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One Fish, Two Fish
By Ivy Knight
"When I wish to make a wish
I wave my hand with a big swish swish.
Then I say, "I wish for fish!"
And I get fish right on my dish."
- Dr. Seuss
My tumble down the rabbit hole of sustainable seafood [see here - Ed.] was beginning to feel more like a journey to the centre of the earth. I started asking everyone about this subject, at work, at a barbecue, at the dog park. I've talked to everyone from chefs to fishmongers to oyster shuckers to vegan dog-walkers and I can tell you that there is hope (just maybe not for the omega-3 deprived vegan). You can still find fish out there that is clean, healthy and not the last of its kind. Oysters, clams and mussels, Pacific black cod and halibut, pickerel and pollock, mullet and mackerel, sardines and squid are all sustainable and safe choices. In his book
Bottomfeeder, Taras Grescoe has compiled an appendix titled "Tools for Choosing Seafood". The book is worth buying just for those fifteen pages, they lay it all out. He tells you which fishing methods are good: trolls are good. Who knew? I thought they were evil and lived under bridges. He also has information on a few websites that every pisc-head should check out, especially gotmercury.org where you can find out how much that can of tuna took out of your weekly mercury allowance.
Anthony Bourdain once wrote, "I can't imagine a better example of Things To Be Wary Of in the food department than bargain sushi." Bargain sushi, all you can eat shrimp and frozen fish sticks all belong in the same culinary category as the ballpark wiener and the Pop Tart. One of the most important things I've found in all this research is that we have to pay for quality. If we keep demanding cheap food then that is what we're going to get and cheap food will never satisfy like real food.
Michael Olson summed this up perfectly in a recent email, "It is you and I, the consumers, who have put pressure on the economy for plentiful cheap food. No chicken farmers wants a world with $5 birds, no one living near the sea thinks $3.99 per pound of salmon is realistic. It is us who want this nearly free food. The biggest impact a consumer can have in making positive change is to spend their money after making an informed decision. Too many are talking about it and too few go to their wallets with the same sentiments."
When you're cheap with your grocery list you don't only short change your health, you put money in the pockets of the companies who make frozen fish sticks. These companies are wasting our precious wild fish on garbage food for stoners to satisfy their munchies. As local chef turned farmer, Brad Long put it "Fiscal greed still drives much of the numbers."
After a morning spent with Glenn McNamara and Paul Foster von Kalben from Macgregor's Meat and Seafood, an eighth generation family-owned business, I felt a bit better about my future as a fish eater. "When people say that all farmed salmon is bad that's a broad statement. Atlantic salmon has a bad rap, but it's an ever-changing story. 'Don't eat farmed salmon' was ten years ago. Can we get an update please?" Said Glenn and Paul added "It's short-sighted to only focus on wild fisheries. You have to focus on aquaculture to be sustainable."
They told me about the salmon farming industry in New Brunswick, where the faltering independently-owned salmon farms were all bought up by one corporation, Cook Aquaculture, who have implemented some changes to the way salmon is raised in the Bay of Fundy. They have a 3-bay management system of crop rotation and fallowing which keeps the marine environment clean. They maintain low stocking densities so the fish aren't overcrowded and they've introduced integrated multi-trophic aquaculture, which basically means they bring in complementary species like mussels to help filter the water.
Atlantic salmon is a money maker because it grows so fast, but it's called Atlantic salmon for a reason ? it's from the East Coast bye! It's not meant for West Coast waters but that's all the salmon farmers out there want to grow because the Atlantic grows up big and meaty and sells for more money. Those Atlantic farmed salmon in B.C. are bigger and more powerful than the indigenous salmon of B.C. and when they escape from the farms they kick the little B.C. salmon's ass. So, one thing you can do when looking for salmon is to ask for, I know it sounds crazy, Atlantic salmon from the Atlantic Ocean.
"Jail Island is raising indigenous Atlantic salmon in one of the most perfect areas of the world ? the Bay of Fundy, fed by the cold Atlantic Ocean." Paul told me as he showed me some gorgeous Jail Island fillets that had been caught the day before. Macgregors doesn't sell to the public, they supply restaurants like Starfish and Crush Wine Bar with fish. They sell all kinds of fish and are now sourcing the more expensive, higher quality products because that's what chefs are demanding. Paul and Glenn showed me striped bass from Boston, each sporting a white plastic tag. The tags are given out each day the bass are in season, six tags per fisherman who can't sell his bass catch legally without that tag. They then pulled out two tins of scallops, in one the scallops had been soaked in tripolyphosphate and in the other the scallops had not been treated. One sniff and it was obvious which was which. Some may love the smell of tripolysphosphate in the morning, but I'll pass. "We're not the arbiters of sustainability. We're just trying to ask questions and be progressive fishmongers" said Paul.
The only problem with Macgregors is that you can't buy any of that fish. I really wanted some fish, but where was I going to get it?
Then came an email from Taras Grescoe on the state of one specific salmon farm that has a great impact on my quality of life. I had slipped Grescoe the name of the farm where Christoph Stadtlander gets his salmon from in Tofino, B.C. for his unparalleled smoked salmon. Grescoe informed me that Creative Salmon was one of the few Canadian-owned fish farms in B.C.:
"Creative has higher standards than the industrial-scale Norwegian outfits. In short, in a pinch, Creative and other farmers who endeavour to be organic are a better choice than salmon from Marine Harvest, Mainstream, and other industrial operations. The best solution is closed containment tanks, inland, which don't threaten wild stocks (by passing on sea lice and diseases like infectious salmon anemia). A fellow named Bruce Swift is raising coho inland in Agassiz and selling them to C Restaurant in Vancouver. After wild salmon from sustainably fished runs, that's the best choice."
As consumers we have to learn to experiment and choose dinner from some of the other fish in the sea as well, spread our greed around, while also being careful with that word "sustainable" and not throw it around too much. Do you remember when every chicken became "free-range" and every bag of carrots became "organic"?
"Sustainability is such an important thing, let's not go down the 'organic' path. To market sustainability is dangerous. We have to be factual with our information." warns Glenn McNamara.
Last weekend I got an oyster fix at the Ontario Oyster Festival hosted by Rodney's Oyster House, where Bronwen Clark informed me of their latest business venture "We have opened a Wet Market which is located at Rodney's, open Wednesday to Friday 11:00 am - 5:00 pm. This market presents the public with the ability to shop and feel confident that the product they are buying has been thought about."
Bronwen's dad, the larger than life Rodney Clark, is one of approximately twelve licensed distributors of fish and seafood in Toronto. "Many people believe that a chef buys from the ocean. If they wish to serve mahi mahi they call up the fisherman to get the fish. This is not the case. They must go to these select license holders and buy what these people choose to hold in their seafood portfolio. We do not need to rely on someone else's portfolio, we create the portfolio based on our knowledge of sustainability. At Rodney's we use two systems when buying fish, one is allocated quota fisheries where a species is given a certain weight and once that weight is caught the fishery is closed and the other is through seasonal licensed fishing. We deal directly with those license holders who work under the license guidelines."
Patrick McMurray, owner of Starfish and champion shucker himself, told me "At the moment I use organic cod from the Orkney Islands, Claire Island Salmon from Ireland, Creative Salmon from BC, and the latest and greatest, Nova Scotian halibut, aquacultured halibut, from an on-land culture facility in Yarmouth County. Water is filtered in and out of the facility, and the solid waste is re-used as fertilizer. This is where we have to go in the world of aquaculture - no sea lice, no escapees, controlled waste, no steroids, or additives to the fish food."
Then I checked out the new menu we're launching at The Drake, which features seafood choices like a Nova Scotia lobster roll, grilled Jail Island salmon and a clam chowder. Chef Anthony Rose assured me that his chowder definitely won't include surf clams or canned clams, about which Grescoe said "Surf clams are bottom-trawled and clams that end up in cans are dredged. Many companies use hydraulic dredges in the Atlantic, which liquefies the sea floor and destroys fragile habitat for other species."
Anthony Rose has also put Christoph's smoked salmon on the brunch menu, while David Chrystian has taken shrimp off all of his menus at Toronto's Hotel St. Germain.
Every little bit helps and if it continues that 2048 expiry date may soon seem like science fiction. To quote Grescoe's Bottomfeeder one more time, "In the uproar surrounding Boris Worm's paper projecting the collapse of world fisheries by 2048, the media neglected to mention a positive side to the paper. Worm and his colleagues found that the parts of the ocean protected by no-take zones and marine reserves experienced a 23 percent increase in biodiversity. The recovery often happened in only a few years. In other words, if we can give the oceans even a bit of a break, there is hope for the future."
We get really clingy about our favourite foods and tend to think that we couldn't survive without them. That isn't the case of course, we survive just fine, it's our favourite foods who aren't doing so great. We can't have Atlantic cod anymore and we've survived. The cod hasn't. How long until the Pacific cod runs out? The prevailing wisdom of the elite may be that if your favourite food is a frozen shrimp ring from the supermarket then you are an idiot who has no taste anyway and you deserve your dose of tripolyphosphate. Whereas if your favourite food is sushi from Masa in the Time Warner Centre then you're obviously a sexy, rich genius with a perfect palate who deserves to eat the last succulent mercury-filled morsels of tuna on the planet. When you see 'orange roughy' on a menu will you order it? If you've educated yourself with books like "Bottomfeeder" you'll know the answer to that question.
As for the chefs out there, you might want to change your menu-planning approach once you listen to what fishmonger Paul has to say: "You hear chefs talking all the time about using only in-season local produce yet some of those same chefs will menu the same fish for months if not an entire year at a time, and you end up chasing fish up and down the coast, and further out to sea just keep the supply going. The concept of a menu as a dynamic, evolving, ever changing thing is starting to catch on (particularly on the produce side of things) and we're really trying to push that concept with fish too."
From head honchoes at Red Lobster to the chef at Le Bernadin and the customers at both, everyone at every level has to do a bit more thinking and asking questions before they write the menu or order from it.
Read 'The Dead Sea: Taras Grescoe's Bottomfeeder' - click here.
Read more of Ivy Knight at gremolata.com/ivyknight.htm
or contact her directly at ladyslenderlegs@gmail.com
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