Three “Better” Seafood Sandwiches
How hard can it be to get a local dinner from American seas?
My New England seafood supper is lost over Tennessee.
Two dozen herring, 20 pounds of squid, and a bushel of blue mussels are circling in a thunderstorm over FedEx’s hub in Memphis. If the FedEx pilots manage to land, all that seafood just might make a northbound connecting flight back to New England, where it was all originally harvested. Eventually, fingers crossed, it will find its way onto a truck whereby it will end up at the cabin I’ve rented for my vacation on Deer Isle, Maine. That’s my hope, anyway. I planned dinner for 7 p.m. for a group of old-school Yankee neighbors. I promised them three radically new summer seafood sandwiches. I’ve now been promising these sandwiches for two days, and still the seafood hasn’t arrived. FedEx swears the re-delivery will come at 4:30 p.m. The Yankees are getting hungry and, in their impatience, are rigging their sloops for a little sailing. By 4:07 p.m., there’s no FedEx truck in sight.
That all these convolutions are necessary just to put a New England seafood dinner on the table in New England is part of my point. Even though the United States controls more ocean than any nation on Earth and is the world’s third largest consumer of fish and shellfish, Americans import 90 percent of their…
