Feast of Burden

Within our 100-mile foodshed, we have access to world-class wine, dewy-fresh produce, hook-and-line-caught fish, heritage turkeys and grass-fed beef. If this is utopia, then why does shopping for dinner require a sustainable support group?

It always starts out so innocently. There I am, doing my weekly shopping at Good Life Grocery, my neighborhood store in Bernal Heights. One of two Good Lifes in the city, it’s locally owned and has a respectably crunchy name. It’s the kind of place where the clerks grab a few non-transfat animal crackers from the bulk bins to give to my kids. I wave to a few friendly neighbors, get a cart, throw some sesame bagels in a bag, wheel around to the meat-and-fish counter—and immediately, my happy-go-lucky soundtrack comes to a record-scratching stop.

There it is: the lox. While other parts of the country are dominated by the biggies such as Wal-Mart, Kroger, Albertson’s and Safeway, San Franciscans are fortunate to have stores, even beyond Whole Foods, that offer eco-conscious choices. In the case of Good Life and its smoked fish, my two-year-old’s favorite food, I’m faced with three different brands of wild salmon—including one that sparkles with a seductive gold star that says “line caught” and another from the “pure waters of Alaska” with a stamp of approval from the Marine Stewardship Council, which sounds official enough. And then there’s a pack of Ducktrap that clearly reads “Atlantic,” which, since there’s no commercial salmon fishing in the Atlantic anymore, means it’s farmed.

I don’t need to consult my “Seafood Watch” cheat sheet from the Monterey Bay Aquarium. I don’t need to ask, What would Alice do? I know. Go wild.

Still, I can’t help but note their price—they all cost twice as much as the farmed. I can hear the most-quoted voice on food politics, UC Berkeley professor and journalist Michael Pollan, whispering in my ear like Obi-Wan Kenobi: “Pay the price, Sara.” Then I picture my son, a half-finished bagel in front of him, salmon bits littering my floor—probably a dollar per bit. I also know I’ve tried every brand of wild salmon here, and it’s all been too salty, too mushy. The Ducktrap is simply better.

But my son’s brain development is at stake. And what’s a little mush compared with the dose of omega-3 fatty acids wild salmon has that farmed does not? I also can’t shake my semi-founded vision of fish farms: miles of overcrowded, polluting pens swarming with silver automatons gobbling up pellets of antibiotics. Not to mention the dye used to enhance the color of their flesh, which their wild, well-adjusted cousins get naturally from eating krill.

By now, I’m thinking crazy thoughts—like maybe I should just wait until king salmon season rolls around in the summer, go deep-sea fishing for a salmon, cold-smoke it myself, make stock with the bones, fry up the skin as an hors d’oeuvre and serve the cheeks for dinner. (Head-to-tail salmon. British chef and proponent of whole-beast-consumption Fergus Henderson would be so proud.)

Ten minutes into my sustainable spiral, the woman behind the counter asks, with obvious concern, if I need some help.

Living in San Francisco, where the label “organic” is for wimps, is a mixed blessing. There’s no excuse for not doing the right thing here. There’s a farmers market every day of the week, and the produce is bountiful year-round. While much of the rest of the country is just getting in line with the idea of eating organic—albeit based largely on watered-down government regulations—farmers here are reacting by labeling themselves “beyond” it and growing things biodynamically, by the light of the moon. Should you want to immerse yourself in the sustainable dialogue, endless resources lie at the ready, whether you’re looking to go camping for a back-to-the-land kind of weekend workshop called “Solidarity with Mother Nature & Sustainable Health,” put on by the SF-based group Indigenous Permaculture, or an Outstanding in the Field gourmet sit-down dinner cooked by a well-known chef and served on a farm, steps from where your vegetables were just plucked from the earth.

But as in any righteous movement, should you do the wrong thing, there’s often a price to pay—even if it just means an awkward social moment. In this case, everyone seems to have their own salmon story. Roberta Klugman, the publicist for Campton Place restaurant and Berkeley’s Pasta Shop, once relayed hers to me: “Right when there was a lot of talk about farm-raised fish versus wild fish, a friend of mine, an advocate for sustainable food, was visiting. I had set up a lunch for her to meet Sibella Kraus, the founder and president of SAGE [Sustainable Agricultural Education], as well as Molly Fraker, then the executive director of the Chez Panisse Foundation, and we ended up at a lovely Thai restaurant in Rockridge called Soi Four. I really love their salmon in green curry, and I said, ‘Oh this is so good! This is what I’m going to get.’ But it stated ‘Atlantic salmon’ right there on the menu....

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