Greenpeace

Casson Trenor, who works with Greenpeace on seafood issues, dropped by the Times the other day, and we sat and chatted for a while. My main question for him was, “What are people supposed to do?” Servers in restaurants and clerks in supermarkets are usually ignorant of what they’re serving and selling.

Even the most principled and informed consumer can’t possibly be certain of what he or she is getting. The strategy, as I said here, may just be to eat lower on the food chain, and eat less: in other words, mostly sardines and the like, and not many of those.

His response was simple, actually. “I myself can barely keep up with this stuff – it’s changing all the time, and it’s really complicated – and I look at the issue every day all day.” But Mr. Trenor, who has written a book called “Sustainable Sushi” and is the sustainability guru and a founder of Tataki, a sushi bar in San Francisco (more on this next month, when I visit), believes that ultimately the solution is not about consumer education. “That’s important, of course, and we need people to care about fish and the oceans. But if we really want to save them we need to get policy makers and companies that are invested in seafood to really change things.”

It’s one thing, he says, to tell people to eat smaller fish, wild salmon, and the like, “But what we really need to do is direct our purchasing dollars to institutions that are making strong, responsible decisions.”

According to Mr. Trenor, when Greenpeace started ranking seafood retailers they were all pathetic. “We were ranking them on a scale of one to ten, and the highest score – Whole Foods – was 3.9. But it’s changing. Real leaders are emerging. Whole Foods, Wegman’s, Ahold (which owns Stop and Shop, Giant, and others), Target – these companies are making good decisions.”

When companies develop specific policies, he explained, those policies allow them to move forward according to certain rules. “Like ‘we won’t buy anything with over a certain percentage of discard rate.’” (Discard rate, also called bycatch, refers to non-targeted fish that are killed during the harvest of the primary fish.) “Like ‘We’re going to work with EDF (the Environmental Defense Fund) to develop a shrimp standard.’”

Not that these moves approach perfection, he cautioned. But some companies are getting better, he said “and the fact that they’re taking the time to do this shows that there are really differences in the industry. We’re seeing a real split in the retail sector – these stores are really much safer to buy seafood than places like Publix, Price Chopper, or Costco.”

Mr. Trenor originally included Trader Joe’s in this list, but a couple of weeks ago the chain announced a plan to sell only sustainable seafood by 2012, and claims to be instituting changes that will move it towards that immediately.

To Mr. Trenor’s way of thinking, it’s great if a consumer knows how to make choices among the five major species of tuna, but “It’s not as important as Wegman’s knowing the difference. If we ally with the retailers that are really working on this, and leave the others behind, we’re voting with our dollars.”

People want to eat fish, and the chain of getting them from ocean to store is long and opaque; there is fraud at every level. But – according to Mr. Trenor – a sustainable policy has transparency and traceability.

What’s clear is that the days of trusting your local fishmonger (if you have one) are largely gone. Oddly, Greenpeace now feels the thing to do is trust your non-local fish-buying corporation, as long as that corporation makes rules and sticks to them.

Surely, I asked, this alone wasn’t going to do the trick. When it comes to marine protection, the United States is among the most progressive countries in the world. We are the leader not only in sustainable seafood programs but in establishing marine reserves, essentially national parks of the sea. Our stores can achieve perfection and our consumers behave in a completely principled manner, and none of this has an effect on what happens in Spain or Norway or Japan.

He agreed that international cooperation and advocacy are needed. “Less than one-tenth of one percent of the world’s ocean is protected – you can fish pretty much anywhere you want. We need to set aside a huge amount of the ocean where fish can spawn and live. And if we leave the breeders alone they’ll spill over into other areas where fish that can be caught are abundant.”

This is beginning also. A small reserve will open (or close, really, since fishing and vessel discharge will both be prohibited) next month in the South Orkney Islands, near Antarctica. (This may sound like an inhospitable environment, but it’s an important spawning and feeding ground.) Others are being discussed. And GPS tracking and other technologies make enforcement possible.

With both international and corporate cooperation it may not yet be too late to turn things around. And if a Greenpeace representative is optimistic, maybe there’s room for real hope.

Source: NY Times