A friend was recently asking me for some seafood cooking tips. Of course that gave me the opportunity to talk about freshness as perhaps the biggest factor in cooking really good seafood. And, of course the freshest fish you can get anywhere is right here from Cape Anne Fresh Catch (or one of the other CSF's that might be in your area).

If you are a CAFC member, you know about fresh seafood. But did you know that 84% of the seafood eaten in this country is imported? How fresh can that possibly be? Let's take the Pacific Cod as an example. These fish by the way are given the highest marks on the seafood buyer cards such as Monterey Bay Aquarium's seafood buyers guide.

The Pacific Cod is the less good looking sister to the Altantic Cod, with a slightly less firm texture, it is sometimes also called the Grey Goo. The Pacific Cod fishery catches and processes large numbers of Cod and freezes them and ships 30% of the catch to China to be re-processed into fillets or fish sticks, then re-imported to the U.S. or another country. If you see "Previously Frozen" Cod at the supermarket and it is not listed as being Atlantic Cod, chances are that fish has been to Alaska and China before arriving at your market. That's a well traveled fish!

In contrast, CAFC's fish is usually landed the same day it is caught, often in the morning. It is weighed and sorted, then delivered to Turner's Seafood - all of this happens before 9AM, where it is either filleted or bagged whole, then put on the truck for delivery. It really doesn't get much fresher than that.

But, I began talking about cooking tips. Here are some I use. Let me know what your secrets are!

• When in doubt, 1 tblsp butter per person
• The fresher the fish, the less you should do, as fish get older spice up the recipe.
• Fish spoil being in water, ideally your fish should be on ice free to drain
• 10 minutes per inch of thickness

I am off to fry up my share from last week for fish tacos! What did you do with your share?

Last week, we discussed the amazingly Orwellian life of a commercial fisherman. When people hear how regulated and heavy-handed regulations are for commercial fishermen they often ask, "What I can do to help change things?"

The first and easiest (and admittedly something that most of you who may be reading this blog are already doing by buying shares at Cape Ann Fresh Catch or another CSF) is to stop buying seafood from the great international fish conspiracy. Here is the easiest and best thing you can do for your health and the health of the oceans and fishermen everywhere:

Stop buying imported farmed shrimp.

Farmed shrimp have a terrible track record.

They are often pumped full of antibiotic's, live in crowded conditions and are farmed in sensitive environments like mangrove swamps.

Also, the testing of imported seafood for contaminants is questionable enough that states have taken it upon themselves to test seafood with less than stellar results.

Not only that but at least to me, they taste awful, a bit like rubber mixed with cardboard and ammonia.

So that's easy right? Just eat local Maine shrimp, fresh in season or frozen out of season. Or support Gulf of Mexico fishermen and buy shrimp from the gulf. (No time here to go into the health and safety aspects of whether Gulf of Mexico shrimp are OK to eat or not. Some reading on that here and here if you care to delve into it.)

And, feel free to lecture your buddies on this subject, you'll be doing them favor!

Another way to get involved is to submit comments to the government on policy issues. This week you can weigh in on state operated permit banks. Its a bit of a complicated issue, but you can find all you need to know here.

A Day in the Life of a Commercial Fishermen

Imagine a world where you have to call the government 48 hours before you go to work and get permission to go to work. No permission, no work.

If you do get permission, you might be assigned an observer. This is a governemnt employee who's job it is to check to make sure you are following all the regulations and rules of your job. If they catch you doing something wrong you can be fined. For now, the government is paying the observer, but in the future you will have to pay to be monitored.

As you head to work, you must turn on your electronic monitoring device which tracks your position by satellite. If for some reason you electronic monitoring device, which you have to pay for and costs a couple thousand dollars stops working you must stop working and return home. If not you will be fined.

But you've made it this far, time to make some money! You start working. The tools you use are all regulated, where you can work is regulated, the size and type of product you make is regulated. If you do any of these things wrong, you can be fined.

But its a good day, you get your work done and head home. Now you have to call in and report that you are returning from work. The government tells you you will be met by yet another observer of your work who will weigh and scale your work, and of course they will fine you if they find anything that does not comply with the regulations. Oh, and in the coming years you will also have to pay for this observer. $75/hr to monitor your work.

Wouldnt it be great if you could bring home some of your hard earned work to share with your family. After all, your work is providing food. But you can't. It is illegal for you to bring home a single fish to put on your family's table. In fact, before you leave the observer(s) they will search your vessel to make sure you are not hiding anything.

When nothing is found and you somehow make it through the day of work, you now have to fill out the paperwork. Pages and pages of paperwork. And if any of your paperwork is out of line, well don't even bother to call in to ask permission to go to work.

But, at least the information from your paperwork is helping to develop a better picture of what is going on in the environment in which you work, right? Wrong. The data is not used for anything.
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Last night I had dinner with fisherman Steve Walsh from the South Shore of Massachusetts. He's been fishing for 33 years. Also at the table were two friends of mine who enjoy seafood, but were relatively unaware of what is involved in commercial fishing. As Steve described the above scenario, they became incredulous. Then they became angry, then depressed.

"How can this be happening in America?" They asked.

"What can we do?" They asked.

The latter question stunned me. In all the years I've been around fishing, boats and involved in fishing regulations no has ever asked what they can do. CAFC members are already doing a small part by supporting local community based fishermen. But can we do more?

In the coming weeks, I will be focusing on finding effective ways for folks who do care to get involved. By it's own admission NOAA has admitted the regulatory process is deeply flawed. We'll delve into that in a couple weeks, and in the following weeks I'll present opportunities for those of you who think fisheries can be managed in a way that:

• doesn't treat fishermen like criminals
• still save our oceans
• improve the safety of fishing
• reward fishermen who fish clean
• improve the overall quality of our local seafood to be a global leader
• support coastal communities
  

Seafood sustainability is such a difficult topic because ultimately it boils down to the idea that we humans have the ability to determine the exact right level of seafood we can take from a complex and not always well understood ocean that will allow seafood populations to not only maintain, but to function more or less as if we were not harvesting seafood.

Wait, does that make sense at all? Is there really some magical line in the ocean that allows us to have our cake and eat it too? What about complex highly interdependent ecosystems? What do we use as a baseline? Do we use historical abundance or recent abundance? How does the harvesting of one species like herring impact the health and abundance of other species that depend on it?

The "truth" if there is one is that sustainability is a "best guess" when it comes to seafood. If you Google "Sustainable Seafood" you'll find a number of species specific seafood buying guides. There is some value to these guides. Most folks that want to do the right thing don't necessarily want to spend their time reading some random blog about seafood sustainability and these guides can be a decent starting point for folks that want to do the right thing.

We think a better way to approach seafood is to have a set of principles.

But, to understand how seafood cards can get things wrong, we have to gain an understanding of how fisheries are determined to be sustainable. Usually this has to do with many sceintific assesments, but the two biggies are TAC (Total Allowable Catch) and MSY (Maximum Sustainable Yield).

TAC is a hard number that defines how much fish fishermen can catch. It is based on fish population assessments and is supposed to be scientifically vetted. MSY is a bit harder to understand, but it is essentially the amount of fish that can consitstently be taken from a population of a single species that will allow the population to maintain over the long term. In simple terms, it is usually around 30% of a "healthy" population of fish.

In some ways they define the same thing, however MSY is more like the speed limit, while the TAC is the actual speed that can get you a ticket. In other words, the numbers are not always the same and are subject to the discretion of the managers.

So, let's get back to sustainable. In effect the TAC defines what fisheries managers think is sustainable. Fishermen have little to no impact on this number. It is defined, determined and vetted by the Science and Statistical Comittee (SSC) of the New England Fisheries Management Council (NEFMC) and accepted or rejected by the NEFMC. So in effect, how much fishermen will catch - whether or not that fishing is sustainable - is determined by managers not fishermen.

So, how can sustainable seafood cards put things like Atlantic Cod on a list of sea foods to avoid when managers, vetted by the best available science, are saying that Cod are no longer overfished? This article is a great exploration of the complexities in particular concerning our local codfish.

So, in sum, managers/regulators are defining sustainable ideally based on science that determines a level of seafood that can be caught indefinitely. As a principle, its a good place to begin to approach sustainability. But if you are like me, you have a healthy skepticism of the ability of scientists and managers to know the ocean well enough to consistently and impartially determine the magical number of fish we can eat without any impact. It just sounds silly to me and reminds me of one of my old friends' skepticism of another magical animal.