Community Supported Fisheries – CSAs for the Ocean

Community Supported Fisheries – Sustaining Our Oceans

The local food movement has had some seriously positive impacts on the quality and transparency of the food we eat. It has also stirred up quite a bit of controversy, which isn’t really a bad thing as it keeps food and where and how it is grown circling through the center of the national attention spotlight. Seeing how short the national attention span is, having food issues, food safety news and local food coming back into it every few days or once a week has helped many people realize just how disconnected almost all of us are from the third most important ingredient that sustains life.

As Joel Salatin recently said, “The average person is still under the aberrant delusion that food should be somebody else’s responsibility until I’m ready to eat it.”

Getting to know our seafood and those that harvest it is much harder than visiting our local farmer or joining a CSA. Most of us don’t live close to the source of fish and seafood, so we usually rely on the seafood lists such as that from the Monterey Bay Aquarium and other organizations who are making a step in the direction of educating us in where our seafood comes from and how sustainably it is harvested. With 86% of the seafood we eat being imported, this becomes almost impossible to sort out who is doing what right on an international scale. After all, I didn’t plan on a doctoral research project in order to feel good about my grilled salmon steaks!

That’s where the Northwest Atlantic Marine Alliance (NAMA) comes in. They are helping to create a national Community Supported Fisheries (CSF) movement. This is how you can get to know where your fish and seafood comes from, how it was harvested and who the folks are that are doing all the work for you. Your support helps the very people in the boats make a living by eliminating the international systems of trade and shipping that grabs most of the profits. It truly is a CSA system for seafood!

Beyond red lists: The power of community-supported fisheries