Northern Arizona University

   

Seafood Traditions at Risk in North America: A RAFT List for Biological Recovery and Cultural Revitalization

From potlatches and clambakes, to sea shanties and tales told in ice fishing huts, America’s cultural heritage has been built not merely on its fertile soils and mineral-rich mountains, but on its waters as well. That is where some of America’s finest artisans have practiced their traditions of weaving nets and basket traps, carving totem-style halibut hooks, harpoons, floats and lures, constructing stone traps, decoys and crab pots, or shaping canoes, kayaks, dories and pangas. Some of the greatest chefs and home-style cooks of the continent have offered their families and friends unforgettable meals of oyster-and-crab jambalayas, alder-smoked salmon or steelhead, clam chowders, blackened redfish, or salted bacalao. American literature would have never achieved its world-renown originality without the mythic novels of Herman Melville, the spare short stories and elegant novellas of Ernest Hemingway, the rich poems of Richard Hugo and Amy Clampitt, or the humorous yarns that John Steinbeck set on Cannery Row. Their figures and fables are stained with salt, plastered with seaweed, and smell of freshly caught fish. Without fish and shellfish, there would be no basic stock from which to build the multicultural bouillabaisse that has become America.

These culinary, material and intellectual traditions will be trivialized if we let the fish, mussels, cockles, oysters, crabs and gators which fuel these maritime expressions fall into extinction. We will be left with mere nostalgia for the life of the fisherman and clam-digger if these livelihoods themselves can no longer be practiced with dignity and economic viability. Barely thirty-five years have passed since the first American scientists suggested that the productivity of the oceans may not be inexhaustible. Since that moment of belated revelation, annual catches have peaked for more than 140 stocks of fish from around the world, and most have gone into decline ever since. Nevertheless, a few have recovered—largely because fishermen, fisheries biologists and chefs have found ways to work together flexibly and tangibly rather than playing the blame game any further. Most of the North American fisheries have the capacity to recover within our lifetimes if valued, rested, invested in and co-managed effectively. However, it is unlikely that we will ever see the white abalone and a few other shellfish on our tables again, for their recovery time under the best of circumstances may take another half century.

Roughly a third of the fish on the List inside are threatened and endangered, even though some were viable elements of America’s great seafood traditions as little as two decades ago. They have declined due to many causes, not just blatant gluttony and greed: the inadvertent arrival of parasites and diseases, the shift in sea currents and sedimentation patterns, the changing densities of otters and seals, and the rises in ocean temperatures that are linked to global warming. Yes, some have been over-harvested, while others persist but are contaminated by mercury or fire retardant chemicals that make them unfit for frequent human consumption. Behind most of the diminished stocks are echoes of habitat destruction, degradation and fragmentation caused by dam-building, dredging, the discharge of pollutants at river mouths, or coastal resort and marina development. Each of these species has an intrinsic right to live, and once that is guaranteed, each of the maritime cultures traditionally engaged with it should have the right to practice sustainable harvesting at an artisanal scale. The Renewing America’s Food Traditions consortium facilitated by Slow Food USA welcomes additions or corrections to this list, but more importantly, encourages you to become personally engaged in actions that allow the biological recovery of these species and the cultural recovery of the traditions associated with them.

—Gary Nabhan, PhD. (Renewing America’s Food Traditions founder)

Download Seafood Traditions at Risk in North America (PDF, 4 pages, 681k)
Download Guide to Seafood of the Seri Indians (PDF, 2 pages, 400k)    

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