The pandemic has sent shockwaves through seafood consumption, with food service providers--the source of 75% of U.S. seafood sales--shuttered or forced to adapt by widespread shelter-in-place orders. Seafood consumers already navigate a heavily consolidated market: just five species comprise 70% of seafood consumed, and seafood consumption in the U.S. is the lowest per capita of any industrialized nation. Given the heterogeneous impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, how will seafood sourcing and consumption change? In order to understand the COVID-19 pandemic’s effect on seafood sourcing and consumption, we used Facebook quota sampling to recruit a diverse cross-section of California residents to take a series of surveys over the course of a year (n=640 remained in study for the full year).
Due to California’s diverse population and varied geography, we will use fixed effects models to analyze how consumption frequency, point of sale, and diversity of species consumed was affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. We will be able to explain seafood consumption patterns by a variety of drivers, including: population density, distance from coast, and a variety of demographics (e.g. wealth, education, race, gender, household size). Our final data collection will wrap up this summer, by World Aquaculture we should have near-final results to share.