News

E. Robert Kinney, Dead at 96

FishSticksE. Robert Kinney passed away yesterday (May 15, 2013). Why is this relevant to the Saltwater Nation? Because E. Robert Kennedy is the man who invented the frozen fish stick. As BDN Maine reports: “In the late 1950s, Kinney joined Gorton’s Seafood Co. as a vice president, stepping into the role of CEO two years later. While at Gorton’s, he successfully turned fish into a convenience food by packaging and selling it as frozen sticks. The company became the first to receive the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s seal of approval on its frozen seafood products.” Kinney would later become CEO of General Mills.

Kinney, then, must be acknowledged for having tremendous impact on saltwater fisheries from two perspectives: first, the popularity of fish sticks has certainly contributed to world fisheries harvests; Slade Gorton remains one of the country’s largest importers, distributors and manufacturers of fresh and frozen seafood products. Despite Slade Gorton’s commitment to sustainable fishing practices (see: Slade Gorton’s Sustainable Seafood Policy in Seafood.com News), there is no doubt that fisheries have been effected by  the Kinney’s invention.

Perhaps more important, though, is the cultural affect of Kinney’s fish sticks. Since the 1950s and the advent of the fish stick as a popular food item, millions of Americans have grown up understanding “fish” to mean these tasty, crunchy rectangles. The fish stick, that is, has unquestionably contributed to our cultural distancing from a relationship with wild sea life, allowing a population to abdicate itself from the responsibility of knowledge that to eat fish requires catching and killing fish. The fish stick absolves us of this responsibility.  This is not to imply that the fish stick–or Kinney by  association–is a bad thing (to be accurate, it can be a scrumptious thing); rather, it is to acknowledge the need for recognition of the ecologies that exist between cultural constructions of wildlife–like fish–as food–like fish sticks–and the effect of erasing those connections by erasing the “fishness” of the animal in favor of the convenient “stickness” of the food.

FISH ON!

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