the trouble with atlantic salmon: an identity crisis

(photo via the pure salmon campaign)

i once worked at a restaurant that served two types of salmon. one type was five dollars less than the other, and obviously sold far more in quantity than that which cost more. this restaurant is one of many belonging to what is possibly the greatest seafood empire in the country, so diners certainly sit at its tables with a sense of trust, that regardless of what they order, by dining there they're treating themselves to something special. but let's really think about this. truly. if one piece of salmon is listed on the menu for $19.95, and the other for $24.95, shouldn't we be looking up from our menus, scratching our heads, and asking our table-mates, why?

so the question is now before you. seriously, why do you think this is?

well, let's start by building the differences between these two types of fish. the $25 salmon is from the wild, and the $20 salmon is not. reason enough for a difference of five bucks, right? if that's the case, and if the $20 salmon isn't from the wild, could you confidently answer if i asked you, where the heck is it from then? if it's not wild, what the heck is it?

and that's the problem that people grapple with. on the whole, the problems with fishing ethics are so tertiary in politics and media, so muted, that people just don't know what's going on. don't know where their food is coming from (which, funny enough, parallels the factory farming problem far too much). and that's because when it comes down to it, we're taught to understand that cows graze and do so on land, birds fly and do so through the air, and fish, well they swim, and swimming is only done through water. and water is something our planet has lots of, so there should be lots of fish. one plus one then equals: shouldn't all fish be from the wild? the answer is yes, but yet, somehow the laws of nature have been tinkered with, and now we have fish coming from that thing that cows, the land grazing animal, call home. farms.

so how about this: one salmon is from alaska, and the other is from the atlantic. now, do you know which is wild caught and which is farm raised? do you know why?

my guess is, most people know that alaskan salmon is the cream of the crop. i'd even go so far as to say this is one the first fish most of us had ever known. remember those nature videos from our childhood? disney was infamous for them, airing often on the wonderful world of disney, remember? the stunning wildlife images of a day in the life of a grizzly bear? of the bear lurking over a shallow stream, her paw swiping at the water and pulling from it a flopping fish? and that fish, the one she'd strip clean of flesh and feed to her cubs, well, that's wild alaskan salmon. and yes, we pay top dollar for it.

but why does it cost so much more than atlantic salmon? hell, if it's atlantic salmon, it's got to be wild too, right?

on friday, mark bittman wrote this in his blog about "discovering alaskan king salmon:"

What an odd history salmon has had, not only in my lifetime but in the history of the world. (There was once so much salmon in the rivers of the Northeast that according to some historians,  servants complained about being fed the fish too often. Supposedly.)

Like so many baby-boomer East Coasters, I experienced salmon first as a canned fish. (Tuna too, of course. Who knew?) It was also an absolute luxury item at white tablecloth restaurants; I might have eaten it fresh two or three times – max – in the 60s and 70s. That’s because Atlantic salmon (of which there is only one species) had become not only overfished but endangered. (You can’t sell wild Atlantic salmon commercially.)

"you can't sell wild atlantic salmon commercially." did you catch that? do you realize the weight of those words? they're telling us that to all but a small minority of this world, true atlantic salmon, the stuff that makes its home the way nature intended, in the wild, does not exist. so what then is this stuff called "atlantic salmon?"

(norwegian atlantic salmon farm, via trondj's photostream)

two years before i started working at that seafood restaurant in boston that listed the two different salmons on the menu, the company launched a campaign around wild alaskan salmon. that was six years ago. here's how the menu reads today:

(menu via legal sea foods, park square)

ironically enough, just six years after launching a campaign to attract diners to eat the more expensive wild alaskan salmon, the fish has disappeared from the restaurant's menu, and the price of our mystery fish has increased.

so what is this mystery fish? and why does it dominate restaurant menus all over the country? again, we'll find a parallel to the corporate giants who have decimated our country's beef, pork, and poultry farming. the shades might be drawn when it comes to the dirty work, but make no mistake these corporate entities are slipping in and out of bed with the world's governments night after night.

spend the three minutes it takes to watch the video below. it's three minutes spent better than almost anything else you could be doing right now, including reading this blog post. again, so much of america's problem when it comes to food is the lack of knowledge we have about what it is, and where it comes from.

i realize how difficult it is to sit down and spend twenty minutes, let alone the three it took to watch that clip, but that's how long this documentary is. just twenty minutes. and in twenty minutes, you're learning more about this food than you've ever known about it. if that's not enough to convince you to watch the entire film, what is?

and that seafood restaurant i worked at in boston? it's called legal sea foods. yeah, you might've heard of it. when the company brought wild alaskan salmon to all of its restaurants six years ago, here's what roger berkowitz, the ceo and president of the giant chain, had to say about wild alaskan and atlantic salmon:

There's nothing wrong with farmed salmon. It's perfectly fine to serve. But wild salmon has different flavor characteristics. It's more interesting. And we're in the fish business--it's incumbent upon us to offer products that others would have trouble getting.

apparently, they're having trouble getting the wild stuff just like everyone else now. incumbent, or not.

(legal sea foods' wood-grilled salmon,

via asir-selvasingh's photostream)

and, yet, what trouble does the company go to in order to bring in the farm-raised atlantic salmon? if you watch the four clips of that documentary, you'll see that atlantic salmon is literally being harvested, boxed, and shipped overnight by fedex from europe every day, which really, i guess means the trouble for roger berkowitz in obtaining the fish is the occasional need to get up and out of his desk chair to sign for the delivery when nobody else is around?

no. the trouble roger berkowitz, and the rest of the consumers who purchase and sell atlantic salmon (and we're talking a massive amount of people here) have is an environmental trouble. it's a trouble that for those of us living today, especially those of us completely detached from our planet's well being, is irrelevant. it's as pesky as a house fly buzzing though the kitchen on a summer day. we can just ignore the thing and get by just fine, and leave the problem for someone else to deal with later on.

(sea lice, a tremendous infector of atlantic salmon,

via neil blake's photostream)

as the video details, atlantic salmon farms are stationed off the coasts of european countries. a popular salmon in restaurants today is scottish salmon, though farms exist and were made popular in norway, and are even found in iceland and other countries. these farms are over-crowded, ridden with disease, and eliminate the crucial variable to life of all species, which is natural selection. think about it, when a child of any species is born in the wild with an illness, it eventually dies. for humans, modern medicine has curbed these statistics, but that's not so in the wild. animals are often prey, and those not fit to survive in turn fuel the life of a creature better suited to live on than the prey. this can't happen in salmon farms. it's impossible. which means we're massively introducing a fish to our markets whose mortality rate in the wild ranges at best around 50%. and consider this, what if these defected fish, pumped with antibiotics and carrying scientifically modified dna, broke free from their farm habitat and spawned with pure fish in the wild? yeah, that's really happening, and some fear it won't be long before a true wild salmon, the fish that swam long before man came along, is completely extinct.

changes are being made to farming methods, but is it too late? and is change coming fast enough?

but americans want to eat good food, and do so with as little damage inflicted upon their checking accounts as possible. and, i have to imagine, roger berkowitz (a semi-finalist of the recently announced james beard award for outstanding restaurateur) is only too pleased to oblige.

fun with blogs

 

the bin 36 blog launched yesterday, and for those who love reading about food, i thought i'd share it with you. this baby has been about a month or so in the making, from when i started design work and began implementing an editorial schedule for the boys to follow, and we're thinking it might really take off... would love it if you commented on the posts and shared your thoughts!

the calamari taco lunch

as i get more and more involved with the uncharted territory before me, i have a feeling i'll be spending a lot of time working from home. like today. and like today, i'm hoping i'll be spending more time in the kitchen making my own lunch—which for more than two weeks now, along with every other meal, have been absent of the one thing i've always treasured above so much else: meat. meat, pork, poultry... all of the things that vegetarians don't eat, i haven't been eating either. but despite how easy it's been to cut the stuff out of my diet, i'm having trouble calling myself a vegetarian. but this is a different story, one i keep on pushing out of my psyche—i think because i just never thought this would happen to me. maybe it's shock—that no doubt i'll sit down and tackle soon enough. but for now, for today, i was inspired by lunch.

calamari tacos. i cut and then sautéed the calamari, chopped some white onion and tossed it with cilantro and lime, shaved some radish, and cut the avocado.

and they couldn't have lasted more than two minutes on my plate.

the brooklyn kitchen

the brooklyn kitchen spawned from amateur cooks who were frustrated with the lack of cooking supplies available in their brooklyn neighborhood. that's when taylor erkkinen and harry rosenblum took what seemed like a good idea and opened their store, which was five years ago. crain's new york business wrote about them just a couple of months ago.

(courtesy of their site, the shop before construction)

i love this. first off, i'm envious at the very idea behind what they've done. they had a passion, saw a need that was in turn impeding that passion, and took the risk to assume that others felt the same and... made a business out of it.

(and how it looks today)

there's something to learn for all of us in this story, which crain's was wise enough to recognize as well. for me, this brings to light the subtext of every thing i've written on this blog. it's like saying, wake up, everybody. at what point was ingenuity and creativity replaced by mass-produced goods and foods. where did the home cooked meal disappear to? why, one hundred years ago, did over 40% of this country's workers classify themselves within the agricultural sector, and we now face a number that is less than 2%? how did agriculture become a multi-billion dollar venture for global corporations to control, pulling the carpet from beneath the country's small farmers?

the brooklyn kitchen is a prime example of how people, whether they're conscious of it or not, are in fact willing to engage this ongoing dialogue and exorcise the far more sufficient and sustainable ways and means of agriculture and distribution that began to disppear just fifty years ago.

(my papa, carving our christmas dinner pork shank)

harry rosenblum is the son of a friend of my grandfather, and yesterday it was my grandfather's birthday. this artcile was sent to me by him. i'd give anything to have sat at the dinner table with my grandfather when he was a boy. what did my g.g. cook for him back then? where did she shop? and how far did the foods she brought home travel before they wound up in her hands? have you ever even thought of how different food might have looked then? that's something i never even thought to ask my grandfather, but so easily could. all of these questions are.

as i often say, maybe i'm just a nostalgic idealist. maybe there's little to the cause and in truth, people are more obsessed with a place like the brooklyn kitchen because we as a people are eating more food than we've ever eaten before. but then why did the brooklyn kitchen just recently opened the brooklyn kitchen labs, as crain's highlights, where cooking classes are offered and filled constantly? people are finding their way back to the kitchen, and the bar has been raised when it comes to what they want to learn and who they want to learn it from. but is this a small movement, or the start of something far larger?

(the newly opened brooklyn kitchen labs and meat hook)

and how much do i wish they'd opened shop in chicago and not brooklyn?

happy birthday, papa. thanks for this.

what should i eat?

the man behind two of the loudest books of the past few years, and whose name appears in this blog maybe more than any other, managed to release a book this past holiday season without creating much of a stir. yes, that man. michael pollan.

food rules: an eater's manual is very simple in its premise. it's an attempt, in sixty-four rules, to help you answer the question that's constantly asked every day by all of us, "what should i eat?" only this time, the answer doesn't come down to a sandwich from subway or a buritto from chipotle, but rather an actual answer to the question: what should you eat.

and so, some rules:

18.

don't ingest foods made

in places where everyone

is required to wear a

surgical cap.

19.

if it came from a plant,

eat it; if it was made in

a plant, don't.

20.

it's not food if it arrived

through the window

of your car.

21.

it's not food if it's called

by the same name in

every language.

(think big mac,

cheetos, or pringles.)

restaurants, and the social media frontier

perhaps this falls on deaf ears, but my conscience has been tugging at the lack of new content on the blog, when the reason for that lack of posting really amounts to content itself. so here goes:

i've been pretty quiet about this, and there's nothing too crazy about it really, but i'm in the position to start my own business here in chicago. it started with stephanie giving me the opportunity to work for her, in a position she calls her media coordinator, which two months ago afforded me the chance to meet the right people at the right time. i've since started working in a similar capacity for the hearty boys, who, for those in the food network know, won the first season of "the next food network star" and went on to run "party line with the hearty boys" for three seasons. they're operation is impresive, pushing out some of the best catering services in the midwest, as well as a brand new restaurant that opened this past fall from their boystown hub, hearty. not long after i started work for the boys, a friend referred me to another chicago mainstay, bin 36. the bin brand is unique in that they operate three restaurants in chicago—from which they've been nominated for outstanding wine service by the james beard awards—but also push their own wine in the national market that's produced in partnership with hahn estates. the driving force behind the operation is a three-man partnership who divide their expertise and presence between food, wine, and management. point being, i'm planning some unique work with some pretty cool people.

it's an interesting place where i find myself, filling the needs of restaurants by offering a service traditional public relation firms are somehow not able, or wanting, to fill. tonight i'm heading to an event with the head of an up-and-coming distillery who's thinking i might fill his needs, too, which has really got me thinking. i don't see why once i get this up and running, i shouldn't make something out of it. there's a need, no doubt, and right now there are few in the position to make it happen.

and yet, there's no certainty in what i'm doing. maybe these guys will learn how to handle social media on their own and manage to integrate its nuances within the day-to-day necessities of hospitality procedures. maybe technology will change further and sites like twitter will peeter out just like livejournal and myspace have before it. maybe you have no idea what i'm even talking about, no clue what social media even is, and my reach just won't reach far enough. or maybe not. maybe i've found a service that's at just the right cost so that the hassle and annoyance of constant updating and upkeep is something people are more than happy to have me carry as my burden, and not their own.

it's an exciting risk i'm taking, and as with everything else, time will tell how it works out.

they want to plump (clap, clap), you up!

the holidays have come and gone, and in the wake of a better christmas holiday than this cold chicagoan could have ever asked for, the navel took a backseat. well, the holidays are over.

so here's a little prelude to today's post:

the opinion section of today's l.a. times ran with a column titled "what goes into chicken," not posed as a question, but rather, an answer. and shouldn't the answer be, other than the food it eats, nothing? shouldn't chicken be chicken?

in the past few years, it has become common for chicken producers to inject fresh chicken with saltwater as a way to keep it juicy and flavorful in the hands of indifferent cooks, a process called "enhancing" or "plumping." in some cases, the plumping solution contains a long list of ingredients, and it can make up a fifth or even more of the chicken's weight.

foster farms, the california chicken giant, defines plumping as:

the practice of injecting saltwater, chicken stock, seaweed extract, or some combination thereof into chicken to increase its weight and price, simultaneously increasing sodium content by up to 700%.

that's a nice thought, isn't it? i dated a vegetarian in college and at that time, my own logic said, as a chivalrous gesture i guess, i should stop eating red meat and pork. but poultry? sure, not a problem. in fact, i viewed poultry as a substitute. i ate more chicken during those few years than i've probably eaten over the span of my entire life.

(an egg factory, via aleutia's photostream)

yikes.

with the reading i've done on poultry farming practices, and the little of it i've shared on this blog, putting how much chicken i ate back then to words in the above sentence really sent my stomach churning. and the reading's had such an affect that i really have no desire to eat chicken ever again. drastic and silly maybe, and time will tell if that holds true, but how does a person eat a food that just the thinking of spawns fits of nausea? especially when, as long as the additives in these birds are "natural," the packaging on the birds in the market can say "all natural."

though i will say it was a relief to see the editorial highlight the above-quoted mega chicken farmer attempting to do the right thing, to an extent: the foster farms "say no to plumping" campaign. but i'd love to hear foster farms argue that their chickens aren't genetically modified and manipulated offspring of the factory farm equation like the rest of the corporate poultry farm birds in america.

 (foster farms' chicks packed tight before slaughter, via

socially responsible agriculture project's photostream)

double yikes.

i've posed this question before and gotten little response, so i'll try again. does this matter to you? seriously, i want to hear what you have to say. i'm considering an organized effort to attempt a change in farming practices and food regulations in this country, but i really have no gage on whether or not there's enough interest in the general public to support this. does it bother you like it bothers me that we're being lied to when we buy our foods at the market and order off restaurant menus? in my opinion, it's criminal, and i'm curbing how i eat and how i shop, and seeking out more and more literature to gain more knowledge on what goes into our food and where it comes from as a response. but maybe you're still gonna keep on eating the same foods, with little regard to what i'm saying here. that won't hurt my feelings. not one bit. i'd just like to have a better understanding, is all.

happy new year everyone.