Piggybacking

A new blog that I'm following is Ecoculinaire, written primarily by Nan Kavanaugh, partner of Scotty Schwartz, the Chef at 29 South in Fernandina Beach, FL. When I was still in school, Scotty hooked me up with the chef at PLaE for a stage during my spring break, and then generously brought me down to 29 South to work for a week in his kitchen. We've kept in touch intermittently, and the last news that I heard was that he was going local, probably a little over a year ago.

There's local, of course, and there's planting a year-round garden out back to supply your restaurant. Nan is the garden manager, and started Ecoculinaire a couple of weeks ago. Her blog posts are focused and well-written, and she clearly loves writing about the restaurant, the garden, and larger food issues. Her most recent post, on markets, has me excited to get back to the first one I can in Atlanta.

Here in Coventry, and indeed throughout Warwickshire and the West Midlands, the farmers' market comes monthly. There's some good food available, but eating locally and sustainably has to be a hobby--even in the winter, most veg won't last a whole month. As someone who was pretty good at sourcing food, people who treated it like something that I did for fun, or something out of a pyramid scheme--"But how do you really know that the animal was raised humanely?"--had to be the most irritating response. When people view the responsible acquisition of their food as akin to a love of canoeing or needlepoint, they have no reason to examine what's in their refrigerators, how it got there, and at what cost.

As I was shopping at the supermarket yesterday, I was surprised twice: once when there was no garlic, which I didn't think was possible at a supermarket, and again when I saw wild Alaskan salmon on offer, for a price that, considering the exchange rate, was pretty competitive.

The state of English fish stocks is notoriously dismal; a cookbook I was reading this morning conjectured that soon the only fish that could be legally caught would be mackerel. Cod struggles, salmon has to be farmed, and fish like pollack and mackerel, which are actually abundant, are being roundly ignored by all but amateur fishers and responsible chefs. Wild salmon in America are faring little better, with the southern seasons getting shorter and shorter, or cut off altogether. The demand then turns to Alaskan stocks, which will, if history is any indicator, soon find themselves in the same situation. It's not responsible right now to fish too much Alaskan salmon, or to offer it in supermarkets over 6000 miles away.

The English are moaning at the moment: everyone loves salmon, and fish and chips apparently can't be made with any of the incredibly similar members of the cod family that have healthy populations. What are we to do?

Suck it up. Learn to eat more than two to three species of what the oceans produce. Encourage responsible fish farming or shelve your salmon recipes for the next five years or so. And then when you can eat it again, make it a treat, like anything that rare should be.