biggest and healthiest seafood sectors that we have. But the X vessel price for beautiful, delicious sockeye salmon was something like 90 cents a pound was going to the fisherman. Yeah, which, and then you eventually see it in the supermarket for 15 dollars a pound. So, a lot of that fight is for how can a fisherman hold on to that value, and fight against this, commodities chain frankly would like to take money out of their pocket?
CARLYLE: yeah, I mean, so they're fighting on a lot of different playing fields in a huge system. And so I read this a lot. That we as a United States are one of the most sustainably managed fisheries in the world.
Are there bright spots where local fishers and fisheries are doing well? And then examples of, you know, even in one of the most sustainably fished countries, areas that need work?
PAUL: You know, from a sustainability point of view, you're quite right that this country is often pointed out as having some of the better fisheries management regimes out there. And, you know, from a, from a, just a sheer sustainability point of view, us is in pretty good shape. Is the American fishermen in good shape? Not necessarily. And that's the issue.
CARLYLE: and this is not to mention climate change.
PAUL: Yeah. And that is certainly wrecking, if not havoc, then disorder with the normal flow of the seasons. You know, there's a fish that we eat in the mid-Atlantic called a black sea bass. which, you know, it's a big commercial species in the mid-Atlantic. and in the south to some degree, not in the Gulf, but in the Carolinas and so forth.
That fish is starting to move into what had previously been waters that were too cold. So we're starting to see black sea bass turn up in Maine lobster traps. Meanwhile, fishermen in the state of Maine don't really have any black sea bass quotas to speak of. So what do you do? How do you rejigger the system so that when fish are on the move, people who are actually encountering those fish have an opportunity to catch them and make some money off of them.
CARLYLE: Maybe you should set the stage a little bit for like, what are the big things going on that worry you about overfishing in the state of our oceans now in relationship to how we eat seafood?
PAUL: I think that we, you know, as a world, and not just our country, The last 70 years have just seen a huge, ramping up of fishing effort. So between World War II and the present, we've quintupled the amount of fish and shellfish we take from the sea every year. That's dramatic.and while we've fixed some of the problems in this country, you can't really draw national borders around fish in many cases. So things like tuna, which do come into our waters, but also spend a lot of time in international waters and other countries, those are a big concern.
And I first, you know, started kind of becoming aware of the plight of tuna when I worked on my book for fish. Um, and it's only gotten worse as far as I can tell. So, you know, that simple can of tuna that we think of as the cheap sandwich, um, there's a lot of wrong that goes into that, Um, you know, slavery, I see slavery as one of the things that's Many things that goes on. uh, I, illegal fishing is going on a fair bit. but that's, to me, it's, um, I think the next big frontier for fish is going to be what's going on in international waters.
But you know, going back to our country and our, our immediate issues, I do think that while we've saw, you know, I remember when I was working on my documentary, the fish on my plate, I remember interviewing Carl Safina, who's really leading ocean conservationists. And we were saying how, looking at the issues around overfishing now through the lens of climate change, overfishing just seems kind of quaint, because you know, you just, it's relatively simple to control.
You just. don't fish so much, and you fish in smarter ways, and you use all the available science. But climate change is just this moving blob that things just seem to get worse and worse. And, There's no immediate fix. It's, it's such a multi-pronged fix that is required. So that certainly gives me pause for concern.
CARLYLE: Absolutely. And maybe that's why it's nice sometimes to look at these bright spots And like you said, we can make such a difference if we stop fishing a species for a period of time or set better limits. The fish can rebound. And, you know, another thing you brought up was that during the pandemic, seeing nature rebound when we gave it the chance to is something hopeful. So, if we can just expand policies to allow that to happen..
PAUL: Yeah. One thing I mean that I'm encouraged was that finally, you know, in the wake of the BP oil spill that a settlement was reached and money has been going into building more marsh and hopefully building up what is really the nursery of shrimp and so many different fish in the Gulf.
So that to me is a potential bright spot. I don't think we've got the science yet to confirm that we've turned a corner on on some of those things, but that I'm certainly glad to see people focused on it. And frankly that's kind of why I decided to write American Catch, because I wanted to talk about the fact that when you become so divorced from your seafood system, you stop caring about the ecosystems that are required to support this kind of thing.
I always remember flying over the salmon country of Bristol Bay, Alaska, and just seeing the amount, sheer amount of land, that had to be devoted to streams and river systems to support what is an epic amount of salmon. And likewise, when you look at all the. shrimp that come out of the gulf that doesn't come from nowhere it comes from this vast network of salt marsh and without that sort of breeding ground and rearing ground then we can't expect to keep having as much shrimp as we're as we currently have so fingers crossed that But that intervention will be good for all of us in the end.
CARLYLE: Something that I've, something that I've been wanting to ask you, and I'm sure you get this all the time. I love seafood and, you know, I want to be on the good side. I want to eat sustainably. But it's confusing. You know, I've got the little cheat sheet guide on my phone that says what kind of seafood you should avoid and what you should eat. So then I'll switch from one fish to another and then read that now that's not a good choice anymore.
So how do you choose what seafood to eat? Do you still eat seafood? And how can we as individuals do the right thing for the planet, but also the people fishing and harvesting seafood who are doing it right? How can we support them too,
PAUL: Yeah. I mean, I do eat seafood. and my personal choices are largely because I live where I live and, um, if I were to live in the Gulf, I would probably have a different approach, um, because I do think being connected to whatever your local ecosystem can produce is generally a good idea. And, and in the Gulf of Mexico, I was always encouraged by some of the direct consumer things that the LSU Ag Extension and trying to get people to buy shrimp directly from the shrimpers. I think that's a really good plan. you know, I do think that generally if you have a choice of, eating foreign seafood or domestic seafood, I tend to favor the domestic, and, you know, again, a healthy dose of your clams, mussels, and oysters. I think that that is an underserved, portion of the seafood sector and really has nothing but good, generally speaking, coming out of it.
CARLYLE: You mentioned that about half of what we're eating is farmed now, and there's all kinds of issues there with loss of coastal mangroves and just the carbon emissions of transporting all of that to us. And then in some countries, the regulations aren't as strong, so you have issues like antibiotics used in a lot of these farms.
But at the same time, we're all eating more seafood. We can't support the world's demand with wild caught, right? So, can aquaculture be a solution? Can it be good for our health? Can it be good for the planet? Like, what's the best case scenario for how we should eat seafood going forward if Paul Greenberg can make the rules?
PAUL: Well, I mean, as I say, clams, mussels, and oysters farmed are fine. And, uh, we should definitely eat more of those. Um, for fin fish aquaculture to work, a big part of it is trying to get the sector to move away from what are called reduction fisheries.
So, as I mentioned. anchovies, and a lot of the smaller, what are called clupeid fish, get caught in the wild and ground up and fed to other fish. That, as a percentage of what goes into fish feed, has been going down, but I think it could go down even further and perhaps be eliminated. There are a lot of interesting technologies being developed, like using black soldier fly larvae that feed actually on food waste, and using those as fish feed, that to me would be a great solution.
The bigger, more complicated question that is never easy to, parse is where do you put these farms? one of the reasons we have so little aquaculture in this country is states have generally refused to allow permitting of open water aquaculture facilities because they've, they fear huge amounts of waste coming off these farms.
They're worrying about escapes, all these kinds of things. So now the latest, thing that the government, the federal government is trying to do is have start off aquaculture outside of state waters in federal waters. That could potentially be a solution. It's very controversial. Um, you know, the old adage from the Clean Water Act is, the solution to pollution is dilution.
And, uh, the idea being that if you were to farm fish in very deep water with fast currents, that perhaps it wouldn't be as, um, impactful on coastal ecosystems, but the jury's out on that. So, I don't have a hard and fast fix for you on this one. I'd say, let's get rid of the fish in the feed. let's make sure that zoning and siting of farms is done tha takes into account their full ecosystem impact. there are just, some people want to farm fish on land. that's very energy intensive. Every single one of the operations that I've ever interviewed has gone out of business. The ones that are farmed on land. So, it's a work in progress. And then, of course, there's all these people out there trying to do cell based aquaculture, where they're actually going to grow fish meat in a lab, or plant based seafood.
Those, that's another thing. I've personally, on my own podcast called FishDoc, that I did last year, we actually did a taste test comparison, where we looked at farmed shrimp, wild shrimp, and then a vegan shrimp. that's made out of a kind of a Konjac powder which is like from an asian crop. Um, so, you know And the results were? And the results were well, uh, you know, it wasn't disgusting the vegan shrimp.
It was kind of interesting it had something like a shrimp like texture Um, but it wasn't shrimp, but it was interesting as a food product.
CARLYLE: I'm not sure that should be their tagline. “Something like a shrimp-like texture.”
So, last question, has there been anything you found in your research that surprised you or that you hadn't previously been thinking about?
PAUL: Well, I think that it's particularly relevant to the Louisiana example that along with local fisheries, we're also losing local fisheries infrastructure. I remember one fisherman I spoke with said you see Fish houses, you know, processing houses getting gutted and turned into hotels all the time, but you never hear of a hotel getting turned into a fish house.
So there's a whole infrastructure involved with having a healthy seafood economy, and that we can't just let the sort of gentrification of our coasts proceed without understanding that this is having a real effect on our ability to feed ourselves. So I guess there's that, and to understand that Oftentimes, fishermen are a lot more in touch with the ecosystem than the people who buy fish, and while they have certainly, there are certainly problems with the way fish are exploited, it's important to remember that there's a lot of ecological knowledge in the fishing community and that if we want to have healthy fisheries that we need to involve fishermen, um, in the thinking through of not only how to set limits on the amount of fish that we catch, but how do we protect our coast?
How do we protect against gentrification?how do we keep the water clean? And, you know, by and large, it's not fishermen polluting the water. It's, uh, land dwellers, agriculture, all these kinds of things. So, Trying to think the thing, the whole system more holistically, where fishermen are a part of that whole.
CARLYLE: Well, Paul Greenberg, thanks so much for talking with Sea Change.
PAUL: My pleasure, Carlyle.
OUTRO
Thanks for listening to Sea Change. This episode was hosted by Carlyle Calhoun and me, Halle Parker with Editing help from Johanna Zorn. Carlyle Calhoun is our managing producer. Our sound designer is Emily Jankowski and our theme music is by Jon Batiste.
If you want to hear more of our conversation with Chef Jim Smith of Mobile’s The Hummingbird Way, check out the bonus episode in our feed!
If you’d like to support Sea Change, please share it with a friend! You can find us wherever you get your podcasts.
Sea Change is a WWNO and WRKF production. We're a part of the NPR Podcast Network and distributed by PRX. Sea Change is made possible with major support from the Gulf Research Program of the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.
WWNO's Coastal Desk is supported by the Walton Family Foundation, the Meraux Foundation the Greater New Orleans Foundation. We'll be back in two weeks!
