Living And Dying In Chinatown: A Lesson In How To Buy Seafood
The latest dispatch from the frontlines of our investigation into the world of illegal seafood for our new series, Food Crimes.
The surest way to drive yourself insane at the grocery store over what seafood you should eat and in what season is to spend the five months prior investigating crimes within the international fishing industry. Then you’d be just like me.
Shopping at Whole Foods one recent evening, it was a piece of salmon that sent me reeling. Could I, given what I’ve learned of the fish’s confused route to the table and farmed salmon’s legal and environmental issues, make an informed decision about what to serve my kid? What if these glistening pink filets in front of me weren’t even salmon at all? Or what if they’d been caught and frozen in 2014, only to be thawed and purchased by me in 2015? I looked at the cod. And then at the bass. I remembered from my reporting the incomprehensible regulations governing roughly 100 types of bass. I left with nothing.
Scott Doyle is an good-natured retiree from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. During his 27-year career, Doyle oversaw a variety of investigations, including that of the world’s biggest fish criminal: Arnold Bengis. He recently started 3SA Consulting, which helps companies with training and compliance issues related to wildlife and fisheries. I asked him to walk with me through New York City’s Chinatown, which is a known destination for all manner of both illegal and environmentally unpopular fish, and give me a lesson in how to shop for seafood.
What are your thoughts on farm-raised salmon? The last thing I would recommend, if I was a consumer, would be the farm-raised fish — like tilapia, farm-raised salmon. There’s a big difference in price if you buy Alaskan salmon that’s caught in Alaska and shipped here versus farm-raised salmon — and the quality, in my view, is much better with the wild-caught. But the salmon, for example, is not a bad fish. I would stay away from the farm-raised shrimp if I could. But then it comes down to a price point. What can you afford? You’re still better off eating a fish than another food.
What fish do you recommend? I would eat locally caught fish first. So if you’re in the New York area, or on the East Coast, you’d eat your flounders, you’d eat cods, you’d eat scallops. Tilefish is locally caught. There’s a big, vibrant clam industry here. There’s a lot of flat fishes — great sole, herring, Spanish mackerel. There’s quite a few fish that are locally caught right in the metropolitan area — New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, all the way up to Massachusetts and all the way down to Florida. Then if you go down to the Gulf, you have the snappers and groupers. You can rest assured — or be pretty sure — that those fish were caught locally, and the quality is going to be pretty darn good. They’re going to be pretty fresh because they were probably caught within three to four days. They may have been caught last night, for all we know. There’s fish here that may have been on a boat yesterday, was shipped to the Fulton Fish market last night, a buyer went to the Fulton Fish market last night, purchased those fish and people are buying those fish less than 24 hours later. That’s a really high-quality fish, and it’s a fresh fish.
What about shellfish? There’s a real tight scheme to keep track of oysters and shellfish — a whole way to track fish from the harvester all the way through to the plate. There are actually tags. We’ll see them on some other shellfish and they’re required. These tags will tell you who the harvester was, what lot he got it from, the date of harvest and maybe even a permit number. So you’re able to track that fish all the way from where it came from. That’s important because people often get sick from shellfish.
What if I live somewhere that there is no locally caught fish? Then I would go with fish that may be frozen but you know are pretty sturdy fish, like the tunas, all the Chilean sea bass, the shark, cod, pollack, haddock — those types of fish that may be imported. A lot of the mackerels, a lot of the snappers. You may get those imported from Mexico or as far away as South Africa, but they’re pretty fresh fish, too, because they’ve been frozen or deep frozen and then shipped here.
What if I live somewhere inland with no local fish markets? I would try to find something domestically caught from that state and then move outward. I would look for product that was harvested in the U.S. and wild-caught. If you know a little bit about fish, you go with snappers, you go with groupers, you go with flounders. You would be relatively safe that they’re domestically caught.
Originally published at www.foodrepublic.com on June 30, 2015.
