Why Seafood Restaurant Menus Need to Change

For years, Kate Masury, a Rhode Island-based environmentalist and seafood lover, heard from the fishing industry that the species they’ve been catching were changing.

Staples such as Atlantic cod were dwindling and American lobsters — another local top-seller — were moving farther north. Other species not common to the area, like Spanish mackerel and blue crab, were appearing and becoming more abundant as ocean temperatures rose.

Fishermen were saying “I wish we could catch more of it,” she said. But they weren’t sure they’d be able to sell seafood that locals never heard of or knew.

As the executive director of Eating With the Ecosystem, a New England nonprofit that helps the seafood industry adapt to climate change, Masury has been trying to convince the whole supply chain, from fishermen to restaurant goers, to incorporate these species that thrive in warmer water, which she calls “climate winners.”

Rhode Island is hardly alone. Climate change is altering the distribution and abundance of fish stocks worldwide. In the Tropics, for instance, traditional fishing grounds are predicted to lose as much as 40% of their catches by 2055, as rising ocean temperatures cause fish to move northward.

As climate change reshuffles what is available in local waters, the choice of seafood has to evolve, Masury said. Changing menus to replace marine species hampered by climate change with newly abundant varieties can help fishers keep their jobs. It can also help reduce the climate toll of seafood production, which otherwise would require burning more fossil fuels to sail farther into the ocean to find fish.

But as her nonprofit found out, this isn’t as simple as swapping the fish on the plate.

Bloomberg Green spoke with Masury about her experience of introducing “climate winners” to consumers, the surprises she’s discovered along the way, and the barriers to inserting those less-familiar species in our seafood supplies. The conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

It is in fishermen’s interest to sell what they can catch, but consumers can buy seafood caught elsewhere. Why would they want to eat more “climate winners” from local waters?

There’s a lot of interest from consumers to eat sustainably and behave sustainably. We get asked all the time: “What should I be eating?” But within the seafood world, there’s over 100 different species that we land here in the New England region. So it can be really complicated for people to understand what to eat from a sustainability perspective, and there’s a lot of dynamics at play. Eating “climate winners” is something that people can do and will enjoy doing.

If consumer interest is already in place, why can’t people just buy and eat more of those species?

Some of it is consumer awareness and consumer perceptions. Within the United States, the top four seafood species are shrimp, salmon, tuna and tilapia. I think a lot of people are intimidated to try something new as they don’t know what it is going to taste like. If you Google salmon recipes, you can find a million. But if you Google something like a longfin squid recipe, it’s a lot harder to find.

It also depends on where the fish historically was and if there is food culture around it. Black sea bass, for example, is a species that used to be centered around North Carolina and Virginia, and it’s more popular within that region. But in Maine, it’s still fairly unfamiliar.

Some species aren’t a big fishery up here because they aren’t here in huge numbers yet. Most grocery store chains want the year-round supply of a product, and they want a consistent supply. If it’s only seasonal or sporadically available and not available in large volume, that often doesn’t work for a grocery market. That could be the same for some main restaurants.

So how do you create a new food culture?

Sometimes people are intimidated to cook something for the first time. But seeing how a chef, who is professional and can make delicious food, prepares it makes people more willing to try. Restaurants can be a good first step, and then it trickles down to the markets and people cooking things at home.

In 2021, we had 10 restaurants in Rhode Island participating in a pilot. We supplied them with 12 species of “climate winners,” including Spanish mackerel, grey triggerfish, blue crab and red drum. Every week, the restaurants served a different species and we collected feedback from chefs and customers for when these species could play a larger role in our local fisheries. [For now, “climate winners” such as Spanish mackerel and grey triggerfish are found in Rhode Island waters mostly during the summer.]

There was a learning curve for the restaurants. For instance, they hadn’t worked with grey triggerfish before, and we heard from chefs: “Wow, the trigger fish’s skin was really tough. It dulled our knives.” And another example is blue crab, which we have in the waters of Rhode Island, but they aren’t caught by fishermen commercially. When we provided restaurants with live blue crabs, it was definitely a challenge for many of them. They found it hard to pick the crab meat. So we knew that we would need processing infrastructure in place if we wanted to have a commercial blue crab fishery here.

We learned from the restaurants through this pilot that we should compare a less familiar “climate winner” species with a species that most consumers know about. For example, if we want to sell red drum, we can compare it to striped bass, which is a more popular species in the New England region. Then consumers understand what they’re going to get.

What’s missing to scale up this practice?

We need consumer education and more awareness. For example, we can tell consumers what it tastes like, what its texture is like, and what are the ways that you can cook it. If we can provide that information, it helps people envision how to utilize it in their cooking.

And fishermen ultimately will need regulations that allow them to catch those “climate winners” when they are available in commercial abundance. It can take a while for fisheries management to adapt to the changing ecosystems. And once there is a commercial fishery and more demand for those “climate winners,” it’s really important to have the science to help understand those species and the dynamics there, so we can catch them at a sustainable level.

What role can consumers play?

If you shop at a local fish market, ask your local fish market: “Hey, I heard that this species is expanding in my region. I really want to try it. Do you have it?” The seafood market often can get a special order for you, if they don’t have it available. And because they now know you’re interested in it, they might get it and make it available to other consumers as well.

A lot of times seafood businesses could get those species. They just don’t carry them on a regular basis because they don’t want them to go to waste if there is no interest in that. It’s a chicken-and-egg situation. Just asking shows that there’s demand for those species.

How do you find “climate winners” in your area?

Eating With the Ecosystem has composed a list of “climate winners” for those living in the New England region, which consists of Rhode Island and five other states in the Northeastern US. If you live elsewhere, you can instead find out what species are increasing in abundance in your region by talking with local fishermen, trusted seafood vendors, and experts from NGOs or the National Sea Grant College Program.