Does It Matter If Our Fish Are Wild?

The Westwego Shrimp Lot is, in essence, a farmers’ market for fishermen: there are eleven open-air stalls surrounding a gravel parking lot, situated across the Mississippi River from New Orleans.It’s a place where stories matter. The vendors sometimes wear white boots, as if they just stepped off a boat. Multiple seemingly independent stalls have a single owner. “Local accents may become thicker in the presence of tourists,” an anthropologist once observed. Still, despite the theater, this place is a local landmark. Home cooks and restaurant chefs alike come for fresh shrimp or crabs or catfish.

A few years ago, I visited in search of a different icon of Gulf waters: red drum—a sweet, mild, firm fish that helped turn Cajun food into an international sensation. Back in the 1970s, Paul Prudhomme—a portly, genial Louisianan who’d already become one of the nation’s first celebrity chefs—blackened a spiced filet in a screaming-hot skillet, creating an off-the-cuff recipe that raced around the world. The recipe (often listed as “redfish,” a local name for the species) remains a mainstay on menus in the French Quarter and beyond.

I write about food and nature. So, after I moved to New Orleans, I found myself wanting to understand the town’s seafood—how it shaped the culture here, and how it’s faring now. I decided to make this famous Gulf recipe, using this famous Gulf fish. In Westwego, I found a cooler filled with whole red drum, $4.75 a pound.

Amy’s Seafood Mart at the Westwego Shrimp Lot, August 14, 2026. Photo by Chris Granger

I asked the vendor, an older man, slight and elf-like—Possum, he called himself—where it was from.

“I wish I knew,” he replied. He did know, at least, that it was not from the Gulf. It was imported, then delivered by one of the local seafood distributors: “It just come in a brown box, and they send it to us.”

Those whole red drum, carefully surrounded by ice—as if they’d just been nabbed from the marsh—offered their own little story, then, one that obscured a Gulf Coast secret. As a heavily protected species, it’s illegal to sell almost any red drum caught in the Gulf of Mexico. That means that the blackened filets served in New Orleans, and almost everywhere else along this coastline, have to be shipped in from somewhere else. If you’re lucky, that may be a pond in Texas that’s been filled with brackish water pumped in from the actual Gulf. But, often, your red drum comes from the other side of the planet, from Asia or Africa.

And red drum is not an isolated case. A few months after my visit to Westwego, a consulting group deployed new genetic-testing technology at a Louisiana seafood festival and found that 80 percent of the vendors were serving imported shrimp. Weeks later, one of the most beloved restaurants in Biloxi, Mississippi—a town once known as the Seafood Capital of the World—pleaded guilty to wire fraud. For more than a decade, the owners had been passing off cheap imported fish as local red snapper. If you think the seafood on the Gulf Coast is fresh and local and wild, you’re living in a lost past. 

But what if we scratched that last word, wild? Can we have fish that is fresh and local and farm-raised? A company called Ocean Era has plans to raise red drum in a submersible pen that will be set off the coast of Florida. If you listen to supporters of the project, this sounds like a first step toward not just supplying more fresh, local seafood, but revolutionizing the seafood industry entirely. Opponents, though, make it sound like an assault on the Gulf, its identity and its culture.

In the years since I bought that fish in Westwego, I’ve traveled the Gulf, thinking about that fish pen, trying to make sense of its seafood. I’ve found myself stuck on a question that’s surprisingly hard to answer: Does it matter if our fish are wild? 

Perhaps it’s best to start with an easier question: Why eat a fish at all? For many diners, the answer is simply that fresh fish is delicious. There’s the fact, too, that seafood is healthy—that the omega-3 fats found in many fish are known to improve heart and brain health. The Gulf, though, is one of many places around the globe where there are other reasons to eat seafood: culture and history. Fish have long been abundant here and so have long been part of regional foodways. 

The Gulf features more than a quarter of North America’s estuaries; scientists have found that few other oceans can match the biomass of fish and the diversity of species here. This has always been a place of plenty, then, where people thrived by eating fish.

By the early twentieth century, all that seafood had spawned an industry. Its epicenter lay in Biloxi, Mississippi, where, along the shoreline, oyster-shucking factories clanked and clattered at all hours; immigrant workers—children, often—cracked open shells so oysters could be packed into cans and shipped across the world. The city declared itself the world’s seafood capital. Despite the apparent pride, this was not always a pleasant business. A stench of dead fish hung over the town; the city’s leadership forced at least one factory to move downwind.

Kim Palmisano, with Capt. Jonathan’s Seafood, holds up Gulf-caught shrimp at the Westwego Shrimp Lot. Photo by Chris Granger

The odors do not linger in Biloxi today. The beachside highway runs past not mountains of oyster shells, but a strip of the world’s largest man-made sand beach and the glittering towers of casinos. If you come at the right time (around 6 a.m., typically) you might be able to buy shrimp right off the boats, in the marina tucked by the Hard Rock Casino. But if you sit down in the wrong restaurant, despite the photos of shrimp trawlers hanging on the wall, you will be served cheap foreign shrimp instead. A 2024 study found that, across forty-four tested restaurants around Biloxi, 40 percent of the “white Gulf shrimp” was imported. (Across the country, meanwhile, many estimates suggest 90 percent of our shrimp comes from another country.) 

What happened? There are several potential answers. One is that the Biloxi innovation came home to roost: The rise of the canneries here helped turned seafood from something necessarily intimate and local into a faceless commodity. Call it the birth of that brown box I encountered in Westwego: First cans, and then ice and refrigeration, allowed for a tangle of middlemen—receivers, aggregators, processors, brokers, and traders—to buy and sell a fish several times before it reaches the plate.

Once fish became a commodity, buyers began to seek “the cheapest thing that they can feed the people and—and make as much money as they can,” as one Biloxi shrimp dealer told a Southern Foodways Alliance oral historian in 2008. And the cheapest shrimp is typically farmed in Asia. Most diners, the dealer lamented, can’t tell the difference between local shrimp and Asian imports. Buyers switched to foreign product, and a local way of life declined.

The presence of foreign imports has so deflated the price for shrimp that today, after adjusting for inflation, Gulf shrimpers are making four dollars less per pound than they did forty years ago. Earlier this year, a federal report declared that “this fishery has not been economically sustainable for at least 20 years.” At least when it comes to shrimp, the size of the catch has held steady. The amount of finfish caught in the Gulf began a steep decline in the mid-1990s. Over the next two decades, in Louisiana, the total catch of nine common species fell more than 75 percent.

Some might say good riddance. As early as 1887, anglers in Texas—people who fish with a hook and line, often for fun—were worried that commercial fishing threatened their favorite species, red drum especially. And in those early years, red drum was caught by guys working close to shore with haul seines and hand lines. By the 1980s, after Paul Prudhomme’s red drum recipe crossed the world, airplanes began to fly over deeper Gulf waters, searching for massive drum schools, calling down to a new fleet: The purse seiners, as they were known, were massive boats that could haul in whole schools, thousands of fish, with brutal efficiency. (On some purse seiners, the nets alone can weigh fifty tons.) So many red drum were caught so quickly that scientists worried the species might disappear. A wave of laws on the state and federal levels outlawed the sale of the species almost everywhere in the Gulf. Mississippi is the sole Gulf state that allows commercial harvest, and the annual catch is capped at 60,000 pounds—less than some Texas farms ship out in a week.

Kristin Cutrer, with Ruth’s Seafood, holds a redfish at the Westwego Shrimp Lot. Photo by Chris Granger

The laws, though, still allow anglers to harvest red drum. This fact has long rankled commercial fishermen, who point out that sportsmen are catching quite a lot of fish. In Louisiana, for example, anglers now consistently bring in 5 million pounds of red drum a year. Only once in history, at the peak of the Cajun craze, did the state’s commercial fishermen bring in that much. The rules seem to be less about what the species needs and more about a changing view of the ocean: It’s seen less as a place where people should be working and more as a place where we should go and have fun. A wild, unspoiled paradise.

The new red drum regulations were bad news for commercial fishermen, maybe, but a few farmers in Texas sniffed opportunity. Matagorda County was considered rice country back then, but a few intrepid farmers had already dug up their fields and turned them into catfish ponds. By the late 1980s, some farmers added red drum to their farms. Today, the small town of Palacios, Texas—pronounced “Puh-LAH-shus,” population 4,400—is, by any metric, the American red drum capital. A half-dozen farms sit within a fifty-mile radius.

Last fall, I flew into Houston, then drove two hours to Palacios, watching the shaggy ranchland give way, just before the coast, to sprawling arrays of rectilinear ponds. I’d come to tour the facilities of Homegrown Seafood—a third-generation, vertically integrated aquaculture business. It sells seafood on behalf of a collection of farms that raise catfish, shrimp, bass, and, at least according to their marketing materials, more red drum than any other farm in the United States.

Boats moored at the docks in Palacios, Texas. Photo by Jon Shapley

Mark Kubecka, Homegrown’s business manager, told me he’d grown up on a row-crop farm but always figured he’d get out of agriculture. He studied engineering and worked for firms in Houston. Then his family started thinking about buying some acres to put into aquaculture. He ran the numbers, and, seeing the results, decided that he would like to live again somewhere quiet and rural. Twenty years ago, in his mid-twenties, he moved home with his wife. By 2019, his ponds were fully stocked—and then a winter storm killed all the fish. It was “a massive loss,” he told me. But Homegrown, run by a friend, had been looking for a business manager, so Kubecka came on board.

Mark Kubecka, business manager for Homegrown Seafood in Palacios, Texas. Photo by Jon Shapley

Kubecka sits on the board of directors at the Texas Aquaculture Association and talked like a booster. He noted that Palacios’ southerly latitude offers a longer growing season than in Mississippi (which, thanks to its many inland catfish ponds, is the nation’s largest aquaculture producer). Nonetheless, cold weather has long posed a threat; in 1989, just as the local industry was born, a record-breaking freeze killed many fish. Another freeze hit Texas in 2021, and research suggests climate change might, counterintuitively, cause more cold weather, posing new challenges to the local farms. Homegrown, whose facilities include a red drum hatchery, is trying to produce hardier fish that can better survive the cold. But even if the freezing problem is solved, there are limits to the local red drum industry. Perhaps most importantly, there’s only so much land close enough to the coast to be converted to ponds. As of 2023, America had seven farms producing red drum for market, which yielded in total less than 4 million pounds a year. That’s enough for each American to have a hundredth of a pound—the same as a handful of Tic Tacs.

And that, according to a certain line of thinking, is not nearly enough.

Seafood is, by many metrics, a green way to eat. The average per-pound carbon emissions from seafood are less than from pork or beef, and somewhere on par with poultry. And, unlike poultry, ocean fish need not occupy increasingly scarce land. If you’re not ready to go vegan, but you’re worried about the climate, the Gulf’s seafood-centric cuisine seems appealing. 

Except, that is, for one concern: those big purse seiners. They’ve overwhelmed the oceans. A 2003 study in the journal Nature noted that, across the world, industrial fishing had already reduced the biomass of large predatory fish by 90 percent. More than a third of global fish stocks are now overfished. If we are going to build a world of fish-eaters, that fish may have to come from farms.

Red fish sit in a container of ice after being harvested from a pond near Palacios, Texas. Photo by Jon Shapley

The good news is that, just as Texas red drum farms were born, other people, too, were diving into aquaculture. By the dawn of the new millennium, fish farming was, as a scientist noted at a United Nations conference, transitioning from an ancient art to a modern-day science. Aquaculture soon exploded into the fastest-growing sector within food production, until, a few years ago, the world’s fish farms began beating the open ocean as the majority supplier of seafood.

American diners hopped on this bandwagon—some 70 percent of the shrimp we eat, our most-consumed seafood, is now farmed. But, the Texas ponds notwithstanding, the United States did not contribute much in the way of actual farms. China, a global leader, has over 5 million acres of marine aquaculture; the United States, by contrast, had just 150,000 as of the latest official numbers. Our commercial fishermen still bring in more than ten times the fish produced in the nation’s marine aquaculture facilities—a striking fact, given that the grim state of our wild-caught seafood industry.

The fish farms we do have in America are mostly freshwater facilities, like Mississippi’s catfish farms; the vast majority of our marine aquaculture is focused on mollusks like clams and oysters. And some people worry that if we’re going to convince the world to skip the steak, catfish and oysters won’t be enough.

“When most folk go out and sit down at a restaurant and they’re looking at the menu, and if they see beef or catfish, they’re going to choose the beef,” says Neil Sims, the CEO of Ocean Era, a Hawaii-based company. He thinks marine fish—snapper, grouper, and, yes, red drum—might be a different story. These are fish that, in Sims’ word, are “arresting,” and, if we grow enough of them, could reshape the whole world of food. 

That’s why Sims wants to try something new: growing red drum far off the coast of Florida. In 2017, he sought federal permission to place a pen—fifty-six feet across and twenty-three feet deep—forty-five miles off the coast of Sarasota. He planned at first to grow a species known as almaco jack, which he’d successfully raised in Hawaii, but ultimately decided that red drum would be a more marketable product.

Jose Luis Jimenez, at right, and José Alejandro harvest red fish from a pond near Palacios, Texas. Photo by Jon Shapley

Sims’ aim is to raise 20,000 fish over a single year. It would be a tiny addition to the world’s supply, but also an American breakthrough: All the country’s existing marine aquaculture facilities are in state waters, which extend for the first few miles offshore. No finfish farm has ever been built in federal waters—which is precisely where Sims thinks we need to build the fish farms that will feed the world. 

One major holdup has been regulatory uncertainty: Congress has never designated an agency in charge of aquaculture. A farmer like Sims has no clear path to follow to collect all the needed permits. But there’s another crucial obstacle: aquaculture’s bad reputation. In the early 2000s, some members of Congress began to push for a law that would help establish an aquaculture industry. But there was a fierce response from environmentalists who oppose the industry. Their stance is made clear in the name they’ve given to their coalition: Don’t Cage Our Oceans.

A fish pond in Texas is, relatively speaking, a closed-off space. The fish can’t escape into the wild; after the drum have been harvested, the pond can be drained and any waste removed. In the ocean, by contrast, farms can get messier. Salmon, one of the world’s highest-value aquaculture products, has left a trail of destruction from Newfoundland to Chile to Scotland. Near some farms, you might find blackened sea bottoms and floating trash. Because domestic salmon have a narrow gene pool (they are sometimes genetically engineered for faster growth), they are more susceptible to diseases and parasites. This means they get dosed with antibiotics, which can then seep out of the pens, polluting ecosystems. Though it’s rare, these domesticated fish can escape when nets rip—and can compete for prey against already threatened wild populations. And since salmon, like red drum, are carnivorous, all these farms don’t actually solve the problem of overfishing, because they demand more of it. A pound of salmon can require as much as two pounds of smaller, wild fish—often sourced from fishers in Mauritania and other West African countries, where these fish remain an essential food for impoverished populations. All these talking points have, for Don’t Cage Our Oceans, made for a winning campaign: Alaska banned salmon farms in the 1990s; California banned the industry in 2003; Washington added its own ban on fish pens last year.

But, in Sims’ view, it’s an outdated argument. Sure, the earliest salmon farms were “in really shallow water with really poor circulation, and they didn’t understand salmon nutrition very well,” he says. “But that was forty, fifty years ago. We’ve gotten a lot smarter.” In Sims’ view, opponents of aquaculture are using out-of-date science to prey on many people’s “emotional attachment to this idea that the oceans should always be wild.” 

Workers sort red drum at the Palacios, Texas,
processing plant of Bowers & Saha Aquaculture,
whose seafood is marketed and sold through
Homegrown Seafood. Photo by Jon Shapley

Sims himself has been part of that getting smarter. In 2001, he founded a company that piloted several almaco jack farms in Hawaii—within state waters, but in different conditions than the early salmon farms. “All of the evidence confirms that if you do this in deep enough water, with a bare sand bottom, and with some reasonable water movement through, you have no significant environmental impact, and often no measurable environmental impact at all,” he said. (By incorporating ingredients like algae and using scraps from fish processing plants, Sims has worked, too, to reduce how much wild fish he needs to feed his crop.) 

Sims began to think about how he might scale this work and decided that “the Gulf was the logical place,” as he told me. His explicit hope is that this little farm—which would be 1 percent of the size of a true commercial facility—will show the world that offshore fish farming is ready to be unleashed at scale. 

When I asked Don’t Cage Our Oceans for a local fisherman to speak with, they referred me to Ryan Bradley, the executive director of the nonprofit Mississippi Commercial Fisheries United. He’s a fifth-generation commercial fisherman who grew up on the Mississippi coast, in Long Beach, shrimping and oystering with his grandfather. By 2009, put off by the low prices for shrimp, he started catching red snapper, a more premium product. 

I met Bradley last year at a gas station outside of Long Beach, where he’d come to meet a consultant who had developed a new, low-cost test to identify what species of shrimp a restaurant is serving—which can help clarify whether it’s a local, Gulf species or the Pacific white shrimp that is typically farmed in Asia. A local seafood distributor had been recently caught mislabeling its foreign product as local. At one restaurant alone, Mary Mahoney’s Old French House, the total impact on consumers amounted to $5 million, according to the lawyers prosecuting the case. “It makes it really tough to grow a seafood business when you’re competing against bigger players in the industry that are committing fraud on such a high level,” Bradley said.

He was concerned, too, that foreign players have taken over so much of the supply chain. He cited specifically a major seafood distributor, Fortune Fish & Gourmet, that had been on a buying spree for years, scooping up smaller distributors across the country. In 2020, Fortune itself was purchased by a Bahraini equity firm. Then, two years later, the foreign-owned conglomerate swallowed up the New Orleans Fish House, one of New Orleans’ biggest vendors. (Possum, the vendor in Westwego, told me that my fish had come from the company.) Some local fishermen had complained about Fortune. “These foreign companies come in, they quit buying the local catch from the local fishermen, and they open up more supply lines from the international, imported product coming into the country,” Bradley told me.

When I contacted Fortune by email, raising Bradley’s concerns, a representative indicated that the company “supports a plethora of local businesses and workers, including the crab and oyster industries, packaging suppliers, trucking companies, fuel providers, and regional labor. Our investment in the Gulf is intended to strengthen—not displace—the domestic seafood supply chain and the coastal communities that depend on it.” (The company, it’s worth noting, is still helmed by its longtime CEO.) The gas station where I met Bradley demonstrates just how complicated the market is now. Inside is a café that serves boiled and fried seafood. Bill Bradley, the owner—and Ryan’s cousin—told me, with pride, that he buys much of his shrimp from a local shrimper. But given the price of tail-on shrimp, he said, he has little choice to import that product: “Domestic tail-on is more than double,” he told me.

Preparing Gulf-caught shrimp for sale at Amy’s Seafood Mart at the Westwego Shrimp Lot. Photo by Chris Granger

Ryan Bradley, like every commercial fisherman I’ve talked to in Mississippi and Louisiana, is opposed to offshore fish farms. That’s in part for practical reasons: He worries that they’ll leave behind debris that will make it harder for him and his peers to catch fish. But, amid the existential concerns for his industry, he sees the farms as just one more pressure on his way of life. It feels “almost like a systematic shutdown of the wild, traditional fishing,” he told me when we first spoke on the phone. And he points out that the farms might, like the distributors, wind up in the control of foreign investors. Can we still call that local fish?

Sims concedes that the kinds of farms he wants to see will be expensive: $20 million at a minimum, he estimates. And that is, in his view, as it should be. Part of the salmon-farming nightmare was that the early farms were not properly capitalized. “It can’t be this romanticized view of a guy buying a boat and a net and going out and making his living, one lonely man against the sea. [That] can’t happen anymore—any more than you could go out and stake out a piece of Illinois and call it your land claim and start farming it.” He thinks the modern aquaculture industry could be good for the ocean’s biodiversity; as on land, some areas can be designated as as production zones, others as wilderness, where wild stock can thrive.

“The oceans have to be managed,” he says, “or it’s going to be open pillage and plunder, and we know where that leads.”

Down in Texas, after touring a hatchery, an array of 114 ponds, and a processing plant, where red drum are processed and packed on ice for shipment mere hours after being harvested, I drove a few miles to the coast. There was almost no sand in sight—just piers and seawalls and marinas, quiet in the afternoon light but for the birds and the gentle knock of hulls against their moorings. Despite the quietude, though, I knew that this was a place that has resisted the general trend along the Gulf: Tourism has not yet taken over. Some 200 shrimp boats still call Palacios home.

The shrimpers I met said this is in part because a swirl of dangerous waters kept away the anglers. But they also said that some local families had been determined to keep up their old way of life. What they described, though, was a different business than I knew back in Louisiana, where shrimpers often work alone or with smaller crews. In Texas, there are fewer marshes and estuaries lining the coast, so the fleet has always had to push further offshore. The boats are bigger; they stay out longer, freezing the shrimp—traveling at times as far as Florida.

“It is very mentally hard to do,” David Aparicio told me when we met at his office, a weather-beaten building surrounded by oyster cages. “’Cause when you leave this dock, you’re gone for forty to sixty days. You don’t come home until you run out of fuel or you fill that boat up with shrimp.” He misses his family when he’s out there, but he told me he thinks it’s still the best job in the world.

Bearded, well-built, sporting a half-smile, Aparicio was not my stereotype of a salt-battered fisherman; he struck me more as the kind of guy I’d find crafting microbrews. Still, his family had been shrimping for generations, and I figured he would oppose the rush toward fish farms. I was surprised that he was excited about Sims’ plans. “I’ve been reading up on it,” he told me. “I know some people are for it, some people are against it, but, you know, I push really big for aquaculture in general.”

A shrimp boat arrives at the port in Palacios, Texas. Photo by Jon Shapley

Not everyone I met in Palacios was so enthusiastic; a longtime shrimper named Craig Wallis told me he was worried, like Ryan Bradley, about the debris that might be left behind, especially after hurricanes. But, as for Palacios’ onshore fish farms, everyone agreed that they’d been a boon. The processing plants provided not just jobs in a rural region—“you drive out there and see all them cars,” Wallis told me—but, perhaps more importantly, a place where the shrimpers could bring their wild-caught product. A diversified industry had turned out to be a stabilizing force, helping keep Palacios as a seafood town.

In a recent down year for shrimping, Aparicio and his brother Jacob decided to diversify their business: They opened an oyster farm. (They’ve branded themselves the Oyster Bros; David now sits, alongside Mark Kubecka, on the Texas Aquaculture Association’s board of directors.) “We’re probably one of the few young people actually getting back into [seafood],” David said. “We need to start making jobs and making it sustainable for families to actually pursue a career and stuff like this.”

Seafood is the world’s last major source of wild-sourced protein, which can make it feel like an atavistic thing—a link to a lost past, when humans lived far closer to the earth. That, of course, is mostly a fantasy. We like to imagine it’s as simple as the ocean and the fishermen and then the fish on our plate. We ignore the brown box, the long chain of hands that carries our fish across the world. 

A similar romance surrounds the fishing way of life too. When I’ve asked chefs in and around Biloxi if it matters that the town retains its local fishermen, they’ve said, yes, of course. “I think it would completely change the way this coast looks if that were to go away,” said Austin Sumrall, chef and owner of White Pillars and, in nearby Gulfport, Siren Social Club. “It’s the identity,” as Alex Perry of Vestige in Ocean Springs put it. Part of what brings people to this coast is the chance to see the boats, to eat the fresh shrimp. But doesn’t this reduce fishing to just a totem? The fishermen offer a nice backdrop to our vacation—proof, perhaps, that the world has not changed too much yet.

In New Orleans, chef Frank Brigtsen—once a protégé of Prudhomme, now a legend in his own right—told me that he buys Texas farm-raised red drum because it’s the only way to keep his mentor’s famous dish on his menu at Brigtsen’s. But Brigtsen finds that the result doesn’t have the same firm texture and full flavor of a wild fish. I will note, though, that I’ve cooked wild-caught red drum that I caught in the Gulf myself. I cooked that fish I bought in Westwego too. My palate is not refined enough to detect the difference.

Tyler Kocurek, left, and Abel Cruz unload frozen shrimp from a boat at the port in Palacios, Texas, on Friday, Aug. 14, 2026. Photo by Jon Shapley

Still, personally, I would prefer that every piece of fish that I eat be local—fresh and unfrozen, pulled from the nearest waters. I would prefer to know that I have neighbors who are doing the hard work of making a living from the sea. I worry, too, that, should Congress pass a bill unleashing the aquaculture industry, regulatory oversight might not ensure every farm is as clean as Sims says his will be. (The Trump administration recently fired an EPA scientist who filed an official memo arguing, against his superiors’ suggestion, that microplastic pollution should be tracked on the Ocean Era farm.) But I’m not sure any of this implies that no cage should ever be built in our oceans.

It’s one thing to ban fish farms from American waters; it’s another to keep farmed fish off Americans’ plates. The shrimpers in Palacios were clear that the threat to their way of life was not farmed fish, but foreign fish. Homegrown and other aquaculture companies raise shrimp in ponds in Palacios, too, but that “is not having an effect on what we do here,” Craig Wallis told me. The issue, he said, was “millions and billions of tons [of shrimp] coming from India and Ecuador.” Whatever we decide to do about American aquaculture, seafood will remain, for the moment, a global commodity. 

To protect our fishermen, we might enact more tariffs on imported products. We should pass—and enforce—laws that ensure consumers know the origin of their seafood. We could build more community fish markets, and support local fishermen so they can connect directly with consumers. Could we create a world in which America eats only American seafood? Researchers have studied this problem, and, in a paper published in Nature, found that, yes, it’s possible for America to meet its current demand with only domestic product—but only if we start eating more small fish, like herring or anchovies, that are currently mostly used as bait and feed.

“Please show me the magic wand that is going to make this happen,” Sims told me by email, when I raised this possibility. “We can’t even get a damn carbon tax passed, for cryin’ out loud! What else will drive these shifts? Food police?”

And the challenge is steeper if you look at the Gulf alone. Despite—or even because of—our long seafood history, the region is actually more dependent on seafood imports than most other parts of the country. We have a large population, and since we eat a lot of seafood, it’s hard to supply ourselves with local product alone. (New England, by contrast, has historically produced a much larger share of the seafood it consumes than the Gulf South.)

By the time I visited Palacios in fall 2025, Sims had, after seven years, gotten a green light from the Environmental Protection Agency: The wastewater from his little red drum farm would pose no grave threat, the agency said. (In summer 2026, Ocean Era received its final federal permits.) There was—once more—a Senate bill being considered that would kick-start a new aquaculture industry. We seemed to be poised on the edge of a new future. 

After my tour of the Homegrown facilities, I went out to lunch with Mark Kubecka and his colleagues. Palacios may be one of Texas’s last active fishing ports, but you wouldn’t know it from the menu at the Palacios Mexican Restaurant. I could order a salmon plate, or fish tacos I figured were made with imported farmed tilapia. There was, despite all the local farms, no red drum on offer. I ordered the shrimp, which Kubecka indicated would be local.

As we ate, the Homegrown team had questions for me: Why, in particular, was Sims bothering with red drum? Sales were down, they said. They’d been switching out red drum ponds to grow more catfish. Kubecka estimated that Homegrown alone serviced 75 percent of the nation’s restaurant demand. If American red drum farming exploded, would anyone even want the fish?

When we talk about fish farms, we’re telling stories about the future we’d like to see. Sometimes it’s a global story: Can we feed the world without burning up our climate? Sometimes it’s local: Can we help the slumping Gulf fishing industry bounce back? But, as I ate my shrimp tacos, it struck me that both futures might require something like a magic wand. We have to get from here to there, and—as with the brown boxes that carry our seafood—there are a lot of steps between. The Homegrown guys were focused on the fish in their ponds, which they pack into boxes and ship to some willing buyer. And those, of late, had proven increasingly hard to find.