No wetlands, no seafood
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With our wetlands under attack, no one knows what’s at stake better than these North Carolina locals.
We are proud to be a longtime partner of the North Carolina Coastal Federation. No wetlands, no seafood is a registered trademark of North Carolina Coastal Federation.
Video by Julia Wall
Written by Stephanie Hunt
As a boy growing up near the coast in New Bern, North Carolina, Ricky Moore dreamed of being an artist. At age 17, with salt water and his grandparents’ “country cooking”—fish stew, freshly caught and “hard fried” Spot or Croaker—deep in his veins, he left home, joined the military, and before long was cooking for the 82nd Airborne.
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“Cooking appeals to my creativity,” says Moore, who graduated from the Culinary Institute of America after leaving the service. Today, the James Beard Award-winner’s canvas includes Carolina-blue picnic tables and paper plates loaded with Picasso-level seafood.
Cars zip along Durham-Chapel Hill Boulevard in front of Moore’s Saltbox Seafood Joint, where customers line up for his celebrated but brilliantly simple fare: local, fresh “North Carolina seafood from North Carolina fisher folk,” he says.
“The goal is to evoke emotions.” Positive ones, he hopes, like the childhood memories he cherishes from romping around wetlands and waterways, harvesting fresh mussels and sea beans. “We’d clean off some of the shellfish, eat it raw, with sea beans and onions and vinegar. Come on! Now that was a beautiful thing,” he recalls.
On a late summer visit, Saltbox’s sign announced, “Fried & Joy,” and that joy is apparent in Moore’s ready smile, his resonant voice. Despite having worked in Michelin-starred restaurants across the globe, he’s happy right here, back home, artfully dipping cornmeal-crusted filets into gurgling vats of hot oil.
“North Carolina’s coastal culture, our fresh seafood, is a beautiful resource I want to showcase. What I serve is a direct reflection of the people who are out catching it and how we are managing and preserving our wetlands. I love educating people about this,” he adds. “It feeds me as I’m feeding somebody.”
Beneath Moore’s well-fed exuberance, however, lies an undercurrent of concern. He reminisces about going out at night as a kid, gigging flounder at low tide. “We’d catch a ton!” he says. “There was an abundance because the wetlands hadn’t been tampered with back then.”
Clean water is the lifeblood of everything we do, it feeds us.
John Mallette, Southern Breeze Seafood
Development along the coastal plain has changed that. “When I left Craven County as a teenager, driving out Highway 70, to my right there was endless marsh, tons of waterfowl and ducks. It’s different now. Very different.”
Moore knows that his livelihood and others’, including fisherman John Mallette, one of Moore’s suppliers, depends on healthy waterways, which in turn depend on healthy, robust wetlands, all of which are now jeopardized by a devastating May 2023 U.S. Supreme Court decision.
In Sackett v. EPA, the court stripped away vital federal wetlands protections that had been in place for over 50 years, explains Kelly Moser, senior attorney and leader of SELC’s Clean Water Program. Just weeks after the May ruling, the North Carolina legislature voted to eliminate the state’s wetlands protections.
“North Carolina has embraced the Sackett decision, and now more than 2 million acres of wetlands are at risk of destruction,” says Moser. That includes some 800,000 acres in the Cape Fear and Neuse River basins, where Moore grew up.
“These wetlands are our best natural guards against pollution and hurricanes. They’re crucial for storing carbon, and they sustain our fisheries that are so important to our culture,” Moser adds. “We at SELC are working every day to restore protections for our valuable wetlands.”
Mallette, a North Carolina native and co-owner of Southern Breeze Seafood, understands what’s at stake. “Clean water is the lifeblood of everything we do, it feeds us,” he says. Southern Breeze specializes in sustainable fishing practices and supplies fresh seafood to Saltbox and other establishments from their Jacksonville, North Carolina headquarters.
“Wetlands are basically the nursery, it all starts here,” says Mallette, gracefully casting a bait net into the mouth of the New River. “The bait fish in here get pushed into the ocean. It’s the basic food chain we all learned about as kids. Inland waterways and wetlands, clean water, it’s the lifeblood of everything we do. It feeds us.”
That food chain ultimately puts food on his table, as well as that of Moore and their 5,500-some colleagues working in North Carolina’s wild-caught seafood industry, a sector that reels in nearly $300 million annually for the state.
“My biggest concern is water quality,” says Moore. “If that’s not good, the fish won’t be there. Without wetlands, there’s no place for fish to reproduce and grow.” To both Moore and Mallette, the threat to livelihoods, to wetlands habitat, and natural beauty is clear—as simple and back-to-basics as the food that Moore is famous for. “We have to get to work,” Moore says. “As Southerners who live, play and work in this region, we’re caretakers. We have a responsibility to maintain our wetlands and waterways for future generations.”
