The True Story Of America's Catfish Gold Rush

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Joe Weisenthal (0:26)

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal.

Tracy Alloway (0:32)

And I'm Tracy Alloway.

Joe Weisenthal (0:33)

Hey Tracy, you know what I was thinking about recently? Remember that time you came over and had dinner at my house?

Tracy Alloway (0:43)

Yes, yes, you promised that you would make me dinner, and the dinner you made was raw fish. So really, you didn't make much.

Joe Weisenthal (0:52)

I said, is there any kind of food that you don't like? And you're like, well, I'm not really into fish.

Tracy Alloway (0:59)

Yeah, yeah, and you made me raw fish. Thanks, Joe.

Joe Weisenthal (1:03)

But I made fish anyway. I apologize about that. So after all this time, like a year and a half later, whatever, a year later, it sort of dawned on me that that was kind of rude.

Tracy Alloway (1:11)

It was pretty good, though. It was okay, wasn't it?

Joe Weisenthal (1:15)

Yeah, it was, yeah.

Tracy Alloway (1:16)

Yeah, I kind of liked it.

Joe Weisenthal (1:17)

I'm glad you liked it. Okay, good. Well, that's the perfect seg, because today on our podcast, we are going to talk about fish.

Tracy Alloway (1:26)

So this is the podcast equivalent of you serving me fish for dinner?

Joe Weisenthal (1:31)

Well, it seems like we have a lot of episodes where I come up with something and then you're like, this isn't really my thing, but they usually turn out kind of well, like that dinner did. So it is kind of like that equivalent, except this time we're not talking about raw fish.

Tracy Alloway (1:45)

What kind of fish are we talking about?

Joe Weisenthal (1:47)

Well, let's back up real quickly, because obviously in markets, we talk about commodities all the time, and we talk about cattle, and we talk about wheat, and we talk about corn and other things. Pig bellies.

Pork bellies, yeah, exactly right. We don't really talk about seafood all that much.

Tracy Alloway (2:06)

No, is there a thriving seafood commodity market that I should be aware of?

Joe Weisenthal (2:11)

Well, not really, but did you know that there was once sort of a bubble in, or a gold rush in US seafood?

Tracy Alloway (2:21)

In US seafood? I'm really, like, I'm trying to scratch my head and think about which particular seafood it could possibly be.

Joe Weisenthal (2:30)

Well, let's just cut right to the chase. We are going to be talking about the delicious, one of my favorite fishes, the catfish. And it turns out that there was once a sort of catfish bubble in America.

I know, hard to believe, right?

Tracy Alloway (2:47)

Well, we've seen, I mean, we've seen bubbles in lots of things. The Beanie Babies episode we did was one of my favorite bubbles of all time. So I can believe it.

Who exactly is going to be discussing this with us?

Joe Weisenthal (3:03)

Well, we have the perfect guest today. His name is Mike McCall, and he is the editor of the Catfish Journal, a publication on the catfish industry. And he is the author of the book, Catfish Days From Belzona To The Big Apple, which is all about America's, the time we had a catfish gold rush in America. So let's bring in Mike. Mike McCall, thank you very much for joining us.

So did I introduce this right? Is it fair to say that there was once a time in America when we once had a catfish bubble, so to speak?

Mike McCall (3:42)

I think that's correct. The way the business came on in the 1960s and started going in the 70s and really the 1980s and 90s, there was just a big heyday in the business. Everybody had to get into it. And of course, the business is mainly in the South, but people are coming from all over the country. And if you look at the statistics, it was just booming. And up until around 2000

And then started going down.

Joe Weisenthal (4:15)

So you mentioned that it mostly boomed in the South.

I was recently in Mississippi, where I had some delicious fried catfish at the Taylor Grocery outside of Oxford, Mississippi. So tell us the story. Why did people get so excited that they felt that they had to get into the catfish business back in the 60s and 70s?

Mike McCall (4:37)