NOT THE SHARPEST KNIVES IN THE DRAWER: A Fish Story That’s Unbelievable
For this recent New York magazine piece, freelancer Tom Gogola took a job fishing on a commercial dragger owned by a friend of his so he could write about commercial fishing regulations that force fishermen who accidentally haul in out-of-season sea bass, flounder, monkfish, and tuna (“bycatch” in the industry parlance) to throw them back in the sea – dead - instead of donating them to food pantries that are awash in canned goods but have little fresh food to distribute to the needy:
My friend explained that owing to the regulations we were compelled to abide, there would be fish coming onto the deck that were out of season, that we did not have permits for, and that we would have no choice but to throw back or we’d risk crippling fines at the dock, should fish cops from the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation greet us at trip’s end to check the fish hold. The fisherman’s admonition was, “You’re going to see a lot of stuff out there that’ll knock you back on your heels, but there’s not much we can do about it. Do your job, shut your mouth, collect your money.”
While concerned consumers fret over which fish are correct to order at their favorite seafood restaurant, heading to websites maintained by groups such as the Environmental Defense Fund for guidance on the “eco-best” and “eco-worst” fish to purchase, the truth about commercial fishing in the United States is that a regulatory framework designed to limit overfishing results in vast numbers of fish per year being scooped up on boats and dumped right back off, dead, never consumed by any human. …
“We’re forced to throw back so much product,” says Chuck Morici, a Montauk fisherman who plies these waters on the Act I. …
The waste, he says, is multifold and maddening in its scope. “We have to spend all our time recycling through all that shit just to get the quota” of the targeted species, he says. “I’m feeding the birds instead of the people. It’s insane.” …
Morici himself has a novel solution. He believes there should be a mechanism in the Northeast that would allow, if not compel, fishermen to keep all the edible but off-season fish they capture and deliver those fish to Veterans Administration hospitals, area food banks, or other charitable concerns in exchange for some kind of subsidy or tax write-off that, rather than encouraging the targeting of off-season fish, would instead acknowledge that this is part of the deal when you drop the net. Lee Benaka, national coordinator of the NOAA Fisheries Services Bycatch Reduction Engineering Program, points to successful fish-donation programs in Alaska and says this is an “idea worth supporting” in the Northeast. Good faith would appear to be the first and only major impediment to such a program, but that’s in short supply.
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