Be True to Your School: Local Seafood is Worth Seeking Out—All Year Round
Photos by Adam DeTour / Styled by Catrine Kelty
Eating locally has long been my mantra. Eggs, meats and even vegetables raised nearby are now readily obtainable most of the year, and I seek them out. So why, when the ocean is literally down the hill from my house, is it sometimes so difficult to find local fish?
There are fish in the local seas even in winter—haddock, hake, monkfish, scup, several types of flounder and sole, black bass, mackerel, skate and some cod as well as an abundance of scallops, clams, mussels and other shellfish. But, as Tim Fitzgerald of the Environmental Defense Fund says, 50 to 60% of all seafood eaten in the United States is the “Big Three”—salmon, tuna and shrimp.
Local shellfish is abundant in Northeast markets, but local finfish can be rare, or at least difficult to identify as local in groceries. Beyond that, while most home cooks know by now how to cook salmon or shrimp, there’s sometimes little information on cooking lesser-known fish. Checking out area groceries was illustrative: On a recent weekday, the seafood case in a natural foods chain—one that concentrates on marine sustainability and traceability—had only one fish marked as local, haddock, alongside many species from other parts of the US, plus sea bream shipped from New Zealand and branzino from Greece. On another day, a big regional grocer’s fish and shellfish on display had country-of-origin labels—but except for a couple marked “USA,” they were mostly from Colombia, Iceland, China, Indonesia or elsewhere. When I asked the man behind the counter for local fish at another multi-state chain market, he shook his head, adding that sometimes in the summer they get a few local varieties. And at one popular, crowded regional superstore, instead of a seafood counter there was only a self-serve refrigerated case where fish were displayed wrapped in plastic trays. Some might be from New England waters, like the whole scup and haddock filets, but there was no one there to identify them or to help a customer decipher the difference.
Independent seafood stores are good alternatives—both to find local seafood and, almost as important, to find out what to do with it.
My first stop was the Fish Market of Marblehead, a small store with a case full of glistening seafood. On a chalkboard and in the case, the fish were marked by origin—local haddock, flounder, pollock and grey sole. Although the Big Three were represented, owner Deb Lewis said she has some customers who buy only local fish. The reasons? “Some want to support the fishermen,” said Lewis, whose father fished for a living, “some because they think they should.” Mostly, she said, people just want it fresh. In the summer and earlier in the fall, Lewis carries sought-after striped bass and bluefish. But boats go out all year, she said, and many local species are always available. She gladly offers suggestions for cooking species people might not be familiar with.
Courthouse Fish Market in Cambridge is another place where customers often ask for locally caught fish, said coowner Edward Damaso. This market, which opened in 1912, has cases full of seafood marked with origin, even down to the harbor where it was brought in, and plenty of whole fish—mackerel from Boston Harbor, ocean perch and scup. Damaso said the store sells monkfish, hake, sometimes Acadian redfish and sole during the winter as well as lots of shellfish—scallops, mussels, clams, oysters and more. As he scaled a small, whole ocean perch for me, he said he and his employees “clean, cut and do whatever” customers want to prepare seafood for cooking and even give recipe suggestions. On a recent Monday, Steve O’Donoghue of Captain Marden’s in Wellesley said the store had local grey and lemon sole, flounder, black bass and lots of shellfish. Customers looking for local “usually know what to do with it,” he said, and it sells well. At Rowand’s in Beverly, a display board listed where fish and shellfish were caught, with several local ports named.
Red’s Best, a wholesaler with a retail market in the Boston Public Market who also sells at farmers markets and other locations, specializes in local fish from New England fishermen. On a quiet weekday, Ryan Rasys, retail operations manager, helped a customer at the BPM choose several varieties of fish as I looked over cases replete with local species—mackerel, scup, black-backed sole, skate, monkfish, scallops and more. “We do a very good job selling underutilized species,” Rasys said, adding that sales of whole fish or lesser-known fish go up on weekends when people have more time to cook and experiment.
When I first lived in my north-of-Boston town, there was a fish store down the street that sold almost exclusively local fish, and lobstermen sometimes sold their catch at the town dock. Those days are long gone, and most seafood now goes through a distributor. Foley Fish of New Bedford and Boston has been in the business of distributing seafood since 1906. Co-owner Laura Foley Ramsden, who started packing fish at the age of 14, said “My grandfather wouldn’t count farmed salmon as a sale because he didn’t think it was a real fish.”
She insisted that educating the public about freshness as well as availability of locally caught species is essential. “People don’t know about pollock, redfish” and other local species, and because the market is dominated by salmon, shrimp and tuna “we leave a lot of quota [limits set by the government to protect fish species and supplies] on the ocean floor.”
Big-box stores, such as Walmart or Trader Joe’s, may have alluring prices, she says, but not local catch. The global market is well established now with fish coming from as far away as Indonesia and China. It’s almost impossible to know how the fish was caught or what happened to it afterwards, she said, mentioning practices of adding water or a slurry of cheap fish to add weight, or soaking fish in chemicals to preserve it. The result is often that customers get an inferior product, and even if it seems like a bargain, they decide they don’t like fish. It “lowers the expectation of what they think fish should taste like.”
Foley sells to Roche Brothers and Brothers Marketplaces in the Greater Boston area as well as to retail accounts in several other states. At a Brothers Marketplace in Waltham recently, fish was labeled with origin, including cod from Scituate, and scallops and oysters from the Cape and South Shore.
Cod is one of the mysteries of New England’s seafood world, said Tom Nies, executive director of the New England Fishery Management Council. North America has the best-managed fisheries in the world, he said, and he can rattle off the stocks that are doing well. Atlantic sea scallops are a “huge success story,” Nies said. Haddock, pollock and redfish from the Gulf of Maine are plentiful, as is monkfish. Even Atlantic halibut is beginning to rebound. But stocks of cod, once the predominant fish off New England, are lagging. There are strict limits on the catch, he said, so the consumer can feel confident in buying cod when it’s available. But climate change and warming oceans, maybe the fact that it’s “a popular meal for seals,” or other factors still hamper the cod population.
However, Fitzgerald, the EDF’s sustainable seafood director, said there’s no reason “to fall into a seafood trap,” and think if you can’t eat cod there’s no way to eat local, which in fishery terms goes from the Gulf of Maine all the way to Virginia. All those species of the same family—hake, whiting, haddock and redfish—can be cooked in the same way as cod. That way consumers can not only get fresher fish but also help the local economies and fishermen.
It’s hard to “break out of the shackles” of the most popular fish, Fitzgerald said, but the advantages are many. “It’s a misconception that local makes it more expensive,” he added.
He and Nies both pointed out that fishermen, like in any business, are trying to meet market demand. If the demand for local fish increased, the supply would rise since these stocks are “healthy” and plentiful. Fresher fish at reasonable prices would be more available, but there are other environmental benefits of buying local, such as shorter transportation distances (using less fossil fuel), support of local economies and of the ocean ecosystem. Oliver Gottfried of Oxfam widened the perspective on eating local seafood as well as other foods. “The growing power of supermarkets has had the effect of less power for workers,” he said. Seafood, he added, is one of the more glaring examples of pressure to underpay and overwork workers in areas like Southeast Asia because of supermarket dominance and consumer demand for lower prices. But shoppers have power, Gottfried said, and should use it. Eating locally, supporting the local marine economy and advocating for better practices abroad can go a long way toward improving worldwide working conditions and helping the environment globally.
As for me, buying local seafood, along with other foods, seems to just make sense. After all, what could be fresher than fish from your own watery backyard?
This story appeared in the Winter 2020 issue.
