Green Options

Today’s post is by Kristen Honey, EDF Lorry Lokey Fellow.

Are sardines making a sustainable and sumptuous comeback? The Washington Post attempted to address this very question yesterday in a provocative article about the self-proclaimed “Sardinistas.” According to this group of nutritionists, environmentalists and foodie revolutionaries, the answer is a resounding “yes!”  Sardine advocates and cutting-edge green chefs like Dean Gold and David Myers are bringing this smelly canned food out of the cob-webbed cabinet corner and back into the kitchen in innovative new ways. Or they are trying to, at least.

Just recently, I had the privilege of attending a private luncheon with the Sardinistas at filmmaker Mark Shelley’s Sea Studios Foundation on Monterey’s Cannery Row.  The purpose of this luncheon was to highlight their recent efforts to promote sardines as a delicious and sustainable seafood choice.   What struck me was their point that while Americans love eating tuna and other steak-like fish, we need to eat fish farther down the food chain (like sardines) to help alleviate pressure at the top.

After talking shop, we had the chance to eat delectable canned, frozen and fresh sardine dishes by renowned chef Alton Brown of The Food Network!  If you don’t take my word for how tasty these creatures can be, try out for yourself these sardine-centric recipes for Sarde Arrosto (Griddle Roasted Sardines), Stuffed Sardines and Vuido (widowed potatoes).

Today’s post is by Environmental Defense Fund scientist Tim Fitzgerald.

Seafood is often called brain food. It’s a good source of many different nutrients, including long chain omega-3 fatty acids. Eating fish — or taking fish oil supplements — has been linked to a number of cardiovascular and neurological benefits. For this reason, most health experts and the U.S. government’s dietary guidelines encourage people to eat more seafood.

However, a new study in the journal of the Canadian Medical Association calls this recommendation into question, contending that the health benefits of omega-3’s have potentially been oversold while the ocean’s ability to provide them is failing.

The bottom line? The jury is still out on how much fish we should eat, so making eco-friendly choices is essential.

The study’s authors accurately point out that the oceans can no longer provide us with fish (and fish oil) at the current pace. Barely one-quarter of U.S. fisheries are known to be sustainably fished, and the United Nations reports that 80 percent of the world’s fisheries are now either fully fished (i.e. incapable of providing more) or overexploited.

Conservation group Blue Ocean Institute doesn’t want there to be any guesswork when it comes to sustainable seafood. Wondering about a species? Just text FishPhone.

The next time you’re looking at the seafood options in your local supermarket, try texting FishPhone to see which selection is best for the environment and your health. Just send the word FISH, followed by a type of seafood (Salmon, for example) to 30644.

In just a few [...]

A lobster, thought to be up to 140 years old, is to be released into the Atlantic Ocean, after briefly becoming an unconventional mascot at a New York City restaurant.

PETA found out about the plight of the 20 pound crustacean when a diner at NYC’s City Crab & Seafood called to say it was being kept in the diner’s tank. PETA’s Ingrid Newkirk praised the restaurant, saying, “We applaud the folks at City Crab and Seafood for their compassionate decision to allow this noble old-timer to live out his days in freedom and peace.”

By Lester R. Brown

After World War II, accelerating population growth and steadily rising incomes drove the demand for seafood upward at a record pace. At the same time, advances in fishing technologies, including huge refrigerated processing ships that enabled trawlers to exploit distant oceans, enabled fishers to respond to the growing world demand. In response, the oceanic fish catch climbed from 19 million tons in 1950 to its historic high of 93 million tons in 1997. This fivefold growth—more than double that of population—raised the wild seafood supply per person worldwide from 7 kilograms (15.4 pounds) in 1950 to a peak of 17 kilograms in 1988. Since then, it has fallen to 14 kilograms.

As population grows and as modern food marketing systems give more people access to these products, seafood consumption is growing. Indeed, the human appetite for seafood is outgrowing the sustainable yield of oceanic fisheries. Today 75 percent of fisheries are being fished at or beyond their sustainable capacity. As a result, many are in decline and some have collapsed.

While oceanic fisheries face numerous threats, it is overfishing that directly threatens their survival. Oceanic harvests expanded as new technologies evolved, ranging from sonar for tracking schools of fish to vast driftnets that are collectively long enough to circle the earth many times over. Indeed, a 2003 landmark study published in Nature concluded that 90 percent of the large fish in the oceans had disappeared over the last 50 years, as a result of this expansion.

Note: Scroll to the bottom to find out about the new Green Kitchen Certification offered by
Food Service Warehouse

Dear Readers,

Some of you have inquired about how I’ve been spending my time since wrapping up production (and living) on the Sust Enable project at the end of July.  As I wrote in my post “Voyage to the Center of the United States,” my August was spent travelling the country, experiencing its still awe-inspiring natural beauty.

Since mid-September, I have taken work waitressing nearly full time at a restaurant.  And no, that isn’t sustainable.

Sust Enable, my three month foray of 100% sustainable living, taught me a lot of things.  The first thing I noticed after the project concluded is that I was hopelessly broke.  Trying to innovate a radical new eco-conscious way of living doesn’t pay… rather, it sapped money, as I watched my planned resources for feeding and housing myself in a “100% sustainable” way fall through.

Partly, I am okay that the Sust Enable project didn’t pay me at all–it was an educational experience to me about how money works from an outsider’s perspective.  On the other hand, I was teetering near the brink of not being able to provide for myself–literally!  As much as I loathe the fact, nearly all systems for providing for one’s basic needs exist within the money-exchange system.  The ones outside of such a system and potentially sustainable, as I learned, are either insufficient, unavailable, or sabotaged at every possible opportunity by the capitalist system–by business owners, managers, policies, laws.

So, come September, I decided I really would like a place to myself.  I really would like to be warmed in freezing weather.  I really would like to have food readily accessible to me.  Basic ideas, no?  Certainly, each of these systems in their current states are unsustainable in terms of the environment.  But at the very least, I now have a perspective on how that might be different in the future, and can hopefully work to create a society that doesn’t have to trade the health of our air or water for our immediate stability and livelihood.

Working as a server in a restaurant has been a difficult situation for me.  I know I need the money… but holding that thought aloft every day above a sea of swirling, conflicting passions has been challenging.  I watch perfectly good food go uneaten and thrown out–but paid for–because of the sentiments that day of the purchaser.  I see inordinate amounts of cruel and unsustainably-harvested meat–from steak to seafood–served with enhancing garnishes on plates to carefree consumers, who will never feel or see the horrors of a meatpacking factory.  Money accounts for all.  I see servers, some of the hardest working people I have ever met, go untipped (our main source of income) by a table of cheerful business people.  But most of all, I see a continuous flow of garbage–paper, plastic, glass, and food–into the trash bins.

With apologies to both Stephen King and Verizon Wireless, the “real” Dead Zones we need to talk about are hypoxic (low-oxygen) areas in the world’s water systems that can no longer support aquatic life. As Joshua Hill, over at Plantsave has eloquently said,

Dead zones are created, in the beginning, by nitrogen (among other things). Nitrogen is the byproduct (in this instance) of natural gas transformed in to ammonia fertilizer, which is then spread across the agricultural landscape of many western and emerging nations.

From there the runoff makes its way to streams, then rivers and finally the oceans. It is at this stage upon reaching the ocean that the real trouble begins. The increase of nitrogen in the waters fuels the increase of algae which subsequently absorbs exorbitant amounts of oxygen, making life unbearable for most creatures…

Does proximity to the sea give a city an advantage when it comes to sustainability rankings?

According to SustainLane who just released their 2008 Sustainable City rankings, city traits that are already set in stone like geography and layout play a huge role. Take the greenest cities in America: Portland, San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago and New York. Four out of the five them are situated on the coast and were built before suburbia existed.

This post is by Environmental Defense Fund scientist Tim Fitzgerald.

The recent The New York Times story about two high school students who did DNA testing on fish shines a light once again on one of the seafood industry’s dirty little secrets — fish fraud. They found that one fourth of 60 samples of seafood taken in New York City restaurants and seafood markets were mislabeled.

But with lax FDA regulations and virtually no enforcement, the practice is more common than one would hope. In recent years, there have been numerous reports of fraud occurring around the country. Three years ago, a Times investigation also found that fish sold as wild Alaskan salmon by high-end New York City markets was mostly cheaper farm-raised salmon, selling for as much as $29 a pound. (See my previous post Plenty of Safe, Eco-Friendly Fish in the Sea.)

The U.S. Food Drug and Drug Administration, which oversees the safety of our seafood supply, defines fraud as the substitution of a less expensive fish for a more expensive kind, for example, tilapia for red snapper, farmed salmon for wild from Alaska, or basa or tra (Vietnamese catfish) for grouper.

Checklist: How to spot fish fraud

Being informed and knowing your seafood is the best way to arm yourself against fraud. Some things that should raise red flags are:

According to this year’s report, Americans consumed a total of 4.908 billion pounds of seafood in 2007, slightly less than the 4.944 billion pounds in 2006. The average American ate 16.3 pounds of fish and shellfish in 2007, a one percent decline from the 2006 consumption figures of 16.5 pounds. But what most concerns scientists is the growth in imported farm-raised seafood coupled with declines global fishstocks.

When my publisher and literary agent were speaking with various people about providing an endorsement for my cookbook, The Sustainable Kitchen, I received an interesting response from an older 70’s/80’s television chef. His note said he would be happy to endorse my book but only if we changed our view on sustainable seafood and aquaculture. His position was seafood, in general, is a high-protein, low-fat food. For health reasons, people need to eat more seafood in order to increase their intake of omega-3 fatty acids (the good fat) and reduce their intake of omega-6 fatty acids (the bad fat). Now, I am not one to contradict a celebrity, of course they must be right, but seems a bit short sighted to me.