Author Archives: sawyerbe

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For my group project, I worked with the Salish Center for Sustainable Seafood, a NGO committed to educating the public about reef netting and other sustainable fishing methods in order to preserve the Salish Sea. Our work was particularly focused on helping the Salish Center establish a PDO (protected designation of origin) for all seafood caught in the Salish Sea. The intention behind a PDO is the center’s belief that seafood from the Salish Sea is special and better than seafood harvested elsewhere. They also hope that PDO will increase consumer knowledge and interest in the Salish Sea and encourage engagement and a desire to protect it. 

On one hand, a PDO would be great in helping people purchase locally sourced seafood and understand the origins of their food. This is the kind of action that is encouraged in readings like The Pleasure of Eating and the lecture Localism. However, you also have to wonder, would a PDO really accomplish much in encouraging sustainable fishing methods and preserving the Salish Sea? The fact is – 70% of seafood is eaten in restaurants. The average American likely does not regularly prepare seafood or can’t afford to eat it on a regular basis. Seafood is a luxury item, and locally sourced, sustainably caught seafood is even more expensive. While a PDO would help restaurants source locally caught seafood, that’s a pretty niche audience and honestly doesn’t seem like it would help broadly increase consumer knowledge about the Salish Sea. While consumer knowledge can encourage activism, I also wonder if this depends too much on the individualist consumer habits and lures people into complacency. Consumers may feel like they are doing enough by buying local seafood, but will that make them interested in protecting the Salish Sea and promoting sustainable fishing methods? 

Map of the Salish Sea

The United States has a lot more legally enforced sustainable fishing practices than other countries, but the PDO would not require that the seafood harvested in the Salish Sea be caught sustainably or at least to the levels of sustainability that the Salish Center advocates for. With this in mind, you have to wonder what exactly a PDO would accomplish and if there would be a more effective way to protect the Salish Sea. Other NGOs are also working towards similar goals and it would be nice to see more collaboration between them in the future, especially in establishing a PDO or encouraging sustainable fishing methods:  a notable one in the Puget Sound area is Long Live the Kings, an organization that works to support sustainable fishing practices and restore the wild salmon populations.

Our Long Distance Relationship… with Food

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 Arisb’s post “Exotic…and I’m not talking about Joe” discusses contemplative practices in the sense of the intentional consumption of exotic food. Arisb makes a good point in the wide variety of food available to us in US grocery stores allows us to maintain cultural connections via food, because food isn’t locally sourced. For example you could buy a mango or watermelon year round at a Seattle grocery store even though it may not be the fruit’s season and fruit is definitely not grown in Washington. On one hand, this is a great power: we get to eat whatever we want whenever we want it as long as we can afford it, but on the other hand, it’s bred a culture of food ignorance. People, myself included, blindly consume with no thought to the source. 

Covid-19 may be the first time that many Americans are thinking about where their food comes from, as shelves at groceries stores are intermittently barren and it’s become impossible to find staples like yeast and flour (as the nation has become obsessed with baking bread), as well as many kinds of meat. News sources warn us of upcoming food shortages. However, the images of barren shelves are juxtaposed with images of farmers dumping their dairy and burying their vegetables.

Empty Meat Aisles at a Grocery Store (Image from Eater)

Dairy Farmer Dumping Milk (Image from Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)

It also makes me think about the section in the course, “Stuffed and Starved”, where we read an article that explained how Coronavirus could double the number of people going hungry due to major disruptions in the supply chain. However, simultaneously, some Americans have never been more stuffed due to their new lifestyle of working from home and boredom eating. Personally, I feel like I’m eating more than ever because of my long hours in front of the screen and little stimulation in my daily life. It makes me feel guilty to think of the countless snacks I’ve consumed in my cushy quarantine lifestyle as food may become increasingly hard for people to source globally. Why do we have so much excess when others starve? Tonight, I ate a grapefruit, and then I ate a Melona bar, and ate yogurt covered pretzels, and drank some sparkling water. Florida, South Korea, Washington, Georgia… Thousands of miles were spanned just so I could have a Monday night snack. Now that’s some food for thought. 

Contemplating Chocolate…

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I can’t remember the first time I tried chocolate. However, there’s a photo of it: me on my first birthday with a chocolate cupcake I had smashed on my face. Delight is tangible on face, although it’s hard to discern whether that’s from the cupcake or the act of smashing it. Either way, chocolate is something we generally associate with pleasure, especially in American culture. It’s not something we eat to sustain our bodies, it’s something we eat for the pure pleasure of taste, to celebrate a special occasion, or treat ourselves after a long day. The contemplative practice on chocolate urges you to think about the chain of commodities behind chocolate – to think about the labor (and to some degree, the suffering) that was invested for a single bar of chocolate. In this sense, a contemplative practice has equal power to be peaceful as it does to be disturbing. It’s easy to be a blind consumer, after all, a lot of businesses are not seeking to empower you. It’s not like the food you buy at the store or the coffee you drink says, “Made in exploitative conditions!”, it’s on the buyer to look for the fair trade certifications and hope that they mean what they say, often at the expense of a few extra dollars. 

However, there are many intricacies of fair trade, and none of them are particularly clear without further research. After doing the contemplative practice, I felt inspired to look at another product I use everyday (tea) to see how equitable it was. I saw a lot of little labels on my boxes of tea, a “fair trade label”, a “certified b corporation”, “quality assurance international”. But what do they mean? In class, we have read and discussed how the individualization of food and environmental responsibility can lead people to believe they are making a difference without actually working towards any political change. The little labels we choose to read or not read urge us towards a similar end. The reality is I can buy my certified fair trade organic peppermint tea that was produced in Sri Lanka and still have no idea what that really means or what conditions it was really produced in. I may feel I did the ethical thing but I also bought a Nestle Candy and who knows what conditions that made in. 

My overall point is we are global consumers, and it’s hard for us to know where our products come from and how ethical that is. On an individual level, we can work towards understanding the sources of food, but there’s not going to be actionable change until there is more consistent transparency in our food system.

Got (Too Much) Milk?

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Americans are eating out less, while that may be healthier for an individual’s budget, it’s impacting both the farm industry and the restaurant industry. So much of farm production is for commercial food, meaning that bags of onions, tons of dairy, and thousands of chickens are used to going to restaurants and cafes. But now we are seeing what happens when the restaurants close.  Starbucks is a huge consumer of milk, yet many of their stores have been shuttered by the virus. The tons of gallons of milk that Starbucks normally buys from farms daily, is now only needed every three days. But milk production doesn’t stop just because schools and Starbucks are closed. Cows still needed to be milked several times daily, so the milk was being dumped.

As noted in the article, “Dumped Milk, Smashed Eggs, Plowed Vegetables: The Food Waste of the Pandemic”, most Americans do not know how to make their own onion rings at home. This means that large bags of onion primarily bought by restaurants are not bought by a regular consumer. An onion is easy enough to rebag, but other foods are much harder and more expensive to repackage. A carton of milk for a school kid is not easily repurposed into a gallon for a family. Farms can’t afford to change the packaging of their product, so they dispose of it.  Farmers are dumping their dairy, crushing their eggs, and burying their produce. 

 In this current period of American life, there are so many people who are going without. Thousands of jobs have been lost, and savings rapidly evaporating; so you would think this would be a time of less waste. However, the opposite seems to be true, food banks lack the volunteer strength or the refrigerator space to absorb all the excess produce, dairy, and meat and farms cannot afford to grow and transport produce just for charity. It will be interesting and potentially frightening to see how the new crisis affecting farms will involve. How many farms will go bankrupt? How will this impact the food we find at groceries stores? Will it get more expensive or will the price drop? Covid-19 is revealing insecurities in our food system when we can’t depend on a culture of eating out. 

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/11/business/coronavirus-destroying-food.html