Chefs from 40 leading restaurants across Australia have pledged to no longer serve unsustainable seafood as part of the Australian Marine Conservation Society’s new GoodFish Project.
All the restaurants have agreed not to source or serve seafood that is red-listed as “Say No” in Australia’s Sustainable Seafood Guide, an independent scientific analysis of seafood production from Australian Marine Conservation Society.
“Chefs that are coming onboard with GoodFish are sending a very clear message. This community does not want to support practices that are damaging our oceans and putting the long-term sustainability of the oceans and food they love at risk. Instead, they want to be able to celebrate great seafood that’s sustainable,” said Sascha Rust, a chef and manager of GoodFish, in a press release. “Chefs have an incredible ability to talk to people through food. We are trusted guides for society on how we eat and what we eat."
Australian chef Ben Shewry, owner of Attica in Melbourne, was named as the project’s official GoodFish Ambassador. Attica is ranked the twentieth-best restaurant in the world.
Shewry began using Australia’s Sustainable Seafood Guide, which covers around 92 percent of all the seafood consumed by Australians, around 10 years ago to inform his purchasing decisions.
“The GoodFish project aims to build a community of chefs in Australia to come together to work on this problem. We have a moral responsibility. We need to understand the ingredients that we are cooking with, and no more so than what comes from the oceans,” Shewry said in the release. “In my position as a chef, I have a big influence on what people eat and what other people cook because our restaurant is well-known. If I don’t have what I would call a clean menu – if I don’t have best practices, the most sustainable menu I can have in terms of shellfish and seafood – then I am contributing to the problem."
The 40 chefs participating in GoodFish include: Alanna Sapwell (Arc Dining, Brisbane), Alejandro Saravia (Pastuso, Melbourne; Uma, Perth), Ben Devlin (Pipit, Pottsville), Thi Li (Anchovy, Melbourne), Jacqui Challinor (NOMAD, Sydney), and the team behind Three Blue Ducks (Byron Bay, Sydney and Brisbane).
