Water drips from the shallow, stainless steel tank that stands at waist level on one side of the processing room. Three hundred pounds of haddock are stacked haphazardly in the icy water. Their eyes, grey and clouded, stare at the white concrete walls and their frozen mouths hang open. Mike Coffill stands above them, sharpening his knife.
At 25 years old, Mike has spent more than half his life cutting fish. He takes pride in the art of cutting, a craft he learned from his father when he was 12. But he’s frustrated by the direction that his industry has taken in the last few years. He says that companies that process fish are paying low wages to anyone off the street that can handle a knife. The decrease in skill leads to an increase in waste. And at a time where the oceans are producing less and less fish for our consumption, increasing waste is a step in the wrong direction.
Mike talks as he works. His quiet voice, colored by a soft New England accent, is at odds with the tattoos that adorn the insides of both arms. When he smiles, he reveals a gap between his front teeth and his left incisor. “I love cuttin’. I could sit here cuttin’ all day,” he says, flashing a big grin. But then he pauses and hunches his shoulders for emphasis as he adds, “But there’s no money in it.” The local processors only offer about ten dollars an hour to cutters. Mike used to make twice that just a few years ago. According to him, the decrease in pay mirrors a decrease in quality. “Most of the guys that you see working these days can only cut one or two types of fish,” he says as he deftly separates a fillet from the haddock in front of him. “Good cutters can cut anything you put in front of them.”
Mike reaches for another haddock from the pile in front of him. Water sloshes out of the tank and onto the floor as he pulls it onto the white plastic cutting surface that sits like a shelf on the lip of the tank. With a deft pivot of his wrist, he cuts the fish open behind the gills, and starts separating meat from bone. The goal is to create a clean, well-shaped fillet that looks good in a display case, even after the long road it takes to get there. But the push towards volume over quality has essentially left Mike overqualified for the job that he has done for most of his life.
Mike finds the industry’s shift towards volume frustrating, because he says he can cut more fish than the average cutter and still create fillets of the highest quality. At the height of the summer groundfish season, he cuts about 3,000 pounds of groundfish a day. More important than volume, however, is the amount of meat that makes it from fish to fillet. “These fish are a bit skinny because they’ve been spawning,” he explains. “I’ll probably get about 50 percent out of them.” Continuing on, he says, “I can get 53 percent from a fatter fish. A decent cutter can get only about 45.”
That eight percent difference, when factored over 3,000 pounds, adds up to 240 pounds of extra fillets that never make it to market. In an industry that is on shaky economic ground, that is over a thousand dollars of product that gets tossed into a bait bucket.
He knows of only five other people in the Portland area that he considers good cutters. “[They] are the only ones that could get 50 percent off a fish,” he says. During the peak summer season, a total of 40 or 50 cutters are employed in the Portland area. That leaves 35 to 45 fish cutters wasting a lot of fish. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Quality cutting, Mike says, isn’t “so much a question of experience, as much as it’s all about how you are trained.”
His father used to let Mike cut on the weekends when no one was around and then let him substitute in for cutters that called in sick. Mike has two daughters, but he has no plans to teach them anything about cutting. “If they ever show an interest, I’ll work it out of them,” he says with a toothy grin. “I’ll bring them to work with me at 4 a.m. and see how much they like it then.”
With a final cut to clean up the edge of the fillet in front of him, he is done for the morning. All 300 pounds of fish have been turned into 150 pounds of high quality haddock fillets. He’s been at it for just over an hour. The pride in Mike’s eyes is evident as he weighs out the last fillets, a pride that may soon disappear from Portland’s working waterfront.
Peter McDougall studied at the SALT Institute for Documentary Studies in Portland.