There's A Price For Not Eating America's Ugly Seafood

Recipe

By Clare Leschin-Hoar
From TakePart

Our love of tuna, salmon, and shrimp has led to the country’s most delicious, most sustainable seafood being sent overseas.

The Saltbox Seafood Joint had been on Jack Thigpen’s radar for a while. Two chalkboard menus listing the day’s catch flank the order window of the itty-bitty Durham, North Carolina, restaurant. Bluefish, mullet, mackerel, wild catfish, croaker, black drum—the offerings aren’t typical seafood-shack standards. But for Thigpen, an extension director for the North Carolina Sea Grant Program, where he works to connect fishermen with more lucrative local buyers, the chance to finally try spiny dogfish was one he wasn’t going to pass up.

The spiny dogfish is actually a slim gray shark. Those caught off the shores of North Carolina are typically sent to Boston or New York for processing and then shipped to the U.K. to satisfy the fish-and-chip habit of hungry Brits. But on this occasion, it was served up spicy with a side of slaw and pile of fried potatoes, a relative seafood bargain at only $12.50. Thigpen’s daughter, like most Americans, was less adventurous: Sticking with something familiar, she ordered the trout.

Spiny dogfish isn’t the only delicious American-caught fish that’s being sent abroad. In 2013, a whopping 3.3 billion pounds of healthful, delicious seafood such as squid, sardines, sea urchins, salmon roe, abalone, crab, sea cucumber, and herring were exported to overseas markets. Americans are comfortable with “buying local” when it comes to sweet corn or juicy summer heirloom tomatoes, but the idea of seasonal, locally sourced seafood is one that’s still sputtering.

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