KEY TOPICS
The vital importance of social capital - “you can throw a lot of money at a problem, but if social capital isn’t there, if there’s no trust, you can’t fix it”
How her experience as an at-sea fisheries observer in California taught her about the legacy of power dynamics that continue to shape how local commercial fishers view and engage with researchers and management (including a serious lack of trust)
The challenges facing the local commercial fisheries sector in San Diego, including logistical and regulatory constraints on direct-to-consumer pathways
Gentrification of working waterfronts and seafood in general
How to help local fishers, in San Diego and beyond, by getting curious and demystifying where your seafood actually comes from
How her biracial, bicultural background inspires and shapes her work of fostering a revitalized, inclusive local seafood culture in San Diego
She likes boats
INTRODUCTION
Hello there, and welcome to Conservation Realist, the newsletter/podcast that gets real about making conservation better. I’m your host, Dr. Tara Sayuri Whitty, expert in conservation evaluation, research, and training. I’m also a tenant of an apartment that is undergoing roof renovation today, yes, today! The very day I have chosen for recording this introduction. So please forgive the thunderous background noise.
Thank you for all of the positive feedback on the Conservation Sense series thus far! Stay tuned for more of that later this week and in future weeks. But for today, I have a special treat – a lovely conversation with Emily Miller, a sustainable seafood expert here in San Diego and also just a very thoughtful, grounded individual with refreshing perspectives. It’s been such a pleasure to get to know Emily a bit in recent months, not only because she’s just a fun person to talk with, but also because her experience and expertise represent big gaps in my own regarding local fisheries in southern California.
I’ll read an excerpt of her bio (full version at the end of the transcript): Emily Miller specializes in community seafood systems and works toward an integrated well-being of people, economies and environment. She is a California Sea Grant research associate, based at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at University of California San Diego (UCSD), and Project Director for Fishful Future, an initiative to build awareness and community around local seafood in San Diego. She has a bachelor’s degree in ecology and evolutionary biology from the University of California, San Diego, a Master of Science in food systems, and a Master of Business Administration in sustainable leadership from Prescott College, Arizona.
Beyond that formal education background, she has six years of experience as an at-sea commercial fisheries observer (which I find impressive and fascinating – we talk about this quite a bit), and four years of experience as a field consultant/community liaison in coastal fishing communities. These real-world experiences underpin her interest in resilient economies, seafood supply chains, and grassroots or market solutions for the challenges facing small-to-mid-scale producers and harvesters.
Her own perspective in this work is that the most precious form of capital is mutual trust, and the second most precious is wild seafood.
Emily, like me, is biracial – Korean and white American – and the cultural context in which she grew up also inspires and influences how she approaches her work with fisheries and seafood. We do reference being “hapa,” which basically means “mixed race which includes some Asian in there.”
A couple of quick notes for context: We often reference the Tuna Harbor Dockside Market, which is a local seafood market here in San Diego that operates on Saturday mornings. It’s near a touristy part of downtown San Diego called “Seaport Village.” There’s another, more recently, established local seafood market at Oceanside Harbor, called Fishermen’s Market of North County, that operates on Sundays. If you’re in San Diego County and at all interested in seafood or fisheries, get yourself to one of these ASAP!
And you might have noticed that I generally use the word “fishers” when referring to those who fish. It’s gender neutral, it’s shorter to say and type, and many others use it. However, in the US, there’s more of a preference for “fishermen,” even for women in the sector. Emily generally hops into using “fishers” in this conversation to accommodate my own verbiage, as she quickly references, so I wanted to provide a little background for folks.
Even if you’re not from San Diego, or the Global North, this conversation has so much to offer for anyone who is adjacent to seafood or fisheries or working with communities. So let’s go ahead and dive in!
TRANSCRIPT
E: Hi, I'm Emily Miller. I work at California Sea Grant in their extension department as a Sustainable Seafood Associate. And I also direct a San Diego-focused local seafood education initiative called Fishful Future. Thanks for having me!
As far as a background on my pathway to these roles… I know we usually start with education for this kind of a question, but I've done some soul searching and I think it goes back a little further to growing up in a biracial household. So my mom is a South Korean immigrant from Yeongdo Island. And my dad is from the East Coast of the US (it's a little bit WASP-y). Recreational fishing was a big part of my father's identity, and eating seafood is a big part of my mom's culture, so I grew up with a lot of experiences revolving around the ocean and seafood. I don't think that's necessarily unique to people that get into marine science, but the cultural aspect, the bicultural aspect, turned out to be very important for me later on.
I went to UCSD. with the goal of getting involved with work at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Worked for a few years in Paul Dayton's lab as an undergrad, and then I got a degree in ecology. But during that time, like a lot of college students, I took a gap year in Alaska, and I lived in Kodiak and worked at a commercial fisheries processor.
And commercial fishing up until this point had been sort of mythologized for me. Living in California, I had a lot of exposure to environmental organization narratives around commercial fishing. But I grew up in a suburb, so I was pretty strongly insulated from real world stuff like how food is made – in particular how seafood is made is probably the most mystical of our food products because a lot of the activity takes place, you know, away from anyone. So I wanted to experience certain things for myself, which led to that foray up to Alaska. When I came back, I was very motivated to work more at the intersection of research and commercial fishing, and I knew I wanted to do field work (Paul Dayton was no doubt a strong influence there).
So out of college, I had my first proper fisheries management experiences as a commercial fisheries observer for highly migratory species in the West Coast region. And so that meant going on board commercial fishing vessels for the duration of their trips. And the target species were swordfish and bigeye tuna. And the commercial fishermen were using mixed gear types. So I observed experimental buoy gear, experimental long line, deep set long line, drift gill net – a few different gear types, lots of different boat sizes, and a lot of variation in trip length too.
Then in the off seasons, I pursued contracts, compiling and interpreting seafood trade data. For one, I worked as a marine science educator – who among us has not had a stint like that, right? And then I also managed a supply chain project for fisheries byproducts, because I really wanted to get more involved in some of the land-based activities and the research. There's this joke among observers where like, when you're out there at sea collecting data, the agencies that are receiving that data, they don't really want your brain – they want your body, collecting samples. So I was a little unsatisfied by that. So I tried to expand my career by taking on these off-season contracts.
And that led to me working for California Sea Grant Extension in the Sustainable Seafood Associate role because I had a lot of long-term relationships with the commercial captains in the San Diego area where I'm based. I spent six years as a commercial fisheries observer. And then I lead and coordinate a San Diego-focused consumer education initiative that intends to stimulate interest and raise awareness for our local fisheries over social media channels, which is pretty fun.
A lot of what I learned from the commercial fishers I worked with is incorporated in the work that I do in consumer education.
T: That's so cool. There's so many follow-up questions I have for you, Emily. As a note, it's nice to meet another Hapa (half-Asian) who has a very white-sounding first and last name.
E: Oh man, it's like, it's so annoying, right? Like you're camouflaged. I guess there's advantages to it too, if we're talking about white-passing. You could interview me on that about that any time, because I have a bunch of comments!
T: Yeah, I'd actually love to talk about that. That's one reason why I started using my middle name more prominently. But yeah, I was like, “Emily Miller” - she's half Korean? Oh, okay. I'm Tara Whitty, half Japanese!
I love that you included some of your more deep background, even to how you were raised. I think that helps us stay grounded in why we do what we're doing, through all the craziness. But one of the things that I really am fascinated by from your experience is your work as an observer, and I've told you this before: I get very seasick. And I am definitely on the side of fishers – I advocate for their rights – however, I get absolutely heartbroken when I'm witnessing fish actually being harvested… I don't know how I ended up in fisherie! And I think it is pretty intimidating to be in an observer position, where I imagine there's possibly some tension between that kind of supervisory position and the crew.
So I'd love to hear a little more just about that experience and maybe some of the most resounding things that you learned during your time in the field with these crews.
E: Sure! I look back at my time as a fisheries observer really fondly, like so fondly that I actually sometimes hope that I am looking forward to another stint as a fisheries observer. You know, it's something that, if I have a rough day, I'm like, oh, I could just go back to that! But it is tough. It is really difficult work. The seasickness, the exposure to weather conditions is, really like the smaller share of the difficulty in terms of the difficult conditions.
The difficult part for me, and the part that was really filled with personal growth opportunities, too, related to how you're living in someone else's space under those kinds of terms, where there's a legacy of a power dynamic that precedes you between the presiding government and the fishing community that you might be observing with. And everyone's tired all the time from the work. And your role as a fisheries observer is the most annoying role of anybody on board, because you aren't essential to the principal goal of the captain and crew, which is to catch fish, right? You are kind of in the way.
So on a personal level, figuring out how to deal with that with humility and be a good shipmate and cultivate mutual respect and goodwill with folks that are really different from me, that I think was very impactful. You mentioned the personal impact of seeing harvest happen, and I think that there is a sort of a pressure among observers to pretend like that doesn't have an impact or that it's meaningless in order to fit in better, maybe, with crew. But I just wanted to stop and say like, oh, that's very real. Particularly on bigger vessels where a lot more fish is being caught, and you're seeing things happen very quickly, it can invite philosophical reflection on commodity-scale seafood.
However, what's not often talked about is how much some fishermen (fishers, as you've been saying), fishers really care about the animals that they're landing. So like if undersized fish come aboard, there's often a lot of concern from fishermen to get them back into the water. And so there's a very interesting tension there, where harvesting the animal is necessary for the people on board to make a living. They care about the future of the stock, presumably, and want to return anything that survives and isn't harvestable to the water. And I don't think fishers should be demonized for this necessary role of harvest! It's a tough job. I feel like I'm having flashbacks actually – that's why my speech is so halting!
Another really impactful realization I had on board these vessels, particularly aboard longline vessels with foreign crew, which were mostly Filipino in my experience, is observing how hard commercial fishers, particularly foreign crew, have to work, like beyond what you might think is physically possible. Most of them are also on two-year contracts, so they get to go back home to their families after that two-year period for a few months. And then they come back to the same boat if it's a good one (a good one is one with a fair captain and good pay).
With their example, I really had the opportunity to reflect on how fishing is such a trade-off of your time and your body. That's true of any fishery, because you risk your relationships in addition to risking your life when you go out to sea. But they risk the most, you know, because of how much time they're spending out there. And there are a lot of people I worked with who were just brilliant individuals. They taught themselves multiple languages and they were talented artists and really skilled leaders of the other crew members. They were devoted to their families, eager to show me pictures of their children back home, their wives. They were accomplished engineers.
So being among them and seeing their work ethic and then their motivations to provide for the families, because they would send that money home to the Philippines. Honestly, I felt ashamed of my trivial problems. I realized that I'd had a comparatively easy life. I had my shared problems, but it was comparatively easy. Even every day on board, I was getting consistent pay, whereas their pay was tied to the volume of fish that they would catch. So that adds to the tension on board the vessel as well. The observer’s fine, no matter what happens, but the stress level spikes for fishermen when they're not catching.
So anyway, to cut the rambling short: it was very motivating to see this, because it was foundational to my realization that if I was going to get all these opportunities in life that I honestly didn't really deserve any more than the next person or any more than any of the fishers that I worked with, then I should use those opportunities to do something good for community.
T: I think that's so important!
E: Humility and motivation!
T: I think that's great. And I think your experience in that way is different from – let’s backtrack: I often conflate fisheries management and conservation, and I think the two are getting closer and overlapping more in how people are seeing them. But I feel like a lot of people who work, even in fisheries management, but especially in conservation, their fieldwork is animal or non-human organism focused. Whereas your experience, you really were immersed in this community of, we can say, fishermen (I know in the US, that's kind of the accepted way of saying it).
You were really immersed, and you were open to approaching that situation with a lot of observation and empathy. And I think a big gap in a lot of conservation is that it's dominated by natural scientists who are not necessarily immersed side-by-side in the experience of the ecosystem with the people who would be involved and impacted in the conservation work. So I just think it's so fascinating that you were in that position. First of all, I admire it because I could never hack it as a fisheries observer! And just the fact that you took so much from it is, I think, remarkable.
E: It was great. Yeah. It transformed me. I recommend it to everybody! But it's what you do with that time. You know, I wasn't laser focused on the people either. I considered myself now and then a natural scientist. I was very interested in the animals we were bringing on board and I always brought back too many samples, like, “they really want to see this one, they definitely want this one back at the lab!” So, a little overeager.
But you can't help but observe the people also, I think, especially if you make a point of it as an observer not to detach totally. It's more and more possible these days because of screens. You can listen to an audiobook while you work and not pay attention to what's going on, on the deck. Or when it's meal time, you can disassociate and look at a screen. I don't know. I just feel like there's a lot of attempts to sedate oneself. It's hard to pay attention to what's happening on a human level and to connect, but it's very worthwhile. But it takes energy.
T: Oh, for sure. I mean, I'm a pretty shy person and a lot of my great experiences in fishing villages I like to think are because I'm a curious person who likes to learn from others, but I'm sure there's definitely a role played by the fact that there was no internet connection in these places.
So, you went from being on board with these fishermen as an observer, immersed in the experience of fishing with them. And then your work now: I assume with both Fishful Future and California Sea Grant, there's a lot of engaging with fishermen. We've talked a little bit about this, but I'd love for you to share some of your thoughts about what that entails. In either of those positions, what does it mean to engage with fishers and what are some of the challenges that you face in that work?
E: So I'll tell a brief story about when I was first training to become an observer, just for context, for what I'll share about going into this land-based job with California Sea Grant. But when I was just starting to be an observer, I sat in on some sort of decision-making meeting between some fishermen and folks at NOAA. And a lot of us fisheries observers in training, we were introduced to the room, which was so mean, because then the fishermen descended on us and were like,
“why do you want to do this work anyway?!” You know, there was a very combative energy.
T: Oh my gosh. Like a hazing!
E: Yeah, it was, you know. I think it was… yeah, it was funny. But I was asked that question in particular by the fishermen. And I was really taken aback by the blatant hostility in his tone, particularly having come from Alaska, where a lot of my friends had been commercial fishermen and had lived in a community that was very dependent on fishing resources. And then, okay, now I'm here in San Diego, and because of my job title, I'm perceived as a potential enemy or regarded with intense skepticism. I was so taken aback. I think I said something really dumb, like, “I like boats.” I mean, I'm serious! I think that was my answer. It's just true! But it was neutral enough that he kind of was so either so thrown off by it or, you know, he accepted it.
But, when I took this land-based work, because make no mistake, I spend almost no time out at sea now in my role at California Sea Grant and in my role at Fishful Future, it's very desk-based. We do fieldwork in that we interact with the community, by going out to the local fish markets and outreach and education opportunities, but a lot of work is desk, computer, meetings, e-mail, right? So my opportunities to connect with fishers and build trust, which was something that I had really enjoyed over six years of being a commercial fisheries observer, it went way down. And some of the people that I worked for and with as a fisheries observer have retired. So the amount of people to whom I'm known in the community is declining. And that can be really challenging, just that conditional aspect of the separation of space. In order to build trust with the communities we work with, you have to be there with them. And there are so few opportunities to do that.
And for good reason, right? A lot of commercial fishers here are mistrustful of any well-intentioned outsiders, particularly if outsiders have been trained to see them as fishers first and individual people second. The US has such strong science-based fisheries management relative to fisheries worldwide, but also that historical legacy of top-down decision-making that's left so many fishing communities feeling unheard, deprioritized, and left out - I think it's disorienting and triggers a lot of skepticism to now have scientists come in and say, “we want to help,” you know?
T: Yeah, I can see that. And that's one reason I was really interested in chatting with you for this, Emily: I have an embarrassingly low awareness of the California or even the US context. I know the laws, I know the policies, I generally know how things work, but my experience has been so biased toward what I've seen in the Global South. And so it kind of reminds me how I've had a lot of friends from my fishing village days in the Philippines. They'll be like, “what do you mean you have homeless people in America? Such a rich country. How could that be?” I might have a kind of a similar view to like fisheries. Like, “what do you mean fishing communities struggle here?”
And then, when I hear more and more from people like you who work with them, or even I've heard from some of them when they've spoken on panels, for example, some pretty serious issues do come up. So when you say there's this legacy of lack of trust, could you go into that a little more? Like, what is it about the top-down approach that's left these communities, like you said, disoriented or left out?
E: Yeah, well, I'm not the expert in this. And I'm also, you know, I'm in my 30s, so I'm not part of that long legacy generationally, but I can tell you at least what I've heard from others about how with our management processes, fishermen struggle to participate in them. And in the early days of the establishment of fisheries regulations, there was the development of an “us versus them” mindset between fishing industry, and the regulatory bodies that were concerned with environmental impacts, as well as long-term stock sustainability. And that's changing now as the knowledge of commercial fishermen is increasingly seen as very, very valuable to research-based management. But it's hard to shake that set “us versus them” dynamic that was built in when regulations came into play that totally changed the landscape for U.S. commercial fishers.
And a lot of the establishment of these regulations was also driven in a way by the activities of environmental NGOs that were able to capture public attention with their campaigns regarding the activities of U.S. commercial fisheries. Things have changed so much, but those wounds still exist in the commercial fishing communities. So there's some decision making from the past, regulatory decision making, that maybe wasn't based on the best science; the scientists and managers were also fumbling their way in the early days, in the 1960s, 70s. And that caused broken trust, right? Sometimes there were situations where commercial fishers were working with policymakers and then what they thought they were working on together didn't manifest.
So their descendants – because fishing is such a family business – a lot of their descendants, remained in fishing and remembered the legacy of decisions like that. But there's a lot of talk about this young generation of commercial fishers, those that remain in the industry, which has really dwindled in strength over the last several decades. But the remaining young generation, as well as new entrants, could represent a different-to-new sort of future for fisheries management, more of a collaborative one. But I think we'll always have to work on repairing the trust because the legacy is there.
It's really been interesting to reflect on social capital as even more valuable, impactful than money. Or you can throw a lot of money at a problem, but if the social capital isn't there, if there's no trust, you can't fix it.
T: That's absolutely right. And, just in the context in which you work now and with this newer generation of fishers and new entrants: do you see efforts at true collaboration improving, in terms of regulatory folks actually making their platforms more accessible, but also making more room for actually listening to what the fishers are saying?
E: I think so. I think that that's happening at a regulatory level. Some of the conditions in order to participate in decision making are just… if I was tasked with “transform this into something more accessible,” I would be at a loss because again, it's the initial conditions of fishers are at sea most of the time and management processes take place on land. That makes just showing up really, really hard.
In my work at California Sea Grant, though, I'm part of the California Commercial Fishing Apprenticeship Program, and I try to teach new entrants skills that will be beneficial for them as commercial fishing owner-operators, if that's in their future. And one big one is public speaking – being able to make your point – and then emphasizing the importance of showing up and being part of these processes.
T: Yeah, that's awesome. I mean, that's being able to represent yourself and your sector. Even with projects I've been involved with, those are almost treated as like side projects, but they have such cross-cutting benefits. Can I just ask you, Emily, again, this shows my ignorance: when you say commercial fishers, that represents a range of different kind of vessel capacity, fleet size, because that's quite a large label, right?
E: Yeah, it's enormous. A lot of the people that I know and work with, because I work in San Diego, which is a very high cost of living area, sort of the only business model that is surviving (there are a few exceptions, but not many)is the smaller vessel owner-operator. Minimal expenses, but definitely a limit to how much money you can make too, how much you can fish.
T: Right. In addition to being able to teach these new entrants these important skills, what are some of the positive outcomes you've had in your work in terms of engaging with fishers, even though there obviously are some pretty major challenges?
E: This is actually why I established, together with colleagues, Fishful Future, because it seemed like an opportunity, an area that was ripe, for collaboration and positive impacts for the community. Because as the direct-to-consumer market has begun to grow in San Diego in response to a lot of the cost pressures that are incurred along a long supply chain, where someone is adding value as well as increasing the price at every step, a lot of commercial fishers are trying to sell direct to the public, direct to restaurants. But there's often a knowledge gap between the products that they want to sell and then the people in the city, all across California, really.
But I focus particularly on San Diego with Fishful Future. And San Diego is a place where there's so much opportunity because you have so many people. It's a metropolis and a very, very diverse one too. So there are all different kinds of people with all the different kinds of preferences that you could potentially market to. But that first step of building demand and interest in the product is a huge challenge for commercial fishers who already have so much on their plate. So Fishful Future has a been a positive outcome for me, to be able to collaborate with commercial fishers on this project and work with them to film some of their fishing activity, which is historically really a no-no. To me, that really represents a change and willingness to share, and just a change in how public attention used to be perceived as a threa and now could be a strength, right?
Working with them to identify different target audiences, to potentially educate, and over the course of the project I've consulted a number of commercial fishers in San Diego on their ideas and their suggestions, and now feeling like I can go to these folks and ask them if I have a need. Or vice versa: the door is open also for them to contact me if they have a question or want to express a challenge that they're having. That's been really rewarding.
But it's very small, you know; it's person to person. So in terms of engaging with fishers, I can't say that we engage successfully with fishers as a monolith, but the more that I look at each of them as individual people, small business owners who are struggling to make it in the heavily regulated industry and in a high cost of living city, the more the connection I think has grown.
T: I do think that so much work of value does happen at smaller scales than we actually initially anticipate, too. As you said, it's so relationship-based and that starts with the one-on-one. And I love - there's something about the name Fishful Future that just kind of sticks in my head. You've done a great job with that. I don't even eat fish and I enjoy your posts.
E: Oh, that makes me happy.
T: Yeah, I got a kick out of them for sure. So, in this work with San Diego commercial fishers, you'd mentioned the topic of the gentrification of waterfronts and even seafood in general. I'm interested in knowing more about, what is the reality? You mentioned it's a highly regulated sector and a high cost of living area, but what might be some things that people aren't aware that the sector is facing, including the whole fate of the waterfronts and how those are zoned for use?
E: Right. Yeah. So there's a few things buried in there. What should I start with? If we start with a working waterfront: here's something that's interesting that kind of clarifies it or makes people go, oh! San Diego has a long history of commercial fishing and a long history of commercial fishing reliance, dominance, success, because in the post-World War II period, this city was the top producer of tuna products in the world.
T: I didn't know that!
E: Yes. It was the third largest economy in San Diego after, I want to say, aerospace and military-related industries. And do you know what the third largest economy is in San Diego today?
T: I don't know… hospitality?
E: It's tourism! So, when you think about how so many things in San Diego are catered to tourists now, you're like, “oh, damn.” It starts to create some relative scale of how important commercial fishing or how baked into people's lives commercial fishing was.
And the waterfront is a great example where you can really see the shift. It's sort of a battleground, an active battleground, a lot of lost battles represented in the waterfront. It's a pleasure-focused waterfront now, what we see mostly in San Diego. The working waterfront struggles in competition to the Hyatt, like these big tourism-centered development projects. Just access to dock space infrastructure and shoreside infrastructure is really critical for landing a high quality seafood product. That means cold storage areas and cranes for offloading and ice machines. We don't have them – we don't have many. And there's a huge need for that all across California. And it's in direct competition with development for tourism. That's a very tough battle to get into.
So that's one major challenge. Let me think of the other. Okay, so price: we can get into the true cost of food with this discussion...
T: That small topic.
E: So local seafood (when I say local, I'm just talking about San Diego since that's where I'm local to) is going to be more expensive than a lot of seafood products from overseas, both wild seafood and aquaculture. Aquaculture is something that's really scaled up and where you can really control the costs because it's a heavily managed system and not as dependent on fluctuating ocean conditions, etc. But these scaled up industries, including industrial-scale wild seafood harvest, out-compete local seafood on price every time. And we have become so used to certain prices and purchasing food for a very small proportion of our budget. I actually think that I read some statistic about how in the 1940s, 1950s, food was like 20% of the household budget. And it's so much less than that now.
But our expectations have really shifted. Our price ceilings are different. There's a ceiling to what the consumer will pay for a seafood product, and when that doesn't match up with what fishermen require in order to cover all the costs of their business, there's a challenge there. And there's this middle ground, where if fishermen are selling direct to the public or to the restaurants, they can potentially get a higher price for their products than if they offload to a wholesaler that's going to need to have make their own markups. But there are certain challenges.
This is another thing that the general public in San Diego probably doesn't know much about, but there are lots of health code related challenges to landing your own seafood and selling it to the public. You can't cut it. So, and that's a big issue. So a commercial fisher in San Diego that goes out and gets a load of fish and wants to sell it to the public, has to sell it whole unless they have access to a permitted kitchen space where they have a HACCP plan (it's a specialized health plan) that outlines hazard prevention and a standard operating procedure for handling seafood. These are policies that keep us safe as consumers, but they present a lot of challenges for these small commercial fishing businesses who don't really have the time or the resources to rent a commercial kitchen space and cut the seafood.
This puts a lot of burden on consumers, who are then expected to be able to handle whole fish. And it really excludes a lot of our fishers who are catching swordfish, tuna, any big fish – nobody's going to be buying that whole, right? So there's a big challenge there. Direct-to-consumer doesn't work for everybody in San Diego.
So what we really need are diversified systems. We need direct-to-consumer opportunities. We need shoreside infrastructure and processing facilities, so that our larger volume, larger fish catches can make it to the public. There's so many constraints for a commercial fisher.
T: I mean, I think even if I did eat seafood, I wouldn't have thought about most of that. And I'm so behind and so out of the loop, but I remember (in fairness, I was in Southeast Asia when most of this was happening), at one point, even having the Tuna Harbor Dockside Market, which is the local seafood market, wasn't even allowed. They had to go for a policy change to even be allowed to have their own markets. It's kind of similar to that.
E: Yeah, the Pacific to Plate bill! That's totally related to everything I'm talking about. Yes. That's something that my colleague Theresa Talley at California Sea Grant was very much involved with, that Pacific to Plate bill, helping Tuna Harbor Dockside Market in downtown San Diego get the permits needed to operate. It's a unique setup. They have a cutting booth at the market. So that's a really necessary component to the Pacific to Plate bill, making this allowance for some cutting to take place, but it happens after the consumer has bought the fish and they take their product to be cut immediately afterwards. Very interesting strategy there. But there's limited space at these weekend markets. And this one's only on the weekend too, Tuna Harbor Dockside Market, one day a week. So there's limited ability to distribute.
T: Right. That cannot be the only source of income for where the boats are offloading their catches, I guess.
E: Right. Fisherman and commercial urchin diver Pete Halmay has talked about how less than 10% of San Diego Seafood will be able to move through the direct-to-consumer market. And it's entirely possible that there could be that kind of a bottleneck. I'd love to see it expand, because I think that is where you could potentially fight this gentrification of local food, this gentrification of sustainable food, that I see potentially developing, as much as our working waterfronts have experienced gentrification.
Diets are also very susceptible to socioeconomic pressure. And our inland communities in San Diego have the least amount of access to local seafood because of dockside constraints for sales, like the Tuna Harbor Dockside Market is right there on the water. It's easier for the fishers, but it's hard for everybody else to get to. It's a small volume of seafood that's present there.
So figuring out how to open up that bottleneck is a hope of mine, to create more accessibility for people throughout San Diego. Because seafood used to be the protein of the people, historically. And now it's the protein of the rich people. I think that's kind of sad. It’s like our last wild food.
T: Yeah. And I think also so much of the harm that is linked to agriculture and industrial commercial fisheries: it's a sector that's driven by consumers who don't have a sense of connection to where the food comes from. And there are so many fantastic projects around the world working on this kind of “Farm to Table” or “Hook to Cook” types of projects. Again, being kind of outside that kind of work, I don't know what pathways people are thinking about, but it'd be really great to see it expand further.
On that note, and I don't know if there's an easy answer to this, but for people who are wanting to support local fisheries – let's say these are people who actually eat seafood, unlike me… or maybe not, maybe there's some kind of policy action point that could be undertaken regardless of diet –but what do you tell people when they're like, I want to help San Diego's local fishers?
E: There's the classic refrain, which is: spend your money on them. But what I like to tell people now is: start by knowing them. Because there is so much history in our working waterfront and if you can get into that and start to understand sort of the power dynamics that have been part of our fisheries, going back really thousands of years, if we’re talking about the Kumeyaay people who were the original stewards of the land and sea here in San Diego. There are so many power dynamics at play that can be very educational as to what's happening now.
I encourage people to not only know history, but know the fishermen. So going to the dockside fish markets, if they're at all available to you. Not on a mission necessarily to buy fish, but just on a mission to observe. You know, everybody can be an observer – not necessarily an official fisheries observer, but start by being curious and try to demystify the landscape around how seafood is made. It's not as hard as it used to be because there are so many efforts these days, Fishful Future included, and a lot of them are driven by fishing communities themselves to provide people with this information. But people still need to go seek it out and be open to learning and ask questions.
And that's actually a really big ask these days, because of this attention economy that we are part of. Who has free time to learn? I haven't met very many people.
T: I've brought students to the Tuna Harbor Dockside Market and I've always found the fishermen to be very friendly, very happy to talk to students to explain a bit about what it is they caught, how they caught it, the context in which they're fishing. I mean, especially now that I live a little closer - getting to there from North County at 8 a.m. on a Saturday is a bit of an ask, but…
E: Yeah, there's another one!
T: I heard that – Oceanside! It's newer, right? Maybe I'll take Danny there at some point.
But yeah, that's a great recommendation to just have this awareness. It's a little too abstract to be like, “I think it's environmentally better to eat X fish over Y fish,” and a lot of that stuff doesn't even take into account the social impacts of the food we're eating. But, getting more familiar, as you said, with the whole system, humans included, of how that food's getting to you, is a great step.
E: Yeah. I don't want to tell people what to eat. I think that decision is so personal and it's tied to how you're doing financially, what you grew up with, cultural things, and how much knowledge you have about the impacts and what kind of education you've had access to, all these things. So presuming to tell people what to eat doesn't really sit well with me, but encouraging people to ask questions, be interested in this part of our world, which is so necessary to our survival – we have to eat, for God's sake, and it makes it makes a big impact – I think is a first step to creating people that are interested in having a more of a stewardship relationship with the place that they live, the planet that they live on.
T: Yeah, absolutely. There's so much more I'd love to ask you about, Emily. I mean, I'll bring it up in a future coffee hangout – yeah, so many questions – but I did want to close with something that you started us off with, which is your cultural background. And I've seen some of your posts with Fishful Future which are like recipes that your mom is sharing, ways to prepare your seafood. And I'm just interested in that side of things – the cultural side of Fishful Future or even how you approach all of this. Is there anything you'd like to share?
E: Well, that's it's very much at the core of how I come at Fishful Future is the diversity of culture that influences how we approach seafood. And among sustainable local US seafood educators (which is kind of a mouthful, but there actually are some of us), there's a lot of talk about what it means for a community to have a seafood culture. And when people think of seafood culture in the US, I think it gravitates towards a Northeast vision of lobster traps, clam chowder, etc. But there's seafood culture everywhere. And in San Diego, there are so many different cultural and ethnic groups that have brought seafood culture from a motherland. And figuring out how to integrate what we have in terms of local products with local culture is, I think, the pathway to more equity in terms of access.
For me personally, I also grew up seeing a lot of conflict at home between my parents about what kind of seafood was edible, you know? Like, it's actually crazy. I grew up hearing this joke told at every dinner party about how when my parents were dating, my mom asked him if he liked Korean food and my father said yes. And then so she took him to eat sea cucumber, which is really, really challenging.
T: I've never tried it actually!
E: Yeah, I know, I don't blame you. know, it's a really challenging dish for a lot of people with a Western diet. The joke is always on my mom, like, my dad saying “oh yeah, I ate it, and then I never ate it again - fooled her!” And I grew up with that sort of relational experience between my parents. Then I would go on to work as a fisheries observer, and I'd hear a lot of different perspectives about how we're supposed to be eating seafood. And some of those perspectives just didn't seem inclusive.
So I thought that if we want to revitalize or rebuild or create a new type of seafood culture in our communities, we need to understand the kind of cultures that are already there and make sure that what we're creating is inclusive to that and it engages that. And that is really where I light up with Fishful Future because of my personal background. So it's very important to me. And it's a very sensitive topic right now, you know? Very timely.
I think it's important to keep up that kind of an effort, to help people understand that we're stronger when we have the collective power of all of our human diversity working towards bettering our communities and we engage everyone.
T: And learning from, again, different cultures that utilize different types of seafood, different parts of the same seafood in different ways – I think the first time I ever went to the Tuna Harbor Dockside Market, and I don't spend a lot of time in Seaport Village, which is this very touristy area of San Diego, but from my experiences in that particular part of town, the most ethnically diverse I've ever seen it was waiting in line with people for the seafood market to open. And I was like, I have never seen this make-up of people in this part of San Diego! It was really, really interesting. Really cool to see. I mean, lots of Asians, basically!
E: Right! It really makes me feel like at home because I grew up in a very, like 70 to 80% Asian diaspora community. So I'm like, oh, to me, this is normal when I'm at Tuna Harbor Dockside Market. And I think a lot of fishers would agree in San Diego that those communities have helped direct-to-consumer market development be successful.
T: Oh, that's awesome.
E: I think that's cool. We do need to be conscious though of, you know, centering voices and perspectives and utilization, cultural practices, centering people from those communities, centering the way that they do things, in order to avoid a march towards gentrification of seafood. And by that I mean local seafood just getting priced so high that only the select, the upper middle class, can have access to it.
T: Another thing to talk about in the future for sure! Thank you, Emily. I don't want to use up too much of your time. Well, I do actually, but not for this recording…
E: Thank you for having me!
T: Again, it's great for me, being based in San Diego in a way that I never expected to be, to finally be learning more about it from people like you in terms of the seafood side of things, the fisheries side of things.
E: I think you have so much to add because of your international perspective. That's one thing that I wish I had more of, because I've had a little and it's interesting that there are things that are similar, and then there are things that are so drastically different. So different! But that I think that knowledge could do a lot of good here.
T: Well, we'll keep talking. And thank you for now, Emily!
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I really love doing these interviews, and it’s always a pleasure to chat with Emily. Please check out the newsletter on Substack for links to various projects and programs that we reference, and absolutely follow Fishful Future on Instagram.
And, as always, please do like, comment, share, rate, review, etc. – I truly appreciate any interaction with listeners/readers, and your feedback and support mean so much to me. Now here’s the song “The Green Touch” by Soe Moe Thwin, Min Min, and Zyan Htet. Thank you so much for joining me!
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BIO:
Emily Miller is a California Sea Grant research associate, based at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at University of California San Diego (UCSD), and the Project Director for Fishful Future, an initiative to build awareness and community around local seafood in San Diego. She specializes in community seafood systems and works toward an integrated well-being of people, economies and environment.
She has a bachelor’s degree in ecology and evolutionary biology from the University of California, San Diego, a Master of Science in food systems, and an Master of Business Administration in sustainable leadership from Prescott College, Arizona.
Beyond that formal education background, her six years of experience as an at-sea commercial fisheries observer, and four years of experience as a field consultant/community liaison in coastal fishing communities, underpin her interest in resilient economies, seafood supply chains, and grassroots or market solutions for the challenges facing small-to-mid-scale producers and harvesters.
A biracial and bicultural background is foundational to her interest in hearing and validating diverse perspectives on fishing practices, resource uses, and seafood culinary traditions.
Her own perspective in this work is that the most precious form of capital is mutual trust, and the second most precious is wild seafood. Both add tremendous value to her experiences and quality of life, are difficult to recover once compromised, and are essential to the longevity of fishing heritages.
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