NAPLES INTERNATIONAL FF REVIEW: Darby Duffin and Adam Jones’ FISH & MEN looks at the fishing crisis and the journey our fish takes from the sea to our dinner

It’s okay. You can still eat sushi. As far as Darby Duffin and Adam Jones’ Fish & Men, which screened recently at the Naples International Film Festival, is concerned, anyway. You just might have to get a little more adventurous about it. But hey, you already made the leap to raw fish, so what’s one more step?

Sometimes it’s nerve-wracking going to see a documentary you’re pretty sure will tell you that you need to fix something. But that’s a bad reason to ignore it. Most folks involved in documentaries about ecological devastation, for example, hope to change the minds of environmental deniers. If we long for results like that, what does it say if we can’t take it when our own sacred cows – or fish – come under scrutiny?

Part of which is to say as a mea culpa that maybe I liked Fish & Men so much because it didn’t so much indict my diet as it did confirm some of my palate biases. But that’s only part of the story. Mostly, the film focuses on the struggles of individual fishermen in Gloucester, Massachusetts, their difficulty competing with massive factory boats, and the way in which our fundamentally screwed-up view of seafood is hurting everything. Let’s face it: we’re a country that’s afraid to offer “squid” on the menu, so we use the Italian word, calamari. We completely invented the term “Chilean sea bass” because most Americans would refuse to order Patagonian toothfish. And for some reason, we’re not repulsed by “catfish,” yet we are by “dogfish.”

But if you agree that the omnipresent family restaurant menu staple of tilapia is boring and bland, know that most fishermen agree. In fact, one interviewee half-jokes, most fish on American menus is a “dough delivery system.” We have no shortage of flavorful fish in our oceans and rivers but Americans as a majority won’t eat them. So we ship them all to other countries, then import massive amounts of the blander stuff that those nations don’t want. And that’s not the only way laws of supply and demand fail to work correctly when it comes to fishing – we’re bad at eating what is most plentiful, and don’t necessarily price rarer but more popular fish accordingly. It’s an odd misfire of capitalism, made even odder by the fact that factory fishery boats are, we are told, primarily a Soviet innovation from the Cold War.

All of which is to say that sustainable seafood as a concept is more complex than “we are eating too much fish.” We’re just eating the wrong kind. And in doing so, putting family businesses out of work.

Filmmakers Duffin and Jones take care to balance the silly (Julia Child talking about monkfish” with the sad (lives and careers going down the drain) so that the call to action doesn’t feel entirely hopeless. Indeed, most of the fishermen are matter-of-fact about the whole thing, and tired of being tired.

In the meantime, try the sea urchin. Or monkfish liver pate. I promise it’s better than tilapia, and the fishermen might thank you even more than your taste buds will.