Live Atlantic blue crabs enter CryoTech Industries. 



Workers place crabs on an automated backing machine that 

 removes the crabs' backs, viscera and gill feathers. 



shrimp doesn't mean that the 

 fisherman's catch wasn't hitting 

 the freezer. 



Quite the opposite. 



More fish and shellfish were 

 handled frozen than fresh. Super- 

 market chains and restaurants 

 bought large quantities of frozen 

 product, thawed it and sold it to 

 customers, and people ate it up 

 without so much as a thought of the 

 freezer. 



At least some processors in the 

 seafood industry had learned their 

 lesson. They were freezing prime 

 quality seafood faster and using 

 better equipment to do it with. 



About this time, seafood con- 

 sumption skyrocketed as nutrition- 

 ists and dietitians touted fish and 

 shellfish as a high quality source of 

 protein that was low in fat and 

 cholesterol. Meeting the steady 

 demand for the catch of the day 



meant freezing became an industry 

 standard. 



And freezing certainly offers the 

 seafood industry several advantages. 



It stabilizes supply and price. It 

 means seafood can be distributed 

 using ships, trains and trucks rather 

 than the more expensive air service. 

 It helps grocers and restaurateurs to 

 buy in bulk at substantial savings. 

 And it permits the flood of foreign 



Continued 



A: Some in the seafood industry 

 question the use of the word "fresh" 

 to describe a fish that hasn't seen the 

 ocean in more than a week. 



In many cases, distributors and 

 retailers use fresh to mean a fish that 

 has never been frozen or processed, 

 not as a measure of the time since its 

 harvest and, hence, its quality. 



But consumers think differently, 

 and they are often misled by the use 

 of the word. Many shoppers stead- 

 fastly believe that "fresh" indicates a 



fish was recently harvested. 



Frequently, however, that's just 

 not the case, and not surprisingly, 

 many grocers and retailers have no 

 idea how old their seafood products 

 are. They receive them in their 

 stores, slap a three-day pull date on 

 the package and rotate them onto the 

 counter. 



But Sea Grant researcher Tyre 

 Lanier would like to change that. In 

 his N.C. State University food 

 science laboratory, Lanier has begun 



experimenting with a simple test 

 strip to evaluate fish for degrees of 

 freshness. 



If developed, the strip could help 

 wholesalers and retailers distinguish 

 acceptable from unacceptable quality 

 seafood and to predict how long a 

 product can be expected to remain 

 fresh at a given temperature. 



Then, retailers could more 

 accurately label their "fresh" seafood 

 products. E 



COASTWATCH 1 5 



