Author: Mildred Bell

The average American consumes about twenty pounds of seafood annually. That may seem insignificant, but depending on who you ask and how they calculate it, between 64 and 94 percent of it comes from abroad. Vietnamese and Indian shrimp. Chinese tilapia. Thai canned tuna. Chilean and Canadian salmon. The supply chain is massive, dispersed, and remarkably under-monitored, based on recent analyses. Most customers seem to believe that someone is monitoring everything. The unsettling reality is that very few are. The U.S. IUU Fishing and Labor Rights Coalition published a policy brief in May 2026 that presented numbers that are hard…

Over the past few years, there has been a subtle shift in American cooking that most people were unaware of until they were spooning warm butter over a piece of cod on a Tuesday night. Celebrity chefs and viral TikTok moments have both contributed, but they weren’t the catalyst. Millions of home cooks were persuaded that finishing fish was not something that only restaurants could do successfully by this sauce, which only required three ingredients, ten minutes, and an almost embarrassingly simple recipe. It’s hardly a recipe at all. Garlic powder, butter, and lemon juice. In a small saucepan over…

There is a rhythm to the fishing ports along the Atlantic coast of Europe: crates of ice sliding across wet concrete, diesel engines idling before dawn, and the low murmur of buyers and sellers who have been dancing for decades filling auction halls. However, the noise has changed since January 2026. Instead of using clipboards, skippers gathered around tablets. Managers of processing plants are answering calls regarding digital lot data and batch codes. Additionally, there was a growing chorus of dissatisfaction directed at the very regulation that was meant to modernize European fisheries from Brussels to Brittany. Although the EU’s…

In a fish processing facility in Gloucester, Massachusetts, discussions about government funds that have been nearly fully diverted for decades are always accompanied by the scent of saline and cold metal. Cotton operations in Texas and soybean growers in Iowa received USDA subsidies and loans. Federal agricultural policy almost ignored the men and women who operated boats and processing facilities along the Atlantic, Gulf, and Alaskan coasts, even though they were ostensibly part of the food supply chain. For the majority of its existence, the Farm document—hundreds of pages of legislation pertaining to food, agriculture, and nutrition that Congress negotiates…

The fact that king crab legs are cooked before they get to you is something that most people are unaware of, and it’s what makes this fifteen-minute supper possible. Every cluster that was sold at a supermarket or fish market was flash-frozen on the harvesting vessel as soon as it was caught, cooked first, and then frozen. Cooking them is not the task at home. It’s reheating them without spoiling them, which is a far more forgiving task than it sounds, and results in something that looks like the main course at a seafood restaurant. Just one stockpot. A basket…

When eating salmon at home, the skin is nearly always the turning point. For the first thirty seconds, nothing seems to be happening when you place the fillet in a hot, shimmering skillet with oil and a knob of butter over medium-high heat. After three or four minutes, the skin has crisped into something that produces a sound when you tap it. The edges then begin to become opaque, and you fight the impulse to move it. This dish is repeated because of that sound and the aroma emanating from the pan. In total, it takes twenty minutes. The cleanup…

Some foods make an announcement as soon as you begin preparing them, such as the sound of something sizzling in a skillet or the aroma of browning butter. That’s not exactly what butter-poached lobster is. It’s not as loud. One tablespoon of butter at a time is added to a small saucepan over medium-low heat with just a hint of steam, and you stir to prevent the butter from separating. When you slide the lobster meat into the golden bath and watch it go from translucent to completely opaque in less than eight minutes, the entire process appears subtle to…

Seafood at breakfast is an intriguing and underutilized option that is frequently disregarded in the midst of the current protein obsession—the supplement shelves, the macro-tracking apps, the social media reels devoted to morning routines. For years, nutritionists have argued that fish and shellfish provide some of the cleanest, most accessible protein sources available, along with omega-3 fats that are unmatched by Greek yogurt or peanut butter toast in the morning. The reluctance is typically more cultural than nutritional; for example, most Western households don’t typically serve shrimp for breakfast, and those who haven’t had salmon before nine in the morning…

When you walk past the shiny seafood counter in any well-lit grocery store in Seattle or London, you’ll find farmed salmon labeled with some variation of the word “responsible.” It looks legitimate. It is comforting. However, the label raises more questions than it answers for anyone who has taken the time to investigate the fish’s true origins and, more crucially, what it was fed. Now, that unease is subtly permeating the industry as a whole. In a field full of green logos and ambiguous promises, the Global Seafood Alliance’s Best Aquaculture Practices certification program has long been regarded as one…

A government regulation and a dinner plate are separated by a specific type of distance that most people never consider. The last thing you think about when you take a piece of salmon or catfish out of the pan and place it for the children is what went upstream in the food chain to get there. That distance only became slightly more hazy. A 2024 update to the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards, which had tightened pollution controls on coal-fired power plants and mandated that they continuously monitor specific emissions in real time, was recently repealed by the Environmental Protection…