Winnegance Oyster Farm (website, facebook) is now harvesting their first crop of oysters. Owner Jordan Kramer is taking orders via email and harvesting oysters ($15 for a dozen) each Friday for pick-up at his home in Portland.
Winnegance oysters are raised in the New Meadows River in the northern end of Casco Bay. Kramer hopes to launch an oyster CSA in 2016.
Today’s Sunday Telegram explores the significant population decline of wild Maine mussels.
Scientists and environmentalists are working to find out why the once plentiful ‘people’s seafood’ has practically vanished from our rocky shores.
Today’s Press Herald includes an article about the Maine Seaweed Festival and the rising interest of seaweed as a cooking ingredient.
But the story is a good metaphor for what’s going on in the world of seaweed right now. Consumers are discovering a local food source that has been around for millennia, but has rarely been used in American cooking and is little known except when ordered in a dish at a Japanese restaurant. Now Americans and western Europeans are beginning to embrace it, and at the same time realizing here in Maine that we’ve got our own handy local supply right on the coast.
Visit seaweedfest.com for more information on the Maine Seaweed Festival.
The Bangor Daily News has published a report on a recent 1-day meeting of Mayor Brennan’s local food initiative.
To reach the city’s goals, members of the mayor’s subcommittee such as John Naylor, co-owner of Rosemont Market and Bakery, are strong disciples. Naylor, who spoke at the conference, works with 40 farmers and local food producers in his four markets, (the fifth Rosemont opens in Portland’s West End soon) and says a commitment is needed across the board to keep the movement robust.
The Press Herald has a report in the ongoing sample harvests of Maine shrimp.
The record price stems from scarcity. Just like last year, the commercial shrimp season remains closed because of low stocks. The shrimp that sold at auction Thursday were caught by one of the three Maine fishermen involved in a sampling project to help state biologists track the timing of egg hatch, size, gender and developmental stages of the shrimp.
Today’s issue of the Maine Sunday Telegram includes an article about Maine’s diver scallop fishermen.
“I’ve been caught in currents and dragged,” said Brian Preney, 55, a diver out of Boothbay who is a member of the Urchin Advisory Council and has been fishing with scuba gear since 1980. He learned how to dive at Colby College, in the pool, and married into a family of fishermen. Fishing for urchins, which generally don’t take a diver below 30 feet, is like “picking cotton” in comparison to the more exciting pursuit of scallops, which have the power to dart away, fast. “I liken scalloping more to hunting.”
The New York Times published an article this week about the impact warming sea temperatures are having on cod and other fisheries in the Gulf of Maine.
In the vast gulf that arcs from Massachusetts’s shores to Canada’s Bay of Fundy, cod was once king. It paid for fishermen’s boats, fed their families and put their children through college. In one halcyon year in the mid-1980s, the codfish catch reached 25,000 tons.
Today, the cod population has collapsed. Last month, regulators effectively banned fishing for six months while they pondered what to do, and next year, fishermen will be allowed to catch just a quarter of what they could before the ban.
Federal regulators have again cancelled the Maine Shrimp season. According to a report in the Press Herald,
Federal regulators are canceling the commercial fishing season for shrimp in the Gulf of Maine for a second straight year, citing a population collapse blamed partly on rising ocean temperatures.
The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s Northern Shrimp Section voted Wednesday in Portland to cancel the upcoming winter season. Regulators say the region’s population of northern shrimp fell dramatically from 2011 to 2013.
Today’s Maine Sunday Telegram includes an interview with Kristen Bartlett, the Whole Foods staffer who tracks down locally made foods for the store’s shelves,
Is this a problem for her at parties? Is she swarmed by local farmers, waving organic broccoli and apple butters? Not yet, she says, though she wonders what will happen after her photo is published in Source.
and an article about Uni being declared the “new bacon” by Food & Wine magazine.
High-end restaurants in major cities have been experimenting with uni for a while, Branchina said. What’s more interesting to him is the big jump Browne Trading has seen in retail sales online: a 54 percent increase between 2012 and 2013, and so far in 2014, up 93 percent from the previous January to May.
Today’s Maine Sunday Telegram includes features on Maine’s relationship with Monsanto and Maine’s Alewife fishery.