Chefs for Oceans want to teach us a thing or two about sustainable seafood. Here's why we should listen

Ned Bell of Chefs for Oceans thinks sustainable seafood is worth the efforts, and you should too.

Ned Bell is peddling sustainable seafood, literally. A sustainable seafood activist and founder of Chefs for Oceans, Chef Bell is biking across Canada to get Canadians more interested and engaged in sustainable seafood.  

Chosen as one of Canadian Living’s Top 10 Canadian Chefs You Need to Know About, Chef Bell is the executive chef at the Four Seasons Vancouver, the first upscale restaurant in Canada to go 100% sustainable for its seafood, meaning that the fish served at the restaurant is caught or farmed in a way that ensures the long-term health and stability of the fish stocks and the greater marine ecosystem. 

How to give your diet an eco makeover this Earth Day

Six ways to give your diet an eco makeover this Earth Day

 

The new “eating well”; being deliberate about what food you buy, where your buy it, and then ensuring that you eat it all.

I consider Earth Day a celebration, a launch party for a new way of doing things. The annual event challenges Canadians to make changes to our day-to-day lives in ways that benefit the planet and if we want to take up that challenge, April 22 is the kickoff day.  

One of this year’s challenges is to give our kitchen tables an eco-makeover by making more sustainable food choices and wasting less. It’s a very green thing to do since where we buy our food, what we buy and what we do with our leftovers has such a big impact on the environment. Regional food security comes into play as well since we’re so dependent on food from faraway places.

So where to begin? Earth Day Canada presents six suggestions for what we can all start doing today to make a meaningful impact through our daily meals.

Choosing sustainable seafood, these helpful tools make it easier

Use this helpful guide to find healthy seafood


We eat a lot of seafood in our house and let me tell you, it isn’t easy being green. Finding sustainable seafood is my greatest eco food challenge, week after week.

Thankfully there are some helpful pocket guides and apps available that provide direction on the best fish and seafood to buy. Seachoice.org created a great tool for choosing ocean-friendly seafood that categorizes fish choices by colour (green, yellow, red) making it easy to identify seafood that is best to eat, and that which is fished or farmed in environmentally damaging ways. It also lists the fish that you should be wary of due to concerns about mercury or other contaminants.  Seafood Watch offers a similar guide. 

Green living guides - a crash course in healthy living



This guide to safer cosmetics is one of the handy tools available to help us buy less toxic food and products.

I spend a lot of time doing green living research. I follow blogs and environmental leaders, I subscribe to healthy living newsletters and eco twitter feeds. You could say I’m up to my eyeballs in all things green.

But I still get to the grocery store and draw half a blank in the produce section, trying to remember what fruits and vegetables are on what list: the dirty dozen or the clean 15. In the personal care section I find ingredient labels confusing, mixing up the siloxanes with the glycinates (who wouldn’t?) Cleaning products are no easier, especially with all of those deceptive (unregulated) labels.

So even when you’re fairly informed, it’s tough to make the right choices. I end up with grocery store paralysis and come home empty handed or buy the wrong thing and have to return it. No wonder I’m so content using vinegar and baking soda for cleaning. The labels are easy to decipher. 

Making safe and healthy choices is hard work, but it’s getting easier thanks to a spate of printable wallet guides and mobile apps that decode labels and provide at-a-glance lists of do’s and don’ts. All the basics at your fingertips.

Here are some of my favourites:

The dirty dozen/clean15 wallet guide and mobile app. Developed by Environmental Working Group, these lists include the produce with the highest pesticide residue (that you should buy organic) and produce with the lowest (it’s okay to buy conventionally grown.) The guide keeps me sane in the produce section and helps me manage my grocery budget.

The dirty dozen of cosmetics, the David Suzuki Foundation’s shopper’s guide to personal care products. This is a great help, especially when I’m choosing products touted as “natural”, which can often be loaded with toxins along with the plant-based good stuff.  Environmental Defense has a similar guide.

The Shopper’s Guideto Cleaners is a new guide from the David Suzuki Foundation. It lists some of the most toxic (and surprisingly common) ingredients in household cleaners, and provides tips like choose fragrance-free and avoid cleaners that don’t list ingredients on the package.

Seafood Watch is a guide to choosing ocean-friendly seafood. It categorizes fish choices so you can avoid (or limit) consuming those that are fished or farmed in environmentally damaging ways. It also lists the fish that you should be wary of due to concerns about mercury or other contaminants.  Seachoice offers a similar guide.

Reading these guides is like a crash course in healthy living. It might be stressful at first (you’ll see there’s a lot to avoid) but keeping these guides handy while you shop will make it easier to make healthy choices. And there is a better chance you won’t be duped by false claims and misleading labels.