Overview

The Seafood Handbook is a well-illustrated and easy-to-read guide of 210 species of seafood in North America, and is a great resource for buyers of seafood, or even your everyday seafood fanatic. However, parts of the introductory chapters, “crash courses” in the seafood industry and seafood handling, are poorly written and seem to evade issues that people who are serious about the seafood business should care about.

Full review

Structure of the book

The Seafood Handbook has more than 280 pages, all in full-color, shiny stock and spiral-bound. The first few chapters are devoted to issues on sustainability, health and safety, aquaculture, harvesting, distribution, product forms, and preparation. Much of the book is for the profiles of the finfish and shellfish. Each species takes up a two-page spread, which has a large painting of the species, the scientific name and common names in a few other languages, a few descriptive paragraphs (on identification and other special features), a product profile (flavor, texture, and storage), cooking tips, a checklist of cooking methods (bake, broil, fry, etc.), substitutions, global supply (with a map and a list of major suppliers, and whether it is farmed or wild), primary product forms (whole, fillets, steaks, smoked, pickled, etc.), and nutrition information. The book also comes with two very large posters providing overviews of the species: one for finfish and one for shellfish.

About the author

The book is written by the editors of Seafood Business magazine, which is America’s leading trade magazine for professional seafood buyers. (Source: http://www.seafoodbusiness.com/)

How is this book interesting/special/new/useful?

The book presents an amazing diversity of seafood — 210 species in all. Each spread is very easy to read and presents all the pertinent data about the species in a clear and organized fashion, though some fields such as market size do not consistently appear for all of them. The nutrition facts (which now include omega-3 fatty acid content), substitutions, and flavor and texture “scales” are very smart additions and make the book unique and quite interesting to read, even for a home consumer. It wouldn’t be very difficult to breeze through the book and gain quite an impressive knowledge of almost all the seafood varieties offered in the market today. The best part is that the book is remarkably light and easy to handle, and shouldn’t be a bother if one wishes to take it on a market excursion.

Another nearly comprehensive guide on seafood written by Alan Davidson, North Atlantic Seafood (winner of a James Beard award), uses line drawings to illustrate each species. It comes down to a matter of personal preference whether one prefers the detail of Davidson’s discrete ink lines which better highlight anatomical nuances, or the skillful color paintings used in the Seafood Handbook. Definitely the latter makes for a better mnemonic device (even if fish colors are inconsistent in real life) and are generally more attractive in this day and age, though some anatomical details suffer, like for bivalves, where the body appears amorphous, and rightly so. It is my opinion that a style that uses both ink and color would be the optimal method.

The introductory chapters on fishing methods and product forms, including the different types of freezing and packing for shellfish, are very informative and not at all intimidating to someone only beginning to become familiar with the seafood industry. There are even diagrams on how to prepare certain types of seafood, though I was disappointed that octopus and lobster weren’t among them.

What problems/flaws are there?

Though the Seafood Handbook is quite impressive in its breadth, it is important to note that the book appears to be geared toward a mostly North American audience. Though some more exotic (but no less important) seafood such as octopus and conch are included, it is by no means complete. Delicacies such as barnacles and sea cucumbers are not included (even if sea urchin is), but neither is milkfish (Chanos chanos), which is sometimes sold in the United States. There is less emphasis on other seafood cooking traditions, such as recommending that fish can be fried whole, or with skin.

The most glaring shortcomings of the book can be found in the introductory chapters. While the book doesn’t promise more than a “crash course” in topics such as aquaculture, a few of the sections are very poorly written. Even though I anticipated some bias for the seafood industry as the book is written by the editors of Seafood Business magazine, I felt like they did their readers a disservice by discussing the very important issues of health, safety, and sustainability in very broad and poorly explained statements. They should have assumed that people who buy the book already have a keen interest in seafood; they needed to have written about the concerns of the consumer even more, rather than downplaying them and writing for a sale. It doesn’t even feel as well-written as a press release, reading more like a Powerpoint presentation in which the bullet points have been passed off as paragraphs. Consider the following excerpts:

The health benefits of eating seafood far outweigh the risks, say nutritionists. The omega-3 fatty acids found in salmon and other oil-rich fish reduce the risk of sudden cardiac death by 20 to 40 percent, compared to a 0.001 percent increase in lifetime cancer risk due to PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls), according to the Salmon of the Americas trade group.

While I appreciate them citing the source of the statement (though there are no endnotes to be found), the statement is dismissive and gives an incomplete picture. Sure, there is a slight increase in cancer risk, but what about acute illness? What about pregnant women and children? Are there any particular sources where the risk of PCB contamination is greatest?

The sustainability issue is even more muddled when it comes to farmed species. Farmed seafood offers buyers plentiful, year-round availability and diversity, making it an ideal product for many retail cases and menus.

Some non-governmental organizations, however, paint a dark picture of aquaculture — particularly farmed salmon — for consumers. But for buyers and consumers who want to be environmentally responsible, avoiding farmed product is no solution.

In addition to being broad and unsupported, the two contiguous, complete paragraphs above (found at the end of a subsection) aren’t really cohesive.

The book takes baby steps into the subject of sustainability, recognizing that it is an important concept to consumers. However, for some species of concern or controversy, such as cod, there isn’t even a mention of conservation issues in the profile. Perhaps adding the current state of sustainability (green, yellow, or red light as adopted by the Monterey Bay Aquarium, for example) and qualifying it for yellow or red lights would be a great resource to add to each profile. Though this may be problematic for farmed species because of a lack of existing standards, at least laying down the facts is a step in the right direction.

There are a lot of tips on how to purchase good seafood, but the book missed on opportunities to show what undesirable seafood looks like, which is disappointing since the high quality of the paper and the printing would best illustrate these points.

Who might enjoy/use this book most?

The book is geared towards seafood buyers, which may include fishmongers, restaurants, groceries, food service operations, and processors. It makes an excellent straightforward “field guide” to the vast diversity presented by seafood suppliers.