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

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.

Does it smell?
No, if your pile smells like rotting vegetables you are doing something wrong. Most likely, you have added too much "green" waste, such as fruits and veggies, and not enough "brown" waste, like leaves and hay. You need roughly equal amounts of both. What I do is throw down a layer of leaves saved from the fall then put "green" waste over the leaves, then cover the whole lot with a few shovel fulls of soil. It's also a good idea to throw in some existing compost, if you have it, to stimulate the biological activity. Then water the pile so that is has the consistency of a damp sponge. If it's too wet, the green matter will rot. If it's too dry, it won't decompose. As the bin fulls up I mix it with a shovel every week or two.

Does it attract rats?
I have a closed compost bin made of hard plastic. I have never seen a rat anywhere near the bin and I've been composting in the middle of DC for four years.

Does it take a lot of time?
Once you get into the habit, making compost is like taking out the garbage or putting out the recycling. It's just something you do. So no, it doesn't take a lot of time.

It's spring and I didn't save any fall leaves. What should I do?
You can still build the pile with hay. You can try newspaper but I found it took too long to break down. Same with sawdust and any woody matter, which I avoid. Buy a bale of hay if you can, or run to your municipal compost operation and pick up a few bags of leaves.

I don't have space but still want to compost. Can I compost inside?
You can investigate worm composting. I have not tried the technique but know it works. The classic text for this is Worms Eat My Garbage. And speaking of worms, that last picture shows a tiny earthworm I pulled out of the bottom of the bin, which was teeming with the critters.

So what do I do with compost?
Grow plants!

If my chatty instructions on making compost leave you dumbfounded, then check out Ed Bruske's video series about making a compost pile. It's a good introduction for the beginner. The one below is just the first in the series.

- Samuel Fromartz

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

Kellogg Meeting Notes: Good Food, Good Business

I’m attending the Kellogg Food and Society Conference outside of Phoenix, which is notable in a couple of ways. The meeting gathers about 550 leaders from the non-profit world - everybody from policy wonks working on the Farm Bill to those working with farmworkers, in urban community gardens, on immigration or with inner city healthy food initiatives.

Secondly, it’s being held at the luxurious Sheraton Wild Horse Pass Resort, a complex in the middle of the Gila River Indian Community which is actually owned by Indian tribes. The upscale nature of the place is certainly jarring for non-profits more accustomed to pinching pennies (Kellogg is picking up the expenses). But notably, the entire place was designed with Indian themes - artwork, bedspreads, even the architecture - and it provides a lot of jobs at all levels to the local Pima and Maricopa tribes.

Unlike the focus of much of my past work, the people at the conference are coming at things from the not-for-profit angle. Curiously, though, I’ve been engaged workshops where the overt theme was business - how do you grow local food? How do you bring more food to people? What’s needed in distribution? What type of ventures can make this happen? There’s a recognition that business can do this, but it’s business incubated or formed by non-profits for clear social goals.

Given the discussion, it’s clear these people would benefit from engaged business people on their boards, as advisers, if they’re not there already. In the food world, at least the organic wing of it, there are many people who have dealt with the same issues, who have gone from small to big, who have done so with clear missions. While those businesses might not always have a social component, the veterans of those paths could offer tools and strategies to get the business right -- so that it provides a solid foundation for the social goals these non-profits want to pursue.

It’s also clear from the discussions I’m having that the food movement is out-growing the farmer direct models that have been extolled for so long (farmers’ markets, CSAs). The new emphasis is on wholesale models that are necessary to bring more food to places where people actually shop - like supermarkets. That’s the next wave. But I will be interested to see how non-profits play a role in tackling this scaling issue, or whether they will be a footnote among the efforts of profit-minded entrepreneurs.

I would also note that the profit-based companies involved in the food world have largely sidestepped social justice issues. Environment, animal rights (to a degree), worker participation (to a degree), fair prices for farmers (to a degree) find a place, but social justice and affordability don’t hold an equal place at the table. That is, for people on the bottom income rungs. What businesses are starting grocery stores in inner city low-income areas - those food deserts we hear about so often? Can it be done? Or is the food bank, or government-led effort the only solution? I mean, the model exists for the unhealthy kind of store in these neighborhoods - liquor and convenience stores. Why can’t there be a healthy store model? Or maybe I just don’t know about ones that exist.

Maybe that would be a source of non-profit/for-profit partnerships going ahead, much like my impression of the economic development provided by this resort. It’s transforming the community (as one of several economic ventures) creating a social outcome but with the tools and methods of business.

- Samuel Fromartz

Fit for Food

We won recognition from food fit for the blog. Thanks!

Rice Rationing, Freeze in California

By now you've probably seen the news that Costco and Sam's Club are limiting sales of rice, seemingly to discourage hording now that prices are skyrocketing and Vietnam and India are placing bans on some rice exports due to shortages.

"There is no rice," saidRita Patel of San Jose, a native of India who couldn't find any at Costco on Hostetter Road in northeast San Jose on Tuesday night, the San Jose Mercury News reports.

This applies to Jasmine and Basmati rice, though there is no shortage of US-grown rice. Costco is also limiting soybean oil sales, according to the Wall Street Journal:

Food hoarding appears to be driven as much by budget worries as concern of shortages. Consumers, feeling pinched by inflation, are loading up before prices rise again. A Queens, N.Y., Costco limited sales of soybean oil several weeks ago. The store had noticed customers buying up flour and placed a brief limit on purchases. The oil limit is still in effect.

Meanwhile, a freeze on Monday and Tuesday in California has damaged organic crops. Organic Partners reports:

Heavy hit are: Prunes, peaches, apricots, walnuts and other tree crops.  Vegetable crops will not show the full extent of the damage until there is some hot weather to accelerate the decay in the plants.