Seafood by-products: offshoots create opportunity.

• Author: Schneider, Douglas
• Position: Alaska fisheries make seafood products out of fish waste - Includes related article about University of Alaska Fishery Industrial Technology Center

Seafood By-Products: Offshoots Create Opportunity

Far out on the frigid and often-times hostile Bering Sea, another net full of bottomfish is hoisted aboard the stern ramp of a factory trawler. It's a scene repeated each day by the dozens of huge commercial fishing and processing ships that ply these waters in the state's newest and most lucrative non-oil industry.

The large trawlers and smaller land-based vessels that deliver bottomfish to onshore processors harvest pollock, Pacific cod, rockfish and flounder. A nearly $1 billion a year industry, the bottomfish industry's prime benefactors are Alaska and Washington. In 1989, more than two million metric tons of bottomfish, mostly pollock, were scooped from the briny depths of the North Pacific and turned into fillets, patties and fish sticks. Some 140,000 tons of pollock ended up as surimi, an imitation seafood that serves as ingredient in a host of other edibles.

Shoreside processors and factory trawlers are locked in a head-to-head battle over allocation of bottomfish. But on one issue they agree: They waste an incredible amount of the resource.

Last year, factory trawlers and shoreside bottomfish processors tossed away nearly one billion pounds of undersized bottomfish, edible meat, heads, viscera, and other parts left over after the more valuable portions were removed. Only about 30 percent of an average pollock or cod contains usable meat. The rest is ground up and dumped back into the sea.

Stopping the squandermania is a battle as much to do with ethics as economics in an industry that pumps millions of dollars each year into the economies of Alaska (where the shoreside processors operate) and Washington state (where most of the factory trawlers come from). Federal laws, public opposition to ocean pollution caused by rotting fish waste, and a moral obligation to use as much of the resource as possible has catalyzed the industry to find new ways to use the waste. New products made from the leftovers could add millions to the profits of Alaska seafood processors.

One new product is a 95 percent fat-free chicken patty called Northern Lites. Made from a blend of only 2 percent poultry meat, it consists chiefly of pollock not used in surimi production, with added flavor, color and preservatives. Another product, named after a Bush community in Alaska's eastern Interior -- Chicken Alaska -- is a pasty combination of pollock, egg whites and chicken that when mixed with pickles, mayonnaise and other ingredients makes a tangy seafood salad dressing.

The creator of these foodstuffs, Rae McFarland, describes himself as an idea man. With a pitch that's part salesman, part fundamentalist preacher, McFarland spends considerable time at food shows convincing skeptics of his latest creations. An entrepreneur whose family name has stood over a Utah-based food business since 1890, McFarland has been accused of "processing everything but the cluck, the moo and the oink."

It's an accusation he considers praise. "There's no such thing as waste, only underutilization," says McFarland.

His most recent pitch was to a gathering of nearly 200 seafood industry representatives from 21 states and 10...