In the gleaming-white Highland Fisheries plant in Glace Bay, on the northeastern tip of Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, tens of thousands of Arctic surf clams—each one steamed and flash frozen at sea, and looking every bit like rude, little red tongues—stream through a maze of conveyor belts and X-ray scanners.
Individually photographed at lightning speed and graded by computer for their colour and shape, the rejects are robotically punted away with quick blasts of air from an array of nozzles, while the rest get sorted, packed and shipped mostly to Japan, China, Korea and Europe as part of a thriving clam export business worth about $130 million a year. That, as they say, is a lot of clams. For Clearwater Seafoods, the company that owns the plant and has long had a monopoly on the fishery, the surf clam—popular as a sushi ingredient for its texture and sweet taste—has been critical to its growth into one of North America’s largest seafood companie