"blue ocean institute" news and stories

No need to whip out your Seafood Watch app at the Whole Foods Market fish counter anymore. The national retailer just applied the same color-coded sustainability-rating program for wild-caught fish throughout their 298 stores, and even better, have committed to eliminating red-listed wild fish from their counters by Earth Day 2013.

Wild-caught red-rated species will remain for sale at Whole Foods for the time being, but will be prominently labeled. Guiding customers towards making better seafood choices are fish labeled with a green rating, including wild Alaskan salmon, Pacific halibut or Dungeness crab. Species that will be phased out include grouper, monkfish, skate and red snapper.

In making the move, Whole Foods Market has chosen to partner with Blue Ocean Institute and the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Both organizations evaluate seafood and assign a color-coded rating to fish ranging from mackerel to tuna, based on species abundance, habitat impacts, fishery management, bycatch and more. It's not the retailer's first seafood partnership. In 1999, the chain began working with the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) for wild-caught seafood.

For a nice Catholic girl like moi, Lent means several weeks of fish-focused Fridays. Sometimes that means grabbing a fish sandwich on the run. While there's no shortage of fast-food spots ready to fill that need, it's not always clear what kind of whitefish is sandwiched between those seeded buns. Frequently it's made from swimmers like pollock, hake or, as Wendy's latest Lenten promotion brags, North Pacific cod. But plenty of fish sandwiches, fish sticks and fish-'n-chips are made with a fish you probably haven't even heard of: hoki.

Like many issues surrounding fish and sustainability, things are often complicated. Environmental groups like the Blue Ocean Institute and Greenpeace give New Zealand hoki (also known as blue grenadier, whiptail and blue hake) a poor rating.

"We're in the process of updating our hoki report now," says Alan Duckworth, research scientist for the Blue Ocean Institute, "but the biggest concern with hoki is very low abundance compared to what it used to be."

When I was a kid, eating raw fish was considered bizarre, and admitting a love for the stuff was comparable to outing oneself as a tree-worshipper or part-time sword swallower. In its own, strange way, it was cool, but it also put one in the same category as the classmate who ate paste or the kid who sometimes set fire to things.

My parents, who had lived in Asia, were huge fans of sushi and sashimi, which meant that much of my childhood was spent traveling from one squalid Japanese restaurant to another in search of honest-to-goodness fresh fish. My sisters and I usually crunched tempura while my parents gobbled down morsels of hamachi, toro, sake, and saba, rating the various venues and moaning about how good the stuff was. As time went on, the claims that this was "grownup food" started holding less and less water; by the time I was ten, the whole family was in love with raw fish.

Yesterday I wrote about the controversy over whether pregnant and nursing women should eat fish and if so, how much they should eat. If you've decided that eating fish is the way to go for you and want to make sure that your choices are grounded in good information, there's a new service that can help you out via text message.

The Blue Ocean Institute is offering a service called FishPhone. Simply send a text message to 30644 with the word FISH and the type of fish you want to know about and it will get back to momentarily with information about that particular type of fish. You can also search on their website if you are planning dinner and want to check out the safety of the fish called for in your recipe. Unfortunately, the website doesn't give much info on mercury levels and seems pretty static, so it wouldn't be helpful in the case of current safety alert.

Via Treehugger

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