Saving Seafood

Regenerating New York Harbor, One Billion Oysters at a Time

December 13, 2019 — When Hurricane Sandy struck New York on October 29, 2012, it deluged every neighborhood it hit. Seven years later, many neighborhoods—including Coney Island, Canarsie in Brooklyn, and points all along the shore of Staten Island—are still recovering. Others, such as Staten Island’s Fox Beach, were destroyed in their entirety, never to have residents again.

With these events in all too recent memory, New Yorkers know how susceptible they are to climate change and are at the forefront of developing new approaches to the climate crisis, with the city’s young people getting especially involved. As the recent youth climate strikes that brought hundreds of thousands to New York’s streets attest, the younger generations—those who will be most affected by climate change—are taking concrete steps to try to turn back the tide, quite literally.

One of the programs that is engaging youth is the Billion Oyster Project. While the project’s founding goal aimed to to make the “waters surrounding New York City cleaner, more abundant, more well-known, more well-loved,” it has a more pressing role in the time of accelerating climate change: creating oyster reefs that can help blunt storm surges that accompany hurricanes by breaking up the waves before they hit land.

Read the full story at Civil Eats

NEW YORK: It’s Now Safe to Eat (Some) Fish From This Famously Polluted Brooklyn Canal

January 18, 2017 — Attention, New York City tourists: There’s a new water attraction in town.

That is, if you’re brave enough to risk the historically polluted waterway of Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal. A new public health assessment from the New York State Department of Health suggests that the famously inhospitable canal—which runs for 1.8 miles through parts of the hip tree-lined neighborhoods of Park Slope, Cobble Hill, and Carroll Gardens—is now safe for leisure activities like kayaking and even a spot of recreational fishing.

“Because of many years of discharges, storm water runoff, sewer outflows and industrial pollutants, the Gowanus Canal is one of the nation’s most extensively contaminated water bodies,” the report admits, referencing its history as a channel for barges starting in 1853 and an outlet for sewage and industrial wastes.

That said, things seem to be cautiously looking up for the Canal. While the report noted the presence of hazards like fecal coliform bacteria and chemicals like benzopyrene, which is related to increased cancer risks, ultimately the Department of Health concluded that “recreational boating” and “catch and release fishing” shouldn’t be harmful to people’s health. They still don’t recommend taking a full-body dip or dunking your head any time soon, though.

Further, if you do plan to consume the local marine species that inhabit the waterway, there are some definitive guidelines: stay away from the eels and white perch, and only feast on needlefish, bass, and perch once a month, max. (And women under the age of 50 should stay away from the seafood altogether.)

But come hot city summers, it’s likely residents and visitors will start taking advantage of the canal, thanks to this report’s (admittedly tepid) assurances of improving health and a plan to invest up to $500 million in its restoration in future.

Read the full story at Travel & Leisure

Predators coming closer to Brooklyn beaches, experts say

June 28, 2016 — The sharks are circling!

A bumper crop of bunker fish churning along the coast is drawing the ocean’s greatest predator closer than ever to Brooklyn’s beaches, anglers and naturalists say.

“That population (bunker) is very high along our shore, and that is bringing sharks and whales much closer to shore, bringing the predators much closer to the beach,” said captain John Calamia of Whatta Catch.

Read the full story at Brooklyn Daily

Enough With the Gefilte Fish. I’ll Have Sushi.

June 17, 2016 — Gefilte fish, of course. Potato kugel, sure. But sushi?

Yes, sushi, which you won’t find in most 20th-century Jewish cookbooks, let alone the Torah, has become a runaway hit in the city’s Hasidic and other Orthodox Jewish precincts.

Orthodox Jews are eating dragon rolls, rainbow rolls, tsunami rolls and California rolls (using imitation crab) in sushi bars like Sushi Meshuga in Brooklyn or in more eclectic kosher restaurants and supermarkets. Weddings and bar mitzvahs aren’t complete without a sushi station, and a sushi platter has become the gift of choice for Hanukkah and Purim, or to congratulate parents who are marrying off a child.

Pincus Yoel Freund, a managing partner of the firm that runs a leading sushi distributor, Sushi Maven, estimates that there are over 50 sushi bars in restaurants and grocery stores just in Borough Park, the city’s largest Hasidic neighborhood, with at least another 50 in other parts of Brooklyn like Williamsburg, Crown Heights and Midwood. He says most have cropped up in the past five to 10 years.

Rabbi Moshe Elefant, chief operating officer of the kosher division of the Orthodox Union, the world’s largest kosher certifier, said 80 to 90 percent of the city’s 100 kosher restaurants now serve sushi.

Read the full story at The New York Times

Frozen fish filled with cocaine worth £400,000 seized in drug bust as cops reel in two ‘smugglers’

May 10, 2016 — Holy mackerel!

The feds busted two alleged drug smugglers in Brooklyn after hooking some fish stuffed with cocaine.

Triston Daniels and Troy Gonsalves were reeled in after 20 kilos of cocaine were discovered stashed inside a shipment of frozen fish.

They were arraigned Saturday in Brooklyn Federal Court and released on $150,000 bail.

The fish tale began May 4 when U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers seized an air cargo shipment of “large, frozen fish” from Suriname at Miami International Airport, according to U.S. Homeland Security special agent Ryan Varrone.

Read the full story at the New York Daily News

A farm deep inside a Brooklyn warehouse may lead the way to large-scale urban agriculture

April 11, 2016 — Here’s one way to grow food in an urban environment: Raise a school of tilapia in a tank. Filter out the nitrogen-rich waste, and let naturally occurring bacteria transform it from ammonia into nitrate. Run that naturally derived fertilizer beneath the roots of greens, herbs and peppers. Let the veggies flourish beneath LED lights. Harvest the vegetables. Later, harvest the fish. Cook and serve.

Known as aquaponics, this complicated but efficient ecosystem is the latest attempt at making agriculture commercially viable in New York City—even though it has a spotty history, a not-quite-proven track record and plenty of skeptics.

“We do aquaponics for the quality of produce it yields,” said Jason Green, CEO and co-founder of Edenworks, an emerging commercial aquaponics company in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, that recently secured a commitment to supply baby greens and microgreens to Whole Foods Market stores in New York City later this year. “Our innovation is that we can do aquaponics cost-effectively, scalably and repeatedly.”

Though the premise of mimicking a natural system in a closed environment is ancient, Green says that new technologies including proprietary software, a complex plumbing system and cost-efficient LED lighting, plus a soaring demand for local food, will make fish-fed farms viable on a large scale, even in inner cities. A 2010 report from the New York City Council cited $600 million in unmet demand for regionally grown produce.

“Consumers are very interested in knowing the provenance of their food, and companies are responding to that by setting up systems to produce food in cities,” explained Nevin Cohen, an associate professor of urban food policy at the CUNY School of Public Health.

See the full story at Crain’s New York

A Massive Aquaponic Lettuce And Fish Farm Will Grow In A Brooklyn Warehouse

March 31, 2016 — BROOKLYN, N.Y. — “We build industrial-scale ecosystems.” So says Jason Green, CEO and co-founder of Edenworks, a Brooklyn-based urban farming startup. Unlike a typical indoor farm—a sterile environment, sometimes run by people in gloves or even by robots—Edenworks tries to build in as much life as possible.

In their new warehouse, set to open in New York City this summer, fish will grow in tanks, bacteria will turn the fish waste into a rich fertilizer, and plants will use that fertilizer to grow. “That’s the way the Earth works—we’ve just turned it into kind of like a manufacturing process, but it’s all based on ecology,” he says.

In a year, the 6,000-square-foot space will produce around 180,000 pounds of salad greens and tilapia for local grocery stores and restaurants.

The startup is one of a handful that will open large-scale urban farms this year. Nearby, in Newark, New Jersey, Aerofarms is turning a vacant steel factory into a 69,000-square-foot “aeroponic” farm. Gotham Greens just opened the world’s largest rooftop greenhouse in Chicago, an addition to the others it runs in New York. FarmedHere, which also runs a large indoor farm in Chicago, plans to open a nationwide network.

Edenworks claims to have an advantage over most of its competitors: because it uses aquaponics—combining raising fish with plants—it says the salad greens it grows actually taste better. (FarmedHere also uses aquaponics; most others use hydroponics or aeroponics to pump in a mix of nutrients separately, without using fish)

Read the full story at Fast Company

Waters Surrounding New York City Contain At Least 165 Million Plastic Particles — Making Its Way Into the Food Supply

February 13, 2016 — The waterways surrounding New York City are a soup of plastic, ranging from discarded takeout containers down to tiny beads that end up in the food supply, according to a new report by an environmental group.

The study, by the group NY/NJ Baykeeper, estimated there are at least 165 million plastic particles floating in New York Harbor and nearby waters at any given time.

The report was based on samples collected by trawlers that plied the city’s East River, the mouth of the Hudson River and New Jersey’s Passaic River and Raritan Bay between March and August 2015.

The average concentration of plastics was 256,322 particles per square kilometer, according to the report.

To maybe nobody’s surprise, the highest concentration, 556,484 particles per square kilometer, was found in New York City’s East River, which separates Manhattan from Brooklyn and Queens and is known for its floating filth.

“It just goes to show you big problems need big solutions,” said Sandra Meola, a spokeswoman for Baykeeper.

The New York-New Jersey study was modeled on a pioneering study of the Great Lakes conducted by Sherri Mason, a chemistry professor at the State University of New York in Fredonia.

That study found plastics pollution in all five lakes, with the highest concentration in Lakes Erie and Ontario, which are ringed by urban centers and industry.

Read the full story at the New York Daily News