Second Movement: “Local Seafood”

Sarah Schumann1

This is the second part of series entitled “The Case for Ecosystem-Based Fisheries Marketing: A Symphony in Four Movements”

As we saw in the previous article in this issue, the sustainable seafood movement attempts to shift purchasing outcomes by linking consumer behavior to product attributes (i.e., the “what,” or the characteristics of a particular product in the marketplace). In contrast, the local seafood movement that we explore in this article focuses primarily on shifts in social and spatial relations (i.e., the “who” and “where” behind the production and distribution of seafood products). The community-supported fishery (CSF) programs, fishermen’s markets, and other dock-to-plate programs that collectively constitute the “local seafood” movement represent “relational seafood supply chains” (Stoll et al., 2019), which “can be understood as production systems that better connect fishers and consumers via geographic proximity and other means.”

In contrast to “sustainable seafood” campaigns, which are “based on individual consumer preferences as the unit of activity,” local seafood initiatives are based on “localisation and re-embedding the economy within social networks” that use “food as a mechanism for community-building and social cohesion, while delivering sustainable rural livelihoods and a channel for the expression of alternative values about society, environment and the economy (Feenstra, 2002).”

The local seafood movement is not a discrete movement. Rather, it is part of a loose aggregation of ideologies and practices that find common ground in their commitment to re-localizing food production and procurement through short supply chains, low-impact agriculture, urban farming, farmers’ markets, schoolyard gardens, community-supported agriculture (CSA) programs, farm-to-table restaurants, and as we will discuss in this section, mantras to “know your fisherman.” Unlike the sustainable seafood movement, these local food systems (LFS) initiatives have emerged in decentralized fashion rather than through strategic, top-down planning.

Roots of the movement

This LFS movement has historical and ideological roots in the “consume less,” “small is beautiful,” and “back to the land” tropes of the 1970s (Feagan, 2007; Goodman & Goodman, 2007), a decade that also saw the celebration of the first Earth Day, the publication of the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth report, and several high-profile books that cemented public consciousness around nutritious food and sustainable farming, including: Frances Moore Lappe’s Diet for a Small Planet (1975), which made the case that greater food security for all people could be achieved by eating lower on the food chain; Lappe and Joseph Collins’ Food First (1978), which encouraged communities to take control of their own food economies; and Wendell Berry’s The Unsettling of America (1977), which described a loss of rural culture that accompanied the rise of agribusiness and mechanization.

As neoliberalism came to dominate the political and economic landscape in the final decades of the 20^th century, this early sustainable agriculture movement fractured. As chronicled by Goodman and Goodman (2007), the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA)’s 2002 codification of organic agriculture through a national standard and label for organic food and fiber had the effect of “conventionalizing” organic farming. Consumers and farmers who were satisfied with the “technocentric regulatory structure” that rose up around USDA organic certification adopted an “accommodationist posture” that fit neatly into an “incrementalist narrative of change that was better adapted to the hegemonic notions of the market and consumer choice promulgated by the dominant neoliberal political economy.” But not all activist farmers and consumers were satisfied with this outcome. With “hopes thwarted,” Goodman and Goodman (2007) continue, “activist ambition has been invested increasingly in the development of localised food systems and spatially demarcated labels of origin,” and as a result, “localism has assumed talismanic importance among food activists in the USA.”

To understand how “a rump of holistic, ‘movement’ farmers or ‘artisanal’ growers serving localised markets (Goodman & Goodman, 2007)” became the massive, decentralized LFS movement by 2010s, it helps to situate these food producers within the broader global economic landscape. For instance, Kurland et al. (2012) tie the LFS movement to a larger “localism movement,” which they define as “a movement to encourage consumers and businesses to purchase from locally owned, independent businesses rather than national corporations.” “Against this backdrop,” write Boys and Blank (2018; citing Allen and Hinrichs, 2007), “the interests of those with globalization concerns and those who wished to support alternative food networks intersected and forged support for local food systems.”

The resurgence of the LFS movement in the early 2000s was unmistakable. The volume of direct-to-consumer food sales such as farmers’ markets doubled from $0.7 billion in 1992 to $1.4 billion in 2012 in the U.S. (O’Hara & Low, 2016), The number of farmers’ markets increased by 180 percent between 2006 and 2014 (Low et al., 2015). Between 2006 and 2014, the number of food hubs (aggregators of local produce and meats) increased by 288 percent (Low et al., 2015). The number of “farm to school” programs in K-12 schools increased from six to 5,524 between 1997 and 2014 (NFSN, 2016, cited in O’Hara & McClenachan, 2018). Meanwhile, local food sourcing has consistently ranked among the top trends among restaurants and chefs in recent years (e.g., National Restaurant Association, 2015).

In the public sector, many federal, state, and local government programs sprang up to support LFS, and the number of such programs continued to grow (Martinez et al., 2010). Through the Farm Bill, Congress established the Community Food Project Grants Program, the WIC Farmers’ Market Nutrition Program, Senior Farmers’ Market Nutrition Program, Federal State Marketing Improvement Program, National Farmers’ Market Promotion Program, Specialty Crop Block Grant Program, and Community Facilities Program (Martinez et al., 2010). At the state and local level, programs have been established to support farm-to-institution procurement, promotion of local food markets, incentives for low-income consumers to shop at farmers’ markets, and creation of state food policy councils (Martinez et al., 2010).

Unlike USDA certified organic production, with its legally codified definition, its centralized management apparatus, and its unified set of qualifying criteria, the heterogenous components making up the decentralized LFS movement share neither a universally accepted meaning of “local” (Holt et al., 2018; Martinez et al., 2010) nor a single agreed-upon set of values that motivate participation. Nonetheless, the LFS movement appears to be tied together by a strong “movement identity,” described by Jasper as occurring when one sees oneself as part of a ‘‘force in explicit pursuit of social change (1997, cited in Dunlap & McCright, 2008).”

What, then, is the social change that the assorted adherents of the LFS movement hope to bring about? It seems there is no single answer to this question; rather, scholars enumerate a number of values and rationales that motivate participation in the LFS movement:

• concerns about food safety (Blake et al., 2010; Boys & Blank, 2018; Winter, 2003);

• concerns about environmental impacts of industrialized agriculture (Blake et al., 2010; Boys & Blank, 2018; Kloppenberg et al., 1996; Martinez et al., 2010; Winter, 2003);

• concerns about the impacts of “food miles” (the distance food travels between being produced and consumed; Kloppenberg et al., 1996);

• concerns about animal welfare (Winter, 2003);

• concerns about food security (Boys & Blank, 2018);

• a desire to connect with and/or economically support one’s community (Blake et al., 2010; Boys & Blank, 2018; Martinez et al., 2010);

• a feeling of “regional patriotism” (Boys & Blank, 2018);

• a desire for more flavorful, nutritional food (Kloppenberg et al., 1996, Martinez et al., 2010); and

• a consumer preference for differentiated products (Boys & Blank, 2018).

At the heart of many of these concerns is a deep mistrust of the globalized, industrialized food system (Boys & Blank, 2018, Kloppenberg et al., 1996), a concern that is shared by some scholars of LFS, such as Kloppenberg et al. (1996):

The physical and social distancing characteristic of the global food system may constrain our willingness to act when the locus of the needed action is distant or when we have no real sense of connection to the land or those on whose behalf we ought to act. Ultimately, distancing disempowers. Control passes to those who can act and are accustomed to act at a distance: the Philip Morrises, Monsantos, and ConAgras of the world.

Sundkvist et al. (2005) add that such “distancing” can break down feedback loops between ecosystems, food producers, consumers:

Signals of unhealthy local ecosystems or production systems are in danger of being filtered out or masked as a result of the globalization of the food market. Information on environmental impacts caused by different components of the food production chain is unlikely to reach consumers, nor is feedback from consumers to producers. This is because the two have become separated both in time and space, a process enabled through for example new agricultural and transport technologies and intense trade flows of food products between distant regions.

Seeking to counteract the negative impacts of such distancing, adherents of the LFS movement are “designing and implementing sustainable, local food systems tailored to their community’s needs… These local food systems are rooted in particular places, aim to be economically viable for farmers and consumers, use ecologically sound production and distribution practices, and enhance social equity and democracy for all members of the community (Feenstra, 1997; see also: Allen et al., 2003; Feenstra, 2002).” Moreover, Feenstra (2002) adds, these systems…

…tend to be more decentralized, and invite the democratic participation of community residents in their food systems. They encourage more direct and authentic connections between all parties in the food system, particularly between farmers and those who enjoy the fruits of their labor – consumers or eaters. They attempt to recognize, respect, and more adequately compensate the laborers we often take for granted – farmworkers, food service workers, and laborers in food processing facilities, for example. And they tend to be place-based, drawing on the unique attributes of a particular bioregion and its population to define and support themselves.

Defining “local”

Running throughout the LFS movement’s goals is an antimony between “local” and “global” (Allen et al., 2003). Although there is no universally accepted definition of “local” (Martinez et al., 2010), Trivette (2015) suggests that conceptualizations of local food generally fall within two overlapping frames: one that equates “local” with physical location and one that equates “local” with personal connection. The first, “local by proximity,” is concerned with how far food travels from producer to consumer. The second, “local by relationship” is concerned with cultural and personal connections among producers, consumers, and food. Allen et al. (2003) refer to these frames as “sites” and “links,” respectively.

The “local by proximity” or “sites” frame relies on metrics of distance and space to demarcate the “local” from the “global.” This approach is often embodied in labels that express locality by state (e.g., “Alaska Grown” or “Jersey Fresh”), growing area, or eco-region, or through the notion of “food miles.” The phrase “food miles” first appeared in print in The Food Miles Report: The Dangers of Long-distance Food Transport, (Paxton, 1994), but the concept predates this use. For instance, according to Kloppenberg et al. (1996), The Packer stated in 1992 that food in the U.S. travels an average of 1,300 miles before it is consumed. Today, the most widely cited statistic on food miles in the U.S. derives from a 2001 study by the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture, which found that produce arriving in Chicago from within the U.S. traveled an average of 1,518 miles. Although that study did not account for foods other than produce nor did it consider imported foods, the “1,500 miles” statistic has become “a breezy way for the media to explain America’s Byzantine food system and its consequences (Black, 2008)” and it is widely accepted as a symbolic representation of the “distancing” inherent in globalized food systems.

In the 2008 Food, Conservation, and Energy Act (more familiarly known known as the Farm Bill), Congress defined “locally or regionally produced agricultural food product” as food that that is consumed fewer than 400 miles from its origin or within the state in which it is produced. However, many states, businesses, and consumers have adopted their own mileage-based definitions of “local” food; 100 miles seems to be a common choice.

In contrast, the “local by relationship” or “links” frame associates “local” with specific supply chain structures that stand in opposition to “industrial” or “corporate” supply chains. Martinez et al. (2010) list two types of “links” associated with “local”:

1. “those where transactions are conducted directly between farmers and consumers (direct-to-consumer), including farmers’ markets, community supported agriculture (CSAs), farm stands/on-farm sales, and pick your own operations” and

2. “direct sales by farmers to restaurants, retail stores, and institutions such as government entities, hospitals, and schools (direct-to-retail/foodservice).”

Martinez et al. (2010) also note that “[o]ther less formal sources of local foods that are typically difficult to measure or are unmeasured include home gardening and sharing among neighbors, foraging and hunting, and gleaning programs.”

In LFS ideology, these “links” are typically thought of as not just monetary transactions, but as part and parcel of a moral economy. Kloppenberg et al. (1996) suggest:

Adopting the perspective of the moral economy challenges us to view food as more than a commodity to be exchanged through a set of impersonal market relationships or a bundle of nutrients required to keep our bodies functioning. It permits us to see the centrality of food to human life as a powerful template around which to build non- or extra-market relationships between persons, social groups, and institutions who have been distanced from each other.

For some LFS scholars (Hinrichs, 2000; Seyfang, 2006), such claims evoke the sociological notion of “embeddedness,” defined by Granovetter (1985) as the idea that market “[a]ctors do not behave or decide as atoms outside a social context, nor do they adhere slavishly to a script written for them by the particular intersection of social categories that they happen to occupy. Their attempts at purposive action are instead embedded in concrete, ongoing systems of social relations.” In fact, Hinrichs (2000) posits that “[e]mbeddedness, in this sense of social connection, reciprocity and trust, is often seen as the hallmark (and comparative advantage) of direct agricultural markets.”

As mentioned above, LFS movements exist in dialectical opposition to global, industrial food systems. But it is not clear whether the goal of LFS movements is ultimately to replace, or simply to coexist within, these larger systems. As Allen et al. (2003) ask, “To what degree do [these movements] seek to create a new structural configuration—a shifting of plates in the agrifood landscape—and to what degree are their efforts limited to incremental erosion at the edges of the political-economic structures that currently constitute those plates? That is, are they significantly oppositional or primarily alternative?”

That there is no obvious answer to this question underscores the fact that the LFS movement is a highly “variegated movement” (Feagan, 2007). Sundkvist et al. (2005) assert that a “food system cannot function in an independent local vacuum” and Feagan (2007) comments that “the local is critically inset within larger-scale spaces nested in diverse ways out to the global level.” Blake at al. (2010) observe, “Indeed, linking local with alternative tends to obfuscate the engagements of mainstream practitioners, such as supermarket retailers or traditional butchers and green grocers, with local food.” Ultimately, Feagan (2007) concludes, “Whether LFS processes must pitch a message of… radical respatialization of food systems through foodsheds for instance or whether… some porosity is a tenable element in LFS formulations – remains to be seen.”

Critics of LFS point to overly facile, untested assumptions about the relationship between “local” and that which it is purported to represent. Born and Purcell (2006) call this set of assumptions “the local trap,” defined as “the tendency of food activists and researchers to assume something inherent about the local scale” by assuming that the local scale automatically delivers desirable benefits such as “ecological sustainability, social justice, democracy, better nutrition, and food security, freshness, and quality.” In reality, Born and Purcell (2006) assert,

[T]here is nothing inherent about any scale. Local-scale food systems are equally likely to be just or unjust, sustainable or unsustainable, secure or insecure… [T]he local trap conflates the scale of a food system with desired outcome… It treats localization as an end in itself rather than as a means to an end such as justice, sustainability, and so on… [By incorrectly] equat[ing] a scalar strategy with a particular set of outcomes… the local trap obscures other scalar options that might be more effective in achieving a desired outcome.

For example, Born and Purcell (2006) assert point out that “there is nothing inherently good about local methods of production, which easily can be as unsustainable as those in conventional agribusiness;” in many places (e.g., corn or hog country in Iowa), local agriculture is conventional agribusiness. Nor is a reduction in food miles always a net benefit for the environment, they add:

In some cases, it may be environmentally desirable to transport products instead of degrade local resources. We need to compare critically the environmental costs of local production of, for example, rice in California or Texas, with all of its water requirements, with the transport of rice from places in the world in which rice production makes more ecological sense (Born & Purcell, 2006).

Moreover, by disregarding the principles of comparative advantage and economies of scale, Boys and Blank (2018) assert that LFS can in some cases lead to more environmental harm, as greater quantities of inputs may be required in some places to produce what could be produced for less elsewhere or using more efficient (perhaps even industrial) processes. “Thus while it is often perceived that small scale farmers are better stewards of their land and water, any such benefits are likely to be more than offset by additional inputs use (Boys and Blank, 2018).”

Lastly, from a social justice perspective, Hinrichs asserts that the socially embedded relationships characteristic of LFS are not necessarily any freer of “intolerance and unequal power relations” than the “[a]tomized market relations [that] are seen as a defining, but negative feature of ‘global’ (Hinrichs, 2003).” Boys and Blank (2018) argue that beyond “an implicit distinction between small and local being ‘good’ and large and corporate being ‘bad’,” local foods promotional efforts “offer no acknowledgement that existing patterns of local livelihood and exchange could be unequal or unfair and thus not deserving of automatic or unqualified support.” Allen et al. (2003) add that LFS narratives, “through their silence about social relationships in production, inadvertently assume or represent that rural communities and family farmers embody social justice, rather than requiring that they do so.”

In sum, Born and Purcell (2006) conclude, “These problems suggest that the key is to concentrate on the end goals, not on the scalar strategy itself.” Similarly, DePuis and Goodman (2005) state that the “real goal” requires activists “to move away from the idea that food systems become just by virtue of making them local and toward a conversation about how to make local food systems more just.” Although these admonitions have a social justice focus, their main point – that localized food systems should be the starting point, not an end goal, of community-led activism -- is equally applicable in the context of environmental values.

The local seafood movement

Seafood has not figured as prominently as land-based foods in the LFS movement (Loring et al., 2013), but in recent years, this gap has begun to close, thanks to a proliferation of alternative seafood marketing programs that strive to “connect small-scale fishers to consumers by way of partnering with or bypassing seafood processors and intermediary distributors (Witter & Stoll, 2017).” As evidence of this growth, the Local Catch network, a community of practice established in 2011 to support and catalyze local and community-based seafood systems, now includes over 200 businesses across North America engaged in alternative seafood sales and purchasing (www.localcatch.org).

Local seafood programs vary in their sales channels (e.g., restaurants, online sales, seafood shops, grocery stores, farmer’s markets, boat-to-school and boat-to-institution initiatives, community-supported seafood, or CSF initiatives) and may or may not involve the purchase of seafood directly from fishermen. However, nearly all engage with small-scale and place-based fishing operations, emphasize traceability from boat to fork in their supply chains, and make high-quality seafood a central selling point (Witter & Stoll, 2017).

Alternative seafood marketing programs are generally established with one or more objectives in mind (Witter & Stoll, 2017):

• To increase financial viability for small-scale fisheries, especially in regions or situations where ex-vessel prices are too low to cover the costs of catching fish (e.g., where costs of fishing quota are high);

• To help fishermen cope with ongoing fleet consolidation in their region; and/or

• To differentiate and establish price rewards for “sustainable” fishing and high-quality catch.

As these motives suggest, the rise of alternative seafood marketing programs can be seen in part as a response to industry contractions after overcapitalization, management trends towards market-based solutions such as catch shares,2 and globalization of the seafood trade (Campbell et al., 2014).

Evidence suggests that alternative seafood marketing programs can benefit producers by: providing higher and more stable ex-vessel prices; increasing the stability of markets and fisher incomes; taking advantage of available price premiums for high-quality fish; and developing new markets for underutilized species (Witter & Stoll, 2017). For consumers, these programs can result in improved market access to a difficult-to-find product: high quality, place-based, sustainable, and traceable seafood (Witter & Stoll, 2017).

In addition, alternative seafood marketing arrangements are thought to provide a number of non-market benefits, such as: interpersonal connections between fishermen and consumers; enhanced recognition of the public value of fisheries; creation of opportunities for fishermen to educate and advocate on local fisheries issues; provision of traceable information to consumers on fishery, boat, gear type, fishing location, and target stock sustainability; and the opportunity to raise awareness about underutilized species (Witter & Stoll, 2017).

In the case studies that follow, we will explore how various alternative seafood marketing arrangements – community supported fishery (CSF) programs, restaurant-supported fishery (RSF) programs, boat-to-institution programs, and logos and labeling -- have sought to attain these benefits by bringing a local “links” and/or “sites” approach into seafood marketing.

Case Studies

1. Community Supported Fisheries (CSFs)

Inspired by the community supported agriculture (CSA) model, community-supported fishery (CSF) programs are a marketing arrangement defined by upfront payments exchanged for regularly scheduled seafood deliveries (Olson et al., 2014; Stoll et al., 2015; Brinson et al., 2018). The first CSF was initiated in Port Clyde, Maine in 2007 (Campbell et al., 2014; Tolley et al., 2015; Stoll et al., 2015; Bolton et al., 2016), and in the time since then, this model has become “one of the most visible and rapidly expanding types of direct marketing arrangements in North America (Stoll et al., 2015).” Subsequent well-known examples that appear in the literature include the Walking Fish Cooperative (North Carolina; Stoll et al., 2015; Brinson et al., 2018), Cape Ann Fresh Catch (Massachusetts; Stoll et al., 2015; Tolley et al., 2015), Fishadelphia (Philadelphia; Cumming et al., 2020), and Abundant Seafood (South Carolina; Stoll et al., 2015).

Many, but not all, CSFs feature fishermen selling their catch directly to consumers. However, whether they are direct or intermediated, CSFs as a rule embrace some form of shortened supply chain and “differ from mainstream supply chains by attempting to establish meaningful connections between consumers and producers (Bolton et al., 2016; see also Olson et al., 2014).” In a review of twenty-two CSF programs in the U.S. and Canada, Bolton et al. (2016) found the following common features: a commitment to traceable chains of custody; domestic (but not necessarily “local” by geographic proximity) sourcing of seafood; provision of provenance information to customers, such as where a product was caught and who caught it; and voluntary adoption of the CSF terminology (i.e., such programs refer to themselves as “CSFs”).

However, CSFs diverge considerably in other ways. As Bolton et al. (2016) note, “there are no formal regulations or widely accepted norms around what is, or should be, considered a CSF. The definition of CSF has been left open to interpretation, and unrestricted use of the term has resulted in a variety of different types of organizations self-classifying as CSFs.” As a result, CSFs show wide variation in terms of their:

• Size (ranging from a few dozen participants to upward of a thousand; Stoll et al., 2015);

• Logistical structures (in some CSFs, customers meet fishermen to pick up seafood at their docks; in others, subscribers receive seafood by mail or pick up “shares” at a drop-off location which may be hundreds of miles from the coast; Stoll et al., 2015);

• Species composition (some CSFs offer only a few species while others offer a wide range of species);

• Legal and organizational structure (CSF programs may be owned and operated by fishing families, cooperatives, processors, coordinators, or seafood dealers; Stoll et al., 2015; Bolton et al., 2016); and

• Guiding philosophy (Bolton et al., 2016, found that fewer than half of the 22 US and Canadian CSFs in their research sample embraced a goal of providing fishermen with higher profits, and only a few mentioned a desire to provide higher quality seafood to consumers; other goals included promoting local seafood, raising consumer awareness, and promoting small-scale fisheries).

Brinson et al. (2018) state that CSFs can reduce costs by concentrating profits in shorter supply chains or single firms, and that they can improve fishermen’s revenues by selling fish at a premium price, providing a market outlet for species with little demand in the industrial seafood system, and stabilizing revenues by providing up-front payments. In this way, CSFs represent a way for fishermen to increase profits without increasing their catch, and can be an important adaptation within regulatory structures that govern fisheries through fixed allocations, such as catch shares (Brinson et al., 2018). For instance, Stoll et al. (2015) found that in its first two years, the Walking Fish Cooperative CSF was able to obtain a 33% price premium and return dividends of 14-18% to their participating fishermen. As a result, CSFs are seen as providing “a support system for producers to improve their economic condition and to maintain locally-based fishing communities and cultures (Olson et al., 2014).”

The social benefits associated with CSFs are widely celebrated and may, in the long run, prove to be their most important contribution (Brinson et al., 2018). According to Brinson et al. (2018), CSF programs often utilize websites, newsletters, flyers, presentations at local events, filleting demos, tastings, photographs of fishing vessels and fishermen, and distribution of recipes to foster ties between the fishing industry and local community. These interactions can help consumers learn about fishing and become fishermen’s allies in the political and regulatory process. In interviews with CSF coordinators, Olson et al. (2014) learned that one of the most valued aspects of these programs was the opportunity they provided for face-to-face interaction, in which consumers can ask questions and learn about fishing while fishermen can receive feedback from consumers.

Moreover, by cultivating cooperation among producers themselves, CSFs have been found to enhance social capital within fishing communities and lead to the creation of institutions that enhance the long-term viability and social ecological resilience of fisheries in ways that go beyond marketing (Stoll et al., 2015). According to these authors, “direct marketing arrangements can act as a type of ‘institutional starter’ by fostering the emergence of nascent institutions that facilitate the production and mobilization of social capital toward improved social and ecological conditions.”

With regard to environmental benefits, McClenachan et al. (2014) found that the primary environmental benefit of CSFs is their ability to reduce the carbon footprint associated with transportation and freezing of seafood products. On average, these authors found, seafood sold through CSFs traveled two orders of magnitude less than seafood in the industrial supply system, with a mean distance traveled of 64.6 kilometers for CSF seafood as opposed to 8,812 kilometers for conventional seafood.

In addition, McClenachan et al. (2014) point to evidence that CSFs can help fishermen diversify their catch and promote bycatch utilization by cultivating outlets for locally abundant species that are often discarded by boats serving the industrial seafood supply chain. According to Olson et al. (2014), “buying a share of the harvest prior to the fish being caught enables fishermen to land and sell a wider range of species than is usually found in the market, diversifying the seafood within the food system.” McClenachan et al. (2014) conclude that “that there is potential to improve sustainability if these seafood products are substituted for less sustainable options.”

2. Other examples

While CSFs are undoubtedly the most prominent type of local seafood movement initiative, fishermen and their allies have devised a number of other approaches to carve out space for local seafood within the globalized food system. We explore several of these approaches below.

a. Restaurant-supported fishery (RSF). These programs are similar to CSFs, but the end consumer is not an individual retail consumer but a chef. An example is the Dock to Dish program, which launched on Long Island in 2013 (Tolley et al., 2015).

b. Boat-to-school and boat-to-university. Stoll et al. (2015) and Tolley et al. (2015) report on an effort at the University of New Hampshire to launch a “Fish to School” program in partnership with Red’s Best, a Boston-based traceable seafood distributor. Love and Virta (2020) describe a set of programs in Oregon in which local seafood was procured by the school department and served on school lunch menus, along with classroom presentations by the fishermen who caught it. Interviews with students revealed that they felt engaged and excited to learn about seafood, and that they experienced “full-circle” seafood education by hearing presentations by fishermen, holding whole fish, and touching equipment such as nets and crab traps. In the process, teachers developed a greater appreciation of the local seafood industry, and seafood industry leaders appreciated the opportunity to share their profession with students (Love & Virta, 2020).

c. Boat-to-hospital. In 2010, the nonprofit organization Healthcare Without Harm hosted a day-long event at which health care facility executives in charge of food procurement throughout the Northeast U.S. learned how to integrate local seafood into their purchasing practices. After that workshop, at least six New England hospitals launched pilot local seafood programs, and health care facilities in every New England state began working on shifting their seafood purchasing policies to reflect these new values (Tolley et al., 2015).

d. Labels and logos. Some states and locales have developed labeling programs to demarcate seafood caught or landed within a particular place. For example, Richard and Pivarnik (2020) report on an initiative launched by the Rhode Island Seafood Marketing Collaborative (RISMC), a coalition of academia, industry, and government members. With legislatively mandated goals to (1) sustain and grow the Rhode Island seafood industry by increasing the value of Rhode Island seafood and associated economic activities and (2) improve the health and welfare of Rhode Island residents, the RISMC developed and codified the “Rhode Island seafood brand” and associated logo. Under the brand’s legal definition, seafood products are eligible to carry the logo if they are grown in Rhode Island waters or landed in Rhode Island ports by commercial fishermen licensed in RI. Although the brand has had limited success in meeting its objectives, a recent survey of Rhode Island consumers found a strong demand for local seafood and a continuing desire to see it demarcated in the marketplace (Richard & Pivarnik, 2020).

e. Integration of seafood into state and regional food system planning. The number of food councils, collaboratives, and networks is growing rapidly across North America. A 2016 survey found 324 food policy councils operating or in development at the local, state, regional, and/or tribal level in the United States and Canada (Sussman & Bassarab, 2016). Food policy councils in coastal states often include a seafood focus. For instance, the Rhode Island Food Policy Council (RIFPC) administers the state’s Local Agriculture and Seafood Act grants program, which has funded small-scale fishermen and shellfish growers to expand market channels and launch apprenticeship programs. The RIFPC also coordinated a multi-year planning project called “Fishing for Success,” which sought to increase local seafood processing opportunity for the Rhode Island commercial fishing industry.

Conclusion

In looking at the sustainable seafood movement (which we reviewed in the “first movement” in this series) and the local seafood movement side by side, we can observe many differences:

• The sustainable seafood movement is placeless while the local seafood movement is territorially embedded;

• The sustainable seafood movement steers consumer behavior to certain products, while the local seafood movement is more likely to steer consumer behavior towards certain purchasing arrangements or supply chain structures;

• The sustainable seafood movement is centralized and top-down, while the local seafood movement is decentralized and bottom-up;

• The sustainable seafood movement gives primacy to quantitative, enforceable evaluation criteria while the local seafood movement places less emphasis on quantifiable metrics and greater emphasis on loosely defined, qualitative “values”;

• The sustainable seafood movement is scalable to the global level, while the local seafood movement is, by definition, local.

In addition, while the sustainable seafood movement is primarily focused on environmental attributes (the “sea” side of the land-sea divide), the local seafood movement has primarily focused on social and economic dimensions (the “land” side of the land-sea divide). Olson et al. (2014) argue that “seafood guides and standards… share a common tendency to regard fisheries primarily as resources… [D]ominant constructions of fish and fisheries, at least in the U.S., have tended to privilege issues of resource management and construct resource management as primarily biological… [M]ost certification programs tend to leave out social and cultural questions altogether.” In contrast, the local seafood movement’s focus on social and cultural questions is strong, but its treatment of resource sustainability seems underdeveloped.

Alleging that seafood certifications are best suited for the “transactional” interactions that take place at the supermarket, Stoll et al. (2019) suggest that the “relational” interactions that constitute the local seafood movement can support resource sustainability in different ways. Although on their own, relational seafood supply chains “are no more a guarantee of sustainability than are seafood certifications,” these authors go on to suggest that:

[P]art of what makes bottom-up, relational strategies like these intriguing and distinct from seafood certifications is that they place the ingenuity and problem-solving capacity of fishers and coastal communities at the forefront of the discussion. Co-generating alternative pathways will not only leverage this ingenuity and creativity, but may also increase the likelihood that they will address sustainability problems at the local level (Stoll et al., 2019).

Specifically, echoing Sundquist et al.’s (2005) proposition that “a more locally based food system with tighter links between producers and consumers can improve feedback management and thus make the system more sustainable,” local seafood supply chains can “create the conditions necessary to catalyze action towards sustainability” by: supplying fishermen with revenue which they can reinvest in technology and research that supports fishery health; boosting the social capital that underpins solutions-focused entrepreneurship; and empowering small-scale fishermen to influence policy and multiple levels of government (Stoll et al., 2019).

Notwithstanding the theoretical work of Stoll et al. (2019) and the empirical research of McClenachan et al. (2014) describing the local seafood movement’s benefits for resource sustainability, it is our observation that local seafood initiatives tend to elide the biological and the social by assuming that what is “local” is inherently virtuous and therefore also “sustainable.” For instance, it is common to see the term “sustainable” referenced in the marketing materials of CSFs and other local marketing endeavors, but it is exceedingly rare to see this term defined or defended in a meaningful way. Certainly, the level of analysis behind use of the term “sustainable” in such contexts is nowhere near as extensive as the technical criteria and evaluations that constitute the “back stage” of sustainable seafood campaigns like the MSC and Seafood Watch. In fact, we suspect that there is little to no “back stage” behind these assertions at all.

Masked by this casual elision, however, we believe the local seafood movement brims with potential to innovate around ecological sustainability. Specifically, we propose that the place-based nature of this movement provides the ideal foundation to import the principles of ecosystem-based fisheries management (EBFM) into marketplace activism. In the next article, we will explore what distinguishes EBFM from the single-species fisheries management (SSFM) that underpins sustainable seafood campaigns. Then, in the final article in this issue, will consider marketplace analogues for EBFM that leverage the ready-made place-based template provided by the local seafood movement.

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