Stoll quoted in article about America's best seafood being sent overseas
Since 2013, the national nonprofit Chefs Collaborative has been host to a handful of “Trash Fish Dinners,” designed to educate guests about the variety of delicious but underutilized seafood that typically hasn’t merited a second look. And from Rhode Island to North Carolina to Oregon, finding local seafood at the farmers market is getting easier too.
“The biggest thing that would help fishermen and Americans eat more of their own fish is to shorten the supply chain and have more access to local fishermen,” Greenberg said.
His advice? Seek out a Community Supported Fishery, the fishy version of a CSA, where consumers can buy a weekly share of seafood, taking home whatever fishermen happen to land that week. The first CSF launched in Maine in 2007; today there are close to 50, and demand is growing. Finding one near you just got easier: In early June, Joshua Stoll launched LocalCatch.org, a website identifying individual CSF locations, dockside pickup spots, and more.
“If we’re serious about getting local domestic seafood in the U.S., we need to think about the whole range of how to do it. CSFs are part of that,” said Stoll. “When you go to the supermarket, you’ll see the same five species of seafood and that’s it. CSFs or other types of off-the-dock programs are the antidote to what we have currently, which is a system where 90 percent of the seafood we have is imported.”
