Seafood is having its Portlandia moment

May 19, 2013

nonflash-1

Cooking for Solutions is a delightful annual conference, fund-raiser and celebration of seafood sustainability produced every spring by the Monterey Bay Aquarium. I’m just back from the 2013 event, and there is reason to feel good about the progress the seafood industry is making.

Consumers, chefs and, most importantly, major retailers in the US and Europe are more aware than ever that the choices we make about what kinds of fish to eat–and not to eat–have an impact on the health and sustainability of global fisheries.

The result is that, in the last decade or so, virtually every major retailer and food service company in the US and EU has adopted a seafood sustainability policy. Some are stronger than others, but the issue is on the agenda and not going away.

“Large corporations may very well turn out to be our angels of salvation,” said Matt Elliott, an oceans expert at California Environmental Associates, which last year published a landmark report on global fishing practices.

You could say that seafood is having its Portlandia moment. I’m referring, of course, to the hilarious scene on the cable TV show in which a couple interrogate a waitress about the chicken on the menu. (“How much room did the chicken have to roam?”) Chefs who gathered last week in Monterey told me that they are asked by diners if their salmon is wild or farm-raised, and whether their shrimp is local or imported from Asia.

By themselves, consumers can’t drive changes in fishing practices. But when consumers make themselves heard, and emerge as part of a larger ecosystem that includes activist NGOs such as Greenpeace, business-friendly environmental groups such as the World Wildlife Fund, certifying bodies like the flawed but important Marine Stewardship Council and brands like Whole Foods Market and Darden, change happens. Regulation of the oceans–a public commons if ever there was one–is important, but markets, too, can drive sustainability. [click to continue...]

Filed Under: Consumption, CSR, Environment, Food, NGOs, Sustainability Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,

Verlasso: Farming salmon the right way

March 10, 2013

salmon“In the fish counter, all the salmon are dead, all the salmon are red, and none of them can tell a story. It’s incumbent on us to tell the story.”

That’s Scott Nichols, the director of Verlasso. Verlasso, a joint venture of DuPont and AquaChile, farms salmon in Patagonia, and seeks to do so in a responsible way. So Scott has a story to tell.

“We feel a tremendous urgency to get this right,” Scott said, when we met recently in Washington. “We have to learn our way into it. We don’t have all the answers, and we may not have all the questions.”

Scott Nichols

Scott Nichols

A PhD. biochemist who studied business at Wharton, Scott, who is 57, never expected to find himself in the business of fish farming. But as he researched new business opportunities for DuPont in the mid-2000s — he had earlier worked on improving the productivity of maize and beans and on Sorona, the company’s plant-based fiber — he got interested in salmon aquaculture. Aquaculture was booming, for obvious reasons: demand for fish is growing, and the supply of wild-caught fish is flat. The problem, was, salmon aquaculture then and now usually relies upon fish feed made in part from forage fish, such as anchovies, herring and sardines. About four pounds of wild-caught feeder fish are typically needed to produce the fish oil to make one pound of salmon, according to Verlasso. So salmon aquaculture, rather than easing pressures on the ocean’s stocks of wild fish, was actually making things worse.

“The system was broken,” Scott said.

Scientists at giant DuPont (2012 revenues: $35 billion) discovered that they could substitute a genetically-engineered yeast for the fish oils, and preserve the [click to continue...]

Filed Under: Consumption, Environment, Food, NGOs, Sustainability, Transparency Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Deep sea farming

August 8, 2012

You’ve heard of the trade deficit. You know about the federal budget deficit. Now comes a California businessman with bold plans to tackle what he calls “the nation’s $10.4 billion seafood deficit” — meaning that we import much of the fish we eat, mostly from Asia.

Phil Cruver, who is president of a company called KZO Sea Farms, last month won permission from US Corps of Army Engineers to build what would be a pioneering shellfish farm about five miles off the coast of Huntington Beach, CA. The farm, where his company plans to grow mussels and oysters, would be the first commercial shellfish farm in federal waters.

Cruver, who is 67 and a lifelong entrepreneur, has to raise about $3 million to build and equip the farm. (The mussels would grow on long lines of rope, the oysters in pens.) He also needs permission to operate from California’s state coastal commission, which isn’t known to be industry-friendly. If he succeeds, Cruver says he’ll help jump-start an industry that will be good for the economy, good for the oceans and good for the health of shellfish eaters, while easing the US’s dependence on imported seafood.

“The potential here is just incredible,” Cruver told me, when we chatted recently via Skype.

He’s right about that, although I don’t think the “seafood deficit” — that fact that we import, rather than catch or grow our own fish — is cause for worry. (What’s next, the “coffee deficit” or the “chocolate deficit”? Trade is a good thing, folks.) More important is what we might think of as a potential protein deficit: the challenge of feeding a growing population that craves meat and seafood. Producing beef, chicken and pigs taxes the planet’s resources, and the supply of wild fish is limited. [click to continue...]

Filed Under: Consumption, Environment, Food, Investing, Sustainability Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Why we can’t shop our way to sustainability

May 19, 2011

Can we shop our way to sustainability in the supermarket aisle?

Eco labels are cluttered, confusing and unreliable.

Organic food gets a tiny slice of the market.

Most shoppers don’t pay much attention to environmental factors. Perhaps understandably so. They’re busy, or  ignorant. Or they don’t care.

Which makes me believe that we can’t count on consumers to bring about a sustainable food system.

So, like it or not, that it’s going to be up to business to fix the food system.

That’s my takeaway from today’s discussions at the Sustainable Food Institute, part of Cooking for Solutions, a great event on food/ag/sustainability organized by the Monterey Bay Aquarium. I’m here for a couple of days of good talk, good food, good wine, shared by reporters, chefs, people in the food business, scientists, activists and a farmer or two.

In several panel discussions–one on eco-labels, another about the popular but nevertheless limited Seafood Watch program run by the aquarium, and also during my own interview with Louise Nicholls, a sustainability executive from the British food and department store Marks & Spencer–it became clear to me that the dizzying complexity of food and agriculture systems, including as they do health, environmental and economic concerns, will make it very difficult to communicate simply to shoppers what’s “good” and what is not, even assuming scientists can reach consensus on that.

Persuading shoppers to then change their habits is even tougher. [click to continue...]

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