Posted by Casson on Apr 20, 2011 in
Guest post Guest posts at sustainablesushi.net do not necessarily represent the opinion of the owner/operator of this website (Casson Trenor). In fact, they are often chosen specifically because they offer an alternative perspective and can give rise to interesting debate. Guest authors neither pay nor receive any sort of compensation for their participation. Illustrations and captions are provided by sustainablesushi.net unless indicated otherwise.
Fitness guru Denis Faye of Beachbody
Sushi: The Ultimate Sports Supplement?
By Denis Faye
Everyone loves the idea of fitness, but actually doing it is a different story. It all sounds so wonderful until you realize you need to exercise every day and, even worse, cut all the good stuff out of our diet.
However, it’s not all that bad. In fact, some of the foods you consider indulgent can offer huge health benefits. (The exercising part is a whole other story. You’re on your own for that one.) One perfect example of this is sushi. If done right, it’s not just good for, it’s a great way to get the nutrients you need to propel that active lifestyle. Let’s take a closer look at everyone favorite Japanese culinary contribution.
But before I start, I need to throw down a few caveats. First off, I’m not talking about those Double-Rainbow-Spicy-Crab-Inside-Out-California-Detroit Rolls that many consider crucial to a visit to sushi bar. They’re usually loaded with sodium-rich or fatty sauces and the minute amount of fish within has usually been fried or mayonnaised into nutritional oblivion. I’m talking straight sushi or sashimi: a nice slice of raw fish (sorry, unagi lovers), maybe a little rice, or maybe a simple maki: fish and rice a little nori (seaweed) wrapped around it.
"Soy sauce is not a beverage." -- Chef Hajime Sato
Also, keep the soy sauce to a minimum. Exercise tends to drain the body of sodium, so the physically fit can get away with more salt intake, but there are still limits. Stick to low-sodium sauce and dip the fish part of the sushi instead of saturating the rice part. If the fish is good, you won’t want to drown out the flavor anyway!
Finally, moderation is key. When it comes to eating healthy, if you need to loosen your belt after a meal, no matter how nutrition it was, you blew it. But as long as you don’t get carried away, fish is one of the healthiest sources of protein you can get. The main reason for this is the super-healthy fat that comes with it.
While many people mistakenly avoid all fat when trying to eat right, the truth is, fat is a vital nutrient. It’s crucial that you have it in your diet. Most fish is loaded with omega-3 fatty acids, which help brain function and act as an anti-inflammatory – a great asset when dealing with bodily stress induced by hard, physical training. Salmon and tuna are both high in omega-3s, as is mackerel, but as you know, the mackerel used in sushi tends to be cured in salt, driving up the sodium count.
As for mercury-in-seafood debate, unless you’re pregnant, nursing, or a small child, you generally don’t need to worry about it. For the rest of us, the omega-3 benefits are worth a little mercury. As long as you limit fish intake to 4 servings a week or so, there shouldn’t be anything to worry about.
Renewable energy?
Now, onto the rice. Generally speaking, brown rice is healthier for you. It’s higher in fiber, which slows absorption into the blood stream. That’s a good thing, because absorbing too many carbs too fast can lead to blood sugar spikes, which, in turn, can lead to type 2 diabetes and obesity. But there are a couple factors here that make white rice okay. First, while you don’t have the fiber to slow absorption, the fat and protein in the fish can serve the same function; so make sure your chef is generous with the fish. And, in the event that you do overdo the rice, here’s a neat thing about working out: After intense exercise, especially when it involves anaerobic (or weightlifting) activity, your blood sugar drops because you were using it as fuel. So, whereas that influx of carbs (white rice) into your system might be bad at other times, post-workout, it serves to top off your tank and rush other nutrients into your system faster. In the fitness world, we call that kind of timed nutrition a recovery meal.
Finally, seaweed is so good for you on so many levels. For the athlete, it’s packed with minerals, or electrolytes, which are often wicked out in training. It also has antioxidant properties, which strengthen the immune system – something else that can get compromised after intense workouts.
So work hard and eat right, but treat yourself to a sushi meal every now and again. It’s the right thing to do. Who knew eating right could be so much fun?
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Starting out as “weight challenged,” Denis Faye dropped 50 pounds following a 5-year jaunt through Australia, a trip that helped him become the extreme fitness and sports enthusiast he is today. He’s been a professional journalist for 20 years, writing for Surfer, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Magazine, Outside, Wired, Men’s Health, Men’s Journal, GQ, Surfer, and Pacific Longboarder. His sports include swimming, scuba, trekking, rock climbing, mountain biking, spelunking, and — most importantly — surfing. Denis writes for Beachbody, which provides effective and popular exercise videos including the well known P90x program.
Tags: beachbody, denis faye, exercise, health, maguro, mercury, omega-3s, p90x, sake, salmon, sodium, sports, toro, tuna
Posted by Casson on Jun 3, 2010 in
Guest post,
News and Announcements Guest posts at sustainablesushi.net do not necessarily represent the opinion of the owner/operator of this website (Casson Trenor). In fact, they are often chosen specifically because they offer an alternative perspective and can give rise to interesting debate. Guest authors neither pay nor receive any sort of compensation for their participation.
Salmon with a side of certainty
One Way to Buy Supermarket Fish – Frozen
By Mark Bittman
I (Mark) found this salmon fillet at Shaw’s, in Berlin, Vermont. Frozen hard. It looked good, and the price was right ($12 a pound, I think, which for real sockeye isn’t at all bad), so I bought it. I had no idea what the numbers meant, so I asked Casson Trenor.
His response:
“Accurate species name — Latin name — certification # — FAO catch area — verbatim wild-caught language – Yes, this is very good. It’s nice to see grocery stores putting Latin names on their seafood – it helps consumers avoid confusion. Some fish are plagued by this problem – a big one on the West Coast is Sebastes spp., or the Pacific rockfish. You see that sold as all sorts of things – rock cod, Pacific red snapper, whatever. If we added a Latin name on the label it would be a lot easier. So it’s great to see stickers like the one on this salmon. Where did you find it?”
When I told him, he was surprised:
“This issue that I have is that Shaw’s is owned by SUPERVALU, which is notorious for their disregard of seafood sustainability. They continue to languish near the bottom of the Greenpeace rankings. In fact, a SUPERVALU executive once told me that their company was so decentralized that they literally did not even know what seafood they sold. How can you build a sustainable seafood operation on that? It’s terrifying.
“So while I see this labeling system as a positive trend, it is anomalous in terms of how SUPERVALU operates as a larger conglomerate. I strongly suspect that label was created and applied by the supplier that the salmon was purchased from, not by Shaw’s itself. You can see the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) coding on the label, so may have just been handed down. That’s fine, but why only in Shaw’s? What about at Albertson’s, or Jewel-Osco, or Lucky? And does this mean that SUPERVALU is looking at improving their labeling overall?”
Just to give you an idea of the size of SUPERVALU, here is a quick line-up of its US banners:
I said, “No doubt they’re opportunistic, but us showing this fish to markbittman.com readers is not exactly implicit support of Shaw’s or SUPERVALU – it’s demonstrating that sometimes you can find what you’re looking for in unlikely places.
“Fair enough,” Trenor responded. “That product itself certainly merits support. Sustainable, fairly priced Alaskan sockeye salmon, frozen and clearly labeled. I’m all for that. It’s just a shame that it’s such a rare occurrence at SUPERVALU that you and I can justify writing a blog post about it.”
Illustrations provided by author (Mark Bittman). Captions provided by sustainablesushi.net.
Tags: albertson's, bittman, frozen, jewel-osco, label, lucky, mark, msc, sake, salmon, sebastes, shaw's, sockeye, supervalu, traceability
Target achieved
The conventional salmon farming industry has never had it so tough.
In an unprecedented policy shift, the Target Corporation – one of the largest retailers in the United States and a direct competitor with Walmart – has just today announced the elimination of all farmed salmon products from its stores. Fresh, frozen, shelf-stable, and smoked items will from here on out exclusively be made with wild Alaskan salmon — no exceptions. Even its sushi department, which is notoriously the most stubborn part of this industry when it comes to change (thus the existence of this website), is in the process of phasing out the last bits of its farmed salmon.
While this act is truly staggering in its magnitude and its implications for the seafood retail industry, of equal importance are the reasons behind Target’s decision. The company does not mince words when it comes to why they have made this transition — Target’s communications department clearly states that the company is not interested in supporting an industry that has done such harm to our marine ecosystems. Their press release spells it out quite simply: “Target is taking this important step to ensure that its salmon offerings are sourced in a sustainable way that helps to preserve abundance, species health and doesn’t harm local habitats… Many salmon farms impact the environment in numerous ways – pollution, chemicals, parasites and non-native farmed fish that escape from salmon farms all affect the natural habitat and the native salmon in the surrounding areas.”
Preach on!
Wild salmon for the people
This move will undoubtedly shake the salmon farming industry to its very core. Target, after all, is not exactly a high-end gourmet market – rather, it’s a price leader that specializes in providing quality products for low prices. How, then, does a market that worships price-driven competition manage to eschew an item that embodies the very concept of bargain seafood?
With help from Greenpeace and the Monterey Bay Aquarium, Target has opened the door to a new era of seafood – one that dares to question tired old paradigms that cannot withstand this kind of innovation. Retailers which have parroted the weary excuse of farmed salmon filling an otherwise unattainable price point will now be exposed as complacent rather than pragmatic. If a low-cost hypermarket like Target, which needs to sell salmon for $6.99 a pound, can manage to transition entirely to wild, sustainable product, how can the Whole Foods clones of the world defend their reliance on environmentally dubious farmed products that sell for over twice the price?
Off to the races
To make matters even more difficult for the industry, a new threat has arisen in the form of legitimate and economically viable closed-containment salmon. Earlier this month, the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch program took another swipe at the open-net nightmares that festoon the Canadian and Chilean coasts by giving the “Best Choice” green light to a new closed-containment salmon farm in Washington State. This operation, lovingly termed “Sweet Spring” by its proprietor Per Heggelund, raises coho (silver) salmon in a sealed recirculating system located many miles inland, far from the fragile habitats of the Pacific Northwest’s wild salmon populations. The feed component of this operation is still not perfect as it does exceed an even fish-in-to-fish-out ratio, but compared to the parasite-riddled, antibiotic-laden concentration camps that provide much of the world’s farmed salmon, Heggelund’s facility is a beacon of progress.
The horror... the horror
Conventional farmed salmon is caught between a rock and a hard place, and it is not a moment too soon. Salmon farms have been the source of countless problems over the past decade – diseases in Chilean farms rip through penned animals like hot knives through butter; parasite swarms in Canadian farms threaten the very survival of co-habiting wild salmon runs, not to mention the essence of Pacific Northwest cultural integrity.
Salmon are the backbone of who we are here on the west coast. It is the wild salmon runs that bring nutrients from the sea to the land, that fertilize the river banks and feed the yawning bears. If we allow this, our greatest legacy, to perish at the hands of a small group of cash-blinded eco-criminals, it is doubtful that we will ever find another source of such selfless bounty.
We need courage, innovation, and foresight if we are to create a wise and responsible seafood industry that can steward our oceans in the coming decades, and it’s companies like Target and entrepreneurs like Per Heggelund that are leading the charge. Remember this day — this was the day that we took our salmon back.
Tags: Alaska, coho, farm, sake, salmon, seafood watch, sweet spring, target, wild
Feeding the world
When Sustainable Sushi was being developed, the Alaska pollock fishery — the 2nd largest fishery in terms of total biomass in the entire world — seemed relatively healthy and stable. At the very least, it provided a traceable and ostensibly well-managed seafood source that was superior to the random mash of imported whitefish that provides the ersatz fish protein underpinning our fish stick and surimi industries. In fact, the Alaska pollock fishery has been considered a “Best Choice” by the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch program for years, and is an MSC-certified fishery.
Things seem to be taking a turn for the worse, however. Recent developments in the fishery seem to suggest that all may not be well in pollock country.
Bottoming out
For five years running, the stock has seen lower levels of recruitment (new fish in younger age classes) than historical trends would lead researchers to expect. Overall stock levels have severely declined as well, taking the overall populations to levels only previously reached in the late 1970s — a time when the fishery was open to international fleets and was being heavily over-exploited.
Bycatch levels are also higher than one would like. An increase in overall CPUE (Catch Per Unit of Effort — a measurement of the amount of resources and manpower needed to produce a given amount of fish) has led to increased mortality among co-habiting salmon. Local sea birds and marine mammals are also being affected; strong links are being drawn between the pollock fishery and a downturn in northern fur seals and the endangered Stellar’s sea lion.
Trawl victims
Pollock trawls are impacting sensitive seabed habitats as well — new explorations in the Bering Sea have revealed rich areas of endemic corals. Unfortunately, these areas are not yet protected from fishing, and the pollock fleet is freely operating in coral beds which should ideally be listed as no-take zones.
Most troubling, however, is the reaction on the part of the Northern Pacific Fishery Management Council (NPFMC), a federal body that is responsible for setting the yearly pollock quota. Rather than use the aforementioned concerns as justification to pare down the fishery and reign in some of its more worrisome aspects, the NPFMC instead did the exact opposite and increased the allowed amount of king salmon bycatch to 60,000 fish.
This is poor management from an environmental standpoint. The pollock fishery’s regulations are such that when the bycatch cap for salmon is reached, the fishery is immediately shut down for the year. This increase in tolerable bycatch numbers reflects the rising CPUE within today’s pollock fishery, but rather than move to rebuild the fishery, it simply allows for greater and more damaging exploitation.
Can you spot the pollock?
The pollock fishery is no longer what it once was. It is clear that federal management cannot be depended upon to make wise and environmentally sound decisions in the face of the economic and industrial short-term interests that dominate the pollock industry. Given the current situation, I have no choice but to urge readers to refrain from purchasing products that contain Alaska pollock. In the sushi industry, this means the California roll and other items that include kanikama (imitation crab).
This is by no means an irreversible situation. The Alaska pollock is an incredibly resilient and fecund fish that has the capability to bounce back. Proper management can restore the fishery to its former productive glory, just as was done in the early 1980s. The greater worry is for other impacted populations, primarily Stellar’s sea lions, Alaskan king salmon, coldwater corals, and northern fur seals. If the pollock fishery is to continue, it must reinvent itself to be more sensitive to these co-habiting species.
I have no doubt that other environmental organizations have this issue on their radar, and that we will in the very near future begin to see more criticism of the Alaska pollock fishery from groups much larger and more established than Sustainable Sushi.
Tags: Alaska, bycatch, coral, CPUE, kanikama, msc, no-take, NPFMC, pollock, sake, salmon, sea lion, seafood watch, seal, Stellar, surimi, trawl, Update
