Fish Too

Turns out I have a lot to say about ocean creatures and homeopathy, sushi, and places to buy great, sustainably caught fish. So, in order to keep the last post relatively short, I've written this one.

First of all, I was excited to learn from Wikipedia that when sushi was first eaten, it was fermented! Sushi was originally made by fermenting fish with rice, then throwing away the rice and only eating the fermented fish. I imagine it was quite tasty and full of good probiotics. Beginning in the Muromachi period in Japan (AD 1336–1573), it was made into a fast food by using vinegar to flavor the rice and no more fermentation! By the 1800’s this form was popularized all over Japan. In one area of Japan, near Lake Biwa, in the middle of the island of Honshu, sushi chefs still make it the traditional, lacto-fermented way. I'd be interested to know if any sushi chefs in the U.S. have ever offered fermented sushi on their menu!

Speaking of sushi, I came across a restaurant in San Francisco, Tataki, that was one of the first sushi restaurants to take on the concept of sustainable dining in 2008. The owners' goal is to preserve the art of sushi, and so they feel they must safeguard the health and biodiversity of our oceans by only serving responsibly sourced, environmentally friendly seafood. The chef/owners, Karen Lui and Raymond Ho, follow the recommendations of their sustainability guru, Casson Trenor. He wrote Sustainable Sushi: A Guide to Saving the Oceans One Bite at a Time (North Atlantic Books, January 2009).

 Here are a few additions to sustainable fish shopping options in the San Francisco Bay Area:

The friendly folks from Hudson Fish, Yvette and Mike Hudson, set up shop at the Thursday and Saturday Berkeley Farmer's Markets, the Saturday El Cerrito Market and the Sunday Kensington Market. They fish out of San Francisco Bay, their fish is local and seasonal, and they only use sustainable methods to catch fish that are not endangered. They have wonderful fresh fish week after week. My family especially enjoys the Maguro tuna that we cut and eat raw, sashimi style, and the butterfish or black cod. Their line and pole caught salmon is also very fresh and flavorful.

 Berkeley Bowl and El Cerrito Natural Grocery are two grocery/butcher stores that publicly source their fish. Berkeley Bowl sells some fish that isn't as sustainable as others, so it's good to read the signs and talk to the butchers. El Cerrito Natural Grocery only buys and sells fish from reliable and sustainable sources, just as they only supply organic produce in their store.

If you want the freshest and most directly sourced fish and are happy shopping from home, Vital Choice is a great web-based mail order sustainable fish and organic supplies store located in Bellingham, Washington. Their main products are fresh, wild fish packed in dry ice, that can be shipped within two days to your home. They also sell canned and smoked fish, nuts, dried berries, oils and vinegar, and herbs and teas. They very carefully source their offerings, and as they say, only 1% of the salmon they are offered for sale meets their requirements for sale to their customers. They offer free shipping for any order over $99.

On a completely different note, I so enjoy watching sea creatures doing their thing, especially when I know we’ve made a homeopathic remedy from that species. It helps me gain insight into the behaviors and sensitivities of those creatures, which I study as a homeopath, in order to see them in the people who come to me for help. When people are ill, they develop a complicated pattern of symptoms. Homeopaths correlate these symptoms to the symptoms exhibited by healthy volunteers when they took a homeopathic remedy developed from a particular animal, plant, or chemical in a homeopathic proving (this is where homeopaths discover the symptoms substances can cause, and therefore cure). One of the things I find fascinating about being a homeopath is seeing how my clients seem to have taken on the characteristics of a creature or substance ...which they may or may not relate to. By careful questioning and observation, homeopaths look for that specific remedy substance that is exhibited by our clients, and so they need homeopathically. I feel a strong connection when I have the opportunity to observe the animals of the ocean, especially when I’ve heard from my clients about their reality and they need a remedy made from octopus, jellyfish, cuttlefish, shark, dolphin, sea star, or seahorse.

The ocean is rich with a huge variety of life; homeopathic remedies are made from a small number of ocean species as well as the elements that make up the sea; Aqua marina and Natrum muriaticum are made from ocean water and sea salt respectively. There are also remedies made from many mollusks, such as Calcarea carbonica (oyster shell), Pearl, Cowrie Shell, and Nautilus. This is one of the many reasons I love homeopathy - I get to study biology, botany, and chemistry as a way to better understand human behavior.

Octopus, Jellyfish, Sharks, Oh My!

Having spent part of the day today at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, I’m thinking a lot about the many delicate, fragile, gorgeous creatures I saw and how precarious their survival is.

 Some of my favorite sea animals on display at the aquarium are the two big octopus, the many tanks of jellyfish, the green sea turtles, and of course, the amazing variety of seahorses. For me, just watching these animals swimming in their tanks and doing their beautiful movements, having evolved in so many incredibly diverse and fantastic ways, brought it home for me. 

I think of the ocean as a giant womb, full of all of the elements for life, everything in balance, allowing for the delicacy of a jellyfish and the massiveness of a blue whale, and I’m pained to think about how much we’ve done to harm it.   

Going to any natural history museum these days is a lesson in how we’re ruining the planet; the Monterey Bay Aquarium is no exception, in fact their mission is to educate the public on sustainability. Today I watched aquarium employees using puppets made from recycled materials and singing about team work as the way to solve the earth’s problems; recordings of artists who are using various media to make the plight of the ocean’s creatures more personal; and entire interactive exhibits showing the many ways we can take responsibility and have less of an impact on the ocean.  

The aquarium educates people across the country with its Seafood Watch Sustainable Food Guide, which you may have picked up at your local fish market. One can also download a free app for the iPhone or Android. They now publish them for most of the regions of the U.S. and also print a Sustainable Sushi Guide. These are small folded cards that can easily fit in a wallet and are edited twice yearly to reflect the current state of our fisheries and tell us what fish are best to eat and which should be avoided. As one of the docents explained to me today as I picked up a new one, it’s often not so much about the type of fish; it’s also about whether it was caught or farmed sustainably, and sometimes, where it was shipped from. 

I learned more about how unsustainable the sushi industry is when my family was looking for a place to celebrate my mother’s birthday last month in Santa Cruz. We were leafing through a local free paper, the Santa Cruz Weekly, and saw a review of a new restaurant called Geisha Sushi in Capitola. One of the objectives of the owner is to only provide sustainably raised or caught fish for the restaurant. He does not serve three of the most popular types of fish: Unagi, made from freshwater eel; Toro, the fatty underbelly of Bluefin tuna; or Hamachi, which is yellowtail tuna that is usually netted, because they are all overfished and endangered. Even though it is difficult as a sushi restaurant not to offer these favored dishes, the chef has found ways to get around this. He serves “Onagi,” which is locally caught catfish made with the same sauce as Unagi, and line caught yellowtail tuna, and the local’s favorite, sardines, which he brines and sprinkles with vinegar. We had a wonderful meal there and I will say felt much more informed and responsible. Since then we’ve eaten sushi a couple of times at less conscious restaurants -  we just order the fish we know is sustainable.