Sustainable Fishing

Truck parked near the docks in Petersburg, Alaska

Alaska salmon is all wild, never farmed. The Blue Ocean Institute and Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch both rate it "green" -- that is, one of the most sustainable fish. "Abundance of salmon, particularly Pink and Sockeye, is high in Alaska due to good management and healthy habitat," writes Blue Ocean. "The majority of salmon is caught with purse seines, followed by gillnets and troll gear. These fishing methods cause little habitat damage and result in moderate levels of bycatch, typically other fish."

Tlingit food, display in Sitka National Historical Park

The Tlingit tribes that have lived in southeast Alaska for centuries depended on salmon, which they preserved by smoking or drying to make a variety of long-lasting foods. Traditionally, they also ate other seafoods, including seal meat, and used seal fat to preserve berries. Their fishing and hunting practices were very sustainable and efficient, but of course the population was small and there were no exports.

Boats in Petersburg (Len's photo)

Now the Alaska fisheries are among the most productive anywhere, and their products both fresh and preserved, go all over the world. In view of the utter depletion of other fishing grounds, such as Atlantic cod, it's encouraging that Alaska fisheries still seem sustainable.

Petersburg, which we visited, has only a few thousand people, but ranks sixteenth among US fishing ports, with a total of 101 million pounds of seafood, worth $65 million, caught in 2011 (source). When we visited, most of the salmon boats were out at sea where the salmon were running.

Petersburg Alaska (Len's photo)

 Petersburg fishermen also catch other Alaska seafoods rated environmentally responsible: Dungeness crab; red, blue, and golden king crab; pink shrimp, Dover and rock sole, and sablefish. Halibut, another valued fish, is abundant in Alaska. Monterey rates it green, but Blue Ocean classifies it as yellow (not as desirable) because of the danger of mercury.

As I wrote yesterday, we tasted several of these, as well as some type of rockfish (which I suspect is only available locally so the Alaska version doesn't appear in the ratings).

Cannery on the wharf in Petersburg

Now that I'm home, I am definitely missing the wonderful flavors of many types of fresh fish. However, I do try to comply with the suggestions of the two rating agencies that suggest responsible ways to eat seafood; as it happens, I shop for fish at Whole Foods which has partnered with both of them and committed to sell only recommended fish.

Both the Blue Ocean and Monterey ratings agree with the fisherman in Petersburg in condemning farmed salmon for its dangers to the environment. In contrast, by inspecting a variety of farms, Whole Foods claims to have identified responsibly and safely designed salmon farms that satisfy higher standards. These farms use "carefully monitored, low-density pens and tanks without antibiotics, pesticides or added growth hormones." They also are believed to prevent the escape of fish or their toxins and diseases into the wild.

Eating Alaska Salmon

Breakfast one day on the Sea Bird: locally cured lox with bagels, cream cheese, etc.
Serving himself: Justin the ship's fabulous diver, who narrated his dives as we watched videos
or (once) narrated live from underwater.

A dinner appetizer on the Sea Bird: smoked salmon from Petersburg, Alaska

White-fleshed King Salmon: a local Alaska delicacy served as our main course the last night of our cruise.
We also enjoyed dinners of pink salmon, whole steamed crab, crabcakes, halibut, rockfish, and true Alaska cod.
(If you count, that's all 7 dinners in our week on the boat!)

Pacific Northwest salmon for sale at Pike Place Market in Seattle

At Whole Foods in Ann Arbor today: Alaska salmon in cans -- as available in various brands for many years!
My mother made salmon croquettes from such salmon, including chopped onion and celery, egg, & cracker crumbs.
I think everybody's mother made something like that.

Whole Foods: fresh and previously frozen fish from Alaska.
Whole Foods observes the recommendations of the Blue Ocean Institute.
I'll say more about sustainable seafood in a later post.

Salmon, Bears, and Trees

Tlingit Totem Pole depicting salmon, Sitka Historical Park

Salmon! Last week in southeast Alaska we hiked and kayaked beside streams crowded with salmon swimming upstream to spawn and die. We saw salmon jumping in the waterways near our ship, the Sea Bird. We watched bears snatching salmon from the streams and eating their favorite parts. We heard lectures on the natural history of salmon and on its importance to the local native people, the Tlingit. We visited a fishing village, Petersburg. And several times, we ate local smoked, cured, or fresh salmon.

Salmon swimming up a stream (Len's photo)

Dead salmon in the stream

The salmon, we learned, are not just good for human food. They play an incredible role in forest ecology, bringing the nutrients they ate while at sea back to the forest where they were born: "When they return to spawn, salmon become a veritable conveyor belt for nutrients. For example, an adult chum salmon returning to spawn contains an average of 130 grams of nitrogen, 20 grams of phosphorus and more than 20,000 kilojoules of energy in the form of protein and fat; a 250-meter reach of salmon stream in southeast Alaska receives more than 80 kilograms of nitrogen and 11 kilograms of phosphorous in the form of chum salmon tissue in just over one month."

Trees by the salmon stream

Using all these nutrients, trees near salmon streams grow faster and larger than trees further away: beside the streams, "Sitka spruce take 86 years, rather the usual 300 years, to reach 50 cm thick." Growth rings in the trees are larger in years with good salmon runs.

"And just as trees need salmon, salmon depend on trees. Every part of a tree participates in enriching a stream for aquatic life, from its tiny needles to its strong twisted roots. Streamside vegetation shades spawning streams, keeping developing eggs cool." -- from "Why Fish Need Trees and Trees Need Fish" by Anne Post.

Distribution of the nutrients brought back from the sea by salmon is the job of the bears who fish in the streams and then spread the leftovers and their droppings nearby: "each adult female grizzly bear on the Kenai Peninsula in Alaska eats about 3000 lbs of salmon per year". The bears are much better nourished by salmon than by the berries and other plants or small animals that they feed on: "Grizzly bears that eat a lot of salmon are 80% larger, produce 25% more cubs, and live in populations that are up to 50 times denser than grizzly bears that fatten primarily on fall berries." -- Washington State University Bear Center.

The entire quality of the stream is created by nearby trees, birds, animals, insects, and other plants. All are nourished by salmon that died after spawning or were partially eaten by bears; the salmons' bodies particularly feed the insect life that later feeds the growing salmon larvae. A tight food chain!

From a kayak we saw this bear with a salmon in  his mouth: gulls were waiting for leftovers.

Note: for a quantitative study of the transfer of nutrients, see this: "Fertilization of Riparian Vegetation by Spawning Salmon: Effects on Tree Growth and Implications for Long-Term Productivity" by James M. Helfield and Robert J. Naiman

Just before leaving Alaska

Happy Birthday to Len: our last evening on the Sea Bird
You can see the dining room behind us. The food was great,
and I'll be posting more about what we ate on our National Geographic cruise.

To celebrate our last afternoon on the boat, Alaska produced a double rainbow.
I hope it's a promise of peace and maybe more chances to travel to interesting places!

Pike Place Market

Seattle's Pike Place Market, right beside the docks, has fresh shellfish, regular fish,
and lots of fruit, vegetables, flowers, and miscellaneous stuff.

Jack's serves fresh market fish, their own smoked fish, and shellfish.
We enjoyed some oysters for a mid-morning snack.

We loved looking at all the fish for sale.
Then we had clam stew and crabcakes for lunch at the Steelhead Diner.
The Diner prepares the fresh fish and serves a bit more formally than this stand, which sells raw fish and
various paper cups full of shellfish to eat while walking around the market.

Ann Arbor Farmers Market

7:00 AM -- too early to pay the parking meter!

What color is your breakfast?

This morning everything I ate was a cheerful shade of yellow-orange: scrambled eggs, peaches (both fresh and in a compote), and orange juice. A bright yellow pencil volunteered to be in the  photo as well. Quite a contrast to the chilly, damp, and gloomy weather that's set in this weekend.

I think I am fully back from Paris in my mind now, and no longer comparing everything I eat to what I ate (or was too full to eat) in Paris. The strong but pleasant taste of French cheese, which really doesn't travel successfully, is now a fading memory and I can eat my usual sliced cheese sandwich without feeling deprived. The sauces I make are sad but I'm getting used to them again.

Yesterday we went to the local art museum on the University of Michigan campus. I doubt if it's as big as 1% of the Louvre, but fortunately it currently has a delightful exhibit of brush paintings by Isamu Noguchi and his Chinese mentor -- "Isamu Noguchi / Qi Baishi / Beijing 1930."

After viewing it, we ate sushi for lunch nearby -- American sushi. I enjoyed it.

The American Paradox

Why do Americans get fat and stay fat? When did they start getting fat? Why weren't they fat before that (whenever it was)? Can legislation make them stop getting fat?

The number of books and articles on the subject of American fatness is vast, and the answers aren't really conclusive. And every day, it seems, there's news of another country approaching or even surpassing American fatness.

The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite by David Kessler is one of the many to ask what can be done. Kessler examines not just the food Americans eat, but the way it affects them. Specifically, he argues, carefully engineered food products of many types change people's brains to make them crave more and more of their favorites. Beyond describing how food affects people, The End of Overeating offers advice on how to overcome the effects of this manipulation, though I'm doubtful that most people have the willpower to do so.

Crave is the key word here. Creating food that people just can't stop eating is the goal of many industrial food laboratories, and Kessler describes both how they do it and how they express their goals of making people into a kind of food-crazed zombies: not his choice of words, but I think the current obsession with zombies reflects a kind of pervasive fear that we have been seized by forces that we can't control, and this is one of them.

Satisfying food is the alternate to cravable food, according to Kessler. Satisfying food is the old-fashioned kind that could be eaten until one had enough. Satisfying food was plain food that didn't have a lot of added salt, sugar, and fat but also included complex traditionally cooked dishes. I think the American paradox, as suggested in Kessler's book and others, is that satisfying food has been crowded out by cravable food. Many people who have been conditioned by cravable food have simply lost the ability to recognize when they aren't hungry any more. The products of the food industry, Kessler demonstrates, make many consumers helpless. Though they often see themselves as victims, they keep eating and overeating, unable to stop.

Kessler uses a number of examples of such individuals who say they just can't stop thinking of some favorite donut, cookie, sandwich, pizza, or other cravable delicacy -- people who engage in what he calls conditioned hypereating. The foods they mention share certain not-very-natural characteristics, Kessler demonstrates in a number of chapters. There's some overlap here with Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us by Michael Moss (as I wrote in Who's Rational?) but Kessler emphasizes how people experience the food in real life, while Moss concentrates more on the labs.

It's not just the content, which includes meticulously researched combinations of fat, sugar, and salt. To create a product that people can't stop eating, food labs also engineer the way that the food behaves when it's chewed. A potato chip may begin with a rush of salt and crunchiness, but it quickly melts away in your mouth: cravable food doesn't have too much fiber. A slice of pizza is layered with several flavors that pop and excite your mouth, but can be chewed and swallowed easily, allowing you to take another bite, another bite, another bite. Cravable meat dishes use tenderized or ground meat that requires minimal chewing compared to a real steak. A Cinnabon roll has a super appealing aroma and sweet spiciness, along with a creamy frosting that provides just the right mouth feel along with the flavor.

Kessler talked to the food engineers whose research has provided Americans (and those to whom we export) with the perfect cravable foods, and he talked to their victims who couldn't stop. He provided statistics about how very young children studied in the past seemed able to keep eating until they had had enough to grow normally, and even how their food choices were balanced to match their needs. Recent research, he pointed out, suggests that this is changing: the engineered foods (like MacDonalds) hijack this innate ability, so children lose the capacity to know when to stop eating.

Kessler mentions the French Paradox: why French people don't seem to get fat in the same statistical sense that Americans do -- or at least why that hasn't happened yet. As I read the book, though, just after my recent trip to Paris, I was struck by Kessler's category of satisfying foods: those that one eats with great pleasure, but that don't trigger the hypereating that he discusses. Satisfying food -- highly satisfying food -- is what's on the menu in the traditional homes, restaurants, bistros, cafes, and brasseries where I ate in France. Is that what most young French people are eating now? Maybe not. Maybe the French paradox will dissolve as their food industry catches up with ours and discovers how to make much more money with fat, sugar, salt, and engineered textures.

Macarons in the News

Today: a wonderful slide show from the New York Times on French macarons, including history and a tiny bit about technique -- see sample photo above. The complete article is here. There's even a recipe, though not for the amazing filled macarons at Laduree.

A Dinner in Paris

Two weeks ago: dinner at Le Baratin, a wine-bar and restaurant near the home of our
friends Jean and Natalie, and a favorite of theirs.
Left to right: Laurent, Jean, me, Len.

Unusual combination: tiny raw clams with radishes, bits of chopped cherry, and herbs.
It would be impossible to try to replicate this, as I have never seen little clams like this in Ann Arbor or California.

White anchovies with an eggplant dish, my delicious second course
(though it was offered as a small plate).

Laurent about to eat...

Laurent and Natalie

Capturing the taste of Paris?

Goose with peaches at La Cerisaie Restaurant, Paris, Monday July 1

Duck with peaches and cherries, an attempt to reproduce some of the tastes from Paris this evening.

I definitely didn't accomplish the presentation, but the taste was close!

How I made the duck:

• I cut some strips of fat from the duck breasts and made little cracklings in the frying pan.
• I sprinkled some lemon juice on the duck breast.
• When the cracklings were brown and rendered a bit, I turned up the heat and seared both sides of the duck breasts. While they were still raw in the middle, I cut them in thick slices and briefly finished cooking them to medium rare, and put the meat on the serving platter.
• I added three peaches cut in quarters and around 20 sweet cherries to the pan, and just tossed them. I added a couple spoonfuls of blackberry jelly (any flavor would do) to make a glaze, and quickly coated the duck with it.
• I garnished the platter with parsley and a few toasted bread cubes.
• The original restaurant version had a few sesame seeds as well, but I didn't do that. Also, I substituted parsley for basil that was on the original.

What's for Dessert?

Dessert in France is often a simple but perfect choice of fruit and cheese, which many people purchase at the stunning outdoor markets that happen in most Paris neighborhoods around twice a week.

Our friend Michelle varied this with fruit and ice cream:

Restaurants also offer cheese and fruit, but also a selection of many other desserts such as this creme brulee that I had at Les Bugnes, a Basque restaurant that our friends took us to:

A fruit tarte at another restaurant, Le Baratin, in the Belleville quarter where other friends live:

All week I tried to get a tarte au citron -- I finally managed on Friday:

Very elegant patisserie in the airport:

Paris: A cup of coffee is a wonderful thing

A set of hand-made coffee cups displayed at an outdoor ceramics fair near Saint Sulpice.
In French homes where we have been, after-dinner coffee is always served in demi-tasse cups the size of these.

Breakfast coffe on our first morning in Paris

A cup of coffee in a cup marked with the brand "Cafes Richard" --
another breakfast at one of the many cafes near our  hotel

Long before coffee: medieval cups, flask, and pitchers at Musee de Cluny

Coffee and breakfast pastry on signature china at the very famous restaurant Le Dome, also near our hotel.
(Hemmingway ate here)

Outdoor lunch dessert: my indulgent sorbet dwarfs Len's little cup of coffee 

Another cup of coffee for breakfast near our hotel

Coffee with a crepe at the famous Josselin Creperie.

After a fabulous lunch: demi-tasse cups of coffee at Michelle's house with
friends Anne-Marie and Dominique

Different drink: a cup of tea at a table on the sidewalk at another creperie.

Breakfast at the airport yesterday: one choice of coffee -- Starbucks. No photo, as it's exactly like a Starbucks in the US, including glazed donuts, bagels, muffins and characteristic names for drink sizes. Who would want to see a photo of that?