Some commercial fishermen tried to make a dollar off the alewives by catching them for two pennies per pound, hauling ashore some 40 million pounds of them on Lake Michigan alone that summer of 1967. Food scientists of the era were scrambling to figure out how to turn that flesh into a digestible—if not marketable—form of human food. They explored alewife fish sticks, alewife breakfast sausages and even mixing the alewife flesh into bread dough, molding it into loaves and baking it in industrial ovens. None of that panned out. The only market for the fish was to churn them into cat food, turn
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