Fresh Harvest Kitchen in Westerly

Feeding the Community Through Collaboration, Education and Local Seafood

When you walk into most fish markets, your eyes are drawn to a display case where fish and shellfish are nicely lined up on ice for you to peruse before making your decision. In Rhode Island, we are lucky: We have access to very productive marine ecosystems, just steps from our shores. These support healthy fish populations and economic and culturally important fishing communities, and have the potential to fill those display cases with a wide array of delicious local seafood.

And yet, in most markets we are lucky to find even a few locally caught species.

The same is true on restaurant menus. Our markets, menus and plates generally do not reflect the diversity of seafood produced by our local ecosystems or of seafood caught in our local fisheries. Instead of squid, butterfish, scup, whiting, black sea bass, fluke, skate, quahogs and Jonah crabs, our options frequently consist merely of shrimp, salmon, tuna, swordfish and some kind of flakey white fish (some of which might be local but much is imported).

FRESH TAKE

Fresh Harvest Kitchen in Westerly is looking to present an alternative, a different kind of fish market where there are no display cases catering to what the consumer demands and no imported fish, only seasonal local seafood, caught by local fishermen to feed the people in their community.

The Fresh Harvest Kitchen is a collaboration between the Southern Rhode Island Conservation District, local independent fishers and small-scale farmers to open and operate a cooperatively run, fully licensed, shared commercial kitchen and processing facility with a retail and wholesale market. The project is led by fishermen Josiah Dodge and Jason Jarvis and by Gina Fuller, district manager at the conservation district.

ANCHORED IN THE SEA

Both Dodge and Jarvis come from fishing families. One of Dodge’s ancestors is Tresum Dodge, who in 1661 was paid with three-and- a-half acres of land to leave the Massachusetts colony and go to Block Island to fish. Josiah Dodge has fished his whole life, spending time on the Cape with his father and fishing for some of the larger fish houses in Point Judith. He now fishes for himself and runs his own boat, the FV Edrie and Logan, named after his youngest daughter and son. He primarily fishes rod and reel, fish pots and lobster traps from the boat but recently acquired a larger boat from which he can gillnet. A bigger boat will allow him to fish more frequently (it can go out farther and in worse weather) and target more species of fish.

Jarvis actually started in commercial fishing while working as a social worker. His brother needed crew and showed up at Jarvis’s workplace one day and persuaded him to come fishing. “I worked for him for a week, monkfish and skate fishing, and I was sick all day. But all I had to do was cut fish and I knew how to do that—so that’s what I did and the rest is history,” says Jarvis. “I grew up with sustenance fishing— we went and caught fish and brought them home and ate them.”

By now Jarvis has worked on many types of fishing boats and has his own two smaller boats, Jake Jr. and Old Jake, named after his father. He primarily fishes rod and reel but worked on an oyster farm when he had engine trouble last year and he will also go shell fishing on occasion.

OBSTACLE COURSE

Having a licensed facility to process and sell their catch out of is a game changer for Dodge and Jarvis and the other fishers in the Westerly area. “Part of why we got started is there is no commercial infrastructure for the 30 commercial fishing boats that fish out of Westerly,” explains Jarvis. “So everyone who fishes here has to transport their fish 42 to 45 miles round trip to Point Judith.”

Point Judith is the state’s largest fishing port and where the majority of the seafood dealers in the state are located. Legally, fishers must sell their catch through a licensed dealer and not having a dealer right in Westerly presented a challenge. In April 2020 in the pandemic lockdown, Rhode Island passed temporary legislation allowing fishers to purchase a direct sales dealers license that allowed them to sell their catch directly from their boats to consumers. This temporary legislation eventually became permanent but came with limitations.

The fishers with the license are only allowed to sell non-histamine-producing finfish and live crustaceans, the fish must be sold from their boats or docks, and they are not allowed to engage in processing activities. That means, among other things, no filleting of the fish and thus all of the fish must be sold whole.

Dodge was one of the fishers who got this license and tried selling his catch direct to the public. “I was coming to the Watch Hill Outfitters everyday with fish and people were trying to buy it. But then they would say to me, ‘Well, I don’t know what to do [with whole fish] and I’d try to walk them through the steps but you couldn’t fillet it for them, even if they bought it,” he says. “You’re trying to teach people how to clean and fillet the fish, and they are looking at you like you have six heads. That’s just one reason why this [Fresh Harvest Kitchen] is good.”

TO MARKET

The new shared processing facility will not only allow Dodge, Jarvis and other fishers to fillet their fish and sell it to the public, but they also plan to use it as an educational space where they can teach people how to fillet and prepare their own fish.

“It’s generational,” Dodge says. “The fillet is to fish what the TV dinner did to cooking. It became a convenience—you go to the store, buy a fillet, you throw it in the oven—and done. You don’t have to know how to fillet, you don’t really need to know how to cook. At the end of the day, we have lost that know-how; we want to bring that back.”

Despite the demand for fish fillets, there are people in the community who do know how to work with whole fish and Dodge has been selling to those customers as well. “I became connected with members of the large Asian community here in Westerly. I was selling fish [through direct sales] to one woman and then she brought her sisters, her aunt and others with her—they were taking smaller sea bass and smaller scup and they were happy with the quality of the fish,” he says.

Customers also include chefs and restaurants in the area. “We had fish going to David at the Shipwright’s Daughter over in Mystic, Connecticut, and Henry at George’s of Galilee in Point Judith,” says Dodge. With the new facility they can expand their retail and wholesale operations. Thus, both fishers have been reaching out to more restaurants and sales are rising.

“Hot Rod Café in New London, Connecticut, is going to buy our fish. I just connected with a new Jamaican restaurant in Norwich, Connecticut, and another in New London, that will buy our fish,” says Jarvis. “One of the things we are trying to promote is quality. We treat all our fish like sushi-grade fluke. We bleed and slush everything on the boat. When you bring people fresh fish and they say to you ‘it doesn’t smell,’ they don’t realize fresh fish shouldn’t smell.”

Henry O’Neill is the head chef at George’s of Galilee in Point Judith. They are one of the restaurants that began buying fish from Dodge during the pandemic. “We developed a relationship with Josiah when he was coming in with some really fresh nice black sea bass and it worked perfectly with a menu item that we have on right now for whole roasted local fish,” says O’Neill. “We really wanted to be able to help the local fishermen so we felt like that was a great thing for him and for us.”

The whole roasted local fish is always on the menu at George’s but the fish type rotates based on the catch. “If he brings in some porgy (a.k.a. scup), we will gladly take some of that, black sea bass is obviously awesome but we are flexible. As long as it’s whole local fish, we’ll offer whatever is available. We’ve served sea robin, fluke, you name it. The dish looks fantastic going out and it’s one we are super proud of—and customers love it,” says the chef.

KNOW YOUR FISH … AND VEGETABLES

This type of flexible attitude is something Dodge and Jarvis hope more consumers will adopt. They want to see more people in their community eating a variety of locally caught seafood. “Most of our local seafood is exported and, more often than not, people have no idea where their fish is coming from,” says Jarvis. “The idea is for people to come in here and see what is local and who is catching their fish—and on top of that, knowing the quality of it.”

They plan on selling anything they catch, which includes scup, black sea bass, tautog, sea robin, skate, monkfish, dogfish, lobster, Jonah crab, sand crabs, green crabs, quahogs, soft shell clams and razor clams, as well as oysters from nearby oyster farms. “Eventually it will be set up as a small retail market with a mix of everything. There will be local produce in addition to the seafood, meat, eggs, etc., almost like a farmers market. Wholesale out back; retail out front. We hope to get more fishers involved,” Jarvis says. Fresh Harvest Kitchen will provide the community with the opportunity to taste, purchase and learn to prepare locally harvested, locally grown and produced foods. It will also provide the member small businesses with the resources they need to grow their businesses. When fully complete, the goal is to offer a range of services, products and programs that will contribute to a healthy and resilient community.

To some, this model may seem new and innovative but not to Jarvis. “I laughed when someone asked, ‘Well, is this a new model?’ and I replied, ‘This is a hundreds, maybe thousands, of years-old model.’ This isn’t new—this is how things used to be done—how things were done all over the world, when our food didn’t travel 1,000 miles. You ate what was in season where you lived, at that given point in time.”

To learn more, visit FreshHarvestKitchen.com.