Tuesday, January 12, 2010

Waste Not Want Not

Waste Not, Want Not
By Izetta Chambers

The seafood industry in Alaska is ripe to start embracing some of the changes that are rapidly materializing in the rest of the world. I have been preparing an abstract on a workshop presentation that I am proposing to offer at the upcoming Western Alaska Interdisciplinary Science Conference in Unalaska on March 24-27th, (information online at http://www.uaf.edu/waisc/index.html) and I got to thinking about marketing. Yes, marketing is everything when you are selling something, but also when you are trying to get rid of something as well. How can the Alaska seafood industry make the shift away from thinking of seafood “waste” as a “resource?”

This past summer I was involved in an endeavor called Alaska Bounty – a company I created to handle some of our waste stream generated at Naknek Family Fisheries. Because our small fish plant was not on the river system, and therefore it was not feasible to simply grind up the waste and dump it back into the river, we had to think up alternatives to the grind-and-dump scenario that is the industry norm in the Bristol Bay region. We were told that the Bristol Bay Borough fish grinder hadn’t been lawfully permitted by EPA since 1994, and therefore, we were legally precluded from using the grinder by DEC as our approved disposal site. Therefore, I was forced to come up with an alternative solution, or risk having our small, family-owned seasonal business shut down. The solution that I presented at the Alaska Marketplace was to utilize the resource in compost, and also to produce a liquid fish fertilizer. We employed our plant workers to think about the resource differently. This is because we couldn’t just think of the leftovers as “stinky fish guts” or some other such negative label, because this was another resource that we had to take care of. In order to make the best possible fertilizer, we needed to process the material fresh, not after it had been sitting around. A big part of the re-thinking came in the form of reframing or rephrasing. I discouraged the term “guts” and “waste,” instead encouraging use of the term “protein” or “material.” Although some might argue that this makes no difference, I beg to argue that it does.

In many parts of Asia, the seafood industry is actively involved in the processing and reprocessing of parts of fish that we in the Western worlds would not think twice about. Take fish sauce, for example. It is essentially fermented fish parts, liquefied and stabilized. However, one cannot think of certain ethnic cuisines, such as Thai food, without that particular flavor.

Underutilized seafood materials are currently finding uses in agriculture, food sciences, biomedicine, pet food, fish farming, and cosmetics. Some other little-used parts are being bought and sold as delicacies in the trendy restaurant and exotic food markets. Mainstream outlets, such as the Travel Channel’s show “Andrew Zimmern’s Bizarre Foods” has brought strange and exotic delicacies to the living rooms of people that may have never considered eating such things as grasshoppers, worms, snakes, bird’s nest soup, or live octopus. In fact, this summer, we provided 100 fish heads to a chef in Seattle for the annual Burning Beast event. The fish heads were a big hit and we had numerous bloggers writing about the delicate flavor of something most Bristol Bay Natives have enjoyed for centuries as a way to commemorate the beginning of the salmon season.

100% seafood utilization can be a tremendous marketing tool as well. Here is what one of our company’s customers writes on their website about where they source their salmon:
Our fish is currently a part of a local venture to compost fish carcasses, rather than throwing them away. This reduces pollution [sic] in Bristol Bay, and instead goes to growing food. Read more about it on our site, here, or at the company, Alaska Bounty’s website, here (www.alaskabounty.com).

Whether we like how these things smell or look, we all here in coastal Alaska need to consider the intrinsic qualities of the materials that the seafood industry currently considers “waste.” The only waste is that what we make of it.

If you would like more information on how to compost using seafood carcasses or other seafood proteins, please call (907) 842-8323 or contact me via email at izetta.chambers@alaska.edu. I can help direct you to the best scientific research on the topic, and help to provide resources on doing it safely – including bear fence installation and Alaska statutes on the subject.

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