Tag Archives: Salish Center

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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.

Salish Center and the Importance of Food Sourcing Education

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My work with the Salish Center was focused on establishing a PDO (protected designation of origin) for all seafood harvested in the Salish Sea. In effect, this would ensure that all seafood derived from the Salish Sea would be labelled as such, and that no non-Salish Sea seafood could be labelled as a product of the Salish Sea. The concepts that we focused on reminded me of Wendell Berry’s work on The Pleasures of Eating and Karen Litfin’s work on Localism. In this way, my work with the Salish Center highlighted the intersection between the legal classification of food and how this fosters community development and pride in local food production.

Salish Sea Certified designation

Sample medallion for Salish Sea Certified PDO. Image courtesy of: https://salishcenter.org/#mission

As our program director told us, one of the primary goals of establishing a PDO for Salish seafood was to foster community pride in what he considers to be a superior food product relative to other seafood. By identifying a superior product as Salish Sea derived, the Salish Center hoped that local populations would be driven to protect the sanctity of the product’s origin. This is reminiscent of Berry’s quote that “eaters… must understand that eating takes place inescapably in the world” in order to contextualize their place in a larger food system. By stressing the importance of the health of the Salish Sea in bringing about its superior seafood, the Salish Center was essentially working to help consumers remember that their seafood and the quality thereof was contingent on a tangible, mutable part of the world.

See the source image

The Salish Center’s work helped remind consumers of the tangible source of their product’s origin. Image courtesy of Puget Sound Action Team.

Further, by identifying superior Salish seafood as a local product, the Salish Center  worked to incentivize consumers to reduce their “food miles” by buying local. The rationale behind this is that consumers would recognize and respond to the superiority of the Salish Sea’s products with increased consumption thereof, thus simultaneously supporting their own appetite and local food economies. As Litfin points out in “Localism”, “a local economy will have lower energy requirements and therefore be ecologically friendlier”. In this way, the Salish Center’s work contributed to environmental conservation.

My takeaway from this project is the power that something so simple as food labelling has in forming and protecting a community. Prior to working with the Salish Center, I could only imagine the corporate incentives behind labelling food as “organic” or “Walla-Walla sourced”, for example, but now I understand the importance that such labels have to protecting the source of the product and reinforcing pride in local food economies.