Transcript

6.26.25 · Smithsonian Magazine

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Speaker 1: Welcome. This is Rebeccah Shore for Radio Eye, and today
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I will be reading the Smithsonian magazine dated July August
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twenty twenty five. As a reminder, Radio Eye is a
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reading service intended for people who are blind or have
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other disabilities that make it difficult to reprinted material. Please
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join me now for the article titled can the Redfish
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that Gulf Coast culinary icon be brought back from the brink?
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The Cajun cooking craze nearly wiped out the species native
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to Louisiana, but conservation stemmed the tide. Now the fish
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faces new threats by Boise upoult. In nineteen seventy nine,
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chef Paul Prudaum invented the iconic dish blackened redfish, and
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in the years that followed it became so popular that
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the chef and others were concerned that the species would
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become extinct. Today, the redfish faces a new threat. Its
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marshland habitat is disappearing. Louisiana's coastline is a river delta
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formed by the Mississippi over millennia as its current slowed
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and relinquished its mud into a calm and sheltered Gulf
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in the back and forth contest between the river's flow
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and the incoming waves. Then the power of the Mississippi
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River one out. There's nowhere else quite like Louisiana, with
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its intricate landscape of bays, bayous, and inlets that wind
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maze like through a seemingly endless expanse of marsh. Sitting
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on a boat, the results can seem empty and monotonous,
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nothing but cord grass as far as the horizon. That's
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because the real action lies beneath the surface. Nutrients carried
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by the river and the ocean meet here in this estuary,
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feeding plant life, which in turn feeds an abundant food
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chain of fish. This abundance has long shaped local culture.
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Fifteen hundred years ago, when indigenous corn farmers began to
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clear and plant the Mississippi's banks upstream, Louisiana was marked
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as a place apart. Agriculture did not really take hold here,
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not when there are so many fish to catch. The
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first European colonists, too, marveled at the bounty. The rivers
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are full of monstrous fish. A nun stationed in New
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Orleans in seventeen twenty seven wrote to her French father
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she noted an infinity of species not then known in Europe.
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Archaeological records from the era show that drum species were
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among the most popular, and today one drum species, red drum,
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better known as redfish, has become a symbol of the region.
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Delta fishermen eventually learned to smell redfish from a one
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hundred yards off and to distinguish the clouds of mud
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kicked up by their tails from those made by mullet
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or sheep. Said. By the nineteenth century, anglers were chasing
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redfish for more than just sustenance. One of the first
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guide books for American anglers, published in eighteen sixty five,
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declared that redfish in the Gulf of Mexico a ford
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fine sport. They hit bait hard and could run off
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forty feet of line in a quick and angry dash.
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When a New York aristocrat launched Forest and Stream a
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few years later, the magazine described the gulf as a
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sportsman's paradise, a phrase that became a Louisiana motto, now
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appearing on the state's license plates. By the late nineteen eighties,
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amid concerns that the species was being overfished, it was
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declared a game fish. That meant it was set aside
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for anglers alone, no commercial harvest allowed. Even a fairly
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young redfish is a taut torpedo of mussel, a beast
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of an animal which, after a few years, can reach
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as much as nine pounds, almost too big for the
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shallow waters that have been its nursery. That size is
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key to their appeal. A charging redfish will send a
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wave rolling atop the surface. While wadefishing off a barrier island,
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you can feel the water beating from their presence. Some
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fishermen have compared the sound of a school to a
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passing freight train. Although redfish range as far north as Massachusetts,
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they love marshlands, which makes the Great Labyrinth of Louisiana's
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Delta a particular redfish hot spot. Today, the fish is
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among the foremost targets of the state's billion dollar sports
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fishing industry, But for complex reasons, offishals believe local reds
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fish populations are now in danger. At the same time,
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Louisiana's marshes are eroding and its coastline is fraying, the
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fates of its iconic fish and its wetlands appear inextricably linked.
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Their looming decline represents a warning and raises hard questions
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about how a seafood culture can adapt to a changing world.
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As more of an eater than an angler. Until recently,
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I knew about red fish for one reason, because a
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blackened redfish filet is not just a symbol of Louisiana cuisine,
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but the dish that made Cajun cooking a world wide sensation.
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It's a relatively modern invention created in nineteen seventy nine
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when a chef named Paul Prudom, the proprietor of K.
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Paul's Louisiana Kitchen in New Orleans, French Quarter, felt nostalgic
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for the taste of his father's camp fire cooking. Hoping
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to conjure the same smoky flavor in his tiny kitchen
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where there was no grille, Prudam dragged a filet of
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redfish through butter, seasoned it with spices, and threw it
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into a smoking hot skillet. Prudam died in twenty fifteen,
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but Frank Brison, then the night chef at K. Paul's,
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still recalls the fateful evening when he saw Prudam cook
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that first filet so black that Britson was skeptical any
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one would want it. Then Brigson took a bite and
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I said, this is the best dam fish I ever
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had in my life. He told me that was the
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start of it all. Redfish was not then known as
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a marquis restaurant fish. It was popular with home cooks,
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sure a king of the New Orleans French market, or
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so one early twentieth century cook book declared, but it
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was considered too cheap for fine dining. There were work around.
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Rigson once cooked at a restaurant that unscrupulously labeled one
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redfish dish as snapper ponchetrain as a way to boost
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the price. Blackening redfish changed the fate of the species
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and the city. K Paul's became one of the hottest
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local tickets, and when The New York Times caught wind
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of the dish, the paper's coverage helped make Prudam one
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of America's first celebrity chefs. Cajun food had been considered rustic, provencial.
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Now Cajun Mania swept the world before the nineteen eighties ended.
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There were Cajun restaurants in New York City and London.
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In Amsterdam. The trend would fade soon enough, but it
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certified Louisiana as one of America's culinary destinations. Once he'd
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invented the dish, Prudam maintained exacting culinary standards, serving only
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ten ounce redfish filets, which were drawn from four pound
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red ff that meant a young fish six years or
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less in age, the sort caught by a fisherman stringing
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a net through the marshes. Per Dom's motivation was taste,
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but this choice had important ecological implications, because full grown
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redfish traveled to offshore waters more suitable to their size.
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By targeting young redfish, fishermen were leaving the main breeding
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populations alone. These bigger offshore fish, known as bull reds,
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can reach sixty pounds or more. They gather in massive
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schools that are visible from above by plane. While it
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was easy to catch a lot of fish at once,
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the flesh isn't that tasty. As a fisherman once told me,
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eating a bull red is like eating a truck, since
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the meat is coarse and overly fishy. There was no
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good market for bull reds, but pro Dom's smash hit
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changed the calculus. Chefs in New York City seemed not
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to notice the bad taste of the biggest red fish,
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or maybe they figured their customers would be distracted by
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the spices. The sudden demand in the early nineteen eighties
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sparked a new approach to Gulf fishing. Airplane spotters flying
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above the coast watched for the telltale bronzed backs of
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a school of bull reds. Then they'd called down to
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boats that could ensnare the entire school. Some old fashioned
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fishermen used to working in the marshes were aghast at
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the scale of the take. We didn't want em, one
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said later about the new competition. We knew we were
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headed for trouble soon. Perdam too saw the trouble. In
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nineteen eighty five, on a visit to one of K.
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Paul's seafood suppliers, he and Brigston overheard a manager on
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the phone arranging to buy an entire school of redfish,
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hundreds of thirty pound bulls, amounting to ten thousand pounds
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of fish. When he said that, Paul's face went white
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ashen white. Brigson recalled and I just about cried. The
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sheer number of fish was overwhelming, raping the resource Brigson
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went on to sell this fish that we wouldn't eat.
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Before the blackened redfish craze began, a big year in
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the Gulf might yield two million pounds of redfish. Half
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Way through nineteen eighty six, fishermen had pulled in six
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million pounds from federal waters alone. Federal officials, who predicted
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the total harvest that year could hit twenty million, ended
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the season early. When Prudam recognized what he'd unleashed, he
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switched over to blackening tuna. It would be tragic for
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me personally to know that redfish would be extinct, he
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told a journalist that same year. The rise of blackened
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redfish coincided with the dawning awareness of another coastal problem.
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Louisiana was disappearing for more than a decade. Scientists had
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been asserting that its wetlands were being swallowed by the ocean,
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but it was hard to convince the public to care.
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A boom and fishing in the nineteen eighties, spurred in
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part by a sudden wave of oil layoffs, but helped
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along by the demand created by Prudam's famed dish, convinced
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many locals that the marsh was far smaller than what
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their ancestors had known, helping waken the state to the crisis.
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The causes were varied. This land sinks naturally, already compacting
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under its own weight. The marshes had persisted because they
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were not just built by the river's mud, but continuously
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rebuilt new floods, delivering new mud again and again throughout
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the nineteenth and twentieth century. As engineers built levees along
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the Mississippi River to contain the floods, they'd wound up
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containing the mud too. Now, instead of spreading across the landscape,
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it was carried to the river's mouth, and once it
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reached the ocean, got dumped off the edge of the
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continental shelf. When, beginning in the early twentieth century, oil
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companies dredged canals to lay down pipelines, they exacerbated the trouble.
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Estuaries contain a delicate mix of fresh river water and
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ocean salts, and these new channels carried salt inland. This
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poisoned some grasses, which, as they died, re released their
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roots grip on the soils. The cumulative effect was catastrophic.
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By the nineteen eighties, Louisiana was losing nearly forty square
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miles of land each year. There were ways to address
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the redfish problem, at least A nineteen eighty six decision
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to limit the redfish harvest turned permanent two years later,
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when the federal government banned all harvest in federal waters.
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Louisiana followed suit, outlying redfish harvest in state waters, which
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includes the marsh. There at least the recreational fishery eventually reopened,
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but the commercial fishery has been closed ever since, nearly
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four decades later. This fact leaves some commercial fishermen bitter.
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For most of the nineteen eighties, Gulf anglers took in
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far more redfish than their commercial peers. The common complaint
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is that the sportsmen, wealthy and powerful, managed to seize
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the fish for themselves. In nineteen eighty eight, the same
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year the fishery closed, a grassroots coalition proposed a moon
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shot solution for the other crisis, known as land loss.
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The state needed a set of diversions, they said, carefully
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engineered openings that would mimic the natural process of land
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rebuilding that had been halted by the levees. The idea
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was to direct some river water and crucially, its mud
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through gates and channels into the areas where the marshes
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had disappeared. The core of the idea was simple, just
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unleash the river, but it was also radical because for
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years the priority had been to contain this water. It
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was unclear too, how to pay for such new engineering. Strangely,
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for fishermen, the loss of land did not seem to
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cause huge problems. Indeed, in nineteen eighty nine, a group
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of scientists conceded in a paper that overall the amount
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of seafood coming ashore in Louisiana was increasing as the
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marsh disappeared. The scientists offered a working hypothesis. The marsh
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was being lost in fragments, creating longer jagged edges, and
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many species like redfish thrive along such edges, which make
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it easier to flit back and forth between habitats. It's
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a strange paradox. Less marsh can actually mean more habitat,
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but only at first. The paper noted that eventually so
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much marsh would disappear that the length of the shoreline
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would have to decrease too, and that's when fish stocks
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would crash. So the scientists worried that the recent increase
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in seafood catches had created a sense of false security
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that has delayed action to curb wetland loss. Scientists weren't
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sure though, when the crash would come, nor was it
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clear what it would look like. Indeed, Richard Condrey, who
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as an ecologist at Louisiana State University in the nineteen eighties,
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led the panel that set national redfish policy, notes that
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the whole idea that land loss much must trigger a
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collapse in fish stocks remains speculative, not untrue, necessarily, just
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difficult to prove. Fish populations are always fluctuating, driven by,
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among other factors, what tools fishermen use, how much seafood
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restaurants are buying, and how the weather's been. Trying to
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determine the impact of habitat loss alone is difficult, so
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when and how land loss will impact species is a
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question that can only be answered in retrospect once the
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catastrophe arrives. It's striking how little we know about oceans
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in general, though then again, these are difficult places for
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land dwelling scientists to conduct research. As Prudam's famous dish
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took off in the nineteen eighties, federal scientists lacked even
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the basic biological information they needed to determine how many
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fish could be sustainably harvested, and when the commercial harvest
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was closed, at least one federal official speculated that any
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further research might get curtailed since those anglers, many of
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them rich and well connected, wouldn't want scientists mucking around
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in what had become their territory. Subsequent studies were indeed sparse.
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In the early two thousands, Louisiana biologists found that the
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escapement rate was well above the goals set by Condrey
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and the council. As a key metric, enough young fish
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were leaving the marsh each year, joining the offshore schools
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to insure a sustainable population. Then for nearly two decades after,
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no one bothered to check again. In the meantime, the
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red fish became an essential component of Louisiana's booming recreational
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fishing economy. That made it noteworthy when Todd Masson, a
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popular Louisiana outdoors writer, noted in a YouTube video in
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twenty twenty two that he'd gone through a two month
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period in which he caught no redfish. I'm not sure
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I've ever seen a decline in a fisheries population like
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what were with witnessing Now, he said, the States biologists
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decided they ought to run the numbers, and indeed, in
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the decades since their previous calculations, the escapement rate had plummeted.
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The number of redfish harvested, meanwhile, had dropped to the
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lowest numbers recorded since the nineteen eighties. The scientists I
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spoke to emphasized how it's impossible to pin down just
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one cause for the decline. Climate change may play a role,
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as might the ever growing size of the recreational fishing industry.
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But Patrick Banks, the Assistant secretary of Louisiana's Department of
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Wildlife and Fisheries, told me that habitat loss was a huge,
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huge part of the equation. The juvenile fish are losing
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their nursery. We may be entering the era of decline
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in the marsh. In other words, Banks noted that another
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popular species, speckled trout, was also suffering. Louisiana now has
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an office working to restore the marsh. The Coastal Protection
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and Restoration Authority, formed in two thousand seven in the
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wake of Hurricane Katrina, which specializes in trying to figure
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out how to stop the loss and rebuild our coast,
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as Banks put it, and I certainly prayed there successful,
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because that's the habitat we need, said Banks. In twenty
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twenty three, after years of negotiation and planning, the agency
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began construction on a major river diversion, but last year,
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after I interviewed Banks, construction was stalled by a lawsuit
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file by, among other groups, local oystermen who worry it
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will kill off their reefs. Governor Jeff Landry, who took
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office amid the dispute, has complained about the lack of
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local input and expressed worries that the project could break
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our culture by hurting commercial fishing. It's unclear whether the
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diversion will ever be completed, and even if it is,
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climate modeling suggests that it offers the delta at best
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a reprieve. Climate driven sea level rise will keep swallowing
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the marshland at a rate too fast to counteract. This
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means that no matter what we do in terms of
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restoration and fishing policy, redfish will keep losing their nursery. Nonetheless,
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the Department of Wildlife and Fisheries decided that given the
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declines it had to intervene overfishing might not be the
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root cause of the problems. Banks told me, but given
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the redfish's decline, we cannot allow the fishing levels that
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are currently occurring to continue, a controversial idea among anglers,
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many of whom did not want to stop chasing this
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flavored fish. In July twenty twenty four, after almost a
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year of debate, a new set of rules was instituted.
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Among other measures, the bag limit, or the number of
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redfish an angler can keep each day, was reduced from
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five to four. The state's models suggest that with this
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new policy in place, it will take twenty five years
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for populations to recover, during which period the marshes will
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continue to decline. As always, it's hard to predict precisely
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how populations will fare locally and nationally, but the future
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hardly looks bright. For now, the species remains a cultural
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force in Louisiana for sportsmen and chefs alike. Despite the
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commercial fishing ban, New Orleans restaurants still offer blackened redfish,
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though few menus admit that the flet on your plate
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is almost never wild caught. Mississippi, which permits a small quota,
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is the only Gulf state where it's still legal to
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harvest redfish. Frank Brixton, for example, who now owns his
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own award winning restaurant, Brigston's, tucked on a quiet block
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just off the Mississippi River in Uptown, New Orleans, buys
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his filets from farms in Texas. Brigston has long been
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an advocate for commercial fishermen, and he is not delighted
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to be serving this out of state non wildfish, but
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it's the only way he can keep serving the iconic
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dish he cooked so many times in his mentor's kitchen
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and that so many tourists seek. If you're a fan
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of regional seafood, Brigston's Texan redfish hailing from the Gulf
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is an acceptable substitute. Not every restaurant is so conscientious.
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In its latest major report on redfish, released in early
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twenty twenty three, the federal government noted that most of
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the farm raised redfish consumed in America is imported from
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China and Vietnam. That's in part because Texas farms have
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suffered from recent snaps of cold weather. It also matches
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the broader trend. Almost eighty percent of the seafood consumed
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in the US is now imported. As Southern Louisiana disappears,
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and as its supply of seafood is curtailed, redfish could
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serve as a kind of warning for how the state
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might end up salvaging its culinary culture just ship in
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farm raised seafood from somewhere else. Consider this the Disneyland future,
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in which restaurants gesture toward an old Louisiana identity, a
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lost relationship with the marshland that no longer exists. Porgy's
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Seafood Market, which opened in New Orleans in twenty twenty three,
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offers what I see as a more appealing approach. It
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sells a variety of fish, all wild caught, often bycatch
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species taken incidentally, while fishermen seek more popular fish, just
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about every species that's commercially fished is inherently delicious when
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handled properly, says Marcus Jacobs, the shop's chef and co owner.
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Black drum, for example, can substitute for redfish. Sheep's head
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and amber jack are tasty but overlooked choices for diners too.
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I've tried both and found that as a consumer, nothing
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is lost by moving beyond the most famous fish. Still
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wanting to taste the famous species, wanting to feel its
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famous mite on a fishing line, I decide to catch
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my own wild redfish under gray November skies. I motor
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on to Lake Saint Catharine, an expanse of slightly salty
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water an hour east of New Orleans. Chris Macaluso, the
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marine fisheries director for the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, a
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nonprofit that works to secure access to hunting and fishing,
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has agreed to help me get a fish. Macaluso too,
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suggests that rather than fighting over redfish, sportsmen ought to
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expand their notions of which fish are desirable. You are
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a lot happier as a fisherman, I think if you're
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not basing the happiness of your experience on whether or
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not you catch a certain species. He says. He's come
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to enjoy chasing sheepshead, for example, which until recently many
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anglers considered a trash fish. Sure it's smaller than a
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drum and sometimes harder to filet, but it's a hard fighter,
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like a caged rabbid raccoon, Macaluso says, and good eating too.
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One thing is clear, we're all going to have to change,
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Macaluso says, somewhat wearily. Ours have passed on the boat,
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and again and again, our casts have been fruitless. We
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don't have any choice, Manicuso says, either that or quit,
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you know, and I don't plan on quitting any time soon.
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Macaluso reds up the motor of his bay boat so
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we can try our luck farther west in Lake Pontchatrain,
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and after a false alarm, we reel in a speckled
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trout that Macaluso releases back into the water. Finally, our
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moment comes a white bellied beast, all copper and bronze
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in the sun, nearly two feet long. Look at this
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beautiful fish, Macaluso says, as he drags our catch from
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the water, seven or eight pounds, he estimates. I wonder
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how this fish might taste. I've still never had a
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filet of fresh caught red fish. But Macaluso, the consummate sportsman,
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poses for a picture and then places the fish gently
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back in the water. It lies still for a moment, recovering,
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then kicks away. This article was produced in collaboration with
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the Food and Environment Reporting Network, an independent non profit
27:45
news organization. This concludes readings from the Smithsonian Magazine for
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to day. Your reader has been Rebecca Shore. Thank you
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for listening, and have a great day.