Greenpeace

In the embattled world of sustainable seafood, it's always nice to see positive change in a major public venue. As heartwarming as it is to hear from someone who has pledged to stop eating Chilean sea bass or unagi, it feels even better when a restaurant — or even better, an entire seafood distributor — drops it altogether in the name of environmental preservation.

In this vein, I’m thrilled to see a spark of light appear in the otherwise relentlessly dismal saga of the bluefin tuna.

Many readers are likely familiar with Food Network’s Iron Chef America, a culinary contest wherein a visiting chef races against time to prepare an assortment of gastronomic delights for a panel of judges. At the same time, one of the resident masters — a star-spangled group known as the Iron Chefs — embarks on the same task in an effort to defend his or her title against the upstart challenger. The dishes are linked by the requirement that they must all involve the day’s secret ingredient, which is revealed only moments before the contest begins. The entire exercise takes place in front of dozens of cameras and a few quirky announcers in a regal arena known as “Kitchen Stadium.”

Iron Chef America is a interesting show, to be sure, but it has historically concentrated on strict gastronomic hedonism — it seems that no ingredient is too expensive (or too endangered) to be included in the Stadium’s massive inventory. I remember one particular episode of its forerunner, the Japanese TV cult smash Iron Chef, where a chef cooked down half a dozen lobsters with a few stalks of asparagus only to subsequently serve the lobster-infused vegetable and throw the crustaceans themselves in the trash.

Anyhow, the reason I bring this up is to highlight what I consider to be significant shift towards ocean conservation in the highest levels of the modern American foodscape. Iron Chef America has catapulted any number of victorious challengers into the spotlight — perhaps it can now do the same for a fish.

On Monday morning, a well-known food blogger and sustainable seafood enthusiast named Richard Auffrey threw his cyber-gauntlet at the feet of culinary celebrity and TV personality Alton Brown. Mr. Brown, the host of Iron Chef America, is known to be a vocal advocate for seafood sustainability. He has, in fact, gone as far as publicly announcing that until sushi kingpin Nobu Matsuhisa removes bluefin tuna from the menus of his eponymous restaurants, he will not set foot in any Nobu anywhere.

So why did Auffrey take aim at someone who seems to be a natural ally in this “Battle Bluefin”? (apologies to the Chairman)

Last week, Kitchen Stadium was visited by Makoto Okuwa, the former sous chef of Iron Chef and sushi icon Masaharu Morimoto. Over the course of the contest, Chef Makoto prepared five dishes, all containing the day’s theme ingredient (which, auspiciously for the sushi chef, happened to be sea urchin.) One of Okuwa’s offerings was his “uni surf and turf”: urchin-kissed wagyu beef paired with a ribbon of otoro, the belly flesh of a bluefin tuna. Brown did not raise any objections or offer any comments on the unsustainability of the dish, and Auffrey reamed him for it.

I’m proud of Auffrey for sticking up for the flagging bluefin, but that’s not why this is so interesting to me. The fascinating thing about this is what happened immediately after Auffrey posted his rant: Brown responded. Like, right away.

Brown fenced with Auffrey a bit over the aggressive and accusatory tone that the blogger had adopted, but he also admitted that the use of bluefin in Kitchen Stadium was lamentable and unnecessary. The two traded barbs and questions for a bit, but in the end, Brown took action and the oceans got what they needed. According to Brown, bluefin tuna is now banned from Iron Chef America.

This is fabulous. Iron Chef America is both one of the pioneering shows behind the recent explosion of food porn in the United States as well the American rendition of a classic Japanese TV program. To have the pseudo-traditional otoro excluded from the Kitchen Stadium arsenal is an extremely powerful statement about the reality of our ailing oceans and the need for immediate action if we are to save them.

There are so many things about this story that I like. I like how Auffrey stood up to Brown and called him out. I like the prompt, gentlemanly, and constructive response Brown offered in spite of his indignation. I like the quick decisive action that Brown took to rectify the situation. I love the fact that bluefin tuna is now pisci non grata on a major Food Network television show. And the icing on the cake? Chef Makoto decisively lost the battle to Iron Chef Michael Symon, who didn’t use any bluefin at all.

Score one for the oceans.

Millions of Americans, like myself, are preparing to celebrate Independence Day with backyard BBQs and picnics. As people flock to supermarkets and shopping centers to stock up, those ending up at Costco Wholesale might be surprised at what they find.

In the Costco warehouse you'll find freezers and coolers full of unsustainable fish. Greenpeace surveys found that Costco continues to sell fifteen of the twenty-two red list seafood items.

Costco is the largest wholesale club operator in North America. While Costco continues to grow bigger and bigger, so does its footprint on the environment. Did you know that Costco is destroying our oceans through its harmful seafood purchasing practices?

 

It's time to shine a spotlight on Costco and expose the truth behind their destructive seafood policies. Costco can be a leader in ocean conservation, not a contributor to ocean destruction.

Costco can and must do better!

Greenpeace is urging Costco to implement a sustainable seafood policy, to offer transparency in its seafood labeling, and to stop selling red list seafood starting immediately with orange roughy and Chilean sea bass.

Sign our pledge telling Costco that our oceans deserve better.

 

The vast majority of the world's internationally traded seafood moves by sea. Many unfortunate fish find themselves ripped out of the ocean only to be gutted, frozen, shoveled into containers, and sent plowing across the top of it in a massive cargo vessel. The companies that transport seafood from port to port play an indescribably important role in the seafood industry's chain of custody.; After all, if you can’t get a fish onto the land, it becomes a lot tougher to put it in the oven.

It is in this respect that the imperiled Chilean sea bass — or more appropriately, the Antarctic and Patagonian toothfish — have recently gained an enormous ally.

Maersk is the world’s largest shipping company. In addition to jet engine parts, hybrid cars, stretch pants, and countless other items, the Maersk shipping fleet transports approximately 20% of the world’s entire ocean-going seafood supply. It’s a staggering amount of frozen fish, and that’s why it’s so heartening to hear that the company is now refusing to ship any Antarctic or Patagonian toothfish due to environmental concerns.

How great is that?

David Pawlan, Maersk’s Line Head of Global Seafood, makes no equivocation about the reasons behind this progressive policy shift. “We recognize the global concerns over the overfishing of toothfish species,” says Pawlan, “and support efforts to curb this trade.”

Pawlan is right to be cautious in this regard. It has beyond debate that much of the toothfish industry is inextricably linked to a massive illegal fishing enterprise operating in an unregulated manner in the Southern Ocean. The tremendous market value of Chilean sea bass fillets has prompted the fishing industry’s equivalent of a Klondike gold rush in the Southern Ocean: a desperate, greed-fueled free-for-all in a frigid and lawless wilderness.

Maersk is a welcome addition to a small but growing movement to protect the toothfish. Greenpeace has been pressuring companies throughout the seafood chain of custody to stand up for this animal and its vulnerable habitat for years, but it hasn’t been until relatively recently that major players in the seafood industry have started to get on board.  In the United States, the world’s largest market for toothfish, some large retailers are beginning to take a progressive stance on this critical issue.  Ahold USA refuses to sell any toothfish products and actively disseminates information about the animal to its customers.  Wegmans, a smaller high-end grocery chain, has pledged not to sell any seafood from the Ross Sea — ground zero for Antarctic toothfish fishing – whatsoever.  Several other major US retailers have also discontinued their toothfish sales in the past year or two.

So the toothfish tide may be turning — but that’s not the end of Maersk’s commitment. The shipping company has also pledged that it will not carry any shark products, any whale meat or whale blubber, or any orange roughy, a fish notorious for its exemplification of unsustainability.

This is earth-shattering. We finally have a shipping company that is beginning to stand up for the very thing that keeps it relevant and in business: the ocean. Still, there are still some missing pieces, including a very important one: the last few members of the world’s most endangered commercial fish species still ride atop the waves in freezer containers stacked high on the deck of Maersk, Hanjin, and other shipping vessels — not to mention in the guts of trans-Pacific jumbo jets — and this animal has very little time left indeed.

We must stop trading in bluefin tuna. If not, we will lose it forever.

Two days ago, the gavel came down in an adjudication decision which may, more than any other recent hammer-strike, determine the future of fishing: The Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) officially bestowed its blue-and-white fish-check label to a massive factory operator that targets Antarctic krill.

This is not a good thing.

Antarctic krill are tiny shrimp-like crustaceans that cluster in vast multitudes (known as “blooms”) in the waters of the Southern Ocean.  They form a critical building block in the oceanic food web: small fish consume the krill before being eaten themselves by seals, penguins, toothfish, and other animals.  Krill are also a primary source of nourishment for migratory whales -- in fact, the majority of the world’s baleen whales journey to the southern ocean to feed on krill and replenish their energy supplies after depleting their reserves during their mating and calving seasons.

While krill in their vast numbers do seem on the surface to be an “inexhaustible resource,” one would hope that, by this time, we have learned that this mindless assumption will never be accurate in regard to any of the inhabitants of our finite planet.  There is no such thing as an inexhaustible resource.  Ask any great auk or passenger pigeon, they’ll tell you.

Oh, wait -- you can’t ask them.

Because there aren’t any left.

Because there’s no such thing as an inexhaustible resource.

There are a few things that we are certain of about krill.  The first is that the tiny animal, like many other sea creatures -- especially crustaceans -- is vulnerable to climate change, especially through the ocean acidification trends resulting from the rising levels of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere.  Nowhere in the Marine Stewardship Council certification system are the potential effects of climate change even discussed, let alone taken into account by the methodology.  Strike one.

Next, we know that Antarctic krill exist in the Southern Ocean – an area adjacent to a land mass that is uninhabited by humans.  The simple fact that we are sending fishing vessels into this area bespeaks an unsustainable paradigm, known as finite expansion.  There is a certain amount of ocean on this planet.  That we continue to fish farther, deeper, and longer simply underscores the fact that we are not approaching the management of our oceanic resources from a sensible and comprehensive standpoint that would account for the idea that one day – one day quite soon, actually – these fishing boats are going to bump up against the ice shelf.  No more expansion.  What then?  The Marine Stewardship Council methodology again fails to even consider these perspectives, concentrating instead on discrete management techniques that do not consider the idea that sustainability is more than a fishery-by-fishery label – it is a way of looking at the world.  Strike two.

Finally, we know that we have only a very rudimentary understanding these tiny animals.  Krill have been studied only cursorily and we have almost no knowledge of their life history and behavior.  It is irresponsible in the extreme to proceed with the certification of a fishery that is so cloaked in mystery – we have no idea what kind of damage we could be doing.  Strike three.

And yet in the face of all these worries, the rubber stamp comes down and the MSC pronounces the krill fishery to be sustainable.  Let’s not forget that vehement objections to this certification have already been lodged by the Pew Environment Group and the Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition.  These objections were overruled -- but let us not forget that the three strikes listed above were not taken into account in the decision, as they are simply not part of the MSC methodology... and if something isn't part of the system, it apparently doesn't have any relevance on reality.  Or so the adjudication decision would lead one to believe.

There is a conceptual concern here too.  The certification of this fishery gives an unofficial nod to the basic idea that vacuuming up the tiny life forms forming the foundations of the oceanic ecosystem is an acceptable practice.  In reality, it’s not.  Even the United States fishery management authorities banned fishing for krill in US waters, specifically to allow it to remain in the ocean as a food source for other organisms.  Legitimizing and expanding Antarctic krill fishing is simply transferring our unceasing resource demand to a hitherto unrecognized protein source.  This is not the way to move forward – in fact, pulling too hard on this loose yarn just might unravel the whole tapestry.

The certification of krill makes no sense.  It’s a minuscule building-block animal on the other side of the world that simply doesn’t belong to us.  We can’t even eat it – the krill will just be used to make oil, fish food, and other rendered products.  And for this, we may end up short-changing whales, toothfish, seals, and other animals – all because the powers that be refuse to look at the entire issue from a larger perspective.  Fishing for krill will not feed the world -- but it just might end up starving it.

It's a bad time to be an ocean-dweller.

First, we have the overfishing crisis, which continues virtually unabated. Every day, we yank hundreds of thousands of pounds of life out of the sea, often in strikingly inefficient and destructive ways — bottom trawls rake the floor of the ocean, pulverizing corals and flattening any animals unable to evade them, while pelagic longlines indiscriminately slaughter curious seabirds, turtles, and sharks as collateral damage in our unrelenting quest for seafood.



To make matters worse, President Obama, who was elected in part by an engaged and hopeful environmentalist demographic, has completely turned his back on the oceans and their largest denizens — whales. His 2008 promise to strengthen the international moratorium on commercial whaling has been completely subsumed by an insidious new agenda that seeks to dismantle the moratorium, legalize whaling in the Southern Ocean (including Japan’s ongoing hunt for endangered fin, sei, and humpback whales), and create an unspoken tolerance among the world’s governments for this intolerable activity.

And above it all, offshore drilling has finally revealed itself as exactly what we have always feared it would be — an inevitable environmental cataclysm. The ruptured Deepwater Horizon pipeline continues to release untold amounts of toxic crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico, strangling birds, fish, and any other life forms unfortunate enough to be caught within its suffocating expanse… which is currently the size of the State of Delaware, not to mention up to 45 feet deep in some areas.



Our oceans and their denizens are besieged on all sides. Given these seemingly insurmountable odds, it is difficult to maintain any sense of optimism when one considers the state of our world’s waters. Still, all is not lost. All three of the aforementioned menaces have sparked resistance, and with the right kind of passion and leadership, we just may find a way out of this mess after all.

Although overfishing remains a tremendous problem, Greenpeace’s recent Carting Away the Oceans report highlights some significant progress: quite a few major retailers have taken strong steps towards the development of sustainable seafood operations. Companies like Target, Wegmans, Whole Foods, and Safeway are making positive sourcing decisions that reduce environmental degradation and enable their customers to shop with more confidence. Even Trader Joe’s, which earned both ire and infamy last year for its indifference to sustainability in seafood, has turned a corner. A recent announcement on the company’s website indicates that Trader Joe’s has discontinued orange roughy and is currently developing a sustainable seafood policy as well as more informative and transparent labeling. Beyond this, the company has called out the need for marine reserves in fishery management and has promised to use its purchasing dollars to support visionary leadership in industry (such as closed-containment salmon). The work has only just begun, but it is comforting to know that this company, which was once an incorrigible laggard in these areas, may now be in the process of becoming a true leader.

Our government's efforts to legalize whaling and reward Japan, Iceland, and Norway for their continual disregard of international law and the will of the vast majority of the Earth’s population seem to have hit a snag as well. Monica Medina, the lead US delegate to the International Whaling Commission and the champion of the legalization effort, seems to be backpedaling a bit in the face of enormous public resistance. Opposition to this despicable initiative is so vocal, in fact, that Greenpeace's petition urging Congress to reconsider has received over 100,000 signatures — and the number is growing every day.

It’s not easy to find something positive to say about the horrific oil disaster in the Gulf, but maybe — just maybe — we can find a way to coax a silver lining out of this mess. One can surmise that if it is this difficult to repair oil drilling mishaps in an area as accessible and temperate as the Gulf of Mexico, it would be infinitely more challenging in the Arctic. And there will be mistakes in the Arctic. There will be spills, fires, and other accidents — they are inevitable to some degree, as we have so painfully learned. So perhaps our government will read the writing on the wall and reinstate a total moratorium on offshore drilling, including the new leases in the Arctic. Another way to stop the next oil spill from happening is to tell Congress that dirty fossil fuels have no place in climate legislation, which should be aimed at reducing our addiction to fossil fuels. While this won’t quell Deepwater’s hemorrhaging, save Louisiana’s shrimp industry, or clean the crude off of any brown pelicans, it would certainly be a massive positive step towards precluding even more — and even worse — nightmares like this from occurring in the future.



So yes, things look grim for our oceans, no doubt about it — but there is hope. There is always hope. Countless people are struggling against the crises facing our oceans, doing their utmost to heal this planet that we are ravaging so blindly. And it is those people, and their efforts, and the possibility of a better future for us and for our children that keeps hope alive. It is undoubtedly a bad week to be a fish, or a whale, or a turtle, or a Louisiana shrimper — but next week just might be a little better.