Bringing Truly Sustainable Seafood to Market

“I was actu­ally con­sult­ing an invest­ment bank­ing group that was tak­ing on some clients who were envi­ron­men­tally focused, which led me to a group that was in seafood,” Tim O’Shea told Organic Connections. “It became clear that this group, how­ever, really just wanted to do some kind of new mar­ket­ing cam­paign. They didn’t have any inter­est in what I was talk­ing to them about in terms of devot­ing them­selves to a whole sus­tain­able plat­form. They thought they could do a green cam­paign or some­thing and make them­selves look good.

“I felt that a branded seafood entity should be cre­ated that would encour­age the bet­ter prac­ti­tion­ers and bring about a pre­mium mar­ket­place where supe­rior prac­tices would be rewarded with a pre­mium profit. And just as it became clear that the seafood group I was talk­ing to wasn’t really will­ing to make that move, it became evi­dent to me that some­body should. I spent the greater part of two or three months talk­ing to oth­ers who I felt were in a much bet­ter posi­tion to do this activ­ity, but by then it was obvi­ous that, no, nobody was pick­ing up on this. It was one of those defin­ing morn­ings; you wake your­self up and look in the mir­ror and say, ‘Guess what, big boy? If you think this is so impor­tant, you’re going to have to do it.’”

This real­iza­tion ulti­mately led to the found­ing by O’Shea of CleanFish, a unique com­pany that at one end brings together arti­san fish­er­men and fish farm­ers and at the other end pro­motes them in the mar­ket­place. The pro­duc­ers have been fully vet­ted by O’Shea and his team and meet a lengthy list of sus­tain­able standards.

It had been a long time com­ing. All the way back in 1974, O’Shea had pulled together what he called a “futures think tank” for the pur­pose of cre­at­ing visions of what might lie ahead. A mem­ber of this net­work was noted envi­ron­men­tal sci­en­tist John Todd, who intro­duced O’Shea to his first aqua­cul­ture oper­a­tion. “I’ve been in this con­ver­sa­tion that long,” O’Shea said.

He spent the next 20-plus years of his career con­sult­ing cor­po­ra­tions. “I made it my busi­ness to be involved in edu­ca­tion and envi­ron­men­tal work for at least half of my client port­fo­lio, and they have always been very much a part of what I’ve been doing,” O’Shea related. “I was among 25 Americans who were the first group to go to Sweden and get trained in The Natural Step [a renowned non­profit envi­ron­men­tal edu­ca­tion orga­ni­za­tion] in the early nineties.

“One of the core ele­ments for me in ground­ing myself as I was run­ning all over and doing these things has been oper­at­ing a com­post pile and an organic gar­den. The insights of the gar­den and the com­post pile are always part of how I’m look­ing at things. Along the way I have also had the plea­sure of being con­nected to some real mission-driven com­pa­nies: there were a good three years or so of con­sult­ing work with Odwalla juices when they were still an inde­pen­dent group, as well as a few other nat­ural and organic food groups I was involved with in the Bay Area.”

A pri­mary moti­va­tion for O’Shea in the cre­ation of CleanFish was the obser­va­tion that the destruc­tive meth­ods of indus­trial agri­cul­ture were mak­ing their way to seafood—something he really began to notice in 2004. “There was a series of arti­cles, notably one in Nature mag­a­zine, that spoke of bad prac­tices in farmed salmon,” O’Shea recalled. “The more I read it, the more I real­ized that here again were bad prac­tices in industrial-scale ani­mal food sys­tems. We’d seen it in chicken, we’d seen it in pigs, we’d seen it in beef feed lots, and here we were see­ing it in fish.”

Unfortunately, that pub­lic­ity caused a reac­tion from envi­ron­men­tal groups that blan­keted farmed fish in gen­eral. “Environmental orga­ni­za­tions were for­ward­ing a mes­sage that, instead of being focused on indus­trial prac­tices, was just say­ing across the board, ‘Farmed fish is bad,’ and that every­body who cared about the envi­ron­ment should eat wild fish,” O’Shea con­tin­ued. “It was a wrong-headed mes­sage. It wasn’t that farmed was bad; it was more Let’s insist upon good farm­ing prac­tices and how these things are done. Just as there are hor­ri­fy­ing indus­trial poul­try plants, I can also go locally here in Marin and get com­pletely cage-free organic chick­ens. I wouldn’t put them in the same class just because they are both farmed chick­ens, yet it seemed as though these agen­cies were in fact draw­ing these big red-painted cat­e­gories of ‘no one should eat this fish.’

“If we were to fol­low this strate­gic direc­tion, two really bad things would hap­pen. Number one, we would be out of wild fish even faster, and num­ber two, the bet­ter farmed-fish practitioners—the bet­ter aquaculturists—would be the first ones who would have to go out of busi­ness; all we’d be left with would be indus­trial crap.”

There were also prob­lems occur­ring with wild fish­ing; many species were being fished nearly to extinc­tion. But as with farmed fish, O’Shea knew the source of these prob­lems too. “The issues I observed on the wild side, again, weren’t being cre­ated by local fish­ing boats and local fish­ing com­mu­ni­ties,” he said. “It was big indus­trial float­ing fish­ing plants—factory boats that were no longer fish­ing but just hoover­ing up whole ecosys­tems and call­ing it a catch. Exactly as on the farm side, it was these industrial-scale producers.

“But for both wild and farm pro­duc­ers, in the mid­dle was a sweet spot of artisan-scale high-stewardship practices.”

It was to this sweet spot that O’Shea and his com­pany grav­i­tated. And it is in that place that some­thing was found, which car­ing pro­duc­ers in agri­cul­tural fields have also dis­cov­ered: fla­vor.

Click any image above to see a larger version.

“Sustainable prac­tices are all very nice to talk about,” said O’Shea, “but if it doesn’t trans­late into a better-tasting fish, the chef doesn’t care. I always say, ‘I want to tell you the story, the prac­tices, and why we have cho­sen this fish, and then I’m going to leave you with some fish.’ After I leave, that fish is going to have to speak for itself. Either they’ll love the fla­vor and call us back, or I’m sim­ply another guy try­ing to sell them some­thing just like the last guy did. Gratefully, 98.5 per­cent of the time we get a call back say­ing, ‘Oh my God! What were you say­ing about this fish? Whatever it was, let’s go back over your story again, because I just tasted this fish and it is the best fish I’ve ever had.’”

That story is a result of prac­tices, and there is a great dif­fer­ence in meth­ods of oper­a­tion when it comes to fish.

“In the wild fish­eries, it means using equip­ment that is appro­pri­ate in order to make as clean as pos­si­ble a catch of the fish you’re tar­get­ing ver­sus the other end of the spec­trum,” O’Shea explained. “That other end would be a huge trawler that just grabs every­thing in that ecosys­tem, tears it up on the ocean floor, grabs it up in the mid­stream, and drags fish around behind itself for a whole day. At the end of the day they pull the nets in and the fish are in ter­ri­ble con­di­tion. Then the fish­er­men bring them in, and because they’re out for sev­eral weeks at sea and they’re catch­ing such huge quan­ti­ties, the catch may not be frozen all that well or chilled in a uni­form fash­ion, as there is just so much of it.

“The same qual­ity of inter­ac­tion is hap­pen­ing in the farms. They just set up these huge sys­tems. It’s a pro­duc­tion machine that in the end goes by the board. Fish get dis­eased, get stressed out, and one series after another of vicious neg­a­tive cycles starts to take over and pretty soon you’re just in a toxic mess.

“To go the other way means to pay atten­tion to where our pens are sited. Let’s site them in appro­pri­ate rough tidal flows where the wash of the fish in and out and the tidal pools will make the fish strong-swimming fish, not just over­stock that’s sit­ting in a bath­tub. They’re swim­ming in shoals the way they would in nature. Ideally the tidal flows are strong enough to both clean them out and give them their great strong mus­cle tone.

“Along with the tidal flows and proper sit­ing is water qual­ity and feed. Is it out in a fairly pris­tine rural non­toxic envi­ron­ment and con­stantly being tested and retested for qual­ity? Are the feed­ing rhythms and per­sonal care of the fish being observed on a daily basis? Does the feed you’re giv­ing them mimic as closely as pos­si­ble what they would be eat­ing nor­mally out in the wild? Are you try­ing to lit­er­ally fol­low as much as pos­si­ble the life-cycle pat­tern that they would be living?”

It is this line of think­ing that unites CleanFish’s producers—wild and farm­ers alike. “I have over and again had CleanFish pro­ducer gath­er­ings where wild fish­er­men come in and they’re happy to be part of the mar­ket­ing that we do,” O’Shea said. “Suddenly they see they’re in a room with fish farm­ers, and they look at me like, ‘What the hell did you bring these guys for?’ Then the fish­er­men talk about their care, their con­cern about their envi­ron­ment, their fish­ing com­mu­nity and their ecosys­tem, and what’s hap­pen­ing to their wild fish­ery, the fish stocks, and the care that they’re tak­ing on the boat. And then they lis­ten to this fish farmer and they real­ize, ‘Wow—at a val­ues level, we share a lot! You’re con­cerned for the envi­ron­ment; you’re watch­ing your fish; you’re con­cerned about your ecosys­tem and you’re employ­ment and your com­mu­ni­ties. Yeah, that’s just like us. You’re want­ing to main­tain sus­tain­able prac­tices. Yeah, that’s just like us. The way you inter­act with your ecosys­tem out in your walk­ways and out in the con­di­tions you choose to be in—yeah, that’s what we look for when we’re out on our boats.’ And you see that there really is this com­mon ground of hus­bandry, of stew­ard­ship, of care.

“At CleanFish that’s what we’re priv­i­leged to be able to do—to be a cham­pion for peo­ple who are really stand­ing up in their ecosys­tems for the species that they’re catch­ing or cul­ti­vat­ing, and really doing a remark­ably dif­fer­ent model job than the indus­trial play­ers that we are all hav­ing such prob­lems with.”

Tim O’Shea con­tin­ues his work of widen­ing the chan­nels by which truly sus­tain­able seafood can be brought to the broad mar­ket, and there is much more to come.

For fur­ther infor­ma­tion about CleanFish, visit www.cleanfish.com.