JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Whether it is baked, fried, bone in or whole fillet, the way we eat fish actually says a lot about our heritage, community and how we grew up. NPR's Ari Daniel brings us this audio postcard from Philadelphia.
(SOUNDBITE OF LIQUID GURGLING)
ARI DANIEL, BYLINE: It's early morning, and I'm in Chinatown at an Asian supermarket, in the seafood section.
Oh, my goodness.
A bounty of ocean life lies before me.
TALIA YOUNG: Large oysters, squid, mussels, two different kinds of snails.
DANIEL: Talia Young is an environmental scientist at nearby Haverford College. Giant whelks sit in wooden buckets on the floor. There are jellyfish in bins.
YOUNG: I didn't know you could buy razor clams. Oh, lots of different kinds of crabs.
DANIEL: There are all kinds of whole fish on ice as well - mackerel, flounder, pompano. Young ate a variety of seafood like this growing up. Her family is from China and Hong Kong.
YOUNG: It's hard for me to imagine somebody raised in a Chinese household who is unfamiliar with the idea that you might eat a whole fish or that a whole fish might show up on your table.
DANIEL: The same thing goes for other communities. Young asked her friend and colleague Valerie Erwin to join us today. She used to run a restaurant in Philadelphia that served food from South Carolina and Georgia Lowcountry, where her grandparents were born. She loves the seafood section of a Chinatown supermarket like this one.
VALERIE ERWIN: It's hard to buy fish in a regular grocery store. You can't necessarily buy a big variety, and also, it's extremely difficult to buy a whole fish. And I really only like whole fish.
DANIEL: Because that's how she was raised, within the Black community of Northern Philly.
ERWIN: All the flavor is in the skin and the bones.
YOUNG: Meat on the bone and...
ERWIN: Yeah, yeah. Like the same way that a steak has more flavor if it's still on the bone.
DANIEL: The two women look at the back wall, where there are 12 tanks with live fish swimming about. Young convinces Erwin to get one.
ERWIN: All right.
YOUNG: Yeah, let's go look. Come on.
DANIEL: She selects a small fish she says is likely a striped bass.
So he's reaching into the tank and pulling out a live fish with the net.
YOUNG: Is that good? Is that right?
ERWIN: Yes.
YOUNG: Thank you.
DANIEL: Talia Young has been on a long-time mission to forge a deeper connection between the people of Philly, like Erwin, and their fish. Years ago, at a local seafood conference, Young overheard a fisherman say something about Americans that puzzled her.
YOUNG: Americans only know how to eat cod and salmon fillets. We need to teach them how to eat other kinds of fish. And I was like maybe you're not thinking about the right Americans.
DANIEL: So in 2017, she cofounded an initiative called Fishadelphia.
YOUNG: We buy fresh seafood directly from small-scale fishermen, and then we distribute it to diverse communities of seafood eaters.
DANIEL: The subscription program will pause in June to allow the team to focus on other ways of building community.
YOUNG: We bring people to the shore to see the ecosystem that the fish come from and to meet the people who harvested them.
DANIEL: To give consumers a better sense of where their fish come from. Meanwhile, behind the counter, the fish is now scaled and gutted.
YOUNG: It's a nice size. It's cute. It's very convenient to come home with a fish that was alive five minutes ago and is cleaned.
ERWIN: I'll probably broil it because frying is way too much trouble.
DANIEL: That's exactly how Erwin will end up preparing her fish tonight, broiled with parsley and garlic. The result, she tells me later, is tender and silky.
For NPR News, I'm Ari Daniel.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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