Cape Ann Fresh Catch Comes to Canton

Cape Ann Fresh Catch is bringing their fresh fish to Canton. Canton residents will now be able to purchase their fish at starting today.

Fresh Catch is based on the model of community supported agriculture–but with fish. Cape Ann Fresh Catch, "a community supported fishery based out of Gloucester," will be making weekly deliveries starting this week.

"This unique program gives local Canton residents the opportunity to receive weekly or bi-weekly deliveries of fresh caught local seafood while supporting local fishermen and promoting sustainable fishing practices," said Emily Currier of Fresh Catch.

History of Fresh Catch

As the twentieth century wound down, fishing towns like Port Clyde, Maine, and Gloucester were in jeopardy of losing their fleets. They are not entirely out of the storm yet, but 43 years ago, the Gloucester Fishermen's Wives Association (GFWA) formed an advocacy group that began to reverse the plight of their husbands.

According to Angela Sanfilippo, GFWA's executive director, they went to congress and "...recommended the regulations to protect the fish stock...as long as the rules and regulations are equitable and fair to everybody, and are for the real purpose of protecting the resources of the food chain in the ocean."

In 2007, Greenpeace veteran Niaz Dorry, now the coordinating director of Northwest Atlantic Marine Alliance, began a Community Supported Fishery (CSF) based on Community Supported Agriculture (CSA). In Port Clyde, Maine, Midcoast Fisherman's Cooperative began the first New England CSF, Port Clyde Fresh Catch with a group of twelve ground fishermen determined to preserve their heritage.

Dorry eventually introduced the CSF to the GFWA. A Gloucester resident herself, Dorry knew that the fishermen's wives had been promoting local fish for some time through advocacy and cooking demonstrations as well as education about some of the lesser used fishes, as Sanfilippo said "to encourage people to use all that comes out of the ocean, not just the haddock, the cod, the flounder, the lobster, but the squid and the pollock and the whiting and the monkfish and you name it."

Gloucester wives eagerly began New England's second CSF. Their spring season will begin on March 7 and sign up is ongoing.  Enrollment is also pro-rated so that people who want to buy a share at any time will not be penalized. 

Steve Tousignant, Cape Ann Fresh Catch's operations manager, points out that the fish they sell are incredibly fresh and have quite often been swimming fewer than 24 hours before delivery. He added, "The advantage of purchasing through Cape Ann Fresh Catch is that we pay the fisherman on average a higher price than what they'd normally receive through the auction or traditional market methods."

Processing is reduced to a minimum and storage is limited to the time it takes to get the fish to the owners of the CSF shares. A direct parallel with which most people are familiar is Fair Trade Coffee which pays coffee growers a much higher price for their beans by putting the consumer several links closer to the grower in the supply chain.  The fisherman's benefit is obvious, higher price, but the consumer also benefits by having better knowledge of a fresher product which is less subject to vagaries of the market that are unrelated to the catch.

For fresh fish, large conglomerates are circumvented.  "The only way you can get fresher fish is if you're out there catching it yourself," Tousignant said.

Sanfilippo added that the product includes support of the fishermen's way of life. Share owners are not only buying very fresh fish, but they're preserving a very old culture that lives in harmony with the sea in contrast to the products created by twentieth century efforts to strip-mine it.

Cape Ann Fresh Catch has been exploring ways to get their fish a little further inland in Massachusetts, fielding calls from as far away as the Berkshires. Currently their CSF drops off in the following locales: Acton, Beverly, Bolton, Cambridge, Canton, Fenway, Gloucester, Harvard Square, Ipswich, Jamaica Plain, Lexington, Lincoln, Marblehead, Melrose, Sharon, and Westboro.  They have also been actively developing a pilot program to sell directly to restaurants and institutions and expect to be much further along by May of this year.

Deliveries will be made in Canton on Mondays from 4:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m. at Brookwood Community Farm, 11 Blue Hill River Road.  Share types and prices can be viewed here: http://capeannfreshcatch.org/spr2011_shares.html

For additional information go to: www.capeannfreshcatch.org