Why a Commercial Fisherman Never Buys “Fresh” Fish at the Grocery Store
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It can feel like there's not much room for nuance at the grocery store. My brain simply doesn't have time to contemplate the way each word on a food label relates to the reality of how a given product came into existence. For the sake of efficiency, I often reduce supermarket vocabulary into broadly positive and negative categories. I consider words like organic and grass-fed to be "good," and I try to stay away from packaging with preservatives and artificial flavors.
I make generalizations like these at the expense of some deeper, more complex truths about how food is produced, stored, and offered to me in neat little rows at the store. One such nugget of knowledge I had long overlooked, it turns out, was in the seafood aisle . I recently spoke with Ian Stokes, a commercial fisherman based in Newport, Oregon, who told me that while many shoppers have a positive association with the word "fresh," it's a label he avoids when buying seafood.
Why a Commercial Fisherman (Mostly) Avoids "Fresh" Fish at the Grocery Store
Seafood is a great option for a weeknight dinner , but it spoils faster than other proteins. As soon as it's out of the water, bacteria and enzymes start their engines, and it's a race to get your fish cooked, plated, and eaten while it retains peak flavor and texture. "Fish has to be unloaded, transported, distributed, and eventually make its way to the store or fish counter where you're buying it," Stokes said. "By that point, it may have been sitting around for a few days."
This doesn't mean that "fresh" fish in the grocery store is necessarily bad. If it's properly handled and refrigerated, seafood will remain safe to eat as it makes its way from sea to store. But "safe to eat" and "at its best" are not the same thing.
There's one situation where fresh wins out, though. "If you're in a port town and buying the catch right off the boat, that's the best you can get," Stokes said. If you're buying seafood at the grocery store , however, he told me it's best to avoid fish with fresh labels and buy frozen instead.
It turns out that the chilly corridor of frozen products is exactly where you want to be if you're buying seafood from the grocery store, Stokes told me. "Frozen fish is often processed and frozen much closer to where it was caught, so you're more likely getting something that was preserved and flash-frozen at its best," he said.
Beyond the potential quality advantage, frozen seafood is often cheaper than fresh because it can be stored and shipped on a looser schedule, Stokes explained. It also has a longer shelf life, so it's less likely to get tossed if it doesn't sell quickly. And frozen fish doesn't necessarily require much extra effort: You can defrost that salmon fillet by leaving it in the refrigerator overnight, and, depending on the recipe, you can even cook fish straight from the freezer .
Do you have a trick or tip for buying the best seafood? Tell us about it in the comments.
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