Whole in the Water
Well-Known Member
Part 2 of 2
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“Even if every consumer had a seafood guide or the issue of sustainability in their mind, ideally we’d want every place that sells fish to have done this work for them,” said Fitzgerald.
The website Fish2Fork takes this approach, reviewing restaurants based on their commitment to sustainability and the quality of information they provide to diners. It launched in 2009 through the Blue Marine Foundation as a legacy project of “The End of the Line,” a documentary about overfishing. “Firstly, we want to show consumers what they should be looking for in a restaurant, and to highlight what efforts restaurants make to be sustainable,” Lewis Smith, the site’s editor, explained to me in an email. “Second, we try to show restaurants themselves where they can improve, hopefully putting pressure on the sector to become more sustainable.” Their utility for the average diner, however, is limited: They’ve reviewed about 1,000 restaurants in Europe, and considerably fewer in the U.S.
As for supermarket shopping, Fitzgerald and Smith both referred me to the Marine Stewardship Council’s certification system: A blue label with a big check mark is stamped onto seafood from wild fisheries that meet its sustainability standards. (The Aquaculture Stewardship Council does the same for farmed fish.) Kerry Coughlin, the MSC’s Regional Director for the Americas, says consumers can be very confident that fish with their seal – about 13 to 14 percent of the world’s wild-caught supply – is sustainable. Their global standards were set after two years of dialogue involving hundreds of scientists, academics, conservation organizations and industry experts. Assessments of fisheries – contracted out to independent third-party certifiers – involve a team of scientific experts whose work is peer-reviewed. Independent certifiers also conduct tracebacks through the supply chain.
“We have a system that is very well designed with checks and balances, and then there are yet external checks and balances on top of that,” Coughlin told me. “So consumers really can put a high degree of faith, when they see the MSC blue ecolabel, that that fish is actually the fish that it’s labeled, and from a fishery that’s certified sustainable.”
The effort the MSC puts into following fish through the supply line and remaining independent from special interests underscores the complexity behind the “sustainable” label. But it’s easy for retailers to make claims that aren’t backed by that kind of verification. Critics use the term “bluewashing,” to refer to claims exaggerating seafood’s sustainability. According to Coughlin, this could mean the anything from criminal acts like relabeling fish to sell at a higher price to “the chef who’s very well-intentioned… who talks to their certifier about it – or their certifier talks to their supplier – and in the end, so often, people just say, ‘Oh, yeah, yeah, I talked to so-and-so and they said it was.’ And really there’s no way of knowing.”
“There are just a few sellers that I think are really committed to sourcing well and to understanding what they’re selling,” Safina told me. The Blue Ocean Institute has partnered with Whole Foods Market, which personally visits its seafood suppliers to verify first-hand that they’re engaging in sustainable practices. Otherwise, he said, they “haven’t been really willing to endorse a lot of people who make those claims.”
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For better or for worse, I’m not a zealot. I don’t go to protests or talk people’s ears off about sustainability issues (although that’s beginning to change now that I’m covering the topic for Salon). When I wasn’t eating seafood at all, it was easy to just avoid the issue. But as soon as I became a “principled” fish eater, I became overwhelmed with factors to consider. Confrontation became hard to avoid. At restaurants, and while shopping, I couldn’t avoid becoming “that girl,” the kind they parody on “Portlandia.”
And so, much more quickly than I’d like to admit, I stopped asking questions. I still don’t eat a ton of fish, but when I do, I order what looks good. A few weeks back, I deliberately forgot what I’d once read about sushi’s complicity in destroying the ocean floor and ate a crunchy salmon roll.
I’m sorry. It was delicious. I’m sorry.
Safina, I was surprised to hear, does eat seafood. But he’s figured out his own way of sticking to his principles: Most of what he eats, he catches himself. “I can remember buying fish like, once in the last twenty years,” he told me. He eats some sushi, too, just not tuna or anything his guide would classify as a bad choice.
For people like me, who live in cities and don’t have the time or inclination to cast out a line, indifference can come to feel inevitable. It’s a problem that comes up with most “green” issues, involving a big picture that’s hard to see from one’s own small-impact, individual perspective. Another thing Safina said, which I didn’t at first understand, is that he was disappointed by how popular his guide, and its many imitators, was:
Lindsay Abrams is an assistant editor at Salon, follow her on Twitter @readingirl, email labrams@salon.com.
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“Even if every consumer had a seafood guide or the issue of sustainability in their mind, ideally we’d want every place that sells fish to have done this work for them,” said Fitzgerald.
The website Fish2Fork takes this approach, reviewing restaurants based on their commitment to sustainability and the quality of information they provide to diners. It launched in 2009 through the Blue Marine Foundation as a legacy project of “The End of the Line,” a documentary about overfishing. “Firstly, we want to show consumers what they should be looking for in a restaurant, and to highlight what efforts restaurants make to be sustainable,” Lewis Smith, the site’s editor, explained to me in an email. “Second, we try to show restaurants themselves where they can improve, hopefully putting pressure on the sector to become more sustainable.” Their utility for the average diner, however, is limited: They’ve reviewed about 1,000 restaurants in Europe, and considerably fewer in the U.S.
As for supermarket shopping, Fitzgerald and Smith both referred me to the Marine Stewardship Council’s certification system: A blue label with a big check mark is stamped onto seafood from wild fisheries that meet its sustainability standards. (The Aquaculture Stewardship Council does the same for farmed fish.) Kerry Coughlin, the MSC’s Regional Director for the Americas, says consumers can be very confident that fish with their seal – about 13 to 14 percent of the world’s wild-caught supply – is sustainable. Their global standards were set after two years of dialogue involving hundreds of scientists, academics, conservation organizations and industry experts. Assessments of fisheries – contracted out to independent third-party certifiers – involve a team of scientific experts whose work is peer-reviewed. Independent certifiers also conduct tracebacks through the supply chain.
“We have a system that is very well designed with checks and balances, and then there are yet external checks and balances on top of that,” Coughlin told me. “So consumers really can put a high degree of faith, when they see the MSC blue ecolabel, that that fish is actually the fish that it’s labeled, and from a fishery that’s certified sustainable.”
The effort the MSC puts into following fish through the supply line and remaining independent from special interests underscores the complexity behind the “sustainable” label. But it’s easy for retailers to make claims that aren’t backed by that kind of verification. Critics use the term “bluewashing,” to refer to claims exaggerating seafood’s sustainability. According to Coughlin, this could mean the anything from criminal acts like relabeling fish to sell at a higher price to “the chef who’s very well-intentioned… who talks to their certifier about it – or their certifier talks to their supplier – and in the end, so often, people just say, ‘Oh, yeah, yeah, I talked to so-and-so and they said it was.’ And really there’s no way of knowing.”
“There are just a few sellers that I think are really committed to sourcing well and to understanding what they’re selling,” Safina told me. The Blue Ocean Institute has partnered with Whole Foods Market, which personally visits its seafood suppliers to verify first-hand that they’re engaging in sustainable practices. Otherwise, he said, they “haven’t been really willing to endorse a lot of people who make those claims.”
*
For better or for worse, I’m not a zealot. I don’t go to protests or talk people’s ears off about sustainability issues (although that’s beginning to change now that I’m covering the topic for Salon). When I wasn’t eating seafood at all, it was easy to just avoid the issue. But as soon as I became a “principled” fish eater, I became overwhelmed with factors to consider. Confrontation became hard to avoid. At restaurants, and while shopping, I couldn’t avoid becoming “that girl,” the kind they parody on “Portlandia.”
And so, much more quickly than I’d like to admit, I stopped asking questions. I still don’t eat a ton of fish, but when I do, I order what looks good. A few weeks back, I deliberately forgot what I’d once read about sushi’s complicity in destroying the ocean floor and ate a crunchy salmon roll.
I’m sorry. It was delicious. I’m sorry.
Safina, I was surprised to hear, does eat seafood. But he’s figured out his own way of sticking to his principles: Most of what he eats, he catches himself. “I can remember buying fish like, once in the last twenty years,” he told me. He eats some sushi, too, just not tuna or anything his guide would classify as a bad choice.
For people like me, who live in cities and don’t have the time or inclination to cast out a line, indifference can come to feel inevitable. It’s a problem that comes up with most “green” issues, involving a big picture that’s hard to see from one’s own small-impact, individual perspective. Another thing Safina said, which I didn’t at first understand, is that he was disappointed by how popular his guide, and its many imitators, was:
It would be even better, in my opinion, if people wanted to appreciate fish for everything that they actually are. Mainly they’re animals, and they have lives and they live in the ocean and they interact in incredibly interesting ecological ways. And most people have really no interest in any of that. They just want to know, ‘If it hits my plate, should I eat it?’ … They miss everything else that there is about fish, and the whole living world really, that makes them so interesting and beautiful and wondrous.
In other words, the guides are like a CliffsNotes version of an issue that’s much bigger than anything we do or do not decide to put in our mouths. Perhaps if we all saw the ocean and its inhabitants the way Safina does, trying to do better by them would seem less of a burden.
