This story was adapted from Points North, a podcast about the land, water,
and inhabitants of the Great Lakes. from Interlochen Public Radio. Listen
and subscribe wherever you find podcasts.
It’s early April, and Jim VerSnyder is sitting at a big stainless steel table that’s covered in fish blood. He’s got a long, sharp knife in one hand, and with the other, he reaches into a bin filled with ice, pulls out a fish, and plops it on a cutting board.
“Here's how you filet one if you want to learn how,” he says. “They're big fish, and they're kind of hard to cut because I'm out of shape, to tell you the truth.
VerSnyder is 76 years-old, a big guy in bright yellow, waterproof bibs, with a blue bandana tied around his head. He slices through a fresh fish with the dexterity of a surgeon.
“Well, you should have seen me when I was 30. I was a machine,” he says, laughing. “These guys got me down here fileting when I should be retired.”
VerSnyder is part of a small assembly line of workers at Carlson’s Fishery in one of the historic Fishtown shanties in Leland, Michigan. Carlson’s is a shop that sells directly to customers. And today, a local fisherman just brought in the first catch of the year. About 1,700 pounds of Lake Michigan whitefish.
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Dan Wanschura / Points NorthCarlson's Fishery opened in 1904 at Fishtown in Leland.
“They are gorgeous,” comments VerSnyder. “You're not going to find anything much better looking than this. It was swimming this morning.”
After he finishes fileting the whitefish, VerSnyder tosses it on a pile in the middle of the table. Then, he slides the rest of the carcass – about half of the fish – into a big rubber garbage bin. Just a few years ago, Carlson’s Fishery was dumping all of those fish scraps in a landfill. Thousands and thousands of pounds of fish biomass. Basically, if it wasn’t a filet – it was thrown away.
But that’s a whole lot of wasted potential, especially at a time when the Great Lakes commercial fishing industry has been declining for years.
Right now, the value of an average Great Lakes whitefish is around $15. But there’s a project that’s trying to double – even triple that amount in the next several years. And it does that by finding ways to use parts of the fish that are often thrown away. This project is based on a success story in Iceland.
The Land of Fire and Ice (and Fish)
Erla Pétursdóttir grew up in the small fishing town of Grindavík, Iceland. Her grandfather started a fishing business there in 1965. It was a tough way to make a living.
“He was just trying very hard for his family to thrive,” said Pétursdóttir. “And that was quite a struggle for him and … no one was really making a lot of money. It was always trying to fish more and more.”
In other words, too many boats fishing too few fish. In 2000, Pétursdóttir’s father took over the business, and it was all hands on deck. She remembers starting to work in the fishing industry when she was 12 years-old. She said some kids even took off school or worked night shifts when the fishing season got really busy. It’s just what people did. But Pétursdóttir just couldn’t imagine a future in her family fishing business.
“People used to say, ‘Oh, you need to go to school. Otherwise you'll just end up in the fishing industry,’” she recalled. “Like, cause it was only unskilled positions, or no chance of moving up.”
So, when she was 16, she moved away from her family to go to school in Iceland’s capital, Reykjavik. From there she went to Minnesota for college where she double majored in computer science and economics.
After graduating, Erla got a job at an energy consulting firm in downtown Minneapolis. Working in Iceland’s fishing industry was the farthest thing from her mind.
From $15 To $5,000
One of the fish Erla Pétursdóttir’s family relied on was Atlantic cod. In fact, she didn’t grow up eating cod because it was so valuable. Instead, they ate haddock.
Cod is Iceland’s most iconic fish and the lifeblood of the island’s economy. But due to overfishing, the population began to plummet. By the 1980’s, the Icelandic government put in fishing quotas – strict regulations that limited the number of fish caught. And that meant Iceland’s commercial fishery started looking for more ways to increase the value of their catch.
The filet of a typical cod is around 40-50% of the entire fish, and for many in the industry, not much thought was given to that other part of the fish.
“Fifty percent were thrown away, said Thor Sigfusson, who was born and raised in Iceland.
Around that time the commercial fishery zeroed in on a few things that were going to waste: the fish skin, the bones, the liver, and the bladder, to name a few. Those were generally parts of the fish that had not been utilized previously.
First, they went to products like animal feed. Not necessarily a ton of value there, but still, better than throwing it away.
When Thor was working on his PhD at the University of Iceland, he decided he wanted to build on that innovation. And he had this crazy idea: to find ways to use 100% of each fish caught.
“So, I thought to myself, we need to establish some kind of community that connects … fishermen with the scientists, with the startup world, and with other parties that can help,” said Sigfusson.
He said at first, some people were skeptical about his idea. Why focus on the fishing industry? It’s not exactly a cutting-edge field.
“And they were all thinking like … ‘this is a part of our past – this is part of our history,’” said Sigfusson. “‘We're proud of that history, but I'm not going to become a fisherman or a fish processor.’”
So, Thor Sigfusson created the Iceland Ocean Cluster, an innovation hub that brings people from different industries together. And their main goal is to figure out how to use 100% of each fish and make more money doing it.
Pretty quickly all these ideas started popping up. Like how fish enzymes in the cod’s guts could be used for skin and beauty products. Nutraceutical proteins could be gathered from fish heads. Highly specialized skin graft bandages could be made from fish skin. Fish skin could also be used to make gelatin and collagen, and one of the most durable types of leather.