Berkeley, California and The Edible Schoolyard

It was a pleasant March day, and I was glad to have the chance to amble about a place I enjoyed but had little chance to visit in the past few years. For those readers who don’t know the area, it is a transitional to upscale neighborhood. It is characterized by pretty little bungalows (the purely upscale neighborhoods of Berkeley having more imposing homes), many with semi-arid wild gardens, and stylish but homey restaurants and food shops. The area includes the gourmet ghetto and Chez Panisse, considered the birthplace of California cuisine. While my walk that day did not take me to Chez Panisse, it did bring me to an important relation of that world-famous restaurant, Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School.

Alice Waters, the proprietor of Chez Panisse, is a high-profile proponent of the local food and slow food (as opposed to fast food) movements. And while her approach to food and lifestyle is often thought to result largely in wonderful gourmet foods for the rich (it does that, hence Chez Panisse), its aims are larger than that.The teachers and administrators of King Middle School, along with Ms. Waters, established the Edible Schoolyard on the grounds of that school in 1994. The website of the Edible Schoolyard states:

The mission of the Edible Schoolyard at Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School is to create and sustain an organic garden and landscape that is wholly integrated into the school's curriculum and lunch program. It involves the students in all aspects of farming the garden – along with preparing, serving and eating the food – as a means of awakening their senses and encouraging awareness and appreciation of the transformative values of nourishment, community, and stewardship of the land.

The organic garden at the heart of the Edible Schoolyard is on a sideplot adjacent to the main campus of the school. Fortunately for people like me, the caretakers of the Edible Schoolyard (many of who are students) don’t mind well-mannered strangers walking about the garden, as long as they stay out of the main campus. As it was early spring, most of the garden was being prepared for vegetable plantings, though rows of fragrant herbs and young citrus trees could be seen and smelled. A stone hearth provided an earthy weight to the place. Near the back of the garden was something new since my last visit—chickens milling about their coop, feeding on kitchen waste.

The Edible Schoolyard provides young people with an alternative to the efficiency, uniformity and globalism valorized by industrial agriculture.

Berkeley Bowl and my more than you wanted to know about salmon

There is a Berkeley branch of Whole Foods Market, “the world’s leading natural and organic foods supermarket” (Nasdaq: WFMI). However, everyone in Berkeley knows that the place to go is Berkeley Bowl on Shattuck, which has been around since 1977 and sits on the site of an old Safeway.

The produce and bulk foods at the Berkeley Bowl are great, and the deli is a fun place to gnosh, but the selection can be overwhelming (how do you choose one appealingly-packaged, pricey, organic green tea from the dozens of others?). The array of preserved salmons alone is prodigious.

Before modern refrigeration and freezing, fish was smoked, cured, brined or pickled (or some combination of these) in order to preserve it. For Europeans that relied on fish as a staple, the fish was typically Atlantic cod. For Native Americans, it was salmon. And because the main the purpose of the smoking or curing was preservation, this was not a dainty process. Curing cod typically involved blasting it with as much salt as possible and/or drying it hard as a plank. The cod could then be eaten on the go, by breaking it off into pieces-- a kind of medieval energy bar. If time would allow it, the cod could be reconstituted by soaking it in water for several hours (multiple changings of the water were often needed to get rid of the salt). Reconstituted cod tasted pretty good, some say even better than the fresh product (some Europeans were so familiar with just the salted product that the fresh version is called fresh salted cod, rather than just cod).

Today, we have the luxury of smoking and curing fish just for the taste, so these processes tend to be less harsh, and the treated fish still needs to be refrigerated (you do keep your smoked salmon in the refrigerator, don’t you?).

Preserved salmon can be found in both the deli and seafood sections of the Berkeley Bowl, and the difference in choice between these sections is striking. The deli section, has, next to the pates and salamis, the following offerings for salmon. Note that I took this survey a few years ago.

(1) Acme Smoked Fish, Scottish style smoked salmon (4oz - $5.99; 8oz - $8.99; 16oz - $13.55)
(2) Acme Smoked Fish, NY original all-natural hickory smoked eastern nova salmon (4oz - $4.99)
(3) Acme Smoked Fish, NY original smoked nova salmon (4oz - $5.99; 8oz - $8.99; 16oz - $13.55)
(4) Acme Smoked Fish, Blue Hill Bay salmon with cracked peppers (Atlantic salmon, product of Chile) (4oz - $5.99)
(5) Acme Smoked Fish, Blue Hill Bay wild sockeye smoked salmon (cold smoked) (4oz - $5.99)
(6) Sea Specialties, Marshall’s naturally smoked nova salmon, NY style (8oz - $11.99; 16oz - $15.99)
(7) Sea Specialties, Natural smoked sliced nova salmon (16oz - $15.99)
(8) Sea Specialties, Homarus label naturally smoked salmon (three flavors, Gravlachs, Lemon-Dill, Tequila-Cilantro) (4oz - $5.99)
(9) Brookside, Scottish style smoked salmon (farmed Atlantic salmon, dry salted and smoked) (4oz - $5.99; 8oz - $10.59; 16oz - $18.99)

Acme Smoked Fish Company is located in Brooklyn, Sea Specialties is on the East Coast, and Brookside Products, is in the UK. I’ve included the prices for the comparison shoppers among you. These preserved salmons I already present a confusing array of culinary and environmental choices, and you need to read between the lines to appreciate them all.

The packaging on (4) says that it is an Atlantic salmon. This refers to the salmon’s genetic lineage, and not where the fish itself was physically obtained. We know for sure that this salmon was not obtained in the Atlantic Ocean because Chile is on the Pacific Ocean. We therefore know that it must have been raised on a fish farm. This would have been a safe assumption to make anyway, since Atlantic salmon are commercially extinct (Stu Stein, Chile largest producer). Fish farms that raise Atlantic salmon can be located anywhere.

It is considered politically incorrect to eat farm-raised salmon because salmon farms raise a host of environmental and health concerns (footnote organic salmon farms). Salmon farms are typically found in shallow, near shore areas, though there is a movement in fish farming, or aquaculture, to try to move farms to deeper areas far offshore. Like cattle farms, salmon farms involve the raising of a large number of animals in a confined area. This leads to generation of a large amount of waste, thus polluting the local waters and perhaps causing eutrophication (note). In addition, the confinement of such a large number of animals in a small space provides a breeding ground for disease and parasites, such as sea lice, which can then be passed on to wild fish. Such diseases are often counteracted with large amounts of antibiotics, which raises concerns about the safety of eating such salmon.

Health concerns aside, one disturbing fact about farmed-raised salmon is that they are not pink. Salmon meat does not naturally have a pink color, instead, the color comes from the carotenoids in krill and plankton that the salmon feed upon. Farm-raised salmon are instead fed fish meal and other processed feeds. This leads to the unfortunate fact that it often takes several pounds of caught seafood to raise one pound of farmed salmon, so overall, fish is not being “grown” but consumed). In addition, because these feeds do not contain carotenoids, the salmon are fed artificial-synthesized carotenoids in order to give them the pleasing pink color that consumers expect. One of the suppliers of these carotenoids is pharmaceutical giant Hoffman-Roche, which distributes the notorious “SalmoFan,” which is a set of color swatches used to help salmon farmers make sure their fish are dyed to an appropriate eye-pleasing color. While this coloring itself may not be a real health concern (it is chemically the same as the natural one), environmentalists have seized upon the SalmoFan, as a trope for the “unnatural” quality of farm-raised salmon.

Some salmon from salmon farms inevitably escape into the ocean, and even if they are Atlantic salmon being raises in the Atlantic Ocean, this can cause problems. The salmon are not the same fish that exists in the local waters, in the way that cattle are not the same as bison. They are chosen and bred for fecundity, growth and handling characteristics, not to mention being a genetic monoculture. As such, they may overtake the native population due to their fecundity, but then die out because of their lack of hardiness and genetic diversity. The problem is even worse with Atlantic salmon escaping into the Pacific Ocean (this is often done because the science of breeding and raising Atlantic salmon is more advanced, since those salmon were defeated first).

Regarding reading between the lines, one assumption you should make when seeing that a salmon is an Atlantic salmon is to assume that it is farm-raised. That’s because there simply aren’t many wild Atlantic salmon anymore, in contrast to pre-European, colonial, an even relatively recent times, when Eastern American rivers were choked with salmon swimming upstream to spawn. This is so much the case, that a wild Atlantic salmon should be labeled wild, in much the same way that a venison steak should be labeled as wild.

And this is an astonishing trend in human history, that, for at least one type of fish, the default assumption is that it is farm raised rather than caught in the wild. If you are even 30 years old, you probably grew up in a world where farm-raised fish was an almost unheard of rarity. All fish, was of course, caught wild, it was an assumption that was unnecessary to state. Of course, by the 1980s, and in some cases even earlier, fish stocks were experiencing some serious declines, but the institution of large-scale fish farming was still years away.

This trend is astonishing only because it is happening today. But it comes as no surprise if we consider a simple analogy. Nobody today eats wild beef or fowl, except for the rare hunting trip bounty. Meat or chicken means domesticated, ranch-raised meat or farm-raised chicken. Yet a few hundred years ago, wild bison roamed the American plain by the hundreds of millions, and commercial bison was wild bison caught by professional hunters out on the plains. Domestication of meat and poultry came relatively quickly, because the precedent had been established in Europe and Asia, where wild game had essentially been eradicated centuries or millennia earlier (footnote on Africa and Australia).

This profound transformation in the way we obtain or fish, which is occurring at a phenomenal rate, today, deserves a chapter of its own, but for now, let’s discuss the more fun, culinary inferences to be made here.

Numbers (4) and (9) are explicitly labeled as Atlantic salmon, but the discriminating consumer would assume that all but (5) are also Atlantic salmon. Pacific salmon is more expensive and has a higher culinary and PC cache, and so is typically labeled by its Pacific species name (chinook/king, coho/silver, sockeye/red, chum/keta, pink and cherry) (Oncorhynchus tschawytscha, O. kisutch, O. nerka, O. keta, O. gorbuscha, O. masou), such as number 5. Atlantic salmon are simply called Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) because there is essentially only one specie.

The packaging on number (7) reads, in part “hardwood smoked, capturing the wildness of the Pacific Northwest,” which is amusing for a number of reasons. Number (7) Sea Specialties natural smoked sliced nova salmon, is produced by an East coast company, rather than a West coast one, is almost certainly an Atlantic salmon and not Pacific, is likely produce on a farm rather than caught wild, and is prepared as nova salmon, a traditional East Canadian method of preparation.

This brings us to the fun topic of method of salmon preservation, and the misnomers that surround it. Although salmon and other fish have been preserved since time immemorial, the typical smoked salmon that we are used to eating with our morning bagels and cream cheese (or better, crème fraiche), resembles the Nova Scotian style of preservation. First, let’s look at the basic types of preservation.

(a) Refrigeration – storing at cold but not freezing temperatures. Maybe people keep their refrigerators at 40F. 38F or colder is better for fish—even better is keeping the fish on a bed of ice in the refrigerator.
(b) Freezing – obviously below 32F, and preferably 0F or colder for fish. Freezing fish in your 0F home freezer does not do nearly as good a job as flash-freezing, vacuum-sealing, glazing and other commercial freezing techniques to initially freeze the fish, but once frozen using these techniques, your freezer will keep the fish frozen just fine.
(c) Brining/pickling – placing the fish in a salt solution to draw out some of the moisture and create an environment inhospitable for bacteria. A brine also typically contains sugar, honey, herbs and/or spices.
(d) Curing – the dry version of brining. Salt, sugar, etc., are placed onto the surface of the fish. Gravalax/Gravlachs is made this way.
(e) Smoking – using smoke to dry, flavor and par cook the fish. Hot-smoking is done at ? and takes ? Cold-smoking is done at ? and takes ? Smoking may have been known as a method of preservation in other parts of the world, but the art was perfected by coastal Native American tribes
(f) Drying – almost always done by curing or smoking, though in a pinch, just drying a fish, particularly cod, can do a good job of preservation.

Salmon preserved in the Nova Scotian style is thin-sliced, brined in a salt-sugar solution, and cold-smoked. It can be easily distinguished from hot-smoked salmon because it has a slimy, uncooked feel and taste to it. Many similar styles of preservation are indigenous to Europe. You will often see cold-smoked salmon prepared Scottish-style, and it would probably take an expert to taste the difference between salmon prepared Nova Scotian and one prepared Scottish.

Hot-smoked salmon, by contrast, is more heavily-smoked and tastes drier and par cooked (like a smoked ham). It is also typically not thinly-sliced, but smoked as fillets or steaks, sometimes with the skin on. Typical temperatures and cooking times for hot-smoked salmon are 160-165F for 4 hours, versus 80F and 16 hours for cold-smoked. The only salmon listed above that appeared to be hot-smoked was number (4), the Acme Smoked Fish, Blue Hill Bay salmon with cracked peppers (it came in a thick chunk with the skin on), though of course I was not allowed to taste it to verify this.

The Nova Scotian style of preparation is also called nova salmon, and novalox, the latter of which is really a misnomer. Lox is an old-world Jewish style of preparation that was brined but not smoked at all. I guess novalox might legitimately have been invoked to mean a salmon that was brined in the Jewish style but then cold-smoked (probably somewhat saltier than true Nova Scotian salmon), but today, even the term lox is used when talking about cold-smoked salmon. Cleary, the nuances of salmon preservation are not as important today as they were hundreds of years ago, and the lack of clarity in nomenclature reflects this.

Strangely, variety number (8) was sold under the brand name Homarus, which is the scientific name for the Atlantic lobsters genus, include the familiar Maine lobster (Homarus americanus). Note also the use of the term “Gravlachs” to describe one flavor. Gravlachs or gravlax, is a Scandinavian method of dry curing salmon with salt, sugar and herbs. It’s meaning today has stood relatively intact, as meaning a cured, but not smoked, salmon. But here we can see the term being co-opted into a smoked salmon. The relative rarity of unsmoked preparations like Gravlachs probably means that it, like lox, will eventually come to refer to smoked salmon.

If you are tired about reading on salmon, you can move on to the next chapter. If your intellectual curiosity remains piqued (or your appetite has been whetted by all these smoked salmon), we’ll move on to other salmon-laden sections of the Berkeley bowl. It’s find to admit that your stomach rather than your brain is impelling you to read on— most people I know will admit upon reading Mark Kurlansky’s wonderful book Cod, they find themselves, hungry for seafood, despite the book’s devastating environmental tale. That’s largely why I think access to seafood by recreational fishing could be an environmental boon—it engages both the mind and the stomach.

When you want to buy salmon fillets the seafood counter of the Berkeley bowl, I saw:

(10) Frozen wild troll caught Alaskan king salmon fillet USA ($8.95/lb on sale)
(11) Frozen at sea wild Alaskan coho fillet USA ($9.99/lb on sale)
(12) Frozen wild troll California king salmon ($8.99/lb on sale)

Fresh wild salmon from Alaska or California are not available most of the year, due to the relatively short commercial seasons.

Above the seafood counter, a banner touted Alaska Gold Brand salmon, and that it is a fisherman’s seafood cooperative, that catches its fish by hook and line. This is all very PC – the seafood cooperative in terms of community empowerment, and the hook and line in terms of environment. Hook and line trolling involves letting out lines with single hooks, which results in minimal by catch as compared to longlining, gillnetting or trawling, all of which can catch large amount of unwanted marine life and even birds, that are tossed back overboard, usually dead.

See the difference from the deli section? In that section, the store appears to make little or no effort made to choose or offer salmon produced in a socially-responsible manner. And the one salmon in that section that could be touted in this manner, number (5), the sockeye salmon, is not prominently displayed or labeled. The smoked salmon are just tucked in a case across from the cream cheese and next to the deli counter. I don’t know what the store’s intention is here. Is this difference because people who go to delis care less about these issues than those who prepare their own seafood? Or the same person cares less when she is buying smoked salmon for a party platter than when she is grilling a salmon on the BBQ?

There are also some prepared salmons, smoked and otherwise, that are available in and near the seafood counter. We can see that these, by-and-large are marketed by the store with more of an eye toward socially-responsible “bubble” that extends around the seafood area that doesn’t reach the deli section.

In the seafood counter there were also:

(13) Fresh (i.e., not frozen) Eco-friendly farmed gravlachs (product of Scotland) ($13.49/lb)
(14) Fresh sushi grade aquafarmed Atlantic salmon fillet (product of Scotland, processed in US) ($12.95/lb)

The gravlachs appeared to be a true, unsmoked gravlachs, as it was a bit thicker than typical cold-smoked salmon (the counter person confirmed this). Number (12) claims to be “ecofriendly” farmed. While there certainly are aquaculture practices that are more environmentally and health-friendly than others (no antibiotics, low-population densities), there are no certification standards for “eco-friendly” or “organic” fish farming.

(15) Wild salmon kasuzuke ($10.95/lb)
(16) Hand sliced Alaskan ivory salmon lox ($14.95/lb)

Kasuzuke is a marination process involving sake lees (pungent rice solids left-over from sake brewing). Ivory salmon is a relatively rare variety of king salmon that is supposed to have a rich, buttery flavor. Its flesh is white because the fish has an enzyme that allows it to metabolize the carotenoids that color other salmon.

In a refrigerated case next to the seafood counter, I saw:

(17) Gerard & Dominique’s smoked king or coho salmon, lox style (nothing artificial added) (4oz - $6.99)
(18) Alaska Wildsides wild sockeye lox (4oz - $6.99)
(19) Sun Valley fresh smoked salmon (no chemicals, no antibiotics) (1 lb - $15.95)
(20) Tony’s smoked chinook salmon (not thin-sliced) (1lb - $11.79)

In the same refrigerated case, there were also:

(21) Leo’s wild smoked salmon strip (not thin-sliced, jerky-like) ($19.95/lb)
(22) Leo’s cold smoked wild king salmon ($14.95/lb)

Leo’s salmon products appeared to have been packaged (vacuum-sealed and labeled) by the Berkeley Bowl itself. You might guess that Leo’s was probably a local producer, which a staff member confirmed. There were also a bunch of Berkeley Bowl packaged products that might have been made with leftover trimmings from the seafood counter:

(23) Fresh Sicilian marinated Alaskan salmon (8oz - $7.99)
(24) Gravlax trim (8oz - $2.75)
(25) Wild lox trim (8oz - $3.95)

In a freezer case in the same area, there were some frozen and vacuum-sealed fillets, which were probably of the same origin as some of the fillets in the seafood case, as well as the following:

(26) Salmon lox trim (in the freezer section) (4oz - $3.99)
(27) Salmolux salmon burgers (1 lb - $5.95)
(28) Wildcatch Alaska sockeye salmon burgers (8 oz - $5.49)

Salmon burgers, are of course, not pure fish but are flavored and mixed with wheat, bread crumbs, or some sort of other filler, sort of like the meatloaf equivalent of salmon.