Ken Rygh/istockphoto

On a warm day last fall, I found myself standing in a crooked line with about 20 other people, each of us armed with empty coolers and insulated bags. "Have you had jumping mullet before?" the woman next to me asked.

"Never," I said. "I have no idea what it looks like, and I have no idea how to cook it. I'm glad they're giving us recipes."

In fact, I had never even heard of jumping mullet until I received an e-mail message the day before, yet there I was, standing in a parking lot on the Duke University campus in Durham, North Carolina, eager to take it home and throw it on the grill.

The message also informed me that although mullet is rarely found in local stores or restaurants, it's actually a common fish along the Carolina coastline. But what I most enjoyed was learning that this mullet had been caught by Ron Sparks, a fisherman a few hours away who landed his bounty with gillnets strung from his 24-foot boat. I conjured up an image of Ron the fisherman -- my fisherman -- landing that night's dinner. I liked it.

I was sharing the fruits of Ron's labor with 400 members of Walking Fish, a community-supported fishery run by five graduate students who study coastal environmental management at Duke's Nicholas School of the Environment. Besides Ron, about a dozen other North Carolina fishermen had signed up for the program, agreeing to provide members with a share of their weekly catches for the next 12 weeks.

Walking Fish is the first community-supported fishery (CSF) in the Southeast. It's modeled after two in New England, the oldest of which started in late 2007. Today it is one of about 10 CSFs in the country. Another 10 or so are in the works, all of them on the East Coast.

They're inspired by CSAs, or community-supported agriculture programs, which have become popular across the country. People who join a CSA buy shares in a farm for a set period of time, usually a single growing season. In return, they receive a portion of the farm's produce. Items are determined by the growing season, which means one month members might receive a load of leafy greens, while another could include tomatoes and corn, or strawberries and cucumbers.

In a CSF, the A for agriculture is replaced by F for fishery. Members of the group get access to fresh, locally caught fish, a special treat considering that 84 percent of our country's seafood is imported, often from places with dubious regulatory enforcement and depleted fisheries. Added benefits include supporting the local economy and creating a greater sense of community.

What about sustainability?

As I picked up my fish, I felt good about Walking Fish's big-picture goals. But I had to overlook one not-so-insignificant problem associated with my first delivery from Ron Sparks (and some others thereafter). Mullet is a relatively plentiful fish, but gillnetting -- the method by which it was caught -- comes with real drawbacks. A gillnet has openings in its mesh designed to trap fish indiscriminately, which leads to a lot of "bycatch," or other types of fish and sea life that are accidentally hauled aboard with the commercially desirable species.

Concerned that my mullet dinner might have come at the expense of other marine life, I started asking questions. At first glance, CSFs sound like an automatic win for the environment: supporting a local community and eating local fish limits "food miles traveled," an increasingly common unit of measure among locavores. But I soon learned that, just as on land, "local" doesn't necessarily equal "sustainable." These fledgling initiatives are works in progress, and although many aim to advance sustainability, Walking Fish is not alone in having hurdles to overcome.

"Sustainability is one of the most complicated issues we've had to deal with," concedes Joshua Stoll, Walking Fish's project leader and a student at the Nicholas school. "CSFs are mostly used for economic development," but, he adds, "one of our goals is to engage people in a dialogue about what sustainable means. When fishermen no longer feel villainized and start to feel like an important part of the community, a feeling of responsibility comes with that."

Walking Fish encourages environmental stewardship, but it doesn't require participants to use specific types of fishing methods or gear. Stoll believes those decisions are best left up to the fishermen. It worked in Maine, where CSF fishermen have begun to make changes on their own.

‘Getting the stock back'

Glen Libby is a 33-year veteran of the rugged Maine fishing industry and head of the 12-boat Midcoast Fisherman's Cooperative. It operates Port Clyde Fresh Catch, the country's first CSF, which started in 2007.

Last fall, 320 families signed up to receive deliveries from Libby and his mates, and he helped coordinate a series of 10 weekly drop-offs throughout Maine. More recently, the cooperative added monthly deliveries to Pawtucket, Rhode Island, and Brooklyn, New York.

Since starting the CSF, Libby has made some meaningful changes to the way he catches fish. He and his fellow fishermen in Port Clyde have switched to less-invasive fishing methods and gear, such as larger net sizes that will allow juvenile fish to escape. And they're working with researchers on new netting to further reduce bycatch.

"The bottom line used to be the more fish you catch, the more money you make," Libby says. "It was the road to oblivion. You're not going to get any more fish because they're not out there. We're committed to finding a solution to getting the stock back."

Meanwhile, money from CSF subscribers has jump-started other businesses and added jobs, Libby says. "We've taken the investment and set up our own processing plant. So now we have filleted fish, shrimp peeled and cooked, and we've started a mail-order business."

It helps that most fishermen also are paid more under the CSF model -- Walking Fish producers earn 28 percent above market price on average -- which may allow for greater flexibility in trying out new, more sustainable technologies and methods.

The cod controversy

The CSFs in Maine and North Carolina haven't had to deal with anything like the kerfuffle experienced by Cape Ann Fresh Catch last year. The country's largest CSF, which the Gloucester Fishermen's Wives Association launched last summer, had 780 subscribers in its first year out of Gloucester, Massachusetts. It didn't take long before the program ran up against sustainability concerns.

Customers were initially told they would get a variety of groundfish: fish that, as the name suggests, live on the bottom of the ocean, such as haddock, halibut, flounder, and cod. But they ended up with mostly cod, simply because that's what most of their fishermen were catching.

"The fishing world, the entire marine ecosystem, is very unpredictable," says Niaz Dorry, director of the Northwest Atlantic Marine Alliance, a group that advocates for local fishing communities and provides assistance to the Gloucester CSF. "We learned that we shouldn't have promised what fish people would get."

The lack of variety started to annoy members, and some complained that the cod should be avoided for environmental reasons. Cod is one of the most severely depleted fish stocks, with some populations listed as threatened or endangered. The National Marine Fisheries Service, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and other groups advise the public to avoid eating the species altogether.

Darry Madden, who subscribed to the program last summer and who heads up Boston Localvores, an online community for local-food advocates, appealed to Dorry for an explanation.

Dorry said that Cape Ann's cod was caught in the Gulf of Maine, where the National Marine Fisheries Service, which evaluates fish stocks, recently removed cod from the "overfished" list, saying stocks have recovered to 58 percent of target level. And yet the agency still says that "overfishing" (which sounds like it should be the same thing, but isn't by the agency's definition) is still taking place in the Gulf of Maine and on nearby Georges Bank. The rate at which the stocks are being depleted puts them on track for the more imperiled status (and cod in other parts of the North Atlantic are definitely in danger).

To make matters worse, cod is generally caught using trawl nets that are dragged across the sea floor, damaging sea life and resulting in significant bycatch. Just last week, the federal government announced new measures developed by the New England Fishery Management Council to reduce overfishing and rebuild stocks of groundfish, including cod.

Madden blogged about her confusion over the amount of cod she was receiving from Cape Ann, and the back-and-forth comments on her post only highlighted the extent to which others were equally confused. "It was really hard to figure out who had the accurate information," Madden says.

I can vouch for that. I spent hours poring over National Marine Fisheries Service information about cod stocks only to discover it was inconsistent and in some places several years out of date.

Madden had enthusiastically endorsed the CSF on her blog, and she and her partner had been thrilled about joining Cape Ann Fresh Catch. They had all but stopped eating fish, she says, "because who knows where it comes from?" They considered a campaign or even a boycott to pressure Cape Ann to change its methods, but ultimately decided just to resume their personal ban on fish eating.

"The more I learned about the fishing industry, the more I realized I don't know what increased sustainability looks like for modern fishing," Madden explains. "It's like trying to make modern factory farms ‘sustainable.' They can't be. By definition, they're not."

When Cape Ann Fresh Catch offers a new subscription in May, it will continue to deliver cod and will not promise specific types of fish, Dorry says. She doesn't want the environmental implications ignored, she says, but prefers that the discussions become more personal.

"We want to work on projects that tie the consumers to the fishermen," she says. "Then they can have conversations and start applying their ethical values, instead of being told what to do."

Educating the eaters

That sounded reasonable to me. But then I spoke with Geoffrey Shester, senior science manager at the Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch, which issues one of the world's best-known sustainable seafood advisory lists. He had a different opinion, one that underscores the challenges that CSFs will have to overcome if they are ever to be embraced as sustainable.

"CSFs are a great concept and offer a lot of potential," he says, "but if a CSF is primarily giving you cod, you're contributing to the continued decline of the species. I do think it's very important to know your fisherman, where your fish comes from, and how it's caught. With big commodity processors, the fish changes hands many times over, which of course also affects the carbon footprint. But I think with a CSF, people need to wait until the stock is at healthy levels before they start supporting something like that."

As CSFs grow, sustainability will certainly continue to be an issue. But with 500 people on Cape Ann's waiting list last summer, it seems unlikely the cod supply will affect membership this year. Port Clyde and Walking Fish are planning their 2010 CSFs as well, and both expect to expand.

Although Walking Fish subscribers might multiply, the spring selection won't be as varied as it was in the fall, when we had, along with jumping mullet (which I grilled), clams, sea mullet, trigger fish, Southern flounder, gray trout, and shrimp.

From those deliveries and the e-mails leading up to them, I learned the difference between types of mullet, what a gillnet is, and how clams are harvested. I appreciated my contribution to a fisherman's income and sense of worth.

But what really excited me was the fish. For the first time in my life, despite having previously lived in coastal cities, I had access to fresh, local seafood from a trusted source. For that opportunity, I'll be right back in line. But this year I plan to be a little more demanding of my CSF. Like most do, ours has an online forum. I think it's time we start discussing gillnetting versus hook-and-line fishing as often as we talk about whether to grill or fry.