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One Square Mile in Massachusetts: Tail-to-Scales, Using The Whole Fish In New Bedford

February 12, 2018 โ€” Every day on New Bedfordโ€™s docks, fish processing plants toss thousands of pounds of fish scraps โ€” or โ€œtrashโ€ โ€” into buckets, and sell them to pet food makers for pennies-on-the-pound.

New Bedford officials are looking for ways to turn that โ€œtrashโ€ into something more valuable. As part of our One Square Mile: New Bedford series, Rhode Island Public Radioโ€™s Lynn Arditi has the story.

Larry and Loretta are my neighborโ€™s cats. And they love their canned cat food. To understand why just read the ingredients on the label. Ocean white fish. Fish broth. Tuna. Those ingredients are actually fish by-products. Fish guts. Fish  livers. Fish intestines. Fish skins. Theyโ€™re what fish processors like Bergieโ€™s Seafood in call โ€œtrash.โ€

Inside Bergieโ€™s process plant one January morning, a conveyor belt moved  freshly caught grey sole to the filet tables.

โ€œThe skeletons are going to go the lobstermen,โ€™โ€™ David Stanley, vice president of operations, explained. โ€œNow, the meat is gonna to us the consumerโ€ฆ.All the trimmings all go down for cat food and animal pet food and things to that nature.โ€

Those โ€œtrimmingsโ€ include fish heads, skin and any of the innards not sold for human consumption.

On this day, the filet machines were turned off;the catch was smaller so the workers were doing all the deboning by hand. A worker coming off a shift break paused to sharpen his knife.

The next stop: a table lit from underneath. โ€œSee these lights right here?โ€ Stanely said. โ€œThis is called a candling table. Every piece of fish here goes across the candling table.โ€

A half-dozen women wearing hair nets and rubber gloves lay the filets, one by one, on the candling table and examine them. The light underneath the table illuminates the flesh, allowing them to remove any impurities.

The processing plant usually produces anywhere from 1,000 to 3,000 pounds a day of โ€œchowderโ€ or trash, Celestino Cacaj, a Bergieโ€™s supervisor, said. โ€œWe have all the trash from the fish after we clean them we sell to the customer who make pet food,โ€™โ€™ he said. โ€œThey pay some money for that so we keep it for them. We try to make a little money. โ€

They make a little money. But could they make more?

Read the full story at Rhode Island Public Radio 

 

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