Supermarkets Fail Greenpeace Test on Fish

Greenpeace rated supermarkets for the sustainability of the fish they sell.

All failed.

As Greenpeace explains:

To date, many environmentalists have asked individual consumers toshift their seafood purchases to reduce effects on overexploited species.  These have proved complicated, bewildering and often ineffective. 

By asking supermarkets to take an active role in preserving overfished species, Greenpeace is enlisting the aid of informed seafood professionals whose decisions send strong signal back through the supply chain.

The larger point -- that supermarkets and others should raise their game when it comes to fish - is incontrovertible. If we want to eat fish in the future, we've got to be smarter about the fish we eat now.

But a couple of issues: first, half of all seafood is sold in restaurants rather than at home, and secondly, as Greenpeace points out, there is massive confusion about "red list" fish. Its own list, for example, contains fish that have been certified as sustainable (such as New Zealand hoki and Alaskan pollack) by the Marine Stewardship Council. This only leads consumers to throw up their hands in confusion.

As for the ratings, Whole Foods rated the highest, but it still got a "failing" grade from Greenpeace.

- Samuel Fromartz 

Mackey Interview, Part 2

In the second installment of the interview with John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods, the focus is on humane meat, sustainable seafood and local food. The first part of the interview can be found here.

Fromartz: There has been a bit of buzz about your humane meat program, which institutes a five-star rating system based on the humane practices of the livestock producers. When will it roll out?

Mackey: We'll roll it out this summer. It got delayed because we were doing it under the Whole Foods-funded Animal Compassion Foundation but we're now shifting it to a third party, the Global Animal Partnership. We think from a credibility standpoint, third party certification is better. Organic is third party, Fair Trade is third party and we think that will have more credibility with our customer base. But this summer, you will start to see the one-through-five rating. (One being the most basic rating and five, the highest, with background here and here).

Fromartz: Have you found enough livestock producers to fill out the meat case? Are there enough grass-based producers, for instance?

Mackey: Well, it's not just for our grass-based producers. All of our meat will be in the program eventually because if they want to sell at Whole Foods, they have to be rated. But if you're asking, have we found that many producers that have the highest ratings, like three, four, and five? The answer is we don’t have enough yet but we think what will happen. As we create more transparency into welfare practices, the desire to have a higher rating is going to kick in. Customers are going to prefer the better ratings, so we're going to see those getting one's and two's try and get three's and four's

Fromartz: Do you expect those with a three or four rating get a premium over the one's and two's?

Mackey: I do. To even get a three, it has to be a pasture-based system, which rules out almost all meat sold in the United States right now. And I don't mean just access to outdoors but a real pasture-based system.

With chickens for example, "free range" is a myth – the birds are not in cages but they are in a big barn. When the consumer thinks of free range, they think the chickens are out running around in pasture but that's not the case. So to get a three under the Global Animal Partnership ratings system, animals will have to live outside and have access to shelter, rather than the other way around - living indoors with supposed access to outdoors. Once there's more transparency and the ratings are out there, the consumer demand is going to be push a lot more producers to get into organic and animal welfare production – they're going to get better scores, a premium and more brand loyalty.

Fromartz: So when are you going to do more in seafood?

Mackey: In terms of sustainability?

Fromartz: You are selling some MSC-certified fish but it's not across the board. (The Marine Stewardship Council certifies whether wild populations of fish are sustainably harvested).

Mackey: We've had quite a few meetings on aquaculture and are coming with standards this summer on farmed fish. That's probably the biggest initiative we've got.

But sustainability in seafood is a huge issue, and I don't have any good answers to it, because world demand for seafood is doing nothing but going up. I think having good aquaculture standards will help. But of course, as you know, demand is very strong for wild caught – and wild caught is hunting and gathering with very efficient technology. It's the tragedy of the commons. I was just looking at our stores in the New York area, and the only certified fish we had was salmon from Alaska and some sea bass. We need a lot more than that.

Fromartz: Yes, in my opinion, your fish case needs the most work.

Mackey: I hear you but is there someone else that's doing more? We're out there working, we're doing monitoring, we've cut off some species. We recently stopped selling orange roughy, and we don't have a lot of species because of sustainability issues. It puts us at a competitive disadvantage against other retailers who do sell those fish.

I think we need someone other than MSC to do sustainability certification, to encourage competition. When we started our Whole Trade label (Whole Food's fair trade designation), we started working with Transfair and Rainforest Alliance. The competition between the two has been intense and that leads to innovation. On the seafood front, there's only one game in town, MSC. We need half a dozen competing to certify sustainable fisheries.

Overall, though, I am very frustrated about it and I don't feel we're going enough. But frankly, I don't know what to do about it.

Fromartz: You've also put a lot of emphasis recently on local foods. Is it growing?

Mackey: I do think it's a fundamental trend, and it's going to grow. But I don't think the locavore movement is going to sweep America.

The simultaneous trend along with local is ethnic and international foods – Asian food, Middle Eastern Food, Mediterranean food. It's not just in the big cities,  there's been a big explosion in different cuisines and that's happening at the same time as local, but they both reflect a growing awareness people have about food. People are looking for authentic artisan food rather than industrial food, or fast food.

Fromartz: Both trends -- imports and local -- are rising?

Mackey: Yes. And there's also whole trade, ethical trade, that's a huge trend that's only going to grow. As Peter Singer said in his book (The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter), the local food movement sometimes lacks a perspective on the globe. Developing countries need to sell in other markets and fair trade gives them a premium when they do that.

Fromartz: So fair trade is growing too?

Mackey: Our goal is to have 50 percent of our foods from developing world be ethically traded in the next 10 years. Right now it's substantially less than that.

Fromartz: I know you need to wrap this up, but one last question: Does anything in the business keeping you awake at night?

Mackey: The truth is the last year was a terrible year for me personally and I had plenty of sleepless nights, while I was being investigated. I feel like I've gotten out of jail, with the SEC dropping its inquiry and not recommending any enforcement actions. Symbolically and emotionally, I feel like I've been liberated. That's really how I feel.

We've got some short term concerns. We've got to integrate Wild Oats, we've got some additional competition, we've got a slowdown in some of our comp sales, and we have an economic environment like I've never seen in my 30 years in this business. I've never seen $133 a barrel oil, I've never seen this kind of real estate crash, we got the Iraq war dragging on, we're sort of in turbulent white water and I don't know what rocks lie ahead because I've never been down this river before.

Fromartz: And your stock price is at the lowest since 2003.

Mackey: The stock was definitely overvalued, trading at 60-70 times earnings. It was a bubble and it popped. But I'm looking to get past 2008 and our earnings back on an upward track. I anticipate that happening next year.

Fromartz: Thanks for the time.

Interview: Whole Foods CEO John Mackey

By Samuel Fromartz

John Mackey, the outspoken CEO of Whole Foods Markets, has been at the center of the natural and organic food business for three decades. But he had stopped talking to the media and shut down his blog because of an investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission into his anonymous posts on a Yahoo message board. 

Once the SEC ended its investigation without taking action last month, Mackey began talking again. "I feel like I've been liberated," he told me. In a wide ranging interview, he talked about the Wild Oats deal, rising food prices, the company's soon-to-be-launched humane meat ratings system, and the prospects for sustainable seafood.

The interview, conducted by phone in late May, has been edited and condensed. It will run in two installments.

Fromartz: Well you're finished with the SEC, but the FTC is still trying to block your deal to acquire Wild Oats.

Mackey: The FTC is still appealing the court decision made last August (which was in Whole Foods' favor), which is unfortunate because the merger's done. We paid all the shareholders, we sold off the Henry stores, we integrated Wild Oats into our system, we’ve shut down several stores, changed the name of many of the stores – so the eggs are scrambled and mostly eaten.

Fromartz: Ignoring the FTC for the minute, was it a good deal in retrospect?

Mackey: It's a difficult question. Because if I could go back in time, we wouldn't have done the Wild Oats acquisition. We spent tens of millions of dollars in legal fees, we've been investigated, it's been highly disruptive. I didn't realize it would cause so much grief.

But if you're saying has it been a good deal aside from that, well, it's very early in the process. And we have to invest money before we get returns on it. We always say it takes about two years to integrate a company we acquire and with Oats we're about 8 months into the process. I'd say we're pretty happy so far but can't say with an absolute certainty until the 24 months have passed. But moral is very high and we've seen a lot of good sales increases.

Fromartz: You've made a lot of acquisitions. Was this one the most difficult?

Mackey: No, I wouldn't say it's the most difficult one. Usually in a merger, there's resistance – the good old days stand firm in the minds of employees. But here, Wild Oats people were waking up from a nightmare of uncertainty. They were glad to have some leadership and some security. We didn't lay anyone off, we've raised pay, raised benefits, and did a lot of training, and they haven't been resistant.

Fromartz: You even offered job security at the stores that were closed?

Mackey: Correct. All the stores we closed were in markets where we already had stores, so they were offered alternative positions. First of all, that's the right thing do, and secondly, if people have a lot anxiety that they could lose their jobs, that inhibits their ability to learn and to adapt. I feel you've got to offer security if you want to get people to move forward. Otherwise they're too scared.

Fromartz: As you've said, the deal was distracting. But did it inhibit your ability to compete with up-and-comers in the supermarket business or even more mainstream players nibbling at your heels?

Mackey: You said nibbling. Well, they're doing a lot more than nibbling. They're very aggressive and coming from a lot of angles. The whole idea that Whole Foods doesn’t have competition (as the FTC argued in its case) actually boggles my mind – we have more competition than we've ever had before. It isn't from Wal-Mart, which the media was talking about a couple of years ago. It's from Trader Joe's, and Safeway's Lifestyle stores. HEB is difficult in Texas, Wegmans has expanded up and down the East Coast and is now targeting Boston. You've got Sunflower and Sprouts and Henry's that are going after the lower end and then the whole phenomenon of farmers' markets. You add all that stuff up and we have a lot more competition.

Fromartz: And you've been feeling that competition in less robust sales?

Mackey: Our comps (year-over-year store sales gains) have declined.  We don't know for certain all the causes of that but it's not unreasonable to assume competition's one of the factors. A year ago, the media was making a lot about competition. The theme this year is trading down. I have to read about it every day, how people all over the United States, apparently hundreds of millions of people, aren't going to shop at Whole Foods markets anymore, and it almost becomes self-fulfilling because it's such a theme.

Our comps last quarter were pretty strong at 6.7 percent, which means we gained market share at the expense of our competitors. But the way it's been portrayed, you would think customers were abandoning us in droves. An objective look indicates Whole Foods had more customers in the last month, or in the last year, than ever before, but we're not gaining them quite as fast as we used to. Is competition a factor in that? Yes.

Fromartz: On food price inflation, have you retooled to react?

Mackey: I don't know if I would say we retooled. We respond mostly on a local level. I always thought Whole Foods had good value if people would take an objective view of it, but they seldom do. An article came out in the Twin Cities on May  17, and it just showed – surprise, surprise – Whole Foods was just about as cheap as Trader Joe's, but almost no one does the objective research. We're tagged with the name Whole Paycheck, and we have expensive things, but we also have 30,000 items. So we're trying to respond by emphasizing value in our stores to our customers.

Fromartz: Like emphasizing private label products?

Mackey: Well, just communicating to customers the value products we have, just trying to get the message out there but it's sort of a message most people don't want to hear because they associate Whole Foods with Whole Paycheck. They don't register that we have products with good value. They've got us in a category and don't want to change.

One of things that hurts price is perishable foods. In areas like meat and seafood, Whole Foods isn't cutting corners. Our core mission is selling the highest quality organic and natural foods. And the highest quality and the lowest price – they don't go together.

Fromartz: But is that precisely the areas people are going to cut back on, to lower their grocery bill?

Mackey: In Whole Foods case, I think what's affecting us more is gas prices. Customers driving 10 miles or more to our stores may not drive as often. Plus with the real estate crash, people don't feel as wealthy. I mean I don't feel as wealthy. Whole Foods stock has fallen 65 percent in the past two years and by any objective standard I'm wealthy, but compared to two years ago, I'm a lot less wealthy. So people are more concerned and cautious.

Fromartz: So you've seen a slowdown or slump in perishables?

Mackey: We have seen a little of that, but I'm not going to disclose any more information than I already made in our earnings call.

Part II: Humane Meat, Sustainable Seafood, and Local Food

Should I Order the Salmon?

Saturday night, my husband and I decided to check-out a new tapas restaurant near our home. By the time we were seated, our 8-year-old son was famished, and wasn’t shy about letting me know it. A procession of sangrias and small plates arrived -- fried manchego cheese, watercress salad, house cured salt cod, and seared duck breast. But Cal was hankering for fish. Not just any fish -- he wanted the salmon, and kept pointing his small finger to it on the menu, punctuating it with “Please, Mom?”

Last summer we vacationed in Tofino, on the western edge of Vancouver Island in Canada. We hired a guide and spent an afternoon fishing. Cal pulled in a small chinook, and we grilled it that evening for dinner. In his mind, all salmon come from pristine waters that are occupied by spouting grey whales and whiskery sea otters. But when I asked the waitress what kind of salmon it was, she looked puzzled. Apparently, she doesn’t get asked the question. Ever. It took a trip to the kitchen for her to come back with the unsurprising answer: farmed-raised Atlantic salmon.

Let me preface this with this statement: I absolutely know better.

But when a hungry kid is tugging on your t-shirt, it’s hard to explain that farmed-raised salmon is not the same kind of salmon he was dreaming about. So true confession? I gave in, and in a few greedy mouthfuls he had polished the plate, while my own appetite diminished and a load of guilt set in. I tried not to think about the sea lice.

Monday’s op-ed by Taras Grescoe talked about salmon specifically. He does a good job on explaining why salmon, farmed or wild, is something that he’ll now go without. I know some other food writers who’ve given up tuna entirely, or who’ve chosen to steer clear of foie gras, but food is something we cover as reporters. There’s no ignorance-is-bliss here. We are often more aware of issues surrounding the food we eat than much of the general public. I understand that no other protein on our plate is as complex as fish, but I made the wrong decision.

I don’t know if Grescoe’s conversation will be heard by people who aren’t inherently interested in the topic in the first place. With food issues, there’s a lot of preaching to the choir. In this case, I heard Grescoe’s lament loud and clear, and will use it as a reminder to explain to Cal that fish can be slippery, and that next time? He's getting the chimichurri chicken instead.
– Clare Leschin-Hoar

Image source: Feeding system on salmon farm, Salmon Farm Protest Group/Marine Photobank

You Got That Fish Where?

(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 Alaskasalmon,” 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 theircomplete 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