Welcome toOut of the Kitchen, our ongoing exploration of the relationships that build and sustain the food industry. This year, we’re traveling the country to look at how sustainability has become a rapidly growing movement within the food world.Chefs at the forefront of this trend are introducing their patrons to local farms, fresh ingredients, and innovative dishes while farmers are educating chefs and consumers about where their food comes from and what it takes to grow the food served. Their practices and personal customer approaches provide a bigger impact to the community at large, hoping to create a better and more sustainable future for all.
The rainstorm comes over Montauk’s harbor like a streak of grey paint, turning a blue-morning seascape the color of crushed clamshells. It brings with it a spattering of ice-cold droplets and a briny breeze that bites through rubberized bib and coffee-stained fleece. But the crew of the fishing trawler Donald T–dressed in a motley uniform of scruffy beards, rubber gloves, dark cargo pants, and weathered hoodies with faded logos from working coastal towns that read like a blue marlin's ports of call–are busy at work bringing in the day's haul.
The men quickly throw out and secure the bow and stern lines, and are greeted at the dock by the smiling face of Sean Barrett, founder of Dock to Dish. He's been waiting for an hour for what's sitting inside the Donald T's hold. He's just not sure what it is.
"What've we got?" he shouts.
Meanwhile, the Donald T's deckhands get the boat safely docked and get down to business. Out from the ice-filled hold come several waxed-cardboard boxes–one of the deckhands uses a contraption that looks like a giant version of a claw-machine pincer to haul them up out of the bowels of the boat one at a time. They slide the boxes across a narrow plank and onto shore, where Barrett eagerly cracks one open. But instead of magenta-haired troll dolls or fuzzy dice, the prize here is scup.
"Scup" is the moniker New Englanders prefer. In the South, it's better known as porgy. Some believe both terms derive from the same Naragansset word, mischcupauog. That unromantically utilitarian word in turn spun off from another that neatly reflects what Native Americans thought of the fish: pauog, or "fertilizer."
Scup is a "trash fish," species of fish that have long been considered undesirable by consumers and unsellable by fishmongers. When they catch trash fish, commercial and sport fishermen often don't even bother unloading them to take to market, instead using them as bait or simply throwing the carcasses overboard. They're the ugly fish with ugly names like tautog, skate, rockfish, dogfish, or squirrelfish, the ones that many American buyers get creeped out by at the fish market before asking the monger for something safe and predictable, like salmon, or tuna, or shrimp.
Unfortunately, America's limited seafood palate has hurt the world's oceans. Bluefin tuna stocks are at a crisis point, overfished nearly to the point of extinction. And tuna-fishing methods are notoriously undiscriminating, trapping countless other kinds of marine life from dolphins to sea turtles, including endangered species. Farmed salmon are saturated with PCBs, are blamed for spreading diseases and parasites to wild species, and use methods that leach pollutants into the surrounding area. And shrimp has been dubbed a "meal of mass destruction" by the National Resources Defense Council: It's the most popular seafood in the U.S., but shrimp trawling is kind of like the strip mining of the ocean, using nets to scour the sea bottom for the crustaceans–and bringing up everything else along with it. For every pound of shrimp that's caught, there's an estimated 15 pounds of bycatch, consisting of trash fish, seals, seabirds, turtles, sharks, and precious swaths of the seabed that are critical to keeping the fragile underwater ecosystem going. Fishermen are exploring other, less harmful methods of fishing–pole-and-line fishing for tuna, for example, or methods other than bottom trawling for shrimp–but too many worldwide are still using destructive industrialized methods that their grandfathers and great-grandfathers did in the mid-20th century.
"The problem with fishing pre-World War II is we thought fish were infinite," Sean Barrett says.
That's where Dock to Dish comes in. Turning the traditional 20th-century idea of a demand-based fish market on its head, Dock to Dish in 2011 created a CSA-inspired model in which customers and restaurateurs buy annual memberships. Instead of ordering the fish they want–and putting an unsustainable strain on the popular fishes that are being overfished, like swordfish and tuna–members get the wild fish that the fishermen bring in and meet Dock to Dish's high standards.
"Historically, it's that catch-of-the-day mentality that prevailed, like in a lot of old European systems you see to this day in the Basque countryside or Italian coast," Barrett says. "What comes in on the boat that day is what goes on the dinner plate at night."
The fishermen follow government guidelines on sustainability from sites like NOAA's FishWatch, and the company keeps the entire process transparent.
Supplying the fish are another endangered species—community fishermen. In this case, it's Montauk natives like the crew of the Donald T, or P.J. Beckwith, whose family's been in Montauk for 16 generations, and have been fishing the waters off of the eastern point of Long Island for at least four. (Dock to Dish has also expanded to Key West, Santa Barbara, and Vancouver.) Buying the fish are customers and restaurateurs who want not only to make a difference to the long-term health of the planet, but also to get their hands on the freshest fish available. Despite giving up the power of picking out exactly what fish they'd get, customers flocked to what was happening on the Montauk town dock–the waiting list for new memberships is now over a year long.
"They started getting exposed to fish they'd never hear of before golden tilefish, driver fish, and Jonah crab claws?" Barrett says. "People love Jonah crab claws."
But it took a while for these unheard-of but sustainable fish to catch on with subscribers and keep them coming back year after year.
"On one hand, the CSF member were all sustainability-minded folks willing to explores new species of local fish as dinner options; but on the other hand, they had no experience working with these fish and very few proven recipes of their own," Barrett says. "There were times, when fish like gurnard hit the shareboxes, that many folks weren't even sure how to pronounce the names of these superabundant, hyperlocal delicacies. I was exhausting myself trying to introduce these underutilized species, like butterfish and bluefish, to our CSF members on my own by personally encouraging them to try these delicious fish, using newsletters with recipes and colorful descriptions."
That's where the relationships he'd fostered with chefs paid off.
"By the nature of our supply-driven system, there were many weeks where members of the Dock to Fish CSF received shares of the same species of fish that the chefs ... were receiving," Barrett says. "The chefs knew how to create bouillaibaisses and ceviches and so on. As soon as they began posting pictures and descriptions on social media, there was an eruption of enthusiasm from the local CSF members, who began replicating the chefs' preparation. Dan Barber personally ignited a wildly popular burst of excitement around gurnard, aka sea robin, after he mentioned the fish on Twitter. Locals went scurrying to try to experiment. The world-class chef members lead by example."
The Dock to Dish model means that the seafood is fresher, too: It goes directly from the Montauk town dock to their kitchens, rather than from Montauk to Hunt's Point in New York City, and back again. And, suddenly, chefs are cooking with bizarre-sounding fish that they turned their noses up at only years before.
"A chef would put sea bass on his menu and say to the fishermen, 'Go get sea bass,'" Barrett says. "We're putting the fisherman back in the driver's seat and steering the ship. The environment and the fish dictate what's on the dish tonight."