Meet the Man Trying to Save the Rest of the Fish!

Meet Reed the fishmonger, a master behind the knife, and a voice behind conservation. Reed grew up commercial fishing with his Dad; in turn, he spent thousands of hours at the cleaning table.

In 2006, when he was 14 years old, he and his family opened Captain Clay and Son Seafood Market in South Florida. This is where we began to explore his mission - “The more we use, the less we need to take.”

We sat down with Reed to get to the bottom of his fishmongering future.

How did you get into fishmongering?

One of the things that struck me from a young age was how much perfectly good food was being wasted. The standard way of processing a fish was basically to take two fillets off the sides and throw the rest away.

But that wasn’t how I grew up eating fish. I knew how good the cheeks, collars, throat meat, rib meat, and meat around the backbone could be.

So nearly 20 years ago, I started cutting and selling those parts at our seafood market.

How many fish have you cleaned?

I’ve been cleaning fish professionally for about 20 years in a working seafood market, on top of growing up around commercial fishing. At this point, it would easily be hundreds of thousands of fish across an enormous variety of species.

What's your mission?

The mission behind Reed the Fishmonger can really be summed up by something we say on the show: “The more we use, the less we need to take.”

Our goal is to get people excited about seafood, but especially about the parts of the fish that have historically been considered undesirable or simply thrown away.

Take striped bass as a simple example. Roughly 5 million pounds of whole striped bass are harvested annually between the recreational and commercial fisheries. If approximately 50% of the whole fish becomes traditional fillet yield, that’s around 2.5 million pounds of fillets.

But there’s still valuable meat in what remains. We can recover an additional 20% of the remaining 2.5 million pounds through the cheeks, wings, collars, throat and backbone, that’s approximately 500,000 pounds of additional food from fish that have already been harvested.

What do you want to see in the future for fishing?

I want to help create a cultural shift in the way people think about seafood.

For generations, we’ve taught people that the fillet is the fish and everything else is waste. I’d like to help change that.

I want fishermen, fishmongers, and chefs to be proud of utilizing their entire catch. I want consumers to get excited when they see fish cheeks, collars and wings on a menu. I want people at home to look at a fish backbone and think about what they can make with it instead of automatically throwing it away.