Fish has a p.r. problem.
That was one conclusion at a recent Slow Fish conference held in Charleston.
Slow Fish is an offshoot of the international Slow Food movement, designed to ensure “good, clean and fair food for all.” Slow Food International has more than 80,000 members in more than 100 countries.
The conference brought together about 115 fishers, producers and chefs to discuss the state of sustainable seafood earlier this month.
In conjunction with the national conference, Slow Food Charleston celebrated its 10th anniversary with a free community event at Bowens Island to highlight local seafood.
Slow Food Charleston executive director Carrie Larson attended and helped organize the larger conference and said she was “proud and excited to see this community come together for Slow Fish 2024.”
In the barbecue-heavy South, the gathering was especially noteworthy because of that “pr problem” fish has. Speakers at the conference said we avoid seafood because we don’t know what fish to buy, we don’t know how to prepare it, we don’t want to touch or smell seafood and we don’t want to fail. In this country, we consume about 20.5 pounds of seafood per person annually (compared with 58.1 pounds of beef and around 100 pounds of chicken).
Even for those of us who do eat seafood, we stick to shrimp, salmon and canned tuna. Charlestonians may have the luxury of good local shrimp, but for most, it’s easier to buy cheap foreign shrimp packaged in sanitary plastic bags, or salmon cut into neat, inoffensive portions.
And that, for those who want a world in which seafood thrives, is a problem.
A return to decentralized fisheries
A single fish can only produce so many filets, just as a cow can only produce so many ribeye steaks. The lack of education about what to do with fish — the whole fish, not just the neatly packaged filets — means large fisheries have stepped in to produce more fish to produce more filets. Add that to waters warmed by climate change, and the fish are disappearing for indigenous communities that use them not just for food, but for religion and for a way of life.
Many are familiar with the impact of “Big Ag” on family farmers, but fewer know about “Big Fish,” in which large corporations harvest large populations of fish like salmon before the fish can swim to the waters fished by indigenous populations.
Melanie Brown, founder of Salmon State.org, which seeks to keep a healthy salmon population in Alaska, says federal monies given to indigenous people to compensate for lost income caused by salmon reduction doesn’t cover the true cost of what the fish means to the culture.
“The replacement value is not just the cost per pound of fish,” Brown said. “It’s also our religion: how much does a church cost? It’s our art: how much does a museum cost? There are jobs associated with fishing, and a transmission of knowledge, generation to generation. How much would a school cost to rebuild to get that knowledge back?”
Large commercial fisheries are not the only impacts on sustainable fishing.
Kerry Marhefka, who runs Abundant Seafood in Charleston with her husband, Mark, said recreational fishers were driving commercial fishers out of business.
“My husband does seven-day fishing trips with one crew member. We have quotas and regulations, and then you have people who go out there with big, fancy boats doing recreational fishing, and they have no enforcement,” she told the conference. “There aren’t going to be any small commercial fishermen left in the Southeast because, no matter how much we grind, we are losing access to the fish. The only people eating snapper or grouper in the future will be those wealthy enough to catch them themselves.”
“We are standing against giants,” agreed Bilal Sarwari, interim executive director of Slow Food USA. “There are large fishing corporations that have fully vertically integrated, and they have a lot of control over the places where fish are harvested, where they are taken out of the water, where they are processed. They are taking away access from generational fisheries and fishermen who have been engaging in this work for a really long time. We are kind of standing against that, which is why it is so important that we come together and that we unite under this shared set of values: what is good, clean and fair fish, what is slow fish. That is the way that we can start standing against them and painting a clear picture of the realities of how we mitigate climate through sustainable fishing, how we engage communities, and then keep the work sustained for generations to come.”
Sarwari said, in an ideal world, “We’d see a return to indigenous fishing practices, a return to family fisheries, to decentralize, to give these processing facilities back to the communities that benefit from them, that sustain them. We need to make sure that the money from fishing goes back into the communities where those fish are harvested. We were already doing it right. We need to return to that again.”
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