Green Options

Some people say you eat with our eyes. At Passionfish restaurant in Pacific Grove, California, you do so with your heart — at a place where the local is celebrated, showcased, and conserved. Sometimes, savoring a meal can nurture our body while helping preserve or restore the planet.  One day, every meal will be consumed this way.

While my family and I make every effort to eat local and lower on the food chain – mostly vegetarian – when we travel, we occasionally become “flexitarians” and enjoy a seafood dish or two when we’re at the edge of a vast ocean, perhaps with a wharf at the end of the street. At Passionfish, a restaurant nestled in the scenic Monterey Peninsula just a mile from the Monterey Bay Aquarium, we connected with the Pacific Ocean by both its salty breeze and through the food we savored.

Opening in 1997, Passionfish is the brainchild of Chef Ted Walter and his wife Cindy Walter. Besides being restaurateurs, the Walters’ might as well be called “marine activists.”  This dynamic duo have ambitions of changing the world by educating people about what they eat, especially if what they eat comes from the sea. Using their restaurant as the alluring (and delicious) platform, the couple promotes sustainable seafood as well as locally sourced, fresh, organic vegetables and fruits. Even their meat products are pasture-raised.

As the 2008 U.S. elections loom ever closer, the world’s many eyes are focused on who will become the next President and thus lead us into the nation (and world) after Bush. This election has garnered a tremendous, unprecedented amount of energy and activity amongst individuals of all demographics. As such, the next few weeks will bring only an increase in the electricity sizzling through our daily lives.

But even with this exceptional, and long overdue, participation in the political process by the general populous, you may still feel like your vote makes no difference in the long run, like you cannot really do anything to determine how the government runs–and runs your life. So you may feel like telling the politicians, pollsters, politicos, and button-toting supporters to “Go Fish!”

When it comes to real live fish, however, you now can have a genuine impact on making the fishing industry more sustainable. My friend and fellow blogger Mark Powell at the Ocean Conservancy is helping spearhead the organization’s FishVote08, which harnesses the power of democracy to help save different fish species.

Ernest Hemingway in “A Moveable Feast“ wrote:

As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to feel happy, and to make plans.

Oysters lead a pretty cushy life. Most oysters on the U.S. market — and many of the clams and mussels, too — are farm-raised. They’re grown in estuaries, those incredibly productive zones where nutrient-rich fresh and salt water meet and mingle. Oysters feed at their leisure, filtering up to eight gallons of salt water per hour to collect food; they simply relax and waits for the tide to bring the next serving.

I only started eating seafood regularly about two years ago. Shortly after I started to add it to my diet, I learned that I needed to be concerned about two things - mercury in the seafood and the environmental impact of how seafood is caught or farmed.

Those concerns have put a serious damper on my new seafood habit. Until today that is. Today I discovered FishPhone from the Blue Ocean Institute. It’s a text message service that allows you to text Fishphone the name of the seafood that you are considering and receive a text message back with information about that particular seafood.

Have you noticed that fish tend to lie? Or should I say that people tend to lie about fish. Chilean Seabass is not a bass at all but actually Patagonian Toothfish. California White Seabass is a member of the Croaker family, Pacific Red Snapper is really Rockfish and Halibut is just a really big Flounder.

Now that I got off my chest, let’s talk halibut. Halibut, found on the continental shelf from California to the Bering Sea, can grow to over 400 pounds grow to nine feet long and are among the largest fish in the sea and the largest member of the right-eye flounder family. They have a translucent white flesh with an incredibly high moisture content.

Last week, I posted about my love for wild salmon, which is as pure and whole as love gets. The day after I posted — the very next day! — there was some sobering news from the West Coast: wild chinook salmon that run upstream in the Sacramento River are vanishing without a trace. Vanishing. Woosh. They’re gone. We’re talking about the most dependable source of Chinook salmon south of Alaska.

Not surprisingly, this is gloomy news for fishing communities. It’s likely that California and Oregon salmon fishing will be halted altogether. Washington fisheries are under threat. Alaska — the source of the majority of wild salmon — is okay for now, but Blogfish reminds Alaska not to get too giddy. Overfishing has threatened Alaskan salmon in the past, too.

But why? Why is this happening? No one knows for sure.

Today’s guest blogger is Environmental Defense scientist Tim Fitzgerald.

As a marine scientist who has been researching seafood sustainability and health issues for a long time, I’ve known for a while that bluefin tuna not only has high mercury levels but is severely depleted, too.

These magnificent fish are highly prized for their rich, buttery flesh. The global sushi market can’t get enough bluefin, and as a result, exorbitant prices and severe overfishing are driving bluefin tuna to the brink of extinction.

I love sushi as much as the next person, but given its dire population numbers and high mercury levels, maybe its time that we all lay off for a while.

Now making big headlines is a New York Times report that found that much of the bluefin sushi served in upscale New York City restaurants actually exceeds the Food and Drug Administration’s “action level” for mercury. (The threshold is 1 part per million.)

To reiterate: It’s no surprise that bluefin tuna has high levels of mercury – it’s one of the largest and most predatory fish species in the ocean. What is surprising is just how many New York City restaurants are serving the really high-mercury tuna.