More Fish Articles of Interest

Tim Egan has a great article today about GM salmon and humility.

And I've been wanting to get my hands on some lionfish filets for some time...  anyone have a hook up?

Tuna Company Announces Move to More Sustainable Buying Practices

In The Independent today:


"Britain's biggest tinned tuna brand has bowed to pressure from campaigners and agreed to end a destructive form of fishing.


* * *


"The company announced the U-turn yesterday after a two-month campaign from Greenpeace that saw activists dress up as sharks and play the Jaws theme tune outside the Princes headquarters in Liverpool."


Bravo activists, including Greenpeace (who recently achieved a related success with Costco), and Fish Fight. 


"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."  - Margaret Mead

Coffee-growing Affected by Global Warming?!?

I've long been a proponent of taking aggressive action to combat human-caused global climate change, but now it's personal.

Green Agriculture Can Feed the World

One of my pet peeves is the conventional "wisdom" that organic and sustainable agriculture may be all right for your typical upper middle class granola-eating yoga-doing Whole Foods shopper, but feeding the world may only be accomplished through chemical-based agriculture.  Tom Philpott and Mark Bittman have both written excellent pieces debunking this conventional wisdom, and both are must-reads.

Grist article by Tom Philpott

New York Times Op-Ed by Mark Bittman

This debate reminds me of the debate over the Iraq war, when those who said invading Iraq and Afghanistan would be a disaster were ridiculed by the "serious" people.  The same thing happened with climate change - weaning ourselves off of fossil fuels would wreck the economy!  Now it is happening with the economy - all "serious" people say we need focus exclusively on the national debt.  Of course, when push comes to shove, the true agenda is revealed.

Proposed Shark Fin Ban in California

A bill in the California legislature would ban the possession and sale of shark fins, including the serving of shark fin soup.  From the front page of today's New York Times:

Sharks like the great white are slow to reproduce and can take up to 15 years to mature, making farming virtually impossible.
Scientists say that as many as 90 percent of sharks in the world’s open oceans have disappeared. “They’re among the ocean’s most vulnerable animals,” Dr. McCosker said. “The whole food web becomes bollixed when you take out the top-level predator." 

Suggested Fish Mobile Phone Lists!

When you're going out to dinner this weekend, don't forget to check the Monterey Aquarium's Seafood Watch Program, and to carry with you the appropriate Pocket List!  Too cool!  If you're browsing from your mobile, go to this link to be automatically directed to the latest online pocket guide.

The "Realist" View of Sustainable Agriculture

I suppose I am a bit late to the punch on this one, but a friend just alerted me to this apparently infamous article by respected agriculturalist Robert Paarlberg.  The article depicts organic agriculture as merely a preoccupation of the privileged class, and argues chemical-based agriculture is the only way to feed the growing world population.

In response, I found this article, which mostly dismisses Paarlberg's claims and argues organic agriculture can in fact feed the world more effectively than chemical-based agriculture.  The article has the added bonus of referencing one of my favorite books in the title.

Of course, I tend to agree with the second article, both from a normative standpoint and because Paarlberg's article appears to ignore the significant support provided to chemical-based agriculture by government subsidies and low-priced fossil fuels, among other things.  Paarlberg's article also diminishes the importance of evaluating the negative externalities generated by chemical-based agriculture, such as its environmental and long-term nutritional consequences.

However, it is an interesting debate, and if anyone has anything to add I would be interested in hearing it.

The Tyranny of Jurisprudence, as rejected by Judge Schwartz

This has little to do with sustainable food, but has a lot to do with law, and how it can get in the way of justice.

"Cardozo has described the process which I believe may have led to the Fourth District's contrary decisions:

Judges march at times to pitiless conclusions under the prod of a remorseless logic which is supposed to leave them no alternative. They deplore the sacrificial rite. They perform it, none the less, with averted gaze, convinced as they plunge the knife that they obey the bidding of their office. The victim is offered up to the gods of jurisprudence on the altar of regularity.

Benjamin Cardozo, The Growth of the Law, in Selected Writings of Benjamin Nathan Cardozo 214 (Margaret E. Hall ed. 1947).

I concur without reservation in this Court's continued refusal to do the same."

- Former Chief Judge Alan R. Schwartz of the Fla. 3d DCA, in his great concurrence in Doctor v. State, 677 So. 2d 1372 (Fla. 3d DCA 1996) (emphasis added).

Whistleblower Protection for Food Safety Employees

There is a provision in the newly enacted Food Safety Modernization Act ("FSMA") which provides protection to employees who report what they reasonably believe to be violations of any food regulation enforced by the FDA.  As many have pointed out, the poultry and meat-packing industries are regulated by the USDA, not the FDA, so workers in those industries don't yet have these types of protections.

Many states, including Florida (where I practice), have private whistleblower statutes which provide an employee with a cause of action against her employer if the employee objects to an actual violation of law and suffers an adverse employment action as a result.  The FSMA has an important difference - apparently, the employee only must "reasonably believe" that a violation occurred.  It looks like this will be an important protection and will enable employees who witness violations to come forward without fear of retribution - which will hopefully cause employers to be more careful to avoid violating FDA regulations.  I'll post more on the FSMA as I digest it (pun totally intended).

Here is the Government Accountability Project's article on the whistleblower provision.

Here is the FDA's useful resource page on the FSMA.

Bluefin Tuna

There is a petition over at Change.org to get Nobu to stop serving bluefin tuna, and I encourage everyone to sign.  If you missed the amazing New York Times article about bluefin by Paul Greenberg, I also strongly recommend it. 

In between my years playing classical viola and becoming an attorney, I worked in a high-end sushi restaurant in Miami Beach, south of Fifth Street.  Our chef's connections meant we always got the best fish in town, including the best tuna.  Depending on what was available fresh, we offered either yellowtail or bigeye, both wild, which arrived at the restaurant as halves or quarters of gigantic whole fish, and were broken down with amazing efficiency.  It was wonderful to sample the tuna which arrived biweekly from different alleged locations, usually somewhere off the coast of South America.  When I became manager, I always looked forward to a pre-shift breakfast of miso soup, brown rice, scallions, and as much fresh tuna as I could hold, straight from the carcass in the process of being butchered.  After all, I had to be able to describe it to the customers, and each week the flesh held subtle differences, perhaps based on its diet, the temperature of the water, or the maturity of the fish.  I became a tuna fanatic - an evangelist, almost.

In those days of the Miami real estate boom, the best-seller was always bluefin toro (the fatty belly of the tuna), which we sold for around $12 per piece, usually the highest-priced single piece of fish on the menu.  We only offered bluefin toro - no maguro (red tuna), and hence it didn't come in to the restaurant like the other tuna.  Instead, it was shipped to us as rock-hard, blast-frozen ingots, and was farm-raised in the Mediterranean, which meant you could taste the difference between it and a wild fish.  The few times we were able to get a hold of some wild bluefin, it was entirely different than the farm-raised stuff - for a tuna aficionado like me, a sublime experience.

Back to the petition.  The petition reads, in reference to Nobu's refusal to stop selling bluefin:

"Their excuse? That Bluefin is part of a cultural heritage of sushi and they cannot simply stop serving it.  Trouble is, it’s not true. Bluefin is a relatively new addition to the menu, and its red meat was in fact despised by sushi elite in the days before refrigeration."
 
This seems a bit like sour grapes to me, and here is where I part ways with the authors.  But for the environmental impact, I would happily eat bluefin tuna every day.  What it comes down to is, you can't succeed in getting people to stop eating something delicious by telling them it is not delicious, and this is a major problem for advocates of sustainable food.  I'm the first one to say that local organic produce objectively tastes far better than stuff that was sprayed with pesticides, picked before it was ripe so it could be shelf-stable for longer, and trucked in from parts unknown.  But you run into problems when you start saying that everything marked "Avoid" on, say, the Seafood Watch List, is undesirable, I think you start losing credibility in general.

After all, isn't the idea of promoting sustainable food both about choosing sustainable options, but also avoiding unsustainable ones?  We are doing great on the former, but I think we need some work on the latter.

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