Sustainability, Day In and Day Out

An interview with Paul Johnson and Tom Worthington, Monterey Fish Market

In 1978, while working as a restaurant cook in Berkeley, California, Paul Johnson started making early-morning runs to Fishermen's Wharf in San Francisco to buy fish for another Berkeley restaurant, Chez Panisse. He soon added the Hayes Street Grill, Bay Wolf, and other restaurants to his route, delivering fresh fish and shellfish hours before the lunch shift cooks arrived. For the first couple of years he operated from the wharf with just a truck, but in 1980 he opened a retail fish store near Berkeley's Monterey Market. Today, Monterey Fish Market is a multi-million-dollar wholesale and retail business with approximately 30 employees split between the wholesale operation at Pier 33 in San Francisco, which serves about 100 restaurants in the Bay Area, and original retail store. (The "Monterey" in the name comes from the adjacent street in Berkeley, and "Market" is included in the overall business name to avoid confusion with another wholesale firm actually located in Monterey.)

Tom Worthington started working part-time for Paul shortly after he opened the store, and soon left restaurant school to work full time selling fish. He became a partner in the business in the 1990s. Both Paul and Tom frequently speak to seafood and restaurant industry groups, environmental organizations, and others interested in seafood issues.

Seafood Monitor editor Jay Harlow recently sat down with Paul and Tom to talk about the challenges of running a good-sized seafood business with an eye to sustainability, and the changes they have seen over the last 25 years.

TSM: How important is sustainability for your business?

PJ: It's a huge issue for us, because it's a huge issue for our customers. The people who live in this area are more educated, more environmentally aware than probably any other place in the country. Most of our customers are truly concerned about the issues, therefore we have to be concerned.

TW: And sometimes their opinions can change overnight. If there's a bad article in the Chronicle, that can be the "tipping point" on an issue that may have been around for a long time. The restaurateurs themselves may be so buried in the day-to-day running of the business that the pressure comes from the customers. [Diners] ask questions of the waiters, who take the questions back to the kitchen, and after a while the chefs say okay, it's time to change. You can get beat up pretty fast around here.

TSM: Do your customers come to you for help with decisions about sustainability, or are their minds already made up?

TW: Some are making up their own minds, others tend to leave it up to Chez Panisse and Jardiniere to follow the issues and set the trends. And a lot of them come to us for information.

TSM: How do you go about making decisions about sustainability?

TW: It's been a long process, going back to the beginning of the business. From the earliest days, Paul and I always preferred to deal with small, individual fishermen, most of whom were catching fish by hook and line. Not because of any philosophical reasons, but because they had the best fish! It has taken years and years to develop our philosophy when it comes to fish, and the process is still going on. We just keep studying the issues, learning all we can and making the best decisions we can at the time.

We talk to lots of people. We always talk to our suppliers, learn as much as we can from the people who are actually out there fishing. We talk to associations, like the Cape Cod hook and line cod fishermen. Each fishery, each species is unique, and each has its experts. We talk to academics, environmental organizations, and try to get all points of view. Our opinions definitely change as we learn more about each fishery.Then we filter out that information to our customers, like on our price sheets, which show the origin of each fish, where it was caught, that sort of thing. We also wrote our own book and handed it out to all our chefs.

PJ: It's incredibly hard to get any information on this stuff. It's not something you can just pull out of the air. Just try to get anything out of [for example] the New England Fisheries Management council about stocks, how most of the fish is caught, or anything....

The information you can get on the Net is almost always 5, 6, 7 years old, people don't talk to you. The information is just not out there for the public. If you're Monterey Bay Aquarium and you have millions of dollars to spend doing the research, you can get this information, but it takes long periods of time, and you have to have a huge staff. Even then, the information is dated right away. So we have to sift through as much information as we can by talking to people on the water, talking to processors, scientists we know in the industry, and try to put it all together and kind of get a feeling for it. What it comes down to in the end is, we have to make a decision based mostly on how the fish is caught.

TSM: For example?

PJ: Rock cod [rockfish]. In California, Oregon, and Washington, there are four or five species that have been overfished, so we have this rockfish exclusion area which is impacting all the bottom fisheries. Basically, California rockfish is unavailable. But rockfish from Canada and especially Alaska is well managed over the long term, [the fishery is] mostly hook and line, and the stock is still in good shape. So I usually buy Canadian and Alaskan, plus a little bit from some Oregon hook and line fisheries. I base my decisions more on how people fish than anything else.

TSM: But then the customers come into the restaurants with their pocket cards that say don't buy rockfish.

PJ: Yes, although the better ones now make a distinction between rockfish from Alaska and Canada and the rest of the West Coast. [Atlantic] codfish is another example. We still buy cod, even though it's on everybody's avoid list, when we can get it from responsible hook and line fisheries. Stocks of Atlantic cod are definitely having a hard time. There are rebuilding plans in place, but it doesn't appear to me that stocks are coming back very quickly, if at all. But at the same time, the basis of cod fishing — before the foreign factory trawlers in the 60s, and then American factory trawlers in the 70s and 80s, that really fished down the stocks until we had "too many boats chasing too few fish" — was a multigenerational group of hook fishermen that had always fished sustainably for cod. It's unfair to punish these guys, who have been practicing sustainable fishing for generations, for the sins of the factory trawlers. If you're going to have future in the fishery, you have to encourage them to keep fishing.

TSM: So management is a big part of the problem?

PJ: The way management is going at it is reducing quotas by historical shares. If a trawler caught 50,000 pounds in the past, and the overall quota is 10 percent of what it used to be, the trawler gets a quota of 5,000 pounds. If a hook and line guy caught 5,000 pounds, they cut him back to 500. The trawler can still [afford to] fish for 5,000 pounds, but the hook and line guy can't make it on 500 pounds. They need to take that quota and give a disproportionate amount of that quota to the guys who are fishing sustainably, don't have the impact on the habitat and the bycatch.

When I first came here to San Francisco, there were probably a hundred artisanal fishermen working hook and line gear for rock cod. Today there are zero. None. And the few guys there are working out of Bodega, every two months the quota comes up, and they get a quota of 2,000 pounds of rockfish for a two-month period. The trawlers get 24,000 pounds. Now what kind of sense is that? And to go after rock cod, where do you have to go? Over the rocks; that's where they hang out, that's why they call them rock cod. So you have the trawlers working the rocky reefs, with much more habitat impact, a lot more bycatch, and they can continue to fish while there are basically no hook and line guys left, who can really control their bycatch a lot better by where and how they fish. That type of management really doesn't make sense.

TW: We call most fishery regulations "management by disaster" — waiting until a fishery collapses and then shutting it down. Where there are still a lot of fish, the pie is being cut up in some very strange ways. They say "Here's the biomass, here's the amount of harvest it can sustain," but they really don't care who catches it or how. The thing is, we could have more fishermen out there if they were fishing in a more sustainable way.

TSM: Sounds like you don't have much use for trawling.

PJ: Not all trawling is bad. People have this knee-jerk reaction to trawling; but trawling over a soft bottom, the way they catch shimp in the southeast, is not really that bad. The type of bottom that shrimp is on is pretty nondescript, soft mud bottom, and there's not much there. It's been proven not to do that much damage. But "improvements" like roller gear [wheel-like rollers on trawl nets that help them ride over rocks and other obstacles on the sea floor that might otherwise snag or tear nets] also make it easier to work the rocky areas —

TSM: — and thus to fish out the rockfish stocks that much faster.

PJ: Right.

TSM: Do you think there's any way the regulatory process can be changed to take these issues into consideration, to award a bigger share to those who fish more sustainably?

PJ: That's the way you would think it ought to be, but that's not how it is. You take the quota that goes to a big trawler and you could put twelve smaller boats on the water, put more people to work. And the quality would be much better, the return would be better because you can get more for higher-quality fish. But instead you have all of it going to one guy, plus all the ancillary problems of trawling.

TSM: Why is that? Is it because the bigger guys have a bigger voice in the regulation process?

PJ: Somewhat. No, definitely.

TSM: Let's get back to your decisions about what to buy and sell. Sometimes you carry items you would prefer not to, like farmed Atlantic salmon.

PJ: I have some customers — people who are nationally known, whose names are known all over the place — who continue to buy it, not only for economic reasons, but for ease of preparation as well.

TSM: Because it's consistent in size, in quality...

PJ: Yeah, the size is always the same, it fits with the architecture of the plate. It's easy to work with. Now I have an economic responsibility to stay in business. If I were in business for myself, as a restaurateur, I could do things exactly as I like, but being in the wholesale seafood business, customers tell me what to do. If these customers want to buy Atlantic salmon, and I don't sell it to them, someone else will. That leads to the quandary, the responsibility to stay in business while I do the best I can, and at least try to achieve our goals.

TSM: So do you try to find distinctions among different producers of Atlantic salmon, to find the best that you can?

PJ: Yes. Exactly. Although maybe Atlantic salmon is not the best example, because mostly I try to convince people to switch to wild salmon. We have been 90 percent successful with that, so we don't sell much aquacultured salmon anymore.

TSM: Over all, what's the biggest challenge in getting and selling sustainable seafood?

TW: As things grow, to continue to have good products caught in a sustainable way. A lot of the challenge is in dealing with the industry, convincing fishermen to do things in the right way. It's a tough one — these are really hand-to-mouth people, and it's hard for some of them to take a long view when they are simply trying to survive. But so many fishing practices remind me of slash and burn agriculture; you get a crop for a few years, but then the land is exhausted.

TSM: But how do you get somebody who has a given size of boat and a given type of gear to change? They have a lot of money tied up in that equipment.

TW: Look at the billions this country spends in farm subsidies. For a tiny fraction of what we spend on farming, the government could do a lot to help fishermen switch to better gear, buy back excess licenses, and otherwise improve the way we fish.

PJ: We can also apply what is learned in one fishery to others. They just reopened the swordfish longline fishery north of Hawaii by switching to gear that avoids catching turtles by using circle hooks and blue bait — something they learned in the Atlantic fishery, by the way. But at the same time the longline fishery off the West Coast has been closed for the same reason, turtles.

TSM: What can we learn from, say, the decline of local rockfish?

TW: We could see the rockfish crash coming more than ten years ago, when the trawlers started targeting the spawning areas. I can remember seeing cutting rooms where there were five inches of eggs on the floor. That's something that has to change; we shouldn't be fishing for anything during its spawning season.

PJ: Many fish are easiest to catch when they come together in spawning aggregations, and that's just the time when they shouldn't be caught. There are some exceptions, like West Coast squid, which live only nine months, then come near shore to spawn and die. But they produce a huge number of eggs, and as long as we don't take too big a share of the spawning population, it seems to be sustainable. But I think the herring fishery [in San Francisco Bay] is a stupid fishery that should have been stopped long ago. It's illegal in California to fish for any fish just for its eggs, but they've gotten around it with this dispensation for the herring fishery. I think it has to do with the balance of trade with Japan. They take the fish and ship it to Korea to be processed so they can say it's for fertilizer or fish meal. Now Zeke Grader would disagree with me, Ed Ueber would disagree, but I've never understood that fishery.

TSM: What do you wish your customers, and the dining and retail public, understood better about seafood?

TW: That we are dealing with something truly natural, and that you can't have it all the time. And that there's something nice about that. There's a beauty in gathering what nature provides in season.

I'd also like to see the fishermen who are doing it right help up as the environmental heroes they are. I don't want to get overly romantic, but I wish more people understood that fishermen's lives are really brutal. They are out there risking their lives to bring us our seafood, and they should be helped rather than punished by laws that make no sense.

PJ: That pretty well covers it.

©2004 by Harlow & Ratner. All rights reserved.