Rationale
Seafood plays a large role in the cuisine and food traditions for many of my students’ cultural backgrounds. The community Overfelt serves is predominately Hispanic/Latinx and Asian. At many Mexican restaurants, octopus, raw oysters, and ceviche made of a variety of fish and seafood are common on the menus. Chinese restaurants will use tanks of live fish, king crabs, Australian crabs, shrimp, and other seafood as décor. Deep fried Dungeness crabs, ginger scallion lobsters and fresh prawns are staples for dinners celebrating special occasions. Living in Northern California in the greater San Francisco Bay Area region, the iconic Dungeness crab season that traditionally starts in mid-December is timed perfectly to coincide with holiday and New Year’s gatherings.
Figure 1: Fried whole smelt fish being portioned at a Chinese dim sum restaurant. Large quantities of clams in black bean sauce are also available.5
Overfelt is located within blocks of Asian and Mexican shopping centers, restaurants, and businesses. Of note are the local supermarkets. We have the usual major grocery chains available in our area. However, what makes the East Side unique and vibrant is the wide variety of large Mexican, Vietnamese, Chinese, and Filipino grocery stores offering ingredients and items that meet the local demands. One of the key differences in these grocery stores is the seafood counter. American run chains typically have very clean, sleek refrigerated cases displaying filets of fish and bags of shellfish sitting on ice, and maybe a lobster tank with a few lobsters. In our Asian and Mexican markets, customers can choose from varieties of fish, squids, octopi, oysters in their shells sold by the dozens, tanks of Dungeness and blue crabs, lobsters, clams, shrimp, geoducks, sea snails, sea cucumbers, abalone and frogs so fresh that many options are still alive.
What goes unnoticed or ignored are government mandated warning signs of potential foodborne illnesses from undercooked or raw seafood, California Proposition 65 warning signs indicating that seafood may contain chemicals that are known to cause cancer, birth defects, or other reproductive harm. Notably absent or not as apparent are signs indicating the potential for ingesting seafood containing biotoxins that are not removable through cooking, nor are there signs clearly visible mentioning ways to minimize exposure. Methods to minimize exposure, which are discussed below, often contradict and conflict with cooking methods and cultural practices used by my students and their families when preparing and consuming seafood, potentially putting the health and lives of many at risk.
Furthermore, beaches on the Pacific are less than an hour away from San Jose. Just over an hour to the south is Monterey Bay, where you can find many restaurants offering their version of clam chowder and fresh seafood. An hour north of San Jose is San Francisco, where Fisherman’s Wharf is a major tourist attraction and the annual Dungeness crab season beginning in the Fall is a highlight. One may easily be mistaken to believe that the restaurants are serving seafood caught off the local coastline and wild mussels, clams and other bivalves can be found along the coast on beaches. However, the seafood most likely came from other sources as the wild populations found off the Bay Area county coastlines have elevated levels of biotoxins that can sicken and potentially kill humans that consume contaminated seafood.
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