If you’ve not seen Finding Nemo, you don’t know the hilarious scene where the sharks get together for something akin to Seafood Eaters Anonymous. “I am a nice shark, not a mindless eating machine. If I am to change this image, I must first change myself. Fish are friends, not food,” they state, with great earnestness. It all comes apart because, duh, they’re sharks, hello.
Fast forward to Fish Wednesday. Readers of this blog will know that Fish Wednesday happens pretty regularly around here, if not quite weekly. About a month ago, I started wondering where my fish was coming from. I get my veggies from a CSA, why was I getting my fish from the Safeway? Was there a better way to buy fish and did it matter where it came from?
Also, hey, while I’m at it, I thought, this is a good story for a food magazine. I pitched it to an editor I’ve written for and she accepted the idea. A little research will go a long way and I’ll be able to sit down and write a nice 1200 word piece. Right? Well, not exactly. It turns out these are very big questions, dammit. I have been hoping for a simple sort of answer, some easy rules that will assuage my conscience and keep a nice plate of fish in front of me. The whole thing is quite a bit more difficult than anticipated.
Last week we visited with Mike McDermid who runs the Ocean Wise program out of the Vancouver Aquarium. And this week, we spent some time with Mark Plunkett who’s the conservation guy at the Seattle Aquarium. While I certainly feel much more educated as a consumer, I don’t feel like I’ve come to any easy conclusions.
There are a couple of basic things I can put my hand on, and for now, they’ll have to do. Step away from the Tiger Prawns, sorry, but put the crustacean down. Don’t touch that Chilean Sea Bass, no matter how gorgeously it’s marinated in wasabi and sake. (Argh!) No Orange Roughy, no farmed Atlantic Salmon.
I have a ton more reading to do. I’d like to talk to the guy at the fish counter at our neighborhood “green” market, I’d like to get in touch with the folks that buy seafood for our neighborhood not so green market, and I need to spend some time on the Seafood Choices Alliance web site.
I told our kind host at the aquarium that I felt like the story was starting to unravel for me. It wasn’t so much that it’s coming apart, it’s just that I’ve opened the proverbial can of worms. (Heh. For fishing. Get it? Heh.) When you start to ask where your food comes from, you unleash a whole lot of other questions that you hadn’t previously anticipated.
I find it both fascinating and frustrating. Frustrating in that I feel I can’t just sit down and hammer out my tidy little essay about sustainable seafood. And fascinating in that the avenues to explore are unlimited. I’ve not yet been to an oyster farm, talked to a fisherman or a chef, visited a seafood distribution hub… Dammit, it’s just supposed to be Fish Wednesday, not a master’s thesis.
Give a woman a fish and she’ll cook it, photograph it, and serve it up on Fish Wednesday. Ask a woman about a fish and she’ll embark on a Hemingwayesque journey to find out where the fish came from, what impact eating that fish has on the environment, whether or not it’s okay to eat the fish in the first place, and any number of as of yet unasked questions.
You can (eat) tuna fish, but you can’t just ask about it and expect an easy answer. Stay, um, tuned.
I feel for you. Do you want to go local? Do you want to go green? Do you want fresh? Do you want a guarantee of healthy? Do you want diversity? Do you want delicious? It’s gotten that I pretty well only eat fresh fish, and then I eat it daily, when we are visiting my mother in Grenada.
I have no doubt it’ll be a fascinating read. Reading this, I realized why I rarely eat fish. It’s not because I’m not fond of it (I actually love it)–it’s because I grew up eating it right out of the river or ocean and I think I’ve never quite gotten used to buying it at the market. Fishing has played a large role in the life of my brother (former commercial fisherman)…and of my small hometown. Fishing is DEEP, ya know? I often wonder if when people are buying their fish it ever flickers across their minds just what it took for that piece of fish to be lying so beautifully on ice…
Whole Paycheck didn’t used to carry chilean sea bass, but they recently started to again, saying it was okay, for some reason. Check into it Pam. I’d loved to hear their reason. And tell my mom when you see her why she shouldn’t eat it. It won’t convince her (I’ve tried). She loves it and would happily dine on the very last one. ARGH!
Hope to see you tomorrow.
LRH
A couple of books by Carl Safina talk about ocean issues: Song for the Blue Ocean and Voyage of the Sea Turtle. I read Voyage first, and I’m just starting to read Song now. Song for the Blue Ocean seems to be focused on tuna, and I’m finding it a little bit more difficult to get into, but there’s a lot of information in these books, and personal stories. In Voyage of the Sea Turtle the author spent time with scientists who track the animals, fishermen who avoid catching them and those that have experience hunting and eating them, as well as people who have the turtles integrated into their spirituality.
Honestly, I’m from the Great Plains, thoroughly land-locked. Sea food is a bit of an acquired taste for most people I know. The biggest problem, from my perspective, is that we can’t accurately monitor populations under the sea, some of which range across three different oceans during their lifetimes. Apparently some fish farming is sustainable, but there’s been a lot of attention placed on farm fish so toxic they need a 30 day dry-out period before they can be eaten and other negative impacts of fish farming. At least on land, we know how many cows/chickens/pigs there are, and we can see if they’re dying from mysterious diseases. When you kill a pig, you don’t generally have to kill a bunch of other animals in the process. You can also choose at what age you end its life, so as not to kill off breeders or the next generation.
Often it seems difficult to justify eating sea food once you know all the impacts, but then a huge portion of humanity relies on the sea for most of their protein, so obviously there’s no simple solution..
Don’t you have a killer fish market in Seattle -the one that lead to a management book? It might not meet your requirements, though. Who knows where the fish come from. I think it is the atmosphere and the employee attitudes that make it noteworthy.