I went to the coast to eat good seafood and, along the way, discovered that maybe I didn’t have to go to the coast to eat good seafood. Well, technically, I was there to write. I was enrolled in a domestic field study course, Writing and Community at the Georgia Coast, which, in partnership with UGA Marine Extension and Georgia Sea Grant, was learning about Georgia’s coastal ecology and communities, as well as local seafood industries; our mission was to appropriately convey our experiences in writing. But I won’t pretend I wasn’t also going searching for a “seafood location.”
Like a lot of inlanders, particularly urbanites and suburbanites, I grew up without a strong awareness of my location and the natural resources around me. However, I did know a little about what resources weren’t around; both my parents grew up in the northwest with access to fresh fish, like salmon, and knew what the good stuff tasted like. I ate little salmon growing up because the good stuff was harder to find in Georgia. From this, I understood that seafood was a locationally conditioned thing, and that I had not grown up in a seafood location. I wasn’t exactly wrong, but by dividing the world into “seafood locations” and “not seafood locations,” I was ignoring something important about how water, food, and culture move throughout the world.
Things move in loops and cycles. We’ve all seen the elementary school water cycle diagrams: water vapor, often evaporated from the sea, moves inland and rains, and the runoff from that rainfall flows into the rivers and thence to the sea. If you live downstream, it’s hard to ignore this — the runoff from upstream comes to you. If you live upstream, however, it’s easy to conceptualize the runoff as going to a non-place, like trash to a landfill, and mentally disconnect from the cycle.
Single oysters cultivated at the Shellfish Research Lab.
The opportunities to visit the coast and work with UGA Marine Extension and Georgia Sea Grant, have helped me reconnect. At the organization’s Shellfish Research Lab on Skidaway Island, we spoke with Laura and Perry Solomon, oyster farmers and founders of Tybee Oyster Company, about their efforts grow Georgia’s oyster aquaculture industry and communicate their work both to their buyers at inland restaurants and, ultimately, to consumers. We also heard from Nik Heynen, UGA geography professor and board member of Shell to Shore, a nonprofit dedicated to recycling oyster shells from restaurants in collaboration with UGA Marine Extension and Georgia Sea Grant. The shells are used to create oyster reefs, supporting the marsh ecosystem health and helping mitigate the effects of flooding and sea level rise, completing a cycle where inland consumers are essential markets for coastal seafood, and the byproducts they create — oyster shells — return downstream to support the coastal environment.
This is great, but I can’t afford to go eat fresh oysters all the time on a college student budget, no matter where I am. At the UGA Marine Extension and Georgia Sea Grant’s offices in Brunswick, we talked with Associate Director Bryan Fluech about the globalized seafood industry that brings in cheap shrimp and fish from every corner of the globe. On the one hand, this means I can afford that bag of frozen shrimp wherever I am, allowing me and many other inlanders to develop a taste for seafood, but on the other, it increases competition for the Georgia shrimpers with whom UGA Marine Extension and Georgia Sea Grant has a longstanding relationship. It also makes the inland-shore cycle of seafood production more opaque and complex, but it doesn’t make us any less a part of it, for good or for ill.
Being at the downstream end of the cycle improves my understanding of, and relationship with, the upstream end. This program reinforces another cycle, a communication loop between the university, coastal communities, and inland communities. What goes on in Atlanta and Athens already makes its way downstream to the coast. By coming to the coast, we can better understand the other end of this cycle; by writing about what we’ve learned, we can close the loop, becoming a conduit between downstream voices and upstream ears so that us inlanders can understand these cycles, their impacts, and our place in them.
Theron Camp, English undergraduate student at the University of Georgia, explores the significance of service-learning domestic field study courses like “Writing and Community at the Georgia Coast” in connecting communities.