No fish for you
The Salish Sea teems with high-quality protein – an obvious source of local, potentially-sustainable food for the 20,000 residents of qathet. Why do we eat so little of it? By Pieta Woolley | pieta@prliving.ca
I
love seafood, but I don’t eat it much. At the grocery store, the tantalizing, thick pink fillets of salmon and steelhead threaten bankruptcy. Most seafood is bitingly expensive much more than industrially-grown chicken, beef, pork, or tofu. May’s beautiful spot prawns are an annual treat; at $20 a pound or more, that’s a wallet-breaking meal for my family. Cheaper grocery store prawns, grown in Asia and imported by container ship, are an environmental disaster, and often host a tangy aftertaste. I’ve thought about seafood a lot over the years. Somehow, fisheries
have largely evaded the local-food conversation, which tends to centre around small-scale gardening. That’s a bit weird; as we live on the Salish Sea, which has fed dense populations of people for millennia. It continues to feed millions of people... just most of those people, I’ve discovered, do not live in BC. This article started with a simple question: what percentage of the local commercial catch and farmed seafood is eaten by locals? I’ve found that’s a near-impossible question to fully answer, due to the way numbers are reported by the federal Department of Fisheries and
Oceans (DFO). However, in trying to answer it, I learned that there’s a big story here for anyone who cares about a local, sustainable future for qathet’s food supply: it’s international, financial, political and very personal. There’s a lot here, but for the purposes of this short article, I’ll stick to two reasons we’re eating far less seafood than you’d imagine, given our location: 1. Most of us in qathet don’t catch fish - and those of us who do just got their hooks clipped, and 2. Most BC-produced seafood is exported.
HAPPY MEAL: Greyson and Lily Carlos are local food enthusiasts... especially when that food is salmon.
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