Good catch:
UMass leads in sustainable seafood effort
BY RACHAEL HANLEY STAFF WRITER

AMHERST - On a recent crisp, fall night, students at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst were crowding the cafeteria. Wild salmon with Thai sauce and Pacific cod fried in batter were on the menu and lines at the Berkshire dining commons were to the door.

Ken Toong, director of dining services, was particularly pleased with the turnout. At the beginning of the fall semester, Toong and his staff switched out traditional fish (farm-raised salmon and Atlantic cod) and created a menu with more sustainable seafood options, such as wild salmon and Pacific cod. Although initially nervous that students would balk, Toong said the response had been positive.

Decisions to change the meals at UMass are not made lightly. UMass spends roughly $8 million per year on its food budget, with 7 percent of that going to seafood. UMass dining services is also one of the largest in the country, with over 13,000 students on the meal plan each year.

Yet, with demand from students and support from officials, the university made the decision to switch to sustainable seafood. This fall, dining services began participating in Seafood Watch, a program of the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California. As a local proponent of the program, UMass has positioned itself at the start of a sustainable movement, well ahead of other state schools in New England.

'Supporting overall sustainability is good for the long run - for our students and for the environment,' said Toong. 'We feel as a large public, land-grant university it is important for us to be proactive and to take leadership roles with issues concerning dining and the environment.'

Limited ocean bounty is a widely recognized problem. According to the report released last week in the journal Science, seafood populations are facing a collapse if current trends of over-fishing and pollution continue. Out of caught seafood, 29 percent of species have already seen a 90 percent decline, the report says.

'We're already well on our way toward driving animals toward extinction,' said Sheila Bowman, outreach manager for the Seafood Watch program. 'That prediction seems very real to me.'

The idea, said Bowman, is not for people to give up seafood completely, just switch to the species of fish that are numerous, well-managed and fished in eco-friendly ways.

'Think of what we eat among terrestrial creatures,' she said. 'Chickens are short-lived creatures. We don't eat a lot of elephants.'

Similarly, people should avoid buying seafood such as shark, which grow and reproduce very slowly. If consumers avoid fish with declining populations, there is a chance those populations will have a chance to recover, said Bowman.

'We need to give them some time to get the numbers back,' she said. 'Fish that have been scraping along would have bigger, better catches. It could potentially really turn things around.'

At the moment, about a third of consumed seafood comes from farms. But seafood farms depend on wild populations to provide eggs and food. Such farms, particularly those of salmon, can also create unhealthy amounts of pollution in existing waterways, said Bowman.

Monterey Bay qualifies seafood as sustainable when it's 'abundant, well-managed and caught or farmed in environmentally friendly ways.' Fish is rated as red when it should be avoided, yellow for good alternatives and green for best choices. In its Seafood Watch guide, fish such as Atlantic flounder, sole and cod are all in the red category; black sea bass, mahi mahi and U.S. swordfish are yellow; and Pacific halibut, Atlantic herring, wild-caught salmon, Pacific cod, farmed rainbow trout and U.S. farmed tilapia are green.

Bowman said efforts to promote sustainable seafood on a large scale, such as those at UMass, could have a trickle-down effect.

'Someone of that size can start to create demand at a level where suppliers start to sit up and notice,' said Bowman. School such as Princeton, Yale and Brown and food retailers such as Aramark, Sodexho and Wal-Mart, had also begun switching to sustainable seafood, she said.

'When you get enough of a sustainable mass going, it seems to push things along much more quickly,' said Bowman.

Other schools in the Five College system have not yet started using sustainable seafood, according to their dining services. Among area state schools, UMass also seems to be ahead of the pack. Although they are testing small sustainable food programs, neither the University of Connecticut or the University of New Hampshire have current plans to change their menus.

'We really haven't thought much about it,' said David May, the executive director of business affairs at UNH, which has 8,500 students on the meal plan. With little seafood on the menus, May said sustainability had not been 'a big issue' for the school. UNH currently tries to buy locally, but concentrates on sustainable local agriculture, he said.

'Certainly as the whole sustainable movement goes forward, I'm sure we'll get involved,' he said. 'But right now it's not high on the radar screen.'

At UConn, a sustainable program has started on a small scale, with the 800-meal Whitney dining hall, which now serves farm-raised catfish, wild Alaskan salmon, tilapia and other sustainable food this semester, said Rebecca Gorin, an assistant manager for UConn dining services.

Since Whitney began the sustainable program, there has been a 10 to 20 percent increase in the number of students dining there, said Gorin. Yet, despite these successes, UConn is still evaluating the costs of the program. Right now, there are no plans for the other seven dining halls to go the sustainable route.
'We'll see how it goes,' said Gorin. 'We haven't made any decision to switch across the board to sustainable seafood.'

Toong said he first learned about Seafood Watch from two sources: student comment cards and a Tastes of the World food conference held at UMass over the summer.

Since then, Toong said he has been working closely with vendors to create changes in the menu. Along with the quiet salmon and cod substitutions, dining services has switched to North Coast shrimp. The dining halls now also provide information about the Monterey Bay program to students.

'It's important for us to educate customers about making the right choice when it comes to seafood,' said Toong. 'It's important to promote a more healthy relationship between dining and the environment.'
Although Toong was initially concerned the alternate seafoods would cost much more, he said he has found the sustainable choices to be comparable in cost, as well as 'tasty and healthier. '

North Coast Seafood, a Boston-based distributor that counts Big Y supermarkets among their clients, agreed to help UMass implement the change. The university is now being courted by such companies as Australis Aquaculture, a fish farming company based in Turners Falls. Australis Aquaculture raises the Australian barramundi, which is expected to be added soon to the 'best choices' section of the Seafood Watch pocket guide.

UMass has already taken other steps toward sustainability, which Toong says is 'one of the biggest demands among customers.' Twenty percent of the university's produce is now provided by local farmers; UMass serves Fair Trade coffee in the commons. This year, UMass also began using organic produce in the dining halls.
Students, in return, have expressed their support for the efforts.

'Not only is this the right thing to do, it's the only thing to do,' said UMass senior Alina V. Ravkin, who had come to Berkshire for dinner. 'It's the only way.'