Relentless Inquiry

[to the good folks at sustainabletable.org]

Hi folks,

You are doing a great job, and making a great resource available. Hats off to you! There's a major flaw in one of your recipes, though, that I am sure you will want to correct.

I was looking through your recipes, and one caught my eye in particular:
http://www.sustainabletable.org/kitchen/recipes/summergrilling/rockfish.html I suspect you're unaware that there's no such thing as a 'sustainable' rockfish recipe! The vegetable ingredients in it look wonderful, but all of the commercial rockfish fisheries are either troubled or endangered by overfishing.

Rockfish aka Rock Cod aka Pacific/Red Snapper are very slow-growing fish with a lifespan of over 100 years. The “6 to 7 ounce” filets recommended in the recipe would come from a 5 – 7 year old rockfish, or be cut down from a 15 – 30 year old rockfish. They only reproduce well at sizes that take 10+ years to attain. They birth and rear live young, and several studies have shown that a 15+ year old female rockfish will successfully rear 3 – 5x the number of young as a 5 year old one.

Please see info at http://blueocean.org/seafood/ or http://www.oceansalive.org/ to locate another type of fish to use in the recipe, as they have sustainability ratings for various fish.

Specifics on rockfish are available at
http://www.oceansalive.org/eat.cfm?subnav=fishpage&group=rockfish

Rating factors are listed at
http://www.oceansalive.org/eat.cfm?subnav=article&contentID=5048

You might want to let the chef know about this issue as well, and encourage him to substitute another type of fish at the restaurant. Encourage your local restaurants to review fish species on their menu, and make choices for sustainability. Particularly bad choices are any seafood fished by bottom trawling, which is equivalent to picking blackberries by bulldozing a field and then sorting through the scoop for berries. Learn more at the Blue Ocean or Oceans Alive sites.

best regards,
Strata