Spring 2008 Issue - Alaska Report
Golden Eggs
Posted: September 15, 2008
Pollock Roe Net Millions in Seattle
By Dan Catchpole
Need salted duck eggs? Or sekihan, the small, deep-red beans common to East Asia? How about frozen eel direct from Japan? All these products and many more Asian delicacies are often available at the Uwajimaya store in Seattle’s International District.
But if you want mentaiko – also known as pollock roe – you usually won’t find it because it is too expensive and too scarce. Yet every February and March Seattle becomes the mentaiko wholesale center of the universe, home to pollock roe auctions that can fetch up to $300 or $400 million in a single year.
The auctions are part of a commercial triangle that links Alaska, Seattle, and East Asia.
The eggs come from Walleye Pollock, fish that breed in enormous schools in the Bering Sea north of the Aleutian Islands. The Alaskan pollock fishery is the largest food fishery in the world, accounting for 35% of all commercial landings in the U.S. In 2004 that translated into 1,519,927 metric tons of fish, and, by weight, the roe is by far the most profitable portion of the catch.
The auctions are held in Seattle because it’s the home port for most of the companies that catch the fish.
Buyers come from Japan, Korea, and other Asian countries where mentaiko is often given as a gift at New Years and other holidays. The phrase is a combination of the Korean word for “pollock” – mentai or myong tae – and the Japanese word for “child” – ko. In other words, “pollock-children,” and the gifts are meant to bestow virility.
The auctions are held on Piers 90 and 91, two huge docks that jut out 2,000 feet into Elliott Bay from the Interbay industrial district in north Seattle.
At a recet auction, buyers were pelted with rain as they moved between the mobile homes while gusts of wind whipped waves against the pier. But, inside the buildings, the rooms glowed with an odd yellow light. The exact shade is a trade secret because it is designed to show the eggs at their most appealing. The eggs themselves come in small, lung-shaped clusters that are displayed in trays arrayed on long tables.
The buyers scrutinized the roe samples in solemn silence, making notes on bid sheets that they held close to their chests. The samples come from huge lots that are kept on ice in Alaskan warehouses.
The buyers picked up the egg sacs, felt their texture, squeezed them for firmness, cut them open and smelled them. Some buyers set down paint chips against the eggs to check for color. Sometook photos which they e-mailed to their superiors on the other side of the Pacific. Others took samples back to their hotel rooms and brined them overnight.
Bids are submitted the morning after the egg inspections and are opened at noon. Bids are never made impulsively. Depending on their respective company’s needs, the buyers purchase eggs in lots of a few hundred thousand dollars to tens of millions.
“You’re holding the future of your company for the rest of the year in your hands,” said one buyer.
Watching the buyers and anxiously awaiting the noontime bid opening was Do-Young Yun, vice-president of the Arctic Storm Management Group. The company owns two catcher/processortrawlers, and one of them, the Arctic Fjord, harvested the roebatches that were displayed the day before.
“There’s a lot of anticipation, lots of pressure,” Yun said, his voice colored by a soft Korean lilt. “Stress level –” He raised ahand to indicate “high.”
Then he added, “Very exciting actually, you know. Just liketoday, I’m getting the first bid of the year, and [it’s] nerve-racking getting into twelve o’clock. I’m trying to calm down.”
When the bids were opened, it turned out to be a successful year for the Arctic Fjord. “We got a pretty good price,” Yun said.
Thirty years ago, the pollock fishery was controlled by foreign vessels, mostly Japanese, but with some Korean and Russian ships too. Then the Magnuson-Stevens Fisheries Conservation Act of 1976 established the 200-mile Exclusive Economic Zone, carving out a rich U.S. pollock fishery in the Bering Sea and around the Aleutian Islands, and triggering the birth of the U.S. fleet of catcher/processor trawlers, or C/P trawlers.
C/P trawlers range from 200 to 350 feet in length and have crews of from 90 to 150. These workhorses of the industry are both trawlers and factory ships that are capable of fully processing pollock and cod into fillets, fish sticks, and surimi, the protein paste used to make Komoboko, a dense, gelatinous fish cake. The most widely known form of Komoboko is the imitation crab that has become popular recently in the U.S. Komoboko is a staple in Japanese cuisine, including sushi.
Most of the 19 processor/trawlers in the U.S. fleet are based at Piers 90 and 91 at Interbay in Seattle. Every January, the boats head north for the opening of the Pollock “A” season and the same boats usually make two or three trips in each season.
Winter is the prime fishing season because that’s when the pollock form huge, dense schools in the deep ocean and start moving to shallower spawning grounds. Schools are so big they are sometimes measured by miles. Food becomes so short in the jam that the fish resort to cannibalism, with juveniles accounting for almost half the diet of an adult.
The trawlers use echo-sounding devices to pick up the schools as they come onto the continental shelf, usually in 100 to 300 meters of water. The fish schools can be packed so close that trawler nets will clog if they are pulled through the middle, so the trawlers usually work the margins of the schools, scooping up fish and bringing them on board at the rate of about 500 per minute.
Crewmembers grade and sort the pollock as they come on board, and the fish are then moved by conveyor belt inside the trawler where they are processed.
First the head is removed, and then fillets are stripped off each side. Next the guts and roe are removed. The fillets are used either to make blocks or individual fillets, or are ground up and made into surimi for Komoboko. The guts and the skeleton of the fish are sent to the fish-meal plant where they are converted into meal that is then used in the aquaculture industry. Virtually everything from the pollock is used in some manner. Even the fish oil is collected and used to power the vessels’ engines.
It is a remarkably “green” fishery. The fishing companies work with Federal and Alaskan authorities to protect the long term commercial viability of the fishery. In 2006, the fishing companies’ Pollock Conservation Cooperative received the first annual Stewardship and Sustainability Award from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
In 2004, the Bering Sea and Aleutian Island pollock fishery became the tenth fishery in the world to be certified as “sustainable” by the London-based Marine Stewardship Council.
But not all agree that the fishery is on the right track. For some environmental groups, the trawlers are symbols of resource depletion and human damage to the oceans, and they argue for a new approach that stresses protection for the entire ecosystem, not just the species.
