Who says Gulf seafood is safe?

I watched a shopper and fishmonger at a high-end Seattle grocery debate the safety of a pile of succulent-looking, fresh, jumbo shrimp in the seafood case.

The shrimp weren’t from Thailand, Vietnam or even Mexico.  They were from the Gulf, from the waters off Louisiana or Mississippi. They weren’t frozen, packed months ago before BP’s oil rig blew up, sank, and began spewing millions of gallons of hazardous hydrocarbons over almost everything.

Fish suppliers across the country have sold off much of the frozen Gulf products they were hoarding. But now new, freshly caught, Gulf goodies are again showing up in restaurant kitchens and on the chipped ice of good fishmongers.

Good chefs and persnickety consumers have long coveted the taste of shrimp, crab, oysters and fish from the Gulf.

On Monday, a gaggle of top chefs from around the country went to Grand Isle, La., to confirm for themselves the safety of the Louisiana seafood. Many promised the shrimpers, crabbers and fishers that they would eagerly use what they catch as long as it’s safe.

There is fresh seafood in the pipeline and according to Louisiana State officials the supplies are gradually increasing as more harvesting grounds are declared safe from oil and dispersants.

Everyone knows the threat is real and that availability could change. Things such as the weakening Hurricane Alex, or those storms that will surely follow, can force the still-surging oil back over previously safe breeding ground.

Consumers should be confident in the quality of what’s being offered.  I think that buying seafood from the Gulf is a much safer gamble than consuming the virtually untested imported seafood when inundates our food supply.

While food-safety activists say barely 2 percent of the imports are inspected by understaffed FDA port inspections, there is an elaborate and intricate system for ensuring the safety of food from the Gulf.  If you want more information, here is a link to a story I wrote this week for AOLNews.

–Andrew Schneider

Must be the artist’s Blue Period

It’s not easy to take a photograph of a crab that’s artsy, but an artist with the Flickr name of Tattooed JJ has managed.  It’s used as the illustration for a rejoicing story on the food blog SlashFood that is headlined “Blue Crabs Are Back in Chesapeake.”

Mmmmm…that old Vietnamese recipe for….crawfish?

A suburb of Boston, of all places, has a vibrant example of a trend that the folks down on the bayou never saw coming: Viet-Cajun.

“This could easily be a crawfish boil in Cajun country, until you notice the spring rolls, fried rice, and coconut drinks. The 25-seat spot is the first to bring the growing Viet-Cajun food craze to Boston: Cajun cooking and crawfish served with a Vietnamese twist,” writes Denise Taylor of the Boston Globe.

Taylor’s piece on Brother’s Crawfish is a tidy little lesson in culinary history as well as a review: She quotes Jerald Horst, a fisheries expert and co-author of “The Louisiana Seafood Bible: Crawfish.”

“The cuisine has roots in Louisiana, where Vietnamese immigrants who had been fishermen settled. The delta of south Louisiana is very much like the Mekong Delta geographically and natural history-wise. As they prospered in the fishing industry, the Vietnamese took land jobs, many as seafood retailers.”

Horst remembers that 35 years ago when he started in the business, most of the industry was in the hands of Sicilian market owners. Now, he says, its over 90 percent Vietnamese owners.

Taylor reports that Viet-Cajun places are springing up throughout the country, as far west as (of course) Las Vegas.

Prepare to salivate as you read this article, which moves into lyrical praise for the magic worked on crawfish when the traditional “mustard seed, coriander, bay leaf, dill, allspice, and a lot of cayenne” get shoved aside for the likes of “ginger, lime, lemongrass, or the salty fish sauce nuoc mam.”

As the late Hank Williams would have said, me-oh-my-oh.

See that orca? No fish sticks for him.

We all know someone who is very picky about what they eat.

What if I tell you that federal, state and university investigators spent four summers proving that killer whales, or orcas — those black and white models for cuddly toys — may be the most fastidious diners around.

One of the Pacific Northwest’s prime attractions for tourists and locals, Orcinus orca can run more than 30-feet long and weigh in at 16,000 pounds. Marine scientists say they eat the equivalent of 4 to 6 percent of their own weight each day.

Photo Seattletours

It’s not how much these creatures eat, but rather what they eat that got the fish scientists from the U.S. and Canada all atwitter.

Like every other pescavore between British Columbia and Washington state, the orca love salmon. I’m not talking about the low end of the salmon food chain, like chum or humpies, or even sockeye or coho. Our black and white beauties go only for the best: the costly chinook or king salmon. Scientists say that they will bypass all the cheaper types.

I’m positive that study published in last month’s Endangered Species Research journal was solid work. Just look at the title: “Species and stock identification of prey consumed by endangered southern resident killer whales in their summer range.”  (Click here for report.)

But Lynda V. Mapes, the Seattle Times reporter and author with a gift for capturing the natural essence of the Northwest, wrote about the scientists’ work in a far more palatable style.

With great delicacy, Mapes explained how the fish hunters followed the orcas in small boats and how they gathered killer-whale poop and regurgitation.

“DNA testing revealed that the orcas select chinook salmon nearly exclusively for food, despite far more abundant numbers of pink and sockeye in the area at the same time,” Mapes wrote.

She quotes the study’s lead author, Brad Hanson, biologist with the National Marine Fisheries Service: “They would literally knock pink salmon out of the way to take a Chinook.”

We have so many orcas along the coasts of British Columbia and Washington State, in Puget Sound and the Strait of Juan de Fuca, that we assign letters to the family or pods of whales. The learned pooper-scoopers followed the J, K and L pods between 2004 and 2008.

Mapes explained that scientists believe that chinook is prime cuisine because it delivers more calories for the effort. Chinook are the largest salmon with the most oily flesh.

One of the most fascinating aspects of the study was the finding that different whale families in different parts of the world’s oceans have vastly different dietary habits: some whale pods outside the Northwest, for example, dine exclusively on seals and sea lions, eschewing fish.

It’s only fitting, then, that here in the Puget Sound area – -where most diners and cooks would never consider farm-raised salmon and run screaming from the Atlantic version of the fish — the resident orcas dine like, and on, kings.

Salmon Nation provides a quick rundown of all the species here:

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In other whale news:

Meanwhile, the port watchers from the U.S. Customs service  and other federal cops have cranked up surveillance to watch for whale meat being imported from the Far East.

This comes amid rumbles that a restaurant in Southern California, busted last year for selling whale meat from Japan, may not be alone in trading in this coveted, but illegal treat.

The Japanese openly skirt the international whaling moratorium which was passed on 1986 by claiming their whaling ships are actually research vessels and the slaughter of 1,000-plus whales each year is done in the name of science. They don’t discuss the fact that DNA-testing has proven that the same whale meat shows up in high-end eateries.

And a final whale tidbit:

The Sea Shepherd spends much of its time afloat trying to thwart the Japanese whale hunters. Last week, the ship’s captain Peter Bethune was indicted on five charges by the Tokyo District Public Prosecutor’s Office for allegedly disrupting the hunt and other anti-whaling activists.

–Andrew Schneider

GAO calls for caution in approving sprawling ocean fish farms out to 200 miles offshore.

Let’s talk about fish. Or more specifically, aquaculture, which is the farming of fish and shellfish.
EPA Aquatic Biologist Dave Terpening at one of Idaho’s many fish farms. PI Photo

There are fish farms all across the country. Small mom and pop operations raising catfish in backyard ponds and streams can be found in at least 19 states. Idaho is home to about 60 seafood operations including an alligator breeder and the nation’s largest rainbow and golden trout farms. According to federal investigators, the salmon aquaculture industry in the United States is concentrated in Maine and Washington, with at least eight Atlantic salmon farms floating in Puget Sound alone. Just a bit north, there are another 120 salmon ranches along the inlets, bays and straits of British Columbia.
Of course an alligator is seafood. Ask them in Idaho.  Photo A. Schneider

As wild salmon grow more scarce due to environmental disruption and diminished water flow on the fish’s traditional spawning rivers, the growth of aquaculture has increased. Enormously in some areas.

But some breeders and the White House say the fish pens in coastal waters are not enough to produce the salmon and other finfish needed to supply the market.

The big business “farmers” want permission to build sprawling complexes of floating pens, nets and cages in deep water miles offshore. This is the United States’ Exclusive Economic Zone, which covers three to 200 nautical miles from shore. Thus, opening shop for anything in this hunk of ocean becomes a matter of federal jurisdiction, not state.

As it happens, there are few if any laws on the books to regulate this new concept in fish farming.

In a surprising example of the government actually getting ahead of a problem, the White House last year pushed for the creation of the National Offshore Aquaculture Act, which would give the Commerce Department the authority to regulate offshore aquaculture.

Rep. Nick Rahall, the chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, introduced the bill in April 2007 “as a favor to the administration. ”

Two months earlier he had asked the Government Accountability Office to determine how such an unusual, deepwater, economic activity should be handled to protect the oceans and the food supply.

The GAO issued its 54-page report this week.

Rahall said the administration’s proposed bill doesn’t go far enough to ensure adequate protection for the marine environment.

“This new report makes abundantly clear what I have long believed – any offshore aquaculture development must be done in a manner that does not jeopardize the health of our oceans or the viability of the fishing industry,” said the West Virginia Democrat.

The GAO report identifies several important safeguards that need to be carefully considered before permits are issued to anyone. These include:

• The appointment of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric administration as the lead federal agency to regulate and permit any offshore aquaculture facilities.

• The clear delineation of the roles and responsibilities of other federal agencies and states in the administration of these businesses.

• The establishment of a permitting and site selection process that clearly identifies the terms and conditions for offshore aquaculture operations.

• The implementation of a regulatory process to review, monitor, and mitigate the potential environmental impacts of offshore aquaculture facilities.

The congressional investigators also called for additional research on developing fish feeds that do not rely heavily on harvesting wild fish; exploring how escaped offshore aquaculture-raised fish might impact wild fish populations; and developing strategies to breed and raise fish while effectively managing possible disease.

We’ll get into a look at the oyster, mussels, shrimp and other shellfish growers in another posting.

Food groups warned that imported seafood labeled “organic,” could be loaded with antibiotics and parasiticides.

The feds aren’t protecting consumers from imported seafood wrongly called “organic,” so two leading food safety advocacy groups have asked the top law enforcement officers in every state to halt this misleading practice.

The Center for Food Safety and Food & Water Watch said it is wrong to label imports as “organic,” when there are no U.S. organic seafood standards in place.

They sent letters to the AGs in each state telling them that the USDA and the Federal Trade Commission have failed to prevent consumer deception by enforcing the few existing organic labeling laws and regulations.

The practice is a violation of the states’ consumer deception and misrepresentation laws, the groups said.

“Allowing importers to label their seafood ‘organic’ when it does not have to meet any U.S. standards is a disservice to American consumers, who have come to trust and believe in the organic label,” said Joseph Mendelson, legal director of the Center for Food Safety.

“USDA’s refusal to stop importers from calling their products organic when many of them use antibiotics, parasiticides, or feed that would not be permitted under U.S. regulations is dishonest,” he said.

Three years ago, California passed a law preventing the labeling of any seafood as “organic” until federal standards are finalized and in place.

Only now is the USDA in the process of establishing organic regulations for finfish and shellfish but the process may take up to two years.

amount of foreign seafood imports labeled as “organic” have appeared to take advantage of this emerging market, the organizations said.

“It is time for other states to follow California’s example and stop the abuse of the organic label on imported seafood,” said Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch.