BOSTON – Roger Berkowitz says he's fully committed to sustainability. He supports practices that foster a healthy fish population, because a fished-out ocean means the end of Legal. But, he insists, having cod and haddock on any list of fish to avoid is “the most asinine thing I’ve ever heard of.” And what about catch quotas, which are ostensibly set to prevent overfishing? Poorly thought out, he says, because the complex government-imposed catch-share system for New England fishermen means there aren’t even enough boats on the sea to hit the annual quota that’s been set.
But that’s just the beginning of the things that piss Berkowitz off. (Or, as he prefers, “things I’m passionate about.”) He really doesn’t like the Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch list — a widely accepted guide to endangered fish populations that consumers should avoid — because he believes it’s based on faulty data.
Then there’s the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, which is responsible for tracking the fish stock and setting catch limits. To do this, NOAA uses trawlers to drag nets through a section of the ocean for a period of time, then counts what comes up. Berkowitz insists that this is a ludicrous methodology for keeping track of species of fish that move around and may not be where the trawlers happen to be. So when Berkowitz was invited in 2009 to tour a marine laboratory in Nahant run by Northeastern University, he began chatting with a scientist who was doing low-frequency sonar research there for Homeland Security. He asked if the sonar she was using could pick up fish. “She answered, ‘Oh, yeah. Because the sonar acts off the bladders of the fish, you can identify the species based on bladder resonance,’” Berkowitz recalls. The scientist said the sonar could also calculate biomass, or the total volume of fish in a given area. Berkowitz recognized that if this sonar could do what the scientist said, it might be the holy grail of fish-stock estimating — accurate, fast, and wide. So to generate support for it, he reached out to Ann-Margaret Ferrante, a state representative from Gloucester who has been fighting catch quotas and limits, as well as Attorney General Martha Coakley and Senator John Kerry. (The politicians are trying to bring the sonar technology to the attention of NOAA for some kind of commitment, but progress has been glacial.)
The issue came to a head last January, when the Culinary Guild of New England asked Berkowitz to host its upcoming dinner. Berkowitz — eager for an opportunity to prove just how stupid the seafood watch list is, and to talk about the new sonar technology — billed the event as a “blacklisted” fish dinner. The menu, he announced, would feature selections from the Monterey watch list.
The dinner, which wound up attracting about 60 attendees, set off a firestorm of controversy that pitted Berkowitz and the fishing industry upon which he relies against advocates of sustainable fishery management. The story was covered by the Globe, the Herald, Fast Company, Grub Street Boston, WBUR, and others. Berkowitz says he didn’t expect news of the dinner to go viral, but it did — possibly because of the controversial statements he made to the press. In interviews with Richard Gaines, the former editor of the Boston Phoenix and now a writer at the Gloucester Times, Berkowitz denounced the “eco-labelers” who were “brainwashing” consumers. And in an interview with the blog Slashfood, Berkowitz was quoted as saying, “I always found it curious that chefs and restaurateurs were the last to get information about sustainable seafood. Oftentimes it was from Monterey [Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch Program] that blacklisted everything, or a group like Chefs Collaborative — you get a group of people that work off a particular science, and I would argue that science isn’t necessarily balanced.”
Berkowitz’s offhand comment about the Chefs Collaborative came as a surprise to the advocacy group, which provides chefs with tips on developing a sustainable menu, but doesn’t give guidelines for specific species. “It caught our attention because we don’t have a list,” says Melissa Kogut, the collaborative’s executive director (and a former Legal Sea Foods server). “We were a little taken aback when he implied that we were following faulty science. I don’t think he understands what we’re doing.”
To Berkowitz, though, such objections are mere details obscuring the big vision: that sustainability is a fluid concept, and that there is new technology available with the potential to give the industry better data — technology he believes is being ignored.
The fishing industry lauded him as a champion after the dinner. “I thought it was awesome,” says Stephen Welch, a Hanover-based commercial fisherman who lands in Gloucester and New Bedford and remembers delivering lobsters to Legal’s Allston processing facility back in the 1980s. “We have the Monterey Bay Aquarium telling people not to eat cod because it’s not sustainable, but it is sustainable, and we’re following the rules. We don’t need someone from California to tell us how to go fishing, and Roger was there trying to explain that to people.”
“Everyone in Gloucester will say Roger is a hero,” says Gaines, the Gloucester Times writer, who is a longtime advocate for local fishermen and has known Berkowitz for 30 years.
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