May 26, 2022 — Dr. Talia Young is an environmentalist who has spent most of her career studying fish.
She has also been a teacher for years, so when she created the program Fishadelphia as part of a fellowship, she made students part of the business.
Now she oversees the enterprise that connects communities: fisheries at the Jersey Shore and consumers in the Philly area.
October 22, 2020 — “We need to teach Americans how to eat other kinds of fish,” says Talia Young, echoing a sentiment she heard from a guest at a local seafood conference. Young, a postdoctoral research associate in Princeton University’s Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and former Philadelphia public high school teacher, realized in 2018 that she might be able to connect her passion for both people and fish.
“I thought…what if we created a program that connected local harvesters to culturally diverse seafood eaters,” she says.
So Fishadelphia was born. It’s a community-based seafood program in Philadelphia, run by high-school students from Mastery Charter Thomas Campus in South Philadelphia and Simon Gratz Mastery Charter in North Philadelphia, after school. They offer locally harvested, affordable seafood to a diverse customer base through various “clubs,” that function similarly to community supported agriculture (CSA) programs — making the program Philly’s first “CSF,” or community supported fishery. The program is focused on accessibility — so customers who have kids who are students at Mastery Thomas or Simon Gratz, are eligible for food stamps or Medicaid, or are referred by another customer, can subscribe to the CSF at a discounted “community rate.”
February 19, 2020 — For some home cooks, fish can be intimidating, expensive, easy to overcook, and polarizing. That might explain why the average American consumed just 16 pounds of seafood in 2017, compared to 92 pounds of chicken and 57 pounds of beef.
But former South Philly science teacher and Princeton post-doc fellow Talia Young sees fish differently. While she has devoted much of her academic career to studying fish, fisheries, and food supply chains, she’s also a lifelong consumer of seafood; as a Chinese American kid growing up in New York City, she routinely ate jellyfish, whole fish, shrimp, and crab.
“In my experience in working-class communities,” she says, “it’s a thing that people eat even if they’re really cash-strapped.”
So Young was surprised at a 2016 fisheries conference when a fisherman stood up and said to the crowd, “‘Americans only know how to eat cod and salmon fillets, and we need to teach them how to eat other kinds of fish.’”
March 1, 2019 — In 1997, large commercial fishing boats based in the coastal town of Beaufort, North Carolina began shifting about 13 miles northward per year. By the end of 2014, they were harvesting off the coast of New Jersey. Although this was an unusual circumstance, it wasn’t singular. As it turns out, many large-scale fishing operations along the East Coast followed similar patterns of movement within that time frame. These shifts will persist or even intensify if climate change continues to warm up our oceans, according to new research published in the latest issue of ICES Journal of Marine Science.
In the past century, global warming has gradually raised the temperature of water along the Atlantic seaboard. Like moneyed New Yorkers taking to the Hamptons to escape city heat, fish close to the coastline are swimming away from their usual marine homes and toward cooler and more comfortable waters. As a result, fishing operations are getting disrupted. While the stories of fishers who have to travel longer and longer distances to secure their catch are well documented, the movements of fishing communities over time have not been mapped until now.
Talia Young, a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University, conducted the first-of-its-kind ICES study in part because she wanted to bridge what she felt was a disconnect between the empirical data of marine species migration and its impact on humans.
February 20, 2019 — As the oceans warm in response to climate change, fishing boats in the Mid-Atlantic that focus on only one or two species of fish are traveling more than 250 miles farther north than they did 20 years ago, while others catching a wide diversity of species have not changed fishing location, reported Talia Young, a postdoctoral research associate in ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton.
“In fishing communities, people’s well-being and the environment’s well-being are intricately tied together,” said Young, who is a David H. Smith Conservation Postdoctoral Fellow. “We know that climate change is affecting natural resources. We can see how it is affecting when things are blooming, where species are distributed, and — because fish are mobile — we’re seeing dramatic changes in the distribution of fish in the ocean. But in order to fully understand how climate change is affecting the world we live in, we have to understand how it’s affecting the environment, the animals that live in the environment, and also the people that interact with and depend on those animals.”
The Northwestern Atlantic Ocean, the patch of sea located off the coast of the northeastern United States, is one of the most rapidly warming parts of the ocean. Young was intrigued by the intersection of the ecological effects with the economic ramifications for the people who depend on commercial fishing.
February 6, 2018 — Well the CSA model works in a lot of different ways. There are cow-share programs where a group of people all get together and buy shares of a side of beef. And now, in South Philly, there’s Fishadelphia, which is a Community Supported Fisheries program designed to bring fresh seafood from New Jersey fisheries straight to consumers in the city.
Fishadelphia was developed by Talia Young, a post-doc researcher at Princeton’s Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. Here’s how it will work:
Fishadelphia customers can sign up to receive eight biweekly seafood deliveries through May 17 at the Mastery Charter Thomas Campus in South Philadelphia. The day-to-day business operations of Fishadelphia are run by middle- and high-school students at Mastery Thomas. Each delivery will contain one kind of fish or shellfish – such as porgy, flounder, mackerel, dogfish, skate, clams, squid or crabs – from fisheries or shellfish farms in Cape May, Barnegat Light and Galloway, New Jersey…Fishadelphia’s goals are to promote affordable access to high-quality food in urban communities, while also supporting local fisheries at a time when the United States imports nearly 80 percent of its seafood.
And that’s pretty awesome. It brings the community together, helps local fishermen and, most importantly, puts fresh fish in the hands of people who might not otherwise have access. Plus, as part of the program, Young is organizing a field trip down to the docks in New Jersey so that customers can see where their fish is coming from (hint: the water), and a season’s end party where the fishermen and harvesters can have a chance to meet the people who’ve been eating their catch.
Read the full story at Philadelphia Magazine