Chews Wise

You Got That Fish Where?

Photo: New York Magazine

(Welcome a new contributor to ChewsWise.com, food writer Clare Leschin-Hoar)

Sure, Sam talks plenty about what kind of fish we should be eating, and we’ve got our own case of the bluefin tuna blues, but not all the fish news is gloomy. Dan Ackman caught our attention when he tackled the job of pointing out primo spots for fishing in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens in a recent WSJ article.

Talk about angling for a view. Who knew New York Harbor was home to striped bass, bluefish, fluke and the occasional albacore tuna? Apparently, plenty of New Yorkers did. There are now nearly 120 fishing spots within the city’s five boroughs, and state officials say the fish caught there is safe for consumption too.
 
Avid fisherman and marine scientist David Conover of Stony Brook University keeps to his fishing grounds off Long Island but says encouraging urbanites to develop a connection to the ocean helps bring home the message of keeping our waters clean. But would he go so far as to eat something he caught off of Battery Park?  “Only on very rare occasions and only if its a migratory species that is just passing through and probably spent most of its life in the open ocean.”
 
It turns out, New Yorkers aren’t alone in their piscatorial passion. Plenty of states, like Kansas and Minnesota are luring residents to urban fishing programs. Here in Boston, our own harbor is hopping too. Fishing expert Pete Santini says it’s home to stripers, bluefish and cod, and most recently, he’s seeing once-depleted flounder stocks making a strong comeback here. 
 
With gas inching towards $5 a gallon, we bet more fishermen will be taking to the waters close to home this summer, which means it’s only a matter of time before this morphs into another lively Boston/New York rivalry.
 –Clare Leschin-Hoar
 

 

What Fish to Eat? An Expert Talks

Henry Lovejoy, a wholesaler of sustainable seafood at Ecofish, spoke with Gourmet's Barry Estabrook on making good sustainable seafood choices.

"If someone wants a blanket statement on what to eat, I say wild Alaska salmon,” Lovejoy says—any species, including chinook, chum, coho, sockeye, king, red, and pink. “They are well managed, very high in Omega 3s, and very low in mercury and PCBs.”

That's the quick answer, but the article has a lot more information on great seafood as the summer grilling season shifts to high gear. We also did a previous post on seafood buying guides.

With Gardens Booming, I Harvest Greens

Organic Bok Choy, Lettuce and Spinach from the Garden

The jump in food prices -- and perhaps just the delight of growing Real Food -- has people gardening again, including me. Vegetable seed sales have overtaken flowers, community gardens are booming, and  spending on vegetable gardens rose 25 percent last year, NPR reports.

 

I took the plunge three years ago, when I was working on my book, Organic Inc. Before that project, I had absolutely no interest in growing anything. But having met farmers around the country, I figured, "I could do that" and took the plunge.

The motivation wasn't economic, though clearly there was an economic benefit, since we were spending about $50 a week on fresh veggies. There's also a guilt factor, since much of that money was being spent at the farmers' market and the advice on how to grow these plants came from those same farmers I used to buy from on a regular basis.

Even though my spending is now way down, my farmer mentors are incredibly encouraging. When I admitted I was guilty asking for yet more advice, Jim Crawford of New Morning Farm replied: "I've got a lot of other people to buy my veggies."

The first year was abysmal, but things quickly improved. Last year was the first time I had a three season garden (spring, summer, and fall), courtesy of a planting schedule worked out with farmer Jim and another great farmer in our area, Heinz Thomet of Next Step Produce. That meant we bought very little produce from June through Thanksgiving last year.

This spring has been cool, so the tomatoes I started are still in flats, though the greens are going gangbusters. The picture above is of our first bok choy and full head lettuce, and the last of the spinach we've been eating since April. We've got a ton of lettuce coming in, from full heads to spring mix. There's nothing like eating lettuce you've picked out of the garden an hour before.
- Samuel Fromartz

Mackey, Vindicated, Is Back Blogging

Whole Foods CEO John Mackey, vindicated in an SEC investigation of his anonymous postings on a Yahoo message group, is back blogging again at the company's web site. His first post explains his view of the incident with a second from a commencement speech he gave.

He said the SEC "matters now are completed with the board affirming their complete support for me and the SEC recommending that no enforcement action be made against Whole Foods Market or me. "

Mackey previously had a lively blog with a lot of comments, so we look forward again to seeing what issues he raises.

- Samuel Fromartz

Agriculture v. Oceanculture

Bonnie Powell had a great post at Ethicurean summing up the sustainability theme at the Cooking for Solutions conference we attended last week, and rather than regurgitate it (really, it's worth reading), I want to make one more point that my ocean conservation friends might chime in on.

And that is the difference between harvesting oceans and growing food on land.

Steven Palumbi, a pony-tailed marine ecologist and the Pew Fellow in Marine Conservation at Stanford University, gave a closing keynote at the conference, touching on this difference.

For oceans to be healthy, the entire eco-system of the ocean needs to be healthy. On land it may be easier to control all those variables -- making sure you have biodiversity in the crops you plant, taking into account water usage and quality, chemicals, mixed farming systems with animals, etc.

And yet, in our interactions with the oceans, we focus on only the species we're harvesting. One problem (alluded to earlier in the conference) of this focus is that it doesn't account for all the rippling effects of this harvest. By-catch, for example, is a huge problem (depleting juvenile red snapper when taking shrimp) or bottom trawling (that damages the seabed). If you simply look at the population you're fishing for you may miss these other effects.

Finally, since we're not actively living in the ocean, we might arguably have a greater impact than on the land. For these are still wild places, not like agriculture. We have to work within the diversity of the ocean, not create it anew on a farm.

Fred Kirschenmann, the Godfather of sustainability (and distinguished fellow at the Leopold Center of the University of Iowa) , talked about this interaction - that we shouldn't necessarily view nature as something apart from ourselves, off in the distance. That's true, we are nature too, but perhaps we're less attuned to a "whole systems" view of the sea than we are of the land.

How can we interact with it -- that is, take fish -- without screwing up? We can always plant more crops, if we care for the soil. We can't plant more fish. So, as Palumbi said, don't eat those "older than your grandmother." 

Obviously this is an area that I'm just starting to think about. But I'm curious about it, looking wider, at distant impacts, rather than drilling down too narrowly.

- Samuel Fromartz

Earthbound's 100 Percent Organic Leap

At the Monterey Bay Aquarium's Cooking for Solutions event last week, I ran into Drew Goodman, the founder with his wife Myra of Earthbound Farm. The company, which began on a 2-1/2 acre plot in nearby Carmel, is now the biggest organic produce company in the world known for their bagged salad mixes.

But for years, they also had a conventional arm, selling non-organic produce from land that was undergoing the three-year transition to organic production. This so-called "split operation" was a nifty set up, for it allowed them to sell to customers who wanted a non-organic product and it also created a market for transitional crops. You might say this arrangement was crucial to their growth.

It also had a downside, most notably when tainted conventional spinach they processed for Dole was implicated in the e. coli crisis a couple of years back.

Now, Earthbound, or more accurately, the corporate entity that owns it, Natural Selection Foods, is out of the conventional produce business altogether.

"As of April, we're totally organic," Drew told me.

This was surprising news since it meant that they were no longer selling any product off of transitioning land. With prices of conventional salad mix so low, however, it might make sense. It also makes sense given their values -- they are strong believers in the benefits of organic farming and food and now have a robust enough business that they could leave conventional behind.

It also means they no longer run dual lines in their salad processing plants, one conventional, the other organic. Now, all their facilities are organic.

I also asked him whether demand was still growing for their product, in spite of rising food prices. He said it was and didn't expect it to let up anytime soon. In fact, he said, organic spinach sales were extremely high; higher than they were before the whole e. coli crisis struck.

It seems consumers still see high value in the organic salad product, perhaps because it's relative premium to conventional salad mix is so slim. You don't have to pay a lot more to buy organic salad.

Another Earthbound employee told me the organic product wholesales for about $4.75-$5 for a three-pound bag to food service distributors, which means a chef pays about $7-9. Conventional salad mix goes for about $4-4.25 per three pounds.

I detailed the company's evolution in Organic, Inc.: Natural Foods and How They Grew, but suffice it to say that despite criticism they were highly innovative. That continues to this day with this latest step.

- Samuel Fromartz

The Biggest Fish Market in the World

 

If you enjoy fish, you might like this story I wrote, "In the Belly of Tsujiki," for Gourmet.com. We visited the market early in the morning and ended up buying fish to take back to my relatives in Tokyo.

Now I know my sustainable fish friends might have a problem with this but this is a problem with sustainability's place in the market right now: it's not available -- or recognizable -- in all places.

Back home, I largely avoid tuna -- because of toxicity issues and overfishing, but I made an exception here. I also know others would make different choices.

As many speakers at the sustainability conference this week at the Monterey Bay Aquarium said this week, sustainability is a process that begins with awareness. On that note, I hope to soon have another story on seafood sustainability in Japan -- which is quite surprising.

Here's a few more pictures from the market.

Las Vegas’s Daily Diet of 60,000 Pounds of Shrimp

That figure comes from Rick Moonen, the chef at RM Seafood in Las Vegas who has a passion for sustainable fish. He mentioned that Las Vegas’s daily consumption of 60,000 pounds per day is more than the rest of the nation combined.

Where does that shrimp come from? Largely from farms in southeast Asia, which have a number of problems: the destruction of mangrove swamps where the farms are based, the application of pesticides and antibiotics in the fish farms that are banned in the U.S., the reliance of low-wage labor. His solution? He uses only wild caught US species.

This came out of a panel at the Cooking for Solutions conference at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, which brings together about 60 journalists to learn about sustainable food. It’s one of the few conferences that gathers terrestrial and oceans experts in one forum and is flat-out one of the best conferences I’ve attended on these issues.

The day was opened by Gene Kahn, a founder of the organic food industry, who has since moved onto greener pastures at General Mills. As global sustainability officer, he set the theme of “continual improvement” -- that there is not one singular solution to sustainable food systems and that it demands incremental gains, not either/or approaches.

Kahn said he’s most interested in changing the mainstream since 1 percent change at General Mills is “revolutionary.” As a former organic food entrepreneur, he said he’s no longer interested in “selling food to yuppies” and that the mainstreaming of these values in everyday products represents a “democratization.”

Interestingly, he said the biggest risk to this entire movement is “greenwashing,” that is the practice of companies making claims that are so limited as to be functionally meaningless. The solution was to have transparent goals, processes and results. 

But back to shrimp, which along with tuna and salmon were the topics of the first panel.

The major issue with salmon is the destructive practices of farmed fish, both in pollution and the use of wild caught fish as feeder stocks. None on the four-person panel could endorse any farmed product. Indeed, the only positive farmed products mentioned were tilapia, trout, with a nod to Kona kampachi and barramundi. And of course, mollusks, such as mussels and oysters, which have been highly successful in farmed systems.

Tuna is one of the most widely eaten species, but the only population that won an endorsement from the panel was the pole caught albacore on the West Coast (low in mercury toxins, high in omega 3 fatty acids) and a few poll caught species off of Hawaii. The other major issue with tuna is that governmental norms over its harvest differ or are non-existant. Illegal fishing is also rampant.

“It’s a highly migratory species and requires international agreements that have not been forthcoming,” said Brad Ack of the Marine Stewardship Council. “The (consumer) market has not begun to drive that change, and that’s going to have the biggest influence.”

Pen-raised tuna (much of it in Australia and the Mediterranean) has been put forward as one solution, but Corey Peet of the Aquarium mentioned that these tuna require 25 pounds of feeder fish to create one pound of tuna - a horrendous ratio that is not sustainable. Furthermore, wild caught  juvenile fish are farmed in these pens, depleting wild stocks in which they might breed.

Paul Johnson, owner of the Monterey Seafood Market, said he expected some blue fin tuna populations to be extinct within the next three or four years. Whether he’s right or not is only a matter of degree.

As for salmon, the familiar advice to buy Alaskan wild salmon was widespread; species such as coho and sockeye will be more prevalent and cheaper than king salmon.

But Johnson said, “We are going to pay more for seafood if it’s sustainable.”

The solution: eat a smaller portion ... or different species.

Moonen said that smaller species are generally more sustainable - mackerel, sardines, trout - but that consumers have to learn how to cook them. To that aim, he recently published a cook book on this topic, Fish Without a Doubt, which we soon hope to review.

- Samuel Fromartz

Who Knew? International Compost Week

This is from the "who knew?" department. It's International Compost Awareness Week. I realized that cruising around a site in Australia of all places, then found a link here about events in the United States running this week.

I get asked a lot of questions about compost, since I have a bin in my yard and we compost all plant waste from the kitchen.

Conventional Farmers Turn to Organic Fertilizer

At the Kellogg Conference, I've heard anecdotally that conventional farmers are turning to organic fertilizers, because of the shortage and spike in prices in conventional fertilizers made with fossil fuel. If anyone knows more about this please let me know or post a comment.

- Samuel Fromartz