Mark Whitham

Mark Whitham’s know-how is a sought-after commodity for small canners hoping to kick-start or upgrade their facilities. Coos Bay entrepreneur Mike Babcock isn’t the only one singing Whitham’s praises. Here’s what others are saying.

Fish to Soup

“When Mark came to the area, I sort of enlisted him to help with our processing records and update our cook times and scheduling,” says fisherman Mark Kujala, who runs his family’s cannery, Oregon Ocean Seafoods, in Warrenton. The family has canned salmon, tuna, and sturgeon under their brand, Skipanon, for nearly two decades. With Whitham’s input, Kujala soon will be releasing a new line of soups — old family recipes he’s keeping hush-hush for now. Whitham is also helping the company develop its own line of pouch-packed fish. “He’s very accessible,” says Kujala. “When I have questions in the middle of the day, I can call him up. Sometimes he’s out on the road, and he’ll pull over and take the time to listen and bounce off ideas.”

100 Diners

“Having Mark available has just been such an asset,” says Stan Eggas, owner of the Berry Patch Restaurant in Westport. “He has helped us come up with recipes and to start a processing and canning facility, which I frankly knew nothing about. It was just amazing.” Starting out as a tiny stand selling homemade jams, the business expanded to a restaurant that holds 100 diners. He also has been working with Whitham to develop a line of all-natural soups for high-end grocery stores. Eggas says Whitham helped him refine his recipes — chowders of salmon and razor clams, soups of tomato and chanterelle — to minimize preservatives and sodium and develop his canning process. “That OSU and Sea Grant have made this program and Mark available is really outstanding.”

Traditional Tribal Edibles

Jobs are sorely needed by the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs. “The unemployment rate on the reservation is really bad,” says Warm Springs elder Ron Supah. “The tribes need to seek opportunities to develop work for our tribal members.” Supah hopes to do that with a facility on the tribe’s reservation that will use retort pouches to preserve traditional foods such as elk, venison, berries and roots. Supah says the tribe is also considering packaging its sought-after Chinook salmon for sale in stores off the reservation.

Supah says the decision to use retort packaging came after he and other Warm Springs members visited Whitham at his Astoria lab. “We were pretty impressed by what we saw there,” remembers Supah. So far, Whitham has helped the tribe apply for a U.S. Department of Agriculture grant that will fund a feasibility study for the proposed facility.

Mike Babcock left a thriving lumber mill and set himself a new challenge: create a seafood business. (Photo: Pat Kight)

Still, in this one-time boomtown of lumber mills and commercial fishing, the entrepreneurial spirit lives. One man, Mike Babcock, is helping to kick-start Coos Bay’s renewal with an unlikely innovation: packing fish in pouches instead cans. Besides being flat and lightweight for cheaper, easier shipping, the laminated plastic-and-metal foil pouches are superior to cans in the No. 1 consumer yardstick: taste.

“Most store-bought tuna is twice cooked,” explains Babcock’s fish-packing guru, Mark Whitham, a food scientist with Oregon Sea Grant. “That means they cook all the nutrients and flavor out. Mike Babcock’s product is cooked only once, and it retains all the good fats, juices, and nutrients, and it tastes much better.”

It all began in 2010 when Babcock, a successful-but-restless sawmill owner, was looking for a new challenge. He heard about the packing pouches — called retortable or “retort” pouches in the industry — from coastal residents who had worked with Whitham on other projects. “I wonder if pouches would work for albacore?” he thought. To find out, he tracked down the food scientist, and together they investigated the pouch potential for Coos Bay. Within the year, Babcock had launched Oregon Seafoods.

The other "Bay Area." (Photo: Pat Kight)

Since October 2011 when he started shipping sustainably caught tuna and salmon under his label, Sea Fare Pacific, Babcock’s products have landed on the shelves of all eight Market of Choice grocery stores, as well as those of Portland’s trendy New Seasons Market for health-conscious shoppers. He also has created a line of smoked salmon for outdoor recreation giant REI, and his four flavors — sea salt, salt-free, smoked and jalapeno — have made their way to several other states.

From Freezer to Pouch

Just blocks from Coos Bay’s historic harbor, Babcock’s Oregon Seafoods plant is no bigger than a medium-sized classroom, but it’s packed to the gills with canning machinery. It’s cold inside. Workers wear hats and jackets under large, turquoise-colored aprons, latex gloves and hairnets as they pack fish for Sea Fare Pacific and several other brands.

“Of course, we would like to have more space,” says the 50-year-old businessman, a hairnet snugged over his red ball cap. “But we can do a lot with a small footprint.”

From the deep-freeze at Oregon Seafoods, workers carry salmon and albacore to the filleting room, where they slice up the fish and plop the chunks, red and raw, into small plastic cups. Two machines imported from Japan stand ready to package the fish into pouches. As the machine spins, another worker transfers chunks from the cups into 8-ounce pouches, which look like UPS envelopes, only silver.

The technical know-how behind Oregon Seafood’s processing, as well as the four specialty flavors developed for Sea Fare Pacific, came from Whitham. It was he who steered Babcock through his transition from mill owner to seafood processor. A soft-spoken, laid-back 57-year-old, Whitham is an unlikely revolutionary. Yet from his food lab at OSU Extension in Astoria, the Sea Grant scientist has been in the vanguard of Oregon’s canning coup.

If there’s such a thing as a food-preservation geek, Whitham is it. And if there’s one thing he “geeks out” about, it’s the flexible, lightweight retort pouches.

Oregon Seafoods workers load individual portions of cleaned and flavored albacore into pouches for sealing and cooking (Photo: Pat Kight)

“Retort pouches aren’t new,” says Whitham. “They’ve been around about 50 years, and, from what I’ve seen, they are really big in Europe and Asia. In general, they tend to be ahead of us as far as packaging is concerned.”

Coos Bay is just starting to catch up. The pouches’ advantages are many: lightweight and compact, they take less energy to ship than conventional steel cans. For the consumer or commercial chef, there’s no can to recycle. And their flat shape makes cooking more uniform. Again, it all comes down to flavor in the end.

Whitham’s larger mission — adding value to the region’s natural seafood bounty — underpins his 30-year career working with small producers up and down the coast. “Here in Oregon, seafood has really been a stand-alone product, and there’s just tremendous opportunity for adding value,” he says. With the right price point, package and recipe, processed fish can command double, triple, or even quadruple what it sells for raw. That in turn injects money and jobs into the community.

Injecting jobs and money into Coos Bay is exactly what Babcock is doing. A self-described “pedal-to-the-metal, get-it-done” type, the entrepreneur’s steely blue eyes are now focused on fine-tuning the process that took elbow grease and determination, along with Whitham’s expertise, to get moving. In Coos County where unemployment hovers around 10.5 percent — above average for both Oregon and the nation — the eight new jobs Babcock has created are a welcome boost.

From Cannery to Shopping Cart

On the cannery’s floor, the Japanese packing machines suck the air out of each pouch and seal it. Then comes the cooking. The oven — six feet around and15 feet tall with a massive metal door — looks more like a missile silo turned on its side than something from a commercial kitchen. It can hold a lot of product — more than 2,500 eight-ounce pouches, or nearly 475 pounds of fish. The pouches cook for 75 minutes at 240 degrees. Then they’re flash cooled to retain flavor.

In the cannery’s entryway, boxes full of packed tuna, ready to be shipped, testify that things are moving smoothly. But plenty of stumbling blocks stood in the way, Babcock attests. Whitham helped the entrepreneur persevere. “Whenever I have a problem,” he says, “I call him up and he’s there.”

Babcock isn’t sure why he left his successful business to start a new one in a field in which he had little experience. When urged to pin down a reason, he cites boredom. “The day-to-day operation of the sawmill was fine,” he recalls. “But we had been building the mill for a number of years, and once we got it built and we got to the monotonous day-to-day stuff, the challenge wasn’t there.”

The cannery lets him do what he loves best: build a business. These days, his schedule is full of food tradeshows. At first, he was skeptical about pitching his fish at the crowded tradeshow scene. But his first show was a total success, generating hundreds of sales leads.

That tradeshow, incidentally, was in San Francisco — the other “bay area.” Driving home, Babcock was elated — so elated, in fact, he just couldn’t wait to make another sale. So he stopped at a small health-food store in Eureka, California, and won yet another customer.

“Everywhere I go, people who try our product, they just fall all over it, they just love the quality, like they never tasted fish like this before,” he says. For that, and for the jobs he created in Coos Bay, Babcock credits Mark Whitham and Oregon Sea Grant. “This product has Mark’s name all over it. I want to keep this relationship going.”

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Editor’s note: In March 2013, Oregon Seafoods announced that with help from Mark Whitham, the company launched a new line of soups and sauces (Seafood Bisque, Smoked Salmon Chowder, three albacore curries and a West Coast Ciopinno). Improved labeling also noted sustainability qualities such as Dolphin Safe and Line Caught. The company’s products are in more than 500 retail outlets.

Illustration by Teresa Hall

I remember when I felt that the climate change workshop would go well. After a period of planning and preparation, our Oregon Sea Grant team arrived in Port Orford not knowing how the diverse community group would respond to the issue of a changing local climate when we were all actually face to face. So, after introductions and a brief discussion of some overall goals, our team explained why and how to make a “concept map” — each individual’s simple diagram of how he or she perceived a particular idea — in this case, the local effects that they were concerned about and that they thought might be linked to a changing climate.

For about 10 minutes, the group worked on their own concept maps and then put post-its next to each other on sheets of poster paper. As we all looked at the array, the 10 community members — a schoolteacher, fisherman, mayor, city manager, environmental leader and others — saw that they held both concerns in common and some that were individually distinct. Through discussion, we rearranged the post-its into clusters until everyone was satisfied with the way their concerns had been sorted.

“Everyone’s ideas are up there” … “no one’s excluded” … “we’re beginning to see an overall picture,” said members of the group. Bingo. With contentious issues such as climate change, a good place to begin is to have each voice within the group be heard.

This isn’t the end-point, of course, but it does highlight what’s often missing from national discussions of climate change and what can happen in a small group context in a workshop: actual two-way communication, listening respectfully, contributing respectfully.

Know the Audience

We started listening long before the face-to-face meeting. Like other professional communicators and similar climate programs on campus, including those of the Oregon Climate Change Research Institute, my Extension, education and research colleagues and I use methods such as surveys, focus groups and interviews with target populations before we start engaging them on the substantive issues — what a particular community may want to do around climate change.

From our 2008 surveys of coastal decision makers in Oregon and coastal property owners in Maine, for example, we learned about not only what information related to climate effects they thought they needed, but also what personal attitudes and other behavioral factors they held that were influencing their actions and intentions to act on information. Without understanding those attitudes and beliefs, we wouldn’t really know what information might be directly useful or how best to present it. In both states, one communication tool we used was short videos that specifically addressed concerns the intended viewers expressed. (Follow-up surveys confirmed their value.)

Focusing on the decisions that individuals and communities feel they need to make to address a recognized problem yields a much more constructive conversation than does focusing on global warming itself, we find. No surprise there, really: if coastal residents are concerned about flooding, that’s tangible and relevant to them. Whether people caused it by increasing use of fossil fuels that led to global warming is, for most, an abstraction — and an invitation to argument.

Public Opinion on Global Warming

Americans certainly have differences on the subject, which puzzles some people. How do we explain that despite about two decades of scientific pronouncements about global warming and the environmental, economic, and social hazards that it presents, just 63 percent of Americans now believe that global warming is happening? Only 50 percent believe it’s mostly caused by human activities, and that percentage has declined 7 points since 2008, even while global greenhouse gas emissions have increased, according to an ongoing study by Yale and George Mason universities (nationwide survey of adults conducted by the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication in November 2011).

Clearly, if “getting the word out” about the science was the only determinant of whether Americans believe the science about humanity’s contribution to global warming, we’d have higher percentages believing than 50%. But, of course, the calculation that each of us makes with the myriad of topics that are presented to us daily is far more complex than if we were blank sheets walking around waiting to be filled by indisputable facts.

If the understanding and framing are used to promote respectful dialogue, this seems like good manners. If they’re used only to construct persuasive “messages,” however, this seems just like more of the same one-way monologue.

We’re all drowning in information and in competing claims on our time, making attention the scarce resource, as psychologist Herbert Simon observed way back in 1971 (“Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World,” in Martin Greenberger, Computers, Communication, and the Public Interest, Baltimore, MD, The Johns Hopkins Press). Before we turn up the volume on this or that “communication” about science, then, a good first question would be, have we dialed into the right frequency that the other party is tuned to? Guessing isn’t good enough. As a recent federal government report about climate communication pointed out, “there’s no such thing as an expert in communication, in the sense of someone who can tell you ahead of time (i.e., without empirical study) how a message should be framed, or what it should say.”

Hence the research that we do on the populations we hope to work with. Beyond the empirical research and specific communication strategies we employ as a result, our team uses tools from behavioral and decision research to guide our efforts. Still, I agree that gaining others’ attention by focusing on concerns of importance to them and providing information that helps with their decisions are worthwhile, even if they are missing part of the challenge. What is to be done — if anything — about the 25% of Americans in the Yale/George Mason research who are “dismissive” or “doubtful” about global warming — and who may be actively hostile, even in the face of the overwhelming consensus of climate scientists?

Values Before Facts

Probably the first thing to recognize is that for all of us — except maybe the climate scientists themselves — every new science “fact” is not a fact of our direct experience but rather one received from someone else. Thus, either we have to collect evidence about it or accept the words of others. “So, just like any other kind of fact,” as researcher Dan Kahan of Yale mentioned during an interview that’s part of our Communicating Climate Change podcast series, “your beliefs are going to be influenced by your values in exactly the same way as any other kind of belief that you might form.” (see a transcript of Kahan’s remarks)

Those who do believe scientists tend to have one set of “cultural” values, according to Kahan and his colleagues in the Cultural Cognition Network, while those who don’t, typically have another set. So, for example, if today’s fact appears to undercut other deep-seated value beliefs that are far more important to you than the fact du jour, what do any of us do? We tend to discount the “fact.” So don’t expect all Americans to suddenly believe any particular thing.

What one does with this insight to improve science communication is a topic of intense interest and discussion among communication researchers and practitioners. (Indeed, the National Academy of Sciences is holding a conference to discuss the “Science of Science Communication” in May.) Many advocate using an understanding of others’ values to frame scientific information in a way that’s congenial to those others. If the understanding and framing are used to promote respectful dialogue, this seems like good manners. If they’re used only to construct persuasive “messages,” however, this seems just like more of the same one-way monologue.

Being sensitive to the other person, curious about them, attempting to understand them and what they think about the topic of the communication, and responding to them thoughtfully as they engage the conversation — we know this works in our personal lives. It’s not the end, but it may be a way forward. Even with communicating about climate change.

"Fishermen are an extremely curious group. That's their nature. And they have a hell of a lot of knowledge," says Jeff Feldner (Photo: Lynn Ketchum)

Fishing is hard enough. The weather, changing ocean conditions and the fickleness of fish make it tough to track your quarry let alone catch them. Now competition for space in the ocean — an oxymoron in an environment defined by its seemingly limitless expanse — poses new concerns along the West Coast. In the future, fishermen will jostle with wave energy parks, marine reserves and aquaculture for space to troll for shrimp, drop crab pots or cast lines for rockfish.

Jeff Feldner knows what’s at stake: individual livelihoods, coastal communities and the resources that support them. The Newport-based Oregon Sea Grant Extension educator bought his first fishing boat in 1973. A few years earlier, on the lookout for a career change (he has a chemical engineering degree from the University of Minnesota), he had come to Newport at the invitation of a salmon fisherman. After a day at sea, he was hooked. “I‘ve been fishing forever,” he says, as though life began the moment he crossed the Yaquina River Bar into the Pacific.

Feldner still fishes part-time, processes his catch in a cooperatively owned South Beach packing plant and tests consumer response to new marketing methods (see how researchers are creating the basis for a sustainable seafood industry at Pacific Fish Trax). He has always kept an eye on the bigger issues that define the industry. Tensions over gear restrictions, by-catch (the non-targeted fish that come up in nets) and closed seasons drove him to serve a nine-year stint on the Oregon Fish and Wildlife Commission. Now, he is one of 15 Sea Grant specialists and educators from Brookings to Astoria, who work with individuals and with community organizations to address coastal issues through dialog and collaborative science.

“We are the go-between between the seafood industry and fishery science or fishery management,” says Feldner. He and his Sea Grant colleagues Kaety Hildenbrand, Flaxen Conway, Jamie Doyle and others help community groups participate in decision-making processes on topics such as marine reserves and wave energy. In 2010, they helped facilitate a conference among scientists and the fishing industry on another contentious topic, off-shore aquaculture. They are addressing invasive species that upset coastal ecosystems and hazards such as eroding shorelines and tsunami risks.

“Sea Grant Extension distinguishes itself in public engagement,” says Dave Hansen, Extension program leader based in Corvallis. “The marine reserves process is a good example, where, in a pretty hot political and emotional situation, we tried to be the convener that everybody could trust, that didn’t have a secret agenda.”

In 2008, Feldner and former Sea Grant Extension agent Ginny Goblirsch coordinated a series of eight coast-wide “listening and learning” sessions on marine reserves. “When the process ended, the governor changed course,” says Feldner, “slowed down the process,  basically said it was going to take at least another two years, and put in place a process to ensure more community based input – essentially moving more toward a bottom-up process rather than a top-down one.”

Oregon’s tradition of strong community participation in resource management has drawn national attention, says Hansen, who came to Sea Grant in 2010 from Delaware. “There is a tremendous amount of community interest in decisions here. Nothing just slides through,” he adds. “People seem to have their fingers on the pulse of what’s going on.”

And new developments in science and technology will continue to fuel that interest. Tomorrow’s fishermen will have access to more accurate information about fish stocks, ocean conditions and markets, says Feldner. They’ll be able to harvest more efficiently, protect threatened species and offer consumers a high-quality local product at the same time. “There’s nothing static in fishing,” he says.

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For information about supporting research and teaching through faculty endowments, contact the Oregon State University Foundation, 1-800-354-7281 or visit CampaignforOSU.org.

Oregon State professor Scott Ashford visited Chile after its February 2010 earthquake.

We’re overdue. If the Cascadia subduction zone behaves as it has in the past, an 8.0 to 8.5 earthquake and a resulting tsunami have a good chance of striking the Pacific Northwest in the next 50 years. That’s the take-home message from OSU marine geologist Chris Goldfinger’s studies of offshore debris flows. He has identified up to 38 such events in the last 10,000 years. At the April 2010 meeting of the Seismological Society of America in Portland, Voice of America correspondent Tom Banse talked with Goldfinger and University of Washington emeritus geophysicist Steve Malone about predicting the next Big One. Read Banse’s account here.

As science defines what’s at stake, what can we do? Oregon Sea Grant’s Pat Corcoran offers tsunami preparedness advice here. Meanwhile, engineers at OSU’s Hinsdale Wave Lab are testing a proposed tsunami evacuation structure for the City of Cannon Beach. Hinsdale engineers previously evaluated the consequences of a tsunami striking Cannon Beach’s neighbor, the City of Seaside. See a video of those tests here and an Oregon Sea Grant video about how research is improving disaster planning for coastal communities.

The New York Times featured a thoughtful op-ed on earthquake engineering on March 27 by Peter Yanev, author of Peace of Mind in Earthquake Country. And if you really want to delve into the faults under the Pacific Northwest, read OSU emeritus geologist Robert Yeats’ book Living with Earthquakes in the Pacific Northwest. You can order it here.