Sustainable seafood is good for business
Last week, several of us from UMass and the Alaska Seafood Marketing Agency (ASMI) were in Milwaukee to present a segment on the topic – Sustainable Seafood is good for business. It was our first time to partnership with a state agency to do a presentation together. No Sarah Palin jokes here. Serving sustainable seafood is serious business and makes good sense.
The presentation was on Friday afternoon at 3:15 pm and it was a bit challenging for us since we were almost at the tail end of the conference and many people were tired and wanted to head back to their hotel room for a rest before dinner. No problem; more people showed up than we thought would.
There were five of us sharing the stage and we all did our part for the 1 hour presentation. It was a tight squeeze to say my part in just 10 minutes and I felt a bit rushed.
As you may not know, Sustainable Seafood means seafood from sources, whether fished or farmed, that can exist in the long-term without harming the surrounding environment. Today our oceans are in serious trouble. Within the past 15 years of industrial fishing we have depleted nearly 90% of our ocean’s large predatory fish. Worldwide, we remove over 88 million tons of seafood from the ocean each year. The United States is one of the largest consumers of seafood. Approximately 70% of all seafood consumed in the United States is served in restaurants and at food service locations such as universities. Therefore, as an operator, we at UMass have a tremendous responsibility to do the right thing.
At UMass, we started serving only sustainable seafood three years ago and it was well received by students and parents. We also joined Seafood Watch (http://www.montereybayaquarium.org/cr/seafoodwatch.aspx), a program of Monterey Bay Aquarium designed to raise consumer awareness about the importance of buying seafood from sustainable sources. They have a great pocket guide that lists which fish are sustainable and which aren’t.
Wild Alaska salmon and Pacific cod are some of the most popular items on our menu. Less than 10% of the colleges in the nation are offering sustainable seafood options. Our objective during the presentation was to convey is that there is actually a role that we as food service operators can play to help improve the situation, especially in three areas:
1. How your seafood purchasing decisions can make a difference.
2. How you can help transform the purchasing decisions of seafood businesses in your community.
3. How you can become an advocate for healthy oceans for today and for future generations.
We are also dispelling the myth that serving sustainable seafood is more expensive, in fact it is cost competitive.
What is more, there are tremendous resources from marketing and technical knowledge that you can draw from Alaska Seafood Marketing Agency, our partner in implementing sustainable seafood at UMass. In addition, they have a great website with many recipes (www.alaskaseafood.org). All Alaska seafood is wild and sustainable and Alaska’s successful management practices are considered a model of sustainability for the entire world.
We would like to say thank you for the support from Claudia and Randy of ASMI, the wild and natural seafood from Alaska and to you, the customers that make our sustainable seafood program a success. Let’s do our part to preserve the healthy ocean for today and tomorrow.
It’s good business for everyone.
This is Ken Toong and thank you for keeping UMass Dining at the top.
Ken Toong
Director
Contact Ken at ktoong@mail.aux.umass.edu
You can follow Ken Toong on Twitter at: http://www.twitter.com/KenToong