“Fish are hard to count. You can’t see them and they move,” are the truest words ever spoken about fish and sustainability. They came from Dr. Robin Pelc, Fisheries Research Manager at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. In a nutshell, this is the problem with sustainable fisheries management: It’s hard to count fish, and, at least in New England, there’s some controversy over whose counting methods are most up to date.
 
I was an East Coaster at a decidedly West Coast Sustainable Foods Institute, the annual “Cooking for Solutions” conference presented by the Monterey Bay Aquarium. On the West Coast, sustainable seafood is presented as a settled issue. For those of us who eat Atlantic local catch, sustainability seems more of a moving target. Seafood sustainability gets complicated for a local chef when a day boat fisherman brings you a fish “red listed” by Seafood Watch. You absolutely know that responsible fisheries management matters for our collective future. But you also know that the guy went out at 4 AM to catch the fish and a mortgage, and you think about that too. As simple as Seafood Watch card makes decisions for locavore diners, it’s less black and white for locavore chefs. Chefs tell tales of diners getting belligerent because they served a local fish that was listed on Seafood Watch’s red list. Sometimes a bluefin tuna on the menu isn’t a blasphemy. It’s just a single by-catch from a responsible dayboat fisherman.
 
The Seafood Watch prints a tri-fold card that lives in 36 million wallets and is an app on 600,000 smartphones. The card identifies seafood species as green (Yes!), yellow (Think twice!), or red (No way, no how). Significantly more information is available on the app version or the website. In 12 short years, Seafood Watch has become the ultimate eco-label: the Gold Standard for consumers and for policymakers concerned about the health and sustainability of seafood populations worldwide. Originally, Seafood Watch was conceived as a crib card to help diners make responsible decisions about what to eat for dinner. The card caught fire with consumers. Seafood Watch leveraged the authority of those 36 million card carriers, and now has significant influence on fishery producers, food service companies, and national and international seafood policy makers and regulators . Quite a coup for a local aquarium in a California resort town! When Seafood Watch speaks, sonic waves spread out across the ocean. Little fishies all over the ocean flap their gills with joy or trepidation based on whether they’ve been labeled as green or red.
 
For New Englanders who want to eat local, there’s a problem. Almost no Atlantic fish are on the green, “best choices” list, and several Atlantic fish (Atlantic Halibut, fresh or farmed Atlantic Salmon) are on the “red” or avoid list from the January 2011 Seafood Watch card. No one wants to decimate the fish population—an Atlantic without an adequate fish population would be an ecological and economic disaster—especially for the fishermen who make their living catching fish. By all accounts, good fisheries management in the last decade has led to a rebound in fish populations in New England. Everyone agrees that fishing limits work. But how much and how high should the penalties be for fishermen who inch over their limits? In mid-May the Commerce department had to re-pay over $600,000 in fines deemed excessive levied against local Boston fishermen.  Seafood Watch has been a game changer in the discussion about sustainable seafood and I thank them personally. But as in all things, it’s hard to distill world down into three small categories of green, yellow, and red. And it’s even more complicated with fish because they are so darn hard to count.
—Louisa