Taiwan is an island and a great consumer of seafood, so it’s only natural that residents of our coastal cities and towns would internalize a seafood culture.

In Donggang, which is famous for its seafood, the local palate reaches far beyond the bluefin tuna, Sakura shrimp, and oilfish roe (of Ruvettus pretiosus) that most of us are familiar with. There, no seafood dinner at a restaurant is complete without an order of battered and fried “that fish” (Harpadon microchir), just-thawed Sakura shrimp, and the dark meat or trimmings from tuna or marlin.

Meanwhile, in Toucheng, Yilan County, even celebrities gush about a teppanyaki restaurant that serves the long-pincered, orange-shelled armored lobster (Metanephrops armatus), a local delicacy whose belly is filled with gem-like roe. First lightly fried, then cut into pieces and served on a white porcelain plate, these “horned shrimp” as they are known in Chinese are no less enticing than spiny lobsters in both form and flavor.
 

A rich and diverse ecosystem

These fascinating and less often seen elements of seafood culture can make you look beyond more common menu items like salmon and cod. “Consider the whole diversity of options when eating ­seafood,” says Huang Chih-yang, associate professor in the Department of Aquaculture at National Taiwan Ocean University.

The seas around Taiwan are bountiful. According to marine biologist Shao Kwang-tsao, one-tenth of the world’s fish species can be found in Taiwan’s waters. The abundance of this ecosystem is reflected in the everyday diet of Taiwan’s residents.

Seafood dishes tend to be the most delicate and variable ones on the table, highlighting the season, the marine species and local customs. Seafood flavors and grades are also influenced by a multitude of factors, including the sea area where they were sourced, whether wild or farmed, the water’s depth and temperature, the method of catch, and the size of the fish.

“But fishermen can’t guarantee that the sea will give them a particular fish on any given day, even if that fish is in season” says Huang.

Stringent production requirements, the need for unbroken cold-chain logistics to maintain freshness and the race against time to get fish to market all serve to keep seafood prices high.

Fisherman-style cuts

The seafood-obsessed Huang combines marine expertise with a foodie’s adventurousness, traveling all over to taste different seafoods. He is also active on social media, sharing his experience via a Facebook group that he set up on fish farming and seafood culture.

But Huang doesn’t focus on the pricey fish popular with the masses. Instead, he directs his gaze to what the seafood industry thinks of as “downmarket” varieties and cuts. Rarely offered for sale in retail markets, many can only be tasted on a fishing boat. The reason so few of these inexpensive and largely unknown varieties of fish stray far from the harbors where they are landed is that sometimes they are simply too ugly in appearance or too few in quantity to go to market.

A fixture in harbors and fish markets for the last 30-some years, Huang’s closeness to both fishermen and fishmongers has provided him with opportunities to go to sea with the former and trade cooking and tasting notes with the latter. This has in turn enabled him to enjoy fresh, quickly prepared authentic harbor cuisine that includes these less common varieties of seafood.

Though there are some harbor-area restaurants that are willing to buy unusual fish and cuts, restaurants don’t include them on their menus because the fishes’ availability is too limited and too sporadic. Unless you are yourself a foodie or are connected to someone in the know, you’re unlikely to run across them except by chance.

This isn’t because fishermen are keeping secrets, or because the fish are hard to prepare or keep fresh. Instead, Huang explains, it’s simply because the fish lack a market price, and few people ask about them. Wholesalers therefore lost interest in buying them, and they became rare on the retail market.

That said, goose barnacles, and the unattractive-looking and hard-to-pronounce Harpadon microchir, a close relative of “Bombay duck” (Harpadon nehereus) and colloquially known to ­Taiwanese fishmongers as “that fish,” are gradually becoming better known thanks to social media.

Or take various species of billfish. The meat may be popular, but offcuts like the voluminous stomach, belly meat, dorsal fin, ozutsu (the area behind the dorsal fin) and even eyes all have their own flavor and mouthfeel that, when paired with other local ingredients, make them aspects of fishermen’s cuisine worth trying. Huang discusses these and other unusual fish and cuts in his book Oddball Seafood: A New Guide for Island Dwellers.
 

“Miscellaneous” fish

Huang doesn’t seek out less common seafoods just to be different or in search of novelty. Instead, he sees local environments and cultures converging in this panoply of offerings. More, he views diversity on the table as a manifestation of the ideas of valuing food, avoiding food waste, and the “slow food” movement.

We visit Daxi Fishing Harbor in Toucheng with Huang to better grasp his point. Looking out from the harbor under the clear summer skies, we can see Turtle Island in the distance. The fishing boats that went out on the morning tide begin reentering the harbor in the after­noon, tying up at the dock so the fishermen can deftly unload baskets filled with their catch.

The stars of today’s haul are familiar to most of us: blackmouth croaker (Atrobucca nibe), blackthroat seaperch (Doederleinia berycoides), horsehead tilefish (Branchiostegus japonicus) and Chinese white shrimp (Penaeus chinensis). Presold to wholesalers by phone while the boats were still at sea, these bestsellers will never make it to auction.

But Huang is interested in the non-mainstream species that fishermen lump together as bycatch. Because most of Daxi’s fishing boats are bottom trawlers, they tend to catch more than a few odd-looking specimens.

These kinds of fish can’t be sold for much, so they are generally offered by the basket or tray. In the event that a crew catches a lot, they’ll separate them by species, but if they have only a few, they sell the whole lot together.

Because of their low value, not a lot of effort is put into keeping these fish fresh. As closing time approaches in the market, vendors hawk them for as little as NT$50 per tray, or three trays for NT$100. “Tourists buy them, but it’s usually just because the fish are cheap,” says a rueful Huang. By the next day, the fish are no longer fresh enough for the market and are either sold cheaply for processing into feed, or simply discarded as trash.

Every fish has a backstory

Unfortunately, few people appreciate that “seafood’s taste and price are largely unrelated,” says Huang, who has tried all of it. Generally speaking, people pick fish based on whether they look attractive. And even though seafood has always been the most expensive of dietary proteins, Taiwanese consume an average of about 30 kilo­grams per person per year. That’s far higher than the global average of 20.5 kg per person. With more than 1,000 species of edible seafood living in the seas around our island, it’s a shame that we eat so few kinds.

If people were more willing to buy less common kinds of fish, if they looked beyond highly prized or endangered species and appreciated non-mainstream varieties of seafood, fish prices would rise across the board, increasing fishermen’s incomes and reducing the frequency with which they have to go to sea. Such a change in consumption patterns would also aid in ocean sustainability. Even Shao Kwang-tsao, a domestic standard-bearer for marine conservation, has expressed support for the idea.

Eating fish is a fleeting sensory experience, but under­standing the process of getting it from its source to the dining table requires sociological observations on the fishing industry, food and farming, and local conditions and culture.

Once you grasp all those nuances, you can’t help but appreciate how much goes into getting seafood to your plate, which is far more rewarding than the novelty and satisfaction we experience from eating particular species. “In the end, which species you eat really isn’t the point,” says Huang, concluding his illuminating class on food and farming.

For more pictures, please click 《Odd Fish: In Search of Unconventional, Sustainable Seafoods》