Aquariums Make Me Hungry...

I made sure not to deprive myself during my locavore challenge last year, and I made sure to eat healthy - even if that meant buying food that wasn't local, but there certainly were things that I missed.  Even though my year is over, I will still be getting most of my food locally.  Meat, cheese, vegetables, and fruit.  They're all better when purchased fresh and locally.

But there are things that will be finding their way back into my diet fairly quickly.

The things I rushed out to buy were:

1. Nuts and dried fruit to make trail mix
2. Oranges
3. Fish

The trail mix is now sitting on my desk at work.  Nuts are good for you, and while there are a few that grow in Wisconsin, my favorites prefer the warmer weather.  The oranges were gone pretty quickly, and I'm sure I'll get at least one more bag in before the spring fruit starts showing up.

But the fish... oh, the fish...

I grew up on basically a Mediterranean diet,  before "The Mediterranean Diet" was a thing.  Seafood and poultry, pasta, bread, olive oil... lots of fruit and vegetables.  This was how I ate as a child, and how I continued to eat.  A lot of this, I'm sure, is due to the fact that I never thought I liked red meat.  Even since learning the joys of beef, buffalo, and pork (my god, not five years ago I would have told you I didn't really like pork... what was wrong with me!), though, I generally would prefer poultry or seafood.

So limiting my seafood over the past year was really hard.

Really, really hard.

There are local seafood options.  Rainbow trout through Rushing Waters, and trout, tilapia, and blue gill (that's new!) from Sweet Water Organics.  Both are good choices.  But that's still only options for small, flaky whitefish.  Nothing firm, nothing too big.  No fish boil - a Wisconsin classic.  No whole fish baked in salt.  Really not even anything I would want to grill - I'd be too afraid of the small pieces falling through the grate and being lost!

I also allowed myself salmon (Wild Alaskan only), and mussels, because they're both on the "Super Green" list, and because they're two of my favorites.  Still, though.  Not a lot compared to the variety I was used to.

So I had a happy heart and a skip in my step when I went to my favorite seafood place on March 22nd. 

I'm not going to name them by name, because I'm not ready to throw them under the bus, but it was not a happy experience.

They had the mussels, and they had the salmon, but pretty much everything else was on the Monterey Bay "Avoid" list.  Grouper, Halibut, Mahi Mahi, Red Snapper, Chilean Seabass (I didn't even need to look that one up.)  And then there was something called Escolar, with "white tuna" in parenthesis after it.  That wasn't on the Monterey Bay list at all - good bad or otherwise - but when I googled it I got all of these warnings to avoid it at all costs, because it causes explosive diarrhea.  That's a whole different kind of avoid list.

I don't know what changed.  I don't think they were this bad a year ago.  Maybe I wasn't checking hard enough. Maybe I just caught them on a bad day.  I called and asked them why they were serving so many fish off of the "avoid list," and was told I would get a call back... but didn't.  I'm not very pushy, to be fair.  I wouldn't make a good investigative journalist.

The Monterey Bay Seafood list provides comment cards that you can leave, asking why a restaurant is serving fish off of the avoid list, so I think I'll print some of those out and drop them off.  Passive, I know.

So I left and went to Outpost.  They don't have a large selection of seafood there; it's mostly the rainbow trout, tilapia, and salmon that I was excited to get away from.  But they also had sole.  I checked, Pacific Sole is a "Good Alternative."  So, that's good enough for me.  They had two choices: regular filets of sole, and then those same filets rolled around a crab filling and topped with some sort of red bread crumbs.  The crab was tempting, but the bread crumbs were not a color food should be (okay, they were probably paprika-ed, which is fine), and I figured I could do just as well on my own.  A quick check of the internet on my phone (I spend a lot of time staring at my phone in grocery stores.  I'm pretty sure that passers-by think I'm addicted to the Facebook... which is also true...) told me that stuffed was the correct way to cook sole, and I saw a recipe for feta spinach stuffed sole, both of which I had in the fridge.

I would love for this sad story to end happily with a picture and a recipe.  Unfortunately, I should have gone with the scary red breadcrumbs, because what I made was not food.  Even the cats did not want to eat it.  That is a bad sign.  I don't know what happened, but the whole thing just fell apart and turned into some fishy baby food mush nasty.  Jeff tried to eat it to be nice, but it was not good.  I'm not a quitter, though, so I will give sole another try.  Probably when I'm home alone and there's no one to be disappointed but me.

The good news, though, is that the very next day in the newspaper, there was an article about Whole Foods.  Starting Earth Day (April 22nd), Whole Foods will only be carrying seafood that is decreed "sustainable" by the Blue Ocean Institute, the Monterey Bay Aquarium, and Greenpeace.  There will also be ratings available from the Marine Stewardship Council.  The Blue Ocean Institute sees seems to be about the same as Monterey Bay, but with five ratings instead of only three. They also seem to have more species rated, which is nice, but I couldn't find an iPhone app, which is annoying. I did check, and they also don't recognize escolar as a food.  The Marine Stewardship Council has a similar rating system as well, but also allows fisheries to get certified.  I'm not usually all about the certification, because it generally costs too much money for small businesses.  They also do not recognize escolar... thus proving that it is not a food product.

So, way to be Whole Foods.  Next, can you please label your products that contain GMOs?

I like it when organizations take a stand.  It's nice to know they believe in something in addition to profits.  And, I'm a realist here.  And a free market capitalist.  I think that doing something like this can really help Whole Foods make money.  For example, I'm now pretty much shopping at Whole Foods exclusively for my seafood.  Which means they can probably get away with charging a little bit more.  The fact that I know I'll be able to find sustainable seafood, and that I won't have to be the loser in the store doing research on my phone, is something I'm willing to pay a bit of a premium for.  Also, lets be honest, I can't go to Whole Foods without walking through the wine/cheese departments.  And you've got to walk past all those pretty fruits and vegetables to get to the seafood.  They're getting people in the store.  It's a good deal.  I'm surprised Whole Foods isn't promoting it more.

And, if more stores would behave in this way, it would be a lot harder for fisheries to sell those "avoid" fish.  Even if they were labeled.  Are you going to buy something with a big red "Avoid" label on it?  I feel the same way about GMOs.  Don't ban them, just let the consumer know what they're eating.

But, as they say, "Caveat Emptor" (Buyer Beware). It's your job, as the consumer, to know what you're consuming.  And, in this day and age, it's not that hard to be informed - as long as you're not embarrassed to look like you're madly texting in the grocery store.  I recommend you check out the Monterey Bay Aquarium, the Center for Food Safety, and the Non-GMO Shopping Guide.  All three have apps that you can download for your smartphone, that can help you make the informed choices that labeling doesn't need to tell us.

Obligatory Hunger Games Post

Oh, hi.  I'm back.  Though absent from the internet, I have had quite a busy past two weeks.  I had a bit of a depressive spell, brought on by the combination of turning 30, the weather going back to typical WI spring (cold), losing my childhood dog to old age, and - I'm embarrassed to admit - reading The Hunger Games.  I know that's a pretty lame thing to have on the list, but you have to understand that I don't do well with apocalyptic/dystopic scenarios.  They freak me out.  For example, on New Years Eve I watched "After Armageddon" on the History Channel.  It was a story of a family that survived a medical apocalypse, what came afterwards for them, and what they had to do to continue to survive.  I had anxiety attacks for about two months afterward.  Honest.  I didn't know what was going on and I went to the doctor.

Just like any phobia, I know it's not a reasonable fear.  I can't say exactly why it bothers me so much.  I know what I'm watching/reading isn't real.  I just feel like it's a little too close - like one misstep and we could all be there.

In the history channel show (which apparently you can watch all of on YouTube.  Go ahead, click on it.  You don't even need to watch the whole thing.  Just listen to the announcer tell you this isn't a real emergency.  That voice gets my heart racing), one of the commentators talks about the year 2000, when London was brought within three days of running out of food by a protest over fuel prices.  Lord Ewen Cameron (Baron Cameron of Dillington), who was, at the time, a member of the UK Government's Round Table for Sustainable Development, said "The nation is just nine meals from anarchy."

And he has a fancy name.  So he must be right.

Lord Cameron was talking about a very specific situation.  There were literally three days worth of food.  The truckers bringing in more food were protesting the high price of gas, and therefor no more food was coming into the city.  So, three days x three meals per day = 9 meals.

But aren't we always nine meals from anarchy?  I mean, really, how much would it take?  What's stopping us all from rioting?  I'm willing to bet you've never missed nine meals in a row.  I haven't, and I used to have an eating disorder.  Three days; not a single bite to eat.  How hungry would you need to be to start stealing?  And what do you do when there's no food in the stores to steal?

And when the power goes out, and the water stops running, what then?  Do you know how to sanitize water to make it drinkable?  

(As a side note, I wanted to see if Ewen Cameron was related to Prime Minister David Cameron, or if everyone in England just has the same last name.  The only article I could find connecting the two also said, and I quote: "British Prime Minister David Cameron is the scion of the Judeo Masonic satanic cult (the  Illuminati) that secretly rules England and the rest of the world."  So I think I'm not going to trust that article as being completely reliable.  But, props for using the word "scion" in a sentence not about The Matrix or a car.)

What freaks me out the most is how distanced we are from our food.  What would happen, for example, if the food trucks really did stop running?  When the grocery stores and restaurants run out of food, where do we go?  I could be all smug here and say I know farmers, but it's not like they're walking to the farmer's market.  Nor am I.  With the exception of my well stocked pantry and freezer, I'm in the same boat as everyone else.  I don't have a garden to plant if the farmers don't bring plants to the market.  I don't know how to hunt, and even if I managed to catch something, I wouldn't know how to clean it unless it was a fish.  We've done such an amazing job of separating the stages of food production - specifically in terms of meat.  Raising, slaughtering, butchering, packaging, transporting, and finally cooking.  Someone different does each step.  And, even when buying local, there's distance between the steps.  How many people really know how to do all of them?

In Wisconsin, maybe the deer hunters.  But, even then, I think you send your deer out for processing.  You field dress the thing, but you don't break it down yourself.  I think.

Don't worry.  This blog is not going to become a doomsday prepper blog.  I'm not freaking out.  I've moved past my immediate panic attack.  If society really collapses into anarchy, I think all the prepping in the world isn't going to do a lot of good.  We're all pretty much f'd.  But every now and then, when I let my brain slip into "what if" mode, my worries are mostly food related.

So, yeah.  Hunger games freaked me out a little.  And the ending made me cry like a tiny baby child.  SPOILER ALERT: It doesn't end in the poly-amorous wedding I was desperately hoping for.

But, I got over it.  I'm going to see the movie tomorrow.  And I'll be making a big crock pot full of lamb stew with dried plums (what's the difference between dried plums and prunes?)  And I used it as an excuse to buy a handful of books on edible and medicinal plants in the Midwest, preserving food without equipment, and saving and storing your own seeds.  Which will both look fancy on my bookshelf and also be handy in case of an apocalypse. 

Not a zombie apocalypse, of course, the only thing useful then would be a machete. 

CROSS PROMOTION!

Please check out my dear friend Jeanette's review of the Hunger Games on her blog, the Mundane Adventures of a Fan Girl.  And make sure you get all the way to the bottom and watch the Muppet's/Hunger Games Spoof Trailer.  Cause it's funny.  My favorite part is the music at the end.  And click around a bit.  Drive up her total hit count.

Next post will be lighter, I promise.  After a year without (really just with-less), it's time to talk about fish!

Have I mentioned that going to the aquarium always makes me hungry?