Why We Should all be "Fed by Blue": Jennifer Bushman

Today we are going to dig into seafood with our guest Jennifer Bushman. She’s going to help us better understand how the bounty of the ocean fits into our diets as well as our national food security plan and a healthier planet. 

Jennifer Bushman is a sustainable seafood expert, communicator, and strategist who has been championing ethical aquaculture for more than two decades. She has been on a mission to transform the food system, preserve the oceans, nourish the world’s ever-growing population, and offset carbon emissions. 

Among her many initiatives, she co-founded Fed by Blue, a science-based communications initiative, designed to provide knowledge and materials to help protect and participate in a responsible blue food system.

In 2024, Fed by Blue will be launching A four-part documentary series called Hope in the Water. Keep your eyes peeled and remember, you heard it here first!

Jennifer Bushman
Fed By Blue

Transcript

Abigail:

Welcome to the podcast today where we celebrate Innovation for a Happy Planet. I am your host Abigail Carroll. 

Today we are going to dig into seafood with our guest Jennifer Bushmann. She’s going to help us better understand how the bounty of the ocean fits into our diets as well as our national food security plan and a healthier planet. Jennifer Bushman is a sustainable seafood expert, communicator, and strategist who has been championing ethical aquaculture for more than two decades. She has been on a mission to transform the food system, preserve the oceans, nourish the world’s ever-growing population, and offset carbon emissions. 

Among her many initiatives, she co-founded Fed by Blue, a science-based communications initiative, designed to provide knowledge and materials to help protect and participate in a responsible blue food system. In 2024, Fed by Blue will be launching A four-part documentary series called Hope in the Water. Keep your eyes peeled and remember, you heard it here first!

Welcome to the podcast, Jennifer. I'm so happy to have you here. 

Jennifer:

Thank you so much for having me. It's exciting to be able to talk to you today.

Abigail:

Could you tell us first a little bit about your background and what you're doing as a sustainable blue foods advocate?

Jennifer:

I came from a group of amazing women, my mom, my grandmothers that were cooks and exposed me to a lot of incredible blue foods, fish and seafood my whole life. And I felt really lucky to have that as part of the ecosystem that I was raised in. That ultimately evolved into becoming a cookbook author. I did a television series that I was lucky enough to get some attention for with both the James Beard Foundation and the International Association of Culinary Professionals. And then one day I was asked by a water farmer to please help champion the work that they were doing to become the most sustainable salmon farm in the world. And that now has evolved into an understanding about the importance of our blue food system.

And for those of you that don't know, that's not blueberries. It's all that comes from water. So the streams, the lakes, the, um, ponds, the rivers and our ocean, both freshwater and marine based, the foods that are the algaes, the seaweeds, the sea vegetables, and the fish and seafood that we hear so much about that over 3 billion people on the planet rely on every single day. And so that really spawned the formation of Fed by Blue because a lot of people don't understand how important and contributive our blue food system is to our survival and the future of food and what it means as our planet gets more and more strained for resources.

Abigail:

So what are some of the reasons why we should be taking a really serious look at seafood and integrating it into our diet more?

Jennifer:

One is it's extremely regenerative. It's not just about fisheries. It's not just about aquaculture. The planet is 71% water. And if we manage those resources that come from water that we're able to eat, and again, I think people think of seafood as just the fishing seafood they find in the grocery store. Seaweed doesn't need any inputs. Oysters don't need any inputs, but they filter water. They can help fight and mitigate against the effects of climate change. So I think it's knowing that you have power in where your values meet your dollars, and that if you shift to consuming more of these foods, you're really supporting a more regenerative food system of the future.

Abigail:

So I think a lot of people eat meat because it's cheaper. Are we gonna see cheaper fish in our future and cheaper sea vegetables in our future?

Jennifer:

Well, there already are some. People don't like to eat tilapia because they think it's a dirty farmed fish and they're for $3.99 cents a pound. There's tilapia that's available, that's coming from really great water farmers, both in the US and out. We also see that on a number of different things. We will produce more seaweed than potatoes in the United States by 2040. [Wow.] So we can't think of these foods as a special occasion food. We have to look at them as part of our overall diet and we have to support projects that then support a more robust blue food system in the United States. The reason why they're so expensive is because in the US and in North America is we import more blue foods than we produce. But if you get behind that oyster farmer and start looking at your legislators and saying, look, I wanna support more licenses to raise oysters off of US coastlines, you can then have an effect on pricing and the things that you're concerned about.

Most of what's baked into price on seafood is transportation. And if we produce more foods like this in the United States, we would not only help contribute to more abundant ecosystems then you would see the price coming down. We have to own more of that and not just be relying on wild seafood to feed ourselves. It's a puzzle of well-managed wild stocks, supporting best in class aquaculture. Just like you can raise a chicken well and you can raise a chicken badly. We have to look at that and demand that off of our shores. And we have to have more robust marine sanctuaries that protect areas of water. Because when you protect an area then the fish have places to spawn, places to grow.

Abigail:

Hmm. So tell me about some of these technologies that they're using now to freeze seafood.

Jennifer:

So we should all be not having the expectation that fresh is best with very, very incredible, advances in freezing technology. You can't tell the difference any longer between that great club pack filet that you just bought at your warehouse market and a fresh fish. It is a system whereby it's not just getting the fish quickly frozen at lower temperatures. It also has to do with the way in which you do it because it's essentially giving that fish a bath and after it's been sealed in order to be able to keep that protein structure intact. Because fish and seafood is primarily water. And what does water do when it's frozen, just like your ice cubes, it expands in the ice cube tray.

So we have to be utilizing technology where we get that fish frozen faster and where we thaw it properly in order for it to maintain the protein structure to be delicious and not be mushy. And so it's the process. They do it and they're utilizing existing technology, but it's the way in which you do it and, and how they utilize it and how then chefs are then trained to make sure that they're slow thawing it, rather than thawing it out on the kitchen counter. It has to be done in the refrigerator overnight in order to be able to maintain its structure. It's not complicated. It's just changing the way in which the industry's been doing it.

Abigail:

And the way we're doing it at home. We talked about frozen seafood. What about canned seafood?

Jennifer:

Super important. I mean the main tinned seafood also, of course it's not the volumes yet, but this tin seafood resurgence and the exploration that you should have beyond tuna. Tuna should be the last thing you buy in a tin. Try everything else. We know, you know how to make a tuna fish sandwich and most of that tuna's unsustainable caught. Stop that. But if you wanna support these other artisanal tin seafood companies, please, please, please do. 

Abigail:

Tell me about low trophic eating.

Jennifer:

Lower trophic animals are the ones that are, like everybody says, eat the feeder fish, eat anchovies, eat sardines. Those little fish that are rich in omega threes that are highly productive. Now, we have to be careful about this. The odds are if you're eating an anchovy, it is unsustainably caught. And we are not raising any anchovies. They are all wild caught. And those are the fish that the other fish need to eat. Those are also the fish that whales and other marine mammals need to eat. That's why you should not take a krill pill. Nobody should be eating krill, because krill are unsustainably caught and they are enormously important to what we call the food web of the ocean. So what we say is we really wanna be looking at increasing blue food consumption in the regenerative

Abigail:

Right.

Jennifer:

Meaning that we wanna be eating more bi valves. That's gonna include mussels and oysters and clams because they're not only zero input. They don't take any feed on a farm. They also are recycling and regenerating water, seaweed, sea vegetables are the same way. So I think that if I was getting people to pick between lower trophic and bivalves, I'd be asking them to eat bivalves and, and sea vegetables, over eating, anchovies and sardines, mackerel and herring.

Abigail:

Right. 

Jennifer:

You can use them for all kinds of things, you know, I mean, we're using them now and building materials. There are companies now creating packaging solutions that are using shells. So there's, there's a lot of room to grow in that space. 

Abigail:

The sweater I'm actually wearing was treated with oyster shells. 

Jennifer

There you go.

Abigail:

We’ll be back with more Happy Planet in just a minute.

BREAK.

Abigail:

Welcome back to Happy Planet.

I mean it seems from speaking to you like seafood has been held to a higher standard than meat. And why are we such carnivores in the United States? And why does it seem like we are much more worried about the provenance of our fish than we are about our beef?

Jennifer:

There has been a lot of money spent on that narrative, and it has been going on for decades. Most of it was created before us, but we all can be a part of creating a blue food system that we want. The problem is the narrative was shaped for us and we bought into the wild versus farmed this narrative. It was earned to a certain extent with bad farming practices, but so was corn, so was pork [Right, right.] Scale it in an effort to be able to create food security in the early 1970s, that was a narrative from the government. And we scaled bad farming practices and now we know that's not serving us, not serving our soil, not serving our water, not serving our land, not serving us new nutritiously. We all have to own that. 

Abigail:

I think there's still questions for listeners about aquaculture and wild catch. There's so much information, and I don't think it's clear, and I don't think we really know. People don't know if it's really truly safe to be eating aquaculture. 

Jennifer:

We have been farming fish for thousands of years. King Kamehameha had farms that were in Hawaii that was farming kampachi in order to be able to bring more food security to his people because fisheries moved. And because they changed not just their course, but also their abundance based upon season, based upon time of year and other environmental effects. When we utilize good farming practices, just like land animals, when you put less animals on a property, when you don't just put them into a feed lot, they don't need antibiotics. The same is true for aquaculture. You've gotta do your research, you've gotta know your farmer. I bet very few of your listeners know which certifications and recommendations to look for. Look for the Aquaculture Stewardship Council label. Do do your homework and know if that farm is actually certified, Seafood Watch, which is out of Monterey Bay Aquarium does an amazing job. Best Aquaculture Practices, which is another US-based certification and recommendation organization.

There are ways to know if your farm is doing the right work, and they have to be transparent on every level. The feed models are assessed, the processing plants are assessed. They have to have good supply chain management. So, you know, if the fish came off the farm, it's ending up on your table. There's more blockchain utilization now. And I would say if you're really worried and don't wanna make an aquaculture choice, picking the bivalves, picking the seaweeds. But you could leave fin fish off the table. And I would argue, if you're talking to me about aquaculture that are your concerns, they're probably fin fish not anything else. 

Abigail:

So what do you feel about these recirculating systems now taking aquaculture on land? Is that something that you think we should be excited about as consumers?

Jennifer:

Well, I mean the, here's the reality. Our food system is a very complicated puzzle. So while land-based aquaculture is going to be part of the system, it's not going to be the entire system. And we're not gonna move everything out of the water or stop eating wild stocks and then start raising it on land.

The technology yet to be proven, there's some species like kingfish that are doing very well in land-based systems. But salmon is yet to really be figured out. We're still seeing a lot of issues because you have to take fresh water and you have to manipulate it so much. When oxygen got in low supply during covid, they didn't have oxygen to be able to oxygenate the waters. And in these RAS systems recirculating aquaculture systems and the fish died, there were mass mortality incidences as a result of those rearing systems. There is not going to be a one size fits all. These systems on land are very resource intensive, energy, water, and they're doing it in some cases in places where water is going to be at a premium. So we just have to look at it and hope that we're citing them, that we're using the best technology. We're going to keep advancing it. And absolutely it will be part of the solution, but it is not the solution.

Abigail:

So I'm interested in you because you come from a ranching family and you don't come from the coast. Tell me a little bit about your background and how does a girl from the mountains become a lover of seafood?

Jennifer:

Yes, it's true. My grandparents, my great grandparents and my great great grandparents were ranchers in rural Colorado. My mom was raised on this ranch. I was not. You see how much they loved the land, how much they valued, they raised the corn that got fed to the cattle. They also had a general store where they sold what they raised in the store amongst many other things and how important that was to their community and also for feeding themselves. Where it resonated with me because I was a cookbook author, a cooking school owner. I was teaching about bringing people back to cooking, honoring that journey in order to feed ourselves and our families better.

Because when I was starting all of this almost 20, 25 years ago, we were moving away from that in a pretty significant way and and really still are. And when I met this farmer on water, they reminded me of the journey that my great grandparents, my grandparents and, and even my mom working on the ranch had made, they were the same. Why was it that we could raise great crops on land, that we could have that relationship with the farmer? There was no honor in what the water farmer was doing and how it was honoring the water or indigenous communities were managing their fisheries. The narrative with the NGOs was the only way to protect it is to leave it alone.

And we saw that with a lot of different groups. Fishermen can't fish reasonably, everybody become vegan. The only way to save the planet is to be vegan. That's not true. And so I felt like it resonated with what my history was and that I could change the narrative and the communication around it so that people understood and revered them. Like we revere our farmers at the farmer's market and I've been tirelessly championing those water farmers ever since. It's why I don't call it aquaculture, I won't. Because we don't relate to it the same way we relate to people who are producing food for us in this warm way, connected way as farmers. And that is what the farmers that I know are doing. They get up every day, they're watching the animals they have out in the water. And they are taking care of the sea. Like you would expect a farmer on land to take care of the land as a legacy to pass on from generation to generation.

Abigail:

Amen. <laugh>, I could tell you they're farmers, been there. What are the tools that you have that you can use today to spread the word about sustainable Blue foods?

Jennifer:

So we started Fed by Blue. It was two dear friends and I that had been working in the industry. One was in algae, one was in feed. And we said, you know, every time we make a couple steps forward, we have to take three steps back because someone comes out with some bad thing that happened on a salmon farm with footage that was 20 years old. It was always seemed to be salmon. And we know that there are examples of good things that are happening and how do we own that communication strategy? No one has tried to change the narrative. The blue food industry, which is a new term really relative to everything else, has always been on the defensive, not the offensive.

We started Fed by Blue as a communication organization and we're working on a lot of things. We have a docuseries that is executive produced by Andrew Zimmern, who is a famous chef and food justice advocate. His production company has more than two dozen shows in production at this moment all around food systems and food system thinking. And then we had another person as we had formed this organization and these tenants. He was raised in Maine, he was a fisherman. He went out with his father fishing. He went on to college, he went on to law school.

He started to have a real love of fly fishing. And as his career grew and he was writing series work like LA Law and Boston Legal and the Undoing and Big Little Lies, he decided that the only way he could save the rivers, save the salmon stocks and their benefit to ecosystems was to invest in responsible aquaculture. That is David E. Kelly, the most prolific writer and producer in Hollywood. He's married to Michelle Pfeiffer and he is the largest trout producer in the United States. And our opinion, if we combine these two powerful executive producers, we produced a docuseries that was the character driven stories of the people doing the hard work on the water, not narrated by someone else, narrated by those characters from all over the world that were doing great work, we could restore hope in the water. 

So the series is called Hope in the Water. There's a cookbook that will be coming out several months after the series. And we will be launching an entire impact strategy next year that will support a responsible blue food system education, K through 12 education, working with retailers, working with restaurants, all kinds of impact to deploy around the series. 

Abigail:

So basically media, media is gonna have a huge impact on what we see and change our mindsets a little bit. Is that the strategy?

Jennifer:

It's not just media because media can only go so far and we'll get a lot of media around the series and then eventually media will die. It's what do you create on the coattails of that media. We have groups like Kroger and Disney and the Independent Restaurant coalition that we're working with, on our advisory board is WWF, the Nature Conservancy, the Environmental Defense Fund, Alexandra Cousteau's Oceans 2050. We are working with organizations that when we work in tandem, not bringing just event driven change where you watch a documentary and then you're really emotional, then maybe you buy the right fish for one day and then you go back to your old eating. But where metrics are not measured by how many people watch the series, they're measured by how the market changes, how does our consumptive behavior change?

Abigail:

That sounds amazing. So what's it gonna take to make this seismic shift that we need to move everybody to blue foods?

Jennifer:

It is going to happen. So that's the first thing. It's not an if, it's a win, I feel like what it's going to take is a lot of investment. There's a bill right now in front of Congress that has bipartisan support that's that was generated from the Environmental Defense fund about aquaculture and federal waters. Getting the science, getting these systems in the water, support it. If you are in a landlocked area, even more support is needed. And then from there, obviously we can't produce these products and have them not sell. Your grocers need to know, your chefs need to know that you want these foods available. You're going to have to be an active eater. 

Abigail:

Love it. so are you optimistic about the planet? Do you think we're gonna solve this climate crisis? I mean, you're coming at it from a food angle, but are we gonna make it?

Jennifer:

Well, I mean, I think the only option we have is to dig in and work as hard as we can. Does it feel like a monumental task? Absolutely. So I get up every day knowing that the most important job I can do is to communicate it, to be in the room so that when people are making large scale food systems decisions, they're adding blue foods to the list. What I wanna do is feed people and keep people working, create vibrant coastal economies where we can have these regenerative crops that are supporting people and planet. And I do believe that we can do that. Now, can I fix carbon? Seaweed is not going to fix the carbon problem, but can I keep people fed while others that are bigger thinkers and smarter than I am do that? I can do that part.

Abigail:

That's great. 

Abigail:

Thank you Jennifer for sharing your knowledge and wisdom with everyone tuning in. I think we will all be able to make better choices at the fish counter now. And, if we all made better choices, the impact could go a long way . I am also just pleased to hear Jennifer’s sense of purpose and optimism about our planet’s future. It’s going to take hard work, but we can do it.

Thank you for listening. Please follow Happy Planet wherever you listen and leave us a rating and review - it really helps new listeners discover the show. Happy Planet was reported and hosted by me. I am also the Executive Producer. The talented Dylan Heuer is our producer and editor. Composer George Brandl Egloff created our theme music. Learn more about my work and get in touch by visiting happyplanetpodcast.com.