"fish" 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.

We can't help but wonder if Guido Rahr, president of the Wild Salmon Center in Portland, Ore., thought he was smack in the middle of ABC's hidden camera series, "What Would You Do?"

Rahr spotted Atlantic bluefin tuna on the menu at Sinju Restaurant's Pearl District location while having lunch, and proceeded to do exactly what groups like Seafood Watch, Environmental Defense Fund or Blue Ocean Institute encourage: he politely spoke up. And as a result, got himself banned from the restaurant. That's right, according to Rahr, they said he was no longer welcome at Sinju and would refuse to serve him.

In an email dated August 16, to Mike Chen of Sinju's management team, Rahr writes:

"I have been a regular customer of Sinju for years and the Wild Salmon Center has given Sinju quite a bit of business. So when I saw Atlantic Bluefin tuna on the menu, I felt it was important for Sinju to know that this is not just another declining species, but perhaps the most high profile endangered fish species on earth."

Rahr had been eating at Sinju for nearly a decade. The headquarters for his environmental group is located in the Ecotrust Natural Capital Center, across the street from the restaurant, and is home to several other conservation and sustainable development groups who share similar concerns about endangered species.

Go fish! That's what blogger Julie of peekandeat did with her partner to celebrate an anniversary, taking off from Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, into the Long Island Sound in search of black sea bass. The result, after a day spent with rod and reel, and a Chinese-inspired recipe from the Cooking Channel's Ching-He Huang, is black sea bass stuffed and topped with slivered ginger, scallions and shiitake mushrooms. Steamed with Shiaoxing rice wine, and served with a hot beer-and-ginger lime sauce, the bass was, Julie says, "soft and moist, its sweetness enhanced by the zesty, hoppy sauce."
Black sea bass is also a sustainable choice, which sweetens this meal even more.

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Speed-to-market isn't just a slogan for manufacturing product. The concept is now being applied to genetically modified Atlantic salmon that grow to maturity in a 16 to 18 months, rather than the typical three years needed for conventionally farmed salmon.

According to an article in The New York Times, a Massachusetts-based biotech company, AquaBounty Technologies, has boosted the salmon's productivity by enhancing the fish with a growth-hormone gene from a Chinook salmon and a "genetic on-switch" from a related species, the ocean pout. That on-switch allows the salmon to continue making growth hormones during cold weather, something non-genetically modified salmon do not do.

According to a company press release, the Center for Veterinary Medicine (an agency within the FDA) has completed reviewing several sections of AquaBounty's application. The company has been seeking FDA approval for many years, and says it expects the formal process for approval of the genetically modified salmon to go forward.

AquaBounty says the genetically modified salmon will be made up of sterile females grown in closed-containment tanks, eliminating the risk of escapement or accidental reproduction with wild salmon.

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