BOSTON — As America goes green with sustainability, Legal Sea Foods restaurant president and CEO Roger Berkowitz is seeing red about published guides that he says have it wrong about avoiding some species of fish.
On Monday night, he did something about it.
At his Park Square flagship location, he teamed up with the Culinary Guild of New England, a nonprofit institution, to offer a complete menu of so-called "blacklisted" species, such as hook-caught hake and Gulf of Maine cod caught by day boats out of Gloucester, along with tiger shrimp.
Berkowitz' point is that institutions such as the Monterey Bay Aquarium are often using outdated or faulty science when they issue their popular "watch lists" to consumers.
A generation ago, Berkowitz said in a broadcast interview that environmental groups such as Pew did much good work a generation ago but are now overreaching. "They're in existence just to keep themselves in existence," he said. "They keep pushing limits. It's just unfair."
Robert Vanasse, head of the fisheries public relations campaign Saving Seafood, recalled in a broadcast interview he had encountered a representative of Monterey Bay at an event and informed the representative that the information Monterey was using about sea scallops was entirely wrong.
"The scallops were being bad-mouthed by this organization even though the facts weren't there," Vanasse said. "I am frustrated by the level of arrogance I find in these conversations."
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