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(light music) (birds calling)
(waves splashing)
In commercial fishing,
there's an element of risk in all of it.
Things can go wrong.
And when they go wrong,
they go terribly wrong very quickly.
(rock splashes)
Well, it was a long time ago.
It was November 11th, 1978, as a matter of fact.
We were coming across the Bay of Fundy,
and we ran into some very heavy weather from the southwest.
When I realized what was going on,
it was when I reached down into the bilge
to close the seacock,
and the water came over my head.
The captain said, "Oh Jesus, Russell, what's happened?"
And I said, "Bill, I can't save her."
I said, "We're gonna lose her."
We were another 14 hours from home,
and I knew I had to get in the water
and get the hell away from that boat.
I jumped in, came up right next to the skiff.
And it wasn't five minutes after we got away
from the boat that she went down.
I mean, she slid down.
And it was the traditional groan of despair.
(metal groaning) (water splashes)
(somber music)
So the boys are off and Roy and I are together.
Roy said to me, he said,
"Boy, I've been waiting to die for six years,
but I never thought it would be like this."
And I said, "Roy, we're not gonna die.
We're gonna make this together."
He said, "If we had the daylight behind us
we might have a chance, but it's the dark of night."
He said, "And they'll never find us."
Another big sea took us.
We just rolled into the crest of that wave
and kept on rolling.
And when the sea spit us out,
I was still with the skiff.
Roy was gone.
And that night, I was in and out of that skiff
I don't know how many times.
I just hunkered down and waited.
What else could I do?
Now dawn comes, you know, hypothermic,
severely hypothermic by that point,
kind of a little out of my head.
And something caught my attention on the horizon.
And I looked and there was this large Coast Guard vessel.
I still had my hat on.
I can't believe I still had that goddamn hat.
And I stood up and I waved the hat
and I lost my balance and over I went.
I had just enough to right that skiff
and I got back in and I was done.
I was done.
She gave a big blast of black smoke,
and something in my mind said,
"They've seen you, Russell.
They've seen you and you're gonna live.
You're gonna live."
And they dropped the line right on top of me,
and I couldn't grab it.
I mean, there I was, 29-years-old, six feet,
200 pounds, strong as a bull,
and I couldn't hang on to that rope.
They came around behind me in the small boat, four guys.
And they just lifted me backwards.
Every man jack turned out,
and they were cheering.
Yep. And I could hear them.
(somber music continues)
Now we've got this crisis in cod fish.
And so our profits have been cut and cut and cut.
And now, the fellows that are in,
many of them financially cannot get out.
They're reduced to working by themselves,
which is the most dangerous thing you can do.
It's not a good situation.
It's not a good situation for a young man
never mind a fellow that's past his prime.
(somber music continues) (waves splashing)
(birds calling)
(water burbles) (soft dramatic music)
(fish sloshing)
People think they get fish
from a supermarket wrapped in plastic
and they have no idea about its source,
which should raise some red flags.
(equipment banging)
Fish from all around the globe,
frozen aboard the factory trawlers,
shipped to China, thawed out, processed,
refreeze it, send it back to this country,
and it's being sold at supermarkets
and restaurants and people don't know it.
(equipment clattering)
The United States fishery today
is the most regulated fishery in the world.
Yeah, I don't think Americans believe that.
I think they think that all of our fish has collapsed
and it's the fisherman's fault
and we might as well get fish from China
because at least there's abundance of it.
Well, that's not the fucking case. It's just not.
(birds calling)
We've lost 5,000 jobs in Massachusetts
and 830 vessels.
It is perverse when fishermen are hurting in New England
and we're importing 90% of our seafood.
(soft music)
The average American palette really needs to diversify,
needs to expand what they view as edible seafood.
If Americans chose to go beyond the simple fish stick,
the shrimp cocktail, and kinda just open up their minds
and open up their palates,
we could probably feed ourselves
with the resources that we have here at hand.
We are the true conservationists
and we are the true stewards of our ocean.
Fish Harbour out here
has seen fishing for 400 years
and we're not going to let it stop now.
(people chattering) (upbeat jazz music)
(crowd clapping)
I wanna introduce a good friend of mine,
Chef Barton Seaver.
He does extremely important work
in the field of seafood sustainability.
Just wrote a killer book.
So take it away.
(crowd applauds) All right.
My path towards sustainability started in restaurants.
I called up my fish purveyor one day and said,
"Hey, I want the fish that I knew as a child,
the fish that I caught in the Chesapeake.
I want blue fish, striped bass.
I want blue crabs.
This is gonna be awesome."
And the guy on the other end of the line
literally said to me, he said,
"Kid, what are you talking about?
We ate all those. What else do you want?"
We really don't have a deep cultural connection
to our oceans, to the communities that provide
for us from them in this country.
Now in America, if I asked you to close your eyes
and do an exercise where I say, "Picture a farm, okay?
Gently undulating hills, rows of corn,
red barn, color fading."
I mean, we get this,
but when I ask you to close your eyes
and picture a fishery,
most people open their eyes back up and say,
"Huh? What are you talking about?"
To understand what a fishery is,
you stand on that dock
and you turn around and you look at my neighborhood
and you look at the houses and the public schools
and the opportunities for a young daughter
or son to follow in five, six, seven generations
of boot steps to take helm of that lobster boat.
That is a fishery, it is the sum
of the labors and aspirations of a community.
And that is something worth saving.
(soft inspirational music)
No other place has ever had its entire identity
wrapped up with a fishery through centuries
the way that Gloucester has.
It's Gloucester that has that statue
of the grizzled fishermen in his oil skins.
It was Gloucester that sent so many men
to sea and lost so many men.
It was Gloucester where, actually,
some of the first Birds Eye processing plants
for frozen fish were located nearby.
So Gloucester is, in many ways,
the iconic American fishing port.
(wood creaking) (birds calling)
My businesses is all family.
It has been forever.
My uncles, in the Bay of Fundy,
took me fishing when I was a little guy,
and I've been doing it ever since.
Well, I guess it's the old saying, it's in your blood.
I started on my own in '77, I believe it was.
Prices were good,
there was plenty of fish to be caught.
And I went to the maximum
of four boats at one time with two crews.
You day boat fish and you'll leave in the dark
at three in the morning,
and you're not coming back to three, four,
five, six in the afternoon.
It's just a feeling of being able
to survive the elements
and taking care of your family.
It's not a bad living.
Let them bake at about 450 degrees.
And you know what's the first thing to do
when you buy fish?
You have to rinse it in cold water.
I'm gonna do one piece
and then I'm gonna let you do the rest.
That's how I taught my children.
My son, my husband my father,
both of my grandfathers, my uncles,
my grandfather father was a fishermen,
and the father before him.
(soft music)
On June 15, 1965, we arrived at Gloucester.
It was a beautiful day.
They were getting ready for fiesta.
And we went into our friend's house.
And I will never forget, as we walked in,
there were two sinks full of fresh fish.
Back then, the Gloucester fishing industry
was 99% Italian-American.
Most people did not speak English.
There was so much fish in the ocean
and fishermen were catching fish in a great abundant way.
The cod fish were selling at four cents a pound.
I describe fishermen as birds
that cannot stay in the cage.
It's a way of life. It's a passion.
(crowd chattering) (upbeat parade music)
Places like Gloucester
are so important to our very identity.
They are our history.
One of the great mythologies of America's founding
is that settlers came here
seeking freedom of religion.
But in fact, Europeans had been sailing
to these shores seeking cod.
Family after family,
every generation have been involved,
in some context, either offshore or onshore.
This country was founded and built on fish.
And it started here.
Yodel-a-hee-hoo! Our next run.
Okay, nice walk.
(film whirring) (marching music)
Well, it looks like the Russians
have come to California.
This stern trawler here is bringing in its net,
which is four to six times larger
than an American net.
It's capable of taking one million pounds
of fish in three days.
After the Second World War,
the Soviet Union industrialized the fish.
Nobody before had ever thought of an industrial fishery.
It was almost an oxymoron, but they did it.
You know, they created factory trawlers
that processed on board.
They could stay out for months at a time.
The United States only had jurisdiction
out to 12 miles.
And just outside that 12 miles
was like Chicago City light up at night.
These Russians are really wiping us out.
Somebody ought to get the bull by the horns
and get ahold of the government
and make them understand what's going on.
The Fishermen's Wife Association started in 1969
because they realized that this resource
was being destroyed by the invasion
of the foreign factory trawler.
For the first time, these wives who never,
as we say in Gloucester, never crossed the bridge,
they went to Washington.
They testified at Senate hearing,
Congressional hearing, that got the attention
of the whole country.
And these woman got it done.
They started the movement for the Magnuson-Stevens Act.
(soft music)
The new 200-mile US fishing limit,
which went into effect last midnight,
has already resulted in a sharp drop
in foreign trawlers.
The United States assumed control
over the fisheries out 200 miles for the first time.
And it kicked the Soviet fleet out.
We kicked the Polish fleet out.
We kicked the Japanese, kick them all out
and replace them with our boats.
The quid pro quo was
that we would accept the government
managing the fishery.
(birds calling)
(chains rattling)
When that happened, immediately,
the government started giving low-interest loans
to people who built fishing boats.
There were doctors and lawyers and dentists
who invested for tax credit purpose.
And it was just to make the quick dollars.
[David] Everybody said, "Boy, this is great,
you know, we own all this ocean.
Now we're gonna catch all these fish."
Many fishermen referred to that era
as the Wild West, anything went.
There were rules on the books,
but very few of them were followed.
Life was good.
And it didn't last very long.
Thank you Mr. Chair.
Peter Shelley, Conservation Law Foundation.
I've been coming to this council since 1989
to try to prevent overfishing
on Gulf of Maine cod and Georges Bank.
The issue here is what do the cod need?
We started to get calls in the late '80s
from fishermen saying to us,
"You guys need to get involved here,
because the managers are collapsing the fishery."
That's why we brought a lawsuit.
(soft dramatic music)
We supported them because the fishermen
saw things that were changing in the ocean
that they couldn't get the government people
to pay attention to.
There was no regulation on the volume of fish
you could land per day.
If you wanted to, you can catch five, six, 7,000,
10,000 pounds of fish, which people were doing.
American ingenuity being what it is,
you know, we got very efficient.
And so I think we did some damage to the industry,
certainly through the '80s.
Overfishing had been going on so long
that the stock assessments showed
that the populations in this '94, '95 period
as being the lowest that had ever been seen
in recorded history in new England,
which goes back centuries.
A settlement was reached
to come up with a management plan
that set the catch levels low enough
so that overfishing was going to stop.
We started rebuilding the fish stocks in the early '90s,
which most of this came from the fishermen themselves.
Obviously, we don't wanna wipe this area out of fish.
In 1994, they went to a limited access program
and it locked in the people that were in the fishery
and basically locked out anybody
that wasn't in the fishery.
During that time, they also established
what they referred to as Days at Sea.
The government originally started out
with like 180 Days at Sea back in the '90s.
And they kept cutting that
and cutting that cutting that.
We were cut back to, I believe it was
160 days per year we could fish.
And then it went downhill from there.
88 days, 44 days, to 32 days.
How the hell are you gonna make a living in 23 days?
Well, you can do what some guys did,
is they went out and bought extra permits
for 150,000, 200,000, some of them.
Only the cruel joke about that was, in two years,
those permits were worthless
because it wasn't Days at Sea anymore,
it was catch shares.
Per permit, you were allocated quota per your history.
The fishery service never told us
that they were going down that history road.
Unfortunately, what tends to happen
unless you have some bulwark against this,
is that larger fleets and larger companies
buy that quota from the smaller fishermen,
amassing it into a larger and larger piece of the pie
until it gets to a point where, the small fishermen,
it's really not worth it for them
to hang onto their quota anymore.
When they told us that,
"We're gonna do this kind of a restriction,
because I guarantee you, by 2014,
we are going to have so much fish
that everyone can fish.
And the ones who didn't sell their boats
will be richer and everything else,"
and we just said, "We wanna survive.
Just let us survive."
At NOAA Fisheries, what we do
is manage fisheries in federal waters,
that's three miles out to 200 miles.
We work with the New England Fishery Management Council.
My job is balancing fish and fishermen.
We have allowed fish stocks to get down to very low levels.
And then with climate change,
it created a hostile environment
for these depleted stocks.
Temperature's a really, really important factor
that affects the timing of when the fish spawn.
It affects how many eggs they can produce.
And since 2004, the Gulf of Maine increased
by three degrees Celsius,
which is about five degrees Fahrenheit.
It's like taking the Gulf of Maine
and moving it south to the temperatures
that we would expect to see,
you know, off of New Jersey.
I knew that the job was going to be very tough.
And I knew that there was a lot of distrust
towards NOAA Fisheries.
And when you give people bad news,
I've never met a single person
who likes to hear bad news.
Six generations down the line passed down,
and he's done nothing but S-H-I-T to us.
I didn't take the fish from the goddamn water.
Then who took it, then? So don't go abusing me!
You and your goddamn people come in!
[John B.] Over 20 years ago,
the Canadians made a quota cut.
I'm making a decision based on the desire to ensure
that the Northern cod survives as a species.
They cut it 100%,
and the cod still haven't come back.
(dramatic music)
[Reporter] Fishermen and political leaders
rallied on Boston's Fish Pier
demanding the federal government
back off its long-planned 77% reduction.
And we are totally frustrated
with NOAA and their regulatory schemes
and their inability to be flexible
and their apparent desire
not to work with us. (crowd cheering)
[Reporter] What would an 80 or 90% cut
in current levels mean to that industry?
That is extinction of the fishery as we know it.
The houses we foreclosed on, our boats, everything,
we're looking at a total complete loss of everything.
It's the end of the oldest independent industry
in the country, period.
And all we've ever done is do what we're told.
We need to set the regulations straight.
We need to get the science right.
The reasons the fishing industries die
is not because of too much conservation.
It's because of the loss of fish.
Yes, people go out of business.
Yes, there is hardship,
because there aren't any fish because,
because there aren't any fish.
Now, Mr. Bullard, I see you out there,
and I appreciate the fact that you're here.
We need your cooperation. (crowd clapping)
We need your help. (crowd cheering)
We need you to find a way to make this work.
At some point, we need to rebuild the fish.
I just hope it's not too late.
Then I won't be miserable
if you can help us take the no out of NOAA.
'Cause I don't know how many times.
(crowd cheering)
We want you to raise the quotas.
Well, legally, we don't think we can do that.
It's not gonna be easy.
There is pain. And there will be pain.
The very survival of fishing communities is on the line.
There's not one fisherman's family tonight
that isn't holding its breath.
(dramatic music slows)
When you go to a store
and you see two different pieces of cod,
maybe even three, you've got Alaskan cod,
you've got Atlantic cod from the New England region,
and then you've got Norwegian cod.
And we're forced to now make
yet a further informed decision of,
"Okay, well, food miles, greenhouse gas,
you know, local economies, global economies.
What are we doing?"
that we forget to ask like, "Wait a minute,
why do we need three pieces of cod
in the grocery store?"
(soft whimsical music)
Americans have a very simple concept
of what seafood is supposed to do,
culinarily and nutritionally.
Only yesterday they told me
how much they like H. Salt fish
because it's not fishy tasting.
It's just plain good eating."
For the average American,
most fish is a dough delivery system,
so of course we don't have an appreciation
for what's really good.
And it's no surprise
that we have things like tilapia,
the fifth most-consumed seafood in America
being at the center of our plates.
Tilapia is the perfect industrial fish.
It's easy to feed. It's easy to reproduce.
It has no flavor.
It's disgusting.
I wouldn't eat a tilapia
with somebody else's mouth.
It became like the aquatic chicken.
And they really went down the same line
as the Perdue chicken model.
We have been taught to like tilapia.
We have been taught to like bland, white foods.
There are abundance stocks in the ocean.
Pollock is a delicious fish.
It's very similar to cod,
except that when you sell it at auction,
it's 95 cents, a dollar on a good day.
Cod is 3.40.
So there's a reason why we catch
and continue to target cod and haddock:
because that's what the people wanna eat.
[Barton] We're only willing to eat
a certain number of species.
And when we make demands of any natural system,
then we become sort of the arbiters of natural selection.
And so what we've done
is we've created an entire irrational economy
that's based on demand
rather than what the oceans can sustainably supply.
(soft music)
(boat engine humming) (water splashing)
I'm a cod fishermen.
I've caught cod all my life.
(light upbeat music)
I fell off the pier three years ago,
fell 20 feet and landed on my head.
Broke just about every bone in my body.
All the doctors, 36 of them I had,
and every one of them said the same thing,
"Take Social Security Disability.
You're never fishing again."
I said, "I'll prove you wrong."
Nine months later, I was back on that boat.
I like doing this.
This is all I've done my entire life.
I get up at 3:30 and I go to work.
And I'm good at what I do and I enjoy it.
The public gets this impression
that it's easy to just go catch one thing.
The fact is that it's not, it's almost impossible.
If you wanna catch a winter flounder,
you gotta have yellow tails.
If you wanna catch American plaice,
you gotta have gray sole.
You gotta have it all.
Almost all fishing gears
catch more than one thing at a time.
And if you're trying to avoid it,
then we usually call that bycatch.
I get an incidental catch permit for butterfish.
I catch more than I'm allowed
and I just shovel them over the side.
Now, that's just stupid,
but that's the kind of management system we have.
(soft upbeat music continues)
Bycatch, what it means practically
is the fish that fishermen catch
that we are not willing to eat.
They cost a fishermen the same amount of money
to catch the unwanted species
as it does the targeted species.
It's a waste of food, certainly,
but it's a waste of economic opportunity
and it's a waste of delicious opportunity.
Bottom line, bycatch should be on our menu
and it should just be called catch of the day.
Back in the early seventies,
I was down at the Fish Pier
and I saw a box of fish marked "Monkey tails."
And I said to one of the dock workers down there,
I go, "Geez, monkey tails, what's this?"
And he said, "You don't want any of this blank,
but we sell it to France for big money."
As luck would have it, Julia Child came by that day.
And she said, "What, what?"
(upbeat music)
Welcome. I'm Julia Child.
We're gonna have a very fine,
fast fish dinner today.
Under this coverture is one
of the great fish of all time.
Woo, look at that. This is a monkfish.
Look at those teeth, their teeth on the lower part,
very sharp teeth up here.
And look at that tail there.
And within a few weeks,
she had put it on her show.
It was in a cookbook.
It was in the "Time" magazine.
[Julia] You wouldn't think
that terrible looking old fish
would produce such nice, beautiful white flesh.
So that was an example of a chef
taking a nontraditional, under-utilized species
that, you know, it's just really great tasting
that we don't do enough with.
If you happen to run into a monkfish one day,
don't scream, invite him home for dinner.
How trash fish becomes cash fish,
there's a long history of that.
Lobster used to be trash.
Literally, we fertilized fields with it.
Indentured servants by law in Massachusetts
we're not to be fed lobster
more than three times a week.
There's never anything wrong with the product.
It's only something wrong with how we perceive it.
One fish out there
that there's certainly a lot of is dogfish.
It's a shark. Don't be fooled.
It produces fabulous fish and chips
that's highly valued throughout Europe,
UK, Germany, et cetera.
The problem is, of course,
people aren't used to eating dogfish.
It doesn't sound like the fish you'd wanna eat.
The classic example of that is Patagonian toothfish.
Until they called it Chilean sea bass,
nobody was interested.
[Barton] We asked fishermen to catch fish on our behalf.
And yet, when they do, we're not willing to eat
what they actually are able to bring up.
Up in a cod net comes haddock and hake and pollock
and cusk and ling and monk and skate
and wolf and dog and ray and robins and others.
There's a farm in that ocean that you can use.
So why aren't more chefs using any kind of fish?
I'm sorry, I'm bringing a challenge out to anyone.
If you think you're a chef
and you can't cook one of these fishes,
then you'd better come to Gloucester
so we can teach you.
(water splashing) (birds calling)
There is a certain freedom that you have
out here in this ocean.
(soft somber music)
I always thought it was kind of a noble profession, myself.
You were working hard.
You were feeding people.
You ran your own outfit.
You were a small businessman.
[Man] Take it up!
Not anymore.
What we see in the farming industry in the '80s
where they put the small farmers out of business,
the whole country has gone that way.
And we're just the last hold out.
And now that the independent fishermen
are no longer strong,
we're no longer out here in number,
we've lost our authority
to be the watchdogs of the ocean.
This is the last great source
of wild protein in this world,
America's fisheries from West Coast to East Coast.
A bum like me (laughs) is not as good as a steward
of the environment as, say, a board of directors member
of British Petroleum or Monsanto
or Archer-Midland-Daniels or somebody like that,
you know, Tyson. (laughs)
You know, who am I?
Who am I?
One of the guys in the old market once told me,
he said, "It used to be the wives,
they came to the market.
They said, 'What's good?'
We told them what was good.
They bought it. It was good.
And they liked fish
and that was the way it went.
Now the wives, they go to the supermarket.
The guy who's working fish came over from the deli.
He doesn't know shit about fish.
He tells them to buy something shitty.
She buys it. She cooks it.
It sucks, and the rest of the family
never eats fish again."
So, I mean, that to me is really what happened.
And we eat about 15 pounds
of seafood per person per year.
That's minuscule compared
to the land food meats that we eat.
We eat something like 200 pounds
of beef, chicken, pork.
And it's also quite small
compared to the real fish-eating countries of the world.
Seafood's a great protein.
I mean, if you've gotta eat flesh,
you're better off eating the flesh of a fish
than you are pretty much anything
that walks on four legs.
By saying, "Don't eat fish,
it's unsustainable, our oceans are empty,"
we've actually scared people away from eating seafood.
And as a public health measure,
that's actually been a great step backwards.
We need to be eating more seafood in this country.
And think about this,
when we go to the grocery store
and we stand in front of this case
and we're so confused by the amount
of environmental information thrown at us,
we say, "Oh my God, well,
I'm just gonna go get some hamburger."
But by many accounts,
the hamburger is the far worse health choice.
And it's far worse for the environment
in terms of the greenhouse gas emissions
associated with it that are causing ocean acidification
that threaten to absolutely destroy
the very foundations of the marine food system.
And one thing that the United States Government
needs to do a better job on is publicizing
what they do to ensure that the fisheries
of the United States of America are fished sustainably.
It is against the law to overfish
in the United States of America.
Overfishing is a funny word
whose meaning has changed over time.
If you asked the average layperson,
"What is overfishing?"
"Well, there's less fish left
because you caught too many."
That's not what it means today.
Technically, overfishing is fishing at a rate harder
than would give you the longterm maximum sustainable yield.
It's a bit of a theoretical concept.
Overfishing means
that we haven't rebuilt the population
to the level that science says it could be rebuilt to,
and we're trying to rebuild stocks.
So we're not decimating fisheries.
These fishermen we have now
want to preserve the ocean.
They care about it all, because it's their livelihood.
They're small, individual businessmen.
I don't think that the US fishermen
get the credit that they should get
for operating under such a stringent system.
So the consumer should feel great
about getting a US-caught piece of fish.
(soft somber music) (chains rattling)
Not far from here,
oh God, it must have been '76 or '77,
98,000 of fish we put aboard of her in 52 hours.
52 hours straight we went.
Our last trip, we worked 10 days, 10 full days.
The three of us, that's three guys, $735 a share.
Yahoo.
Things have changed so much.
This is our log entry we have to do
for the fishery service every day.
And down here, we have the amount of fishes landed
for the day by this boat, 1,500 pounds of dog fish.
They are 20 cents to the boat.
10 pounds of cod fish, 10 pounds of pollock,
two pounds of haddock, four pounds of flounders.
Gross revenue for this boat today, it was $350.
There is a lot of overhead costs when you go fishing.
First, you pay the fuel oil,
which is the biggest bill today.
Then you have to pay for the food, for the ice.
You have to put money aside for pay insurance.
The list goes on and on.
When you look at all this equipment,
I mean, this stuff is all incredibly expensive.
And most of it is being used
in an extremely harsh climate and salt water.
So it means it doesn't last very long.
I have a hydraulic pump that's got a seal gone in it.
It's probably a $1,000 to repair it.
I went to Walmart and bought a bucket for 9.99
and stuck it underneath it to catch the oil.
It's just gonna have to wait.
I don't have the money.
But now we have an extra added expense,
which is the lease.
My allocation at the beginning of the year
was 3,200 pounds of cod fish.
So we went through that pretty quick.
We just went into our savings
and took out $5,300 to lease another 3,200 pounds
so we could stay in business.
Too many fishermen are losing too much money.
We can't keep up with this much longer.
There'll have to be a solution
or your small boat fishing communities will vanish.
I used to think that there was hope.
I used to believe that through everyone's good efforts
and good intentions, that we were gonna pull this out.
I don't believe that anymore.
Two years ago, the Fishery Service Science Center
told us that, in the Northeast region,
all of our fish stocks would be rebuilt,
at the rate that the stock was increasing, by 2014.
Fishermen and conservation, we were exhilarated
that a population that was so important,
so iconic, was back so quickly.
(soft somber music)
That exuberance didn't last very long,
because the model was wrong.
Basically overnight, they said,
"Well, you know what?
We just built this new model.
And (laughs) it says that the fish
is about to collapse."
And it kind of left fishermen
in a state of disbelief.
Counting fish is a lot more difficult
than counting trees or deer, actually.
You know, they're under water and they move around
and they're hard to see.
The science that's reported
from Woods Hole Science Center,
which comes out of their research boats,
that's our book we live by.
Everything relies on the science.
Therefore, everyone is very critical of the science.
Fishermen are always wondering
how are they using their nets?
What speed are they towing at?
Are they fishing in the right areas?
Do they get a good overall perspective
of what's actually out there?
You have lots of opinions
on what's going on in the water.
You have the fishermen who are out there
who can find the fish and know how to find the fish
and say that they think there are a lot of fish.
You have the scientists
who have their very data-centric approach.
And so, yeah, it can be very adversarial.
It's fair to say there's a fair amount
of scientific debate about what you have
as far as its value for catch advice
after you've adjusted some things.
Is that fair to say?
No. No?
The hostility, I guess, between those two camps
that ought to be cooperating is unhealthy.
To counter that, I'm sure that other people
have taken that precise estimate in other years
when they liked the number.
Oh, that's not the point.
Nice editorial, but not the point.
Biomass is low.
We present a stochastic projection.
You look at the median value.
I mean, I can't give you a number.
No, I understand.
But obviously, there's a fair amount
of uncertainty with the projection,
so it's fair to say, okay.
I don't know.
How do you know?
(man laughs) Well, I would ask.
There's so much mistrust
between the fishing industry
and the National Marine Fishery Service
because of all the polarization
that this cordial relationship
that we enjoyed for decades
has pretty much evaporated.
When you are operating in a system
where everyone understands
that we're all in this together
and that the oceans are a shared resource,
then I think you begin to see examples,
like in Norway or in Iceland,
countries that began to look at regulations
and the communication and collaboration between fishermen
that I think leads to opportunities.
(regal music)
Norway is the second-largest seafood exporter
in the world.
The cod is the most valuable product
from the wild-catch sector.
People have been catching cod
and living from cod for thousands and thousands of years.
In Norway, there's a very special legislation
giving the Fishermen's Organization a very strong position.
And we do that by organizing minimum prices
for the fish, securing equal terms of competition,
both for those who sell the fish,
as well as for the fishing industry who buy the fish.
Most of the fishermen is very pleased with this system.
Being a fishermen in Norway today
is a well-respected and a very good occupation.
The average fisherman today
who would make more than a $100,000 US a year.
When I was over there, I went to that conference,
and it just seemed that the fishermen themselves
had a lot more respect by the regulators,
by the government that they do over here.
(audience applauds)
In Norway, we have put the collaboration
with fisherman into our sampling routines.
Every day, they do sampling for the scientists
from their catches,
data that goes directly into stock assessment
so that we can come up
with the best possible conclusions.
That's how things like stock assessment should be done.
They should be cooperative ventures,
because we want the answer to be right.
Fishermen inherently are more trusting
of the data that's coming from fishing vessels
that actually gets used in the region
than they are of a big research vessel
that's chockablock full of PhD scientists,
but probably has never got at a fish.
It is important to have also a close cooperation
between scientists, the fishing industry,
and the administrators,
so the fisherman have their say
on how we should structure the various regulation.
We have been able to rebuild the stocks
to a historical level.
Two years ago, we had the total allowable catch
for more than 1 million tons of cod.
That's the highest cod stock we had ever had.
There will always be attention,
there will always be different opinions
about what is correct thing to do.
I think, in a way, we understand each other's role
and the need to go forward, yeah.
[Reporter] Government surveys claim cod
is at dangerously low levels in the Gulf of Maine.
The goal, a break to allow the species
time to bounce back.
Our reading of the stock assessment science
indicated that some of the populations, including cod,
might be at the point of a commercial collapse
and that the fisheries should be closed.
(soft music)
I talked with some managers from Newfoundland
and they said, "You know, 20 years ago,
our mistake was we let fishermen catch
those last concentrations of cod."
Can we strike a balance that saves cod and saves fishermen,
or is either one of those destined for extinction?
And what if you are wrong?
There's no contingency plan for if you are wrong.
We've been talking about fish.
I wanna talk about humans.
I've seen more fishermen and fisherman's wife
cry on the other side of my desk
than I can remember.
How do we even know that any of these
kinds of closures are gonna work?
I'm opposed to this motion,
because if it is adopted, I'm all done.
I would urge you to reject this motion.
I think it's gross overkill.
From what we heard yesterday and today,
I don't see how we can avoid saying
this is a stock in collapse,
this is an emergency, and action is warranted.
What this will do is eliminate the integral fleet
of Maine, New Hampshire,
and potentially some of the folks
in Northern Massachusetts.
[Man] Motion carries. (gavel banging)
(crowd chattering)
(upbeat inspirational music)
[Announcer] Our day is just beginning
as yours is coming to an end.
We are searching for a new answer
to that nightly question.
Hey, honey, what's for dinner?
♪ Trust the Gorton's Fisherman ♪
That advertisement on television,
that big blue trawler
over to the yellow slickers.
I used to have a skipper, he'd say,
"Chief, chief, I never saw that boat around here.
You ever see that guy around here?
Where does he go fishing, anyway?"
Our fish sticks are so delicious,
they'll make your taste buds snap to attention
and say, "Ahoy, matey."
(audience laughs) (audience applauds)
Gorton's is an example of one
of the very large businesses that are in town
that don't buy from local fishermen anymore.
We couldn't supply them,
the kind of volume that they need
and the kind of dependability that they need.
We couldn't do it.
The Gorton's Fisherman,
like everything in Gloucester has changed.
Brokers are watching computer screens
and they're buying their fish
wherever the supply is.
It's advertising.
They're using the Gloucester Fisherman
and everything to brand their product.
(soft upbeat music)
Gorton's of Gloucester hasn't sold
Gloucester fish in years, generations.
(soft dramatic music)
When you think of seafood,
I think a lot of Americans think of it
as the most local food.
In fact, they'll probably only ever eat it
when they go for their beach vacation.
But actually, seafood is like the least local food
Americans are likely to come across.
91% of our seafood in any given year
is coming to us from abroad.
[Barton] We rarely consider
where our seafood comes from or even think to ask.
At present, the United States imports
more than 6 billion pounds of seafood,
making it one of the most significant trade imbalances.
So we're right now involved
in this ridiculous fish swap.
We export about 3 billion pounds
of seafood every single year,
really excellent seafood,
black cod and New England sea scallops, wild salmon.
And in return, we get farmed shrimp, farmed tilapia.
And why? It's cheap.
It's easy. It's flavorless.
And that's what Americans seem to want.
Fish can be moved anywhere.
And the cost of moving fish is oftentimes less
than the cost of catching fish.
So fish catching goes on where it's cheap.
[Paul] Almost all of the tilapia is coming from China.
90% of the shrimp is coming from China, Vietnam, Thailand,
and then all of the Pangasius catfish
is coming to us largely from abroad
In many of the Southeast Asian countries,
it's a industrial scale aquaculture.
So these fish are grown in very, very high densities,
packed in tooth to jowl.
I've seen these ponds, and it's almost
like an M.C. Escher painting where like,
tail in front of head in front of tail in front of head.
(fish splashing)
Under this banner of,
we're gonna create cheap seafood and a lot of it,
they're taking over coastlines of these countries
that don't have that many other options,
and they sell it to them as progress,
as development, as we're gonna have jobs for you.
Labor restrictions, labor costs in Asia
are much lower than they are in the United States,
plus they don't have nearly the environmental restrictions
and regulations that we have here.
So it allows their fish to hit the market
in the United States at much lower price levels.
A lot of the biomass that's taken out of the ocean
is not caught by mom and pop operators,
not caught by small-scale operators.
They're big commercial enterprises
that are not particularly grounded in a community,
industries that do not have a lot of men
who are fourth-generation fishermen,
industries that are simply
like many other extractive industries
around the world that are applying capital
to make profit for shareholders and then move on.
There are a lot of third-world people
who have been very threatened
by first-world fisheries relocating.
Foreign fleets have come in with technology,
the scale of which local people there had never seen.
And these fleets have vacuumed up the fish.
Fish don't stand a chance
against these giant factory trawlers
that can let out 30 miles of hooks
or nets that you could swallow up
an entire football field in,
the helicopters chasing schools of fish
above them in the air.
What's a fish to do?
In a factory trawler,
their net is a size of 10 jumbo planes.
Their bycatch, in one haul,
was what I could catch all year.
Where do you see the rationality there?
I would argue that we may be
actually causing more environmental problems
of overfishing by importing our fish
from places that don't regulate their fisheries
than we would if we fished a little harder in the US.
(soft dramatic music continues)
Well, US imports over 90% of the seafood
that we consume in this country.
And considering how much seafood is caught here,
that almost seems unbelievable.
But most of the seafood that we catch
goes somewhere else.
And then, often, it gets re-imported
back into this country.
Some of these products that you see
have enormous carbon footprint.
I was at a restaurant in Gloucester.
I asked them a little bit more about the haddock,
'cause I saw the processing factory
right across over there.
And I knew the auction was right down the road.
And the haddock was actually, it had come,
fished off the Grand Banks, landed in Gloucester,
went on a container and went to China,
came back to Gloucester,
and was sitting there on my plate in the restaurant
across the street from almost where it was caught.
It just seems crazy that here you have
these American fishermen and they go out,
they catch something,
and then it's too expensive
to process it in this country.
So we ship it halfway across the world.
It gets processed over there
and probably treated with something
that we wouldn't wanna have in our bodies.
Preservatives are added.
You may have masked the aging by dipping it
in some brine or gassing,
but the flavor, it never lies.
You get fish sometimes twice and thrice frozen.
If I bring haddock home and my wife freezes it
and then we have company down the line
that we have a haddock dinner or something,
it's tasty, it's good.
I'd still rather have it right off the boat.
But if she thawed it out, refroze it
and thawed it out again,
I wouldn't even give it to the dog, myself.
Of all these billions of pounds of seafood
that are coming to this country every year,
not a lot of it gets looked at.
The trade of meat and poultry and everything else
is very heavily regulated by the USDA,
but there is no such organization for fish.
So USDA is doing their thing with meat and poultry.
FDA has everything else,
seafood, vegetables, processed foods.
They never get above 2%
in terms of their inspection rates.
So odds are, if you're sending a shipment of something,
odds are, it's not gonna get inspected.
(soft dramatic music)
Whenever somebody does a study,
whenever a state does their own testing,
they find violation after violation after violation,
especially in aquaculture products.
The levels of toxicants that have been found
in the flesh are pretty alarming,
and including antibiotics.
Remember, with these animals, you are what you eat.
If it's just like soaked in antibiotics,
then you're gonna be consuming that.
We ourselves published a story on imported shrimp
where we bought over 200 cases of shrimp
that were frozen or fresh and tested them
for a range of antibiotics and other things.
And what we found is, out of those over 200 shrimp,
we found 11 samples that had antibiotics on them.
There were cases of where the FDA knew
certain aquaculture drugs were being used
in Vietnam that were illegal in the US,
but they weren't testing any of the imports
for that particular drug.
You go to a restaurant and you'll see your tuna,
and it's perfectly pink all the way through.
There's no tuna that the meat
is perfectly pink all the way through.
There's a process with tuna whereby processors
put it through a CO gassing program
that bursts all the blood vessels in the piece of fish
to allow it to maintain
this bright watermelon color.
Why that's a problem is that tuna
is a histamine producing species,
and people can die from histamine poisoning.
Histamines happen when there's temperature abuse.
Normally, you'd be able to tell that
because the tuna would show signs of temperature abuse,
browning on the edges.
Well, once you've had it gassed,
it masks all indication.
So other countries, like Canada,
have outlawed what we call tailpipe tuna.
But here in the United States,
you can buy it at your retailer at a price
much lower than a fresh piece of tuna.
When you get that kind of level of uncertainty,
I don't think Americans would tolerate that
for any other food product,
for any other meat product.
This is not the feeding of the hungry movement.
This is feeding the restaurant movement
that wants to sell you a 10.99 a plate of shrimp.
And I know for a fact that the more they shut us down,
the more fish are coming from other countries.
(soft music) (boat engine humming)
Get down, c'mon.
C'mon, let's run. (claps)
c'mon, baby.
What's happening right now
is I invested into the industry.
I elected to stay in the industry
when Days at Sea came around.
And my wife and I purchased other permits
from fellows that were getting out of the business.
[Reporter] Can you walk him beforehand?
Absolutely the calm before the storm.
Right now, I owe a bank here in the region
$400,000 on permits that are worthless
because the Fishery Service changed their plan.
(wind howling) (TV playing indistinctly)
I'm paying $5,000 a month to the bank,
and there's no money coming in.
I'd like to think there was.
But as John Bullard said, "Too bad.
It's no different than being a factory worker.
Go find another job."
It's all I've ever done.
(soft somber music)
(wind howling)
(snow pattering)
And everybody that's risk their life
to feed this country fresh fish
is being tortured right now.
I had the opportunity to sell the entire business,
boats and permits, almost three years ago
for over 3 million bucks.
And I didn't, I can't put these guys out on the street.
I'm not like that.
(metal scraping)
You know, what am I gonna do,
take the money and run,
let everybody starve to death?
I can't.
We're gonna downsize the house a few years early,
but we'll do it, no big deal.
You do what you have to do.
(soft somber music continues)
(clock ticking)
(birds calling)
[Frank] We're cleaning her up, chipping, painting,
adding some steel, as, you know,
she's got some time onto her.
(sander whirring)
We've lost everything. We've lost our market.
We've lost opportunity. Our investments are no good.
This boat isn't worth a damn.
I can't sell it, even if I want to.
(paintbrush scraping)
It's a catch 22.
You can't stay in, yet you can't get out.
(welding torch crackles)
Our port infrastructures, our machine shops,
our oil facilities, our ice facilities,
all the ancillary businesses,
our supply businesses, have gone into demise as well.
The City of Gloucester has been ruined.
(soft somber music continues)
They've opened up the door.
Not just cracked it open,
they've opened up the door.
We're gonna lose more people
in the industry, more boats.
And once they start building condominiums
and hotels in the waterfront,
the fishing boats are not gonna come back.
I used to say that we could feed the world.
Then I used to say we could feed the United States.
And now I'm just saying just let us feed Massachusetts.
In a few years, the only thing we're gonna have
are these oars with the name of the boats
that they are no more.
In silence, I was saying that to myself.
It's gonna go corporate.
That's where all of this is leading.
And that'll be the end of a great and long tradition.
Fishermen are absolutely right
to feel as though they have been targeted,
because they have been.
The fishermen who are struggling to make ends meet,
whose quotas are constantly being slashed,
who are being given very different information
from different sources and who are largely being vilified,
they feel under attack.
And rightly so.
Everyone in this discussion has equal interest.
Everyone wants to sustain jobs.
Everyone wants to have dinner on the table.
Everyone wants resilient ecosystems.
But it's that lack of understanding
that we're all in this together
that I think is so detrimental.
If there are no fishermen, there's no seafood.
And, ultimately, we're trying to sustain the ocean
so that we may sustain ourselves.
(soft somber music continues)
(soft upbeat music)
I had grown up on same-day sourced seafood,
and I knew what really fresh seafood tasted like.
I was traveling through Spain
and I saw bass fishermen coming up
with their wicker baskets filled with ice and fish,
and they were going right into the restaurants
in the harbor.
Moments later, the waiters were coming out
and changing the menu board.
And what we just saw go in the wicker basket
was what was on the menu that night.
And that was kind of the light bulb.
I had an epiphany there.
I was like, "Why can't we do that at home?
We should have this at home."
Voila, suddenly, Dock to Dish was born.
[Sarah] Dock to Dish operates
as a restaurant-supported fishery,
which is a membership-based program.
Instead of a chef walking into a fish market
and saying, "This is what I want,
this is what's on my menu,"
we're now switching it to,
the fisherman comes into the harbor,
and whatever comes in within that 24-hour period
gets delivered to the restaurant.
It was the community-supported agriculture movement,
it was the CSAs that you saw in the local farms here
is where I really was able to see the blueprint.
They blazed a trail for us to follow,
and so now, fisheries and seafood,
we're just following what the farmers
and the chefs have done already on the land.
Our whole premise is built on transparency,
a know-your-fishermen culture.
You really should be entitled
to know who caught your seafood.
Hey, Jeff.
(Jeff speaks faintly)
Yeah.
(laughs) That is awesome. (woman laughs)
So these are warty California sea cucumbers.
I'm gonna buy some from you.
4.50 a pound. [Jeff] Yeah.
[Sarah] Well, then I can take 50 pounds.
(laughs) Smile.
I'm smiling.
[Sarah] (laughs) He's like, "I'm smiling.
What do you want?"
This demand-based system is not sustainable.
We've already proven that.
We're really changing the conversation around fish,
actively making it a more sustainable endeavor.
It's always the way, right?
We get to write that check right there
on the docks to the fishermen.
So where are these fish going?
They're gonna Providence in LA
with one of the best seafood restaurants out there.
They can go out when the weather is good.
They know they have a paycheck waiting for them on the dock.
That would be awesome.
And as soon as those urchins are good, let me know.
Yeah, I will.
[Sarah] That's not something that they're used to.
If you're an American fisherman
following American laws,
you're a sustainable fishery.
We firmly believe that, like,
if there's something unsustainable
about what you're doing,
NOAA is gonna be the first one to eliminate you.
What we need to move towards
and what I hope that this program
is helping to demonstrate
is a more supply-driven network.
(crickets chirping)
C'mon.
(truck engine roars)
Really, you have to start somewhere.
And right now where we're starting is at the top.
(soft music)
Hi!
So what do you have for us today?
The meat is really orange.
It's got these crazy black lines on it.
It's really beautiful.
That's usually bycatch, so that's really exciting.
[Niki] Let's get to it. [Sarah] Yeah.
I've been looking for so long
to find fish that are from California,
and it's been very hard to source these ingredients
because a lot of the fish that are caught
don't end up in the markets that are available to us.
The meat is so fresh, Sarah.
Yes, 'cause it's just really firm,
really clean, really shiny.
(soft upbeat music)
It's good.
We have a mantra that define our cooking,
and we say the fish is the star of the plate.
We are looking for the best ingredients possible.
If you give someone wild fish, for instance,
and you give him again what he was buying before,
I'm sure all the consumer will know the difference.
I think it's all about education.
So we've got two beautiful yellows.
That's nice.
Wow. This will be an adventure.
All sorts of people walk into this restaurant
and say, "Well, I don't eat uni."
But yet, I talk to people all the time here
that say that they tried uni
for the first time here and loved it.
So I think there's always that possibility
that you can turn people on
to something they've never had before
and please them with it.
I spent a lot of time around fishermen as a kid.
I feel a certain responsibility, I think,
to try and really highlight American seafood,
wild American seafood.
To my mind, the less American fishermen
that are contemplating selling their boats
and giving it all up, the better off we all are.
When we look for chefs, we are really looking
for people who embrace the whole animal.
It's not just the filet that people are getting.
They're getting a bouillabaisse sauce
made out of the head and the tail
or a sauce thickened by the eyes
or the cheeks themselves.
It's not just about utilizing all the fish,
it's about really creating a cuisine around the whole fish
and a culture around the whole fish.
Here we go.
Mackerel Español, Jose. España.
These are actually from the Beckwith brothers in Montauk.
If you're bringing fish to Dan Barber,
you better let him know who caught it.
Okay, they're going on the menu tonight.
How do we create delicious dishes
out of the fish that you normally wouldn't use?
A great example is bouillabaisse.
Fishermen arrived to the docks,
and the wives took out all the damaged fish
and all the fish that were in the nets that wouldn't sell.
And they made this beautiful stew.
It ends up becoming an iconic dish
that becomes what it means
to be French by the seashore.
The barrier for a lot of the underutilized species
was that people just weren't familiar with them.
They didn't know how to cook them.
The chefs have removed that ceiling.
Now they're cool.
We have a lot of questions from regulars.
And a lot of people who are consider foodies
are very interested knowing
that the fish is sustainable
and we are helping the fishermen to have a job
and be financially sustainable as well.
We tend to associate deliciousness
and enjoyment of food with some kind of gluttony,
some kind of negative impact on the environment
when actually, the opposite is true
if it's done with intelligent design.
You as an eater don't have a choice
if this is what you're being handed.
And as long as there's culinary craft involved
and it's a key component, gluttony is good
in the pursuit of this kind of balance.
The choices that we make here
hopefully will inspire the people that come here
to go and make similar choices
when they go out to purchase seafood,
you know, in the retail setting.
I feel like it's a collective awakening.
We are at a crossroad.
We are, and it's not too late to change things.
I do believe that, you know, ultimately,
these ideas end up trickling down.
It just takes awhile.
(class bell rings)
(students chattering)
Finding fish that was caught locally,
processed locally, and then delivered to us
was almost impossible at a price point
that we could deal with in a public school.
New Hampshire Community Seafood made it possible.
[Spencer] Hey there, chef.
Hey, how are ya?
We've got some locally caught
and processed Acadian redfish for you, yeah.
Very nice.
Some herbs, breadcrumbs, and a little butter,
some fresh lemon juice.
Nice and simple, and it's fresh. It works.
This fish was caught by New Hampshire fishermen,
as well as processed in New Hampshire.
And we're bringing it to the schools today
through New Hampshire Farm to School.
And we're building a new layer
of access for young high school students,
elementary and middle as well,
to eat locally caught seafood.
There's a study that says that kids
eat 2/3 of what they eat in a day at school.
So we have a bigger impact
on what they're eating now
and what they're eating in the future
than I think a lot of people realize.
So we're here to show you the fish
that you guys will be eating today, super fresh.
You can eat the eyes, actually. (laughs)
(soft upbeat music)
do you guys like it? I mean what's.
Yeah, it's pretty good.
[Spencer] Well, you already ate it.
It's all gone. Yeah, it's gone. It's gone.
Yeah, so there's the filet.
Just about a little angle, but nice.
That was a good first cut, I'd say.
I would, if the school continued to do this,
'cause most people don't eat fish
in their daily routines.
They don't understand that there
are many different types of fish that you can eat.
I mean, I'm a fishermen daughter,
so I'm used to fish
that's no more than six or eight hours old.
So I was pleasantly surprised when I came in here
and the room didn't smell like fish,
which it's not supposed to,
and it actually tasted really good.
One of the ways that we can get fish here
at the right price is if we order
500 pounds at a time and have it split up
between all the different districts.
We're not looking for things like cod
and halibut and salmon
and things that we can't afford,
but we can do a lot with pollock
and hake and dogfish.
We really just wanna promote
like a bio-diverse plate.
So yeah, redfish today.
Maybe who knows, next month,
you guys will do dogfish.
(student laughs)
Thank you for that question.
I think it's very important
from a public health perspective
that we acknowledge that access
to sustainable, healthy protein,
healthy seafood, is imperative in American society.
Further, the average age of fishermen
in this country is growing.
And few participants are joining their ranks.
A lack of jobs and prosperity in wild fisheries
has led young people in coastal communities
to look for work elsewhere.
Aquaculture could provide that missing opportunity
in an exciting and innovative new industry.
And this is already happening
where sons and daughters of fishermen
are operating dozens of oyster,
mussel, seaweed farms.
(soft upbeat music)
I'm a shellfish farmer in Wellfleet.
This is not an instant gratification type of job.
You have to have a little patience.
I mean, a hard shell clam takes typically
24 to 36 months for a harvest.
Aquaculture is gaining traction.
Oysters have really come into vogue lately.
And that's great, because it's shedding light
on a conversation that is more
than just how good is this oyster.
I get more and more inquiries about,
"Hey, can I get out to the flats
and see actually where these are from?"
I say, "Sure.
Let's go take a walk out there,
and we'll show you exactly where they're from."
People are doing a good job.
And I think the better job they do,
the better it is for the business
and the economy in town here.
[Alex] Not only does it provide a sustainable resource,
it employs local people,
and it's also completely beneficial
to the health of the harbor itself.
Clams, oysters, mussels, seaweed,
these are all things that remove nitrogen
from the environment, prevent dead zones,
that actually clean the water
and actually provide habitat
for a lot of the fish that we like to eat.
So I cannot stress enough how much aquaculture
must co-exist in parallel with our wild fisheries,
as they will augment each other
and ultimately raise the profile and value
of each of each other's products.
(soft music) (waves splashing)
We have to be serious.
We cannot speak from all sides of our mouth.
If for conservation we're trying to do,
then let's stick to the conservation.
125 pound of red fish filet.
Every year in Boston at this time a year,
there's the Boston Seafood Expo,
and all the whole world comes to it.
People are trying to sell fish
and people are coming to buy fish.
(Angela speaks in Italian)
We are promoting the Gloucester fishing industry.
We are doing the redfish soup.
Redfishes right now is one of those fish
that there is abundance.
It's very sustainable.
It's a beautiful fish.
It's beautiful to look at it.
Already my eyes are killing me.
Yeah, we'll put more celery and onions in there.
Too many carrots. I'm coming.
My eyes are already killing me with the onions.
Jason, if you see that it's a little watery,
then keep the cover this way so it steams out.
There's gonna be fish in the ocean,
and somebody is gonna catch them.
And if the small family-owned boat doesn't exist anymore
because they're getting wiped out
and because our boats are old,
who's gonna fish?
Factory trawlers.
Would you like to taste
some redfish soup? [Man] Yes, please.
Well, this came in yesterday
on the boats in Gloucester.
This is a very old tradition fish.
The redfish was the fish
that fed the American armed force
during World War II.
Do you get redfish all year long?
Yes, our boats can get redfish all year long.
So we're hoping to increase the requests for them
so we can keep our fishermen fishing.
Unfortunately, we don't have any containers
for take-home. (laughs)
If we don't do that, believe me,
there will be condominiums and hotels and restaurant
and T-shirts and taffy in the Gloucester waterfront.
There will be.
(water rushing)
When things started dwindling, we cut back.
We cut back on gear.
We cut back on maintenance to the boats.
We had to sell three boats
at probably way below fair market value
just to get rid of them,
'cause we couldn't pay the insurance,
we couldn't pay the dockage.
So we went from a good, vibrant business,
everybody very happy, to basically
working on a thread right now.
(soft somber music)
For the captains and owners
that are staying in this business,
it takes change, a lot of change.
It's time, perseverance.
Brian, my great-nephew and I,
decided to rig up the 44-foot Ryan Zachary
for an experimental mackerel jig fishery,
automated mackerel reels out of Iceland.
We're catching quite a few mackerel when we go.
Your great-great-grandfather
would have been proud of you.
(soft inspirational music)
People think they get fish
from a supermarket wrapped in plastic.
You know, they have no connection
to who caught the fish.
Once they start to think about,
where did that fish come from
and did it come from my neighbor
and how was it handled
and who processed it
before I put it in my frying pan or on the grill?
Once they start asking questions about that,
then there's a story to tell.
What I think we as consumers must demand
is storied seafood,
because if that seafood has a story,
then we can apply our value system
in choosing whether or not we buy it.
If it comes from somebody
that's snapping up quota and harming neighbors
and doing things that I don't necessarily agree with,
well, I'm not gonna buy his or her fish.
And if this person is acting responsibly,
is local, is fishing artisanally,
is going out teaching his son,
apprenticing in the same thing,
okay, that's something I really can get into.
Okay. I will buy that story.
I think what's really important
is people being aware
and not being satisfied when I read a menu
that just says sea bass.
But what kind of sea bass is it?
And where was that sea bass from?
And how was that sea bass caught?
And is it wild or is it farm-raised?
And is it fresh or is it frozen?
If you don't get the answers that you like,
then those are the fish that you should be avoiding.
If you really wanna support fish
and you want to support the rebuilding
of our ecosystem, then buy local fish.
Try a variety of fish.
You'll encourage fishermen to take more control
over their future, to fish more responsibly.
And it'll be fresher.
[Peter] If it's been harvested
in the United States under the Magnuson Act,
it's a sustainable product.
And so support your neighbor.
I think as much as we are trying
to save the oceans, we are trying to save those
who provide us access to the oceans
so that fishermen might regain a place
in our society that they've rightfully earned,
which is a place of honor.
Gloucester is a unique place.
There'll never be another place like it.
That sticktuitiveness, that believing
that we can get the job done
no matter how large it is,
that spirit is born in scratching for a living
and wrestling a living from the sea.
And that will be gone.
That will be gone.
In a community like Gloucester, there isn't much.
We're just a fishing town.
And I really do believe our faith
will keep us strong.
Like my uncles told me when I was a kid,
"You need to watch out, boy,
because it gets into your blood.
It's an adventure. You'll love it."
We're just gonna keep going.
We're doing the best we can.
He's not gonna get rich,
but if he can keep going
and raise a family and pay the bills,
it's not a bad living.
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(soft dramatic music)
(soft upbeat music)
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