Allow me to explain by indulging me in a little experiment.

If you have Yelp or a similar restaurant-finding app, fire it up and do a search for “tuna poke” from your current location.  Go ahead… I’ll wait.

For the benefit of poke noobs, poke (pronounced POH-kay) is a traditional raw fish salad that is an important part of Hawaiian cuisine.  While various seafood can be used to prepare poke, by far the most common and most popular preparation uses tuna, primarily yellowtail or big-eye tuna.  While poke has been eaten for millennia by Polynesians, it was Hawaii chef Sam Choy (the “Godfather of Poke”) who really put the dish on the map for a global audience.  So much so that Business Insider claimed in early 2016 that, “poke will be the next big thing in fast food.”

Fast forward to April 2017.  So how did your local tuna poke search go?  Allow me to share the results of my search from my home in Oakland, California:

Yelp apparently limits smartphone map results to a maximum of 20 locations per search presumably to avoid over-cluttering the screen.  But according to Yelp, I have at least 12 locations within easy walking distance where I can find tuna poke.  Some are mom&pop poke operations like “Poke Koma,” while others are mega-poke chains like “Poke Zone” (a wholly-owned subsidiary of “Poke Salad USA,” or “Ono Grill.”  Still others are sushi restaurants or sushi fast food retailers that advertize poke.  Maybe it’s just me, but I was amazed by how many poke retailers had seemingly appeared out of nowhere.  Granted, I live in the SF Bay Area, a proud foodie haven, but this poke bonanza was most definitely NOT the case just a year ago.  Tuna poke has really taken off.

Wondering if poke was booming across in San Francisco, I performed a few Yelp searches to check for patterns.  Here’s what I found:

San Francisco:
Again, the map search is limited to 20 results across the visible map area.  But tuna poke retailers can be found across the city, with a plethora of choices not surprisingly being concentrated in the downtown/financial and tourist-heavy neighborhoods.  But what if I drill down closer into a neighborhood?  Zooming in on The Castro, for instance, I can find another set of poke retailers who did not appear in the initial, broader scale search.

According to Yelp, I can find 17 retailers who carry tuna poke in The Castro alone.  Who knew there was so much fish eating happening in The Castro?

So let’s assume that the deeper, more selective geographical area you search for “tuna poke” on Yelp will return more unique options for procuring your poke.  But what does poke availability look like across the mainland US?  Here are my results…

Washington DC:

New York City:
With a drill down on south of 34th Street:

And from Tribeca to the Financial District:

Houston, Texas:

Minneapolis, Minnesota:

Anchorage, Alaska:

Portland, Maine:

And yes, even Fargo, North Dakota has poke according to Yelp:

Which raises an important point.  These are results of what Yelp reports as to the availability of tuna poke based on their users who have reviewed restaurants, posted photos, or restaurants who have advertised on their app that the menu includes tuna poke.  I would imagine that North Dakota readers may know of some great tuna poke spots in Fargo.  So take all of these results with a dose of context.

But it does indicate to me that tuna poke has gone from a specialty dish that required a holiday in Hawaii to enjoy to something that has been mainstreamed across the mainland.  This represents A LOT of tuna consumption.

But here’s the thing.  The Hawaii tuna poke brand identity that Chef Roy Choy and others have successfully built is one that conjures impressions of the freshest catch of the day (remember, you are eating raw fish) that is being harvested in Hawaii and shared with Aloha around the world.  When you eat poke, it’s supposed to evoke an image and a connection to Hawaii.

And this is where I smell a rat.
Take a peek at a Yelp search for tuna poke in Honolulu, Hawaii:

Again, the search is limited to 20 retailers, but not surprisingly Honolulu streets are lined with poke vendors from downtown to Diamond Head.  This is as one might expect at ground zero for tuna poke.

But in the motherland of poke, mass consumers of this dish (and by that I mean visitors and residents who eat poke regularly from high-volume retailers such as Safeway, Foodland, KTA Super Stores, and also numerous food courts that dot Waikiki as well as across the main islands) are NOT eating fresh-caught fish.  Volume tuna poke sellers are not buying their fish from small scale, sustainable, local fishermen (called pono fishermen) who fished that day but from the Honolulu Fish Auction Block.  The mass-market poke retailers are sourcing deep-frozen tuna (often treated with carbon monoxide gas in order to retain color) that were caught perhaps months ago by tuna longline fishermen, often from the waters of Micronesia or the Marshall Islands.

Very little of the premier quality tuna landed in Honolulu makes it’s way to Hawaii restaurants or poke retailers, but is destined for restaurants in Japan and other Asian markets where they fetch handsome prices.

So if the bulk of Hawaii poke eaten is sourced from long-ago frozen, carbon-monoxide color-stabilized tuna that was caught on longlining vessels, what do you suppose mainland tuna poke vendors are selling?

Make no mistake… I love poke.  It’s delicious, simple, satisfying in a way that is hard to describe, and I do truly feel (as much as a white dude can without sounding culturally appropriative) a connection to a Polynesian tradition.   Why I find the proliferation of mass-market tuna poke so alarming is that it’s coming at a steep series of costs to the ocean as well as to sustainable local fishermen.  First, there’s the reality that longline fishing, where miles of mainline are deployed with thousands of baited hook sets, is the absolute antithesis of sustainable, pono fishing.  The tally of bycatch and discards from tuna longline fishing is staggering, and it means that you carve a very deep impact on long-term ocean health with each serving of tuna poke that is sourced in this manner.

Secondly, in embracing mass-produced tuna poke we miss the fact that truly sustainable tuna poke is indeed possible.  Each of the Hawaiian Islands has communities and networks of local pono fishermen who use handlines and practice traditional methods to bring their catch to market.  Contrast this with the Hawaii commercial tuna longline industry that uses mostly foreign workers who work for slave wages and who cannot even step off their ships.  Of course pono fishing cannot supply mass global demands.  But that, in essence, is what makes this type of fishing pono (or correct/righteous/sustainable) in the first place.  Perhaps some food is simply not suited for globalization.

Finally, this explosion in tuna poke further stokes the mythology that our oceans are an inexhaustible source of food, irrespective of the fishing effort or methods.  This isn’t conjecture… this is free market reality.  If there is demand for a resource, there will always be a group seeking to exploit it.  Case in point, the Western Pacific Regional Fisheries Management Council (WESPAC) is now urging President Donald Trump to remove fishing prohibitions within the Pacific marine monuments created by Presidents George W Bush and Barack Obama and re-establish the councils’ supervision of the fisheries.  Why would a quota-based fishery that meets it’s federally determined quota every year be trying to open fishing once again in fully-protected marine reserves?  Simply put, it’s greed.  But it’s greed that is fueled by consumer demand, and cheap/affordable tuna is a big part of that.

Perhaps tuna poke will, like the cronut, fade away once the next food trend appears.  Or perhaps we will hit peak poke before that.  My crystal ball is hard to read.  Tuna has the dinstinction of being incredibly ono (Hawaiian for “delicious”).  That’s a good thing.  Now, if we can just try harder to also make sure it’s pono.

The post Peak Poke? (Or, Our Choices Have Consequences) first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Jiro Dreams of Sushi is a 2011 Japanese documentary film directed by David Gelb. The film follows Jiro Ono, an 85 year old sushi master and owner of Sukiyabashi Jiro, on his continuing quest to perfect the art of sushi and his elder son Yoshikazu’s struggle with living up to the legacy of his father. The film briefly contrasts this with the younger son Takashi running a mirror-image restaurant, except with a more relaxed feel.

Jiro Dreams of Sushi debuted in the US in 2011 at the Provincetown International Film Festival[2] and was an official selection of the Tribeca Film Festival[3] in the same year. [Source: Wikipedia]

If that’s not convincing enough, you can’t argue with the trailer:

The imagery is amazing – Gelb is an expert at interweaving music and striking camera angles as he details Jiro’s moving story.  This film boasts an impressive score to accompany the gorgeous cinematography, including music by Phillip Glass, Mozart, and Bach.

Are you hungry yet? Cause I definitely am.

The post Jiro Dreams of Sushi, and so do I first appeared on Deep Sea News.

The Story of Sushi from Bamboo Sushi on Vimeo.

The post TGIF: The Story of Sushi first appeared on Deep Sea News.

I only eat anchovies with Caesar salad, and am rather fond of the tiny fish that add a bit of strong flavor to the romaine lettuce. I’m unusual for wanting to get even that close to the tiny, oily fish – sardines, anchovy, menhaden –  that used to be a staple of regular American food. That’s why Julia Whitty’s recent article in Mother Jones in which she encourages consumers to pause before they ” take a bite of that sardine sandwich” was so surprising. You won’t find sardines anywhere on the list of the top 10 consumed seafoods – or do you? Here’s why eating more sardines directly would actually be good for the ocean:

1) The United States Pacific sardine fishery is not overfished. This may be surprising to people who are familiar with the famous collapse of the Monterey (central California) sardine fishery, which was described by John Steinbeck in his book Cannery Row. Puzzlement over this collapse launched one of the most important long-term oceanographic investigations of all time, the California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigation, which continues to provide critical scientific information to this day. Over 50 years of investigation has shown that this crash actually WASN’T caused by overfishing – at least not directly.

Sardine and anchovy populations are actually tied directly to large-scale climatic conditions – if they’re favorable, there’s lots of fish. If they’re unfavorable, the fish crash. Overfishing may have exacerbate the crash and slowed recovery, but it probably didn’t cause it directly. Some researchers are predicting a similar sardine crash this year due to unfavorable climatic conditions similar to those seen before the late 1940s crash, and are encouraging managers to decrease sardine quotes in order to speed post-crash recovery. (Though this is controversial – see this response).

Historically, sardine & anchovy fisheries in other parts of the world, such as the South American anchoveta fishery (the biggest fishery in the world) are less well regulated. Overfishing in these ecosystems leads to no room for error – if there is the slightest change in the climate that causes the  fish to reproduce less fast, the fishery crashes. Buy U.S. Pacific sardines.

2) Americans should eat more sardines directly, and fewer sardines indirectly. Only about a quarter of the enormous U.S. sardine haul is eaten directly  – the rest are sold as bait or as fishmeal. All of the three most popular U.S. seafoods – shrimp, salmon, and canned tuna – are farmed with fishmeal or caught with bait. This is why Jennifer Jacquet developed her “Eat Like A Pig” campaign. Grist covered this issue in response to Whitty’s article as well:

Geoff Shester, the California program director at Oceana, talked to Grist contributor Clare Leschin-Hoar for the article, “Small fish, big ocean: Saving Pacific forage fish.” We followed up with him to ask his take on sardine-eating. In the case of Pacific sardines, he said that “the lion’s share go to bluefin tuna farms (ranches) in Australia, then to commercial longline bait in international tuna fisheries.” Overall, he says, “consumers are demanding the wrong things. Instead of demanding farmed salmon, which uses at least three pounds of forage fish to get one pound of salmon, people should be demanding the forage fish themselves.”

Also, sardines are healthy! They appear on the New York Times list of the 11 Best Foods You Aren’t Eating. Also, food writer Michael Pollan’s Rule 32 (Don’t overlook the oily little fishes”) elaborates further:

Wild fish are among the healthiest things you can eat, yet many wild fish stocks are on the verge of collapse because of overfishing. Avoid big fish at the top of the marine food chain–tuna, swordfish, shark–because they’re endangered, and because they often contain high levels of mercury. Fortunately, a few of the most nutritious wild fish species, including mackerel, sardines, and anchovies, are well managed, and in some cases are even abundant. Those oily little fish are particularly good choices. According to a Dutch proverb: “A land with lots of herring can get along with few doctors.”

3) Since sardine and other small forage fish like anchovies and menhadan congregate in single-species schools in the water column (see the awesome photo by Jon Bertsch at the top of this post!), there’s relatively little bycatch. Fishers are able to catch these fish, and only these fish, without accidentally killing a lot of other marine life. This is emphatically not the case with the longline tuna fisheries for which forage fish become bait. Fish farming operations have other significant environmental impacts, such as the infection of wild salmon stocks with farmed salmon parasites and damage to the ocean bottom communities. Eating sardines directly is far better for the ocean environment than filtering them through large predators caught accidentally with more large predators.

After the beating I took on bluefin tuna, I feel that I need to say that  I am a marine biologist but not a fisheries scientist. A blog post can’t be a critical, comprehensive review of fisheries populations models, since a) nobody would read that and b) I actually do have a day job. But I love eating fish and reading scientific literature, so I keep writing on these issues in the attempt to make complex issues more accessible to the general public. Because when super-lefty-enviro magazines Grist and Mother Jones disagree, what the heck is a consumer to do?

Anyway, a sardine sandwich sounds super gross. Before you eat some sustainable tasty Pacific sardines, check out Barton Seaver’s website for far more tasty ways to eat them.

The post How to eat sardines sustainably first appeared on Deep Sea News.

An e-mail invitation to the sold-out event, sponsored by Legal Sea Foods and the nonprofit Culinary Guild of New England, reads: “Presenting a menu of supposed ‘blacklisted’ fish, Legal’s President and chief executive Roger Berkowitz discusses how outdated scientific findings unfairly turn the public against certain species of fish.’’

But was the science outdated and unfair? I dove into the latest scientific literature so you don’t have to. Check out my post from last month for the answers, and for an incriminating look into my deep love of unsustainable shrimp burritos.

The post The science behind Legal Sea Foods’ “blacklisted” dinner first appeared on Deep Sea News.

As seen in this short glimpse into my psyche, I understand how hard it can be to eat sustainable seafood. I am fully informed as to the envioronmental cost, and yet I regularly lose my battle against that delicious burrito. It’s just really fun to rebel against a smug environmental scold, whether that scold is your annoying vegan cousin or, as in my case, just your own conscience.

The appeal of thumbing one’s nose at ever-present environmental guilt is why this “Outlawed Seafood” dinner from Boston restaurant Legal Sea Foods is both brilliant and insidious. Via Grubstreet & GG:

There might be a panic over seafood sustainability, but Legal Sea Foods CEO Roger Berkowitz isn’t taking the bait. Instead, he’s hosting a dinner on January 24 with the New England Culinary Guild to address “outdated” scientific findings that turn the dining public against certain species of fish. Behold, a special feast featuring items that people often think are outlawed or blacklisted.

To translate: if you eat this seafood, you are a rebel, an outlaw, going boldly against conventional wisdom. You, like Berkowitz, are not someone who engages in environmental “panic.” Leave that for those annoying the-sky-is-falling (or in this case the-fish-are-disapppearing) environmentalists.

So what is on this rebellious outlaw menu? According to Grub Street:

Fritters
Black tiger shrimp, duck cracklings, smoked tomato, and avocado sauce

Cod Cheeks
Spaghetti squash, toasted pecans, melting marrow gremolata

Prosciutto Wrapped Hake
Braised escarole, Rancho Gordo beans, blood orange marmalade

Well, DAMN. That sounds great. Ever since I fell off the kosher wagon I would eat a shoe wrapped in prosciutto, never mind delicious fresh fish. And please sign me up for anything involving duck cracklings.

Except there’s one problem. Every single one of these items – black tiger shrimp, Atlantic cod, and Atlantic hake, are listed as AVOID on the Monterey Bay Seafood Watch Guide. Black tiger shrimp is listed primarily for the incredible habitat destruction that farming it wreaks on mangrove forests and artisanal fisheries, and U.S. Atlantic cod and white hake* are listed due to severely depleted populations.

What does Legal Sea Food CEO Roger Berkowitz know that the researchers at Monterey Bay don’t? I called Legal Sea Food to find out. (I also contacted New England Culinary Guild, but they said I needed to attend the dinner to ask these questions, which I will totally do if someone wants to fly me out to Boston.)

I spoke to Rich Vellante, Executive Chef of Legal Sea Foods, who designed the menu around these seafood items. Mr. Vellante said that seafood sustainability is a complex and confusing issue. “In my opinion there’s no right or wrong. This is about people trying to educate each other…we want to make decisions make decision based on sourcing and not broad brush everything.”

According to Vellante, the cod and hake are locally sourced from the Gloucester and Chatham MA and Portland ME fisheries, and are caught by day boats using hook and line, not trawls. Vellante also emphasized that in the case of the cod, they were featuring the cheek meat, a cut often overlooked by American consumers, so they were using a greater portion of the fish.

In regards to the shrimp, Vellante said that Legal Sea Food did send people to Vietnam to inspect the shrimp farming operations and that there were “certain stipulations” that had to be followed, but he was uncertain about the nature of those stipulations and referred me to the Legal Sea Food marketing department. I called twice but was unable to reach the person he referred me to. I will post an update if she gets back to me.

So what does the latest, non-outdated science say about Legal Sea Food’s claims? (You may also be interested in food writer Jacqueline Church’s post on this.)

Black Tiger Shrimp. According to Seafood Watch, these shrimp should be avoided due to habitat destruction and pollution. Conveniently, a study of the environmental consequences of shrimp aquaculture in Vietnam was published just this June. The province discussed in the paper, Can Gio, has undergone mangrove restoration after having been deforested in the 1960s-1970s, and a section is now a UNESCO International Biosphere Reserve. The area devoted to shrimp farms has leveled off over the past 6 years, which means that new mangroves are not currently being destroyed for shrimp farms.

However, the study found that significant water pollution results from shrimp farming in Vietnam, and that many farms released wastewater and contaminated sediment that violated Vietnamese water quality standards. Not all farms did this, but on average, shrimp farms effluent had such high nutrient concentrations that it was similar to agricultural fertilizers. This level of pollution is extremely damaging to surrounding marine environments.

Therefore, while ongoing mangrove destruction may not be a current issue in Vietnam, severe pollution of the remaining and restored mangroves by shrimp farms is an ongoing problem.

Atlantic Cod: When I began researching this, I was surprised to learn that as of this year 2010, Gulf of Maine cod is no longer classified as “overfished” by the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS). This is because spawning biomass (basically the number of fish times their weight) is at half of target levels. This graph provided by NMFS looks pretty cheery, since it only looks at cod populations since 1982, but if cod stocks are compared to historical levels, current cod populations are truly pitiful.

This figure is from a paper by Rosenberg et al. 2005 (PDF), which used  historical research methods and population modeling to estimate the biomass of cod on Canada’s Scotian Shelf in 1852. The blue dot is estimated cod biomass on the Scotian shelf in 1852, and the red line is cod population today.

Looking at that, it’s pretty hard to argue that cod populations are just fine. Nonetheless, I commend Legal Sea Food for buying from local, hook-and-line fishers. Trawling is undeniably damaging to benthic ecosystems.

Hake. As of 2006, hake was in a pretty sad state. This graph of biomass is from the NOAA stock assessment, showing that hake populations are at less than half of what they were in the 1980s.

As of 2004, NOAA found that hake was overfished, and that overfishing was still occurring. I was unable to find a more recent assessment.

The Big Picture

The only case of “outdated scientific findings” I could find was that Gulf of Maine cod is no longer classified as “overfished.” I personally would not feel guilty about eating locally caught Gulf of Maine cod cheeks (yum!), but would continue to attempt to avoid black tiger prawn and hake.

And here’s the big picture, as presented in Myers and Worm 2003. This is biomass data from the beginning of large-scale industrialized fishing in the 1960s. (New England/Eastern Canada fisheries are excluded as they were already being exploited).

There are just less fish than there used to be. This means that we need pressure from consumers for effective management – people have to have the correct information about where their fish comes from, and to understand why they should care. Thumbing one’s nose at those no-fun fisheries scientists and environmentalists  is not going to change the fact that fisheries are in serious trouble.

In our conversation, Vellante summarized the purpose of the Legal Sea Food “Outlawed Fish” dinner by saying “I think there are a lot of questions and answers to be had. I don’t think there is one sweeping answer to everything. We want to create some dialogue around that.” Unfortunately, the data show that most fisheries worldwide do have one thing in common – a downward slide.

*Silver and red hake are listed as a “Good Alternatives,” but I think they are referring to white hake, since it is by far the most popular. I will be happy to make a correction if I am wrong.

Works Cited

Anh, P., Kroeze, C., Bush, S., & Mol, A. (2010). Water pollution by intensive brackish shrimp farming in south-east Vietnam: Causes and options for control Agricultural Water Management, 97 (6), 872-882 DOI: 10.1016/j.agwat.2010.01.018

Myers, R., & Worm, B. (2003). Rapid worldwide depletion of predatory fish communities Nature, 423 (6937), 280-283 DOI: 10.1038/nature01610

Rosenberg, A., Bolster, W., Alexander, K., Leavenworth, W., Cooper, A., & McKenzie, M. (2005). The history of ocean resources: modeling cod biomass using historical records. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, 3 (2), 78-84 DOI: 10.1890/1540-9295(2005)003[0078:THOORM]2.0.CO;2

The post DON’T PANIC: Sustainable seafood and the American outlaw first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Green washing is misleading publicity or propaganda designed to present an image of environmental responsibility. TerraChoice has a nice list of the Six Sins of Green Washing.

1. Hidden Trade Off, in which companies highlight one eco-friendly attribute, and ignore their product’s other (potentially more significant) environmental concerns. “Okay, this product comes from a sustainably harvested forest, but what are the impacts of its milling and transportation?”
2. No Proof, which, just like it sounds, involves claims that can’t be verified (the report found 26% of environmental claims fall into this category).
3. Vagueness in terms such as “chemical-free,” or “non-toxic,” which are both universally true, and universally false depending on your interpretation. Other examples “organic?”, “all-natural”, “environmentally-friendly”, and “earth-friendly.”
4. Irrelevance, when companies make claims that, while true, are unhelpful (like “CFC-free,” when CFCs have been banned for almost 30 years).
5. Lesser of Two Evils, like “green” herbicides, which ignores the fact that herbicides in any form aren’t good for the environment.
6. Fibbing. The most obvious, in which companies flat out lie (less than 1% of companies make this mistake, but does happen). Examples include use of third party certifications like “certified-organic” or “Forest Stewardship Council” without consent.

Southern Fried Science finds that Orange Roughy, a decidedly not sustainable fishery, is being marketed as such. This is similar to my finding that Pacific Supreme salmon was actually Atlantic farm-raised salmon. Earlier this year French grocer Leclerc fended off criticisms from Greenpeace that its sustainable seafood initiatives were misleading. Stateside, Greenpeace also targeted Trader Joe’s for simultaneous promoting a culture of organic and healthy foods while carrying such unsustainable fishes as Chilean Sea Bass.  Pressure from customers and Greenpeace resultes in Trader Joe’s to begin phasing out these fish, among many others non-sustainably harvested, from their stores to be completed by 2012.

The consumer should also beware of seafood marketed as local.  Typically, we assume that eating locally caught, grown, or produced foods is better because of the reduced carbon footprint.  But eating local may fall short when considering fish.  For example, eating the red listed Atlantic cod, even if you live on the Atlantic coast, is unadvisable.

Alarmingly, the effects of green washing can be significant.

Well-intentioned consumers may be misled into purchases that do not deliver on their environmental promise. This means both that the individual consumer has been misled and that the potential environmental benefit of his or her purchase has been squandered. Competitive pressure from illegitimate environmental claims takes market share away from products that offer more legitimate benefits, thus slowing the penetration of real environmental innovation in the marketplace. Greenwashing may create cynicism and doubt about all environmental claims. Consumers – particularly those who care most about real environmental progress – may give up on marketers and manufacturers, and give up on the hope that their spending might be put to good use. This would eliminate a significant market-based, financial incentive for green product innovation and leave committed environmental advocates with government regulations as the most likely alternative.

The post Greenwashing: The Case of “Sustainable Fisheries” first appeared on Deep Sea News.