A President in the Family by Byron W. Woodson Sr.

How's that for food miles? We don't want to pay the labor involved in boning fish and more and more of that fish that used to go make that round trip is actually staying in China because the Chinese are realizing how good it is, much to our detriment. On sending American salmon to China and back for cheap laborĪ certain amount of Alaska salmon gets caught by Americans in Alaska, sent to China, defrosted, filleted, boned, refrozen and sent back to us. If we don't like the flavorsome fish - like bluefish, mackerel, things like oysters, things that really taste of the sea - if we don't like that, then we're going to go for these generic, homogenized, industrialized products. Foodies about flavor and texture and the food movement and that kind of thing, and that's true of about 5 percent of Americans, but 95 percent of Americans really are not so into flavor. Kind of in tandem and in league with that is the American tendency to avoid taste. We want our food cheap and easy.Īll of this fast-food commodification of seafood protein - because that's kind of what it is at this point - adds to that general preference for cheap stuff. They're willing to pay top dollar for it. The Chinese love seafood the Japanese, the Koreans - they love seafood. The other thing is that other countries really are hip to seafood. That's half of the global average, so there's that. We only eat about 15 pounds of seafood per year per capita. They fill a similar fish niche, but they're very different.

And in the other direction, we get a similarly white flaky fish - tilapia or pangasius - coming to us mostly from China and Vietnam. We use a lot of pollock ourselves, but we send 600 million pounds of it abroad every year. Alaska pollock is the thing in Filet-O-Fish sandwich it's the thing in that fake crab that you find in your California roll. Another great example of this fish swap is the swapping of Alaska pollock for tilapia and pangasius. So salmon for salmon, we're trading wild for farmed. We export millions of tons of wild, mostly Alaska salmon abroad and import mostly farmed salmon from abroad. In effect what we're doing is we're sending the really great, wild stuff that we harvest here on our shores abroad, and in exchange, we're importing farm stuff that, frankly, is of an increasingly dubious nature. What I think we're doing is we're low-grading our seafood supply. On what Greenberg calls 'The Great Fish Swap' Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title American Catch Subtitle The Fight for Our Local Seafood Author Paul Greenberg

A President in the Family by Byron W. Woodson Sr.