Interview with Chef and Cookbook Author Barton Seaver

As I mentioned in yesterday's post, I enjoyed hearing Barton Seaver's speech on reclaiming dinner and the importance of sustainable seafood. As a sidenote, the dinner at the event was also delicious (hello bread dipped in anchovy-garlic oil!) and many of the recipes for the dishes featured at the dinner are in Barton's upcoming cookbook, For Cod and Country.

Before I dive into the interview, I had the chance to flip through Barton's cookbook. It seems that most of my friends are intimidated by seafood--they're unsure how to cook it, what to serve it with and it's easier to just order it at a restaurant. Then there are also the poor suckers who have only had frozen fish sticks and think that fish automatically tastes and smells fishy. So I think this is a good cookbook for both of those audiences, as well as the seafood afficionados like myself. It's organized by season (yes, fish have "seasons" for when they're caught), which is very helpful for the home cook. There are a ton of recipes that will push you to try new fish and explore the classic salmons and tunas that we're all familiar with. Plus the cookbook has a wide array of side dishes to pair nicely with seafood. It hits stores on May 3rd, but you can order your advance copy here.

Without further ado, here's my short interview with Barton Seaver:

Marissa: What can consumers do to promote sustainable seafood? What is their role?
Barton: Consumers can really create demand. Stores will carry whatever customers want, so we have to drive stores to carry other seafood. We have to diversify our demand. In the U.S., we eat about 10 species of fish, but the ocean offers so much more. Consumer demand is so narrowly focused. It's our responsibility and opportunity to explore.

We also have to switch to small, but enjoyable portions. We're never going to save the ocean by eating sustainable seafood alone. There should be a balance with vegetables, and it all has to be delicious. Also we have to re-examine our sustainable options, such as canned pink salmon and sardines. These are low-cost solutions that are easily available to everyone.

M: Can you talk a little bit about writing For Cod and Country?B: I really enjoyed the process of writing the book and going from chef to cook. Chef is a managing title. Cooking is about satisfying elemental, fundamental, basic needs. I got to occupy the emotional space of my own kitchen at home. I had never developed "home ec" skills, so I had to learn to plan a week's worth of meals and stock a pantry. Interesting chefs write their narratives as a menu and all of the dishes work together to tell the chef's story. As a cook, it's a much slower narrative. You might only have one dish for dinner, but it's a story that's told night after night. It was a very different way of looking at food.

M: Why did you choose to write the book by seasons?
B: As I was writing the book, I found that the seasonality of seafood is important. Just like other produce, we expect to have whatever we want available whenever we want. Often there are farm-raised fish that are available all year round. But the seasonality is about what's fresh. It's about being nimble as a cook and trying different things based on what's available. We shouldn't be forcing recipes onto a natural system.

Check out the National Geographic links to read more about Barton's work with National Geographic, find information about sustainable seafood, and watch his show, Cook-Wise.

Take a bite: www.bonappetitfoodie.com.

Sustainable Seafood Talk and Dinner with Barton Seaver

The other week I had the opportunity to go to a sustainable seafood dinner and talk hosted by National Geographic Live, featuring chef, cookbook author and Nat Geo Fellow, Barton Seaver. The whole evening can be summed up by the simple fact that Barton just makes sense; he gets it. His passion goes beyond the basic appreciation for ingredients, and his speech touched on several points that hit home for me. He put into words exactly what I've been thinking and what I've been taught my whole life. And while the case for protecting the inhabitants of our ocean is a pretty obvious one, Barton's argument for sustainable seafood is one that everyone needs to hear.

For the record, dinner was delicious!

There's an idea that food is this powerful force--we need it to survive; it can have such a profound pull and influence on our memory and our behavior. But there's something else. "Food really represents a window into a broad array of cultures and histories. And it's an opportunity to really connect to each other," according to Barton. "It was the fluency of food that allowed me to just insert myself into a community and to find the support networks that I was so desperately in need of."

Like writing, food is a means of communication. I happen to like both, and they've each got their merits. There are so many lessons to be learned when you share a meal with someone else. Not only does it connect us with others, but as Barton said, we explore the world with our forks. "Dinner is my lense of exploration. [...] Everybody speaks delicious." I couldn't have said it better myself.

There are people who view food and this whole "foodie thing" as pretentious, but I don't believe it is, nor should it be. Food is one of the rare things we all commonly enjoy. For that reason alone it's as familiar to everyone as the air we breathe. Unfortunately though, we've gotten into somewhat of a distorted, messed up relationship with our food. There's the obesity issue. There's the fact that we forget where our food comes from and how it ought to be made (hint: it's not in a factory or lab). Excuse me while I get philosophical here, but we've gotten ahead of ourselves and we're at a point where we think we're smarter than nature. We think we can grow and farm genetically modified foods with no consequence; we think it's a good idea to work against the natural seasons; we think it's acceptable to put wacky stuff in our foods to make them last longer and taste better. Simply put, we've gotten out of touch with our food.

"I'm trying to save dinner. Why? Because dinner is in jeopardy. But also because dinner provides a connection, joy, communion, health, jobs, community," Barton says. "Family should be the first ingredient in every meal. But even if we eat alone, we've invited entire communities that have participated in our meal to our tables," he says. "Dinner, I think, is the first way in which we can begin to replicate the bearing that we've lost in our country's agricultural transformation when we took the culture out of agriculture."

There was a memory Barton recounted of going to a farm in the midwest, where he rediscovered the social benefits of living in a farming community. I'm not foolish enough to think we should all go back to some idealized, honest version of farming. I'm also not advocating for some yuppie-ified, Birkenstock-wearing, overly romanticized view of farming. It's hard work, but rewarding. And I agree with Barton that we've lost the culture in agriculture, and that maybe that's partly what got us into this mess of health problems and a distorted view of food.

Continuing on the theme of food and culture, Barton added, "I began to step back and realize that regardless of my efforts I was never going to best a summer ripe tomato simply sliced on a plate. And this led me to dig a little bit deeper into my own practices in the kitchen, to take a step back from the plate and begin to identify with the communities that had brought the ingredients to me. My interest in food communities really led me to focus on the role of fishermen in our society."

And that's where we get to the whole focus of this dinner: sustainable seafood. "I was trying to save the fish so that I could continue to use them. I was coming to this because I wanted to save the seafood, which is also known as dead fish. I had very particular self-interests coming into this," Barton says.

The most startling statistic Barton gave was that 90 percent of our predatory fish are gone and approximately 70 percent of the world's fish population are overfished. Once those fish are gone, they're gone for good, folks. Part of the solution is that we need to take only what we need from the ocean. We also need to educate ourselves, and yes, change our appetites a bit to eat fish that are more plentiful while other species recover. It also wouldn't hurt to put some more vegetables on the plate and maybe scale down our portions of fish a bit, as Barton pointed out. I know that's a tough pill to swallow, since I could probably eat my weight in scallops, but if you want certain seafood to still be around in years to come then we do need to scale back on seafood portions.

Overall, the event was very interesting and I had the opportunity to grab an advance copy of Barton's new cookbook, For Cod and Country. Come back tomorrow to read my interview with Barton about his book, more about sustainable seafood and what you can do as a seafood consumer to be more sustainable.

Take a bite: www.bonappetitfoodie.com.

Updates and Posts Soon

Oh foodies, I know I've been quiet around here lately. All this week and last I was supposed to be writing up a storm. Actually, rewind that. For the past three weeks I was supposed to be writing up a storm. I've got backlogged and future posts ideas out the wazoo! But I started my new job, had a little cardiac scare (everything's fine! I'm back up to my insane speed of running from place to place and event to event) and then got in a minor fender bender. Needless to say, life has been extremely hectic these past few weeks. I'd be kidding myself if I said things were going to slow down, but at least some bad stuff is behind me.

I promise to write a boat load of fun stuff for you all to read this weekend. In the meantime, head over to We Love DC and check out my last two Capital Chefs posts about Nate Garyantes of Ardeo + Bardeo and Mallory Staley of 1789. Get in the kitchen and make their recipes (I drool just thinking about the scallops schnitzel, and looking back on it I regret letting Dan Giusti steal Mallory's rhubarb shortcake trifle from me when I was at the restaurant) this weekend!

Take a bite: www.bonappetitfoodie.com.