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A table stretched a few hundred feet on the L-shaped end of MacMillan Pier in Provincetown, draped with white linen, set with a dazzling array of plates and wine glasses. While attendees enjoyed hors d’oeuvres, Mike Chute held the evening’s menu above the expanse to take a picture before guests were seated.
With 400 people gathered under a party tent on an August night, one would expect plenty of noise, but during John Pappalardo’s speech there was silence.
“We are here tonight because we belong to a place—a real place. Cape Cod is not an idea or a brand,” Pappalardo, CEO of the Fishermen’s Alliance, told the crowd. “It is a stretch of coastline carved by time and tide, filled with working hands and living stories. The men and women who fish its waters have done so not for fortune, but for sustenance, for dignity, and for the hope of passing something along.”
The audience wasn’t quiet when Lisa Whelan began describing what she made for that night’s Meet the Fleet.
The recipe includes an Asian sweet and spicy sauce, said the owner and chef at Dancing Spoons, to a chorus of “mmms” and “mmhmms,” with wild onions and the leafy green tops of vegetables from her garden. Then came a round of “yums.”
Long-finned squid, also known as Loligo, was the centerpiece and received the most oohs and ahhs of all.
Cataumet Fish is committed to buying and selling local seafood and oftentimes uses social media to share the name of the boat that brought in the catch of the day. But owners Patrick and Jenny Ross have found an old-school approach works wonders as well; a sandwich board set up right outside the Bourne market with fish specials highlighted in bright-colored chalk.
“The chalkboard is effective even for regular customers,” said Patrick, adding it works even better if they pair specials with a recipe.
Business owners and fishermen across New England have been working for years to get more local seafood onto plates, a difficult challenge for a variety of reasons.
Steve Gennodie, in a checkered button-down shirt and grey jeans, stood in biting wind outside the Fishermen’s Alliance to talk to close to 100 people as they left the building.
He held a plate of furikake, also sprinkled on ahi tuna and avocado mini tacos many were munching as they left the first Meet the Fleet of the year on April 16. The heart of the savory Japanese spice blend was kelp from a farm just a few miles down the road.
“You have a little treasure in Chatham,” Gennodie told everyone.
Gennodie, who owns Chatham Pier Fish Market, had joined Jamie Bassett, Richard Curtiss and Carl Douglass from Chatham Kelp to talk about his business (which opened for the season that day) and how he hopes to sell local furikake.
The Oreo was introduced by Nabisco in 1912 and is the most popular cookie in the world, but still subject of a $20-million marketing plan in the United Kingdom.
If a cream-filled cookie sandwich needs that much help, what are the chances for fish such as skate, thornyhead rockfish, the obscure Ta’ape, and monkfish?
Fish have another problem too.
“People are intimidated by a naked fillet.”
Maritime trade, forecasters, fishermen, scientists, the Coast Guard and many others rely on ocean models to make predictions, and those models can be wrong.
George Maynard, a marine resources specialist at the Northeast Regional Science Center, said without real world information those models can become further and further “divorced from reality.” That’s where commercial fishermen come in. Sensors on their gear gather data about the ocean’s current conditions every time they fish.
Josh Stoll is steeped in fisheries research and policy and has often heard how the United States imports 90 percent of its seafood.
“Everyone from my mother to members of Congress have referenced that statistic,” said Stoll, an assistant professor in the School of Marine Sciences at the University of Maine. “If you always talk about the problem, there is not really space to imagine something different.”
So, he, and other researchers, Tolulope Oyikeke and Sahir Advani, are giving people that space. The trio recently published a treatise, “Seafood independence is within reach: a multi-scale assessment of seafood self-reliance in the United States,” in the journal Ocean Sustainability.
Eric Hesse majored in physics at Bates College and in addition to his normal courseload he did computations about refracting light on the ocean, and how the bending light shifts the image of Atlantic bluefin tuna.
“My old physics notebooks are filled with fishing diagrams,” Hesse, a tuna harpoon fisherman, told nearly 100 people gathered at the Fishermen’s Alliance last week for Meet the Fleet.
“I am uniquely qualified,” he said to laughter.
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