Why We Import Our Own Fish
The American Catch is often mysterious
In 1982 a Chinese aquaculture scientist named Fusui Zhang journeyed to Connecticut in search of scallops. The New England bay scallop had recently been domesticated, and Dr. Zhang thought the Stonington-grown shellfish might do well in China. His visit complete, he boxed up 200 scallops and spirited them away to his lab in Qingdao. During the journey most of them died. But 26 made it. Thanks to them, today China now grows millions of dollars of New England bay scallops, a significant portion of which are exported back to the United States.
As go scallops, so goes the nation. According to the National Marine Fisheries Service, even though the United States controls more ocean than almost any other country, on any given year anywhere from 70–85 percent of the seafood we consume is imported.
But it’s much fishier than that: While a majority of the seafood Americans eat is foreign, around a third of what Americans catch is sold to foreigners.
The seafood industry, it turns out, is a great example of the swaps, delete-and-replace maneuvers and other mechanisms that define so much of the outsourced American economy; you can find similar, seemingly inefficient phenomena in everything from textiles to technology. The difference with seafood, though, is that we’re…
