How Fresh Fish From Monterey Bay Reaches School Lunch Trays

How Fresh Fish From Monterey Bay Reaches School Lunch Trays

Waterline is an ongoing series that explores the solutions making rivers, waterways and ocean food chains healthier. It is funded by a grant from the Walton Family Foundation.

This story is published in collaboration with the Local Catch Network. 

With the 2014 school year in full swing, Jenn Lovewell, the then-acting director of the Monterey Peninsula Unified School District, noticed something was conspicuously missing from her schools’ lunchrooms. “We were doing a lot of work in the district around farms, so we had a lot of beautiful salad bars full of fresh local produce and free range chicken, grass fed beef, all that stuff,” recalls Lovewell. “But I really wanted a source of seafood — local seafood — because [what] we served otherwise was frozen fish sticks.”

For Monterey Bay, which was once given the moniker “Serengeti of the sea” in a nod to the region’s aquatic diversity and abundance, the omission of seafood from the local public school menu was glaring. The bay is massive, curving along 276 miles of wind-whipped, mid-California coastline. And its waters even more so: the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, a federally protected ocean preserve created by NOAA in 1992, encompasses a little over 6,000 square miles of ocean, where sea lions tangle in the dappled light of kelp forests, wrasses feast on sea slugs, and fat, pink starfish decorate rocks nestled in foamy tide pools. 

The bay is also, historically, a nourishing place for humans. Since time immemorial, Indigenous fishers built and maintained sustainable fisheries that supported their societies with species like abalone and Pacific salmon. In the 19th and 20th centuries, the bay was the epicenter of a sardine boom led by the Booth Cannery Company, and at its peak, the sardine fishery that supported Cannery Row produced 250,000 tons of canned fish a year. But toward the end of the 20th century, the sardine population had been overfished, and the industry saw a majority of its canneries close. 

By 2014, the environment students in Lovewell’s school district saw through their classroom windows was drastically changed, and in the place of the active wharves that once defined the area’s culture were saltwater taffy shops and sweatshirt stands. As Lovewell’s mission came into focus, so did the region’s changes. “There was no working waterfront anymore,” Lovewell says. “There just weren’t local fishermen at the scale needed to be able to serve a school district.”

Lovewell calls this period of time her “crash course” in the complexities — and contradictions — of fisheries and seafood at large scale in the United States. “So much of our seafood caught here in the U.S. gets exported, and [meanwhile] we are importing cheaper, farmed-raised seafood from other countries,” she explains. It seemed absurd to her that the 10,000 students of the Monterey school district, many of whom could gaze out their classroom windows at waves of the Pacific crashing upon the shore, didn’t have access to the fish in those very same waters. Lovewell set out to change that.

In Monterey County, where the average annual household income is $94,486 — just slightly over the national average of $80,610 — class variance effectively reflects, and in some cases determines, access to fresh seafood. A study conducted by Stanford University in 2024 found that wealthy and generally white individuals (both as residents and tourists) have better financial access to fresh seafood despite the fact that the county has a high diversity of racial and ethnic, particularly Latinx, identities. These lower income groups generally have lower financial access to that same fish coming out of the oceanic commons. Meanwhile, in lieu of participating in commercial fishing operations, some fishers prefer to make their own sales connections in local markets. But this choice comes at a cost, and often it is tougher for fishers to make a living wage. This phenomenon is described in the study as a problem of “poverty on both sides,” where local communities can barely afford to purchase fresh seafood and local fishers can barely afford to fish for it. 

This imbalance isn’t new. Similar conditions plagued the agricultural industry in the middle of the 20th century, and in response, Community-Supported Agriculture (CSA) programs started popping up to create affordable and efficient local supply chains. Both consumer and farmer stood to benefit from this new system, where individuals could sign up for a subscription-based acquisition program, creating both predictable capital for farmers and reliable, nutritious food for consumers. The idea was a revelation for farmers who had been edged out of profitable outcomes by corporate agriculture, and experts in other fields, like the fisheries, sought to replicate the program. Ten years ago, Jenn Lovewell and her partner, Alan Lovewell, saw an opportunity to modify the CSF (Community-Supported Fishery) model with a twist of their own: in addition to individuals with subscriptions, they would enable institutions to buy seafood directly from fishers. 

As Ryan O’Connor, a PhD candidate at Stanford University’s Doerr School of Sustainability and author of the Stanford study, explains, “[CSFs] create an institutionalized and really consistent market to support fishers in moving these products,” but to make a small, local fishery successful, you must have buy in from larger groups. “If you have institutions that have power and if you have these long standing sort of multilateral agreements between the local fishers, and a school … it creates these markets in ways that are really sustainable.”

In 2014, the Lovewells founded the Sea-to-School program Bay2Tray as a CSF-modeled organization that connected Monterey Bay area schools with local fishers to purchase their bycatch (the unwanted species caught incidentally while fishing for another type of fish). Key to the pilot’s launch was what turned out to be the most important participants in the endeavor: the children. The team set up booths on playgrounds and in lunchrooms, and served sample bites of recipes made with local seafood, like ceviche with chips or fish burgers. They asked for honest feedback, created a voting system and supplied participating kids with stickers with phrases like “I love it” or “I tried it.” More often than not, kids who said they didn’t eat seafood ended up reaching for the “I love it” sticker. “On the day that we were going to pilot the local fish tacos, [it] was such a success, we sold more fish tacos than we did pizza,” recalls Lovewell. 

Lovewell and O’Connor agree that buy-in from the kids is crucial for the Sea-to-School mission to succeed. “The cafeteria is an extension of the classroom,” says Lovewell. “So we can really teach them without them even knowing that they’re learning about food and about their bodies and about choices.” Often kids bring home the knowledge they’ve gained, encouraging their parents to buy more seafood as a result of the tasty recipes they are trying at school. O’Connor calls these “sharing chains,” in which a child’s preferences can contribute to and sometimes alter the behavior of a family group. 

And getting kids on board is crucial for another reason: One day these first and second graders will be adults with their own families, and hopefully they will have internalized the lessons learned in the cafeteria about local seafood and make more sustainable choices. “The creativity of how we present [the fish] and introducing it in new and interesting ways can trickle up through a community,” says O’Connor. “That’s ultimately the huge power of engaging youth in these kinds of processes — it creates this grassroots energy that will grow into a cultural consciousness where it creates norms.”

But shifting an entire society’s cultural norms when it comes to fresh, locally caught seafood is not without its headwinds. “With scale comes efficiency, and with efficiency comes cost savings,” explains O’Connor. “So the small-scale fishers competing with massive international, commercialized, industrialized fishing operations are always going to be at a disadvantage. When you don’t have the institutional resiliency of a large, massive operation, there’s risk.” 

Because there is no centralized government support for programs like Bay2Tray, a lot of pressure is put on the leaders of individual institutions to make the more values-driven choice when it comes to what ends up in the cafeteria. O’Connor, however, is confident that in time, this reluctance on the part of institutions like schools and hospitals can be overcome. “A lot of these institutions want to be able to go to their community, go to their consumer bases and say, ‘We value supporting local economies. We value sustainability in our seafood purchasing.’”

Since its inception, the Bay2Tray program has managed to repurpose over 75,000 pounds of what would be considered seafood waste to serve over 88,000 healthy school lunches, a challenge in its own right considering that the average school lunch budget in California is approximately $1.25 a day per student. The program has already expanded into four additional school districts in the state, and the next phase extends all the way to the Chesapeake region, where Lovewell is training school districts to purchase and create meals out of blue catfish, a highly invasive species in the region.

Coastal localities like the Bay Area and Chesapeake serve as ideal incubators for Sea-to-School programs, which are taking hold in other states as well. In Oregon, Tre-Fin Day Boat Seafood, a small day-boat operation, is supplying albacore to 12 different school districts, with the Oregon Department of Agriculture actually hiring a chef to develop recipes for the schools. In Maine, kids are being served kelp meatballs via a local kelp provider, and programs like the Maine Coast Fishermen’s Association’s Fishermen Feeding Mainers supply freshly caught fish to schools as far north as the Canadian border. Elsewhere in New England, cooperatives like Chatham Harvesters bring under-appreciated species like monkfish to schools’ cafeterias. 

The increasing number of Sea-to-School programs is in line with broader nutrition trends in public schools. According to the most recent Farm-to-School census conducted by the USDA in 2023, local food, which includes locally caught seafood, is being served in over 74,000 schools across the United States, up from less than 43,000 schools a decade ago. In California, Bay2Tray’s home state, of the schools who responded to the census in 2023, 5,788,489 students benefited from locally sourced food in their cafeterias, up from 2,564,112 in 2013.

Willow Grinell, a graduate student in the Social Oceans Lab at the University of Maine who is studying the impact of Sea-to-School programs on communities, has witnessed a lot of progress and energy, especially around the use of unwanted species like the bycatch being used by Bay2Tray: “Seeing some of these products and species go from [a situation] where no one quite knows how to prepare it in a school setting to this value-added [product] because there’s recipes and interest — that’s exciting momentum.” 

O’Connor believes that maintaining this momentum is possible and that the expansion of Sea-to-School programs into more states can happen with the right formula. “I do think [programs like these] provide a really exciting and effective opportunity to simplify these supply chains and bring the money back into small-scale fishing communities instead of massive, industrialized fishing economies. But it’s a really, really challenging equation to balance that requires a lot of buy-in from a lot of different stakeholders and rights holders on all sides of the equation,” he says.

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The impact of getting that equation right, though harder to calculate, has ramifications beyond a more nutritious future for kids “Making more cognizant choices about the food that is in the cafeteria basically affects the whole atmosphere and the messages that [kids are] getting,” Lovewell explains. “A lot of kids are going through a hard time at home … and [when they’re served] beautiful food that we’ve put a lot of care into — the message is, ‘You matter.’” she muses. “‘This is what fresh fish actually tastes like. This is what local supply chains taste like.’”