Marthá Lopez Ramirez, Fish Cutter

Photo credit: Peter Adame

When thinking about local seafood, people often imagine fishermen and women on Monterey Bay harvesting fish, crab, and shrimp, or chefs at their favorite restaurants developing unique and skillful ways to prepare the local catch. But behind the scenes, many indispensable people are working hard: cleaning, fileting, and packaging Monterey Bay Seafood before it hits your dinner plate.

Marthá Lopez Ramirez, a fish cutter at Lusamerica Seafood in Morgan Hill, is one of those people. Marthá has had many different roles at Lusamerica. She started out in prepared foods, making ceviche for Safeway, and later moved on to the salmon and steelhead filet line. Currently, Marthá, 53, works on Lusamerica’s newest filet line, cutting and preparing California groundfish, including a variety of rockfish, sablefish, soles, and flounders, among other species.

“I like my job, I like learning and every day is different,” Marthá says. “There aren’t many women fish cutters here, but we show them we can do it too.”

The filet line is not easy work. Fish must be kept cold to ensure their freshness, knives are very sharp, and fish like rockfish have sharp spines that can puncture the skin even while wearing gloves that protect the hand from the blade of the knife. Marthá says she has enjoyed the challenge, learning the craft from her coworkers with more experience since moving to the groundfish filet line in early 2021. 

Photo credit: Peter Adame

Marthá has worked at Lusamerica for three years but has worked in food her whole life. She grew up in Colima, Mexico, helping her parents run the family restaurant. After she moved to the United States in the late 1990s, she started working in agriculture in San Juan Bautista, packing garlic, onions, and carrots. She then moved on to working with organic leafy greens like lettuce, kale, and spinach before shifting gears to seafood.

“It’s a little different, but it’s still healthy food,” she says with a chuckle. “For all my life I've worked in all aspects of food,” from cooking in the kitchen of her mom’s restaurant as a kid to now slicing sleek filets of petrale sole and rockfish seen on display in seafood cases.

Marthá doesn’t do much fishing herself, but loves the ocean and its bounty. She lets her friends and family do the fishing while she does the cooking. Her favorite seafood dish to make is ceviche, but she says there are many ways to make it and experiment with flavors. She likes her ceviche with sliced carrots, similar to how her mother prepared ceviche in Colima.

From organic leafy green to sustainable seafood, it’s the work of Marthá and her colleagues that makes a healthy diet possible for us all.