6.26.25

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome. This is Rebeccah Shore for Radio Eye, and today
I will be reading the Smithsonian magazine dated July August
twenty twenty five. As a reminder, Radio Eye is a
reading service intended for people who are blind or have
other disabilities that make it difficult to reprinted material. Please
join me now for the article titled can the Redfish

(00:24):
that Gulf Coast culinary icon be brought back from the brink?
The Cajun cooking craze nearly wiped out the species native
to Louisiana, but conservation stemmed the tide. Now the fish
faces new threats by Boise upoult. In nineteen seventy nine,
chef Paul Prudaum invented the iconic dish blackened redfish, and

(00:49):
in the years that followed it became so popular that
the chef and others were concerned that the species would
become extinct. Today, the redfish faces a new threat. Its
marshland habitat is disappearing. Louisiana's coastline is a river delta
formed by the Mississippi over millennia as its current slowed

(01:10):
and relinquished its mud into a calm and sheltered Gulf
in the back and forth contest between the river's flow
and the incoming waves. Then the power of the Mississippi
River one out. There's nowhere else quite like Louisiana, with
its intricate landscape of bays, bayous, and inlets that wind

(01:32):
maze like through a seemingly endless expanse of marsh. Sitting
on a boat, the results can seem empty and monotonous,
nothing but cord grass as far as the horizon. That's
because the real action lies beneath the surface. Nutrients carried
by the river and the ocean meet here in this estuary,

(01:55):
feeding plant life, which in turn feeds an abundant food
chain of fish. This abundance has long shaped local culture.
Fifteen hundred years ago, when indigenous corn farmers began to
clear and plant the Mississippi's banks upstream, Louisiana was marked
as a place apart. Agriculture did not really take hold here,

(02:19):
not when there are so many fish to catch. The
first European colonists, too, marveled at the bounty. The rivers
are full of monstrous fish. A nun stationed in New
Orleans in seventeen twenty seven wrote to her French father
she noted an infinity of species not then known in Europe.

(02:41):
Archaeological records from the era show that drum species were
among the most popular, and today one drum species, red drum,
better known as redfish, has become a symbol of the region.
Delta fishermen eventually learned to smell redfish from a one
hundred yards off and to distinguish the clouds of mud

(03:04):
kicked up by their tails from those made by mullet
or sheep. Said. By the nineteenth century, anglers were chasing
redfish for more than just sustenance. One of the first
guide books for American anglers, published in eighteen sixty five,
declared that redfish in the Gulf of Mexico a ford

(03:25):
fine sport. They hit bait hard and could run off
forty feet of line in a quick and angry dash.
When a New York aristocrat launched Forest and Stream a
few years later, the magazine described the gulf as a
sportsman's paradise, a phrase that became a Louisiana motto, now

(03:46):
appearing on the state's license plates. By the late nineteen eighties,
amid concerns that the species was being overfished, it was
declared a game fish. That meant it was set aside
for anglers alone, no commercial harvest allowed. Even a fairly
young redfish is a taut torpedo of mussel, a beast

(04:07):
of an animal which, after a few years, can reach
as much as nine pounds, almost too big for the
shallow waters that have been its nursery. That size is
key to their appeal. A charging redfish will send a
wave rolling atop the surface. While wadefishing off a barrier island,

(04:27):
you can feel the water beating from their presence. Some
fishermen have compared the sound of a school to a
passing freight train. Although redfish range as far north as Massachusetts,
they love marshlands, which makes the Great Labyrinth of Louisiana's
Delta a particular redfish hot spot. Today, the fish is

(04:50):
among the foremost targets of the state's billion dollar sports
fishing industry, But for complex reasons, offishals believe local reds
fish populations are now in danger. At the same time,
Louisiana's marshes are eroding and its coastline is fraying, the

(05:10):
fates of its iconic fish and its wetlands appear inextricably linked.
Their looming decline represents a warning and raises hard questions
about how a seafood culture can adapt to a changing world.
As more of an eater than an angler. Until recently,
I knew about red fish for one reason, because a

(05:33):
blackened redfish filet is not just a symbol of Louisiana cuisine,
but the dish that made Cajun cooking a world wide sensation.
It's a relatively modern invention created in nineteen seventy nine
when a chef named Paul Prudom, the proprietor of K.
Paul's Louisiana Kitchen in New Orleans, French Quarter, felt nostalgic

(05:56):
for the taste of his father's camp fire cooking. Hoping
to conjure the same smoky flavor in his tiny kitchen
where there was no grille, Prudam dragged a filet of
redfish through butter, seasoned it with spices, and threw it
into a smoking hot skillet. Prudam died in twenty fifteen,

(06:17):
but Frank Brison, then the night chef at K. Paul's,
still recalls the fateful evening when he saw Prudam cook
that first filet so black that Britson was skeptical any
one would want it. Then Brigson took a bite and
I said, this is the best dam fish I ever

(06:37):
had in my life. He told me that was the
start of it all. Redfish was not then known as
a marquis restaurant fish. It was popular with home cooks,
sure a king of the New Orleans French market, or
so one early twentieth century cook book declared, but it
was considered too cheap for fine dining. There were work around.

(07:00):
Rigson once cooked at a restaurant that unscrupulously labeled one
redfish dish as snapper ponchetrain as a way to boost
the price. Blackening redfish changed the fate of the species
and the city. K Paul's became one of the hottest
local tickets, and when The New York Times caught wind

(07:20):
of the dish, the paper's coverage helped make Prudam one
of America's first celebrity chefs. Cajun food had been considered rustic, provencial.
Now Cajun Mania swept the world before the nineteen eighties ended.
There were Cajun restaurants in New York City and London.
In Amsterdam. The trend would fade soon enough, but it

(07:44):
certified Louisiana as one of America's culinary destinations. Once he'd
invented the dish, Prudam maintained exacting culinary standards, serving only
ten ounce redfish filets, which were drawn from four pound
red ff that meant a young fish six years or
less in age, the sort caught by a fisherman stringing

(08:06):
a net through the marshes. Per Dom's motivation was taste,
but this choice had important ecological implications, because full grown
redfish traveled to offshore waters more suitable to their size.
By targeting young redfish, fishermen were leaving the main breeding
populations alone. These bigger offshore fish, known as bull reds,

(08:31):
can reach sixty pounds or more. They gather in massive
schools that are visible from above by plane. While it
was easy to catch a lot of fish at once,
the flesh isn't that tasty. As a fisherman once told me,
eating a bull red is like eating a truck, since
the meat is coarse and overly fishy. There was no

(08:52):
good market for bull reds, but pro Dom's smash hit
changed the calculus. Chefs in New York City seemed not
to notice the bad taste of the biggest red fish,
or maybe they figured their customers would be distracted by
the spices. The sudden demand in the early nineteen eighties
sparked a new approach to Gulf fishing. Airplane spotters flying

(09:16):
above the coast watched for the telltale bronzed backs of
a school of bull reds. Then they'd called down to
boats that could ensnare the entire school. Some old fashioned
fishermen used to working in the marshes were aghast at
the scale of the take. We didn't want em, one
said later about the new competition. We knew we were

(09:38):
headed for trouble soon. Perdam too saw the trouble. In
nineteen eighty five, on a visit to one of K.
Paul's seafood suppliers, he and Brigston overheard a manager on
the phone arranging to buy an entire school of redfish,
hundreds of thirty pound bulls, amounting to ten thousand pounds

(10:01):
of fish. When he said that, Paul's face went white
ashen white. Brigson recalled and I just about cried. The
sheer number of fish was overwhelming, raping the resource Brigson
went on to sell this fish that we wouldn't eat.
Before the blackened redfish craze began, a big year in

(10:22):
the Gulf might yield two million pounds of redfish. Half
Way through nineteen eighty six, fishermen had pulled in six
million pounds from federal waters alone. Federal officials, who predicted
the total harvest that year could hit twenty million, ended
the season early. When Prudam recognized what he'd unleashed, he

(10:46):
switched over to blackening tuna. It would be tragic for
me personally to know that redfish would be extinct, he
told a journalist that same year. The rise of blackened
redfish coincided with the dawning awareness of another coastal problem.
Louisiana was disappearing for more than a decade. Scientists had

(11:09):
been asserting that its wetlands were being swallowed by the ocean,
but it was hard to convince the public to care.
A boom and fishing in the nineteen eighties, spurred in
part by a sudden wave of oil layoffs, but helped
along by the demand created by Prudam's famed dish, convinced

(11:29):
many locals that the marsh was far smaller than what
their ancestors had known, helping waken the state to the crisis.
The causes were varied. This land sinks naturally, already compacting
under its own weight. The marshes had persisted because they
were not just built by the river's mud, but continuously

(11:52):
rebuilt new floods, delivering new mud again and again throughout
the nineteenth and twentieth century. As engineers built levees along
the Mississippi River to contain the floods, they'd wound up
containing the mud too. Now, instead of spreading across the landscape,
it was carried to the river's mouth, and once it

(12:15):
reached the ocean, got dumped off the edge of the
continental shelf. When, beginning in the early twentieth century, oil
companies dredged canals to lay down pipelines, they exacerbated the trouble.
Estuaries contain a delicate mix of fresh river water and
ocean salts, and these new channels carried salt inland. This

(12:40):
poisoned some grasses, which, as they died, re released their
roots grip on the soils. The cumulative effect was catastrophic.
By the nineteen eighties, Louisiana was losing nearly forty square
miles of land each year. There were ways to address

(13:01):
the redfish problem, at least A nineteen eighty six decision
to limit the redfish harvest turned permanent two years later,
when the federal government banned all harvest in federal waters.
Louisiana followed suit, outlying redfish harvest in state waters, which
includes the marsh. There at least the recreational fishery eventually reopened,

(13:28):
but the commercial fishery has been closed ever since, nearly
four decades later. This fact leaves some commercial fishermen bitter.
For most of the nineteen eighties, Gulf anglers took in
far more redfish than their commercial peers. The common complaint
is that the sportsmen, wealthy and powerful, managed to seize

(13:51):
the fish for themselves. In nineteen eighty eight, the same
year the fishery closed, a grassroots coalition proposed a moon
shot solution for the other crisis, known as land loss.
The state needed a set of diversions, they said, carefully
engineered openings that would mimic the natural process of land

(14:13):
rebuilding that had been halted by the levees. The idea
was to direct some river water and crucially, its mud
through gates and channels into the areas where the marshes
had disappeared. The core of the idea was simple, just
unleash the river, but it was also radical because for

(14:34):
years the priority had been to contain this water. It
was unclear too, how to pay for such new engineering. Strangely,
for fishermen, the loss of land did not seem to
cause huge problems. Indeed, in nineteen eighty nine, a group
of scientists conceded in a paper that overall the amount

(14:57):
of seafood coming ashore in Louisiana was increasing as the
marsh disappeared. The scientists offered a working hypothesis. The marsh
was being lost in fragments, creating longer jagged edges, and
many species like redfish thrive along such edges, which make
it easier to flit back and forth between habitats. It's

(15:20):
a strange paradox. Less marsh can actually mean more habitat,
but only at first. The paper noted that eventually so
much marsh would disappear that the length of the shoreline
would have to decrease too, and that's when fish stocks
would crash. So the scientists worried that the recent increase

(15:41):
in seafood catches had created a sense of false security
that has delayed action to curb wetland loss. Scientists weren't
sure though, when the crash would come, nor was it
clear what it would look like. Indeed, Richard Condrey, who
as an ecologist at Louisiana State University in the nineteen eighties,

(16:04):
led the panel that set national redfish policy, notes that
the whole idea that land loss much must trigger a
collapse in fish stocks remains speculative, not untrue, necessarily, just
difficult to prove. Fish populations are always fluctuating, driven by,
among other factors, what tools fishermen use, how much seafood

(16:28):
restaurants are buying, and how the weather's been. Trying to
determine the impact of habitat loss alone is difficult, so
when and how land loss will impact species is a
question that can only be answered in retrospect once the
catastrophe arrives. It's striking how little we know about oceans

(16:50):
in general, though then again, these are difficult places for
land dwelling scientists to conduct research. As Prudam's famous dish
took off in the nineteen eighties, federal scientists lacked even
the basic biological information they needed to determine how many
fish could be sustainably harvested, and when the commercial harvest

(17:13):
was closed, at least one federal official speculated that any
further research might get curtailed since those anglers, many of
them rich and well connected, wouldn't want scientists mucking around
in what had become their territory. Subsequent studies were indeed sparse.
In the early two thousands, Louisiana biologists found that the

(17:36):
escapement rate was well above the goals set by Condrey
and the council. As a key metric, enough young fish
were leaving the marsh each year, joining the offshore schools
to insure a sustainable population. Then for nearly two decades after,
no one bothered to check again. In the meantime, the

(17:57):
red fish became an essential component of Louisiana's booming recreational
fishing economy. That made it noteworthy when Todd Masson, a
popular Louisiana outdoors writer, noted in a YouTube video in
twenty twenty two that he'd gone through a two month
period in which he caught no redfish. I'm not sure

(18:18):
I've ever seen a decline in a fisheries population like
what were with witnessing Now, he said, the States biologists
decided they ought to run the numbers, and indeed, in
the decades since their previous calculations, the escapement rate had plummeted.
The number of redfish harvested, meanwhile, had dropped to the

(18:39):
lowest numbers recorded since the nineteen eighties. The scientists I
spoke to emphasized how it's impossible to pin down just
one cause for the decline. Climate change may play a role,
as might the ever growing size of the recreational fishing industry.
But Patrick Banks, the Assistant secretary of Louisiana's Department of

(19:01):
Wildlife and Fisheries, told me that habitat loss was a huge,
huge part of the equation. The juvenile fish are losing
their nursery. We may be entering the era of decline
in the marsh. In other words, Banks noted that another
popular species, speckled trout, was also suffering. Louisiana now has

(19:24):
an office working to restore the marsh. The Coastal Protection
and Restoration Authority, formed in two thousand seven in the
wake of Hurricane Katrina, which specializes in trying to figure
out how to stop the loss and rebuild our coast,
as Banks put it, and I certainly prayed there successful,
because that's the habitat we need, said Banks. In twenty

(19:46):
twenty three, after years of negotiation and planning, the agency
began construction on a major river diversion, but last year,
after I interviewed Banks, construction was stalled by a lawsuit
file by, among other groups, local oystermen who worry it
will kill off their reefs. Governor Jeff Landry, who took

(20:08):
office amid the dispute, has complained about the lack of
local input and expressed worries that the project could break
our culture by hurting commercial fishing. It's unclear whether the
diversion will ever be completed, and even if it is,
climate modeling suggests that it offers the delta at best
a reprieve. Climate driven sea level rise will keep swallowing

(20:31):
the marshland at a rate too fast to counteract. This
means that no matter what we do in terms of
restoration and fishing policy, redfish will keep losing their nursery. Nonetheless,
the Department of Wildlife and Fisheries decided that given the
declines it had to intervene overfishing might not be the

(20:52):
root cause of the problems. Banks told me, but given
the redfish's decline, we cannot allow the fishing levels that
are currently occurring to continue, a controversial idea among anglers,
many of whom did not want to stop chasing this
flavored fish. In July twenty twenty four, after almost a

(21:13):
year of debate, a new set of rules was instituted.
Among other measures, the bag limit, or the number of
redfish an angler can keep each day, was reduced from
five to four. The state's models suggest that with this
new policy in place, it will take twenty five years
for populations to recover, during which period the marshes will

(21:37):
continue to decline. As always, it's hard to predict precisely
how populations will fare locally and nationally, but the future
hardly looks bright. For now, the species remains a cultural
force in Louisiana for sportsmen and chefs alike. Despite the

(21:57):
commercial fishing ban, New Orleans restaurants still offer blackened redfish,
though few menus admit that the flet on your plate
is almost never wild caught. Mississippi, which permits a small quota,
is the only Gulf state where it's still legal to
harvest redfish. Frank Brixton, for example, who now owns his

(22:20):
own award winning restaurant, Brigston's, tucked on a quiet block
just off the Mississippi River in Uptown, New Orleans, buys
his filets from farms in Texas. Brigston has long been
an advocate for commercial fishermen, and he is not delighted
to be serving this out of state non wildfish, but

(22:41):
it's the only way he can keep serving the iconic
dish he cooked so many times in his mentor's kitchen
and that so many tourists seek. If you're a fan
of regional seafood, Brigston's Texan redfish hailing from the Gulf
is an acceptable substitute. Not every restaurant is so conscientious.

(23:02):
In its latest major report on redfish, released in early
twenty twenty three, the federal government noted that most of
the farm raised redfish consumed in America is imported from
China and Vietnam. That's in part because Texas farms have
suffered from recent snaps of cold weather. It also matches

(23:24):
the broader trend. Almost eighty percent of the seafood consumed
in the US is now imported. As Southern Louisiana disappears,
and as its supply of seafood is curtailed, redfish could
serve as a kind of warning for how the state
might end up salvaging its culinary culture just ship in

(23:46):
farm raised seafood from somewhere else. Consider this the Disneyland future,
in which restaurants gesture toward an old Louisiana identity, a
lost relationship with the marshland that no longer exists. Porgy's
Seafood Market, which opened in New Orleans in twenty twenty three,

(24:06):
offers what I see as a more appealing approach. It
sells a variety of fish, all wild caught, often bycatch
species taken incidentally, while fishermen seek more popular fish, just
about every species that's commercially fished is inherently delicious when
handled properly, says Marcus Jacobs, the shop's chef and co owner.

(24:32):
Black drum, for example, can substitute for redfish. Sheep's head
and amber jack are tasty but overlooked choices for diners too.
I've tried both and found that as a consumer, nothing
is lost by moving beyond the most famous fish. Still
wanting to taste the famous species, wanting to feel its

(24:54):
famous mite on a fishing line, I decide to catch
my own wild redfish under gray November skies. I motor
on to Lake Saint Catharine, an expanse of slightly salty
water an hour east of New Orleans. Chris Macaluso, the
marine fisheries director for the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, a

(25:19):
nonprofit that works to secure access to hunting and fishing,
has agreed to help me get a fish. Macaluso too,
suggests that rather than fighting over redfish, sportsmen ought to
expand their notions of which fish are desirable. You are

(25:39):
a lot happier as a fisherman, I think if you're
not basing the happiness of your experience on whether or
not you catch a certain species. He says. He's come
to enjoy chasing sheepshead, for example, which until recently many
anglers considered a trash fish. Sure it's smaller than a

(26:02):
drum and sometimes harder to filet, but it's a hard fighter,
like a caged rabbid raccoon, Macaluso says, and good eating too.
One thing is clear, we're all going to have to change,
Macaluso says, somewhat wearily. Ours have passed on the boat,

(26:24):
and again and again, our casts have been fruitless. We
don't have any choice, Manicuso says, either that or quit,
you know, and I don't plan on quitting any time soon.
Macaluso reds up the motor of his bay boat so
we can try our luck farther west in Lake Pontchatrain,

(26:49):
and after a false alarm, we reel in a speckled
trout that Macaluso releases back into the water. Finally, our
moment comes a white bellied beast, all copper and bronze
in the sun, nearly two feet long. Look at this
beautiful fish, Macaluso says, as he drags our catch from

(27:13):
the water, seven or eight pounds, he estimates. I wonder
how this fish might taste. I've still never had a
filet of fresh caught red fish. But Macaluso, the consummate sportsman,
poses for a picture and then places the fish gently
back in the water. It lies still for a moment, recovering,

(27:35):
then kicks away. This article was produced in collaboration with
the Food and Environment Reporting Network, an independent non profit
news organization. This concludes readings from the Smithsonian Magazine for
to day. Your reader has been Rebecca Shore. Thank you
for listening, and have a great day.