Skating around sustainable seafood

We have good fish in BC - as long as you limit your desires pretty much to salmon, halibut, salmon, oysters, salmon, spot prawns and clams. But Britain is, I think, a fish-lover's paradise, for variety and freshness. Well, Suffolk certainly is. In London the price is such that many of the offerings are for special occasions only: the price of quality in an expensive city. And a fishmonger's view of sustainability is, like that of any vested interest, fraught with contradiction and self-protection.

So it's interesting to look at what's on offer, and consider what ethical repercussions there are for fish consumption, here in the land of End of the Line, whose seafood widget is actually a link to information from the Monterey Bay Seafood Watch - so most relevant to American consumers. Though fish are poor respecters of national boundaries, you can cross-check your choices using the Greenpeace Red List, or the Marine Conservation Society's Fishonline Purchasing Guide. Canadians can consult the SeaChoice database.

Here's an example of what kind of information you'll get if you ask your fishmonger (which you should, anyway, so they know you're interested in where your food comes from). I was at a farm shop in Suffolk last week, where a new sustainable seafood shop had opened earlier in the year, which promises to stock only fish supplied by skippers who catch in a sustainable way.
I noticed skate on sale and asked about it, because I had an idea it was endangered.

Yes, the woman told me, it is endangered, but this is not skate, it's ray. We just label it as skate because people know it as such. The catch is controlled, she added. So I asked the fishmonger in London, on Turnham Green Terrace, who also had skate on sale. Rubbish, he told me: skates are from the ray family (Rajidae), so there's no distinction. And not in the least endangered; plenty of them about, especially this time of year.

Consult the sustainable seafood guides, and you find a much more complicated story. Greenpeace has skate on its red list because its numbers are threatened (they breed and mature very slowly), they are caught by unsustainable fishing methods (most are bycatch in otter or bottom trawling), and are subject to pirate (illegal, unregulated and unreported) fishing. They do not appear at all on the FishOnline purchasing guide, and when you search for information on skate, you find that common skate (Dipturus batis) is considered critically endangered; the number of remaining stocks is unknown; and since January 2009 it has been illegal for fishermen to retain and land common skate caught in EU waters.

FishOnline does allow that other faster-growing varieties of ray are considered sustainable at the moment: but only if you deal with a reputable fishmonger, whom you can completely trust to know the source of the fish he's selling. But look at the age of the fish considered as fast-growing (common skate takes 10 years to mature):

Avoid eating skates and rays unless you are certain they are one of the smaller, more sustainable species such as spotted, cuckoo, or starry rays from the North Sea and Celtic Seas. Avoid eating these species below the size at which they mature: spotted ray males mature at a length of about 54 cm and females at about 57 cm (both between 3 to 8 years old); cuckoo ray males and females mature at between 54 to 59 cm in length when approximately 4 years old; starry ray males and females mature at a length of about 40 cm (between 4 and 5 years old)
(Source: FishOnline)

SeaChoice puts seven species of Atlantic skate - including those very subspecies spotted and starry skate - on its Avoid list (a High concern rather than Critical at this point), adding other common names: raja fish, imitation scallop, briar skate, common skate, summer skate, hedgehog skate, tobacco-box skate, leopard skate, smooth-tailed skate, prickly skate, eyed skate, big skate (and in Latin: Dipturus laevis, Raja eglanteria, Leucoraja erinacea, Leucoraja garmanii, Malacoraja senta, Amblyraja radiata, Leucoraja ocellata).

Though it used to be routinely discarded, nowadays skate is used for food (skate wings or imitation scallops) as well as bait, mainly for the lobster industry. If obtained as bycatch from trawling (which accounts for 97%+ of skate on the market), you run the risk of buying a fish that is undersized and/or was harvested dead, and may be subject to ammonia taint.

The future of fish

A convergence of schools of thought on fish, and some opportunities to make your views known:

Alexandra Morton is inviting Canadians to take action on proposed federal Pacific aquaculture regulations, which have been offer a 60-day public input period (page 1933 of this hefty document). Now is the time to give some thought to how you want to see Canada's Pacific coast used in future: the deadline is September 12.

Morton's views on fish farms are well known and always make interesting reading; she delivers again in this article which unpicks the politics of Canadian fish farm regulation for The Tyee.

Also chugging through its 60 day public input is this document on Canadian organic aquaculture standards. Deadline for this one is August 30.

Some good background reading on the question of wild vs farmed fish can be found on Barry Eastabrook's excellent Politics of the Plate blog, which features a review of Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food, by Paul Greenberg. Discussing the fate of salmon, sea bass, cod, and tuna, and offering thoughtful suggestions for going forward with, the book sounds unmissable.

Spring greens, crackling and tuna

Now that I'm harvesting just about a meal's worth of greens every day, at least those I can wrest from the appetites of the resident slugs, I am starting to think about what to do with them. It's mostly rocket/arugula/rucola, a bit of kale, and a bit of spinach. (This picture includes purple sprouting broccoli which is done now.)



Spinach is a funny one. It used to be the champion green, loaded with iron... until we discovered (back in 1937) that someone had misplaced a decimal point and it's not the Popeye dream after all. Now I learn that its oxalic acid content makes it hard to digest what iron it does contain; and tea and coffee can also make it harder to absorb. Apparently drinking a Vitamin C-rich drink with your meal will help your body along.

I am always entertained by other people's scientific experiments with food, so I enjoyed this quest for the perfect pork crackling.

And as seafood generally becomes more problematic, I am particularly leery around tuna. The popular wisdom is eternally contradictory. For example, I hear that bluefin is out, but troll-caught albacore is ok due to sustainable fishing methods (so says the 'impartial' advice from a website called PR web, and a number of albacore fishery websites). Then I read this article which explains that sushi grade albacore is the worst for mercury levels. I think I will have to go on mostly avoiding it.

Salmon, meat, sourdough, Lorri at PEP and the Hali garage sale

There's a lot of buzz around the salmon walk (Alexandra Morton's Get Out Migration) which has involved a land-based migration of activists travelling by foot from Sointula, on Malcom Island, down Vancouver Island, raising awareness about the risks to wild fish of ocean-based fish farms (or, as they are described by some, Norwegian feedlots). It commenced on April 21 and is due to end in Victoria on May 9. Here's the itinerary if you want to join in or just see what's happening where.

Some good news around meat inspection regulations in BC; the protests were heard - to some extent - and the regulations have been changed. A little bit. It doesn't solve the problem for a lot of farms, but it's a start. When the regulations were changed initially, many small livestock producers on this island had simply packed in their business when the regulations made it impossible for them to carry on; it will be interesting to see how many are willing to get back into this. Meanwhile, I hear that the reduction in livestock has meant a reduction in the amount of manure available to farms and gardens, which is causing problems for farmers wanting to carry on building their soil without artificial fertilizers. (When oh when will we be able to remember that everything is connected?)

Sourdough seems to be everywhere I turn these days. Here's a great website that explains how to make a reliable starter using wild yeasts (which are present on the grain, not floating in the air as many suppose... which is what Back Home baker Mark Sinclair told us at the sourdough workshop he gave in Victoria). There's a good article about sourdough in the Wall Street Journal, and another in the Atlantic.

Lovely Lorri Neilsen Glenn read at Planet Earth Poetry's season closer on Friday. Before she was allowed to get on stage she had to eat some Cowichan Bay Chicken confit with very local purple sprouting broccoli and organic beets & cumin;



greet the herons in Cuthbert Holmes Park;



and help pack up Rhona's Own Baking for the Haliburton farm stand.



We got to the venue to join a packed house



in time to hear the open mic which included series founder Wendy Morton



and Yvonne Blomer, seeing out her first season as host



and then, and only then, was Lorri allowed to read to us from her superb new collection, The Lost Gospels.



On Saturday she flew the coop, heading east, and I was forced to seek other entertainments, including the Haliburton Farm garage sale



which was meant to raise money for repairs to the farm stand and greenhouse. The day was also the opening of Haliburton's farm gate sales, featuring vegetables, seeds, herbs, seedlings and even a bit of baking.

More fishiness

Fish are ever-topical these days. Last week's BC Supreme Court ruling that froze out new fish farm licenses for another 10 months is a victory for those opposed to the farms on the grounds they are insufficiently regulated to protect the ocean environment, and in particular the wild salmon whose numbers are shockingly low for reasons that many believe are tied to sea lice infestations from the farms. The predictions of possible extinction for pink salmon in the Broughton Archipelago are still out there, so the federal government's takeover of fish farm regulation had better make for some swift improvements.

One of last year's Slow Food newsletters included an article about seafood sustainability by Victoria-based fish expert John Volpe, who puts his finger on the problem (or one of them): "Seafood often remains a blind spot in the otherwise educated consumer’s knowledge base."

A few articles to shed a bit more light, including one about trawling; one for chefs, from the Culinary Institute of America; one about oysters; and one from the New York Times (still free for the moment) about balancing health with seafood sustainability.

There is a lot of information out there about climate change's effect on the ocean which is worth knowing about; I predict the dual ills of warming and acidification will soon put those all-you-can-eat seafood buffets of yore into the history books alongside the excesses of Rome.

On a more positive note, thanks to Marci for pointing me towards Todmorden, West Yorkshire, which has a dazzling website showing off the town's efforts towards sustainable food production. One of their projects is aquaponics, which combines food and fish in a truly virtuous circle of water. Check it out:

More seafood

The New York Times offers another of the seemingly endless guides to sustainable seafood which are starting to make me very uncomfortable. For example they recommend eating anchovies on the grounds they're low on the food chain and reproduce more readily, but anchovies are known to be endangered.

I begin to wonder if it is right to eat any kind of seafood (I will for the time being draw the line at farmed oysters, however).

The future of fish

Seafood is as confusing a topic as any these days. Trying to get to the bottom of what is and isn't a good choice of seafood is baffling and contradictory. Here's an attractive guide for Europeans from The Guardian; and here's some information from the Suzuki Foundation, complete with informative videos and links to sustainable seafood lists, adapted to different geographies.

But is it as simple as eating only this or that fish, when they do not exist in isolation? Humans are persistent in choosing to believe they can pick and choose from nature with no effect on its complex interrelationships. There is a whole aquatic food chain involved, and deeply affected by our choices; eating our way through multiple links in it is bound to cause unknown effects on all the ocean's stocks.

Today I listened to a report on NPR about a study of acidity in the coastal waters just south of Victoria. It seems CO2 emissions are being absorbed at such a rate by our oceans that they are turning acidic much faster than supposed, bad news for acid-sensitive marine life like mussels, while ideal for acid-friendly life forms like algae; and down the line will corrode the shells and kill off other vulnerable shellfish including coral and plankton, way down at the bottom of the food chain - and what more important place is there? (Lots more on this in a 2006 report called Impacts of ocean acidification on coral reefs and other marine calcifiers)

Meanwhile, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency has published a new and interesting page of information for people wishing to peddle so-called "novel fish and fish products" in this country. Novelty is not so cosy a word as it used to be; nowadays this is food-regulation-speak for genetically modified and otherwise oddly manipulated food items. (A list of the "novel food decisions" going back to 1994 makes for uneasy reading.)

This led me down some time consuming side-tracks... I find myself wondering if the appearance of this information sheet might herald some potential movement on Canada's part in allowing genetically engineered fish to be farmed here, just as the FDA has offered up some procedures for companies wanting to market genetically modified animal products in the US; and what happens next door usually spills across our border without a fight or much delay at all.

The 2008 March Status Report of the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development hints that this might be coming, even as it states that this country has no intention of developing a policy on transgenic aquatic organisms because it feels that the Canadian Environmental Protection Act, 1999 (with its Animate products of biotechnology section, and the Domestic Substances List (DSL)) covers the matter nicely thank you. Lots of reading there for interested parties.

And the complexity of all of that regulatory verbage explains why most of us haven't a clue what genetically modified foodstuffs are and aren't being fed to us; unfortunately for us, the politicians are as confused as the rest of us. And this CBC story from 2002 is as mercilessly true today as it was when it was broadcast. Beans and rice for supper, I think...

Anyway. Nancy Willard has written a great tribute to seafood in A Wreath to the Fish.