Whether in your kitchen or ordering in a restaurant, doing the right thing — picking the most-sustainable seafood — can be a political minefield. And it's more complicated that just finding local, organic produce or grass-fed beef.
Just consider what happened at Sinju Restaurant in the Pearl District this summer when it banned a longtime customer who objected to a struggling species of tuna on the menu.
In late July, Guido Rahr, president and chief executive of the Wild Salmon Center, was eating lunch at the sushi bar, right across the street from his office. He noticed bluefin tuna on the daily specials and asked if it was Pacific or Atlantic. Turns out, it was Atlantic bluefin. Prized by sushi lovers for its fatty belly meat, Atlantic bluefin has been fished to near extinction in the wild — a situation made worse by the Gulf oil spill, which contaminated the spawning grounds and may leave a gap of a year or two in the reproduction cycle.
"I said to the sushi chefs: 'You should know what you're serving. This isn't just another fish,'" Rahr recalls.
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