Yum! Lindsay's cooking up eco-friendly fish with guest Jill Lambert
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Gail Mainster, Editor
NatureChallenge@DavidSuzuki.org

Surrounded by three oceans and home to thousands of lakes – no wonder Canadians love their seafood! (We each eat about seven kilos of the stuff a year.) But our underwater bounty will disappear if we don’t all make an effort to choose fish caught in the wild or farmed in an ecologically-friendly way.

This month, Lindsay, and guest Jill Lambert author of A Good Catch, provide seafood buying tips, and show you how to prepare a quick and easy meal from one good choice –  sablefish (also known as Pacific black cod).

How to choose eco-friendly fish 

Whether you’re going out to your local supermarket, fish monger or eating in a restaurant, you’ve just got to ask these three little questions: 

• What kind of fish is it?
• Where’s it from?
• How was it caught?

Seachoice’s handy seafood guide will help. (Here it is in French.) Do your best to purchase only the Best Choice recommendations and avoid the Worst Choices. When considering those with Some Concerns, be sure to ask a lot of questions so you can make the best possible decision. (Some red and yellow listed choices are species at risk due to overharvesting, others are from fisheries that damage eco-systems or result in a large amount of bycatch*. Check the Seachoice website;for updates.)

Don’t fret if your favourite recipe fish is ‘red listed’. Try these substitutes instead:

Don’t buy these Try these instead  tiger prawns  BC spot prawns (trap-caught)  shrimp (warm water/tropical)  spot shrimp (cold water; trap-caught;  from BC, Oregon or Alaska)  North Atlantic swordfish (longline-caught)  North Atlantic swordfish (harpoon-caught)  Atlantic salmon (farmed)  steelhead trout (farmed in closed systems – NOT in open net cages)  Atlantic cod  Pacific cod (pot or jig-caught)  Russian king crab  Dungeness crab  tilapia (Asian-farmed)  tilapia (Canadian or US farmed)*  Pacific cod (trawl-caught)  sablefish (aka Pacific black cod)  bluefin tuna  albacore, bigeye, skipjack or yellowfin tuna (troll-caught)

*Important Note: production of US and Canadian tilapia is very limited. If you cannot find a US or Canadian source, then be sure to purchase fresh tilapia from Honduras, Costa-Rica, Ecuador, and Brazil.

As consumers, we have tremendous power to effect change: 

• Ask the person serving you those three important questions. Most retailers and restaurants are interested in serving their customers.
• If you can’t get answers, consider taking your business elsewhere.
• Vote with your dollar. Refuse to purchase seafood from producers who don’t respect ocean ecosystems.

Eventually (we hope), retailers and restaurants will pay closer attention to the practices of their suppliers and seafood producers will be more responsible about what and how they harvest.

Jill Lambert’s book, A Good Catch, is a collection of sustainable seafood recipes from Canada’s top chefs. Taste a sample – it’s a page right from the book! Hungry for more? Sign up at www.QueenOfGreen.ca.

*What’s ‘bycatch’ It’s fish caught ‘unintentionally’. In 2007, boats dredging the bottom of the Bering Sea for pollock hauled in 130,000 pounds of chinook salmon, then threw them away. (That’s three times the number anticipated to return for spawning in 2008!) The ‘unintentionally-caught’ salmon were all dead, but couldn’t be processed and sold because the fishing fleet regulations only allow harvesting according to tightly-regulated licensing agreements.

These species are in desperate need of protection. Refuse to buy or eat them. • Chilean seabass • Atlantic and international shark • rockfish (aka red snapper, yellow eye) • orange roughy

Maintenant en français! Later this month marks the official opening of our Montreal office, la Fondation David Suzuki au Québec, headed up by our new Directeur général, Karel Mayrand. The September issue of David Suzuki’s Nature Challenge newsletter will be our first in both official languages! To sign up for this and future issues of our French newsletter email NatureChallenge@DavidSuzuki.org and write ‘le Bulletin Défi Nature’ in the subject line.

Correction:  Last month’s version of our pdf on How to be unattractive...to mosquitoes contained an error. It turns out that, no one knows exactly how DEET works. There is some evidence that it blocks mosquitoes’ sense of smell; other research indicates they simply don’t like the smell and so avoid it. The jury is still out. We’ve updated the pdf, removing the misinformation.

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