Small Actions

I'm not naïve and yet I also can't give up the possibility that taking action in small ways makes a difference. Although some days I do give up. I mope or buy a piece of plastic. I tell myself I don't care and I throw the plastic in the trash without a backwards glance. And then possibility, I don't know how, but possibility returns when I'm asleep and there it is waiting for me on the edge of the bed. It still surprises me.

So I've been signing petitions. The first was initiated by the Wildlife Action Center to request a ban of the fishing of bluefin tuna in and near their spawning grounds after the recent BP oil spill centered in their breeding grounds. If there are any still there, they deserve to be left alone.

Then I sent a letter to Hilary. It seems she wants to give corporate awards of excellence to Coca Cola and other bottled water companies. I agree with Food and Water Watch; What is she thinking?

The same day Food Democracy Now! sent an action alert titled, FDA cover up on genetically engineered salmon. Again I put my name to a letter asking, demanding, urging, begging, pleading for the FDA to not approve GE salmon; at least until there is transparent and independent studies done on their impact for an educated and unbiased decision.

Food and Water Watch took a different approach to their opposition of GE salmon. They drafted a letter to Barbara Boxer requesting she ask President Obama to deny approval of the 'experimental fish'. I joined them and sent a letter to her too.

And two days ago I took a stand and declared my commitment at Four Years. Go. A commitment to communicate, adopt, educate and create; a stand for a thriving, just and sustainable way of life for all. The wording reminded me of John Lennon and I wanted to hold hands with someone. Anyone. Everyone.

Maybe I am naïve and signing petitions and declaring a commitment to thin air is useless. Completely useless. But naïve or not I can't ignore the possibility, the smallest penny sized possibility that even such small actions can make a difference.

SALMON NATION

I've had the same conversation twice this week. First with my mother on the phone and then with the Muse over dinner; over a hot bowl of kale and potato soup.

First we talked about voting with our forks, the usual conversation I have with either of them, but then both times, the conversation wound it's way to the idea of how we have other choices too, choices to vote with our purse. Not buying something new but in places where we're already spending money and where a different choice might exist.

I thought the Muse was going to hit the table with her fist as we went on about it. She got that let's make change kind of a look. And then cleaned her bowl of soup with the last bite of bread. First things first - food and then change.

Mom didn't hit her fist on anything, not that I could hear anyway, but I could tell, she had her fist in the air with that let's-do-it-gesture too.

This is what I did. This is for my Mom and the Muse.

I applied for and received a SALMON NATION Visa card. It has a big red jumping, I swear it's smiling, salmon on the front and bigger blocked letters spelling out SALMON NATION.

It's not a huge change, it took all of five minutes to print, fill out and fax back the application, but really, those are the changes that work best for me. Five minute changes. My best changes have all been small but that's why they last. I hardly notice them.

A percentage of income from the SALMON NATION Visa card goes to Ecotrust to help grow a SALMON NATION. And honestly, I don't know the due diligence of that equation, but I'd rather have even a penny go to SALMON NATION and support communities working together to improve watersheds than have the same penny go to a Bank of something. Plus it feels good to pull the bright red salmon from my purse and hand it over.

As good as kale and potato soup.

Haiku Friday

A deep sea-blue bowl
filled with dry farmed tomatoes.
The last of the year.

The State of Your Bacon

The Renaissance Woman sends me articles and comics she cuts from magazines. I love their torn edges, the off center folds. I love getting an envelope with a handwritten address and a postage stamp.

A couple of days ago she sent an article from Time Magazine titled Getting Real About the High Price of Cheap Food. The first paragraph, which was placed solo in the sky portion of a full page photo, a black cow grazing in a brown field, read like a little farm fairytale. Except it was even scarier.

Here's it is, by Bryan Walsh:

Somewhere in Iowa, a pig is being raised in a confined pen, packed in so tightly with other swine that their curly tails have been chopped off so they won't bite one another. To prevent him from getting sick in such close quarters, he is dosed with antibiotics. The waste produced by the pig and his thousands of pen mates on the factory farm where they live goes into manure lagoons that blanket neighboring communities with air pollution and a stomach-churning stench. He's fed on American corn that was grown with the help of government subsidies and millions of tons of chemical fertilizer. When the pig is slaughtered, at about 5 months of age, he'll become sausage or bacon that will sell cheap, feeding an American addiction to meat that has contributed to an obesity epidemic currently afflicting more than two-thirds of the population. And when the rains come, the excess fertilizer that coaxed so much corn from the ground will be washed into the Mississippi River and down into the Gulf of Mexico, where it will help kill fish for miles and miles around. That's the state of your bacon — circa 2009.

Like all good fairytales there is a happy ending to the article though. It's this; the opportunities we have, three times a day, to choose better food. For ourselves, our neighbors, the pigs, fish and for our pretty planet.

The Cove

Dolphins are like ice cream; most people love them and seeing one is as good as dessert. I've always wanted to hug one. Which is why the movie we saw last night, The Cove, was so disturbing. The movie uncovered and documented the hidden slaughter of dolphins in a cove of a Japanese city that upon first glance appeared to also love dolphins.

The city however was ground zero for the capture and sale of dolphins to the big business world of theme parks. It's the thousands of dolphins that don't make it to the stage that are packaged as meat, high mercury meat, and often labeled as whale, which commands a higher price. Unbeknownst to the public a good portion of dolphin also found its way into school lunch menus.


The film plays like a James Bond movie. There's bad guys, good guys, high tech cameras, cameras hidden in rocks; there are jagged cliffs, guarded tunnels and tails everywhere. I had to remind myself to breathe more than once. The sailor guy and I rotated between slouching lower and lower in our seats to sitting on the edge of them. One couple walked out.

Eating dolphins is one thing, depleting the oceans another but battling for first place in the list of disturbing was the politics that cover up the dolphin harvest.

Taking a broader view the film was a microcosm for many arms of our food system that are hidden and guarded; protected from view. It was about the world and not only Japan.

The good news however was the film itself. The effort, experience, community, commitment, knowledge and technology that went into making it were amazing. And when the crew wasn't running undercover they found time to laugh.

I love that. It gave me time to sit up and breathe.

Is the movie playing near you?

Haiku Friday

Reading on the bus
I look up at the first stop.
The weeds have been mown.

Culinate Book Review

I was excited today to find a review of Bottomfeeder in the recent, what do you call it, issue?, of Culinate, the online sustainable food magazine, which lands in my mail each Wednesday. I read and reviewed the book last year and have been a champion of it since. Funny how some books have that effect.

Culinate's review of Bottomfeeder - How To Eat Ethically In A World Of Vanishing Seafood is by Twilight Greenaway. She works for the Center for Urban Education and Sustainable Agriculture, better known as the people that put on the Ferry Building farmers' market, which makes me believe this book is slowly getting the audience it deserves. And it gives me hope that even though we can't see what's going on underwater in the ocean, we really do care.

The Culinate review is a good one, although not as good looking as the Chewy Chocolate Cookie recipe right beneath it. They're wicked.

Oceana

The first time I heard someone say that nine out of ten of all the big fish in the ocean are gone, it was James Gustave Speth speaking at the World Affairs Council. But I didn't believe him. I tried to convince myself I'd heard him incorrectly. That he was a kook. I looked at his bio again - Dean of the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale.

Then I looked around the room. No one, well, other than Mr. Speth, seemed too concerned. I left confidant that I'd missed a clarifying precursor to the nine out of ten missing big fish. I often miss things.

Then I read Bottomfeeder, How to Eat Ethically in a World of Vanishing Seafood. The author, Taras Grescoe, wrote about the missing big fish but he also wrote about the little fish still plentiful that he loved to eat. I focused there and tried fresh sardines and then stayed away from seafood for the most part. Eating it was too overwhelming to consider; the mercury, the way it was caught or grown, where it came from. I needed to let the ocean settle before I put any part back on my plate.

Last night I saw Ted Danson talk about acting and his work with Oceana. And I heard that line again, "Nine out of ten big fish are gone from the oceans as a result of over fishing." He was literally on the edge of his chair, a posture he never took when reminiscing about acting. He looked ready to spring up and pace the stage. He gave more facts but I was still repeating the first one and then the lights were turned up for questions.

A young woman asked, "What can we do to help the ocean."

"Become activists," he replied. "Eat sustainably caught fish that's low in mercury."

There were more questions about his twelve years on Cheers, other roles he'd played. Not another question about the ocean.

I wish I'd stood up, taken the microphone and asked Ted Danson to repeat the first line one more time, "Nine out of ten big fish in the ocean are gone as a result of commercial fishing." Maybe then I would believe it. I'm still reasoning that it must be some other ocean. Not my ocean. Ha.

Sustainable Seafood Sushi Guide

I've been wanting to post the new Monterey Bay Aquarium seafood watch sustainable seafood guide for sushi for awhile. Say that five times fast! Finally here it is.

It's interesting to note that many of the items on the Best Choice list are farmed. What happened to the wild sources?

There's eye candy information on the aquarium's website about trying new flavors. Be daring, they write, explore new flavors.

I've avoided sushi since reading Bottomfeeder, How To Eat Ethically In A World Of Vanishing Seafood. But with the guide I'm going back informed. At least to give something new a try.

Smelt roe, giant clam or Canadian sea urchin anyone?

Honey & Plastic In A Jar

I got the chance to use our downtown independent drug store today. It was actually the cute guys idea. I suggested a chain store.

Here's what happened. I started buying local honey for our kitchen at work in a big jar. And then I bought a syrup pourer so people could, you know, pour it. The honey stuck in the spout instead. The lid had to be unscrewed to get to the honey except the lid would stick because it was caked with honey.

That was the case today. Hot water didn't help. I twisted harder. The glass syrup pourer shattered in my hand. A plastic honey bear was sounding like a better idea until this evening. Bandaged I went to see Dr. Marcus Eriksen and Anna Cummins from the Algarita Marine Research Center on Beth's suggestion at Fake Plastic Fish.

After studying jars of collection samples from the Pacific gyre which they passed to the audience, think a dirty snow globe of plastic, buying throw away plastic stuff (except maybe medical supplies when you're bleeding all over the place), I'm convinced throw away plastic isn't worth the damage it's doing to the ocean. Plus we likely end up eating the plastic when we think we're eating seafood.

Bottom line, syrup pourers for honey and throwaway plastics are dangerous. Fortunately there are alternatives. Like regular honey jars, water from the tap and canvas bags to start with.

Does anyone have a non-plastic alternative to keep greens fresh in the fridge? That's a plastic alternative I haven't figured out yet.

Farm-Free Salmon Pledge

The Muse has done it again. Remember our dinner many weeks ago when she declared farmed salmon for her dinner with a determined hurrah fling of the menu. And then I spilled stories of farmed salmon I'd been reading and she ordered a lovely pasta dish. Well, the Muse has taken no-farmed-salmon another couple of steps.

First, not long after our meal she was at the same restaurant with a friend and before the menus were opened said, "You can't order the salmon!" No further discussion was necessary and I'm still laughing at the story.

Now the Muse has found the Farm-Free Salmon Pledge at Fish restaurant in Sausalito. The pledge encourages restaurants and retailers to remove farmed salmon from their menus and shelves. Individuals can take the pledge too and remove it from their carts and tables.

Fish has printed the Pledge on recycled 5x7 card stock for customers to take and/or distribute. The Muse took the Pledge herself and is taking the card to the restaurant of our not quite legendary no-farmed-salmon dinner. And she gave me several to distribute too.

It's exciting or maybe I'm naive. But I believe if people learn about the impact the farming has on the environment and the facts that farmed salmon is fake and dyed and bolstered up with antibiotics they wouldn't want to support farmed salmon. Let alone eat it.

If you know a restaurant(s) or retailer(s) you would like to have receive the Farm-Free Salmon Pledge card, or you would like some yourself, email me from the sidebar with the business name and address or yours and I'll happily put the Pledge card or cards in the mail.

Let's get busy. There's still a lot of hope to restore the runs of the wild salmon. Delicious wild salmon, I might add.

The Farm-Free Salmon Pledge.

In the spring of 2008, the Pacific Fishery Management Council announced the closure of both the commercial and sport fishing for wild Chinook and Coho Salmon for California and Oregon coasts and rivers. The immediate impact of this will cost the west coast over 200 million dollars and over 4,200 jobs. The long term effects could be much greater if we don’t act now.

Fish. restaurant in Sausalito, Ca. is taking the first step by introducing the Farm-Free Salmon pledge. Restaurants and retailers taking this pledge will remove farmed salmon from their menus and shelves using only wild salmon when it is available. By doing this, they will protect the marine food webs that are plundered to support farmed salmon, prevent the waste that open ocean pens produce, and eliminate the possibility of escape of non-native species into our west coast ecosystems while supporting the fishing communities that depend on healthy oceans and wild salmon populations for their future.

Today, rivers and streams on the Pacific Coast are dammed, degraded, drained, diverted, buried under silt or otherwise unable to support abundant salmon populations. Consequently, some salmon populations that once supported communities along our Pacific coast are severely imperiled to the point where numerous fish populations are now protected by the federal and/or state Endangered Species Acts.

The loss of Pacific salmon populations has damaged coastal and tribal communities all along our coast and inland to Idaho and Nevada. Across the country, families are faced with the choice of paying high prices for wild salmon (if they can be found), or buying farmed Atlantic salmon of dubious quality and nutritional value, or not eating salmon at all. Commercial fishermen have been forced to fish in unsafe weather in order to make boat, insurance, and related payments. Over the last couple of decades, the Pacific Coast commercial fishing fleet has declined from more than 10,000 salmon fishermen to 1,000.

Many of these remaining fishing men and women work second jobs in to order to make ends meet. Native American tribes can no longer depend on the salmon for sustenance as they always have; as a result, these people are suffering skyrocketing increases in heart disease and diabetes. As salmon populations decline, more and more of their food now comes from the grocery store – it is high in starch, fats and sugars.

But salmon are very resilient! If you restore healthy rivers and habitat and give them a half a chance, they will bounce back. Case in point: Sacramento River winter run Chinook salmon nearly went extinct in the early 1990’s; their numbers had dwindled to a mere 186 spawning adults.

Once they were protected under the Endangered Species Act, measures were undertaken to restore habitats in the Sacramento River. Dams were modified to provide cooler water for incubating salmon eggs. A nearby mine that was leaking acid into the Sacramento River was cleaned up. Another dam that was blocking salmon migration was opened. Within a few years of these improvements, winter run Chinook salmon numbers had increased to over 8,000 spawning adults.

The winter run of Sacramento River Chinook salmon is still imperiled; we can restore these populations if we choose to protect and enhance their freshwater habitats.

Farmed Salmon

I had dinner with the Muse last night at a restaurant down the street; table cloths, big art.

She closed the menu. "I'll have the salmon."

I stopped breathing trying to remember the chapter from Bottomfeeder related to salmon. "Is it farmed?" I managed.

"It is," she said. "But it's organic."

I hid in the menu. "Where is it farmed?"

"I don't know."

I didn't lunge at her from across the table or pick up my purse and leave. Instead I reminded myself that I loved this person across from me and that she was not ecologically challenged. Her husband that evening was signing papers for solar panels to be installed on their house. I reminded myself that she cares about the environment. "I'll ask the waiter," I said.

His answer wasn't as bad as it could have been. It wasn't Chile. "British Columbia," he said in a hushed tone.

I bit my lip until he walked away.

The salmon farms in British Columbia are owned by Norwegian companies that have decimated the wild populations of salmon in Norway by salmon farming. They're now purchasing and setting up farming operations on the coasts of BC putting that wild stock at risk. Farmed salmon is treated with colorant to make it pink, it has sea lice, is fed antibiotics. It swims in cages thick with waste.

I apologized. "I can't help it," I repeated. "I'm sorry, but farmed salmon isn't even good for you."

At this point the Muse could have picked up her purse and left but instead she ordered pasta with morels. It was a lovely dish. I had a little gem lettuce salad with pumpkin seeds, a tomato soup with chick peas that was leagues better than it sounds.

She thanked me for the salmon information.

I took a drink of water and apologized again even though I knew she appreciated the information. Someone else would have been a different story.

What do you do when an ecological hot spot gets ignited? Do you go with the flow, let it go or do you speak up?

Bottomfeeder: How To Eat Ethically In A World Of Vanishing Seafood

Last month I saw the author of Bottomfeeder, Taras Grescoe, speak at Book Passages in the Ferry Building. Me and seven other people. Three were his friends. It was admittedly an unseasonably warm evening but I expected a higher turn out.

Taras is a young man, almost shy, to the point I didn't buy the book. His hesitation became my own. He was solid in the content of the book but a salesperson he's not. Which is too bad because his book is a winner. After reading it from the library, I'm sold.

Bottomfeeder is to seafood what Omnivore's Dilemma is to corn, what Uncertain Peril is to the seed. This book is a top of the list read for anyone with an appetite for fish and half a conscious to eat responsibly.

Part travelogue, part food memoir, part wake up call to the state of global fish stocks, Taras begins his journey of seafood in NYC exploring fish on the menus of four star restaurants. He travels to the fish markets of Japan for an investigation of blue fin tuna, to Marseilles for bouillabaisse and with many stops in between ends in Nova Scotia at a factory for fishsticks. In each place he eats the local catch, explores the history, traditions and present day wild stocks of seafood. And he interacts with salty characters on every shore.

Following him down to the waterfront, I watched him strip to his trunks, don flippers and a snorkel mask, and swim a few yards out to his racks of oysters..... Emerging from the water, he bade me follow him into a stone toolshed, where he responded to all my questions while standing unselfconsciously naked. (He explained that it is healthier to let the breeze dry one off after swimming.)

Each chapter puts a face to the men and women fishing, farming or working the fisheries. The people that experience or deny first hand the affects of overfishing, of destructive methods of aquaculture, invasive species, dead zones and unsustainable fishing methods.

As I was shown more sores and patches of dry skin on slender arms and legs, the old woman with the thick glasses took my notepad and wrote in it, in a schoolgirlish hand: "Dysentery. Ulcer. Womitting. Itching. Breathing problem." All of them, Selapan explained, were maladies that afflicted the people of Riverbank Street since the shrimp farms arrived.

Each destination brings to the surface new challenges to maintaining species of fish native to our varied cultural diets. But Grescoe doesn't let the book drown in despair. He is a constant fish eater with no plans to give it up. He chooses his fish wisely and hopes we will too.

Surprisingly McDonald's has chosen wisely. Their Filet-O-Fish sandwich uses Alaskan pollock whose stocks are still abundant. The Alaskan pollock, live in the middle of the water column, which mean destructive bottom-trawls do not have to be used in their capture.

Several times reading this book I day dreamed taking up post at the local fish counter with a patent leather purse on the crook of my arm. And swinging it at people that ordered fish from the list to avoid. Tara's takes a smarter approach. ... knowledge is power, he writes.

My fierceness would be more effective copying and distributing the appendix from Bottomfeeder that includes tools for choosing seafood with informational web sites, principles to follow, questions to ask. He succinctly explains and categorizes the good, bad and the ugly of fishing methods. And he gives his opinion of seafood to never, sometimes or absolutely indulge in.

While the contents of the entire book are relevant and important beyond the fish we find or don't find on our plates there are two chapters that stand out. The first deconstructs shrimp farming in India and the second focuses on salmon farming in British Columbia. Reading them you may find yourself considering a patent leather purse as I did.

But remember, knowledge is power and we can no longer afford to be ignorant of the way sea food arrives on our plate. The price has a face and it's much too high.

Low Carbon Diet

I woke up to this radio piece Monday morning. It's produced by Quest and titled Low Carbon Diet.

Much of the information I've read or heard before such as cows are at the top of the list for making large carbon footprints. So are fish however, which was surprising to me. But then I live next door to an ocean.

The four minute piece visits the Berkeley farmers' market, discusses meat CSA's and spends a considerable amount of time on the importance of not wasting food and recycling. The latter of which brought everyone into the fold; grocery shoppers, gardeners and farmer marketers alike.

The piece is like a long commercial, minus the actors, to encourage locavorism. I like that.

If you have a couple of minutes give it a listen.

Salmon - Darling of the Omega-3 Fatty Acid Foods

I was excited this morning to find an op-ed piece by Taras Grescoe that was in the New York Times yesterday. Taras is the author of the book I'm reading, Bottomfeeder - How To Eat Ethically In A World Of Vanishing Seafood.

His book reads like a travelogue as he eats seafood in a variety of cities and shores, collecting the narratives of grey bearded characters, fishermen and fish farmers. So far it's a good, although disturbing read. My kind of a book.

In his op-ed piece , Sardines With Your Bagel?, Taras looks at the current state of salmon in the world. Not only the west coast where the commercial season is shut down, but wild caught salmon in Alaska and farmed salmon from Norway, Canada and Chile.

In his short essay Taras deconstructs the darling of the omega-3 fatty acid foods, worshipping it's benefits and highlighting it's sudden and not so sudden wild demise.

Can we ethically continue to eat it at this time, or not?

Reducing Our Carbon Bite - Everywhere

,Sometimes I leave a lot of people out of the local food movement and I'd like to apologize and invite everybody in. I know we can't all shop at the farmers' market or eat totally local for a universe of reasons. Regardless, we all have the ability to vote for a more sustainable food future and we all have the ability to take action to reduce our carbon bite.

There are as many ways to make a difference in the aisles of the grocery store as there are in the aisles of the farmers' market or even the rows of a side yard garden. And they're all the same. I don't know why I couldn't see this before.

I've made a list of actions, which aren't anything new but they do have a different flavor when applied to the grocery store, the farmers' market or the garden.

- Choose fruits and vegetables grown as close to home as possible.

- Say no thank you to farmed salmon and shrimp.

- Buy what's in season.

- Choose organic when you can or every once in awhile.

- Pick seasonal flowers grown as close to home as possible, preferably not grown in a hot house.

- Eat one locally grown food or meal a week.

- Don't waste food.

- Drink water from the tap instead of disposable plastic bottles.

- Say no to bags when they aren't necessary.

- Take a canvas bag.

- Try a new fruit or vegetable - the purple tomato, the red carrot, the heirloom variety you've not heard of before.

- Choose the produce that isn't boxed in plastic.

- Reuse plastic bags.

- Use cloth instead of paper napkins or towels.

- Choose GMO free.

- Compost.

Every action toward a food system that makes more sense counts. For all of us.