Oh So Blue...

About a week or so ago I met my friend Pam for lunch. This is a frequent occurrence, she works in the part of the Financial district that borders both Chinatown and South Street Seaport. Mostly we look for a good lunch special in Chinatown, but with Summer in full swing and my new found discipline to diet I suggested we go somewhere lighter, maybe someplace that might serve salad. So instead of heading to Chinatown we went to the South Street Seaport to see what we could find, after much deliberating we decided to go for Japanese food at Suteishi.

The place is cool, modern, in a fairly generic way and it's packed with the businessman lunch crowd. No $5.99 lunch specials here. After much deliberation we decide to have a green salad, one roll, eel and avocado, a few pieces of sustainable Sashimi and a big bowl of a spicy cabbage and tofu soup. The service was glacially slow. With each dish the waitress giggled, in her oddly artificial, whined-up doll, high pitched voice, placed the food down and apologized for how long it took to bring to us. Lunch took 90 minutes, it took over an hour to get our soup. The food was all great, no complaints and I love spending time with Pam, but if it was indeed a business lunch and I had to get back to doing business I wouldn't have been happy. Instead it was something else that made me mad, way madder than the slow kitchen, it was the preponderance of Blue Fin Tuna on the menu. At the end of the meal with the check was a comment card, I wrote in my best bold letter printing: BLUE FIN TUNA IS NEARLY EXTINCT SERVING IT IS WRONG.
Somehow, in my mind, contributing to the extinction of a species isn't something one should do casually by mindlessly ordering expensive lunch.

To my mind Blue Fin Tuna should not be an menu option at all.

So, OK, some crazy ass high end sushi place has blue fin on the menu. So does celebrity hang out Nobu and even all the famous people who eat there can't seem to convince Chef Nobu Matsuhisa to take it off the menu. His idea of a compromise was to put an asterisk next to the blue fin tuna with a note that says "environmentally challenged".

Why not: "Eat it now before it doesn't exist any more" ?

Maguro or Toro is how Blue Fin Tuna is referred to in Sushi restaurants, so a lot of people wouldn't know that they were eating Blue Fin unless they asked: What kind of Tuna is this?

And seemingly a lot of people don't want to ask, aren't aware they should ask or don't care.

I care.

Anyway, I more or less forget about this lunch and am walking around in the East Village and pass by Desnuda this wine bar/cevicheria that I have been wanting to go to for months and over gay pride weekend was telling my friends Jorge and Patrick we had to go to. When I get home I check out their website and click on Menu and there it is, item number cinqo:

Ceviche de Atun :
Bluefin Tuna with lemon,, espellete oil cured Moroccan olives, bell pepper, artichoke hearts, hearts of palm, & avocado 18

I like the placement of this dramatic picture interrupting the narrative, it's kind of like scary music to emphasize something bad is going to happen: da da da dummmmmm.

Sadly the bad thing that's going to happen isn't that these restaurateurs are going to stop serving Blue Fin, or that lots of their patrons are going to complain and stop coming until they stop serving it. Nope, the bad thing that is going to happen is that in a few years time there simply will be no more Blue Fin Tuna so these places will just have to serve some other endangered species until we wipe it off the face of the planet.

The saddest thing about all of this is that it doesn't have to be. There are lots of other delicious, sustainable fish to make into Sushi or to make a ceviche out of. Certainly these restaurants aren't unique, they just represent a bigger problem. People need to be made aware that if we keep killing Blue Fin Tuna it will very soon (some say next year) no longer swim in our seas. All they need is a break, 5 years maybe a little more to recoup, so we can once again start to fish them again, only next time we need to do so in a far more responsible way.

Is that too much to ask?

Apparently yes. So I am recruiting you dear Urban Food Guy reader and giving you a challenge: the next time you are in a restaurant and you see blue fin tuna on the menu, very nicely tell them they shouldn't serve it and tell them why. Then tell them you won't eat there again until you see it off the menu.

Simple.

Below is the trailer for a devastating movie called End Of The Line which I'm re-posting.
For more information on Blue Fin Tuna:Oceans, Montereybayaquarium, Greenpeace, NRDC, The New York Times, Scientific America, Christian Science Monitor
and it goes on and on and on I could make an entire page, but this should get you started.

The End of the Line - Reviewed

Here is the NYT's review .

My favorite excerpt:

This vital, if rhetorically clumsy, film by Rupert Murray subverts our ancient faith in the ocean as an inexhaustible resource, offering a persuasive case that the major species of edible fish are headed for extinction — by some estimates, as soon as the middle of this century (the bold is my emphasis).

The middle of this century, 2050, is 39 years away.

Your children will see the extinction of seafood.

Weird how the standard thinking on eating seafood has always been:
"you should eat more it's healthy for you!"

Sadly as this movie points out it's not so healthy for the fish.

We must be reaching a tipping point, Mark Bittman in the Times wrote just last week about this very topic.

The phrase "ancient faith" sticks in my craw a bit, if only because I think a lot of people still believe the oceans and their bounty will never run out. You think people ordering fish sticks at fast food take out places have ever even given the matter a thought?

I have friends in this city who think it's all just poppycock. And, no I don't think they will be seeing the movie. Or I may just be over reacting and this documentary and reams of scientific research may be just whack?

It's weird to think that we may die being the last generation to be casual about fish n' chips?

To take sushi for granted?

I'm making wild caught poached salmon for dinner on Saturday.
Deviled eggs with smoked trout and horseradish cream.

Eat it while you can? I eat it rarely and source it with fanaticism on the special occasions I choose to serve it.

My thinking on it for now is eat very little, only eat fish that are certified sustainable and buy local fish from local fisherman.

How did the waters turn so dark, so quickly?

Today is World Oceans Day

The United Nations has named this the first ever World Oceans Day or maybe it should be called a day without seafood?

Reading the reviews of the new documentary The End Of The Line makes it sound more like a horror flick you have to keep looking away from.

Looks like Sushi needs to be taken off the options list. Also Fish and Chips are rarely made with a fish one can feel comfortable with, Natural Resource Defense Funds seafood chart now includes not only Cod, but Atlantic Halibut as must avoids. In general it seems like most Atlantic fish are in danger, with the exception of Lobster which seems to be making a come back.
It seems to me like eating fish out has become a very treacherous affair and that really at this point the only fish you should eat should be bought from a local fish monger at the green market. Unions square green market has two or three fish mongers and I believe one is there every day the market is open. Of course I also have noticed that one of the fish mongers sells Cod so...

As always grist.org has a bevy of informative and interesting articles and have knocked themselves out today with ocean day coverage.

One way to do something productive on this World Oceans Day is to click here and take action. They offer several ways to do things from calling the White House to emailing them (which I did) and some other social networking stuff. Here is the text they are suggesting:

President Obama, in honor of the first annual World Oceans Day I'm asking you to take the lead on getting the Convention on the Law of the Sea ratified before Congress goes home for the summer. Though the votes are there, it is unlikely that the Senate will adopt any major treaty without Presidential leadership. This treaty has broad bipartisan support and will help protect marine life, keep our ships safe in international waters, and boost our economy.
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Mr. President, please steer the Law of the Sea towards ratification and show your commitment to working cooperatively with the international community by speaking out about this important treaty today. Thank you.