Fishadelphia: Connecting Communities with Fresh Seafood

Fishadelphia: Connecting Communities with Fresh Seafood

0:00:01.4 John Sheehan: Supporting fishing communities, fisheries, and seafood production at the local level is an important part of NOAA Fisheries mission. One of the agency's best tools for doing that is the Saltonstall-Kennedy Grant, which funds projects around the country that very broadly lead to the promotion, development, and marketing of US fisheries. That can take a lot of forms, and every so often we like to check in with our S-K Grant partners, who are doing amazing things, like this.

0:00:27.7 Talia Young: We bring fresh, locally caught seafood in from the Jersey Shore and distribute it at sliding scale prices to economically and culturally diverse communities in Philadelphia.

0:00:39.7 JS: This is Dive In with NOAA Fisheries, I'm John Sheehan, and today we're highlighting Fishadelphia.

0:00:44.6 TY: I describe Fishadelphia as a community seafood program.

0:00:47.6 JS: This is my guest, Dr. Talia Young, the Founder and Director of Fishadelphia and a visiting Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at Haverford College. Fishadelphia is partly a community-supported fishery, a CSF, where members buy-in to support local seafood producers, but Fishadelphia is also more than that.

0:01:07.2 TY: We also run an after-school program at two high schools in the city, and the students help run the day-to-day operations of the program and run a fish stand and contribute to social media.

0:01:18.7 JS: And they throw events like fish fries and dock visits. It is very much a community endeavor.

0:01:24.2 TY: We're gonna bring two school buses full of people to the shore to meet the fishermen who catch their fish, and then we're all gonna have a fresh seafood lunch. It's gonna be so fun. I really hope it doesn't rain.

0:01:35.6 JS: I asked Talia to walk me through how a membership to Fishadelphia works.

0:01:39.8 TY: So, members join and they receive a share of seafood every other week delivered to a house or pick-up location near where they live, typically. On Friday, I call the docks to see, "Are there boats out, what are people catching?" We work with George Mathis, who's a third-generation bayman, and he drives seafood in for us every week and brings it into The People's Kitchen, which is a chef's collaborative that prepares food to distribute for free in the community. And chefs and volunteers filet the fish, we pick it up and bring it to Simon Gratz Mastery Charter High School in North Philly. And our team works to weigh out and portion out the fish and put it into coolers with ice, and then it goes out around the city. We have members who volunteer to host a cooler on their porch, and so they come and pick up the cooler and put it on their porch, and then their neighbors come and pick up their seafood at their house. And every week we include information about who harvested the seafood, where it came from, some ecological information about the species, and a recipe on how to cook it.

0:02:47.2 JS: And that's one of my favorite parts about community-supported models in general is that, yeah, you're supporting and you're getting what the supplier has, including lesser-used fish sometimes considered bycatch, but it's what they're bringing in.

0:03:01.6 TY: Yeah, absolutely. So as a rule, we buy what's available. We have relationships with the major docks on the shore and we pay what they ask. From the fin-fish side, it ranges from migratory species like tuna and swordfish, to much more local species like tilefish, porgy, black sea bass, fluke, dogfish, skate, monkfish. We have on occasion bought bluefish and whiting, which also sells super, super well. We just don't get them that often. If I could get them more often, I would. And then we do a bunch of shellfish. It's often, I would say almost 50% shellfish; clams, and oysters. In part because we buy every week, but the boats can't go out every week. Right? So like this week, there were no boats out this weekend, so we did clams this week. I would love to buy more bycatch than we're buying actually. In part because people commit to buying whatever we get and so we can move whatever comes.

0:03:52.2 TY: It's really fun. And part of what we do is try to teach people what it means to eat seasonally, eat with the ecosystem, eat locally. What does that look like? And there's sort of a set group of species that are available here. And we've gotten to know those species and getting to know "What can you do with monkfish, and how is that different from what you might be able to do with skate or swordfish?" And so for members who've been with us for a really long time, they're certainly a rhythm to it.

0:04:15.0 TY: Oh, scallops, we do scallops. And the scallops are by far the most highly [chuckle] desirable thing that we get. They are so good. And I think, also think they're... I don't think it's possible to get fresher scallops than we get. We have, I think, the highest quality, freshest seafood that is possible to buy without going to the shore. And that is part of what feels really important to us. Is that our members are really different in lots of ways, but one thing that binds them together is that everyone really appreciates high-quality seafood. And if you want, we can tell you where it comes from, and if you wanna just eat it, that's also fine. [chuckle]

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0:04:52.3 TY: One of the origin stories of Fishadelphia is, I tell this story about being at a seafood conference, a local seafood conference, and somebody got up and said, "Americans only know how to eat cod and salmon fillets, and we need to teach them how to eat other kinds of fish." And I remember thinking, "I don't think you're talking to the right Americans." So, I'm Chinese-American, and I grew up in New York City. And when I give these talks, I have this photo of a seafood counter that I took at Whole Foods. And then a photo of the seafood stores in China Town, and they're really different. There's beautiful salmon and whitefish fillets at the Whole Foods and in China Town, there's dozens and dozens of species of whole fish and lots of fish still swimming in their tanks. And I know that there are lots of people who know a lot about seafood, that eat a lot of seafood, and who don't only eat cod and salmon fillets. And one of the things that became clear to me as I was living in Philadelphia is that many of the people, I know who eat a lot of seafood and know the most about seafood, are people of color. So Asian people, Black people, folks whose ancestors come from the Caribbean in some way or the other.

0:05:56.8 TY: And I was curious about, "What would it mean to connect these communities?" We have these small-scale fishing communities looking for domestic markets for their catch. And we have incredibly knowledgeable communities in the city who know a ton about seafood, who are always looking for high-quality seafoods. What would happen if we connected these places? Could it have the potential to increase knowledge and awareness about each other? Could it have the potential to increase connection between these places? And could it have the potential even more to build solidarity between these places? So, that was the project. [laughter] So, I wrote a couple of grants and then one of them got funded and then I was like, "Oh, now we have to do it." And then the reason that we are in schools, before I went to grad school, I was a high school science teacher. And I think working with young people on real-world projects is really fun. And here we are, six years later. [chuckle]

0:06:55.1 JS: And so let's talk about the school component. Is this science, is it biology, is it social science? Are you talking about sort of like the history in the food ways? What's the curriculum?

0:07:07.8 TY: It's a little bit of all of those things. I think more than anything else, it's a community. It's after school, so it's a club that kids join. And kids join it for many, many years. So we... One of our students is a senior and he joined it in seventh grade, and he's a really different human now than when he joined. And when we ask students why they join, a lot of them join because they want to learn how to run a business. And then we're like, "Well, we'll do our best to teach you, but we're not experts." A lot of them wanna help the community. Some of them are interested in fish, a lot of them don't eat fish. The students are paid to be there, because we recognize that we're competing with other jobs, so they get a stipend every semester for being involved. They get to take home seafood to their families, which I think is a big draw. And they often sell it to their communities. Another thing that's true is that we have a high proportion of LGBTQ identified youth. It has ended up being a safe space for students to be in a variety of ways. And so the kids talk about fish, they post on social media, they run a fish stand and work with customers, and they can also talk about the other things going on in their life. And it's a safe space for them to do that. So it's more of a community space than anything else, I would say.

0:08:18.4 JS: A quick note here on Fishadelphia's social media presence. It is joyous and includes many pictures of delicious-looking seafood, cooking tutorials, and happy teens dancing or setting fish to TikTok channels.

0:08:31.1 Speaker 3: Danni here. Last week, I traveled with Stacy to go to an East Coast climate change scenario planning workshop, taking a page...

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0:08:41.8 Speaker 4: Hi, everybody. So this is porgy fish that we got from Fishadelphia this week.

0:08:48.2 Speaker 5: Do folks know what oysters do?

0:08:51.0 Speaker 6: No.

0:08:51.1 Speaker 7: No.

0:08:51.2 Speaker 8: No.

0:08:51.2 S5: No? So they actually filter ocean water.

[background conversation]

0:08:55.3 TY: The students also help us reach communities we would never reach otherwise. We have this student, she joined us when she was a junior and she just graduated from nursing school. And she's still working with us and she does some of our bookkeeping. And she also runs our WeChat group, and... So WeChat's a social media platform commonly used in China. Everybody who started on that WeChat group were our student's mom and her friends and now it's much bigger than that. And every week, when she posts and says, "This is what we're getting. Does anybody want any?" That's a group of members that we would never be able... That I would never be able to reach, and certainly the docks would never be able to reach. Right? And so, because our students are embedded in communities, they can help us reach communities. We, for a while, had a Burmese student who was embedded in the Burmese Christian community in South Philly, who would go home with a backpack full of fish and come back with a handful of cash the next day. And it's like, "Well, I was never gonna sell to these folks, and the docks were definitely, definitely never gonna sell to these folks."

0:09:49.1 JS: And your day job, you're a professor at Haverford College of Environmental Studies. There's a junction here of your school studies and this project. How does your academic work sort of inform this?

0:10:04.1 TY: Yeah. The students at Haverford and Bryn Mawr are also a part of what makes the whole project work. We have students who work for us to help support operations. And then this semester I'm teaching a community engagement class, and so we have a bunch of students who are doing internships with us working on various projects like developing the social media plan for the year, helping pack fish, helping develop an on-line merch store. And like we had... Oh, I should totally share these with you. I had these students make a podcast. It was so amazing. So, there used to be this fish truck that drove around Philly and sold fish off the back of the truck in neighborhoods, mostly in West Philly and North Philly, mostly in Black neighborhoods in Philly. And one of the things that we've been talking about is whether it makes sense for us to revive a fish truck. And as part of that, I had a group of students, it's now three years ago, do a podcast project interviewing people who remembered the fish truck. And they did a great job of it, talking about this historic way of distributing fish.

0:11:07.7 JS: They really did. Here's a little bit of their first episode of that fish truck podcast, featuring the narration of Mimi Tran, and voices of Zakheem Lindsay-Moore, and Rennie Murray.

0:11:18.1 Mimi Tran: Right now Tashae's interviewing Zakheem, he's the youngest person we spoke to about the fish truck and has the earliest memory of the trucks last sighting.

0:11:26.0 Zakheem Lindsay-Moore: My mom would always tell me, "Go down stairs, go out the house and wave the truck down," so that my mom could get her fish.

0:11:35.5 Speaker 11: Was it the only fish?

0:11:35.7 Rennie Murray: They did soups and vegetables, too.

0:11:37.9 S1: Gotcha.

0:11:38.3 RM: But mainly fish. It always seemed like fish and potatoes went together. So, they always sold potatoes, sweet potatoes, onions and different...

0:11:49.3 JS: All of this is in furtherance of Fishadelphia's mission of inclusion.

0:11:52.3 TY: We're super interested in connecting with other folks doing inclusion work in communities of color and elsewhere. And I guess I think sometimes people call us and are like, "I wanna talk to you about starting something similar." And I'm like, "I gotta tell you, I do not have the answers. I do not know how to make it work. We're still figuring it out." But we're interested in brainstorming and supporting and figuring things out together with other people who are mission aligned in the same ways that we are.

0:12:15.9 JS: Well, Dr. Talia Young, thanks so much for talking with me.

0:12:19.1 TY: Thanks so much for having me.

0:12:22.3 JS: Dr. Talia Young is the Founder and Director of Fishadelphia and a visiting professor of Environmental Studies at Haverford College. If you're in the Philadelphia area or want to learn more about the project, check out fishadelphia.com. Do not skip on the TikToks while you're there. And to learn more or apply for a Saltonstall-Kennedy Grant, visit our website, fisheries.noaa.gov. I'm John Sheehan, and this has been Dive