Eating Local

I went to a mandatory meeting for my job yesterday. It was about the Montery Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch Program (www.seafoodwatch.com). They basically collect all available information about all the seafood sold in the US and translates it into a simple system of good and bad options for those that want to eat sustainably, meaning food that has been produced in an environmentally friendly and sustainable way. It's pretty awesome and makes it very easy to make good choices. For example if I want to buy salmon for dinner. Alaskan wild salmon is okay, Atlantic (farmed) salmon is not okay. If you want to know why in detail, they have the reports as well as abstracts and quick info on the website. They also have an app. It is genius!

The lady that was there talking about the program was really good at it. She talked about PCB's and other pollutants in food. Apparently pancake batter is one of the worse things you can eat with respect to PCB's. She also encouraged us to research Atlantic farmed salmon and promised that if we still wanted to eat that kind of fish afterwards, she'd send us some pancake batter.

I liked her way of describing the importance of eating local. Here on Maui, eating local is huge and one of the most common arguments is that it requires less fuel for transportation. Now that might be true in a place like Hawai'i but does that mean that local=environmentally friendly, as it sometimes seem from what the newspapers write. As the lady said:

"Somewhere someone lives next door to a giant panda, it doesn't mean that they should eat local."

Now I'm at work early in the morning. I got here early since I take the bus but it's alright. Our stray harbor cat Sunshine is keeping me company. :)