The Covid-19 Story Behind Your Wild-Caught Salmon
The world’s largest sockeye fishery evades the pandemic, but another disaster looms
Steve Kurian is a fisherman. The owner, along with his wife Jenn, of Wild for Salmon, a shop in Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania, that sells wild-caught Alaskan seafood, Kurian travels each summer to Bristol Bay to fish with a small crew on his regulation 32-foot boat in the mouth of one of the rivers that spill out into the Bering Sea on the state’s southwest coast. In a little over a month of hauling drift nets, Kurian nabs a quarter-million pounds of salmon, most of it bright-red, nutrient-rich sockeye. This year, nearly 58 million sockeye made their way back into the bay’s rivers to spawn; 39 million of them were harvested.
Bled and refrigerated in his boat’s seawater hold, Kurian’s salmon are periodically transported via tender boat to Leader Creek Fisheries, one of the seasonal processors here. There, they are cut and flash-frozen for the wild sockeye filets that Kurian sells at his store and online. This year’s harvest is available now. A premium, sustainable protein for which consumers pay more than $20 a pound, it is a hard-worked catch. “The salmon come in such numbers and so fast, you fish for eight hours, offload, clean, sleep two hours, and look for more fish,” Kurian said. “You spend the…
