It’s Thursday morning at the Portland Public Schools central kitchen on Riverside Street in Portland, Maine. A crew of white-coat-clad kitchen employees is preparing locally landed Acadian redfish fillets topped with oyster cracker crumbs and seasoned with Old Bay for more than 2,000 elementary school students. This facility prepares local seafood once a month as part of the district’s commitment to the local food movement.
We’re either doing redfish, says Ron Adams, the director of food services, or sometimes, we’ll get the haddock coming off Georges Bank. Although Adams prefers the haddock, he’s pleased with the redfish, especially since it helps support beleaguered local fishermen.
Species like Acadian redfish, scup and sea robin have earned the moniker trash fish in commercial fishermen’s eyes because demand is so low that the price per pound makes them hardly worth landing. Some of these species are so abundant that they can interfere with harvesting money-making species, such as cod. But cod and other iconic New England seafood species are disappearing because of overfishing, and fisheries managers have drastically limited the amounts fishermen can catch. So trash fish are now getting a makeover.
Numerous campaigns by environmental groups are looking to rebrand trash fish. But some New England politicians think the process is too slow and the markets too small to provide the immediate assistance fishermen need. In the past year, some politicians have begun looking to federal food programs as customers for one of the most abundant and despised species: the Atlantic spiny dogfish. But proponents of serving dogfish in school lunchrooms, food kitchens, prisons and disaster shelters seem to have missed the simple fact that the mercury levels in the fish mean that serving it to these populations could be a risky move.
Cussed Dogfish
New England fishermen have hated dogfish for a long time, and there has never been a significant domestic market for the species. New York Times articles penned more than a century ago bemoan the dogfish as cussed, ferocious and so thick it’s good-bye fishin’. In the mid-20th century, dogfish gained some goodwill as European demand drove up New England exports. Since the 1950s, the dogfish has been the default choice for fish and chips across the United Kingdom, where it’s commonly called rock salmon. In Germany and France, the fish is sold as small salmon or sea eel. Dogfish fins have found a home in Japanese-Chinese cuisine.
Today, the dogfish population in the western North Atlantic is as large as fishermen can remember. The Marine Stewardship Council recently certified the population as a sustainable fishery. Unfortunately, as dogfish numbers have boomed in recent years, international markets have slumped, owing to a rebounding Northeast Atlantic cod fishery and changing tastes.
New England now finds itself with a glut of dogfish and few willing buyers, and at the same time, catch limits on other species are being drastically tightened. It’s estimated there are 23 times as many dogfish as cod in the Gulf of Maine right now, but dogfish earn only a fraction of cod’s price. To make matters worse, dogfish both compete with cod for food and directly prey on cod.
Solving the Surplus
In that quandary, fishing industry advocates and lawmakers see an opportunity for government intervention. Last spring, 19 members of Congress from the Northeast wrote to the U.S. Department of Agriculture [pdf] asking the agency to buy Atlantic spiny dogfish under the Section 32 program, which buys surplus food and then makes it available to the National School Lunch Program and other federal programs. In addition to providing affordable food, the aim of Section 32 is to help absorb the excess supply of certain foods and thereby shore up prices.
A USDA commodity purchase would, the lawmakers argued, be a win-win: cheap food for institutions and a much-needed bridge for struggling Northeastern fishermen, to tide them over until cod populations could recover. The USDA is evaluating the request. If it gets approved, dogfish filets, nuggets and tacos would make their way to government programs across the country.
Kalmbach Publishing Co.