#twoxsea

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I'm gonna need a bigger board. #twoxsea (at Paiche)

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Getting some big fatty wild king salmon from Humboldt Bay in these days! Destined for a citrus and dill salt sugar cure. #kitchitchef #bigfish #kingsalmon #local #twoxsea (at The Residence)

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Feb. 23 -- Fish farms have a big problem: They’ve been making feed out of sardines and anchovies from the oceans, a source that could be depleted within a few decades. A California company called Two X Sea could have a solution: They’ve developed the first completely vegetarian fish feed to be used commercially in the U.S., with the help of a USDA scientist who has made fish nutrition his life’s work. (Video by: Alan Jeffries, Amy Marino)

[nopalize]

A Precursor: Setting the Stage for Our Discussion with Kenny Belov and Marie Logan

Though its almost over, October is, and was, Salmon Month. On the 13th of this  month, Nopa participated in an inaugural citywide benefit, “Dine Out for Wild Salmon”. The night was organized by the Salmon Aid Foundation. The deal was, we'd feature wild salmon on our menu for the evening. All of the profits from each salmon dish were donated to the Foundation. I am happy to say that Nopa sold enough Wild California King Salmon that night to contribute $925 to the cause.  

I did a bit of research on the organization and became increasingly impressed by the mission and breadth of the organization. This was already solidified when earlier that evening Marie Logan, Co-President of the Foundation, joined us for nightly lineup to talk salmon. And that talk was really about the perils of Wild Salmon in California. 

Her talk was succinct and informative, but I gathered from her demeanor that at her core, Marie was an activist. I really liked her and asked her to do a podcast with us. She obliged and suggested that we invite Kenny Belov, Entrepreneur and California's superhero in the fight for sustainable fishing. He is Co-Founder and partner of Two X Sea, a sustainable fish purveyor. He also (surprisingly) raises trout with an algae/flax rich diet, a feed he developed himself.  He is quite busy and as we’ll hear, and is growing increasingly so as his fight and accounts gain momentum.

Kenny Belov

I don’t want to go into too much detail about the Salmon Aid Foundation-- its a pretty focal point in the podcast. But  if you're looking for some context, it is essentially a multi-stakeholder organization of consumer groups, activists, Native Americans and recreational fishing groups bound by a shared mission to defend California’s wild salmon population.

Marie also works in the Fish department of Food & Water Watch, which is a national nonprofit that challenges corporate control of food and water. They have a fantastic mission, which reads as follows: 

Our Mission

Food & Water Watch works to ensure the food, water and fish we consume is safe, accessible and sustainably produced. So we can all enjoy and trust in what we eat and drink, we help people take charge of where their food comes from, keep clean, affordable, public tap water flowing freely to our homes, protect the environmental quality of oceans, force government to do its job protecting citizens, and educate about the importance of keeping the global commons — our shared resources — under public control.

Tomorrow we will post the podcast in its entirety, then break up the conversation into 3 more digestible sizes for the subsequent days of the week. I can not emphasize enough how much inspiration I find in my work when I meet people like Marie and Kenny. When I think of Kenny Belov, I see man who is singularly focused on providing information and solutions to advance the health of our oceans and population. Every decision that he makes, and each conversation he is in, is rooted in the same place- an impassioned belief that reckless commercial fishing is destroying our oceans.

The aforementioned feed that he has developed for his trout at MacFarland Springs has the potential to completely revolutionize the fishing industry in this country. If for no other reason, I would strongly recommend a listen to the podcast to learn more about this. It is truly astonishing. 

Marie is the same. Her activism is rooted in her time at UC Berkeley where she studied environmental history. She honed in on Latin America where severe examples of corporate/government exploitation of natural resources, led her to a path of fighting back as a matter of social justice. She is organized and academic, but feisty. She is my kind of lady.

At the end of our conversation, I gave an open mic. She takes the opportunity to go in on a topic  in which she is clearly growing more active, which is raising awareness ofthe emerging threat of genetically modified foods, and our rights to know as consumers. Again, we hope that you all will take some time to listen to what she has to say about some of the existing and prospective policies on this front. It feels like this will be the next new battleground for food activists. Some really freaky stuff happening in labs....

Marie Logan

For Nopa, I feel strongly that it is not enough for us to be content simply asserting that we know our food sources. More importantly, we must cultivate a genuine understanding of the food sources for ourselves and our diners. This includes information about the producers, handlers, and the political, environmental and social factors that affect our access to these foods.

Is the restaurant an appropriate place for inciting these conversations? I think yes. If we take on the responsibility of committing to these purveyors who are dedicating their lives to affecting change, then we must take that commitment seriously and do our part. Of course many diners come in simply to enjoy a meal and a beverage and sometimes crave nothing more. That is certainly okay. But we also know that there are an increasing number of diners who do want more, and whose minds are fertile and curious, and we want to do our part to provide many ways to nourish the curiosity. If you enjoy this podcast, please share with others or contact the Salmon Aid Foundation, Food & Water Watch or Nopa to find out how you can be involved. We hope you enjoy!

[nopalize]

We love working with TwoXSea

Here's a document they wrote which we copied down in order to send to everyone in the restaurant. 

"A Simple Solution for Sustainable Seafood (and maybe a better world). The trout we are serving tonight is very special, and represents a very obvious component to a, if not the, solution for the quest of a balanced, renewable and responsible source of seafood for this generation and those to come. Simply stated, we need intelligently farmed fish to supplement well-managed wild fisheries. An overview of the current state of the farmed-fish industry sheds light on a few problems and some of the great opportunities before us. --In order to be sustainable, or better yet renewable, we should meet at a minimum the following criteria for aquaculture. 1. no habitat destruction 2. no adverse drugs, chemicals or elements in the fish, or released into the environment. 3. no escape of farmed fish into the wild. 4. no dependence on wild fish to feed the farmed fish. The last point is seldom discussed, as it tends to reveal the point that it takes as much as 10 pounds of wild bait fish to yield one pound of farmed salmon. Liberties are sometimes taken when these conversion rates are declared, by stating the dried weight of the resulting feed, rather than the weight of the original fish. Moreover, the notion of industrial vessels hauling in millions of tons of fish in order to farm thousands, sometimes to the collapse of these species, seems both foolish and shortsighted. In 2009, we set out to understand why fish meal and fish oil were being fed to virtually every farmed fish we could find, including vegetarian and insectivore species. If possible, we wanted to produce a fish that could be farmed inland and replace fish by-products with something else. With the help of Dr. Rick Barrows of USDA’s ARA group, we were able to create a specialized feed for trout that uses (non-GMO) corn and soy protein to replace fishmeal, and DHA Gold from Martek to replace the fish oil. At this point, a brief discussion of what goes into the average aquafeed should be had. Fish meal, feather meal, blood meal, corn oil - just a few of the components you wouldn’t want to feed your cat, let alone eat yourself. In the quest for the cheapest possible feed, the industry has created a diet that also left a nutritional void - the unwanted result of using corn oil creates an unhealthy amount of omega 6 in much of our mass produced food, including farmed fish. By substituting flax for corn oil, and dried DHA for fish oil, we inadvertently created a nutritional bonus. Omega 3’s come in two basic buckets - long chain and short chain. The long-chain is the one our brains need, whereas short chain omega 3’s must be stitched together in order to be used by our bodies. The presence of Omega 6 limits the ability to do so, as well as genetics. As a result, the trout we produced have more residual DHA - the stuff doctors praise so highly - than wild salmon, and no omega 6. In this case, the test showed 875mg DHA per 100g of fish. So what does this mean? Simply this. Algae is one of the very few sources of DHA in the world. It grows to maturity in 1-2 days, and out produces any other crop by 30 to 1. It is a burgeoning industry that can produce food, nutrients, biofuels and jobs at the same time it converts CO2 back to oxygen. It is one of, if not the, most efficient conversions of solar energy in existence. At the time this document was created, the cost of algae oil per pound is approximately 5 dollars (vs. 2 dollars for fish oil) and the price will continue to drop. Economics has long been the villain when discussing sustainability, always lurking in the background and demanding more profit. Though it seems to fly in the face of conventional capitalism, we believe that an incremental cost to produce a renewable, responsible and healthful food source is a sound investment in all our futures. The solution to sustainable seafood isn’t complicated. We can create intelligent and nutritional farmed fish to fill in between the seasons that nature gives us wild fish, as long as we wisely protect that resource and carefully monitor those populations. " -TwoXSea http://twoxsea.com/