452 MARINE FISHERIES OF NORTH CAROLINA 



i. Market-to-Table Study. One concern of the housewife is the question of 

 just how much edible food can be had from a whole fish. When she buys a 

 fish in the rough, the retail price she pays is, of course, for the entire fish, 

 including what will be edible and what will become waste. The amount of 

 this waste determines her true cost per serving. 



To get some figures on quantity and costs of edible portions of fish bought 

 in the rough, the food classes at Woman's College in Greensboro bought 

 four fish each of nine popular varieties, a quantity of shrimp, and some 

 oysters. These eleven varieties were weighed individually as purchased, 

 then they were prepared for cooking and the amount of waste recorded. 

 Finally, the items were cooked, divided into servings, and the cost per 

 serving computed. The prices are of October, 1946. 



MECHANISM OF DISTRIBUTION « 



Distributor-Dealers. Because of the great diversity of kinds of fish avail- 

 able to the market, their sizes, grades, seasons of abundance, etc., and 

 because of the public taste, which varies from place to place, it is the func- 

 tion of the distribution mechanism to perform the exceedingly complex 

 service of assembling from the many points of production the many kinds 

 of seafoods, sub-dividing and transporting them to the many markets. In 

 North Carolina it is the function of the distributor-dealers not only to 

 distribute North Carolina production, but to reach often far beyond the 

 State into Florida, New England, and other distant sources and to bring 

 fresh, frozen, packaged or not, but preferably fresh seafood products of 

 many kinds into the State to wholesalers, institutions, and retailers. By 

 adding the function of storage of perishable products to their other services, 

 they are able to provide a ".ertain stability and continuity of supply of the 

 highly variable assortment of production from many fluctuating sources 

 wherein scarcities of one kind are made up by abundances of others. 



In 1946, nine of these distributor-dealers were reported as operating in 

 North Carolina: Charlotte, i; Elizabeth City, i; Washington, i; Greens- 

 boro, i; Swansboro, i; Hampstead, i; Wilmington, 3. Some of these dis- 

 tributor-dealers in North Carolina acquire fish from as far away as Canada 

 and the Gulf of Mexico; frequently their sources are the producer-dealers 

 on the North Carolina coast, but they may also buy from other distributor- 

 dealers. Their sources of supply may change with the seasons. The North 



6. Based on report of field survey made by Dr. C. A. Kirkpatrick in the fall of 1946. Dr. 

 Kirkpatrick made inquiries in the following fifteen towns and cities in North Carolina: Asheville, 

 Charlotte, Greensboro, Raleigh, Winston-Salem, Burlington, Fayetteville, Greenville, Hickory, 

 SaHsbury, Laurinburg, Morganton, Tarboro, Oxford and Whiteville. Dr. Kirkpatrick's report, 

 being based on a limited coverage, is mainly qualitative and descriptive, and is here rearranged 

 so as to conform to the general style and design of this Survey. 



