guest blog: sustainability, and how one restaurant works with, and supports it

On Monday, November 15, Ria restaurant, one of my newest partners, will team up with the Shedd Aquarium to present an “Ocean Friendly” dinner featuring a sustainably-sourced menu.  For the next three days, Ria General Manager Brian O’Connor will discuss the complexities and concerns associated with sourcing sustainable seafood, a struggle difficult for restaurants, but one I hope more and more take on—and one I've written about at length in the past.

The Shedd Aquarium via setholiver1's photostream.

Hi there.  Thanks to Johnny Auer for providing this opportunity to think out loud (or in type) about some of the challenges and rewards involved with sustainable seafood.  I’ll be posting three times on the subject: today I’ll discuss the general goals and criteria of sustainable sourcing, tomorrow I’ll get into some examples we face each day in the restaurant, and then Friday I’ll do my best to describe the future direction I see the whole endeavor heading.

Sourcing sustainable seafood presents even more complex challenges than those associated with other sustainable food.  The usual concerns associated with sustainable sourcing are there: environmental impact, methods of production, and of course quality of the product.  Additionally, we have to worry about the uncertainty inherent in a longer supply chain, the stability of species populations and the length of their reproductive lifecycle, and even the effectiveness of public and private oversight. 

Investigating the sustainability of our seafood presents other problems.  We make it a point to regularly visit and communicate with our farmers, and we can see firsthand the methods used and even debate their effectiveness when necessary.  Getting out to the Alaskan seas three times a year, however, is prohibitively expensive.  If we were able, we’d still have a hard time tracking the vulnerability of population stock or seeing if the rest of the fleet fishing the species were as responsible as the boat we were on.  The issue is vast as—well—the ocean.

Thankfully, we have the work of the Monterey Bay and John G. Shedd Aquariums to guide us.  Through their Seafood Watch and Right Bite programs, they collect and distribute a wealth of information regarding wild and farmed seafood.  Monterey Bay has even established a set of guiding principles and criteria for objectively judging sustainability.  These criteria group fish into three categories: Best Choices (Green), Good Alternative (Yellow) and Avoid (Red).  These evaluations are invaluable to the chef or restaurateur interested in sourcing sustainable seafood.

Shedd's Right Bite wallet card, download it here.

There are five Seafood Watch criteria for evaluating the sustainability of wild-caught seafood.  They focus on the stability of the species itself, the effects of capture on the surrounding environment and the effectiveness of enforcing any necessary limits on catch.  Here they are:

•       Inherent vulnerability to fishing pressure

The more resilient a species, the less likely it is to be overfished.  For this criterion we consider the growth rate of the fish, its fecundity (a great term for reproductive capacity), and its maximum age. 

Compare a sardine and a coastal shark.  Sardines begin reproducing as young as two years old and live 5-10 years.  Additionally, they produce loads of offspring.  Sharks mature in 8-15 years (longer for females), can live 30+ years and produce only a handful of young.  The shark is inherently vulnerable to overfishing because it cannot reproduce as quickly as it can be caught.

Mediterranean sardines via anthony plewes' photostream.

•       Status of wild stocks

This criterion evaluates how “endangered” a species is.  We consider the overall biomass of the species and the rate at which it is captured.  This is surprisingly difficult to assess accurately. (Imagine trying to count all the sardines in the Mediterranean: How do you find them all?  How do you ensure you don’t count a sardine twice?  These are just the initial challenges.)

Because of the difficulty accurately assessing wild stocks, the Seafood Watch program adopts a conservative position: uncertainty is assumed unsustainable.  If we cannot be sure the health of a stock, it is considered unhealthy.  As we will see in the coming days, this leads to some of the most interesting questions in the evolution of the program.

•       Nature and extent of discarded by-catch

As anyone who has been fishing can attest, one can never be sure what is on the end of the line until it is reeled in.  As the scale of fishing increases from basic hook-and-line to longlines with hundreds of hooks to football-field-sized trawls dragged along the ocean floor, it becomes more difficult to catch only the intended fish.  Methods which reduce or eliminate by-catch are more sustainable.

We often look for hook-and-line caught fish as it not only limits by-catch (which is quickly thrown back), but also because the smaller scale tends to lead to better quality product.  Each fish pulled aboard is cared for properly: the body is not packed awkwardly, bending and denaturing the flesh; it is processed as necessary and sent to us as quickly as possible; also, it provides a more direct link between the source of the product and the final dish.  In addition to hook-and-line, diver-harvested and trapped seafood also tend to limit by-catch.

•       Effect of fishing practices on habitats and ecosystems

This criterion directly addresses the double-whammy of massive trawling operations.  As the anchors holding down the trawl net scrape along the ocean floor, entire ecosystems are disturbed and even destroyed.  The smaller-scale the operation and the less invasive the method, the smaller the footprint left behind.

Additionally, this section looks at the role the fish itself plays in the larger ecosystem.  Removing a creature that is a vital link in the food chain can have lasting consequences far beyond immediate physical damage.

What you might find when eating at Ria...

•       Effectiveness of the management regime

For the final standard we take a step back and investigate exactly how all of the above criteria are managed and enforced.  Many fisheries limit yields or methods of capture, but if there is no enforcement mechanism these limits are routinely ignored.  Additionally, the disincentives must be strong enough to stop the offending behavior but not so strong they discourage good fishing practices. 

Again, uncertainty is treated as unsustainable.  Without a certifiable metric for measuring effectiveness, management regimes are assumed to be “good alternatives” at best.  To address this challenge, a number of different operations have emerged, from completely government-controlled and operated to those formed by industry association and privately overseen.  In time, we will be able to better assess how each of these designs works and hopefully take the best of each to move forward.

So that’s a (somewhat) brief introduction to how we think about sustainable seafood.  The Seafood Watch guiding principles and criteria give us a great starting point to examine the product we are using in the kitchen.  Sometimes small changes can make huge improvements in practice: switching from Atlantic to Pacific Halibut or dropping Monkfish off a menu immediately make it more sustainable.

The real challenge is in the gray areas.  Should I use wild diver-caught scallops?  If I know the person fishing my black bass and I am certain she fishes it sustainably, am I right to use it?  These are the real questions we face each day in the restaurant and these are the questions I’ll address tomorrow.

See you then!

an 11 year old tells us what's wrong with our food system

birke baehr is eleven years old. and he knows more about our food systems than you do.

watch. and learn.



"think local. choose organic. know your farm. and know your food."

i want to be an organic farmer when i grow up too, birke. chase 'dem dreams, boy!

whole foods and grass-fed beef

the whisnant's of rain crow ranch, an all grass-fed and pasture raised cattle farm.

i think a lot of us enjoy retaining information. it's why the history channel and the travel channel and animal planet and every other odd and random niche of a network are on our tv listings, right? and now, we have social media. we have things called news feeds on facebook and streams on twitter. every minute of every day these feeds are updated with pictures and links and snippets of stories being told by someone, somewhere that we're not at that exact moment. while there are definite downfalls to this, there's also a tremendous upside. i'm retaining more random news and info than i ever have before!

which is why i was so excited to find a whole foods post in my news feed announcing a nation wide sale on grass-fed ground beef at every single one of their stores this coming friday, september 3. grass-fed ground beef. $3.99 per pound. just in time for labor day. are you kidding me?

cheeseburger time via whole foods.

but i was also skeptical. how in the world can whole foods pulls this off? how can the farmers afford it? and whose beef is this? who are those farmers? well, luckily, whole foods wasn't shy to share just exactly where the beef would be coming from for every single store in their repertoire. so i now know that the beef i'm buying this friday is coming from a 10,000 black angus cattle farm in missouri called rain crow ranch. it's a family farm run by a husband and wife (she has a doctorate and her husband studied in both agriculture and marketing) and their six kids. that's the kind of story i want to hear—and the kind of producer i want to buy from. read the list of farmers to find out where whole foods will be getting your beef from.

people have issues with whole foods ranging from things like cost to political opinions to issues with a lack of local product in their stores, i understand this. but if you're going to cook out this weekend, and you're buying ground beef anyway, then why in the world would you not take whole foods up on this?

and why grass-fed beef? hear it from the doctor (and mom) of the whisnant family:

"grassfed products have enormous health benefits. higher in omega-3 fatty acids, higher in cla, higher in vitamin e, higher in beta-carotene, lower in calories grass fed beef is one of the healthiest protein sources on the planet. though these health benefits can be measured by science they alone do not represent the true product. grass fed is as much a process as it is a product. it is a sustainable management philosophy that benefits not only the product but also the animal, the producer and the environment. grass fed beef as a product is the tip of an underlying mountain of strength and integrity rooted in family farms that put their hearts and hands into what they produce. each farm has its own unique story and history; i would like to share part of ours with you."

for more on rain crow ranch, and to really understand what goes into an operation like this—why it's important for the cattle to be fed on grass and raised in fully sustainable and organic pastures—i implore you to watch this video. this is the kind of food education we all should've gotten when in school, as kids. the kind of education our own kids are still not getting. and it's right here at your fingertips! and there's no processing or butchering at all, it's clean!

you learn a thing or two, from time to time

an elephant in the room via law h8r's photostream.

there's an elephant in the room. it's in the corner when i sleep and sitting next to me on the train when i head to the city. i see it drinking a beer at the bar and it joins us at dinner in our dining room when we eat at home. i even see it now from my desk. it's across the street, trying to climb the tree where the squirrels are. but it can't. it's too fat.

and no one else can see this elephant but me. or so i've come to realize.

losing my grandmother this summer, and watching my family suffer with that loss, has had a tremendous impact on me. which is to be expected, right? but the thing of it is, i'm ashamed of what's become of this. i've stopped eating well. i haven't been to the gym in months. we rarely cook dinner at home. our fridge is bare—and when we do go to the market, the stuff sits and rots before we ever think to eat it. to be totally candid, our produce drawers are full of mustard greens, arugula, and escolar that i bought the week we moved in to our new place. that was a month ago. and yet, when i do open the fridge, and the smell of something stale so blatantly hits my nose, i ignore it. i leave the spoiled foods where they've been untouched for weeks now in those drawers. and i'm not sure why.

fair haven, ny. where my grandmother left us and we
discovered the magic and simplicity of family and summer.

there was a point this summer when i wanted to just walk away from the business i'd started, feeling the pressure of running a one-man operation, that it was just too stupid of an idea to ever start to begin with. i'd imagine most people would come to that point when facing the loss of a family member, the excitement of an engagement, and the weight and pressure of the wedding planning that follows. which is why i didn't walk away from my business and instead am restructuring the way my business operates. if working alone is too tough, then hire somebody, right? if wedding planning is overwhelming, then take a step back and think about why you're even getting married to begin with—i keep on thinking over and over about the moment i bent on my knee. her face was beet red and she was laughing and crying and while i lost the ability to speak, i was so damn nervous, she kept asking what are you doing, what are you doing, what are you doing. over and over. and it just might be the happiest moment of my life. so planning a wedding? it's about remembering that moment, isn't it?

but the problem i'm having is that through all of this, the elephant is still there. i weigh more than fifteen pounds than i did before alicia and i left for california in june, when we got engaged. i'm at my highest weight of my life. i look awful. i've looked awful for a while now. and yet, i haven't found the courage to do anything about it. it's not that i'm sitting in a room with the lights off every night drowning in my sorrows—i've been there before. i know that feeling. this is different. most days, i'm numb to my emotions. after my grandmother's second service, which was in california, my grandfather's health started to deteriorate, too. he hasn't been able to eat much, and like her, he's been fighting cancer, too. but when she was alive, they had each other. how does one keep fighting after a loss like that? cancer doesn't let up. if you let your guard down just for a moment, it sneaks right in and doesn't relent. unfortunately, that's what he is now facing. so when i'm hungry or tired or overworked? when i'm vulnerable to my emotions and lose that numbness i carry with me every day? that's when i stop caring about what i'm eating or where it's from or how it was cooked. that's when i just eat. that's when things feel good.

and that's the total opposite of everything i've ever written about in this blog.

so there's this elephant, and i'm just not sure what to do about it. the answer is obvious. i know how to shake it. but that produce drawer is still stinking up our fridge, and i'm still sitting here ignoring it. maybe now that i've called the elephant out i'll step into the ring and take the thing on. but if it's that easy, then why'd it take me so long? why didn't i kick the elephant's butt before this?

though really, when it comes down to it, i'm getting married next summer. whether i like it or not, that elephant will grow wings before my bride to be allows any ol' elephant to sleep in our room at night. and that's maybe the sign of courage i need. like my grandparents were for each other, i've met that someone who won't let me back down.

hello, again

this was our backyard for one night. deetjen's, big sur.

it's been a while. a long while. since i last wrote, i proposed to my girlfriend; bunked for a night under a redwood along a creek in a cabin on a big sur canyon; lost my grandmother to cancer; failed to add any new clients to the business; stephanie opened her restaurant; started reading the town that food saved—a remarkable story of agriculture and community set in a vermont town called hardwick; finished reading anthony bourdain's newish book; moved; my parents moved, too; and so did my brother mikey; got deathly ill off oysters in san francisco—in the middle of the night, when i was going to propose the next day; the hearty boys received a flawless review in the tribune—and are now packed nightly; my brother tommy graduated from the 8th grade; found what might very well be the venue for the wedding; went to a wedding in north carolina; and michigan; but failed to eat my first chick-fil-a; but not my first epic burger; and, oysters and sickness and all, somehow the girlfriend said yes.

and yesterday morning i found myself sitting next to a husband and wife farmer, discussing a future project that's very much raw and in the early stages of development—but just might have the right combination of timing, public and political interest, influence, and just a desperate, desperate need by a small minority (family farmers) that'll evolve into something really, really big. something i've been waiting and waiting to not only see, but have a hand in.

but it was sitting next to the farmers, hearing first hand what it's like to be small farmers in a country whose government is making money hand-over-fist with its interests in big food commodities, when i noticed the dirt and filth caked to the nails of the farmer sitting next to me, that i realized how far i'd come in my journey from little woodland hills, california.

this farmer wore the dirt on his hands as though he'd been born that way. that my small, unblemished, dainty little fingers separated my hands from his like his bald head was different from my flowing head of hair. like blue eyes are different from green. the farmer wore his filthy and weathered hands like he had no choice. something like genetics.

i was sitting next to, and having a responsible and mature conversation with, real life farmers. to me—i could've been sitting next to magic johnson or vin scully—big deal, man.

and when i woke up this morning, i couldn't stop thinking about finding a way to re-immerse myself yet again within the issues i'd been writing and researching about late last year. family farmers are struggling. corporate farms are thriving. and in all this time that i've started my business, thousands of people across the country have continued to write and work and better the state of our food systems. well, i'm looking forward to rejoining the cause.

that, and run a business. and plan a wedding.

leaving on a jet plane

alicia and i are flying to los angeles tonight to spend a couple days with my family, and then we're driving up the coast to spend some time in san francisco, carneros, and big sur. some great farm to table restaurants are in the plans and same too for some vineyard visits, but i think i'm most excited about driving along the coast and through the windy and rolling hills of wine country. this will be a first time there for both of us—and is there a better way to close it out than staying in a cabin on a creek near the ocean in a redwood forest in big sur?

in the meantime, i'm pretty excited about something that launched yesterday. the splash page to my website! jamco new media has got some legs - albeit it wobbly toddler ones.

hope everyone has a great weekend. and we'll see you in a couple weeks!

pesticides: what to avoid, and what's okay

eating organic wasn't something we ever really learned about, right? i mean, if you really think about it, the way americans shop at the market is pretty standard: follow the big yellow price signs in the produce department and pick what not only what looks most fresh, but costs the least, too. which, of course, organic is not.

but even for those who are buying organic, nobody is quite sure why it's better and if some foods are okay to buy if they're not organic. growing up in california, i knew strawberries year-round. big, plump, juicy ones - but it's funny, because it wasn't until last summer when we moved to chicago that i tasted my first real, true strawberry.

(at the market via sarahpoelstra's photostream)

thumb nail sized berries with chive-like stems that just radiated with that bright ruby color like in the picture above - but yeah, they definitely aren't cheap. but they also aren't covered and caked in pesticides like the giant strawberries i know so well from home - the same strawberries i see in grocery stores all over chicago - which leads me to my point... unless you make nice with the produce workers, the supermarkets aren't going to take the reigns and teach shoppers what's best to buy, and it for sure won't be the government, which means we're kind of at a loss, aren't we?

that's why i try and pounce on these things as soon as i can. starting june 2, cnn will be running a two-part report on pesticides in our food - and they've thrown together a list, as well as the short video above, as a precursor of what's good to buy non-organic, and what should be avoided.

the government states that consuming pesticides in small amounts is not harmful. how do you feel about that? you mind eating these foods, caked in the stuff even after washing? the government's pockets are lined with gold by big food, so of course low doses aren't harmful... i bet your doctor would tell you the same thing, wouldn't he or she?

(not sure what about this is anywhere near appetizing...

the obvious via through joanne's eye's photostream)

and the thing of it is, fruit is tested for pesticides after it's been washed by the farmers. so that old trick you thought was helping, running the sink and giving your food a quick rinse? not really helping...

the bottom line is this. the edible parts of foods with a skin or husk aren't exposed to the chemicals like a strawberry or an apple. so think about it: if you have to peel it, like a banana, then it's okay to save your money and by what's cost-effective for you. but those berries you love? even though organic berries are sometimes twice the cost of non-organic, you're only helping yourself and anyone else in your home in the long-run.

here's a list to follow. if nothing else, i hope it at least will give you second thoughts...

what to avoid

celery
peaches
strawberries
apples
domestic blueberries
nectarines
sweet bell peppers
spinach, kale and collard greens
cherries
potatoes
imported grapes

lettuce

and what's okay

onions
avocados
sweet corn
pineapples
mango
sweet peas
asparagus
kiwi fruit
cabbage
eggplant
cantaloupe
watermelon
grapefruit
sweet potatoes

sweet onions

happy eating.