“Imported seafood makes everything so expensive,” he says. Now, he sources entirely local, traceable catches for his 14-seat pier-side restaurant, where he offers a $65 five-course tasting menu including tuna tataki, pescatarian ramen and miso-glazed black cod. The Tokyo-born former music student believed he could help protect the ocean for future generations, keep his restaurant’s carbon footprint smaller and save his customers money at the same time, and convinced the CEO of a Japanese-owned local fish plant, Aero Trading in Port Edward, to support his business. “I was shocked and depressed, but at the same time I thought, ‘Maybe this is my opportunity.’ ” “I knew Prince Rupert was one of the biggest fishing meccas in northwest B.C., but I did not see any of that seafood available,” says Fukasaku.Īs with 75 per cent of all Canadian seafood, comprising a nearly $9-billion industry, the bulk of catches in the town are exported abroad. Mussels and oysters – the latter of which I adore so much I have one tattooed on my right forearm – help filter and clean the ocean as they grow and eat algae, making them one of the tastiest and most environmentally defensible species around.Īs recently as a decade ago, many locals doubted chef Dai Fukasaku’s vision of serving sushi made solely with locally caught seafood in Prince Rupert, B.C., a community of about 12,000 year-round residents. Hand-harvested sea urchin and scallops also boast a low carbon footprint and are industries in which rural-based scuba divers often receive a cut of their boat’s profits for their undersea labours. The giant bluefin tuna, which measured two meters in length, was caught off the coast of Nova Scotia in October 2020. spot prawns, Newfoundland coldwater shrimp, and EAC-endorsed Chedabucto Bay shrimp from Nova Scotia, which are delectable and caught by well-regulated fisheries.Įric Jacquard (right), a long time Wedgeport, Nova Scotia fisherman, helps bring a giant bluefin tuna aboard the Pelagic Predator fishing vessel. Or trap- and mid-water-trawl-caught shrimp, including B.C. The spindly legged crustaceans are thriving owing to good management and a warming climate. Take, for example, the tastes-good, does-good snow crab, a catch that supports many rural fishers in northeastern Quebec and Atlantic Canada. In previous years, people would have said, ‘that’s not environmentalism …’ but now we’re looking at it more holistically.”

“The labour and social issues, how people are treated on fishing boats, are becoming a huge thing. “We’ve lost so many of our fisheries from communities,” says Shannon Arnold, associate director for marine programs at Halifax’s Ecology Action Centre (EAC). And that sustainability is increasingly extending beyond fisheries’ management – how species are regulated and harvested – to the distribution systems, carbon footprint, and local and regional health of people and communities engaged in fishing. Stricter quotas, bans on fishing juveniles, and crackdowns on poaching and trafficking of the species have resulted in a “spectacular recovery,” according to Francisco Alemany, a leading marine scientist.Īnd just last November, the international agency overseeing tuna catches even approved new science-based mathematical models, called harvest strategies, to further protect bluefin: good news for those craving red, unctuous maguro from their local sushi joint.įor diners willing to do their homework, Canadian waters provide some of the most delicious and ecologically beneficial seafood available anywhere. More recently, particularly in schools targeted by Jacquards, and on the other side of the Atlantic, the massive, magnificent fish are teeming in numbers not seen in years. In the early 1990s, some scientists estimated that the Atlantic bluefin population had plummeted by 90 per cent over two decades. Like many Canadian diners, I’ve long heeded environmentalists’ appeals to “Save the Bluefin,” and avoided eating it.

“Does it look like this fish is endangered to you?” he quipped. As the chartered boat’s paying customers chewed their bites, groaning with pleasure, dozens of 300-plus-pound bluefin jumped and swam in the inky waters, leaping at chunks of creamy butterfish chum Jacquard had tossed overboard minutes before.

Fish sauce taste crossword