Sustainable Seafood
Date: April 19, 2008

Lemon basil basa, miso-glazed cod or linguini in red clam sauce … just a small sampling of the John Jay Dining Hall seafood menu entries as remarkable for why they’re there as what’s there.

Last semester John Jay began buying and serving seafood according to the Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch Guide in an effort initiated and driven by the student action group EarthCo, says Joseph F. Heavey, Executive Director, Dining Services Controllers Office.

Heavey says EarthCo’s calling attention to serving sustainable seafood made Dining Services realize it was doable. “And the truth of the matter is that it didn’t have a lot on the down side,” he says.

The Monterey Bay Aquarium Website describes its regional guides as containing “the latest information on sustainable seafood choices available in different regions of the U.S.
The guides list seafood in three categories: “Best Choices … abundant, well-managed and fished or farmed in environmentally friendly ways;” “Good Alternatives” to the “Best Choices” list; and “Seafood to ‘Avoid’ … overfished and/or fished or farmed in ways that harm other marine life or the environment.”

Heavey says John Jay menu selections from the “Best Choices” and “Good Alternatives” lists are communicated to food distributor SYSCO. SYSCO, in turn, finds the fish from about 100 vendors with whom they collaborate. “We set the specs with our vendors, and this makes it easier to set up our program,” he says.

John Jay’s only exception to seafood from “Best Choices” and “Good Alternatives” lists is salmon. About $17 per pound, Monterey Bay-approved wild-caught salmon is prohibitive, so farmed salmon is served occasionally. However, Heavey says, “we are discussing various ways and methods of creating a more sustainable dining program, including the elimination of farmed Atlantic salmon from our menus."

EarthCo member Jason Patinkin, CC ’09, says the group decided this was the project they wanted to take on in the current academic year. It was important, he says, because “it increases sustainability in one of the most important parts of what we eat.”

Patinkin says there’s been a lot of progress at Columbia with other types of food – organic, for example – but until now seafood had yet to be addressed. Describing EarthCo’s working with Dining Services to get the sustainable seafood menu under way, Patinkin says it was “the easiest environmental program I’ve worked at at Columbia.”