Sustainability means many different things to many different people. Even when narrowed to just the question of what is sustainable seafood, there are umpteen definitions in wide circulation.
The problem with this, apart from sustainability being a word that no one seems entirely comfortable using (it’s still all too often verbally delivered with flexing index and middle fingers denoting inverted commas), is it has become more and more complicated and open to misinterpretation as the sustainable seafood movement has gathered momentum.
Much of the current dialogue about sustainable food is based upon the question of how we’re going to feed the planet’s anticipated 9 billion population come 2050. But renowned Washington, D.C.-based chef Barton Seaver believes the focus should be less about searching out a silver-bullet solution to feed 2 or 3 billion extra people and more about finding greater value in the food we already have access to.
The first I learnt of Seaver was three years ago at SeaWeb’s Seafood Summit in Barcelona, Spain. He was executive chef at the famed Hook restaurant, and he talked passionately about the power chefs have to drive sustainability through their menus. I remember him saying that enabling people to change was far more important to the future of fisheries than simply telling them how to change.
A year later, Seaver was named Esquire magazine’s 2009 “Chef of the Year,” and today he’s also a writer (“For Cod And Country” will be published in April) and a National Geographic and Blue Ocean Institute fellow.
At this year’s Seafood Summit in Vancouver, Canada, he spoke about the complicated role that food, particularly fish, has in society. Essentially, Seaver said sustainability needs to be boiled down to the point at which the general public interacts with it, i.e. the dinner plate, in order to achieve greater results.
It is, he claimed, the most overlooked stage in the grand theory of sustainability and this is where he feels a more targeted effort is required from all stakeholders.
“Environmentalism, which is the umbrella under which this conversation usually resides, is all too often measured by impacts on ecosystems. But dinner is a story about opportunity — about how we’re impacted by eco-systems and what we expect to gain from them. And I think we forget the important role of dinner in these dialogues,” said Seaver.
“With our analysis we know what product is sustainable, e.g. this farmed salmon isn’t, this one is. But we all too often forget how we use these products,” continued Seaver. “Just because we have sustainable seafood, doesn’t mean we’re eating it sustainably. You could have ASC (Aquaculture Stewardship Council)-certified shrimp but putting it on an ‘all you can eat’ buffet equals failure.”
The problem is that we have lost touch with all the basics of nutrition such as eating lots of vegetables and fruit along with small portions of protein, said Seaver. “We’re taught this stuff in elementary school and yet we take pills to get the nutrients we need and most of us probably take vitamins; we fortify our milk to get products we don’t get from our diet; and we drink shakes to get protein in the morning. All this is in absence of eating how we know we’re supposed to eat. This is nothing new, but it’s also a very intricate part of the sustainability conversation.”
However, Seaver believes that omega-3 fatty acids are a turning point in the conversation, as they provide “for the very first time” a direct link of how consumers are impacted by marine ecosystems.
“It’s great,” he said, “People will be running out to get more seafood because they’re now being told by Oprah, Dr. Phil and others that it’s a ‘superfood.’ But I think that as well as having an opportunity to connect people with the impact oceans have on us, we also have the opportunity to introduce the dialogue of how we impact the oceans. This is back-to-back environmentalism. For me, sustainability is not about finding more fish to feed people. Instead, it’s about gaining more value from the products we already use; it’s about feeding and better nourishing people with the fish that we have.”
Seaver’s work with National Geographic has led to the creation of an interactive Seafood Decisions Guide, available on the organization’s website. Launched some five months ago, it’s intended to be used by consumers to see where their favorite fish ranks in terms of sustainability, toxicity and omega-3 content, as well its place in the food chain. The hope is that by being better informed, consumers can lower their seafood footprint, he explained.
The guide is a new departure for the society, and it currently gives information on 43 species, which represent a large majority of the seafood consumed in North America. Each species has a sustainability ranking, mostly provided by the Blue Ocean Institute; toxicity levels are taken from the Environmental Defense Fund; the omega-3 content is supplied by the USDA; and trophic/food chain level data is provided by FishBase.
“What this begins to introduce is a larger context of how we are impacting our oceans. Omega-3s, toxicity and sustainability have all been done but not trophic levels,” said Seaver, who pointed out that society has placed most of its burden close to the top of the ocean’s supply chain — on big, slow growing, carnivorous species.
He argues that in order to continue using the health benefits of the ocean, consumers need to move the burden further down the food chain to species like clams, mussels, scallops, herring and mackerel.
“I’m not saying don’t eat tuna, it’s delicious and I love it,” said Seaver. “I’m saying eat it with reflection.”
