Seafood: Fish, Foreigners, and Hard Times

As the fishery producers had noted early in the twentieth century, foreign populations ate much more fish per capita than did Americans. Meat-eating was a prerogative of living in the United States, and many immigrant populations gladly took it up, with their seafood consumption declining after a period of residence in America. At the same time their willingness to eat certain species previously under-consumed in the United States taught their American neighbors to broaden their choices some. In early twentieth-century Boston, for example, albacore, or tuna, appeared in the market, caught and purchased by Italians who managed to persuade Yankee consumers that tuna was a good substitute for pricier beef.