Say NO to Genetically Engineered Salmon

By Rick Moonen, Special to CNN

September 15, 2010 9:35 a.m. EDT

Las Vegas, Nevada (CNN) -- I am and always will be completely against any food that has been altered genetically for human consumption. And never, in the 30-plus years I have been a restaurant chef, has one customer requested a genetically modified organism for dinner.

This is why I was alarmed to learn early this month that the Food and Drug Administration announced with "reasonable certainty" that a new genetically modified Atlantic salmon awaiting approval posed "no harm" to humans who might soon have the opportunity to buy it and eat it as though it were a fish from nature. The announcement brings this "Frankenfish" one step closer to your table.

But make no mistake. The creation of this fish is just another tactic for big industry to make bigger, faster profits with no consideration for the impact it will have on our personal health and the health of our environment and ...

To read the entire story please go to CNN http://www.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/09/14/moonen.gmo.salmon/?hpt=Sbin

Moonen's BIG FIVE Theory

The way I see things (from my heart)…The state of the oceans according to Rick Moonen

    
The word sustainable is threatened and destined to be diluted towards meaningless rhetoric if big business has their way. Very much the same way organic has become a sound rather than a mentality. I have a tendency to poke my finger in the eye of mass industry mentality for several reasons and have a strong desire to shift the mentality of the mass market to battle the controlling influences of that big business propaganda. Seafood, or the acceptable biomass species we consume daily, is very narrow in my opinion. We know and target a minority of edible species and therefore place an unfair pressure upon those species causing dangerous futures of these exploited few. There are millions of seafood sources in the world and I believe that in the USA the population as a whole is only comfortable with choosing from the “BIG FIVE”.

     Here is my argument…

Whenever we discuss the state of affairs in the ocean we only talk about the edible wild biomass or targeted species…that we deem acceptable for human consumption…very narrow-minded, I say, when there are millions available. Most consumers feel very confused and intimidated by seafood yet realize the need to consume larger quantities of seafood for their health. They grasp on to what they know which is…and these are broad categories…I know…Ladies and Gentlemen…Presenting the “BIG FIVE” finfish fanfare…soon to be extinct by 2048…yum yum yum, eat ‘em while you can…

Salmon…the number one selling finfish in the world
Tuna…canned or fresh… the meat of the aquatic world…no question
Cod…the reason that the Americas were established (see the book called Cod)
Snapper…a broad category and completely confused
Bass…the blanket name that all else is swept under around and through…

If these names do not appear on the menu then it is time to go to another section for that particular meal. I want to research and start to expose some more balance to the ocean world in regards to our eating habits. There has to be under-utilized species that have broad market appeal and it is my opinion that we need to let our minds expand and our plates with them. The first problem is the identification of some tasty species that suffer from bad names…Wreckfish from Florida, for example, is not attractive when considering what’s for dinner yet provides a delicious protein profile and in the right hands kicks butt on the plate. So what do you do???

Sea Cats or wolf fish, drumfish, wrass up the ass, cobia the species of its own, wahoo sounding more like fun than dinner, tautog or black fish, red fish, blue fish, green fish, yellow fish, orange fish, snapper this bass that…on and on and on and on.

Stop the madness!!!!

Time to go after the “Non Targeted Edible Wild Biomass” NTEWB (oh boy another acronym to add to the trillion already out there!!!) to create a better balance on the entire population down under the sea…I was having a discussion with the “big five” the other day and they feel collectively that it has been unfair of the humans to ignore the other guys and they want a break for a while to get back to reproducing and increasing their populations; back to where they used to be…thank you very much! And if you don’t mind, while you’re at it, stop destroying the most favorable living conditions as well so they can finally settle down in a nice neighborhood for a change. All the moving about has been a little exhausting…nuff said!

Patagonian toothfish morphs into Chilean seabass…Slimehead becomes Orange Roughy…bla bla bla. The root of this argument starts with vernacular and the origin of the name game seems to be from the salty dogs that were removing them from their hooks in the first place…more like suggested nicknames to converse with each other. Wreckfish is a far better name than “that grey long slimy fishy thing I caught today”…right? The fishermen weren’t thinking of marketing strategy when the names were being created. So the confusion thickens like a fish stew.

Let’s talk business for a minute. Discuss amongst yourselves how to make a living selling the most perishable inventory available…other than human body parts. If you were to be a seafood distributor and you only wanted to deal with fresh seafood you would lead a very high anxiety lifestyle; a constant game of hot potato or musical chairs. What would you stock your ice filled refrigerators with??? Well… I would only stock them with what I know would sell within the next 8 hours so I wouldn’t get caught holding the stinky fish sale items of tomorrow…right? That brings me back to the…you guessed it…the “BIG FIVE”…why chance anything else…unless…Chefs were asking for something completely different…the creative gatekeepers of the food world…that’s right folks. Right back at ya into the hands of the next generation of cuisiniers, cooks, fish flippin culinary students.

• But how do they get the NTEWB’s in the first place to play around with?
•  Howcan we prime the pump of supply and demand to shift things into a more fair balance of all that is happening under the sea???
• How do we get a balanced inventory of super perishable stocks in the refrigerators of the world…?

DOWNLOAD THE SEAFOOD WATCH GUIDE HERE

OUR THREATENED OCEANS NEED OUR HELP

Ocean wildlife is threatened today as never before by human activities. We are in a very unique situation here. We, as a generation, must start to realize the task at hand …which is that our world is only renewable and capable of keeping up with the demand for nutrition and food if we take better care of it. It is designed to provide us with more than what we all could possibly need, but selfish greed has pushed the natural process of the food replenishing machine past its ability to provide us enough…naturally…to survive. I am not trying to sound fatalistic…but it is a fact. We now (since 2009) need to farm over 50% of the fish protein we consume, globally, on fish farms.  Fish used to be infinite in numbers…remember. Of course you don’t…it started over 50 years ago.  OOOO and that’s so long ago? Families move so frequently that they never get to realize the damage and changes to their place of existence. Listen to communities that have and learn something from them. First Nations have been crying trouble for a very long time but few have listened…LISTEN! 

Here comes the slap on the hand part…For several years we were taught that all we needed was a little rectangular piece of plastic to get anything and everything we wanted. Keep putting off the debt until a later time. Someone else will settle the score at a later date…after you got to live your easy wonderful…self deserving existence. It has been like trying to shovel an entire driveway of deep snow with one shovel off a cliff with one continuous push. Well …that snow built up pretty quick, got too heavy, and you are now stuck, several yards short of that cliff and can’t even see the cliff anymore because the mound grew too tall. As a matter of fact…does that cliff even exist in the first place?  And if it did was the snow going to crush your neighbor below and did you even care? It was never a great idea in the first place but because of a hand me down spoiled attitude perpetuated by generations of millions that got to reap in the rich spoils of a bad idea…no one was ever motivated to make a change.

Now we have NO choice. We must be the generation of true realization. A new born understanding of symbiosis with our environment must be realized. It’s all going to be OK…we just have to play better with our toys and put them away at night when we go to bed and the world will take care of the rest…it’s that simple…at first anyway.

WE ARE IN A UNIQUE SITUATION AS THE GENERATION OF 2010 TO HELP TURN THE TIDE!!!

Our globe is covered two thirds by the ocean and within it contains the answer. It is very forgiving but we must start to respect it and appreciate its capability.  Please motivate yourself and your families to get with the sustainability movement. I have been preaching this for over 30 years of my professional career and am dedicated to prove that it isn’t that difficult and that it can taste awesome as well. Through our menu choices, our purchasing decisions we can support the earth’s natural ability to rectify this phenomenon.

Monterrey Bay Aquarium puts out a popular guide to help navigate you through this mess. Theypoint out the land mines and the closed roads and show you where you can go to still enjoy the scenery along the journey. It is called the Seafood Watch card and it identifies the types of seafood that are most environmentally friendly and those that are the worst. Seventy percent of the world’s fisheries are either in decline or are already fished to capacity. Many species contain high amounts of toxins like mercury and PCB’s. We dumped the toxins in the water in the first place and there are thousands of seafood species that we have never considered serving on our dinner tables. Well… chef’s, like myself, are trying to get us all to consider them as a way to relieve the pressures of the species that are over exploited. I promise that they taste just as good…Please help me spread the word… 

You can download the latest Seafood Watch card here, or the app if you have an iPhone