<2010 Forum>

Contact:

Patti Parisi

Co-Founder, Passionfish.org

Director of Marketing & Communications

patti@passionfish.org

303.827.8636

September, 2010

Transcripts of our June 2010 Multi-Stakeholder Forum on Seafood & Ocean Sustainability

Media & Passionfish'ers: We Will Not Be Pessimistic

Below are the transcripts from our June 2010 Fish! Forum held at the Hotel del Coronado, and co-sponsored with the Cooks Confab and Slow Food Urban San Diego.

Panelists are introduced in the order that they spoke:

CR = Carl Rebstock, Forum Moderator. Executive Director, Passionfish, US Army Colonel, Marine Scientist.

MH = Martin Alberto Hall, Ph.D., Head of International Dolphin Conservation Program, Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission

LK = Logan Kock, Vice President, Responsible Sourcing, Santa Monica Seafood

TG = Tommy Gomes, Fisherman, Catalina Offshore

KG = Kristin Goodrich, Board Member, Slow Food Urban San Diego

AS = Andrew Spurgin, Co-Founder, Passionfish, and Executive Director/Chef, Waters Fine Catering

NH = Nigella Hilgarth, Ph.D., Executive Director, Birch Aquarium at Scripps

DK = Don Kent, President, Hubbs Sea World Research Institute

CG = Caron Golden, Freelance Journalist/Radio Host

RS = Robin Seigle, Co-moderator, National Conflict Resolution Center

CR: Thanks for joining us for this exploration of fisheries – an issue that is fascinating and sometimes confounding.

Strap yourself in. We’ve got an hour and a half to run through a pretty extensive subject. The Environmental Issues Forum provides structure to an issue that could otherwise run off in all directions.

We want to be sure that all voices are captured in this discussion. To help us, we have eight people representing differing perspectives on fisheries.

MH: I’m a fisheries scientist. I work with the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission and manage the international fisheries for tuna. I work on reducing the impact of the fishery on other species such as sea turtles, dolphin and others.

LK: I’m with Santa Monica Seafood and I’m a former marine biologist. I’m the VP of Purchasing for the company and we do about 16.5 million pounds of seafood per year.

TG: I work for Catalina Offshore; I’m a fifth-generation American commercial fishermen whose family came to San Diego in 1892 and started the American tuna fleet. I’ve had the opportunity to work in fishing in seven different governments across the world.

KG: I serve on the board of Slow Food Urban San Diego.

AS: I am the executive chef and director of Waters Fine Catering, and co-founder of Cooks Confab and Passionfish.

NH: I am the executive director of Birch Aquarium and we are the local ocean connection; we really try to educate people about how to take care of our oceans.

DK: I am the executive director of Hubbs Sea World Research Institute. I am the former member of the Marine Fisheries Advisory Committee for six years, and I’ve been doing aquaculture research for 30 years now.

CG: I am a freelance writer in San Diego. My latest story was on sustainable seafood for Edible San Diego magazine. Think of me as the consumer who wants to know what to do.

RS: I am with the National Conflict Resolution Center to help facilitate the forum with Carl.

CR: Fisheries have changed quite a bit over the past decade or so. However, there are still conflicting reports that we are all still barraged with. Just back in 2006, news headlines stated that most all fish would be gone by 2048. Then just last year, the NMFS announced that many of the fish stocks under US management have begun rebounding.

Then there is the whole health issue: whether mercury in fish is a concern, Omega 3s and 6s and 9s: how much should you take and what ratios and which species are best. It’s a lot for a consumer to try to sort out.

Add to that the socio-economic aspects such as fishermen whose livelihoods depend upon getting out in the water and fishing, or the coastal communities whose economies depend on seafood. So, there are a lot of dimensions to take into account.

What is your personal interest in this subject? Why are you here? Why is this important to you?

Why is this important to you?

CG: I am a consumer and I love seafood and I really care about what’s going on with our planet and the viability of the seafood in our oceans and what’s happening to it.

DK: I am a native San Diegan and when I was a kid there were tuna seiners lined up three deep at the Embarcadero and they are all gone now. It was a livelihood for so many families here. San Diego used to be the largest seafood port in America. It’s hard to imagine that we only harvest now 1,000 tons a year here if that. And a 1,000 tons is what one tuna seiner brought in on one trip.

So, my personal ambition is to create a more diverse supply of seafood that isn’t reliant on foreign suppliers anymore. So that as we create more of a domestic supply, we can keep the fishing jobs and the seafood processing jobs in this country rather than exporting them to other locations.

We can keep the fishing jobs and the seafood processing jobs in this country rather than exporting them to other locations.

NH: Of course, I love seafood, too, I’m a consumer. I am particularly interested in this subject because our visitors to the aquarium are always asking us which seafood should they eat, should they even eat seafood, and so we have joined with the Monterey Bay Aquarium. It’s not ideal but it’s a start to let people know.

AS: 67% of all seafood put on a plate in this country is put on a plate in a restaurant. That means that the majority is eaten is provided by a chef in a restaurant. Clearly our fisheries are collapsing all over the world. As a chef and a consumer, that number is what got me into this issue a decade ago. It’s simple mathematics: Convince chefs, change the plate, make a difference.

It’s simple mathematics: Convince chefs, change the plate, make a difference.

KG: My background is in fisheries management and I work down at the Tijuana Estuary at Imperial Beach and every day I get a glimpse at how important habitat is in fisheries management. And, from serving as a board member with Slow Food Urban San Diego, I’ve gotten to be exposed to the concept of local communities connecting with food.

It’s promising to see student chefs here. Having chefs educated and having consumers educated is important. My hope here is that we educate people who didn’t have a great understanding about fisheries.

TG: There’s no question in my mind that we’ve gotten too big, too fast, too soon, and some of our practices of harvesting have not allowed our stocks to rebound. We need to pay more attention to the people and companies that are harvesting using non-destructive practices and doing it by hand and by hook-and-line, not the big draggers. It would allow our stocks to rebound.

As American consumers of seafood, we should be paying more attention to where our seafood comes from, how it’s harvested, and figure out as individuals what sustainability means to you.

We should be paying more attention to where our seafood comes from.

LK: I’ve been involved with fish all my life. I’ve worked on fishing boats, I’ve been a biologist, a fishery manager, and now I buy a lot of fish. My goal is to not be part of the problem but to be part of the solution. I’m here not so much to teach but to learn. I’m here to see, as seafood distributor, what I can do for you all.

MH: I’ve been working in fisheries management for 26 years and I know that many species have issues that need to be improved. I’ve also seen that when we tackle them we can solve them, most of them. To do that, we need pressure from different sources and consumers are one source. We need intelligent pressure, not just pressure. The pressure of someone who is well educated and knows one thing from another is important.

What the public consumes is important and that’s why chefs are important to me in my communications. If one chef is convinced then hundreds are convinced.

We need intelligent pressure, not just pressure.

CR: We are going to plunge into the three courses of action for fisheries management. And we’ll hand out index cards to the audience so you can write down questions for the panelists.

The format we’re using for this is “Fisheries for the Future.” It was published 10 years ago. Nigella and I had a brief conversation and I wonder if she can share her insights about the framework we passed out.

NH: It’s an incredibly useful framework that spells out three approaches. We’ve come a long way in 10 years. Sustain ecosystems, put people in the equation, use the ocean’s resources efficiently. But as we’ve moved forward over the years, all of these approaches are used together.

CR: The first course of action stresses ecosystem management first and foremost: looking at the ecology of fisheries. Then, everything else is secondary: people become secondary, economies become secondary, in the purest sense.

But, by hopefully saving the environment, we save all the rest. That’s the intent. Those who disagree with putting ecological issues first think that the kind of collaboration to get something like that done is overwhelming, and that it doesn’t take into account the people part of the equation.

Martin, looking at the ecological dimensions of fisheries, what kinds of problems are encountered when you look at the precautionary approach as the first and foremost goal in managing a fishery?

MH: Fishermen are part of my ecosystem to begin with. With ecosystems, we are barely beginning to know how they function, to be honest. So we have some ideas but we don’t have a deep understanding. So we do things and then see what happens. That’s the way humans develop in agriculture, etc.

Sometimes the planet is very resilient and nothing happens or nothing major happens. Once in awhile we say, “Ooops, we’ve done something that doesn’t work.”

And, we see an ecosystem where jellyfish are the dominant creature and fishermen say, “No more fishing here unless we want to eat jellyfish.” So you have pushed to a level to where you cannot go back.

The simplest thing for me from this point of view is that we do not know the details of how to maintain an ecosystem, keep it functioning. But we do need to maintain all the pieces in the system. We do not want species to go extinct because that is irreversible.

We do need to maintain all the pieces in the system. We do not want species to go extinct because that is irreversible.

TG: I think collaboration between scientists and fishermen who have spent their lives on the water is crucial.

NH: There isn’t enough information yet; it’s difficult data to collect. If we wait ‘til we have all the information we need, we may not have any ecosystems left. I don’t know much about the fishing industry but the scientists at Scripps tell me that collaboration is happening in unprecedented ways to collect the data needed.

DK: When you talk about the concept of ecosystem-based management, the way we manage fisheries is we try to understand the life stages of a particular species of fish, how many it takes to make a sustaining population, try to develop an idea of the maximum sustainable level out of a population.

It’s like going to a forest and saying “we can’t keep cutting these trees down or they won’t grow back.” The big problem we have in fisheries is the forest is out there and we can see it. With fish, we don’t have great understanding of the stock that’s available to begin with. And generally, we don’t become overly worried about it until, for three years in a row, we find that suddenly we can’t catch as many as we did before. So, we’re behind the curve constantly in trying to understand how to manage fisheries.

We’re behind the curve constantly in trying to understand how to manage fisheries.

We’ve made that up in fisheries like pollock and halibut and some salmonids. But, when you talk about ecosystem-based management, you’re talking about the interactions between all these different populations and the environment and all the other species around them. It’s almost like, in my opinion, the barn door was open too long ago and it’s gone. It’s almost impossible to monitor an ecosystem. We’ve been trying to do it in wetlands, with tropical rainforests, and doing it with fisheries and their interactions with pinnipeds and humans becomes very problematic.

At the end of the day, what we have globally is about 20-25% of our fisheries with any abundance left in them that’s underutilized. All the rest of them are either in a state of recovery, overexploited and we need to stop exploiting them, or fully exploited. So, we’re talking about managing something that isn’t going to be large enough to provide seafood even if we manage it correctly.

We’re still going to need twice the seafood that we have now in the next 50-60 years. So, yes, we have to manage what we have more effectively. But, at the end of the day, it’s still not going to be enough. Until we develop enough, we’re still going to have these social-political pressures that cause people to think, “Well, I don’t care what the scientists said, I’m going to go out and catch more anyway.”

We’re still going to need twice the seafood that we have now in the next 50-60 years.

CR: Don, how do you respond to those folks who question aquaculture and wonder how we can begin to pursue aquaculture if we don’t already understand the natural system well enough, and what problems may ensue if we start messing with it?

DK: There are a lot of chefs out here in the audience. When you start chopping up vegetables on your cutting boards, how much of that did you get by going out and foraging in and around San Diego? You didn’t. You went to a market, it was farmed somewhere, it was farmed in the Imperial Valley or the Central Valley or it might have come from a local farm.

The reality is that the majority of what we eat today is farmed. The last source of protein that we go out and look for and harvest is seafood. And already half of the world’s seafood production is coming from aquaculture and that trend is going to become more prevalent over time. Seventy percent of the seafood we get is from Asia.

So, my question in response would be: “Do we really worry about where the buffalo are before we order a Big Mac?” We need to have wild buffalo, no doubt about it. But, we also need to have a ready sustainable supply of beef and fish and carrots and everything else that we eat. And that, over the long term is going to come from farming. We have to double our seafood supply just to meet current needs.

The World Health Organization just came out with a report that said the biggest problem we have related to human health and seafood is that we aren’t eating enough of it. And in our own country, we need to double our seafood supply. If we’re importing 80 percent of it now, where is it going to come from? It’s a matter of taking a portion of what’s available offshore here and dedicating to the growth of a variety of seafood and done in a way that over the long term that isn’t dependent upon what Mother Nature can provide year-to-year from wild fisheries.

CR: Martin, how do you feel about being able to study, manage, understand systems which if we pursue that route that that Don just mentioned? Wouldn't the natural systems that we want to try to maintain be very different in their structure? So, how do we do that?

MH: In the ocean it’s very difficult to see the changes than on the continent where you can see the forests disappear, the lakes drying. So, you can monitor what you catch and you see the sizes of fish getting smaller. You can see species getting eliminated.

But, when we do an assessment of an ecosystem, we don’t do that based on ecological principles. We harvest based on economic principles—We take the law of supply and demand as if it were a physical law.

We take the law of supply and demand as if it were a physical law.

So, if we wanted the ocean to produce more food, the question is not “how do we harvest more swordfish or tuna, but how do we use an ecosystem to produce protein?” or whatever the goal is. To do that, we should have a very diverse way of feeding people from the ocean. And this is one of my issues with chefs. To produce a pound of tuna per year, you have to feed it with 16 pounds of other things that are edible for us humans.

Why aren’t we eating the other fish? Not the entire 16 pounds, but perhaps 10 of those pounds are edible for us humans. So we have loved these big predatory fish—fewer bones, easy to grill. So we went that way, and the prices went up. Meanwhile, no one eats the sardines and herring that we used to eat. So, as consumers, we could make a more rational use of the ecosystem. The ocean is not saturated as far as producing; it may be saturated as far as what it we have been asking it to produce.

The ocean is not saturated as far as producing; it may be saturated as far as what it we have been asking it to produce.

AS: Seven out of 10 people on this planet, their source of protein comes from fish. If we keep taking fish out of the ocean and bringing it to First World countries, we’re going to have one of the biggest epidemics of hunger this world has ever known. If we take all of the fish—and we’re certainly taking a great deal of them—I would challenge anyone to produce a report that says there are plenty of fish out there. Certainly some stocks are healthy.

But, just imagine, it’s 20 years or 50 years from now, what are these people going to eat? What’s going to happen to them? Aquaculture has been around for centuries, thousands of years to some extent with the Chinese growing carp and the Romans growing oysters. Essentially, aquaculture as we know it in our society now, is a fledgling industry. As any fledgling industry, it’s going to have problems. Look at salmon raised in South America with its huge problems.

What makes me upset is that certain types of aquaculture have problems, not all, and yet there are sweeping generalizations that “all aquaculture is bad” and this is simply not true. Unless we develop responsible aquaculture for the future, seven out of 10 people won’t have anything to eat. If you want to see this planet go to hell in a handbag, that’s what’s going to happen.

Unless we develop responsible aquaculture for the future, seven out of 10 people won’t have anything to eat.

CR: We’ve looked at ecosystems as the most important criteria by which we measure our use of marine resources. The next approach we’d like to touch on is different: It’s about putting people at the center of the issue.

A lot of people will say that fisheries management is less about managing fish than it is about managing people. And certainly from a fisherman’s point of view, there’s been a great deal of concern in the past that the knowledge that fishermen have about the ocean – having spent generations on the water – isn’t treated in the same manner as the knowledge that scientists gather.

There’s also concern among those that say putting people in the equation creates a very difficult dynamic because people are complex organisms – and the social aspects of trying to work collaboratively can hinder progress.

Caron, how do you help communicate these issues to the public and convey the nuances in a way that people understand and contribute to helping move the issue forward?

CG: When I was doing research for my recent article (for Edible San Diego magazine), and I talked to a lot of people, you couldn’t get a single answer on defining what sustainability is.

You find that everyone has their own interests, whether it’s the fishermen or scientists or consumers or wholesalers or retailers.

It’s very difficult to parse out where people are coming from and where they feel the issue has to go, even against their own best interests. There are communities that decades ago way overfished and found themselves in economic trouble. And there are mega corporations who trawl and have giant amounts of bycatch. One wholesaler told me: “bycatch is just a part of fishing, live with it.”

People are trying to be good consumers and don’t have good answers.

You find that everyone has their own interests, whether it’s the fishermen or scientists or consumers or wholesalers or retailers.

RS: Logan, what’s your thought from a commercial perspective?

LK: When we (the US) created the 200-mile Exclusive Economic Zone we kicked out foreign fishers from our zone and began to protect our waters as a national treasure, with a finite amount of product that we had to manage on behalf of all of the people who were not fishermen. And in the process of doing that we subsidized these fisheries, we bought big boats, we went way over capacity of what the resource could support in an effort to bring our US fishermen up to the level before – since we took the foreign boats out, we increased the number of Americans fishing.

But, subsidizing fishermen resulted in some pretty depressed fishery stocks. We can’t roll it back to 150 years ago when people were out hunting buffalo. We can’t afford that luxury anymore. There are going to be fishing communities that are going to be impacted and it’s going to be tough. Unfortunately, fishermen are going to have to give up some fishing; they’re going to lose it in the long run, anyway.

We can’t roll it back to 150 years ago when people were out hunting buffalo. We can’t afford that luxury anymore. There are going to be fishing communities that are going to be impacted and it’s going to be tough.

TG: We do have to give up some fishing or we’re going to lose it in the long run, anyway. But, fishermen don’t get paid unless they actually bring in a catch. We have gotten too big, too fast, too soon. Now, we have GPS where we can pinpoint a rock cod: Is that really fishing? Where’s the bloodline in that? Where’s the heritage? Anyone can do it; it’s that simple.

Now, we have GPS where we can pinpoint a rock cod: Is that really fishing? Where’s the bloodline in that? Where’s the heritage? Anyone can do it; it’s that simple.

CR: Don, is this all just quaint –that fishing has become less of what Tommy just described and more of a way to just feed a burgeoning population in the most efficient way?

DK: Well, I don’t think it is very efficient. And, fishing has changed. We’ve been watching fishing change over the past 30-40 years. I guess what it all comes down to is that we’re all fighting over a chunk of the pie that’s gotten smaller over time. And even if we brought it back to where it was 30 or 40 years ago, the pie’s not going to be big enough, because in the interim, there are now a lot more of us.

We humans are inherently non-conservative; I’m not saying we have bad practices. I mean we live in a non-conservative world. I’m talking on a thermodynamic level. Every time you go up a trophic order, you lose efficiencies. Humans are really not very efficient.

So, if you really want to feed everybody and use the ocean at the best capacity possible, then we ought to be growing algae out there to the tune of hundreds of millions of metric tons and bringing that to shore to feed everyone. But, that’s not the variety that people expect.

So, it’s balancing the sustainability that people talk about: it’s not just environmental, it’s economic, as well. This conflict I mentioned comes from people being so polarized on opposite sides of the issue that they don’t realize that the sustainability comes from a balance of the long-term economics and the jobs over the long term against the pressures that we put on the environment, and not causing our dues to be paid by our kids and our grandkids. And that’s the world we inherited right now.

As Tommy said, it used to be a lot different. Now, we’re paying the dues of our parents and we have to turn that around. And farming is the way we can do that.

CR: So Kristen, if we use the comparison and we take a look at an organic farm and it’s run as sustainably as possible, the species biodiversity of that farm has dropped most likely from what occurred there naturally.

Do you think that Slow Food or as a fisheries biologist, we are comfortable with turning the ocean into a large farm that we harvest protein from? Because if we don’t do that, aren’t we going to have to chew up a lot more land to raise protein that fish are currently providing?

Aren’t we going to have to chew up a lot more land to raise protein that fish are currently providing?

KG: You bring up economics as a really important component of this but so is socio-economics. There are going to have to be huge adjustments to the way that we fish and that’s pretty clear. We’re also going to have to put some money into aquaculture and figuring out the best way to make aquaculture a sustainable practice.

But, if we look to some small artisanal fishing communities, there’s a huge oversight to not include fishermen. Fishermen are the experts and they have been doing this for a lifetime as a generational practice. In the Galapagos, for example, when there’s fisheries management that comes in, without including those artisanal fishermen, there will be problems.

We found out when working with the sea cucumber fishermen, we found out that by putting in fishery management regulations, they weren’t being obeyed. Fishermen need to be part of the participatory process.

Are we going to have to go further for fish? Yes, and aquaculture is going to be an absolute truth and emerge in the market, but we have to make an adjustment to the way we fish and do research into how to aquaculture right, we may be able to find a good balance.

CR: Nigella, where does the aquarium stand on helping the public consider both the natural world that we would like to maintain, and the possibility that the natural ocean world will become more of a managed environment to provide food for a growing population, and in turn, lose some of its biodiversity and its natural qualities?

Where does the aquarium come in to help the public make those choices, those trade offs?

NH: To me one of the roles of having animals in captivity in an aquarium is to get people interested and excited about what’s under the surface of the ocean in the first place.

So many of our visitors have no idea about the ocean and what it contains.

But one of the problems we face is that people want to see a lot of fish and they see a kelp forest and that’s what they would’ve seen in a local kelp forest 40-50 years ago. If you go diving in our local kelp forest now, you would not see so many fish or so many big fish because there has been so much fishing in those areas. So, already we’re giving people a false impression, if we’re not careful, of what has happened to our oceans.

At the same time, if we really tell the public everything that’s going on in the ocean today, with overfishing, with pollution, with massive accidents like oil spills, they’ll run out of there. They want to hide under a blanket and say, “I don’t want to hear about that,” and they go off to enjoy a nice meal.

I was lucky enough to be on a ship coming back from Antarctica and heard a lecture about what was happening to Chilean sea bass and why we need to be careful about not eating it in restaurants because it’s a large ancient and threatened fish.

Everyone listened and said “what a great talk that was,” and when we got back to town in Argentina, a group of people went to a seafood restaurant and they all ordered Chilean sea bass.

So, to me, there’s no easy answer in an aquarium about to address these issues. It’s a balance between what’s in our ocean and how we have to manage our oceans in the future so they’re not going to be quite as dynamic as our grandparents’ oceans.

Everyone listened and said “what a great talk that was,” and when we got back to town in Argentina, a group of people went to a seafood restaurant and they all ordered Chilean sea bass.

CG: What’s interesting to me is that when I posed that question to the Monterey Bay Aquarium folks, they told me that actually they are not concerned about the human element of ocean sustainability. Their concern is strictly over the ocean environment. It’s interesting to me that their advocacy is on behalf of the ecosystem and they have the most popular seafood resource for consumers. So, I wonder if you can answer if there’s a discrepancy.

NH: I think that aquariums have different roles and foci. At Birch Aquarium at Scripps, we’re the outreach arm for the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and we have many different scientists looking at different aspects of the ocean, and increasingly we have scientists who look at the socio-economic aspects of this problem.

So, we have perhaps a broader perspective and we don’t do any direct advocacy at the aquarium, except for joining Seafood Watch because we are a part of the state.

AS: If I can just jump in here, and address the Chilean sea bass (Patagonian toothfish), it’s a fascinating story. This is where I separate from some of these lists.

The Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) is a fishery certification process and it does great work. One of the things that occurs to me with MSC is that it’s expensive. It’d be like a farmer who can’t afford to pay for certification to be called “organic” even if the farm is organic.

There’s a small fishery of Patagonian toothfish off the South Georgia Island that’s certified by the MSC. What happens is when you go to Whole Foods and you look in that fish counter and right there smack in the middle is Chilean sea bass, well as a consumer, ‘I don’t know what MSC means’. No one is standing behind that counter saying, ‘Let me tell you all about it; how long do you have?’ They just see a fish with a blue label on it.

So, if Whole Foods is selling it, it must be fine to buy and eat it. Then I go to another grocery store where it’s 2/3 the cost or less, so I’m going to buy it there and not go back to Whole Foods.

So that’s the issue I have about some of these seafood lists with good and bad, green, yellow, red. I know it sounds like I’m beating them up, but I’m trying not to because it’s something I believe in. But it can give the wrong message.

And, back to the farmed salmon or aquaculture: We don’t live in a black-and-white world. There’s always another element to this issue. At Waters (Fine Catering), we did a “green” event and the cards all say “don’t’ eat tilefish. I served tilefish; it didn’t come from the Atlantic, it came from the Pacific, from a panga – it was hand-lined and it was little. There are no viable studies that say there are no tile fish nor that they have a bunch of mercury in them. But it’s on the “bad” list.

So, in our firm, we give our money to people who are catching fish in a sustainable manner – we take the onus of responsibility to do research. We put that on our shoulders. People want to be spoon-fed information: black, white, good, bad, do, don’t…but we’re better than that. We should take responsibility to make decisions for us, not “them.”

People want to be spoon-fed information: black, white, good, bad, do, don’t…but we’re better than that.

CG: If you talk to people about what to buy and you put the human factor in there, you’ll hear a lot about carbon footprint and people saying “you ought to buy local.” But, what’s “local”? One person says it’s 100-150 miles of where you are. Someone else says that fish coming from anywhere in the U.S. is local.

To chefs this is a big issue because if you have a popular fish among customers, they have to buy based on what they can sell. If they can’t sell tilefish or local sardines, it’s difficult to convince them to put it on the menu. Some are trying creative things like an amuse-bouche to give customers a taste of the fish.

But, you talk about fish that are doing well in other parts of the world and do we bring those onto the menu? It makes your head spin or want to explode. There is no one easy answer that shows up on a watch card nor iPod app.

What’s “local”? One person says it’s 100-150 miles of where you are. Someone else says that fish coming from anywhere in the U.S. is local.

NH: I agree they are not ideal. But, one of the problems we deal with at the aquarium is that the guests come in for a short time, they don’t have patience: They want answers in 30 seconds. They’re not going to get a PhD. They’re not going to understand the different kinds of populations of tile fish and different species.

But, you’ve got to start somewhere. They want to simple answers of what they can eat or not eat. That’s a problem with society today: People want simple answers and they aren’t always available.

KG: I am onboard with what you are all saying. I think people look at the seafood lists as bibles and they’re not. They’re tools to help people make better decisions. They’re imperfect. The research that goes into them is very complicated. Each one of those fish that made them appear in green, yellow, or red categories have different components. On top of that, it’s split between wild and farmed fish.

If we look at it as a tool rather the end-all, be-all of information, and take it upon ourselves to do more research and ask a person at the restaurant or at the seafood counter, we become better consumers.

CR: Logan, can you comment on whether you can, in your business as a seafood wholesaler and retailer, spoon feed us solutions so we don’t have to bother with this.

LK: I think the lists were really good about five or ten years ago for gaining peoples’ awareness on this issue. But, at this point, they’re having a bad effect because they are not recognizing those that have made changes and have improved.

The lists have been categorical. Aquaculture is so maligned and I don’t know why. There’s an expectation out there that it has to be perfect for the United States to try it. And that’s just not going to happen; it’s a work in progress. It has to begin at some point. Our nation and particularly the state of California –with our knowledge and our universities –are the in the best position to pull of aquaculture rather than letting Third World countries do it.

But, these lists give the impression that farmed stuff is bad and they don’t give specifics on those farms that are doing things right. The attitude is that we shouldn’t even get involved. One of the things we try to do at Santa Monica Seafood is try to “drill down” into more detail so people can tease apart the differences between, say, South Georgia sea bass versus Ross Sea sea bass. We’re trying to differentiate it.

Our nation and particularly the state of California –with our knowledge and our universities –are the in the best position to pull of aquaculture rather than letting Third World countries do it.

MH: This is an important discussion for another three or four hours! Something important about the cards is that simple ideas feed simple minds. And the future is not about simplifying minds but about raising minds to understand the complexity of ecosystems. So, if the public is not ready to understand, it should become ready with our help or we’re doing a bad job.

I’ve been on the advisory board for the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) and the Monterey Bay Aquarium. They very good concepts. But you cannot communicate the ecological complexity with these aggregates. When someone says, “tuna are bad,” I say “which ones? Some are completely unexploited. Others are completely overharvested and you have all the range in between.

Sea turtles are in danger of extinction, but wait a minute, two species of sea turtles are growing well. So there are three species of sea turtles in really bad trouble, so which ones are you talking about?

You need to be more precise, but on a small card you cannot put any more information but “shrimp bad,” and “farming bad,” and those things are killers. Because they put the good producers together with the bad producers and the public doesn’t recognize, so you blast the whole industry for some of the bad ones. I have been fighting from inside these groups to improve their systems.

The MSC certifies intermediary populations; they are not perfect, but the MSC looks at each one with a lot of science behind them. Their effort is significant. That’s the direction to go, to be specific about which populations of fish are okay to eat.

CR: Very helpful. I’d like to move on to look at market-based solutions. We’ve looked at ecosystem priorities, economic priorities. Can we create a market for certain species in order to save them? On the other hand, people criticize the market for having no soul. If you rely on capitalism to “do the right thing” you will end up with whatever will be the most financially lucrative.

Martin, can you shed light on what happened with the Atlantic bluefin tuna and why CITES did not list it. Did it have anything to do with market mechanisms or politics?

MH: The management of the Atlantic bluefin tuna is one of those bad examples. That tuna has been an international failure because management of international resources requires many nations and you cannot run over the will of a nation. You have to bring them along and we don’t have mechanisms.

But, consumer mechanisms cross those boundaries. If the consumers in Europe say, “I want certified fish,” and the European Union hasn’t voted for that, the will of the consumers becomes part of the equation. On top of years of mismanagement of bluefin tuna, is the oil spill in the spawning area and it finishes off the job (of destroying the fishery).

On top of years of mismanagement of bluefin tuna, is the (U.S. Gulf) oil spill in the spawning area and it finishes off the job (of destroying the fishery).

RS: Don, can you talk about the “farmed is dangerous” issue and how can we get people to see it differently to promote innovations and efficiencies that would be positive?

DK: Well, there’s a lot of rhetoric out there and a lot of it is promulgated by the people who make these damn little cards. I’m sorry, but I don’t agree with some of the folks about how great the cards are. I have talked with the people at Monterey Bay Aquarium who generate the card and anything that’s cultured that isn’t a herbivorous animal grown in a pond on land is bad. Period. That’s the bottom line. So if you want to eat a tilapia from Mongolia, that’s fine. But if you want to eat a salmon from a cage, that’s a problem.

We’ve learned a lot over the past many years. In the same way that we’ve learned to do fishing better…I got out of graduate school, the UN was giving gill nets to fishermen in Sri Lanka because it was a more efficient way for them to fish. And they started catching dolphins. So the UN wanted to take the gill nets away, but the Sri Lankans starting eating dolphins.

So, anytime humans touch something in the environment, we’re going to have an impact on it. It’s a matter of minimizing that.

In the same way that we have bycatch in commercial fishing, there are ways to do aquaculture right and ways to do aquaculture wrong. If you don’t’ like the way the Chileans raise salmon, then allow us to grow salmon in California because we can do it the right way. They’ll be grown under USDA and EPA standards. But a law was a passed a decade ago by Senator Sher of Morro Bay that banned salmon farming in California. When I called their office and asked, “Why are you doing this?” They gave me a lot of environmental mumbo jumbo and at the end of it, they said, “We have commercial salmon fishermen in Morro Bay and they don’t want salmon farming.” Well, not anymore.

If you don’t’ like the way the Chileans raise salmon, then allow us to grow salmon in California because we can do it the right way.

We have a collapsed salmon fishery in California; we’re not catching any salmon in California. It’s a matter of where you do the aquaculture and how you do it. If you’re interested you can look at our website (HSWRI) where we address the environmental questions. It’s a matter of where you site the farms, which species you choose, what you feed them, and how you keep them healthy over time.

Those are the big criteria. For us, that means you grow locally predominant species in the right region. You don’t take a white sea bass from California and take it out to the East Coast – you don’t translocate a species. And you try to develop diets for these fish that use less fish meal and recycle protein products that are available from processing plants.

The bottom line is that we already have very rigid environmental standards in this country that can be used and applied to develop aquaculture. Right now there’s a law pending in Congress written by a Congresswoman here in California that would eliminate any desire by anyone to even attempt aquaculture because it’s written by organizations like Food and Water Watch and the Ocean Conservancy. Their goal is to keep humans out of the ocean, not create a sustainable industry that utilizes the ocean.

I’m a firm believer that we have the regulations we need in place now, but until we start doing it, as Logan mentioned earlier, we have to start doing something before we can build a comfort level with it. And if we’re never going to try and simply continue to import more and more of our seafood, then we’re never going to develop the best standards possible for this country.

If we’re never going to try and simply continue to import more and more of our seafood, then we’re never going to develop the best standards possible for this country.

TG: The salmon farming up in the Straits in San Juan de Fuca got a bad rap, because of pollution. They just started popping up like popcorn at a movie theatre. With that came the sea lions and the whales and the birds and the fecal matter in the water and everything else.

Another issue that came up with the Chilean salmon farming was greed. They went too big too fast and there were parasites and they crammed the fish into pens, and they flew that stuff up here and Costco and everybody else were just eating that stuff up.

On the seafood card issue, I look out in the audience and see five or six major seafood companies attending, and you give me a week and I’ll have a different card for each of them. Anybody can do it. It’s education. It boils down to trust your fishmonger, trust the company you buy from, buy from a reputable dealer.

AS: Someone was showing me fish imported from China. Each of those cryovac-frozen packs from China was 75 cents for five fillets. They’re shipped to the U.S. And, as far as the carbon footprint, it’s more costly in that regard to put the fish on a flight across the world, than it is to get it from a boat nearby.

Maybe because I’m getting older and becoming a grumpy old man, my response is: “Do the math! This is too inexpensive. You have to pay the cost for the fish even if it’s not that 75 cents. And, aren’t those the people that had melamine in their milk that they are feeding to their babies? And you trust that product? I would never put that on a plate.

I want to buy stuff that’s made in the United States. First I buy cheese from California, then I buy cheese from the West Coast, then I buy cheese from North America. I do my best to not buy cheese from anywhere else. I love cheeses from other places but we can brand the story for products here in the U.S.

I don’t eat swordfish, but I respect people who catch them in a sustainable manner by harpooning. Those guys make the same money from their fish as the ones who catch the swordfish by using a longline. But, they’re completely different! If I blindfolded you and gave you a swordfish that’s been on a longline versus one caught by harpoon out on Catalina here, you’d know they weren’t the same fish. You want to give your money to those harpooners, and tell people about them, the name of the person who caught it, the name of the boat. Be the cheese!

Be the cheese!

CR: Lloyd (our forum's graphic recorder), you’ve got to do something with that. We’ve got questions from the audience. One is: Is there a fish out there that’s genetically modified, and if not, is it coming? If so, is it a bad thing?

DK: What it comes down to is when you’re eating that protein on the plate, you don’t have to worry about that genetic material coming into your system and you becoming a fish. That’s a fallacy.

At the same time, you don’t grow a genetically modified organism in a situation where it can escape into the wild. I’m fully supportive of the idea that we don’t translocate species—that we don’t genetically modify species that could escape into the wild.

At the same time, though, look at domestication of all the animals that we eat now. We have different types of chicken, different types of beef grown in cattle yards or grass-fed on pastures. They’re all the same species when you look at their origin. And if they get out, are they going to flood and destroy the wild buffalo population?

There’s an ecological component to this, as well. A genetically modified organism probably cannot reproduce successfully on its own; so it doesn’t represent a threat to the gene pool of the wild population. But, at the same time, I don’t think you take that risk.

CR: We have more questions from the audience: Martin, how do we educate the public about the complexity of fisheries? Nigella, can we create for fisheries something in school lunch programs the way kids are now starting to learn about produce? And, Andrew, can we introduce this into school curricula? Caron, how do we get the public to grasp the nuances of fisheries. Logan, how do we educate professionals?

NH: As we’ve talked about today, it’s hard to get this kind of information across quickly and it’s incredibly complex. When we have forums like this at the aquarium, we’re talking to people who are already interested in the subject. So getting the public to the point where they actually want to learn more is important. And doing work with the schools is a major step. Kids go back to their parents and ask where their food comes from, and they want to learn more. I would love to work with you at Passionfish to develop school programs.

KG: Slow Food USA is running a campaign called “Time for Lunch” that’s trying to reauthorize the Child Nutrition Act, to link local food with local schools. An important component is seafood.

AS: Blue Ocean Institute put together a program called Green Chefs, Blue Ocean. We put together an outline of a curriculum that originally was going to be for culinary students. We realized it was too big for that. The site is oceanfriendlychefs.org and spend two hours doing the program to gain base knowledge.

Education is the most important thing in any issue. We don’t give enough credit to children. They are sponges. We can get children to make a decision by themselves.

MH: The problem with elementary education is that we’re not teaching critical thinking. We provide simple answers for this or that. People don’t understand the diversity of things. If there is one scientific dogma, it’s that every time someone makes a sweeping statement, it’s wrong. If someone tells you that aquaculture is all good, no. If someone tells you that it’s all bad, no. Any issue treated like that is wrong.

If there is one scientific dogma, it’s that every time someone makes a sweeping statement, it’s wrong.

Marketing and advertising work on the weak side of their brains. If children have only learned to think simplistically, then they will not understand the complexity of the world.

CR: Are you saying that people are always wrong when they say something is always the case?

MH: Yes, like I said. Except for me. ; ) (That means, everyone laughed!)

RS: What about creating a market for uncommon fish? Like a ray?

LK: It’s a great idea, but logistically it’s quite difficult. The perishability of some of these items, getting them here, inventorying them, getting them to be used, so forth. It’s a challenge. We are looking at the rays, though.

(See an upcoming article from the Culinary Institute of America and us/Passionfish about the ray).

KG: For a long time, I’ve become accustomed to getting produce out of season in the grocery store. I think that educating chefs about seasonality of seafood is important.

CG: We also live in a popular media society and we have shows like the Food Network. It can be about storytelling about seafood on these shows. We have about 50 farmers markets in San Diego, so look how far we’ve come in learning about produce and getting it locally.

CR: You’re not of the hook yet. One of the things I love about this opportunity of hearing from people with diverse expertise is that it illuminates the nuances of the issue. But it also can be frustrating because it leaves people with more questions.

I’d like to ask each of the panelists, what might be something you can do in your own lives, personally or professionally, to move forward with this issue?

CG: Be a vegetarian before dinner. What are we eating, can we alter some of our preferences and take delight in some other foods, and personally take the pressure of some of the fisheries. And, to ask questions of fish mongers at the fish counter. If they get enough questions they’ll have to find answers.

DK: I work for a research institute that tries to solve problems. The last thing I want people to walk away with is that aquaculture is the thing that will save the world.

It’s certainly part of the equation and we have to learn how to do it right. To me, it’s just a function of getting the problem defined so we can find a solution to it.

When we talk about education, I think that’s great, but it’s a question of what we educate people with is the right information. If we don’t know something, we tell them we don’t know it, but we don’t come up with these absolutes that “this is good and that’s bad.”

At the end of it all, if we’re going to get into the next century with the ability to have seafood at all, it’s going to have to be done in a way that allows us to not ruin the offshore environment, not destroy the coastland, that will provide jobs, that will allow us to feed a larger number of people, but not at the cost of future generations.

That’s why I got into science in the first place: to solve problems. What I take away from meetings like this is try to keep doing what we’re doing so others can still catch and sell and cook fish for people.

NH: I want to say that I’m not at all against aquaculture. Responsible aquaculture is going to be a major component of the solution to the fish we eat in the future. Ask questions, I couldn’t agree more. I have driven a lot of restaurateurs in San Diego mad with my questions about the seafood they serve—where it comes from, is it sustainable. And again, most of them don’t know.

To me, the reason I like simple tools, is that people who visit the aquarium want simple answers. If we can at least get them interested using simple tools, they will begin to think about what they eat.

AS: I don’t eat sharks, I don’t eat bluefin tuna, I avoid larger fish, eat smaller fish, eat smaller portions of fish. Our society is out of control. You go into some restaurants and they’re serving you half a baby—and that’s just one course. It’s ridiculous. You can have five bites of something and the palate loses its taste. So unless you keep eating because you just like to chew, the palate wants to move onto something else.

You go into some restaurants and they’re serving you half a baby—and that’s just one course. It’s ridiculous.

KG: I think that behavior change is important. One component of that is for people to feel empowered to make better decisions.

Wholesalers have a lot more information about seafood than we do, retailers a little less, and us consumers have even less information. I encourage people to ask questions.

TG: We used to go out for lobster at the beginning of the lobster season. If you were lucky you could go twice. Now, you’ve got lobster available year round at Roberto’s, Rubio’s. That stuff is coming from somewhere, and it’s not coming from California. It’s coming from across the equator.

Know your food and know where it’s coming from. I’m lucky to work for a company that’s trying to do the right thing, but we can’t do it overnight. We’re trying to learn more as we go. We’ve opened our doors to the general public who can come in and ask questions.

The stupidest question is the one you don’t ask. So, know your purveyor, try to buy as locally as you can.

The stupidest question is the one you don’t ask.

LK: I tell people in our company that as fisheries become better managed, there will be less wild fish for us. I think aquaculture is going to fill the gap though it may not be the only solution. The way we do eat, as Andrew said, has to change.

Given the size of our company, we’ve been able to focus in on this issue; we have the resources to really get involved in the subject. With 67 percent of seafood consumed in restaurants, we’re putting together web information that’s balanced and clear.

We’re also participating more such as the wild fishery enhancement of wild king crab in Alaska along with Sea Grant. With the NFI’s Crab Council in the Philippines. With the Central Coast Groundfish Association. All of these projects we are going to get involved in behind the scenes, but the educational piece will be on our website for anyone who wants to look at it.

As fisheries become better managed, there will be less wild fish for us.

MH: Of the many messages that I would like to convey to you is that we have been working for many years to reduce bycatch, in reducing the impacts on the fisheries, and we are beginning to win those battles. It’s not a lost issue. When we can bring the fishermen to work to find solutions, then solutions appear. But we need pressure to change the system or we keep doing things the way we’ve been doing them for years.

The pressure comes from people you. I think we are evolving and the lessons have not been wasted over the years. I will not be pessimistic. I think that we are learning to deal with the problems. We need a public that is well informed and well involved to put pressure on the system to change.

I will not be pessimistic.

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Thank you, all!

The famous cartoonist Lloyd Dangle graphically recorded our forum; he did an amazing job illustrating the complexities of this social-economic-environmental issue. Check out his portfolio.

If you're interested in seeing the photographs from our event, check out our "wall" on Facebook. Our site that has the fish tails against a blue background. That's us.

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