Buying green fish
I talked to two fish authorities who told me that it’s hard to find hook-caught haddock. Daniel McKiernan, deputy director of the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries, estimates that only a tiny percentage of the haddock sold in retail markets is hook-caught. And Carl Fantasia, owner of the New Deal Fish Market in Cambridge, says that because retailers must often deal with middlemen, rather than buying directly from the fishing boats, they can’t always get accurate information about how a given fish was caught. So, as much as Fantasia would like to assure a customer that a particular piece of haddock was hook-caught, he may not be able to.
McKiernan and Fantasia agree that buying locally caught fish is an important step in the right (sustainable) direction. These fish will have been taken according to regional and local regulations, which are designed with both the species and the environment in mind. And this information is easy to obtain, since federal law mandates that fish must be labeled with their country of origin and whether they were farmed or wild. McKiernan points out that US haddock would almost surely come from New England waters, that fish’s natural habitat.
A good fish cookbook devoted to sustainability is Fish Forever, by Paul Johnson. Since 1979, the author, a former chef, has sold fish in San Francisco and Berkeley, California. In addition to recipes, there’s useful information on health, sustainability, and fishing and aquaculture methods. Another great cookbook on the topic is Fish Without a Doubt, by Rick Moonen and Roy Finamore.
