A few years ago, when I made regular trips to the Baltimore waterfront to fish for rockfish, several people stopped to ask the same question: Are they safe to eat?
My answer: “I don’t know. I’m not a biologist. But rockfish are migratory. They move around and visit the Atlantic. So it’s not like they’re just bottom feeding in the Inner Harbor or Middle Branch all year, accumulating toxins in their flesh. They’re probably safe. Besides, I might catch and keep only one or two per year. I don’t think it will kill me.”
Notice the reference to bottom feeding, the suggestion that rockfish have eating habits superior to less venerated Chesapeake species such as channel catfish or carp.
While bottom feeders eat natural food — mollusks, insect larvae, small fish and some plants — they are thought to be consumers of stuff we’d rather not think about, especially in urban areas. I don’t know if that reputation is deserved, but it’s what a lot of us think, and science-based advisories suggest that certain fish that feed on the bottom pose some risks to humans.
I bring this up because we’re in the second month of The Year of Eating Chesapeake Blue Catfish, proclaimed in this space to support efforts to arrest the growth of an invasive species. Blue catfish are all over the Chesapeake and its tributaries, and it appears they are eating everything, top and bottom.
We need to eat more of them.
To this end, Sun readers sent me recipes to share. (There’s one at the end of this column.) But I also received a caution from Andy Grosko, who has harvested catfish from local waters.
“Sure,” he wrote from Woodstock, “we want to manage invasive fish populations and help commercial watermen, but not at the…
