The inlets that envelop this bayou community extend like fingers on a hand, reaching into the backyards of lifelong fishermen. But the boat behind one fishing family’s house sits idle for now, as Tracy Kuhns turns from living off the water to worrying about it.

“The elected officials and the petrochemical companies think the fishermen are just going to let this go away,” Kuhns said this week during an interview at her office. “They’re used to fishermen allowing them to do this to fishing grounds.”

For Kuhns, this time is different. The multicolored pins on her wall tell the story, each inserted into a map of the coast to detail outreach she has made to other towns since the Macondo oil field first began spewing crude into the Gulf of Mexico. This time is different, she believes, because some fishermen are not willing to stay quiet and keep hauling up catch they do not trust.

“This stuff is in my canal, behind my home, where my grandchildren swim all summer long,” Kuhns said. She voted for President Obama in 2008, but now she watches in disbelief as his White House serves Gulf seafood to assure the public of its safety. “Come to my house,” Kuhns advised Obama, “and I won’t pretty it up before you show up. I won’t tell you, the seafood I pull out of [the water], that I feel comfortable feeding it to my grandbabies.”

Kuhns, who leads the local coastal protection group Louisiana Bayoukeeper, is part of an alliance of seafood industry veterans organizing an ongoing protest against what they believe is a rushed and unwarranted reopening of fishing grounds previously closed due to contamination from the oil gusher. These fishermen see an alarming disconnect between the oil they continue to encounter on the water and the assurances they receive from state and federal officials that their nets and lines can go back in the Gulf.

The use of sensory testing to check fish samples for traces of the 1.8-million-plus gallons of chemical dispersants sprayed by BP PLC during the leak is particularly frustrating to many in Kuhns’ camp.

“How can they be doing a smell test to check for toxins in such a minute amount?” asked Chris Bryant, a 15-year commercial fishing veteran from Bayou La Batre, Ala. “There is obviously a reason [dispersants] are considered toxic. Maybe in a minute amount they won’t affect us in the short term, but if you continue to ingest them in a period of time, what are going to be the long-term effects? That’s something all the commercial fishermen are concerned about.”

Those doubts resonate with Steve Wilson, chief quality officer in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s seafood testing program. His team is “just as concerned as the fishermen” about the safety of Gulf catches, Wilson said in an interview conducted by phone from the Mississippi lab where groups of trained sensory testers run through seafood samples. “We don’t want product coming into commerce that’s unsafe.”

Sensory testers take the first look at seafood samples to determine if federal areas of the Gulf — more than one-third of which were closed to fishing at the height of the oil disaster — can be reopened or contain too many “hot fish,” as testers call tainted samples. Most of the smell testers have more than a decade of experience sniffing out defective food, Wilson explained, with their natural abilities honed by courses and lengthy training.

Oil contamination at the level of 1 part per million would be equivalent to “a golf ball in an Olympic-sized swimming pool,” he added. “They’re able to smell at that level, but most people can’t.”

Windex and watermelon

Debate over its dispersant tests may be raging in the Gulf, but NOAA’s sensory panel does not use the D-word to describe the samples it examines. Because the odor of the chemical sprays can be very similar to oil — petroleum distillates are a key ingredient in the Nalco product used by BP — Wilson said other terms are being used to distinguish between the two.

“We’ve used descriptors like ‘Windex,’ ‘light chemicals,’ ‘alcohol,’” he said. Those words can be crucial triggers of befouled fish, because testers are trained using vials of potent scents that can help unite various assessments into a broad conclusion. “You might smell watermelon, you might smell ammonia,” Wilson added. “You’re trying to get to the smell that’s more important.”

Should a member of the sensory panel find a sample to contain elements of oil or dispersant, the fishing area in line for reopening must remain closed, according to the protocol (pdf) developed by NOAA and the Food and Drug Administration to guide seafood testing during the spill. Only one sample his team encountered has failed sensory tests, Wilson said, though the area at issue has reopened for fishing since that May incident.

Guidance issued by NOAA in 2001 calls for post-spill sensory tests to include control groups, in order to make sure panelists’ noses can still sense the difference between good and bad samples. Given the higher frequency of seafood sniffing this summer, Wilson said, that guidance has been modified so that individual control samples can be dropped on testers without their knowledge.

“From time to time,” he said, NOAA supervisors will put either a known “good” or “spiked” piece of fish into the mix, the latter laced “with an oil-dispersant combination.”

After sensory testing is finished, tissue samples for the fish are subjected to lab analyses for the presence of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), a chemical class that includes toxic and carcinogenic elements of oil that tend to resist evaporation.

The chemical tests are done using composite samples of several species of fish, such as tuna and grouper. Because finfish have similar abilities to metabolize oil, Wilson said, “if you compile the sample correctly, it speeds up the process so we can get fisheries open” or keep them closed without paying up to several hundred dollars for each individual test.

A community divided

Not every Gulf fisherman shares Kuhns’ and Bryant’s fears about the viability of government seafood tests. Some locals whisper that skeptics are acting out of concern for their bottom line, preferring to earn a steady paycheck from BP for cleanup work to the uncertain fate of selling fish that consumers may still view as tainted.

Before staging a press conference last week outside a listening session held by Ray Mabus, Obama’s Gulf restoration point main, Kuhns and her allies addressed that issue head-on. “Fishermen would rather work cleaning the severely damaged Gulf than selling tainted seafood,” they wrote in a release outlining their goals.

Oysterman Mike Voisin, CEO of Motivated Seafood in Houma, La., questioned the wisdom of airing such critical sentiments. “Don’t hurt the market by saying, ‘I don’t want to feed it to my kids,’” he advised. “They’re just hurting themselves.”

Voisin, who says his processing has been cut nearly in half since the oil leak began, joins NOAA outreach calls to members of the Gulf seafood industry and displays a resulting knowledge of the ins and outs of testing.

Noting that the government’s assessment of the potential risk of eating contaminated seafood assumes an annual consumption level more than 10 times higher than that of the average American, Voisin said: “We’re still meeting those requirements. If anybody’s finding anything out there, they should report it immediately. … I don’t believe the state would open areas if they weren’t confident.”

Part of the conflict on the ground appears rooted in a lack of communication between the government and members of a community that, while close-knit, is also fiercely independent and spread throughout remote corners of the coast.

“I’ve heard more than one local person say, as far as they know, that there’s not a test for dispersant” in seafood, said Rebecca Templeton, environmental outreach coordinator at Bayou Grace Community Services in Chauvin, La. “Even as someone who’s trying to gather this information, I don’t know what kind of testing is being done … if I knew those details, it would be reassuring to me.”

NOAA is working on a framework for the chemical analyses of dispersant contamination that Kuhns and her fellow fishermen are calling for, but an agency spokeswoman said it is difficult to predict the time frame for development of the tests.

Meanwhile, Louisiana shrimping season is set to start next week, and Voisin said he expects more state-level waters to reopen by that time. But Kuhns’ boat is unlikely to make another fishing journey in the near future.

Her next step is continuing to unite with like-minded fishermen to protect the waters they love from the threat of abandonment, by BP and Washington, before the fallout from the oil leak is truly contained. “They need to be honest about this,” she said. “It’s not going to go away.”

(NYT)

Surrounded by cornfields and a chicken farm in rural Maryland sits the possible future of shrimping in the US.

“Bringing it indoors, making it 100% re-circulating, we were able to move the facility off of the coastline to middle America, farm country,” says Marvesta Shrimp co-founder Scott Fritze, pointing to one of sixteen large tanks filled with partial-salt water and thousands of shrimp. “There were no limitations from a geographic standpoint anymore [on] where you could build these.”

Fritze, along with Guy Furman and Andy Hanzlik, believed the domestic shrimp industry was fragile and ripe for change. So, in 2002, they began a new blueprint to grow shrimp. The first step: move the farm inside.

“We decided to take the technology indoors as we’ve been trying to do in the industry for a long time because of all the advantages that come along with that. You avoid all the diseases that are available in the open environment,” says Furman. “You get control over the systems so that you can bring it to a northern climate like Maryland or even further, and you can still keep them warm like they would have in the Gulf and grow a controlled indoor product.”

Built on roughly 32 acres on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, the Marvesta shrimp farm produces roughly 130,000 lbs. of fresh shrimp per year. The company purchases hatched shrimp larvae from Florida, raises the crustaceans for roughly five months, then harvests and ships to restaurants and customers from California to New York.

Fritze says there is a simple reason for his product’s high demand. “Most shrimp that you eat has been frozen for six to nine months. Sometimes our chefs have our shrimp within 2-3 hours of coming out of the water. Or as a home consumer, if you have access to a product within 24 hours of coming out of the water, you’d be amazed at the difference in taste of a fresh shrimp versus a frozen shrimp.”

Aside from taste, Furman says there are other advantages to his company’s way of doing business.

“Marvesta is green because unlike the rest of shrimp producers in the third world, we do not produce a bunch of pollution that we pump out into the environment. That’s why they’ve destroyed a ton of mangroves at various points in history and why they’ve caused environmental damage and ecological damage all the way down the coastline of places like Peru and Ecuador. So we don’t have that byproduct and part of that has to do with our technology when it comes to water re-use and water treatment.”

But that technology did not come to fruition without obstacles.

“No one had ventured into this at the level that we had planned to do. So essentially we were pioneering a system and built it from a piece of paper,” says Fritze.

“We had to learn it all by trial and error and so it’s been a very long learning process because shrimp don’t grow overnight. So when you want to change something, you have to change everything and hope for the best in eight months [that] you’re going to get it right that time. So we’ve always had some great results and we’ve had some problems,” adds Furman.

Marvesta’s great results have not gone unnoticed. With the recent disasters in the Gulf, people are looking to the company as an alternative to the traditional methods of farming shrimp.

“It’s peaked because of the Gulf. There’s been a lot of talk about the shrimp industry,” says Furman.

Fritze sees the recent oil spill as a way to help change shrimping in the US.

“It gives us an opportunity here to step back and implement some new strategies and new techniques to mitigate some of these risks that the oil spill has really heightened everyone’s awareness about. What we can do is provide a sustainable, supplemental source of economy for these industries and help create jobs. And more importantly, domestically produce a sustainable fresh product 365 days a year.”

As he pulls up a net of gray squirmy shrimp from the murky green water in one of his tanks, Furman puts it simply, “This is the future of how shrimp are going to be grown in this country and in the world.”

(CNN)

The first line of defense against oil-tainted seafood: an old-fashioned smell test. Fresh from government sniffing school, Bill Mahan describes the odd odors protecting the public health.

The oil pouring out of the Deepwater Horizon well, decimating wildlife, ecology, and income alike has an incongruously sweet, fresh odor. I know: Over two days, recently, I did little more than smell it.

My nose, and others like it, turns out to be the best line of defense we have against the possibility of contaminated seafood from the Gulf, given the current impracticality and expense of laboratory tests.

Using portable gas chromatographs, a.k.a. a person’s nose, is a faster, more economical way to screen the seafood. Which is how I found myself among the first 20 recruits last month being trained by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to inspect various fish and shellfish for levels of petroleum.

For two days, five professional sensory evaluators, at NOAA’s seafood inspection lab in Pascagoula, Mississippi, in collaboration with the FDA and the International Food Protection Training Institute, taught us the fine art of smelling shrimp. My job, as a food researcher at the University of Florida, made me a logical candidate—NOAA, which pays for the boot camp, has focused specifically on getting testers trained in the five Gulf states. (None from my training class has actually been called into the “field” yet.)

The teachers started by putting us on a pretty strict, very bland diet designed to keep our noses pristine. No spicy food, no orange juice. The instructors then presented a basic introduction to the sensory evaluation of food. We were given dark vials filled with relatively common items—things like cucumber, yeast, and rice—to see if we could identify what they were as well as practice attaching descriptive words to the smells we were experiencing.

They also gave us a couple of little tests. The key to effective smelling, we were told, was multi-sensory coordination: vision, taste and smell all work together. As if to prove the point, we were given glasses of seltzer water that had been tainted yellow with food coloring and was flavored with a very common fruit juice. They had us smell it first, and I remember thinking “Oh, yes, I know that odor!” but I couldn’t put a word to it. People around me were saying, “I know that smell,” but no one was able to identify it. They said it was safe to take a sip and I kept thinking I knew what it was. My mind was racing, trying to come up with the identity. It wasn’t banana, not pineapple, not lemon. It was enough to drive you nuts. It was strawberry. The yellow color had us all messed up; not one person guessed it.

In another, we were given a cup of granular material and told to put it on our tongues, with our eyes closed and noses plugged. It had the texture of sugar crystals, but I didn’t taste any sweetness. I opened my eyes and exhaled. Wow! Immediately, I knew it was cinnamon sugar. Not one person in the room had a clue it was cinnamon, because without the odor of cinnamon, it’s impossible to sense.

Next there was a series of labeled products, mostly oils that they wanted us to smell and describe. There were two types of bunker oil, creosote, used motor oil, some non-oil products—eventually they gave us actual oil from the Deepwater Horizon spill. It has a unique odor, sweet and fresh—a sweetness that car oil doesn’t have.

After we familiarized ourselves with the smells of different oils, we moved to a lab with artificially contaminated oysters, red snapper and brown shrimp at separate stations in concentrations of 10, 20 and 40 parts per million, as well as uncontaminated controls.

The instructors explained the critical thing was to be able to detect relative strength of the odor, but they weren’t sure we’d be able to detect the oil in the least saturated samples. Part of this exercise was to give them the opportunity to assess our abilities. Again, we recorded any observations or sensations that we had while we smelled the samples.

To cleanse our palettes, we sniffed chopped watermelon, cucumber and canned corn held in Pyrex containers throughout the lab. I would compare it to wine tasting—you take a sip and cleanse your palette. I particularly liked the watermelon followed by the corn. The instructors also suggested burying our noses in our shirts or in the crook of our elbows to recalibrate your sense of smell to your own odor—a trick of the trade. (After boot camp, I compared notes with a man in the perfume business, who told me about his “library of scents,” a reference to identify specific oils/fragrances.)

When I did the shrimp infused with 10 parts per million, I couldn’t detect a clear oil odor, but I got a burning sensation in my sinuses that I didn’t experience with the control samples. One inspector from Mississippi had a rather sensitive gag reflex: She could smell the control samples, but if a sample was contaminated with oil, it was gag, gag, gag—a perfect example of how each person’s sensory perception reacts in different ways.

For the testing phase, we each went into the lab to face eight numbered, covered Plexiglas bowls, which held oysters, shrimp, and fish with different concentrations of oil and control samples that we had to identify. After each test we’d take a break and then go back in to test eight more samples. We repeated this until each of us smell-tested 16 samples of each type of seafood.

The trainees got along really well—there were times when all we could do was laugh about the absurdity. As someone put it, “C’mon, we’re huffing oil!” Some people developed a headache and all of our noses were sore after the first day. Even after the overnight break, by the end of day two, my nose was just kind of raw and sore. But the strict diet the teachers had insisted on also served a purpose: while raw, my nose was also more perceptive. As I was heading into the lab, a FedEx deliveryman passed me by wearing cologne or deodorant—and the scent just knocked me over.

The instructors said we all did really well (no one bombed). We never saw our results, but we were told they would be distributed to the state agencies in case they ever need a screener. Because I regularly work with seafood processors and harvesters and I’m not a regulator, if screening becomes necessary, I can help state health agencies understand the screening process or can accompany a seafood plant inspector who is trained as an oil taint screener as a second opinion. My small part in a region-wide crisis.

(The Daily Beast)

Celebrity Chef Frank Brigtsen coated the squid in a perfect blend of seasoned cornmeal then dropped the batch into a vat of oil at Charlie’s Seafood, a beloved neighborhood joint.

After a lifetime in Louisiana, 38 years as an architect of Creole cuisine inspired by the gifts of the Gulf of Mexico, this was one of the first times he had served diners fried calamari.

Before BP oil’s endless flow threatened the supply and upped price of fish and shellfish by up to 30 percent, a hankering for southern fried seafood at this 60-year-old landmark would have yielded a heaping plate of crispy Louisiana oysters.

“Charlie’s is a place that celebrates Louisiana seafood and here I am frying calamari from Rhode Island,” says Brigtsen, an award-winning chef who also owns his eponymously named contemporary Creole cuisine restaurant uptown. “I feel like somehow I am betraying my customers by not giving them oysters. I feel like I am wearing someone else’s clothes.”

The enemy that gushes from a broken well day after day has taken a toll on the region’s culture, now starting to alter centuries of Creole culinary traditions born and perfected in Lousiana. That heritage, built from a gumbo of indigenous ingredients and ethnic influences, helped to christen New Orleans as an epicurean capital; no other American city is as closely linked to or shaped by its palate. The sudden collision of a seafood scarcity and a regional menu built upon the magic of the local catch has forced marquee chefs and down-home cooks to rethink Creole dishes. They hope changes are temporary — but they’re also inspired by the challenge.

`FOOD IS EVERYTHING’

“Just about everybody here is chatting about what will happen to our cuisine and what are the alternatives. People are starting to venture into other seafoods,” says Poppy Tooker, a local food writer, historian, instructor and master chef. “Food is everything to us, so something like the oil spill truly threatens our culture.”

In a state that delivers nearly a third of the nation’s domestic seafood supply, some standard Creole dishes have already been removed from menus — here and across the nation — including the popular po’ boy, a manwich stuffed with fried oysters or shrimp or other seafoods. Chefs are rushing to the reading room at the New Orleans Public Library downtown, scouring vintage cook books for authentic Creole recipes that don’t require Gulf seafood. They’re in kitchens experimenting with substitutes including mussels, scallops, carp, alligator and the lowly but fresh-water crayfish, recruited to step into the shoes of crab or shrimp. And still others are conjuring the spirit of Creole cuisine by using familiar seasonings and marinades to flavor other meats and seafoods.

Some of the signature Creole dishes already starting to evolve. In the same week BP failed to stop the oil leak with a containment cap, Brigtsen — with a bit of sadness — replaced his signature baked oysters topped with a white bachamel sauce with baked scallops.

Drago’s Seafood Restaurant, famous for its char-grilled oysters, has introduced char-grilled mussels. And Galatoire’s executive chef Brian Landry is considering returning to a dish served at the restaurant years ago: chicken liver en brochette, a stand-in for oysters en brochette. “Any great cuisine is based on local ingredients. Here that has become compromised so we are challenged to find new ways to prepare our foods that are still part of the tradition,” says Brigtsen, whose upscale eatery is a renovated Victorian cottage on the Mississippi River bend. “A lot of us are so spoiled because we grew up here and have always been surrounded by great seafood. It’s absolutely engrained in our culture. Seafood here is a birthright.”

As the slick’s power and path became clear, those who love to cook and those who love to eat Creole dishes knew they would have to adapt.

“You could almost live without the architecture here. You could maybe live without the music, only because so much of it is already recorded. But the thing that defines us every day is what we choose to eat, so within a month or so of the spill, chefs began calling us looking for old recipes,” says Liz Williams president of the Southern Food & Beverage Museum, whose very existence says something about the role of cuisine in this city.

“We are lucky enough to have a strong tradition to work with.”

They were referred to the museum’s public reading room headquartered in the library, where a trove of 5,000 books dating back to 1910, offer resources as much for scholarship as recipes. Now those volumes offer inspiration for the newest chapter in the evolution of Creole cuisine. But it takes the lively Tooker, who has built a career on the finer points of Louisiana foods, to offer the most colorful anecdote of how the oil spill affects the business of eating here.

“The other day I was at this restaurant. They were already so squeezed for finfish that they were only offering it during dinner hours,” she says. “So anyway, the waiter comes over and whispers that they have some filets in the back and he is sure the chef would make something for me. I thought, `dear Jesus, this could be our future.’ I felt like I was in a fish speakeasy!”

`MAKE-DO ATTITUDE’

Still, Tooker is confident that the Creole culinary way — its biggest ingredient is the proud make-do attitude — will survive. And thrive.

“As long as we have celery, bell pepper, yellow Spanish onion, okra, Creole tomatoes, eggplant and garlic, we can make an authentic meal,” Tooker says. “As long as we can make a roux, we will be fine, no matter what happens.”

At the iconic Commander’s Palace, opened in 1880 and still offering the quintessential New Orleans meal, executive chef Tory McPhail refined a signature dish. As the seafood supplies dwindled, he purchased 300 pounds of fresh whole shrimp from the docks, four times more than normal. But what to do with all those shrimp heads?

“I roasted them at 400 degrees then ground them until they looked like sawdust. We made a stock from it and used it in our shrimp maque choux which made the flavor sharper and more intense. Really good!,” says McPhail of the restaurant, whose alumni include Paul Prudhomme and Emeril Lagasse. “In some ways, this is an exciting time to eat because it is forcing us to think outside the box. Out of necessity, some really cool things can happen.’

(Miami Herald)

Keith Chancley, the senior shucker at one of the oldest oyster bars in the French Quarter, leaned against the cold counter during lunch hour with a knife in idle hands and nothing to shuck. Plenty of fat Louisiana shellfish — procured by the hardest means — rested in chopped ice. But nobody wanted them.

“Y’all having oysters today?” Mr. Chancley chimed brightly to several tourists who ambled in to scan the menu at Felix’s Restaurant and Oyster Bar, a family business since the 1940s near the corner of Bourbon and Iberville Streets, crossroads of the tourist universe here.

Dave Morgan, from New York City and a Gulf of Mexico seafood skeptic, asked, “Now these ain’t tainted with BP oil, huh?”

Here was the moment Mr. Chancley, 51, had been anticipating. It happens every day. A master of performance, Mr. Chancley knows how to defuse tension with humor, how to get a reluctant customer — someone who came in for a simple salad, perhaps — to end up eating a couple dozen on the half shell, making an afternoon of it.

But the hard sell has gotten so much harder lately, with the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig and the leak that followed forcing the closing of some — but not all — of Louisiana’s famed oyster beds.

“Well, there’s just a little bit,” Mr. Chancley said. “Helps ’em slide down easy.”

Everybody had a good chuckle. Then Mr. Chancley paused a beat and added: “Seriously, I wouldn’t be serving them if they weren’t good. I couldn’t do that in good conscience, man. I’m a professional, and we have a reputation to uphold. I don’t have time to be messing with bad oysters.”

Convinced, Mr. Morgan tilted a half-shell into his mouth and gulped. “That’s great!” he said. His friend, Derrick Middleton, ordered as well, and they both promised they would be back for more.

John Rotonti, Felix’s owner, would not let the bar go dry. He bought oysters from Florida and Texas to supplement the meager harvest from Louisiana.

Still, a shucker can only do so much in the face of an environmental disaster of mammoth proportions.

Close to closing time, Mr. Chancley, who on a good day last year might have made $200 in tips, took a measly $4 out of the tip bucket after the total was split with the rookie shucker (three years on the job) and the novice shucker (a dishwasher in training).

“We’ve got to take the good with the bad,” said Mr. Chancley, a 35-year veteran. “I tell the other shuckers around town — we’re a close group — just weather the storm. Take it as a time to heal your cramped hands and your soul.”

(NYT)