Our relationship to seafood is unlike our connection with any other food. Most of what we eat —beef, chicken, pork, grains, vegetables, and fruit— has been cultivated for thousands of years. The majority of seafood, on the other hand, is still largely sourced from the wild. Farmed fish is a relatively recent innovation, aptearing only in the last century.

“Fish is different,” says Stephanie Pazzaglia of J.J. McDonnell, one of the Mid-Atlantic’s biggest and most respected seafood distributors. “It’s the only food we still hunt. Other than salt, there really aren’t many things we eat that come from the wild.”

That wild harvest makes seafood’s journey to our plate far more complex and creates lots of variety at the seafood counter. Even the most modest seafood display typically includes a dozen or more species: cod, striped bass, salmon, tilapia, catfish, shrimp, scallops, oysters, crab, tuna, swordfish, and more. And each one comes with its own story of where it was caught or farmed, how it was harvested, and how it arrived at the market.

Seafood often travels a long way to reach our plates, sourced from both wild fisheries and aquaculture operations around the globe. Sea scallops served in Annapolis were likely dredged in Cape Cod waters, shucked on board, packed on ice, and trucked to a Mid-Atlantic distribution hub within a day or two. Salmon might be ocean farmed off Scotland’s Isle of Skye, blast-frozen at peak freshness, and air-shipped to Dulles preserving quality and reducing waste.

Jared Auerbach of Red’s Best, a Boston-based fish distributor, laughs when asked to map it all out. “I’s hard to put the industry in a flowchart,” he says. “As a natural product, it’s unpredictable. Nothing is typical.” The variety changes daily with seasonal migrations, catch limits, fishing conditions, and shifting consumer demand.

For the consumer seeking healthy, environmentally friendly seafood, the task of sorting through all the factors that make seafood sustainable such as species, place of origin, and harvest or farming method— can be daunting. What’s more, claims of sustainability on fish counters and packaging labels can be incomplete or misleading. The Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch program is the gold standard for sustainable seafood guidance, with its familiar red, yellow, and green ratings. But Seafood Watch doesn’t offer a comprehensive consumer guide for the Mid-Atlantic, as it does for many coastal regions of the United States. And that means that— as with much of our food—the best assurance comes from knowing your suppliers. Talk to the people who raise, catch, process, and sell your fish. Learn their stories.

Fresh and local can be great, but frozen is often fresher than “fresh,” and while some fish farming methods are notorious polluters, farmed fish are sometimes the more sustainable choice. (More than half the fish on Seafood Watch’s quick-reference “Super Green” list of top 10 sustainable seafood choices are farmed.) The key is informed decision making, grounded in both science and trust. That knowledge deepens not just our connection to the food but also to the working waterfronts and fishing communities that define our coasts.

To understand this better, we followed a few fish from water to table. Our reporting took us dockside in Scituate, Massachusetts, on boats on the Chesapeake Bay, to fish-processing facilities in Jessup, Maryland, and to fine-dining restaurants in DC. Join us as we follow several species of fish and shellfish on their journeys to our plate and encounter the hard work and many hands that make their voyages possible.