"monterey bay aquarium" news and stories

The Monterey Bay Aquarium's free Seafood Watch app just got enhanced with a nifty new feature: Project FishMap. The idea is to give you eaters a chance to spread some sustainable seafood love by giving a public nod to restaurants and markets that are making an effort to source their fish thoughtfully.

LA Magazine deems it a GPS for fish, and we agree.

Press the "locate" button on the app, and you'll pull up restaurants like Oleana in Cambridge, which got a pat on the back for serving ocean-friendly seafood such as mussels and striped bass; or Esteban Restaurant in Monterey (a Seafood Watch partner), which snagged some smooches for serving items like farmed clams, Pacific halibut, mussels and oysters.

While the list of restaurants and markets is on the slim side right now (the app was just launched Tuesday), Seafood Watch is hoping users will get busy placing push pins in locales all over the country when they spot a "Best Choice" or "Good Alternative" seafood item. With over 325,000 users, we think the list will be chock-full in no time, earning participants badges like "Sushi Master" or "Pioneer".

Thanks in part to our breaking story last month, Sinju Restaurant in Portland, Ore., has removed bluefin tuna from the menu at all three Sinju locations.

According to a story in The Oregonian, the sushi restaurant made the change after being pressured by customers and environmental groups when Guido Rahr, president of the Wild Salmon Center went public about being banned from the restaurant after speaking to Sinju's management about the fish's appearance 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 the earth," Rahr wrote in a letter to Sinju in August.

Jae en Woo, who spoke to The Oregonian on behalf of her father who owns the restaurant said, "We should have been more up to date on this issue of sustainability and how it lives in the minds of Portlanders. I know this sounds really irresponsible, and I know aquariums often have literature about what's sustainable and what's not, but you're living the bubble of running your own business you're largely unaffected by these issues until a situation like this comes up."

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.