Andrew Zimmern & Barton Seaver | The Blue Food Cookbook | Talks at Google

Good afternoon everyone. I am Jessica Carless. I am a UXR on the Android AI team. I will be the moderator today with these lovely gentlemen. We have Andrew Zimmern and we have Barton Seaver here today in Chefs. I will start with introducing Andrew today and I will read their bio so that I don't leave anything out. I think it's really important to kind of celebrate where a lot of people have come. And so Andrew is an Emmy winning and four time James Beard award winning TV personality, chef and writer. As the creator, executive producer and host of Bizarre Foods franchise, MSNBC's what's Eating America, Magnolia's network, Emmy nominated Family Dinner, the Emmy winning the Zimmerman List, Field to Fire, Wild Game Kitchen and the executive producers of PBS Hope in the Water. He's devoted his life to exploring and promoting cultural acceptance, tolerance and understanding through food. He has authored four books, sits on many national boards and is the global ambassador for the United Nations World Food Program and the International Rescue Committee.

Wow.

It'S impressive. Yeah, this is great. We're lucky to have you here.

I'm old, you know.

It didn't say 70.

Keep going, keep going.

It piles up and so and for Barton, one of the world's leading sustainable seafood experts and educators. Before leaving the restaurant industry to pursue his interest in sustainable food systems, he was an award winning chef leading top seafood restaurants in Washington D.C. he's written seven seafood centric books including For Cod and Country and the Joy of Seafood. Barton has contributed to Coastal Living, the Coastal Table, Cooking Light, Every Day with Rachael Ray, Fish Fine Cooking, Fortune, Martha Stewart's Whole Living, the New York Times and of course Oprah Magazine, the Washington Post among many others. He's appeared on 60 Minutes, CNN, NPR, 20 20. You like TV? You like TV? And Ted Stage. Seaver hosted In Search of Food on the Ovation Network and Eats the History of Food on National Geographic tv. Please help me welcome these great chefs.

Hi everybody.

Thank you.

So how this will go today is we will do some questions that we've kind of already kind of talked through with them and then we'll open it up to the audience. So kind of get your questions ready, curated in your mind and I'll take some questions from the audience and I'll also get some questions from the dory also. So let's start with some of the questions that we have cooking. What inspired the Blue Food Cookbook and what do you hope readers will take away from it?

Go for it.

This has been a three plus year project to get this Book off the ground, right? And when you have so many people contributing to a book, because it's not just us, right? There's our illustrator, our photographer, editors, our assistants, recipe testers, on and on and on and on and on. We've learned who gets to answer what question. And it's very funny. So Bart just shot me a look that I usually only see from my wife that was very funny, which was, you take that one, babe. This is essentially what those eyes were telling me. I was a little kid, 5 years old, 1966. My mother wakes me up in the middle of the night. We put hot cocoa in the thermos, the old metal ones with plaid around the outside, old scotch thermos. And we sat in the dunes of the beach community that I grew up in. And I asked her, what are we doing here? And she said, just wait. And the sky just started to brighten a bit still really, really dark gray, blue.

And.

And these men just started pulling these giant white boats, probably the length of this room. There was a huge net in the middle of it. They had oars. There were five foot waves coming in and they're putting this boat through the waves, put this net out, pulled another one in. So now there's the net plus, you know, 1,000 pounds of fish in it. And they pulled the boat back up on these logs and back up into the dunes and threw the fish in the truck and off to their seafood store. And I asked. It was beautiful to watch. And my mother said, that's going to go away in a very short amount of time. But within two years, three years, by the end of the 60s, that was gone. Nobody was fishing off the beaches of Long island anymore. People had big houses there and my parents were. Had an activist mindset and, you know, we dug clams. They didn't call it foraging. We, you know, pulled mussels out of the jetty. You know, they didn't call it foraging. We crabbed. They didn't call it foraging. We clammed. You know, it was. That's just what we did. And so that set me on a course professionally. I love to cook seafood. I love everything about seafood. As a chef, it's a great challenge. And there's a tremendous variety of flavors and textures from foods that come from the ocean, thousands of them. There's one type of chicken we eat, there's one type of cow we eat. There's thousands of things we can eat out of the ocean. And I was fascinated by that and had the opportunity to cook all over the world. And Then make TV all over the world. And I saw these systems crumbling and disappearing. And I was on countless boats in the middle of countless places in Africa, Europe, South America, Asia, with someone who was telling a translator in a language that I didn't speak, the water is changing. I've been doing this for 30. My family, 30 generations, we're not doing it anymore. And I started to really, that activist mindset of mine that my parents had gifted me with turned into an activist action planning. And I really devoted the last 15 years to working in the blue food space with my work with the UN and a lot of the other NGOs and nonprofits that I do a lot of work with. And Barton and I met 20 years ago. Along the way, I wound up making this television production company that I have made Hope in the Water for PBS because of all of this stuff. It's interesting though, I don't think I've talked about this, but you mentioned NBC's what's Eat in America? And in that episode three, we actually went out on the water and there's used to be these big fish fries in the Midwest. I don't know if anyone's here who lived in the Midwest or family grew up doing fish fries. One fist pump in the front, right on Midwest. There's no more perch on the American side of any of the Great Lakes. They just don't exist anymore because of our climate crisis. Ice out on the Great Lakes, we lose a day, a year. So what used to be ice out by May 1, now ice out by April 1. And fish replicate on a lunar cycle. And it's. It's been a horrific thing. So we profiled all these stories, we did this TV series, and then it was time to do a book. And who better to do the book with than Barton? So it was, it was, it was a pretty easy sort of step forward. And I think for me, it's just, I want people to eat one more seafood at home that you cook a week. That's the goal.

Barn, do you want to add anything to that or do you want me to just move on?

Yeah, well, picking up on the Eat more seafood, I consider myself and Andrew is as well, a seafood evangelist. It's our mission to get more people across all demographics to eat more seafood more often. If we were to do so, there would be, I think, radical public health, economic and environmental outcomes. Seafood. If you're going to have an animal protein as part of your diet, seafood is the sustainable choice. There is good land animal proteins, and we are very Much pro those systems, but seafood is just more biologically efficient. There is more to be gained with eating more seafood than there is to be lost. And one of the things that has been unfortunate is that seafood has kind of become guilty before proven innocent. The headlines that you read about it are all very negative, and rightly so. Those stories are true. But what we're not hearing is the Hope in the Water. What we're not hearing is the stories of things that are going radically right that have given Andrew and I as salty seasoned as we've become after decades of traveling and traversing and seeing being a part of these communities. That's what Hope in the Water, the series is about. And that's what this book is about, is trying to echo the good that's happening in order to inspire people to fall in love with seafood, to give them permission to fall in love with seafood and then to create the confidence and competence in order to really, truly adopt it and make it part of their lives. And the best part about this is like, yeah, this is all high and mighty stuff, right? Actually, we're just talking about delicious. Like at the end of the day, all of this is ideas until we pick up a fork, at which point health, environmentalism in economies become actions. And that's the fun of this, is that we can all bring it back to the communion of our commons, which is the dinner table.

I love that. And as we were talking about in the green room, the mini hustles and bustles of like children, right? You know, like I told you, my son, we'd got him three costumes and then the day of Halloween, he decides he's not going to to wear any of them, right? Think of the families who are juggling, you know, family, work and kids and all of the things that they do. What are your go to weekday seafood meals that feel special, but they don't take all night. Like, what, what's one? You're like, okay, mom, all of them. Okay.

I mean, this, this is you. You bring up a. I mean, it's fantastic point. And we haven't talked about, no one's brought this up yet, but with us. But the, the fact of the matter is, is that, you know, seafood, you know, if you were doing a quick fire challenge at home, seafood, right? It can take you 6, 7 minutes to sear a piece of fish, right? Less if you cut it a little thin, right? I mean, it just, it's, it's extremely easy to get dinner on the table. Most families that I know are time poor and financially restricted for the 80% of Americans that have a food life. We have to remember there's a fifth of Americans that do not have a food life. So we're looking for something healthy, nutritious, good for our family, good for our environment, good for all of those pillars that Barton referenced. You know, a simple piece of fish, regardless of what it is, as long as it was raised sustainably, doesn't matter whether it was frozen or came in fresh, doesn't matter whether it's farmed or whether it's wild. If it came from a sustainable fishery and it was handled well and you have purchased it, that then, I mean, look, I'm not telling everyone to go out and buy lobsters and caviar. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about fish that comes out of the water here. I assume you all live here. We're blessed to have so many different types of species of fish that rotate through seasonally here. So when you say favorite, that's really, really hard for me because who's your favorite child? Right? And I can hear Barton about to go into his rhythmic rap song about the 87, you know, white flesh fish species that are right in the water about two miles away. But it really is, really is true. There's just so much deliciousness and it is economical and it is easy to make.

If I could answer that. So my favorite dish is not in the book. It's one that's just, it's a victory in my house where dinner is called survival, which is that my children don't know that boxed Mac and cheese does not come without tuna in it. They have never had it without tuna in it. And this is just a can of tuna. Boom. Right done. If you stir it up and you add it in there with the butter and I forego the milk in the box cheese Mac and cheese recipe. I put in some pasta water and I really work it in there with the back paddle of a spoon and I make it nice and creamy and rich. And then that cheese or whatever it is melts into that and the tuna is all broken down and kind of becomes this protein rich, delicious omega 3 woo healthy SA sauce around it and the texture is just a little bit offsetting to the creaminess of the pasta. And damn, like, this is good. Eats like straight up. This is a good plate of food, right? And my kids don't know the difference. Seafood from the freezer is also a big part of sort of my favorite family style recipes because it's a convenience food. All right. And we can get into frozen seafood. And the pros of it that Andrew and I are both very, very much in favor of frozen seafood. Now, good quality frozen seafood, you pull it out of the freezer on a Tuesday night when you're just trying to get to taekwondo and ballet and whatever else is happening. Right. You put it directly in your freezer from into your toaster oven from frozen with a little bit of salt and olive oil on it, and 25 minutes later, at 300 degrees, you're done. Okay. Now all of a sudden, health, nutrition, environmental, is all convenience food out of the freezer.

Right?

I'm sold.

So then there's other dishes that you want to take that freezer fish and dress it up. You heard of panzanella salad, Late summer ripe tomatoes, all of their wonderful juicy glory, with spicy red onion sliced thin, maybe some cucumber and a little bit of spicy arugula in there too. And all of this is bound together by croutons. This is an Italian salad to make use of yesterday's bread. Well, I take the croutons out and just use fish sticks and straight out of the toaster oven, chop them up into crouton shaped pieces, and there you go. I mean, you have a dish that is compelling, seasonal, nutritious, creative, fun, cheap, like all of these things. So seafood really isn't can be taken out of the sort of elitist or like this specialty item idea in cuisine and just, hey, let's insert it into the things we're already doing.

When Barton talks about seafood being presumed guilty before innocent, like it always has to prove itself. And I think part of that is that feeling that many people have to not even go buy the seafood corner in the supermarket where there's a person who knows what they're doing standing with a whole bunch of really good fish on ice. Right. Because we practice as human beings, contempt prior to investigation. Right. It's expensive, but I won't know what to do with it. Worse if I do buy it, I will mess it up. Right. So when Barton talks about confidence and competence, that's why we have so many simple, easy. I'm a big fan of the, of the poach braise. I like liquid heat with fish because it's super simple. He's obsessed with throwing things in his toaster oven.

Heard that. I see that we've got one at.

The house, but I have, I have my session too, and I, I'm a big. It's so fast. I have a really powerful stove and so the. It boils water really quickly. And I have one of those things in my house where there's hot water that comes out of the faucet. But then I have one of those little power boosts. I have 170 degree water comes out of this other faucet. And you know, it's, it's, it's nice, but it really is only an extra 2 minutes for anyone anywhere versus 170 degree water to get 2 inches of water to a boil in a pan that has a cover on it. Right. Something two inches high and a little wide. Three, four pieces, whether it's from the freezer or the fridge. And you add a little bit of celery and carrot and onion and some peppercorn, something to season a sliced lemon, maybe a splash of wine before you pour yourself a glass after work and just let that corbuillon do its thing. And that fish is going to be amazing. I will do that sometimes knowing that the next day for lunch, I'm just gonna put it on greens or whatever sort of salady thing I wanna make to bring. Cause I'm trying to lose weight to bring to the office for a healthy, nutritious, delicious lunch. You know, seafood is easy. Seafood is simple. And you know this cookbook. And there's 145 insanely craveable, delicious, easy recipes. Well, I lied. 10 of them might be a little challenging. Don't try them first, but you can try them second. But that's only 10 out of 145. But they're super, super, super accessible for everyone and primarily delicious. And we really think that people will eat something good and say, yeah, I want that. I want to, I want to do that. I want to do more of that. So, yeah, okay.

And you've both traveled a lot, you know, traveled around the world, I think, met a bunch of cultures and seen different people. How do you see seafood traditions as a reflection of culture, identity or even resilience.

As quintessential? You know, I think we don't have to go very far in order to maybe exemplify this. You've all heard of heirloom tomatoes or heritage heritage, you know, pork or something like that. Well, America's settler, America's first heirloom food is cod. It was white people were fishing cod off of the shores of this country long before we stepped foot on was upon the backs of cod and the communities that fished them. That this country took our first steps towards political and economic freedom. The importance of cod cannot be overstated. And so when we look at these heirloom things of like, what are we trying to, what are we grasping in the past to rec and virtue that we want to carry through with us, right? And I think through seafood we can begin to see that long before we turn to amber waves of grain, we were charting the tempestuous waves of the North Atlantic. And that was the food basket of this early nation. So that is proven by the effigy of the cod that sits above the Massachusetts statehouse. So, you know, yeah, we've traveled all over the world, but this also cuts close to home. But when we don't understand the avatar or the archetype of the fishing community, as we often don't, you know, if I ask you to close your eyes and picture the small American family farmer, like, we get it, right? It's, you know, perfectly patterned hills, perfectly patterned rows of corn leading off in undulating hills towards autumn splendor, setting sun, with a white farmhouse picket fence, red barn, color fading like, hot damn, right? I mean, this is the thread by which the fabric of, of America is woven. But you ask people to picture a fishing community and they've got like the Gorton's fisherman, You know, it looks like a damn Scooby Doo villain, right? If it wasn't for these kids, it would have gotten away with it. Like, ah, like, here's your fish stick, right? Like, okay, but like, once we begin to reassert or reassign the archetype of the fishing community to look like us, to be reflected in the labors and aspirations of that community, then we begin to understand the noblesse and the virtue and the value that they bring to our society. So I'll leave it at that for the sort of the American, you know, and I've had plenty of experience working in fisheries. I worked as a sardine fisherman, an octopus fisherman in Africa for a while. Western Africa, the same in Senegal. What I see here with the cod is replicated elsewhere, or vice versa. Really. And I'll pass it to you.

Yeah, I mean, could go a lot of places. But you said Africa, which is a place where I currently do a lot of work. You know, Africa is the world's largest island. You know, don't, no, don't judge me. I know it's man made, not a moron, but it's an island, right, if you think about it that way. And some of the best seafood, well, the best seafood I've ever eaten in my life has been in several places in Africa. And it's absolutely remarkable. But we never get it anywhere There's a couple of Dutch and German companies that are actually have some. A lot of big oyster farms off the coast of Namibia. But we really never see African seafood because Africa is only responsible for about 4 and a half, 4 and 3 quarters percent of global fish exports. And the reason that it's so small is that it's made up of tens of thousands, maybe more, of artisanal fishing communities all around the coastline. Interior Africa, where I do a lot of work, especially in Zambia, 96% of the people there are small hold farmers. The vast majority of them are solely growing corn. Right. When you look at these fishing communities, you talk about culture and you said the word. I think the last word you used was resilience. I immediately thought of the fishing communities in Africa that I've spent a lot of time working in and talking with because they are going out every day a mile offshore, oftentimes in rather dangerous waters with no electronics, no safety gear, so no life jackets, no nothing, just like they've been doing for thousands of years. But because of our climate crisis, they have to go further and further out. So sometimes when a storm comes, and by the way, they know when a storm is coming way before any electronic gear could tell them that sometimes it's tough to get back into shore. And when they get to shore, oftentimes there's no electricity, which means no ice, no refrigeration. So in a lot of artisanal communities, because rehydrating scorched fish, that's how it's often dried in these African. You've probably seen it in Senegal, if you spend a lot of time there, they will literally burn it until it's dry, knowing that that scorched flavor, when those fish rehydrated will go into a rice dish, it will be part of a meal, it will be made into a sauce. And the cultural significance of being able to feed oneself, regardless of the situational challenges that coastal Africa faces right now. And interior Africa, you know, as the GRE economy there is plunging because of soil degradation. I mean, they're trying to. Fields aren't going fallow. They're getting every drop of energy out of the land there, right? So they can feed hungry people. We've got to grow the blue economy there. And there's so much joy in these fishing communities from Cape Town all the way up to Alexandria, Egypt, and from east to west coast. I think some of the greatest stories that I've experienced and some of the most moving times in my life have been with those artisanal Fishermen. And that story is being repeated over and over again in Europe, in South America, off the coast of Chile, especially these days, you know, in Asia, there isn't a place on planet Earth, what is it? 2 billion people earn their living off the water or work on the water, and 1 billion. It's their primary source of protein, or is it reversed? I confuse myself regardless. Lots, Right? Lots. And so from a cultural significance standpoint, it is culture. Food is culture. Right. So I think it sort of speaks for itself that way.

That's a great answer. I'm going to ask a question that maybe is very obvious, but let's not assume. What does blue food mean?

Yeah, we have no clue. Yeah, we thought it was a cool title that gave a color palette to the book. I'm kidding.

Blue food is a United nations term that speaks to the larger paradigm of what seafood is. Right. Seafood is the thing that's on your plate. Blue food is the environmental impacts, the public health impacts, the economic impacts. It is the policy. It is the global trade organizations. It is all that sort of goes into seafood ending up on our plates as well as the culture of eating it. And we use this term for the book in order to kind of ask people to look anew at the category. Seafood. Yeah, like, yeah, I got seafood. Blue food. Actually, there's a lot more to this story and more than we can do with seafood. And, you know, another way that we. You could put it is like, blue food is seafood that matters, meaning it's an ingredient through which we are intentionally accomplishing some outcome, whether that's positive, economic, public health, or environmental.

I think that's a great answer. I will do one more question, and then we will turn it over to the audience, because it's more important that they ask the questions than I do.

I like your questions. They're good.

What's one ingredient you can't live without? And we'll say as a compliment to the blue foods or to the seafood.

I mean, we don't want to do the cutesy thing and say it at the same time, but we're both kind of obsessed with fennel.

Sorry, I was gonna say mint.

Well, we are obsessed with mint.

I saw a lot of mint in the book.

There's a lot of mint in the book. But you wanna know something that's really interesting, though? That when you have something, you know, that has a certain flavor profile, Right. And a lot of fin fish has the same flavor. A lot of, you know, crab, lobster, and shrimp, very different. Blindfolded, you taste the Difference, but they have a lot of commonality. Right. And I'm just picking general categories. Things that have that sort of, you know, brilliant hit of. Of acid, like a lemon, will wind up almost everywhere with that. There's an antiseptic quality that mint has that's glorious with cold seafood, hot sea. I mean, I could take mint. I can't think of anything that comes from a lake, ocean, river, stream, does not matter. That wouldn't benefit from having some form of thing that has mint in it. Not that I serve it that way all the time. My family would kill me. But the same can be said for fennel, both bulbs and seeds. You know, there's certain flavors that are just so beautifully, like, comfortable around seafood.

Oh, how we love fennel. Andrew and I got into a little competition while working on this book, each boasting our bona fides as the true fennel king. Andrew even texted a few of his colleagues, asking them to serve as witness to his crown.

I did.

Bolstering his claim to this throne.

Petty is that sound?

I'm just reading the book.

I get it. You probably wrote that sentence, but it's really funny. I mean, I literally. I had a sous chef who worked for me for about 15 years before he moved from Minnesota down to Louisiana. And every time I post a recipe online or I mention the word fennel, he screenshots it and sends it to me. That's it. Because he would always accuse me of, why does fennel have to be in everything? I just think it's so ridiculously versatile. My family, if they never saw another fennel bulb. Right. But, you know, I quarter them or cut them in six, poach them in a Corbouillon that has a little bit of honey and butter in it, then brush it with a little honey and butter and slow roast it in like a 275 degree oven so they just caramelize and get candied and then just put them on plates with anything. With fish, it's great. Or you can just take it and slice it on a mandolin so you can read newsprint through it and just toss it with a little mint, a little lemon juice and olive oil and serve it with seafood. It's just so, so good. And he harvests his own seeds. I mean, this is an ongoing.

When I write recipes, my business, and I, I don't have fennel in it. My business partner Katie asked me if I'm. If I'm okay, if everything is so.

Yeah, well, I had to laugh when you said mint because someone should have Told me mint was a weed. We grew it in the garden one year, and it is everywhere. Everywhere, everything. Every year, it keeps coming back.

So now join the club. Because the only way to control it is to put it in everything.

My wife ripped out the mint bed. We both have spent a lot of time in Morocco, right? You worked there, didn't you? And the one thing I remember about Morocco is just the smell of mint. Everywhere you go, there are donkeys pulling carts with hundreds of pounds of mint. That's a massive amount. And when the breeze blows the right way, you just smell mint. Everywhere you shop, someone brings you a little cup of mint tea. And so what I wanted to do was David Boulay sadly passed away last year. Famous American chef. And when he opened up his flagship restaurant in New York when I was working there in my 20s, he famously put baskets of apples. Apples inside the front door in the vestibule before you went through the second door to enter the restaurant. So when you opened up that first door, if the doors had been closed for a little while, you just smelled apples and you just went nuts. Right. You couldn't get any hungrier. So I had this idea. I'm gonna plant mint beds on either side of our front door. And of course, they took over everything. Yes. And every year, my wife threatened to. And I came home the other day from a business, and there's nothing there, not even stumps. She literally had everyone just rip it all out. And she just said, no, you put that down the garden, you do a pot, you do whatever. You can't possibly.

It's everywhere.

It's everywhere. I love it. I love the smell of it. Oh, my gosh.

All right, thank you both so far for your questions and your.

Your.

Your commentary on the questions. We'll open it up to the audience. Do we have any questions? We have mics on the right and the left. Or you can project as much as you can. Whatever you want to do. Okay.

I'm just curious. When you say sustainable seafood, I'm thinking of all of us consumers in the room. When we're at the grocery store and we're looking at what's in front of us, how should we be thinking about it? There's rating systems. There's the merits of farm raised versus wild. There's low trophic species. Like, what should we be?

This is the eternal dilemma of the seafood evangelist. Right. I want to almost write a 19th century style poem about it. Because the minute you set out to evangelize about seafood, immediately all of, well, that question and about a dozen others. Right. Come out of, you know, people's mouths. Wow, Andrew and Barton, this sounds great. And, okay, I'm gonna try more fennel and mints with my seafood. But what do I do? What do I do when I walk into that store? How do I know what's right with all of these? What do you call them? Alphabet soup.

The Alphabet chowder.

Yeah, the Alphabet chowder. Of all the different agencies, you know, msc, asc, you know, ocean wise. I mean, there's all these different organizations that have, you know, red, yellow, green or numerical systems about what you should or shouldn't be eating. Look at some of them. Pick one. Don't drive yourself crazy. It's nice to be reminded that sometimes things change and you shouldn't eat something for a while. Right. Sometimes nature does it by itself. Right. I mean, crab up in Alaska wasn't available for three years and then magically this year it just showed up again. But, you know, Barton always talks about, you know, introduce yourself to the person behind the counter at the supermarket or at the seafood shop, wherever you get your seafood, there's someone there who's invested in making these choices and to help you to be a gatekeeper. Barton said something earlier that I think is really applicable to your question. He talked about all of these horrible things in the seafood industry.

And then.

He referenced how much had changed. And I, you know, the chicken industry hasn't changed that much and neither has the beef industry in the last 120 years. Right. Except technology has allowed them to create chicken that's worse for you. And beef that's worse for you. I mean, that's their big, like, I mean, unless you're buying $70 a pound ground beef somewhere that's grass fed and handled by a very small family farm. And I'm not really exaggerating that much. The seafood industry in the last 15 years has probably accomplished more to clean up their systems, whether it's managing wild fisheries or aquaculture systems, than the beef and chicken industries combined over the last 60 to 75 years. Right. And supermarkets, not specialty seafood shops, Right. They're already clean gatekeepers for the most part, but supermarkets have been the first ones to kind of step up and say, okay, nationally, regionally, municipally, whether it's a large, medium or small chain of grocery stores, we are going to just buy seafood that is raised in a sustainable fashion. So you, the consumer, can make an easy choice by picking anything, or almost anything in our case. And it's a really miraculous thing, but introducing yourself to the person behind the counter is probably the most important thing that you can do. Ask them what's fresh. Ask them where it's from, right? Take a look on your phone. There's nothing wrong with looking on your phone. And in seven seconds it'll tell you if it comes from a well managed fishery or not. You know, you live here on the Atlantic coast. I mean, you couldn't have a better, you know, dock to backseat of your car in a shopping bag system set up for yourself, right? So you're lucky that so much of what comes in here into this city comes from sustainable fisheries and from a fishing community that needs all of our support. But ask those questions wherever you buy seafood and be somewhat aware. I mean, the great thing about seafood is there's thousands of species that we can eat, right? The bad thing about it is there's only one kind of chicken and one kind of cow. So no one ever goes into a supermarket and says, where's the wild chicken? No one. Right? But I get all these arguments from people at my house about wild versus farmed. And I'm like, what do you think's going on with your chicken? Oh, my God. I was just at your house the other day. Your pork chops, I mean, I wouldn't give that to my children. I mean, just. Oh, my. It just gets me all angry.

We'll take the next question.

Hello.

So I appreciate so much all the comments on, like, sustainability and accessibility. I had a bit more of a culinary question. So I just returned from a long trip in East Asia, which Andrew, as you pointed out, has long embraced seafood as part of cuisine. And I think, yeah, really got exposed to just the variety of ways that you can use it, both in terms of flavor and even texture. So a couple dishes I tried, kani miso from Japan, which looks quite unappetizing, I must say, but it's delicious. It tastes like the ocean. It's like a stew of crab innards, basically. And then also I had a fish that I can't remember the name of, but the texture was like, crunchy, which was, like, kind of unusual for what I expect fish to taste like. So I was curious, for things that we have access to here, what were some fun or interesting things you've gotten to try over the years that have been exciting for you or that you would recommend that we try?

What a fantastic question.

No, I want to hear your answer.

I mean, there's a bunch of them, and I've had that same dish in Japan. And the minute you said it, I was just like, oh my God, do I love that stuff. Probably one of the more interesting things is down in Peru they have their own cross pollinated Chilean Chinese cuisine and Chilean Japanese cuisine. And the Chilean Chinese cuisine is called chifa. And I, I'm sort of obsessed with all things Chinese. It just is a fascination of mine. This incredible rich food culture that's super deep and super deep and super wide. And some friends, actually a Japanese chef there took me to a Chinese restaurant and he knows I love steamed fish. I mean, just really pure, really clean. And it was a dish whose flesh is minimal and you essentially ignore it. And the translation, the only name they had for it was frogfish because of its face. And you essentially over steamed this fish and you just pulled this big chunks of very thick gelatinous skin off it. I know this sounds so unappetizing, but you dipped it in a little sauce and you were just like, oh my God. And it had that, what the Chinese called qq. It has a bouncy, chewy texture to it, but insanely pleasant. And that immediately jumped to mind. I don't think there's anything crazier. Were these fish small, those armored box fish, the crunchy ones?

I don't remember. We had it as part of hot pots.

Yeah, it's really fascinating because the Amazon river system, they're bringing out new ingredients all the time. And I've spent a lot of time down there. And you just, every day there's like. Have you seen that before? No, never seen it. Does it have a name? Yes, it's called Spring Spring Crunchy fish or whatever. But we had these little armor plated box fish that were kind of crunchy all the way through. And you ate this crunchy armor plating on the skin the same way that you would eat a shrimp shell of certain types of shrimp, fried or hard seared. It's just incredible.

So going with a much more benign or sort of answer. Having done exploration, not to the same degree, but I'm constantly amazed by what's available here. Just even within the category of fish that you think you already know, cod. Everybody understands cod in Massachusetts right here. You ready for this? Drop it.

Yeah.

Do you want to do it?

No, go ahead.

All right. But within that category, when you fish cod, you'll also have haddock and hake and cusk and ling, monk skate, wolf, dog, eel, ray pout, place dab flounder, witchbacks. If you go further outside of that, you've got basa tri swab. You, I mean, you could go on and on and on, right? These are all flaky white.

You could go on and on and on. None of us can go on for.

Somebody to drop me a beat. No, no, no.

You. You know.

Within that category, they all cook very much similar. Meaning you could go to the store with a recipe that inspired you from here for cod and say the pollock was great, good, perfect substitute. But there's also so much exploration to be done within these categories. And pollock, for example, which is on the menu today in a Veracruzano style Chef Gregory is doing, is absolutely fantastic. It's called blue cod or harborcod, and it's got this pearlescent blue hue to the flesh. It's got a nice snappy, elastic texture to it, but still that same convex, soft, sweet flake of cod. And it just sits on the back palate with this wonderful rich, buttermilk kind of mashed potato aroma. Hot dam with a little bit of salt. Fragrant seafood, gory coming out of it. You're like, okay, right? And it's $4.95 a pound for filet right now because it's running hard, and the harbor's cool, right? So there's all these taste, textures, seasons, narratives, colors to explore within seafood that we don't necessarily have to go so far outside of availability or our comfort zone in order to find something new and pleasant.

And talking to whoever's selling the seafood. I mean, find the place that you like to buy it, and that could be your neighborhood grocery store, or you could get your everyday seafood there. But once a week, you're going to a seafood specialist, right? And you develop those relationships. Trust me, when you look at him, the fourth time in a month that you've been there, they will remember you. And you will, because you will have introduced yourself, and you get to say, what's the most interesting thing that's come in today? What haven't I been ordering that you think I should try, right? I mean, sometimes they go into the back and say, we got three of these. They're amazing. Do you want one? Because just like in a traditional butcher shop, there are always, you know, the hanger stakes people that, you know, oh, it's the best cut of meat, you know, on the cow, and there's only two pieces of it on either side of the breast of the beef. You know, the butchers called the butcher's cut because they would take that home at night. Well, the same thing happens in the world of seafood, right? The boat comes in, you know, good thing being here versus the Midwest, right? Those three fish that they got, right, it's not necessarily bycatch. They're maybe fishing rod and reel while they're hauling in nets. They got nothing to do. They got a couple fish. They give them to the people at the shop. The people at the shop. Or like, yeah, we've got our. Our freezers are full at home. Like, I'm eating a pork chop tonight. I'm not eating fish. Right. That's where you're going to have these magical experiences and. And moments where you're going to try things that you've never tried before that are just absolutely glorious. And. And then you start to have a real experience and relationship with. With where and what you're eating and. And how you're eating. I think it's really cool.

Well, I'm a little mad because you partially ruined my question. Because I was gonna raise pollock, but I was gonna say, often I go to a supermarket and I'll see everybody waiting for the cod. They want the salmon, but maybe they'll reach out to a haddock or a flounder. But I often like half the price, much fresher, looking like beautiful blue fish or a pollock or other varieties monkfish. So I was kind of like, maybe even. Is there something you could say about the. The fishes that are. I'll say just. You don't even have to do a whole different recipe, right. Like a thing of like, oh, this looks fresher. It's a better price. Like how. How do people start, I'll say, wandering outside of, like, the shrimp, the salmon, the cod.

Sure. Well, that's how we. How we organize this book is in. In culinary categories. So all of those flaky white flesh fish that I just mentioned all do well in the recipe for monkfish in shakshuka. Right. Which is a spicy. It is.

Wow.

I was told this yesterday. Wow. Sorry. We've been doing a lot of interviews together.

He might even remember that he has that recipe in the book. But I cooked it three weeks ago, and it's glorious.

Thank you. But it's for monkfish, but it's a spiced tomato sauce served with a brown rice almond pilaf with a little bit of cilantro and lime juice. Like, it's fantastic. Right. And something I like to say is sort of sell the dish, not the fish. And in that way, when you have a preparation that you know is familiar, you know exactly what it's going to taste like. Right. The fact that you bought the dogfish today doesn't actually change the dish. Right. You're still 90% familiar with what's going to hit the table in that way. It's a very comfortable way to begin that process of exploration.

Black cod makes a lousy bouillabaisse. Okay? It's a very soft flesh fish. Bouillabaisse gets its name from boiling it quickly, the fish broth, right before you put all the little local fish in, really small ones sometimes, but you emulsify the olive oil that's in there into the liquid. That's how it gets its name, right? So if you try to do that with, you know, a species of fish where that's so tender that it falls, or a flounder fillet, a really small flounder fillet, or, you know, panfish from Midwestern lake, little bluegills or crappies, you're gonna have a problem, right? There are very few exceptions to the rule. That's one of them. But when you have a dish in mind and the. You. You ask for cod, and the guy kind of looks at you and says, we just got a whole bunch of great monkfish, what he's really telling you is this is the last day the cod. Like. Like you come here all the time. I like. You buy the. The. Buy the monkfish and do the same dish. Do the same dish.

Hi there. So I get my fish from a fish share, Cape Ann fresh catch. And I feel good about it because I feel like, you know, in the movies, you see some unscrupulous fish middleman, like, charging a lower, outrageously low price. So I feel good about that. But should I, like, in the hierarchy of how I get fish, what are some of the best ways to buy fish?

Well, you named. I mean, you actually named it. We did. In. In Hope in the Water, season one, that came out last summer, episode three, we profiled a group of people in Philadelphia that are going down to the dock buying fish that nobody, quote, unquote, nobody wants. And because they're blasting all this mythology, right, These incredible young people, they're all under the age of 25, have created a seafood CSA, right? And so they're bringing it in, and we have these wonderful moments with all the people that they're selling to, right? Because everyone says, well, Americans don't eat seafood. Well, what is American? I mean, that's. I mean, you look around this room where every color, shape and size there is, and all of us come from traditions and cultures you were talking about before, resilient ones, where seafood was on the plate all the time. Like Barton was saying about cod, right?

Here.

So I think the best way to do it is the way that you're actually doing it right. And you do save a lot of money. And it's one of the ways that you can fight this mythology that seafood is always expensive. Sometimes it is, right? But boy, is that a great way, Great, great way to eat seafood. The other thing, and Barton said it earlier, but I just want to underscore, we're big fans of frozen, the techniques now that so many fisheries are using. The fish is harvested and frozen so quickly, it's pristine when you defrost it. And there's tremendous savings in it because they can store it. The boats can stay out longer at sea. The, the fish filet or whole can sit in warehouses for longer. We're the beneficiaries of that. Right. So I like frozen. What do you think about that question?

I would just iterate to decide. A really great thing to do to purchase seafood is to decide that you are going to purchase seafood at least twice a week or to make seafood, what's for dinner twice a week. That's one of the biggest major hurdles that just America has to get over in order to accomplish these great outcomes that we want. Over 50% of Americans eat little to zero seafood at all. So there's a big cultural shift that needs to happen. But just going into a store, whether it's your csf, whether it's a Shaw's, whether it's Red's Best or a specialty store, just committing yourself and your own menu planning to seafood at least twice a week is a, is a must.

So last year I went to Portugal for the first time and was introduced to good tinfish. And for Christmas, for my family's Yankee swap, I got a nice box with like a variety pack of tin fish and everyone just rolled their eyes at it. And my partner ended up taking it because she was the only other person who knew that it was actually good. So I guess I'm curious for your general thoughts on tin fish and in particular, how do you get people to get past their skepticism and like think be beyond chicken of the sea when they think of tin fish.

We adore tinfish. I mean, adore.

You know, there's quite a few recipes.

In the book I don't start. We have a whole section on it in the book. And you know, I have at my house, I will take tin fish literally out of the tin, say sardines, and you know, crumble it onto a salad for lunch. I will also, if you're coming to my house for Dinner. Take those same sardines out, gently pat them dry. I save the oil, right. I may use it for something else, or I may make a citrus vinaigrette with it with lots of chopped herbs. And then we'll dress it as a first course, probably with a lot of shaved fennel, but. But you can go high, low with it. It's extremely, extremely prudent to buy, especially when it's on sale because like frozen, it is designed to last. Right. And I always tell people who are new to tinned fish, do not make your first tinned fish. Experience the $42 ounce tin of five razor clams in a, you know, a black ink escabesh, right? That is deep end of the pool. You will love it maybe the second or third time. But there's so much deliciousness with. I mean, look, you referenced chicken of the sea. There's so much great sustainable tuna harvesting around the world and in this country big time in the Pacific Northwest with species of tuna that are very sustainable, where it is cooked once, not twice, right? A lot of tinned fish that's bad is actually cooked twice, right. To seal it. And stuff that's packed in water tends to be a little more problematic for me texturally. But so much tuna is so delicious and about 25 other species. And even just tossing into pasta, I mean, it's just glorious. I'm glad you had that good experience. Evangelize to your friends. Have a tin fish. I was just at a restaurant in California and as a, you know, there's people were doing breadboards. They actually did a tin fish board that I made fun of when I saw it on the menu. Until it came to me and it was like three or four tins of fish. And the chef just selects them, opens them up and then puts accoutrements, you know, bread and butter and salt and radishes and lemon wedges and little piles of sliced tomatoes and stuff in these incredible, incredible crispy homemade crackers they make in the restaurant. And I was like, this is the best thing that I've eaten and presented the best way I've said better than anything I've eaten all year long. It was fantastic. So very, very pro tinned fish. And look, a lot of people practice contempt prior to investigation. I mean, this is our battle every single day. But there are, there are so many beautiful ways to serve it and obviously shameless. Plug start with some of the delicious recipes in the book. Right.

Perfect. Okay, so we have five minutes. I want to do three things in those Five minutes. One of them is, I think there are some dory questions. I only see one now, but they were like four or five earlier. Can we bring those up? I feel like I want to honor at least a couple of people that were in the dory. And then there's someone in line.

So put in some dory questions too. So maybe whatever you want.

Okay.

I can rephrase the question.

Yeah, Come on up and we'll say you like the dory question. Yeah, from the dory.

Yeah.

So skip the Chris Murphy questions. So this thing about perception is very interesting to me and I think if we had another hour, we could talk about why it was perceived this way. But talking about solutions. So I'm really interested in the idea of the renaming thing, the Patagonian toothfish. The dogfish is now Cape shark something.

Right.

What's the next one to do? How can we keep that train going?

We just named seafood Blue Food, so we just went for the whole category. Right. So I actually wrote an entire book on the history of American seafood industry to kind of understand what that passage was, from being the principal bed mark bedrock of our economy to being sort of shunned. And that book is called American Seafood. I think it's a very fascinating cultural shift there. The renaming of things, I think is probably a. It's usually illegal, but probably less effective than reminding people of the virtue and value of the communities that produce it. Right. You don't go to the farmer's market to find what you're going there for. You go there to find the vegetables that are ripe. And whether it's a purple cauliflower or some weird green fractal thing that looks like it was shot out of some space laser or just a white cauliflower, the idea that we are going to the market for the virtues and values, giving them the social license of the value that they create for us. That's what we need to. To do for fisheries. And if we understood that dogfish is delicious, it is incredibly abundant and it would radically help east coast fisheries if we just said, sure, it's what's for dinner. Why do we need to rename it dogfish? I mean, we eat plenty of catfish in this country. We can eat dogfish too. So the idea that I think it's not so much renaming it as so much as it's reimagining and revitalizing our belief in and the systems that produce.

It, I think from a solutions oriented standpoint, and I agree with what Barton said immensely, Patagonian toothfish To me, is no more or less appealing than. What did they turn it into? Chilean sea bass. I really wasn't that fond of it. It's wet and it's kind of mushy, and I'd rather have black cod. Right. But that's just me from a taste standpoint. I mean, we get to not like things, by the way. It's not like I like everything, but it's one of the, you know, I mean, I'll eat it if you serve it to me at your house, but it's just not something that I necessarily looked for. Dogfish, on the other hand, one of my favorite fish to cook with and in very plentiful supply here. But I heard something very interesting at a conference from Dr. Swetichok Tabori. And I always like to give her credit because she's one of the foremost behavioral scientists in the world. And she always reminds me, we do a lot of panels together. For whatever reason, we've just wound up in the same places. And she always says to me, whispers to me, remember, the number one determinant of changed human behavior is how much value they place in the words of the person delivering the message. So that's why. Well, a lot of you, I think, are too young. But that's why Clara Peller, that one was screaming, where's the beef? In those old commercials? You know, everyone trusts Jimmy Dean. That's why regardless about how horrible it is for you, that is a billion dollar frozen breakfast business in America. Billion dollar plus business. I mean, that's crazy, right? So you, we hope that you will be the evangelist to your friends, right, about whatever it is that you're cooking. As long as you're making seafood, what's on the plate. We hope that people listen to us. Some people come because the recipes are delicious. Some people come because we're somewhat amusing. Others come for the messaging about the environment. You know, we just want people to come to the table and have seafood be what's for dinner.

Thank you so much for your time. Thank you so much for your time.

We really appreciate all of you. Thank you.

Sa.