Edible San Francisco

By Marcia Gagliardi

In many a San Francisco restaurant, it’s not uncommon to overhear savvy diners asking their server, “Excuse me, is your salmon farmed or wild?” And just watch the eyebrows shoot up when the answer is, “Farmed.” As the public becomes wiser about the harmful environmental effects of aquaculture, or fish farming, the more often they are inquiring about the provenance of certain sea creatures before committing to buy.

But there’s one product of aquaculture you can feel good about: abalone. It’s even been given the thumbs up on the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch list (www.seafoodwatch.org). That is, if you can afford it. Jacques Cousteau called abalone steak “the filet mignon of the sea,” and since it can clock in at $50 or more on many restaurant menus, oui, it is one pricy snail. A marine snail, to be exact; don’t let the glistening mother-of-pearl shell fool you—it’s not a shellfish.

Why so expensive? Like many other once formerly plentiful Californian sea dwellers (the Olympic oyster, Monterey sardines), the slow-growing wild abalone was tragically over popular and thus was over-fished. This delicate sea snail also had a hard time surviving disease and pollution. Abalones are so sensitive they are actually used as an indicating species for water quality testing—state water-quality laboratories use them to test for pollutants in water samples. Other contributing factors include loss of their habitat and an increased population of otters, which harbor quite a love for them—the balance between otters, kelp, and abalone numbers (sea urchin, too) is a delicate one, to say the least.

By the 1970s, this formerly abundant and luxurious little filet was bordering on extinction, especially the white abalone. (All along the Pacific coast, there’s an array of colorful species, ranging from green to white to black to pink.) Various harvesting moratoria began in California in the early 1990s, and in 1997, commercial abalone fishing was prohibited. Only sport fishing of the red abalone is allowed in northern California, and no abalone diving is permitted south of San Francisco Bay. There is an enthusiastic group of “ab” divers who eagerly await April 1 each year, when the season opens; it runs through November, although no diving is permitted in July. Some abalones are harvested through rock- or shore-picking (wading), but diving is most common.

The use of SCUBA gear is prohibited, so divers can only go as deep as their breath will allow while navigating tangled kelp beds, treacherous surf and surge, and murky waters. Death is more than a remote possibility—at least a half-dozen people die while diving off the north coast of California each year. Since a diver’s lung capacity is the sole thing protecting the populations of larger abalone that reside in deeper waters, only the fittest get to feast. That is, except for the poachers who cheat and dive with air support, often in remote coves and under the cover of darkness. Fortunately there are passionate ab divers and organizations that keep a watchful eye on the water for poachers.

Abalones can be harvested only by hand—it takes a magic touch—or with an abalone iron. An ab iron is a crowbar of sorts, with its own set of specifications. Great care must be taken in “popping” the ab from whatever rock it has fiercely attached itself to with its foot. No easy task, mind you. Many inexperienced divers inadvertently injure an abalone while prying it off, and since they are essentially hemophiliacs, they can bleed to death. Since all harvested abalones must be at least seven inches or more along the shell’s diameter, attempting to return an undersize (and probably now wounded) one to its rock will often cause its inadvertent demise. (The Abalone Rangers continues >>)