Hillary Eaton

Eating a freshly-caught urchin’s uni (its testes) right out the shell is one of the finest gustatory pleasures I’ve ever had. I owe this indulgence to Stephanie Mutz, California’s only female uni diver and former marine biologist who supplies fresh urchin to some of LA’s top restaurants like a drug dealer. Santa Barbara sea urchin’s silky roe has earned the name “California gold,” and I understand why. These prized urchins are handpicked by divers off the Santa Barbara coast and sold to California restaurants and distributors, some getting shipped as far as Japan.

I met up Stephanie at her boat on the Santa Barbara pier after a long day of harvesting, where we discussed the challenges of both uni diving and the fishing community at large as we cracked open some of her freshly caught urchins and sucked the uni straight out of the shell. That shit was so good, I didn’t care that she was telling us it was the urchins’ testes.

MUNCHIES: How did you first get into diving and commercial fishing?
Stephanie Mutz: I went to grad school in Australia and started deck handing on boats so I could finish my publications and look for a job. I got into fishery politics and realized that I had a better angle on it if I came to meetings and said I was a fisherman, instead of saying I worked for one. The more meetings I went to, the more I hated them. The more fishing I did, the more I loved it. Now I fish a lot more, go to a lot less meetings, and I’m a lot saner.

You mentioned that you stay fishing because you feel it’s an honest way to live.
I have a purpose, a purpose of supplying a protein source to a community. It’s gratifying.

When you go out on dives, how do you find a place that you think will be urchin-rich?
I look at the weather and go from there. Growing up diving on the coast means I’m familiar with the bottom of the ocean and the reefs. I go on exploratory dives to check out spots and mark them and sometimes talk to other fishermen and see if they have suggestions, but that’s not reliable as they might end up sending me to the opposite spot. As a last resource, I look for rocky reefs and variable topography, because the bottom has lots of bumps and valleys with kelp on the bottom.  

How do you dive down to get the urchins?
I do a type of diving called hookah, with a surface-supplied air source. I have a compressor on my boat run by a five-horse power Honda engine attached to a hose, so essentially my ‘tank’ is on the boat. Theoretically, I have unlimited air supply—until the fuel runs out. If I’m diving hard, it’d take me two or three days to empty that thing.

That sounds intense! How much uni can you get on a good day?
Two hundred pounds is average, but every day is different. I think that’s why my ADD-self likes it so much—you’re always on your toes. I use my brain much more now than when I was in grad school, because you have to think ahead and prepare. Especially for me, being relatively new to the industry. I’m graduating out of newbie status. The average age of the urchin diver is about 66-years-old and they’ve been diving for 30 or 40 years.

Crazy. Are there a lot of younger people starting to dive now?
They’re starting to. I think it also has a lot to do with the economy—it tanking was one reason I started full time fishing. I got laid off, freaked out, then said, “Alright, I’m a full time fisherman, here we go.”

Do you need a permit to dive for urchins?
Urchin diving in California is what we call “limited entry,” which means that you need an urchin permit to dive and fish. It’s not like I have the permit and can just be on the boat while someone else does it—I have to harvest the urchin. It’s non-transferable. I can’t sell my permit— it doesn’t belong to me and I pay for the ability to use it. There are 300 permits available in the state, and if one year only 295 people renewed their permit, then five permits are available and people who have been a deck hand for at least three years or more have their name gets put in a lottery, then five people get picked. I don’t know anybody who didn’t take it.

Is the fishing environment competitive right now?
Well, only about 130 permits are actually being used because there are a bunch of old guys who keep them “in case.” Like, they work construction but keep their permits in case they lose their job. I think 130-150 divers is good, not only for the resource but also the economics behind it, because there’s probably about ten percent of those 130-ish divers that are getting the bulk of the weight. The fishing game goes on weight, not value, so my urchins are worth more because of my marketing and distribution. With good weather the market fills up quite quickly, and you’re competing for space, especially since they put up the marine protected areas—not a terrible thing, but they didn’t take into consideration that they were taking the same amount of fishermen and putting them all into a small space. So we’ve got less space to fish with the same amount of competition. Urchins are fast growing and pretty plentiful, though.

Is the urchin population OK right now?
I think they’re fine. It’s pretty impossible to overfish them because we’re logistically limited. One frustration we often have with management is that they aren’t concerned about the economics of our fisheries. They don’t address concerns we may have like limiting the number of fishermen. But what if all 300 permits are being utilized by 20-year-olds and there are people who need to support their families?

Do you typically sell all your urchin when you have it?
Lately it’s been crazy—I’m selling out really quickly. I’d rather bring less and sell out than waste any because they’re princesses and don’t last long out of water.

Has there been increased demand for urchin over the past few years?
I think so. Sushi restaurants have become more predominant in the US, so that’s a reason. Also—and this is not a derogatory remark—more white people are eating urchin. They are getting more adventurous.

You’re in a very male-dominated profession. Does it affect your work?
No matter your sex, you will have a hard time succeeding if you don’t have support from your constituents. Fishermen are salty—myself included—but we’re not crusty and mean. I guess people look at me as more approachable, being a woman. I do fish differently than men. The guy I was fishing with yesterday was a lot more aggressive and caught more than me, but I’m a lot more patient.

How many other female urchin divers are there?
In California it’s just me, but I’m not the first ever. There’s some pretty amazing women that seceded me.

You mentioned to me before that people often don’t want to deal with whole urchin, so a lot of the urchins you sell to other companies have to go to a processing plant first. What’s up with that?
When the urchins are loaded onto a truck after fishing, they go to a processing plant either in LA or San Diego and are cracked, opened, and cleaned and sorted by color and size. They’re also put in a preservative (an aluminium or sodium nitrate) that firms it up and brightens the color. In my opinion, it does alter the taste—I prefer it fresh out of the shell.

Yea, I can tell there’s a huge difference. Thanks for talking to me.

Most people hear the name “Malibu” and flash to images of a star-studded beach town, the place that’s packed with celebrities like Pamela Anderson being trailed by the paparazzi in her Ugg boots. If you’re a local, you know how it really is around here: This town is a strange mixture of laid-back and luxury. We’re a hodepodge of college kids, aging surfers/waiters, and celebrities and little more than a beautiful stop along a permanently congested highway full of empty beachfront second homes,  drive-thrus, rehab centers, and a sprinkling of high-end stores and restaurants looking to tack Malibu to their list of locations. It’s a quiet town unless it’s the weekend, a holiday, or bikini season. I couldn’t live anywhere else.

But among the idiosyncrasies that make up what Malibu is, there is one thing that marks the city apart from other beach towns, the same anecdote that every local is painfully aware of: Malibu is a culinary wasteland. It’s the Bermuda-triangle for up-and-coming restaurants. May God have mercy on their culinary souls.

Of course, we’ve got a few redeeming places: Malibu Farm Pier Cafe, a straightforward organic restaurant; Plate and Tra di Noi, where there’s attentive and warm service; and Taverna Tony’s. Nobu, of course, won’t disappoint, but as a whole Malibu is severely lacking when it comes to food that you want to pay to eat.

Trip Advisor lists 78 restaurants in Malibu, but considers deli’s, McDonald’s, Starbucks, and Subway in the list of establishments. It’s a sad day when The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf are the 14th and 15th highest rated restaurants in your town. Once you remove those from the equation, you’re left with less than 30 options. If you look at the list carefully, the only ones that you’d actually want to patron—all of which are scattered along the 27 mile coastline from Topanga State Beach to County Line—are less than half the options given. According to my own experience, they include Carbon Beach Club, Moonshadows, and Malibu Seafood, whereas Duke’s, La Costa Mission, and Coral Beach Cantina are deep in the thick of the “hell no, you can’t make me go there” territory.

Thankfully, it’s hard to  mess up a restaurant experience when you have a killer ocean view, like the software company Oracle’s CEO Larry Ellison’s giant, beachside Nobu and Nikita establishments. Even if the food is not always consistent, I don’t give a shit because the landscape is forgiving. Unless you are a been-around-since-forever local spot regularly frequented by weekending celebrities like Taverna Tony’s, you’re just a small blip, soon to be covered by a  “for lease” sign.

The unparalleled view and celebrity sightings have a tendency to distract oneself from any issues they might have at Nobu or Mr. Chow. Yet once you get past the big guys, most of the restaurants in Malibu are either not very good, have a problem with service, apparently work under the belief that their views automatically make their offerings taste better than they do, or are unnecessarily expensive. These are the restaurants that get big buzz during their opening weeks, because anytime a new place opens here, locals act like it’s the second coming of Christ and this is the restaurant that will save us all. Usually, that hope is left unfulfilled.

Then, in the unforgiving Malibu way, it goes back to a solid rotation of the five or six decent restaurants in town—when I’m always asking myself, How many times a month you can eat Greek food?—while the latest attempt at rectifying the Malibu food scene quietly crawls under the patio to die alone. I don’t think people actually cook more at home in Malibu, or actively make the trek into LA to get a better culinary experience, but are simply stubborn fucks—myself included—who would rather suffer consuming mediocre cuisine at the usual haunts rather than give in to accepting that we need a more diverse array of establishments out here. I wonder if this town has some sort of food hex on it.

Sadly, I’ve seen quite a bit of turnover in Malibu restaurants over the past five years, with each vacancy spurring an opening of another restaurant in its place, only for the newcomer to then close and die a silent death like the one that came before it. All the while, Nobu continues to expand so that there can be more room for the same sushi. It’s at times like this when I’m reflecting on the state of the Malibu food scene that I consider giving my firstborn child to the first person who can pull this shit off.

Maybe Pamela Anderson has the answer to where I should be eating around here.

I see the light now and say this with a heavy heart: Salmon is a basic bitch. In terms of the seafood paradise that is Portugal, there is one particularly strange—yet delicious—type of shellfish that people cannot get enough of around here: percebes, or goose barnacles. Yes, barnacles, those weird little things that grow on rocks and on the hulls of old ships. The first time I had these, I thought I was going to have to force down something that looked like arthritic parrot claws. Once you break it open by snapping the top off to the side, though, there’s this phallic-looking tiny pink barnacle inside. It’s reminiscent of a mildly briny oyster, but tastes like heaven.

Goose barnacles aren’t farmed; they have to be harvested by local fisherman, a process quite dangerous because of how the barnacles grow: on large, slippery boulders jutting out into the ocean, continually pummeled by waves. In Portugal, percebes sell anywhere from 20 euros/kilo to 125 euros/kilo. Fishermen often climb down onto jagged rocks with the help of a rope, to chisel away the crusty critters off the rocks in a rhythm timed between the crashing waves. The other option is to dive deep, and pray that they don’t get pulverized in the rocks. It’s the worst.

In order to get a better understanding of the crazy shit that’s involved in harvesting these weird sea creatures, I headed over to the fish market in Portimão on the southern Algarve coast and met Jody Lot, a percebes fisherman who also happens to be the world champion of spear fishing. He’s also a professionally trained chef who’s in the process of opening up a restaurant in The Algarve. I sat down with him over a pint of beer to talk about the dangers of free-diving and the secrets of percebe harvesting in Portugal.

MUNCHIES: How did you get into fishing? 
Jody Lot: One day I was at the beach with my parents and my father was like “Let’s go have a dive,” you know, with the goggles. I was really scared. I didn’t want to. He hit me and was like, “Get in the water!” Ever since then, I was hooked on the sea. I already had a passion for fishing and then started to develop one for diving. And then I kept up diving and started competing and started being able to live off it. Catch fish, sell fish; gather shellfish, sell shellfish. Ever since then, I haven’t stopped.

Wow. Why did you start to harvest percebes?
If you live off the sea, you really have to learn how to be able to make money off the sea. Percebes are a really reliable way to make money on the coast because they’re quite expensive for the Portuguese, and everybody loves them and everybody eats them.

When is the best season to harvest them? 
You can’t harvest them from September to December, but on a daily basis, I can only catch them when the sea is very calm. There are two ways of harvesting percebes: when the tide is low, you climb down on the rocks and hang with ropes to gather them. Diving is the second option—when I harvest them this way, I find ones that are a little bigger. You can only harvest them when the tide is up in free-diving, the exact opposite approach from the rocks with the ropes method.

How deep do you have to dive when the tide is high?
I usually have to dive between one or two meters, but the deepest I’ve harvested them is around seven meters. You go into the caves and you dive down between the cracks in the rocks while the waves come crashing in. You have to carefully hold yourself between the rocks. A lot of the time they are hiding in the big crevasses of the rocks. You have to be careful when you cut them, because you want to cut it clean.

So how long can you hold your breath?
Normally if I’m diving in the sea, around three minutes and then some. My record, (in a swimming pool) is four minutes and 46 seconds. It’s just natural training from working.

I know moray eels like to hang around the rocks here. Do you encounter them when you’re out diving?
Yeah, that happens often. When I’m trying to chisel the percebes off the rock—right when it’s almost off—a fish comes by and quickly steals them [laughs]. They’re really territorial.

Evil little fish. Have you ever really hurt yourself doing this?
Oh yeah, of course. Sometimes I get stuck between the rocks with my flippers and I have to try and get them off my feet and get back up to water, almost running out of air in the process. Sometimes the waves and tide pull me out and I get thrown against the rocks. I almost broke my arm once.

Good god. It seems like there’s a pretty high demand for them around here.
When they are big, you can always sell them. When they are small and the sea has been calm for too long—maybe a week or more—the market gets flooded because they are easier to harvest when the water is calm.

Is there a time of the year when they taste better?
In the winter, the percebes you catch in shallow water are better. In summertime, the ones caught in deeper waters are better because they grow differently.

What’s the best part of Portugal for percebes?
The Sagres coast and Peniche, where there are really big waves because there are more plankton there. The plankton give them a really good taste.

Interesting. So do you have any tricks or things you look out for when scouting a good spot to dive for them?
You have to look for where the rocks that are jutting out of the water are further out at sea. You have to look for where there are bigger waves. Normally, those are the places where percebes grow bigger. You also want to find a rock that has certain types of cracks in them because that could mean that percebes are there. You have to have a local knowledge of the region and the area to find the better spots.

So is it territorial when it comes to harvesting percebes then? 
Yes, you have a lot of rivalry around here. People are careful to not let anyone know their little spots they always go to. Because to harvest the percebes, you have to have a license. Normally, they only give licenses to locals in the west coast. There are only about 90 licenses given, which is very small.

Is there a problem with people who don’t actually have a license to harvest doing it anyway?
Yes, our country is in crisis and people need to put food on the table. There are a lot of people who live off the sea, and they see harvesting percebes as a good way to make some money, so they are always running from the police.

When you harvest, who do you normally sell to? 
At the market, to restaurants, to privately to people who call me and are like, “If the sea is good next week can you get me some percebes?”

You’re a chef, too. What’s the best way to cook them?
If you cook it the simple way—by boiling them—that’s always going to be the best. They have such a good natural taste and if you mix it with other things you’re going to destroy it.

Now I’m hungry. Thanks for the time, Jody!

Germophobes and bakers might find it difficult to comprehend the world of Wet and Messy (WAM), a type of fetishism that usually involves someone spending the better half of an evening rubbing vanilla-scented cake batter all over their junk. But it’s not just liquid pastry items that get certain people hot and bothered: food, mud, slime, and any other goopey concoctions teetering on health code violations fall under the wide umbrella of liquid festishes out there. It’s a vague concept for a seemingly unending niche of sexual desires. Since I’m a huge fan of cake batter, I started exploring UMD, a WAM fetish forum site that helps you “stay messy with friends,” where I played guess the fetish with people’s profile pictures (batter smeared on tits = up my alley) in attempts to locate a couple who like get down by playing with their food.

After browsing through some of the videos and photos on the site, I quickly realized that my half-assed explorations into whipped cream and chocolate were total childs play. Most of the people I chatted with were surprisingly helpful and happy to talk about their fetishes, which is how I found Mary (also known as Mud Bunny) and Tyler, a WAM couple who make adult food fetish videos under the name Mud Bunny Studios. Picture activities like sitting on multi-colored cake batter pies and being doused  in buckets of cream, batter, or custard, and you’ve fallen into an X-rated Paula Deen scenario. I spoke with Mary and Tyler about the food fetish side of the WAM community, what it’s like to be in a WAM relationship, and learning about the bond that is forged from fucking (literally) with food.

MUNCHIES:  How did you two meet?
Mary: Tyler and I both met at a cellphone store that he was working at and we ended up going for coffee on his break that day.

How long have you been together?
Mary: We’ve been together for about two and a half years now.

How did you two discover that you shared a food fetish?
Mary: Tyler first let me in on his fetish after watching me bake cookies with him one afternoon. We both had no idea that we were even semi interested in the same thing. So while I was shyly teasing him—more for my benefit—I had no idea that it was actually something he enjoyed. A few days later he showed me some WAM photos online. That instant was filled with a sort of tingly excitement. I had randomly stumbled upon someone else with such a undiscussed fetish. I mean what are the odds?

Interesting. What initially sparked your interest with WAM?
Mary: I always enjoyed baking and cooking a lot, and I’ve always found that I loved getting my hands in the batter. It was always something that I’d found sensational but it was never really anything that I had sexually related to until I ended up coming across the UMD community.
Tyler: For me, it came about mostly from browsing the internet. I was always interested in girls and mud and stuff like that, and eventually through scouring porn you kind of come across stuff that you like and you’re like, Maybe we’ll give that a try, and then one thing lead to another.

So what’s the draw of WAM food play for you all?
Tyler: I really enjoy seeing it dripping on a girl, pouring it over her body. It’s a very sexy look, very smooth, the textures are awesome, and they taste good. It stimulates all the senses, which is really interesting from a sexual point of view.

So what’s your favorite food to play with together?
Mary: My favorite would be cake batter. We use some substances that we experiment with, like adding methylcellulose to make it more stringy or adding guar gum to make it thicker and stickier. But on a regular basis, cake batter is just really easy to obtain and if you decided that’s want you want to do together, you have to prepare it and clean up afterwords. It’s a huge process, so cake batter is just a lot quicker in terms of facilitating that, but it also tastes and smells good. Our favorite thing is vanilla because it pours nicely and feels really good on the body.
Tyler: Cake batter is something we come back to quite often. It’s got everything you want.

You mentioned the whole thing is a huge process?
Tyler: Yeah, a lot of things have to align in order for it to happen. Like, if you have roommates you probably don’t want them around; you have to get everything ready. It’s very similar to bondage in that matter. For more elaborate bondage stuff, you aren’t going to be able to just whip everything out and go, you know? It takes hours.

Do you find it difficult to find a partner that shares this fetish with you?
Mary: I’ve never met anyone else who also enjoyed it, or even really knew what it was. There was a girl that I did one package with that found me on the internet and actually lives five blocks away—which is really strange—and was totally into it and loved it.
Tyler: It’s not hard to find someone who likes aspects of it. I think we’ve all played with whipped cream canisters and chocolate paint and stuff like that. It’s hard to find someone whose truly interested in it and more open sexually.

From what I understand food play doesn’t even necessarily involve sexual penetration, but is often a visual stimulation, right?
Tyler: I find that the community itself—though greatly appreciated the visual aspect of it—but I think for a lot of them it may have to do with humiliation. For us, it’s definitely textural and visual. It definitely seems like the act is very sexy. There are some people who do the sexual penetration with it, but those videos don’t necessarily sell more than the rest. You don’t have to actually be having sex with people to be noticed within this community.

Have you found there are common misconceptions people have about the WAM community?
Mary: We haven’t really told too many of our friends. A few of them know and they are the few that love and support us. I’ve never really had anyone that’s taken a back from it either.
Tyler: I think it’s easy to see from an outsider’s perspective how some things might be pretty attractive, but I think the volume is where people get confused. Like pouring a little bit of custard or pudding on someone and then licking it off, you can definitely see the attraction in that, but the idea of an entire bucket of it—I think you kind of lose people at that point.

How does this fetish affect your relationship?
Mary: We both feel that it greatly enhances our relationship. It feels really great to finally reach a stage of complete comfort and understanding with the other person. I feel that Tyler and I have made connections on so many levels that I couldn’t even imagine being able to do that with anyone else.

Great. Thanks for the time, guys!