™

issue #1 june 2004

how green is your seafood?

pocket seafood checklists sometimes oversimplify complex decisions, but more detailed information is available

is the seafood you are selling an environmentally sound choice? chances are many of your customers are deciding for themselves, helped by information on a wallet card. at least five organizations now publish pocket-size seafood selection cards listing "best" and "worst" seafood choices, and other lists are posted online and frequently reprinted in newspapers, food magazines, and other consumer publications. like pocket vintage charts for choosing wine, these cards offer a simplified--sometimes simplistic--approach to some very complicated issues about the sustainability of seafood.

to comply fully with the recommendations on these cards could mean dropping some popular items, perhaps some long-standing suppliers. a public increasingly conditioned to look for approval in advance may be hesitant to try unfamilar items that are not on their lists. and if you do choose to sell or serve certain seafoods that are in the wrong column on somebody's list, you may well find yourself publicly challenged. fortunately, there are resources, often within the same organizations that publish the pocket cards, to help you make and defend those decisions.

red light, green light

the original pocket card, the seafood watch guide published by the monterey bay aquarium in 1999, established a widely copied color-coded system based on traffic lights to rate a variety of seafoods. in a clever combination of symbols, the best seafood choices (labeled "go ahead" in the original version) are listed under a heading of green, the color most associated with environmentalism. red, the color of brake lights, stop signs, and hazard lights, is reserved for those seafoods to "avoid." varieties of some concern, but still better choices than the "avoid" category, get a yellow rating, for "proceed with caution."

through several revisions, including regional cards, the monterey system has remained the same, though with the green heading relabeled "best choices." the list of species has also grown, and some items have moved from one category to another as new information has been gathered. in the newest editions published for summer 2004, the green column ("abundant, well managed, and caught or farmed in environmentally friendly ways") includes, among other varieties, albacore, catfish, caviar from farmed sturgeon, dungeness crab, farmed tilapia and striped bass, west coast halibut, and wild-caught salmon from california and alaska. among the seafoods listed in the yellow category ("good choices, but there are some concerns with the way they are caught or farmed") are lobster, oregon and washington wild salmon, west coast swordfish, most west coast soles, and longline yellowfin tuna. the red "avoid" category ("overfished or caught or farmed in ways that harm other marine life or the environment") includes some traditionally very popular items: atlantic cod, imported shrimp, most sharks, atlantic swordfish, monkfish, farmed salmon, and chilean sea bass (the last more properly known as patagonian toothfish).

monterey's card was joined in 2001 by the seafood wallet card put out by the national audubon society's living oceans program. rather than clear-cut categories, the audubon card (as well as the companion book, seafood lover's almanac) puts its list of seafoods against a spectrum from green to red, with alaska salmon and dungeness crab at the top and chilean sea bass and atlantic halibut at the bottom. most of the audubon ratings coincide with monterey's, with notable exceptions: california wild salmon does not appear at all on the card, and in the book it is lumped with all non-alaska pacific salmon in the red ("most problematic") category.

another pocket guide comes from environmental defense, whose pocket seafood selector uses just two categories, best fish and worst fish. the latest edition (summer 2002) shares most of the best and worst choices with monterey and audubon, though it was the first to feature some species not listed elsewhere (farmed arctic char and crawfish in the best column, skate and tilefish in the worst).

one of the newest pocket guides is a spinoff of the audubon guide. in 2003, almanac editor mercedes lee and contributor carl safina left audubon to start the blue ocean institute, and are working on a revision of the book. in the meantime, blue ocean has published its own list, the guide to ocean friendly seafood, also available in the form of a small flyer that folds up to wallet size. staying with the spectrum approach, the blue ocean guide has more grades of color, with a pale green for some items that are not quite as "green" as others. for example, farmed tilapia, a best choice on other lists, gets dinged slightly because it is not native, and escapes could jeopardize native fish. on the other hand, the blue ocean list puts haddock in an orange category rather than lumping it together with red-listed cod.

making the grade

criteria for rating seafood sustainability vary, but the main issues are the status of the wild population, the effectiveness of current regulation, and the environmental effects of fishing or farming methods. pacific rockfish (a.k.a. rock cod, "snapper") gets a red rating because most populations are now known to be in steep decline due to years of overfishing. pacific sardines, having recovered from their crash in the middle of the last century, now support growing catches that are assumed to be sustainable under current regulations, so they get a green rating.

some fish ratings are determined mainly by capture method, with a clear bias against bottom trawling (towing nets through the water near or against the sea floor, which can disrupt the habitat). sablefish (black cod) from alaska and british columbia, which is caught mainly in traps or on bottom longlines, gets a green rating, while the same fish taken in bottom trawls off california, oregon and washington gets a yellow at best. east coast monkfish, once an unwanted bycatch in the scallop and cod fisheries and later popular in its own right, now gets a red both for being overfished and for the inherent problems of bottom trawling. however, trawling is not an automatic disqualifier; sand dabs, a delicious little west coast flatfish taken mostly by trawling, gets a yellow light from monterey, as its habitat is muddy or sandy bottom that apparently sustains less damage from trawling than other surfaces.

for shrimp, the key issue is bycatch; the vast majority of what comes up in shrimp trawl nets is not shrimp, but an assortment of other fish and invertebrates that are discarded, mostly dead or dying, after the shrimp are sorted out. us-caught trawl shrimp get a slightly better rating in most systems than imported because of the mandatory use of turtle excluder devices, which allow sea turtles to escape the net without affecting the shrimp catch. but only domestic trap-caught shrimp such as alaska spot prawns get a unanimous green rating on the cards.

with the growing importance of aquaculture, all these lists pay a lot of attention to farmed fish and shellfish. aquaculture per se does not get a positive or negative rating, as the effects vary so much by species and culture type. farmed mollusks like clams, oysters, and mussels, which just sit there in minimally altered habitat and absorb nutrients from the water, generally get green ratings, as do most fish farmed in land-based closed systems (catfish, tilapia, hybrid striped bass, sturgeon). but two of the biggest farmed seafoods, shrimp and salmon, are roundly criticized for a variety of alleged environmental sins, and get red ratings in most systems.

consensus approach yields a short list

there are some seafoods on which nearly everyone agrees, up or down, and these make up the two categories in the fish list from seafood choices alliance. developed in partnership with monterey, environmental defense, and blue ocean, this list is whittled down to those species on which there is consensus: catfish, farmed sturgeon and its caviar, farmed bivalves, dungeness, snow, and stone crabs, pacific halibut, sablefish, sardines, bay scallops, alaska salmon, striped bass, and us-farmed tilapia are the only seafoods that make it into the "enjoy!" column, while the "avoid" section contains the usual suspects: chilean sea bass, atlantic cod, grouper, atlantic halibut, monkfish, orange roughy, pacific rockfish, farmed salmon, shark, imported shrimp, snapper, wild sturgeon and its caviar, and bluefin tuna. other varieties which typically make up the yellow zone on other lists are simply not mentioned.

and that's the biggest problem with the pocket-card approach. just as a vintage chart has no room for nuance, no way to identify the winery that made a very good wine in a "bad year," the compact format of these cards does not allow for fine distinctions, regional, species, and gear variations, and other exceptions. yet it's precisely at those edges that much of the crucial work is being done. a local fishery, even an individual fisherman, may be producing a "worse choice" seafood in a much better way. the same goes for farmers, as they respond to criticisms with improved practices that reduce their environmental impact. but the simple yes-no (or yes-no-maybe) nature of a wallet card offers no way to distinguish, let alone reward, incremental improvements.

stephanie crane, publicist for seafood choices alliance, acknowledges the limitations of a short list, but defends the approach. "there are millions of people [buying seafood] who don't know anything about these issues," she says. pocket lists are a starting point for discussion, and "anything that generates discussion is good."

in fairness, most of the wallet cards are backed up by resources that go into further detail, and sometimes offer exceptions to the rules. the monterey seafood watch web page for "avoid"-rated atlantic cod, for example, notes that "a few east coast fishermen maintain old-fashioned, sustainable fishing methods; where available, hook-and-line caught east coast cod is an eco-friendly choice." the audubon seafood lover's almanac also singles out "pen-rotated farmed salmon" as a yellow exception to its overall red rating for aquacultured salmon (on the theory that rotating, or fallowing, farm sites allows for the local environment to recover from impacts of salmon farming).

the blue ocean institute site is particularly informative, displaying a detailed analysis of each of its listed varieties and the numerical scores for several variables (abundance, habitat, fishing/farming methods, regulation) used to reach the overall ranking. the monterey site also contains links to its seafood information center, with a searchable database of government documents and journal reports on a growing number of species.

nor are the scorecard ratings permanent; both the monterey and audubon cards have evolved since their first published versions. "we've always intended for this to be a dynamic process," says jennifer dianto, seafood watch program manager at monterey. "our policy is to monitor all rated species and change the ratings if significant changes occur in their status." information can come from various sources, including those in the seafood industry with an economic interest in a change, so long as it passes muster with the aquarium's scientists. since the original version of the card, atlantic lobster has been upgraded from red to yellow, and farmed oysters and mussels from yellow to green, both based on information supplied by industry. pacific coast rockfish was originally an across-the-board red choice, but some hook-and-line fisheries, especially in british columbia and alaska, are sufficiently selective to merit a yellow rating. on the other hand, west coast squid, a green choice on the original list, is now in the yellow category because of delays in adoption of a comprehensive management plan. rainbow trout, a green choice, was demoted to yellow at one point due to concerns about farm effluent issues, but has since been restored to best-choice status.

defending your choices

while the cards continue to evolve, individual chefs, restaurateurs, retailers, and other sellers of seafood have a role to play. find out as much as you can about the specific sources of the seafoods you sell, and if they satisfy your standards, go ahead and sell them with pride. at the recent "cooking for solutions" event at the monterey bay aquarium, boston chef gordon hamersley gave the example of a new england seafood supplier's daily price list, which included cod, atlantic halibut, and sea scallops -- all red-light items on most seafood cards. "but look at the fine print: the cod is cape cod hook and line, the halibut is from day boats in maine, the scallops are diver [taken by hand by divers rather than trawled or dredged]."

still, as hamersley says, to sell these items "we have to rely on the incredible work that waiters do" in "the delicate business of informing the public about seafood." if you can't be on the dining room floor or at the fish counter yourself, be sure your staff knows why every seafood item is there and how to sell it--even if (especially if) at first glance it goes against somebody's rules.