Good Fish_ Sustainable Seafood Recipes From the Pacific Coast - Becky Selengut [1]
Jerry Traunfeld, I consider you my mentor, and it seems fitting that most of this book was written at your restaurant, Poppy, while sitting at the bar drinking a Papi Delicious, tapping away at my computer, and eating some of the most extraordinarily prepared seafood dishes on the Pacific Coast. Thanks to all your staff at Poppy for taking such great care of me and April.
Jeanette Smith and Ashlyn Forshner, my wing(wo)men, you two deserve a week’s stay in a spa (yes, I’ll rub your feet) for all the help and heart you contributed to this book—it wouldn’t be half of what it is without your creativity, humor, and gentle guidance. Food adventures would not be the same without you both.
Mark Malamud, Susan Hautala, and Jasper Malamud, you are my patrons, friends, family, clients, and guinea pigs—your kitchen has been my test kitchen for ten years and counting. This book is as much yours as it is mine.
Some food-and-wine pairings are so sublime that the food makes an already good wine sing, and the wine makes an enjoyable dish unforgettable—and that is precisely how I think of my partnership with April Pogue. Sharing a life of food and wine with April makes everything better.
“We can eat in ways that are good for us AND good for the planet. Instead of feeding our desire for tomatoes 365 days per year, we’ve rediscovered the joy of summer heirlooms. We’re reminded again and again that forcing natural processes into unnatural production has consequences beyond dulling our senses to seasonality. These lessons apply as much to fishing as they do farming. Fish are seasonal, and increasingly, farmed. We can and should enjoy them, in season, responsibly raised or sustainably caught.”
—Jacqueline Church, food writer and sustainable food advocate
foreword
“One of the great dreams of man must be to find some place between the extremes of nature and civilization where it is possible to live without regret.”
—Barry Lopez
Twenty-five years ago, a heartbeat in human evolution, we figured out that the sea is not an inexhaustible source of food. Until then, the notion of infinite fish, clams, scallops, oysters, krill, shrimp, and the rest of the ocean banquet was a serviceable fiction that contained a lot of comfort. When I was a kid in the 1950s, the Weekly Reader I got in school told me that scientists had determined we could take a billion tons of seafood a year. Mercifully, Thomas Robert Malthus’s dreadful calculations that the human population would soon outrun the food supply were wrong. The sea would save us. Whew. By the mid-1970s, slightly better science revised that estimate to about five hundred million tons. Still, no problem at dinnertime. Since most people are no more able to live comfortably with the certain specter of global famine than they are with a firm date for a killer asteroid, those predictions gave us welcome relief. We continued to develop our wide-open fisheries at a breakneck pace. In 1989, though, a couple of decades of careful record-keeping revealed that no matter how many fishermen or how much horsepower we sent to sea, the sustainable yield of food would not be more than a hundred million tons. To that point, fishing and all our interactions with seafood were founded upon the assumption of endless supply, a paradigm that created an economic system dependent on constant development. For a few years after the facts banished the fiction of infinite seafood, we simply blamed the fishermen. Overfishing surely diminished the productive power of the sea and its creatures, but heaping the burden of responsibility on them did not fundamentally alter the calculus of finite seafood and human survival. Finally, we got it.
Becky Selengut’s wonderful compendium of sustainable seafood recipes, Good Fish, is informed by an indelible truth: we are personally accountable for what we eat. She has taken her inspiration from the acceptance of individual responsibility