Seafood restaurant encourages educated consumers

Many seafood restaurant operators are naturally reluctant to draw attention to issues surrounding the sustainability of their livelihood, but one Massachusetts owner is deliberately shining the spotlight on the subject.

Maritime Gloucester, a waterfront museum and marine science education center, is running a series of free public lectures in March on the future of fishing and seafood, sustainability and seafood fraud. The sponsor? Turner’s Seafood. Turner’s runs a retail fish market and wholesale fish processing facility in Gloucester, Mass., and a restaurant/oyster bar/fish market in nearby Melrose, MA, called Turner’s Seafood Grill. Turner’s also sells fish and lobster online.

Gloucester, north of Boston on Cape Ann, has historically been an important fishing and maritime tourism community. Seafood restaurants and whale-watching tours are big business here, and standing guard over the shoreline is the iconic Gorton’s Fisherman statue.

"The public is hungry to better understand these topics, and we are thrilled to bring the conversation to Maritime Gloucester,” says Tom Balf, executive director of the museum.

The March program will cover the following timely subjects:

• Fish, Fraud and Forensics. A Boston Globe investigative reporter and a representative from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, or NOAA, tackle this growing problem and measures to address it.

• Trawl to Table: Understanding Today’s Groundfisheries. An eye-opening discussion of commercial ground fishing methods, gear technologies, seafood transport and the seafood needs of discerning markets.

• Sustainable Seafood Choices. Representatives from two consumer-oriented sustainability programs offer advice on buying seafood.

The series wraps up by putting theory into practice with a city-wide seafood crawl.