Changing the Menu

(water whooshing) (gentle music) - Fall of 2021 was the first time I really noticed it.

We were just gonna do some like snorkeling to see if we could find any sand dollars or whatever, and then, it was so shocking to me.

I just remember my jaw was dropping and I looked at my friend, she was like, "Oh yeah, this is normal.

Like, I don't know where they came from, but they've been here for a while now."

The entire ocean floor was littered with these purple sea urchins.

There are millions of them, and they're taking over the California coastline.

- I am a commercial sea urchin diver.

Grew up with my dad and my uncle on the boat.

- I never said I wanted to be a urchin diver when I grew up, it just kind of fell into place.

I am proud to be a fisherman.

- Hi.

- Hi, how's it going?

- Good.

- You guys stoked?

- Yeah.

- Me too.

I had no idea that, you know, an urchin diver was a job.

- I'm thinking of going to the east end of Santa Rosa Island.

- Okay.

And there's lots of urchins, - There's a lot of purple urchins.

- You'd think an abundance of urchins would be a boon for urchin divers.

- Oh yeah, here we go.

(rhythmic music) - [Shailene] But the proliferation of purples is actually bad news for the ocean and the divers.

(rhythmic music) (water sloshing) - [Fisherman] Gearing up, searching for urchin, - Searching for urchin.

And so I think it's amazing what these divers are doing so that humans can be a part of the solution to these zombie urchins.

(gentle music) - Good?

- Okay, have fun down there.

(gentle music) - It is our only home, and our oceans are its greatest resource.

They cool our warming planet.

(cars honking) They help feed our growing population.

But we are asking more of our oceans than ever before.

(gentle music) (invigorating music) Around the world, we are eating twice as much seafood as we did 50 years ago.

Many of our most popular species have been overfished, some to the brink of collapse.

Feeding more people while also saving our oceans may seem impossible, but adding less popular seafood to our diet helps take the pressure off the most popular.

- If you would give one word that summarizes what we should be doing, that one word is diversity.

It's a diversity of fish species with high returns in terms of production, productivity, nutritional quality, and it's all types of aquatic foods, very many different types.

- [Shailene] There are people working to create an abundance of food through a variety of fish, challenging us to expand what we eat, both for the benefit of the planet and ourselves.

(birds chirping) - A lot of Americans don't really understand the seafood from the Jersey Shore, people like a tuna fish that's easy or a shrimp that's just ready to go on a plate.

But who wants to eat a dogfish, you know?

Pretty good-sized fish right now.

(bright music) (onlookers speaking faintly) - [Shailene] They're called the big three - salmon, tuna and shrimp.

In the United States, these familiar species account for more than half of all the seafood Americans eat.

While most of that is imported, including 90% of all shrimp, many of the fish that American fishers catch aren't even eaten in the U.S., they're exported to other countries.

(birds chirping) - I am a commercial fisherman at Barnegat Light, New Jersey.

Well, when I first started gill netting, we'd run from the spiny dogfish 'cause it was a cheap fish, but it's a really good white meat.

(water sloshing) They're great for fish and chips, you know, the Europeans love them, but the Americans aren't really familiar with them.

- Viking Village in Barnegat Light, New Jersey.

We are commercial seafood producers here.

At Viking Village, we produce at least a million, if not more pounds of spiny dogfish a year.

It'll get processed in the United States and then the final products will be exported.

It's a very sustainable fish, fillets are obviously used for consumption, tails and fins go over to China, bellies are delicacy in Germany, and the rest of the fish could be used for feed, bait, or biodiesel.

Hoping to make more of a domestic market for it.

- Spiny dogfish are 18 cents a pound right now.

When you're spending 150 bucks on fuel for the day, you got boat maintenance, we gotta pay for nets, you have to work on volume.

If we could sell a lot of more of it locally, I think we'd get paid a little bit more, you know?

- [Shailene] Like any commodity, supply and demand drives the cost of seafood.

So, if local desire for Atlantic dogfish rises, so does the price.

That's better for fishers.

Keeping it local also reduces the carbon footprint of shipping the fish overseas, and that's better for the planet.

The trick is creating that demand.

(people murmuring) Getting more Americans to try unpopular fish may depend less on the fish than it does on the Americans.

(cars whooshing) - Sometimes, I think we should burn it all down, right?

But this is what we've got and we can make it ours.

(bicycle rattling) I am a scientist, I was raised by scientists, I believe in science, but ultimately I am interested in people.

In academic context, I talk a lot about the trade imbalance, right?

Like so we're importing a bazillion pounds of seafood and we export a bazillion pounds of seafood every year.

But when people in the fisheries world talk about Americans who only eat cod and salmon fillets, they're talking about the people who shop at Whole Foods.

You may think that white Americans are afraid of seafood, but every time you say that you are implying that the rest of us are not Americans.

Go to Chinatown and shop and it's full, there's like 35 different kinds of fish, they're all whole different kinds of shellfish, different kinds of invertebrates.

Asian people eat a lot of fish, they eat a lot of fish, we eat a lot of fish.

- Eel, good.

- How do you cook it?

- Just a little bit of soy sauce, vinegar.

- Do you... - The other people who I knew who ate a ton of seafood and knew a lot about seafood were my black friends.

Philly's a city of neighborhoods, and it was also a stop on the great migration north for Black Americans moving north after enduring Jim Crow.

And it's also home to strong immigrant communities - east Asian, Southeast Asian, central American Mexican immigrant populations.

And, so, all of those people are mixing, especially in South Philly here.

(gentle music) (invigorating music) There are all these people who are trying to figure out how to build domestic markets for their fish.

(invigorating music) And there's a whole group of Americans who, they are not thinking of, who eat a lot of fish.

(invigorating music) What would happen if we connected these, and is it possible that if we connected these communities with a commodity that everyone is interested in and everybody cares about with fish, does it have the potential to build connection between these places?

(cars whooshing) - Okay, so, the announcements are, this week is sea dragon week.

So, that means we will be distributing on Wednesday.

The fish that we will have this week is dogfish.

- So, in grad school, I wrote this postdoc proposal for a subscription seafood program and I toss in a little part about how I might do some kind of connection between high school kids and the shore.

I spent four years teaching physical science in South Philly.

I wrote a grant, it didn't get funded, I wrote a second grant and then it got funded and then I was like, "Oh, (beep) now we have to do it."

(people murmuring) (gentle music) Fishadelphia is a community-supported fishery program.

It's like a community supported agriculture, like a CSA box, which people pay in advance and they get a bag of fish every week.

We are based at two high schools in Philadelphia and we run after school programming at both of those schools, and those students help run many of the day-to-day operations.

(students murmuring) - So, yeah, we need to start working on things.

So, Aaliyah, you're working with me.

So, it's a lot of like marketing whatever species we have that day where students are working on informational graphics, jokes, or fish puns.

- What do you call a fish that practices medicine?

- What?

- A sturgeon.

- [Talia] And using social media as a marketing tool.

- Wait, I'm gonna dip it in the sauce.

You ready, Joseph?

- I'm ready.

(upbeat music) - They get paid, but it's a club.

We realize we're competing with other retail jobs basically, and everybody gets fish to take home.

(upbeat music) - Hmm hmm, crispy.

- We're 60 miles from the shore.

We buy a lot from Viking Village in Barnegat Light.

One of the many things at school about New Jersey is that the commercial fisheries species selection is very wide.

I'm all about improving fisherman's lives.

When they wanna move stuff that they might not otherwise be able to move, we can move it and we pay whatever they ask.

So, this week we're getting dogfish and tilefish.

- Good morning, George.

We got some more spiny dogs for you guys.

They're looking good.

- Yeah, they're nice fish.

- They always taste better than they look.

- Yeah.

- On Monday, George will go to Viking and they will put a bunch of ice boxes of fish on his pickup truck.

George is the third generation Bay man.

(gentle upbeat music) - George drives the fish from Jersey to South Philly.

(cars whooshing) - [Talia] George brings the fish to People's Kitchen.

- Hi, George.

- Hey.

It's always an adventure.

- How you doing today?

- Good, man.

(gentle upbeat music) - [Talia] Ben receives the fish from George.

(gentle upbeat music) - People's Kitchen is a community kitchen, it's a free kitchen, it's a free restaurant and one of the things that we do to generate income is to partner with Fishadelphia and cut fillets for them.

We also get the benefit of being able to use those bones in a stock or these sort of things.

- [Talia] And, then Tasha, on Wednesday morning, she runs the packing operation.

And then, Mr. Rodney and Zakheem prep all the coolers.

And then, the students are in charge of distributing the fish.

Okay, so, we can take the fish coolers over to the tent.

Let's do it.

- Okay, so, y'all two are on greeting customers and comp means dogfish.

Okay, that means that they're getting it for free.

- We have a sliding scale payment system where people can pay market rate or people can pay higher than market rate or people can pay less than market rate in order to increase access.

- Hi, I'm Beverley.

(Beverley speaks indistinctly) - Hey, how are you?

- I'm good, how are you?

Fish stand, I feel like, is a place where students and customers get to connect in real life.

- We met last time.

- Okay.

- When you were on that side.

- You just learn about a sense of community and you get to learn about business.

- Awesome, thank you.

- So, there are two kinds of people who pick up, members who are picking up directly.

- Yay, thank you.

- Thank you.

- [Talia] But then, there are also the cooler hosts.

- Have a great one, enjoy.

- This one is also going in the blue gray car.

You know, can you host a cooler at your house?

Your neighbors can pick it up, we'll comp you a share.

Thank you so much.

Have an awesome time.

I wish I could eat your Sancocho.

- I heard someone getting fish out of a porch and I thought that was exciting.

(alarm beeping) I'm from Columbia.

(cars whooshing) We moved here five years ago and it has been a great way to know people I will never meet somehow in my path.

(food processor whirring) - I've lived here for about 40 years, I don't drive and I love fish, and it's not that easy to get, you know, like really wonderful, fresh fish.

But with Fishadelphia, one big thing for me is that I can pick it up in my neighborhood.

I'm gonna make tonight a tilefish with a Caribbean green sauce and then the head, I'm gonna roll in cornmeal and fry.

I owned a restaurant for 12 years called Geechee Girl Rice Cafe that really focused on the food of the African diaspora and, particularly, of the low country of South Carolina and Georgia, which is where my grandparents were from.

I don't cook in a restaurant now, so this is as close as I get.

(gentle music) I fried the head.

- I know, I'm super excited.

- Ooh, I see, yeah.

- So, we peaked at about 400 customers in the pandemic.

Our goal is to get to between 600 and 1000 over the next couple of years.

- Hmm, this is good.

- Is it possible that people of color, immigrants, low income people are, in fact, a really important and overlooked market for small scale domestic fishing communities?

And, if that's true, then that really changes the idea of who's holding some of the solutions and answers to some of the major sustainability, environmental and conservation problems in this world and in this country, in particular.

(people murmuring) Okay, Adriana's here, Saichance here, Sydney's here, Harmony, Sojo.

How many years has it been since you've been on a school bus?

We are taking a group of people to go visit the docks that catch their fish.

So, the docks are gonna give us a tour and we have a bunch of Fishadelphia members, a bunch of students brought their families, and then, we have a bunch of our Chinese speaking customers.

(gentle piano music) - We connect with the processors and the harvesters in the jersey end, and I feel like it makes it real for them too.

This trip shows them these are the families that are consuming the fish.

- [Tasha] Yay, hi.

How are y'all doing?

(student laughs) - [Talia] Groups A and B are gonna start touring Viking Village, which is this dock right here.

- These are our gill netters.

- And all the scouts go into deck, then we set this back over.

- Okay, so, here at Viking Village, we have three types of fisheries that we do.

We do long line, gill netting and scallops.

(speaking foreign language) These guys don't really see what we do as much as we don't see what they do out in the inner city, right?

So, it's definitely nice to be able to show them what we're about.

- I think it's wonderful when you can find out where your food comes from and it gives you more assurance of quality, of freshness, of supporting a local economy, like, all things that we all want.

I mean, don't we?

- This is last year's seed that was again dry stored all winter.

- We don't get to know that much about where our food comes from.

The kids in the program are part of the supply chain and they're getting to see the other parts before it comes to them.

It's a lot of steps, it's a lot of people - Spiny dogfish, these guys here.

100% of this fish is actually used.

- I, kind of, have never seen this many boats before.

And also considering that, like, people have like jobs, like fishing is like kind of awesome.

And how many people are like on the boat?

- On the crew?

It's normally, I fish a lot by myself, most of the boats fish with two guys.

It's nice to see a school from Philly come down and talk to the kids who've never seen a boat or the ocean or, you know, a crab or an oyster or any kind of seafood unless they see it on TV.

- What's your favorite fish you would say?

- I think one of my favorite fish is a sea bass, winter flounder is really good fish.

Fishadelphia is really great for the community.

Any kind of program like that that wants to promote local seafood is a good thing and I think we need a lot more of that.

- Diversity is a key word for transformation of food systems and for making them better for people and for the planet.

And it's first not starting with diversity of foods but starting with diversity of people, of culture, of location.

(gentle piano music) - We're told that we have nothing in common, but I think the challenges are really similar.

We try to build those connections.

And, so, I think there's a lot of ways to do it, but I would love to share the things that have worked for us so that other people can use them in the ways that make sense.

That feels like the best thing to do.

(birds chirping) (water sloshing) (tense music) - I was really lucky to grow up here in Southern California.

I think just being a part of nature at such a young age you don't realize what a novelty it is and what a rare gift it is.

We'd go to the tide pools.

There were always starfish, there was always anemones and sea cucumber.

If we saw an urchin, it was an exciting thing to find.

Like, it wasn't a very common thing to see.

An urchin, it's just this ball of spikes that houses five stomachs, five teeth, five gonads, which is what the uni is.

Uni is the edible part of an urchin.

It's a delicacy, particularly in Japan, which accounts for up to 90% of the global urchin market.

I've only ever had uni at a sushi restaurant, which I think is probably most people's experience who have had uni and, I think, most people probably haven't had uni.

So, I had no idea where it came from.

(water sloshing) - [Fisherman] Gearing up, searching for urchin.

- Searching for urchin.

Turns out that some of the most coveted uni in the world comes from California.

- They're red for you, what do you think, Big boy?

- There's purples right here.

- [Shailene] It's the larger red variety that are profitable.

Purples are smaller and are worth a lot less.

- I started diving for purples because I thought, potentially, this could be the only sea urchin left.

The temperature is really warm a few years ago.

- It's known as the blob and you can see right here on this map, sea surface temperatures are warming up, so we are seeing the blob.

- The giant blob of the marine heat wave that was off the coast here kind of extended between 2014, 2016, 2017.

Marine heat waves - this kind of extreme version of temperature fluctuation.

Per our definition is, like, they just have to be extreme enough and last at least five days, this one lasted several years.

Turns out temperature increases, increases your metabolic rate.

So, like, when you're really hot or you're running, you gotta eat more and the same was true for the urchin.

(gentle music) (water sloshing) - [Shailene] Luckily, for the hungry urchins, there was plenty of food - a vast kelp forest along the California shoreline.

These forests are often called the lungs of the ocean.

They produce oxygen and support both fish and fishers, an important part of a half trillion dollar fishing economy worldwide.

- The purples are eating the kelp and kelp is super important because it sequesters carbon, it's for structure and shelter for a whole bunch of different fish and other organisms, food.

You can use it as biofuel, it's quite important.

- I think it's important at the outset to recognize that purple urchins are not an invasive species.

They're part of the California rocky reef marine ecology and they are frequently associated with barrens.

You'll get these situations where the urchins will suddenly, you know, bloom and they will mow everything down to mineral rock, and ordinarily then, something will come along and eat the urchins.

Sea otters, sheepshead fish, and one of the more interesting ones is the pycnopodia, which is the giant starfish.

And then, you'll have a fresh start.

When the blob, as it was known, this giant warm water event occurred, everything sort of started to suffer.

Sea Star Wasting Syndrome just annihilated the sea star populations.

And with those gone, and with other things generally weakened, the hypothesis here is that the purple urchins just exploded, ate everything that was remaining and nothing is, sort of, removing them to hit that fresh start.

- Unfortunately, for the ocean here on the Pacific coast, that results in things like over 90% reduction in the bulk kelp in Northern California.

And, over the last about decade or so, it went from normal populations of, you know, tens of thousands of urchins to millions of urchins explosion.

So, just orders of magnitude of difference.

There is a real interest in their removal and that is taking numerous forms.

- It's burning off a little.

- It's now looking more like Ireland?

- Yeah, it's completely.

The visibility wasn't great because there wasn't a lot of sun so, I went down there with low expectations.

- Good?

- Okay, have fun down there.

(invigorating music) - Imagine a rock that's this big that looks like one urchin.

(invigorating music) You can't see any rock whatsoever.

It's just this very spiky, massive, massive mound.

- The theory on it is, hopefully, we can start collecting enough purples that it thins back the population enough to allow the kelp to start growing again.

- By the end of them collecting, you see there's still lots of urchins, but now, there's at least some pieces of the rock that is visible.

- How was it?

- Epic.

Woo!

It's beautiful.

- I got it.

- I know the visibility wasn't great but there's so many.

- [Shailene] As you can see, we're not like putting a big huge dent in the population.

- Yeah, at all.

- But they need to be thinned down.

- Yeah, there's just too many of 'em.

- Too many of 'em, they're eating too much kelp, they're competing with other organisms on the bottom for space, food.

Individually, they don't outcompete other organisms but in numbers, they do.

- So, we'll just crack a couple open.

They are all mostly empty.

You can see there's barely any roe.

- Cracking open the urchin, it's kind of just a bowl of guts, but even the guts themselves are quite small and if there's any uni at all, it's no bigger than like a sliver of your pinky.

- They're alive and well, they can survive like this for a few years.

- They're able to take a little bit of food and then survive a really long time off of that food and, kind of, put everything on hold until their next ability to feed comes in, and that's why they call them zombie urchins.

(bright music) - There's plenty of urchin out there, they're good size, they're just not marketable, they're not edible.

- The processors don't really value them because 80% of 'em have no roe in them.

So, what do you do, right?

(gentle music) - We're gonna just unload the purples that we just got and he's gonna take 'em straight to the abalone farm right now.

(gentle music) (car engine revving) - So, this is Dos Pueblos Canyon.

It's got such an amazing history, I mean people have lived here for 14- 15,000 years.

I'm the general manager and partner of The Cultured Abalone Farm.

We're a small abalone farm, dabbling in seaweeds and purple sea urchins.

- Honestly, what I've known about abalone is they have beautiful shells, they've been a massive source of food in California for a long, long time, and that's it.

Oh my god.

- And this approach is, like, what the old abalone fishery used to be like, right?

It's a snail, it's a big old snail, it's a big marine snail.

It's not that different than a garden snail.

- Wow.

- But, in this case, instead of eating lettuces or your herbs, it eats seaweed.

(machine whirring) So, that's about a 1500 pound bag of seaweed.

We've become, you know, really familiar with feeding seaweeds to abalone.

That's also what urchins eat.

And if we just bring those in and feed them kelp the same way that we're doing with our abalone, we should be able to develop that roe and make them into a premium seafood product really, really quickly.

And spoiler alert - turns out, it works really well.

- There's two seaweeds that they grow on-site and then, there's one seaweed that they wild harvest from the oceans but they do it in a way that's very sustainable.

- We just give it a haircut, we're just trimming the stuff off the top of a kelp canopy so their ability to create future kelp plants are not in any way altered by our harvesting.

(machine whirring) - Each net carries 1500 pounds of this kelp and they have between 7, 8 bags of it.

So, you do the math that's a (beep) ton of pounds of kelp.

(gentle music) - We're very hands in the bucket kind of a farm.

We started this idea with a tank and with some purple urchins and let's see if we can do it.

- [Shailene] I probably put between 25 and 50 pounds of the stuff in each tank, and in three days, these urchins go through it.

- 10 to 12 weeks we went from an empty urchin to an urchin which is absolutely just stuffed with not only stuffed with roe but stuffed with roe, which was just, just delightfully good.

- That's a remarkable difference.

- Alright, so, you have to have a small piece.

- Here's some eggy uni.

- Eggy uni.

- Oh my, it's so good.

- It's like the sweetness, right?

- It's so sweet.

- Yeah, you don't expect it.

- It is sort of this really delicious, buttery, creamy sweetness.

I didn't expect.

It completely threw me how much I enjoyed it.

- Little brininess- - It's like a fruit loop.

- And a tiny little mineral hit.

These are urchins that come straight from the reef, and we're using these seaweeds that come straight from this local system, and we're just trying to concoct something that's special and carries that little hit of ocean magic.

- That wasn't a little hit, that was like a, hey, you just went to Disneyland in one bite.

- Yes.

It's one of those rare things where the idea tracks with the result, you know, like very, very quickly.

It definitely doesn't always happen this way.

I've referred to myself a bit as a recovering environmentalist.

No food is free.

We all eat something and that something comes from somewhere and it all has an impact associated with it.

So, we have to get away from the scorecard against like a magical fictional future and start scorecarding it against the actual alternatives that are in front of us.

(water sloshing) (insects chirping) (gentle music) (engine revving) They, kind of, poach in their own shell, right?

- This looks amazing.

- This is mermaid style.

- Today, when we were sitting around the fire and enjoying time and space with one another, eating something that is indigenous to this area, for me, it filled my heart with just these warm childhood memories of camping by the ocean.

When it comes to specific types of seafood like urchin and abalone, things that are usually reserved for high-end restaurants, Michelin star restaurants, sushi restaurants, it only exists like that because we haven't made it something that's normal yet.

- The purple urchin for me, the origin of like how they came about, like, producing it, I thought was brilliant.

What Doug is doing is basically coming up with a really, really good product that can benefit a lot of restaurants and a lot of the industry around here.

I've never had someone try uni for the first time and not like it, I think it's delicious.

- [Shailene] Could uni become as common as salmon?

(people murmuring) Maybe that's asking a lot, but consider that a salmon fillet was once priced alongside rib eye steak as a luxury menu item.

Our tastes do change over time and what we choose to eat drives what is available to us, be it uni, salmon, or any other seafood.

- Something that could happen could be exactly what happened with the shrimp industry.

There could be this kind of flooding of uni from the purples because there's just more of them.

You can ask for a higher price point for the wild product but have access to a larger pool of people because aquaculture is able to produce just that much more.

- Hmm.

- I want more, it's so good.

- It was good (indistinct).

- After tasting the uni that came outta that farm today and those zombie urchins, I think it's a really smart model and I hope that more people actually, kind of, look into replicating it.

There's no reason why more people shouldn't have access to urchins.

Wow, what a treat.

(gentle music) (engine revving) (suspenseful music) - I think being Icelandic is first and foremost an islander who doesn't realize that he is an islander.

With a society of just 380,000 means that we are feeling a little bit larger than we actually are.

(gentle music) We actually have not that many resources.

We have of course the energy, natural energy.

This is probably the most popular snack for outdoors in Iceland.

This is dried fish.

And then, of course, our fishing resources.

Fish has always been a huge part of the Icelandic economy.

We realized that cod is our most valuable resource.

(invigorating music) (cars whooshing) - [Shailene] By 2050, the global population is expected to reach 9.7 billion people.

(people murmuring) And that means we're going to need more food, a lot more.

(invigorating music) The amount of fish caught every year has basically stayed the same since 1990.

Aquaculture is also producing more farmed seafood than ever before, but there's another option to consider.

What if we did more with each fish?

(gentle music) - So, basically this is the fillet of fish.

This is what everyone in the world uses, (gentle music) but this is not used, and this is almost two thirds of the whole fish.

- These are actually the most valuable parts, it's amazing.

The world wastes at least 10 million metric tons of perfectly good fish byproducts annually, we want to change that.

The 100% Fish Project is to inspire other nations to use the is isolate model to find ways to utilize the byproducts of the fish and create value from it.

Fishes have always played a huge part in the history of Iceland, (camera squeaking) (invigorating music) - [Shailene] Just like oil is to the Middle East, cod has been central to Iceland's economy and wealth.

Through the early 20th century, they turned the Viking invention of salt cod into a lucrative international export (invigorating music) and successfully battled for their maritime rights against the United Kingdom in a series of skirmishes known as the cod wars.

- Only, (indistinct).

- Look out, look out.

(tense music) - [Shailene] When overfishing led to the near collapse of the fishery in the 1980s, that's when Iceland wised up.

(bright music) - I am an economist by background.

I'm not really good on board fishing boats for a long time.

I'm still getting seasick.

We have in kind of clever of doing things differently with fish.

Now, I'm talking numbers but they make a huge difference.

In 1981, we were catching 460,000 tons of cod with today's value in U.S. dollars around 317 million.

In 2016m we were catching 264,000 tons giving us a value of 830 million.

In this 35 year period, we cut the cuts by nearly 40% but increased the value by more than double.

I became so inspired to take it further and we do that by connecting people.

(people murmuring) (bright music) The Iceland Ocean Cluster, many would call an incubator, a platform where we were actually connecting people (bright music) (group murmuring) not only from fisheries and fish processing, but also from research, from the startup community, scientists, people doing marketing, product design, universities, pharmacists even, if there were no limits and we could collaborate, how much value could we actually get from one fish?

(car engine revving) - Well, I rented a desk at the Icelandic Ocean Cluster and there, I met Thor.

He told me that you could use fish skin to make collagen.

- [Thor] Fish skin is filled with proteins and the protein in this case is called collagen and collagen is good for your joints and for your skin.

- We came up with the idea to have collagen in a soda drink.

- Oh wow.

- Right.

- That's delicious, actually.

- Wow.

- Sadly, it doesn't taste fishy at all but I would love that to be.

- I drink it, like, every day because it's just, it's in every shop and in our school.

(upbeat music) - We actually sold more than Pepsi Max one month.

So, it's quite popular and it's fish skin in a can.

- A guy came to me some years ago, he was wearing this black, kind of coolish set of of clothes and he said, "I'm a clothing designer."

And I said, "Well, you are probably not a path of the cluster as we are not into clothing," he said, "I'm actually designing from salmon leather."

(invigorating music) (camera shutter clicking) And I'm sometimes asked if the fish leather is waterproof.

Yes, it is, which is part of the beauty of it.

- Health supplements, cosmetics, snack foods, hundreds of innovative products have been born of Icelandic ingenuity including a medical miracle - skin grafts for humans made from cod skin.

- We are now reaching 90% utilization of each cod.

and many companies have actually reached already 100%.

And the idea here is basically to try to export the Icelandic model to from other species.

- It's great that we're thinking about the low hanging fruit.

- We are actually working with the Great Lakes on the invasive carb.

(bright music) (water sloshing) But, what we found out is that with our new technology here in Iceland, the processing itself led to a much more beautiful fillet.

The invasive carp has a really good taste.

We were kind of fascinated with seeing this problem as it has been defined as an opportunity.

If we can actually create more value from the fish, there's more incentive to catch the fish.

We are actually showing that we can take these species to the 100% level, increasing the yield of a fillet, collagen from the the skin itself, using some of the byproducts as well, creating opportunities for young people to be joining the seafood industry again.

- There might be some interesting amino acids for nutritional supplements and nutraceuticals.

- We have still the the guts to study, the heads as well, so there are lots of opportunities.

- There are so many possibilities we can use.

There is so much we can get for so little.

Over Asia and all of Africa, they do not have refrigeration.

But if you would take the fish or any aquatic food for that matter, make it into a dried powder, that can stay at room temperature and have a shelf life of over six months and you can use it in small amounts in many dishes, and thereby vastly increase the nutritional contribution.

It becomes a super food micronutrients, vitamins, minerals, and also essential fatty acids which are extremely important for cognition and development in children and therefore form part of diets that children should have.

So, we must begin with the waste and work our way backwards.

(bright music) - Running a restaurant, if you're not using all your resources 100%, then you're doing something wrong.

So, the cod head, it's glazed and just roasted in the oven, and with the colors we make two different kind of chicharrones.

The fish skin chicharrones is exactly the same thing that you do with pork chicharrones.

(gentle music) We're just scratching the surface of what can be done with fish.

- [Thor] Nations of the world are still throwing a lot away.

We need to change that, If we do that, we will definitely see more opportunities to feed many people.

- [Director] Take one, Mark.

- We all know that our planet is in trouble but there are ways that all of us can help save it.

Adding more diversity to our diet is just one small idea, but it doesn't have to stay small.

(gentle music) - We're not under any illusion.

Even if I converted my entire business model to purple sea urchins, it would not make a dent in the breadth of the purple urchin barren concern.

The only way that this works is if we are completely open and like open source code transparent about this, and it should be replicated and people should be doing this.

(upbeat music) - The fact is we need to do at least 10 million metric tons of fish byproduct that are wasted today in the world.

It's happening already.

We're seeing it now again and again, seafood companies that are saying, "We wanna do more."

- There's also power and connection.

Getting local fish to local people, building the type of community we all wanna live in.

- Alright, so, you know, here we are going to hell in a hand basket.

All of us.

I'm am interested in using fish as a vehicle for justice and if I need to leave fish behind to get to justice, I will do it, but I do love fish.

- Eating more plants and seafood heavily, outweighs anything you can do, and like buying an electric car.

If people were to replace a proportion, not all, they don't have to get rid of their burgers, but a proportion of eating meat, you could have a really substantial and positive impact on both the planet and people's health as well.

- Can we save our oceans and feed our growing population?

Is it possible to do both?

Yeah, it is possible, and it starts with us.

(water sloshing) (gentle music) (upbeat music) (gentle music)