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Local Fishmonger Tommy Gomes Practices What He Preaches WRITTEN BY: MICHELLE SLIEff PHOTOGRAPHY BY: DAvID KINg
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ommy Gomes is a salty dog, a purist of the sea and an advocate for children on land. Gomes is a retired fisherman who swapped his boat vessel for Catalina Offshore Products. Here he resides as your local trusted fishmonger. He practices sustainability and makes waves in the community by educating San Diegans on making ethical, healthy lifestyle choices; he also prepares a mean Chilean Sea Bass. Follow him on YouTube at FishSlang101 for tips on how to cook fish...with a plastic fork? Gomes lives and breathes the sea air, what doesn’t he do that involves the sea? He makes and distributes fishing products, like Uni Goop and Uni Butter, products that practice what he preaches, using leftovers from urchin and re-appropriating them in a usable form (fish attractant for bait). He hosts seven-course charity dinners with his buddies (who happen to be some of the finest executive chefs in San Diego) and gives all of the profits to needy children. His past is salted but the future looks fresh. Q: What’s the name of your boat? tOMMY gOMES: My boat? I don’t have a boat. I retired from commercial fishing and now I’m a local advocate for local sustainable seafood brought in by California fishermen and also the fishermen of Baja, Mexico that are doing it right. I’m an advocate for the small fishermen, hook and line and trap guys. We don’t buy any fish that’s brought in by massive vessels or big dragon bottom trawlers that go in and wreak havoc on the habitat and destructive fishing practices. If you’re a commercial fishermen and your boat is registered as a commercial fishing boat and hold a commercial fishing permit, then we will purchase from you. We want the smaller local guys, anything that’s landed within a 100 miles point-ofsale. We really don’t buy a whole lot of fish that’s flown in from around the world, or third world nations. One needs to remember that American fishery is one of the highly most regulated fishing in the world. They buy more permits and spend more money and we have observers on our boats making sure that we’re doing the right thing, and that’s one of the reasons why our seafood is a little more costly, plus we don’t have cheap labor. We have labor laws that we have to abide by. I’d like to say with your food in general, don’t be fast, don’t be easy, don’t be cheap and don’t be fake. We’ve got enough people like that in California (laughs); there’s no reason why your food needs to be that way. There is no such thing as cheap seafood or food in general. You’re going to pay with your health. Eat healthy, be wise. Be smart. You are what you eat. Garbage in, garbage out.
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| Indian Summer 2013 Issue
Q: Do you still fish even though you’re retired? tg: Oh yeah, I fish every weekend. Q: On a boat? tg: Yeah, I got a little boat that I take my father out on. My family came to San Diego in 1892, and we’ve been in the fishing industry ever since. My dad was a captain of a tuna boat that fished all over the world. I fished for seven different governments throughout the world. I fished tuna all over the place. I wouldn’t trade it for the world. I don’t have a high school diploma, I don’t have any $20 words in my vocabulary, but what I do know, is seafood and I’m very, very passionate about that. You are what you eat. Q: What’s the biggest catch you’ve ever had? tg: An 1,800-pound Blue Fin Tuna in the North Atlantic in 1976. There is a set of jaws hanging up here from an 890 pounder that we harpooned 60 feet in water outside the surf line at Blacks beach last year. He had a seal in him. Q: Wow! What’s the rarest thing you’ve ever caught? tg: The Oar Fish (which you can check out on the wall when you come visit). Q: What percentage of your seafood is never frozen here at Catalina Offshore Products? tg: Ninety percent of our seafood here is fresh. Q: What advice would you have for people to stay away from those cases with frozen fish? tg: I always suggest fresh, it’s more in price, but it’s better for you. We’ll try some stuff out. If they come into the center, and they are a new customer, I always ask them the same questions: Who are you cooking for? Do you like who you’re cooking for? And where is your culinary talent? If you burn it, cover it in sauce and call it blackened Cajun, we’ll bring them over to the little kitchen and show them how to cook some seafood. Q: Catalina Offshore Products practices sustainability but still offers frozen options, why is that? tg: We’re not perfect, but we are trying. The Sockeye block Tuna…yeah you know that stuff’s really neat, it looks great in color, and if you like chewing on cardboard that’s probably what you want to eat. You see that stuff at all-you-can-eat buffets. It retains its color because it’s frozen at sea and gas treated. Once it’s defrosted it looks that way forever, and real true fish is not like that. It will spoil within six days. So Sockeye block anything is a gas treated carbon monoxide piece of fish. Know your sources, read the label, ask questions and check and see the country of origin. The country
of origin in our fish and in our food today plays a huge part. I ask your readers when you go to these huge super markets and you see Salmon for $6.99 per pound and you see its country of origin and see that it’s from Chile, ask yourself what does Chile know about Salmon? They are growing them in these pens and they’re packing the pens so full because they want them bigger and growing faster. The American Farmer, the American Fishermen are a dying breed. There was an article that came out that said in 30 years China is going to be our number one food import for this country. It’s pretty scary. We need to seriously think about our food source now, for our kids’ sake. Q: So being aware of this information is that what inspired you to start your Educational Seafood Nutrition Center? tg: I started the program because I felt there was a need for it in San Diego. We have an open door policy here and anybody is welcome to come in. Our Educational Seafood Nutrition Center is held on Fridays and Saturdays, I have guest chefs come in and we show you easy simple healthy ways to cook fish, and during the week, you have to suffer because I’m the one doing it. We go a step further and we have local cooking classes throughout the city with Chef Jen Felmley, and we also do a monthly cooking class here called Collaboration Kitchen where I bring in a top chef. And, Catalina Offshore and Specialty Produce donates everything needed. We do seven courses, and we talk about each piece of seafood being served, and we talk about the vegetables and how they’re grown, and then we donate all the money to a charity of my choice. That charity always changes, for example, Monarch School, King Chavez Prep School. I only like to donate educational tools for kids. There was a group of children that we took from a school of underprivileged children; none of them had been fishing. So we took them, all forty of them. And that gave us an opportunity to talk to these children one-on-one, who came from broken homes, their moms or dads were in prison. I was in prison. I did ten years, straight. And just because you go to prison doesn’t make you a bad dad. You went because you did something stupid, and you paid your debt to society and now, you need to make amends and move forward. With some of these children, they need to know that they’re ok, and that it’s not their fault. They didn’t do anything bad; a lot of kids have that guilty feeling. One of the ways you can bring them around is through education and food. On our fishing trip we caught some Bass and Mackerel; we had a really great time.