July 12, 2016 — For Barton Seaver, improving seafood sustainability begins by starting conversations. The chef turned author and sustainability advocate spends his time making connections between academics and business people, producers and consumers, sustainability and health. With his new cookbook, “Two If by Sea,” he has also created recipes that help people understand their options when it comes to eating sustainable seafood.
In the cookbook, Seaver seeks to make seafood approachable by identifying more than 70 varieties of fish — some familiar, some less familiar. He looks at seafood by flavor profile and identifies cooking techniques including poaching, pan-roasting, brining, and smoking that work best for different varieties.
Seaver, who was named chef of the year by Esquire in 2009, left his Washington restaurants for South Freeport, Maine, in 2010 to be closer to a working waterfront and the fisheries he is looking to sustain. He is now director of the Sustainable Seafood and Health Initiative at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and is a fellow with the National Geographic Society. In his Harvard role, he often works with businesses to make connections between their sustainability and employee wellness initiatives. “One of the things about sustainability is that when we choose to buy products, there’s another equal and opposite action. That is, we are not buying another product. If I put salmon on my dinner plate tonight, I’m not putting beef on,” he says.