May 2024 - Director's Corner

By Melissa Mahoney - May 6, 2024

Why local seafood is hard to find…

The most common question we get asked is “Where can I get local seafood?” You’d think that would be as easy as searching online, going down to the harbor, or to your local fish market. Especially living on the Monterey Bay, where fishing has been part of our culture for centuries, why isn’t it more obvious where to find and buy fresh, local seafood? 

As Melissa Clark points out in her recent New York Times article, “Why Is It So Hard to Find Local Fish (Even by the Water)?” seafood from local waters has long been left out of the farm-to-table movement. Why is that? 

She describes a “startlingly inefficient path… where seafood is routinely trucked hundreds of miles to centralized dealers, changing hands four or five times before ending up at a local fish counter or restaurant, in far worse shape for the commute.” 

Because the highest price offered is usually from a distant buyer, most US produced seafood is exported overseas, while US consumers buy up to 80% imported fish. This imbalance shifts profits away from the fishing communities who really need it…if the fish stayed local, you’d have a multiplier effect where more people are benefiting from that catch. To make matters worse, many of our key fisheries are currently less accessible (see our past articles on rockfish and salmon). That leads to even more inconsistent supply and that makes selling to local markets even more difficult. 

And that’s where we all come in. It takes a network of people who care about a healthy and vibrant food system to keep our local fisheries alive. We can’t always give you the easy answer to the question of ‘where can I buy local’, but we can inform and empower you, the consumer, to be on the lookout for the magical places where fishermen are directly providing their catch. 

Won’t you join us on our mission to keep local seafood on local plates?