The Elegant Sufficiency

Michael Pollan at the Writers Festival

I’ll be honest… I haven’t read Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma, In Defense of Food) so what he had to say last Saturday at the Sydney Writers' Festival was fascinating, if not surprising.
On his request, moderator Caroline Baum had taken Pollan to the Sydney Fish Markets, and to an Australian supermarket. He showed the audience Exhibit A, Yoplait Smackers, and Exhibit B, an Omega 3-enhanced bread that “promises healthy brain development”. Among the bread’s ingredients was “tuna oil”. “This is a tuna sandwich even before you open the can of tuna,” he joked, before going on to say that adding Omega-3 to processed food is a very "reductive" approach to nutrition. He continued this theme on ABC's 7.30 Report on Tuesday night (transcript and video here) when he told Kerry O’Brien (who was hugely amused by the concept of the "soul of a carrot"):

“We know carrots are good for you, right? People have been eating them for a long time and the assumption was that what was good in cancer preventing in the carrot was the beta carotene. What makes it orange. So we extracted that and we made these supplement pills and we gave them to people and low and behold in certain populations like people who drink a lot would get sicker, were more likely to get cancer on beta carotene and the scientists kind of scratched their head. There is a couple of explanations. We don't know. But one may be that the beta carotene is not the key ingredient. You know there are 50 other carotenes in carrots. Food is incredibly complex. It's a wilderness, you know, we don't know what's going on deep in the soul of a carrot. And we shouldn't kid ourselves to think we can reduce it to these chemicals.”

My notes below on other themes he touched on at the Writers' Festival:

• In California’s Central Valley, vineyards are being ripped up to make way for almond crops, which are now one of the most profitable crops in the US. But almond trees only bloom for 10-14 days in February so there aren’t enough bees to do the pollination job. So now, every February, 60% of America’s honey bees are shipped across the country — others are brought in from Australia. With bees from all over the world mingling, it becomes, he says, “a great bee brothel”, trading viruses and parasites. The Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus (IAPV) has been implicated in colony collapse disorder in honey bees. Bee owners get $140 a box for the process. The bees are fed high-fructose corn syrup to get them in shape. Industrial agriculture is stressing bees and monoculture is the “original sin of agriculture”; nature doesn’t work that way. It may be an efficient method of production, but it’s not a resilient one.
• Caroline Baum asked Pollan how we can get people to care about food. Pollan responded by saying that when you can tell stories that link what’s on someone’s plate to what’s happening in the wider world, when you can tell people a narrative, a story, that’s when people will start to care. (This to me, is the most interesting sort of food writing.)
• He talked about the carbon and moral footprint of eating meat and predicted that we won’t be eating the way we do now in the future.
• He was asked about the crazy portion sizes in the States. Apparently they got bigger in the Seventies, when the price of raw materials was negligible. Companies such as McDonald’s were faced with two options: reduce prices, a bad move in business, or increase portions. The latter option won out. He drew gasps from the audience when he said it was possible to get a 64 ounce portion of soda in the US — half a gallon. That’s about eight cups, 1.9 litres, 4 pints. With food prices skyrocketing, it remains to be seen whether the super-sizing will continue.
• In one of the most interesting things he had to say, Pollan said that eating ethically in the 21st century is a complex decision-making process that depends on your values. What is your priority: your concern for your health? For the environment? For animals? Because those values might conflict. Organic rules, for example, “were invented before climate change was an issue”, and organics can have a very high carbon footprint. Work out what you value, Pollan said. “The key thing is to introduce values, not just value to your shopping decision.” As a result, we should be trying to get as much information as we can about what we buy. Transparency is what matters. 
• The refrain he has repeated time and again: “Don’t eat things your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognise: Eat Food. Not Too Much. Mostly Plants.”

Pollan can also be heard on Radio National’s Life Matters program here.

The Problem with Salmon (and Kingfish, and ...)

Had a great chat yesterday with Craig Bohm, Sustainable Fisheries/Threatened Species Campaigner at the Brisbane-based Australian Marine Conservation Society (AMCS). Was talking to him in relation to a short piece I’m writing for work but our conversation strayed into territory unrelated to the article and he confirmed some facts about fish that I knew, but was pretending not to know, would prefer not to know.
Eating ethically requires a strength of character that I wonder if I have. I like fish. I like seafood. I adore bluefin tuna belly (toro), love salmon and ocean trout, and probably any number of other species that should be left alone.
I asked Craig about salmon. In Australia, and probably in most other western countries, consumption of salmon — sea-cage aquaculture salmon — just keeps growing. Yet, the AMCS's Sustainable Seafood Guide tells me that we should avoid eating it.
For two reasons: first, the potential for environmental problems caused by escapee fish; second, the salmon are carnivorous, hungry things and eat massive volumes of wild fish. Apparently, there have been 20,000 lost fish from these sea-cage aquaculture properties since 2000. Those fish can form their own populations in the ocean, transfer diseases, become predators of wild fish, and cause displacement of other fish species, which previously might have lived happily in their natural environments. If it seems a remote possibility that farmed salmon could establish itself in the wild to such a degree, Craig offers the example of foxes, an introduced species in Australia that has caused any number of problems. It took three separate incidents of introduction in Tasmania before the species firmly established itself.
Then, as if I’m not feeling uncomfortable enough about my occasional salmon purchases, Craig tells me all about what farmed salmon eat. They like to eat other fish — pilchards and other small fish that’s turned into fishmeal. According to Craig, to produce one kilogram of farmed salmon can take between one and four kilograms of wild-caught fish.
Then he raises the subject of the other carnivorous fish that can be farmed, and so present similar problems – ocean trout, barramundi … and yellowtail kingfish.

Nobu Inspiration
I didn’t tell Craig that, only two days before our conversation, I’d pulled the hefty bones out of fillets of yellowtail kingfish on my kitchen bench and then dunked them in a marinade of sake, mirin, white miso paste and sugar.
A post on Rasa Malaysia had reminded me of Nobu's signature black cod dish and, with Nobu opening its first Australian restaurant in Melbourne last month, it seemed like a good time to try the recipe (it also fits my criteria for Elegant Light dishes). Black cod – any sort of cod – isn’t something I see where I buy fish and an expert had suggested to me that kingfish might be a good substitute. I liked the result (see below), but it was certainly dryer than I expect fish to be.
Then I called Nobu Melbourne chef Scott Hallsworth and it became apparent that yellowtail kingfish really isn't the best substitute for black cod (he gets his black cod flown in from Japan). Far better, he mused would be Patagonian toothfish. Or salmon. So I'm back to square one. Of course, you're supping with the devil if you eat Patagonian toothfish, which is threatened by illegal overfishing and definitely not on the Australian Marine Conservation Society's list of approved fish.
But, if my conscience stops me from trying the Nobu recipe with salmon, there is one sliver of light and hope: Scott Hallsworth tells me that it's a fabulous technique to use with Wagyu beef.

Nobu-style Kingfish
(Serves 2; needs to be marinated for at least 24 hours before cooking)

2 yellowtail kingfish fillets
1/4 cup sake
1/2 cup mirin
2/3 cup white miso paste
1/2 cup caster sugar
Green onions to finish or, if you can be bothered, 2 stalks hajikami

To make the marinade, bring the sake and mirin to a boil in a medium saucepan over high heat. Boil for 20 seconds to evaporate the alcohol. Turn the heat down to low and add the miso paste, mixing with a wooden spoon. When the miso has dissolved completely, turn the heat up to high again and add the sugar, stirring constantly with the wooden spoon to ensure that the bottom of the pan doesn't burn. Remove from heat once the sugar is fully dissolved. Cool to room temperature. Set aside a small amount of the marinade for serving.
Pat the fillets thoroughly dry with paper towels and remove any bones (they should be large and simple to tug out: tweezers help). Slather the fish with the marinade and place in a non-reactive dish or bowl. Cover tightly with plastic wrap. Leave to steep in the refrigerator for a minimum of 24 hours – two days is better.
Preheat the oven to 200°C (400°F). Lightly wipe off any excess miso clinging to the fillets but don't rinse it off. Heat a non-stick frying pan and fry the fillets until the surface of the fish turns brown. (They will burn very easily, so keep a close watch on it.) Transfer the fish to the oven either in the frying pan or to a baking dish. Bake for 10 to 15 minutes.
Arrange the black cod fillets on individual plates and garnish with sliced green onions. Add a few extra drops of warmed marinade to each plate.

Fish Trails

I started this post with the intention of ending it with a recipe. But I’ve got carried away and tied up in knots with a multitude of strands and thoughts. The recipe will have to come tomorrow. (Besides, I’m still determining whether or not it proposes eating an endangered species.)
I’m on a mission – determined to find out what I can about the fish species I should and shouldn’t eat if I want my niece to live in a biodiverse world. Time and again in the past few weeks, various articles, broadcasts, websites etc have hammered me over the head about the gravity of this subject.
It all started with a podcast from Eat Feed, in which Charles Clover, the author of The End of the Line: How Over-Fishing is Changing the World and What We Eat (revised 2006 edition, New Press) is interviewed:
He says:

“Imagine what people would say if a band of hunters strung a mile of net between two immense all-terrain vehicles and dragged it at speed across the plains of Africa … this fantastical assemblage like something from a Mad Max movie would scoop up everything in its way … predators such as lions and cheetahs, lumbering endangered herbivores such as rhinos and elephants; herds of impala and wildebeest, family groups of warthog and wild dog. Pregnant females would be swept up and churned along with only the smallest juveniles being able to wriggle through the mesh. Left behind is a strangley bedraggled landscape resembling a harrowed field … there are no markets for about a third of the animals they have caught because they don’t taste good or simply are too small or too squashed. This efficient but highly unselective way of killing animals is known as trawling. It is practiced the world over every day from the Barents Sea in the Arctic to the shores of Antarctica and from the tropical waters of the Indian Ocean and the central Pacific to the temperate waters off Cape Cod.”