“Sole” Music: Fisherman and Musician Russell Kingman Sings Tales at Slow Fish 2016

This is one in a series of recollections or snapshots of Slow Fish 2016. Slow Food Austin Board Member Lauren Nelson interviewed fisherman and musician Russell Kingman about life on the water, and the music that was born of those experiences.

Butterfish. It's what's for dinner, says Russell Kingman.

Along the Massachusetts coast of Cape Cod, Russell Kingman and his partner Shannon Eldredge practice the ancient, sustainable art of weir fishing. Building a weir fishery is labor intensive and demands that all of the members of the fishery – Kingman, Eldredge and her father, Ernie – be in the water almost every day.

“It’s a really great life,” Kingman said. “It’s a hard life. We build stationary traps offshore with hickory trees that support the nets. The hickory trees weigh around 200 pounds apiece, and we have put in as many as 320 trees for three traps. Lots of miles of nets go down. It sometimes feels like we’re building the railroads with just three people.”

The hands-on approach of weir fishing allows Kingman to virtually eliminate bycatch.
“When we collect fish, we pinch off the nets and scoop them; it’s like a fishbowl,” he said. “It’s a super sustainable fishery and is very friendly to all the species. If they’re babies, they go back in the water. If they are a species we can’t sell, they go back in the water.”

All in the family. Russell and Shannon Eldredge with fresh caught mackerel.

That connection to the waters they fish is at the heart of the Slow Fish movement: taking care of the resource so it takes care of you and your community. This was the message Kingman and Eldredge delivered with their presentation at Slow Fish 2016. Accompanied by several slides depicting the hard work and bounty of weir fishing, they spoke of honoring a fishing tradition long forgotten in many communities around the country.

Sharing that narrative is one way to keep the tradition alive, and perhaps spark interest elsewhere. Anytime someone approaches Kingman with questions about weir fishing or his nets, he takes them out on his boat for a hands-on lesson. “A lot of people are curious,” he said. “We take anyone who asks us out, unless the weather conditions are dangerous.”

Kingman described his connection to the community as one of partnership and education. “We get all these species in our traps, and we’ve tried them all. We’ve gotten sea robins which taste just like bass,” he said. “Restaurants and customers like our product because it’s from a clean fishery with no bycatch. It’s literally from the ocean to the dock to the table. We give two restaurants in town free fish to see if they’ll try new fish, and we’ll sell them that species for a dollar per pound. We’re just people working together, trying to connect to each other in this community so we can have more access to everyone’s plate and educate the public.”

Pogies in the weir.

Kingman and Eldredge also deliver those messages via their band SeaFire Kids, which gets its name from Russell’s past company, Sea Fire Construction, named for ocean phosphorescence. “We started the band and didn’t know where it would go,” Russell said. “It’s become a fun way to express a lot of things that go on in the fisheries, what life looks like and feels like for fishermen. Sometimes we get a little political about stuff we don’t agree with that goes on in fisheries.”

They laid down the groove at the funky Southern Food and Beverage Museum in Mid City at Slow Fish 2016.

“As a group of people – Slow Fish, Slow Food, the band and my friends – we’re all very optimistic about creating a path to the future of sustainable food and healthy food,” he said. “There’s a lot of doom in the world surrounding the state of our oceans. We’re working hard to create great solutions. Slow Fish has been very effective at getting the message out. We’re helping put forward an entire food movement that really needs to happen in this world.”

Check out SeaFire Kids’ music.

SeaFire Kids performing at the Southern Food and Beverage Museum (SoFab)
Left to Right: Shannon Eldredge, Russell Kingman, Danielle Tolley, and Brett Tolley

Also, check out Kingman and Eldredge's presentation at Slow Fish 2016 New Orleans.

Slow Fish Rises to the Challenge

Slow Fish Rises to the Challenge

The sun shines on Day 4 of Slow Fish New Orleans at Docville Farm in Violet, La, where attendees were treated to tasty seafood (at left) and a boucherie with slow cooked, fire pit pork and lamb (at right) from the local Slow Meat chapter.

By Colles Stowell, founder of One Fish Foundation

This is one in a series of recollections from some of the people who attended Slow Fish 2016.

It’s a surreal, if a bit funny experience to eat oysters surrounded by larger-than-life representations of male and female anatomy. Kind of a Harold-Robbins-meets-Jules-Verne aura.

How a bunch of fishermen, chefs, scientists and seafood activists from around the world ended up in a dilapidated warehouse surrounded by lewdly, yet very craftily decorated Mardi Gras floats for the Krewe du Vieux (pronounced “croo du voo” and which pulls no punches lambasting anything/anyone political or sexual) is a study in adaptation.

The Krewe du Vieux warehouse was an eye-opening experience for many Slow Fish 2016 attendees in New Orleans. Courtesy: Sarah Shoffler.

We had gathered for the Slow Fish 2016 event in New Orleans to discuss important fisheries issues, make connections and celebrate locally caught, fresh and delicious seafood. Naturally, intense Louisiana spring weather turned carefully planned scheduling on its head with impending violent thunderstorms and potential flooding. Not one hour into the 150-person event at the Old US Mint, the state called for emergency evacuations and closed our base of operations for the next three days.

So instead of celebrating the gathering on the grounds of a historic building, we found ourselves feasting on pompano and sea bass in the shadows of papier-mâché sex. Ironically, that kind of mandatory last-minute logistical two-step closely parallels the rapid fire challenges many family fishermen face, constantly having to adapt to ever-shifting polices, seafood markets, climate, etc. beyond their control. We banned together at Slow Fish to pull it off, perhaps serving as proof that collaboration and flexibility are critical to addressing broader policy and market challenges ahead. That was the first of several truly unique experiences at Slow Fish 2016.

The next was the following day at the quirky Broad Theater in Mid City, a neighborhood at the heart of New Orleans. There, fishermen ranging from Alaska to California, and from Louisiana to Maine shared stories about their watersheds, community-based fisheries traditions and the management policies changing the landscape of how, when and where they can fish.

Kevin Scribner explains Salmon Safe's success ensuring owners of 95,000 acres of agricultural and urban land in three states and B.C. have minimized or eliminated harmful nutrient and pollutant discharge into precious spawning streams.

They discussed challenges such as privatization and resource allocation, biodiversity, policy impacts and ways to protect watersheds and fishing community heritage. Former Alaskan salmon fishermen and current Slow Fish board member Kevin Scribner described how the Salmon Safe program has worked with farmers, businesses and urban planners to reduce downstream impacts on native salmon habitat. This means the owners or tenants of more than 95,000 acres of agricultural and urban land (including the Nike campus, and several major farms) in three states and British Columbia have committed to reducing or eliminating harmful nutrient and pollutant discharge into precious streams.

Kindra Arnesen spoke passionately about the challenges facing fishing families on the Mississippi River delta. She described her Herculean efforts to unite struggling fishermen after the BP oil disaster, first to get jobs helping with cleanup, then to challenge BP, the EPA, NOAA and other local, state and federal agencies on their methods of cleanup, cover-up and compensation. It was yet another story of adaptation and survival. 

Recirculating Farms Coalition operations in a Central City neighborhood. Some happy catfish in the tank, and some happy lettuce rooted in lava rocks and the filtered water from the tank.

Other presenters discussed creating direct channels between fishermen, retailers and chefs to bring fresh seafood inland from the coast. Marianne Cufone, executive director of Recirculating Farms Coalition, showed the audience how a motivated team was able to start a clean, productive aquaponics operation right in a Central City neighborhood. Restaurants have already expressed interest in the fresh lettuce and catfish growing in recirculated water.

Set to the backdrop of compelling images, each story brought to life some of the common struggles many fishermen and coastal communities face, and some of the successful solutions to those challenges. 
 

Alligator shrimp and grits. Yeah, that's right.

The adaptation of the Slow Fish 2016 continued Saturday at the Dryades Market, whose previous life had been a public school in Central City, another neighborhood steeped in diversity. Groups of concerned fishermen spoke about adequately addressing quotas and fairness issues and ways to promote local fisheries management. One common theme that emerged, perhaps prophetically, was the issue of adaptation.

Some call crawfish "mudbugs." Others in the know call them delicious! 

Louisiana fishermen are constantly forced to adapt to changing ecosystem habitats, based on the chilling statistic that the coastline loses a football field of marsh every 45 minutes. Okanagan tribes have to adapt to the ebb and flow of wild sockeye migrating several hundred miles into incredibly diverse watersheds straddling the border between British Columbia and Washington state. Maine fishermen have to navigate the fluctuations in their fisheries due to the rapidly warming Gulf of Maine and the seemingly arbitrary nature of regional management.

Two of around 300 dozen oysters brought to the event.

Perhaps it was divinely appropriate that Mother Nature decided to throw a curveball and forced organizers to scramble. Because it is that instinct to go into auto pilot in the face of adversity and figure out a solution that determines success. For a Pacific salmon, that instinct to swim several hundred miles to its natal waters to spawn, die and give sustenance to its young is pure survival. For fishermen, it’s the ability to chase different available species when Nature or policy forces their hands. It’s in banding together to work toward a common cause to bring communities closer to their seafood.

Through all of the rain and high wind and last-minute venue changes, the shuttling of food from here to there…and back again, the audio visual challenges, the taxis, carpools and long walks through a noisy French Quarter, Slow Fish 2016 attendees made connections. They found common ground. They discussed ways to organize, set goals and pursue them. They made friends.

I learned how to trim the pork loin correctly.

Perhaps the skies dawned on a warm, bluebird day on the last day of the gathering at Docville Farm in Violet, La., a boucherie and seafood feast, as a reckoning of sorts. Adapt. Persevere. Hope. Something good will come out of it.

The memory of the food, the conversation, the energy and camaraderie will stay with all of us for a long time.

The Telltale Cod

Chef Evan Mallett showing Slow Fish UNH students how to prepare locally abundant dogfish.

By Chef Evan Mallett 
This is one in a series of stories from some of the people attending (or wishing they could attend!) Slow Fish 2016.

 In 2012, I wrote a blog entitled “Grandpa, What’s a Cod?” The motive for writing that blog was a dramatic realization that my children’s children might someday ask me such a question. Perhaps, I projected, they will see an old menu or read an article, or visit the Cape that bears the name of a mystery fish.

Entire books have been written about cod—citing the fish’s dominion over our national heritage, how it inspired colonization and later, an inestimably rich global seafood trade. As our New World and its human population have expanded from the shores where codfishing boats first landed, cod has been there every step of the way. Until now.

Since I wrote the blog, assessments of the cod population in the Gulf of Maine (my backyard) have only brought more bad news. I am a chef, and I have grown up alongside the bounty of North Atlantic fisheries. In recent years, I have watched those fisheries, and the small family-owned boats that ply our local waters, dwindle to the point of near-extinction. It is clear that a revolutionary shift in mindset is the only solution to a problem we have created over decades of fishing a species to the brink.

Some experts point to changing water temperatures, locally and globally, that might explain a shift in breeding grounds for Atlantic cod and other coldwater species. And, whether as a result of this shift or a three-decade moratorium on cod fishing, there is evidence that Newfoundland—where annual cod harvests once numbered over a million metric tons—might be experiencing a cod comeback of sorts.

It’s not that I personally hold cod up as the all-seeing banner of virtue and supremacy that our founding fathers did when they marched a “sacred cod” wooden replica to the Massachusetts State House, where it still hangs today. The truth is, I definitely revere cod’s flavor, texture and utility. However, a simple reality check tells us that we have no choice but to consider other species as alternatives to our New England culture’s longtime staple fish. I am one of those few chefs who sells Pollock, Acadian redfish, even dogfish, on my menu, because I believe with all of my heart that we have no choice but to ignite a new awareness now, before the fish we grew up eating are gone.

When I attended Slow Food’s Terra Madre and Salone del Gusto in 2010, I heard a fisherman from Oceania talk about how his family could afford frozen farmed salmon from Northern Europe, purchased in his local supermarket, but could not afford to eat his own fresh, local catch, upon which his livelihood depended. That fisherman’s story started my trip down the undercurrent of insanity that is our global seafood distribution system.

I have yet to understand how the economics of food have so egregiously ignored the ecology of food for so long, and I don’t know if even radical change will come too late. But I do know that right now, every community on our planet needs to wake up to a seafood crisis. At stake is not only the human diet’s most nutritious animal protein, but also the trophic balance of all aquatic ecosystems. 

Slow Fish is uniquely positioned to spread this gospel like no other organization, and I look forward to seeing talk of change lead to actions that will preserve both fisheries and fishermen.


Evan Mallett is chef/owner of Black Trumpet in Portsmouth, N.H. He also sits on the national Chef’s Collaborative Board of Overseers, the Slow Food Seacoast Board of Directors and the NOAA Seafood Marketing Steering Committee.



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