After years of roasting chicken, grilling steak and broiling lamb, I recently declared a fish mandate.
Sure, the benefit of eating lean was part of it. But there was an underlying reason. I had come to realize that despite my hard-core home kitchen experience, I wasn’t comfortable cooking fish.
I started poking around my local fish shops to experiment, and I found that there wasn’t a lot of difference among the varieties offered. Flounder. Scrod. Tuna. Salmon.
And of course, swordfish. And Chilean sea bass.
And that struck me as odd.
Even if you’re not that into food, you must have heard by now that those two species are dangerously overfished.
So, I asked, why stock them? Nearly every fishmonger answered: That’s what the customers want.
And that, also, struck me as odd.
I wondered if these are the same customers who buy organic, pasture-raised chicken from their local farmer. Are they the same ones who clean their homes with Mrs. Meyer’s green products? Stock their fridges with organic milk and local produce?
Because if they are, they sound a lot like me. But how can the green movement apply to land and not to sea?
“It’s a new idea,” says Andrew Brown, chef of the White Dog Cafe in Philadelphia, which is known for spreading the word about socially conscious eating by serving delicious food. “I didn’t know about this until five or six years ago, and I started at the White Dog 10 years ago.”
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