Transcription of Barton Seaver for the show Maine Conservation & Restorative Seafood #257
Lisa: My next guest is an individual who I think serves to remind me that the world is actually pretty small, someone that I was connected to through the Harvard Extension school actually by an individual who teaches there, a physician who does public health work. This is Barton Seaver, who is on a mission to restore our relationship with the ocean, the land, and with each other, through dinner. Barton is a firm believer that human health depends upon the health of the ocean, and that the best way to connect the two is at the dinner table. Highlights of culinary career include three rising culinary star awards, twice earning best new restaurant awards and being honored in 2009 by Esquire Magazine as Chef of the Year.
Since leaving the restaurant world, Barton has become involved with a number of local and international initiatives. In 2012, he was named by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to the United States Culinary Ambassador Corps. He uses this designation to curate internal conversations on sustainability and the role of food and resource management in public health. He is the director of the Sustainable Seafood & Health Initiative at the Center for Health and the Global Environment at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. An internationally recognized speaker, Barton has delivered lectures, seminars and demos to a multitude of audiences. His 2010 Mission Blue Voyage TED Talk entitled “Sustainable Seafood: Let’s Get Smart” garnered over 400,000 views. Barton currently resides in coastal Maine, a stone throw away from a working waterfront with his wife and their ten heritage chickens. Impressive, and thanks for coming.
Barton: Thanks. It’s a real pleasure to be here.
Lisa: I don’t know what a heritage chicken is. Is that just a chicken that just has deep roots in the community or is this like a special sort of …
Barton: Our chickens all look like punk dinosaurs. They just have feathers coming out of the top of their head or they look they’re wearing disco pants or just of such beautiful coloration which makes them fun to be around and fun to look at but inefficient as egg layers. They are a lifestyle addition rather than really part of our farm content.
Lisa: I see. So they’re not really contributing significantly to the food economy per se.
Barton: No. We actually don’t like eggs very much.
Lisa: Oh good. Good for them, anyway, right?
Barton: My garden does like what chickens produce, in addition to eggs, very much. That is really why we have them there is for constant compost.
Lisa: I like that. Compost is a favorite theme of mine. I feel like I’d get along really well with your disco heritage chickens. Maybe someday I’ll have to visit and see what these punk rock hairdos and pants and things are all about.
Barton: Yeah. They’re pretty cool looking things.
Lisa: That’s excellent. I’m interested in how you ended up in Maine. You’ve got so much going on and so many different places, nationally, internationally. Why South Freeport?
Barton: Well, my wife is originally from Bangor and her father before her up from the county and this was a long intended move to get her back to her home state. It also is something that I’ve long been working towards in my own career, starting in restaurants. I think we well understand as chefs that it’s our responsibility to sustain and support the people who walk through our front door, who pay our salaries but we also I realized have a responsibility to sustain and support the people that walk through our back door, the producers and my culinary career and thus everything after, my entire career trajectory has been around sustaining communities, producers, and specifically marine producers. The opportunity to come here to Maine, to live on a working waterfront within the very community that I’ve long dedicated myself to helping sustain, is a real honor. It’s a pleasure. To me, sustainability, the ultimate act of sustainability can be described simply as being a good neighbor and to do so, one must embed in the community.
It’s a nice sort of departure and opportunity for me to focus as I have so many things happening in so many countries and so many places. It may seem very scattered and spur of the moment but everything I do is very strategic and having a core, having a center place to call home and a community where I really feel I belong is the strength and foundation from which I am able to do all these things.
Lisa: Where did you grow up?
Barton: I grew up in the opposite of Maine, which was downtown Washington, DC during the height of the crack epidemic in Marion Barry’s era when we were unfortunately the murder capital of the world. I have wonderful memories of my childhood in a very unpleasant place. I’ve lived all over the world from Marrakesh to Barcelona to Chicago, New York, France, Italy and just … I’ve traveled the world enough with National Geographic when I was an explorer to know that all of those experiences have led me to be quite sure of where I want to be now.
Lisa: Why food? With all of this other stuff you have going on as an explorer. Why is it that food became your focus?
Barton: People are I think very hesitant and cautious about really listening to other people. We’re very closed in our lives. We don’t often know or practice how to find wisdom in the world, how to find relationships in the world and really draw from them inspiration, knowledge, wisdom, and how to give back. Food is a fluency that everyone has. You never know someone as well as you do until you break bread with them. Coming from the chef world, I quickly understood the power of food for convening and for disarming people and that is specifically the nadir of my work now is even though I’m working on global greenhouse gas emissions, though I’m working in public health impacts, though I’m working in marine economies and the preservation of cultural heritage, all of this, all of these very disparate seeming conversations are all linked together and food is oftentimes the most common avenue.
Lisa: I watched your TED talk and I was interested in this idea of restorative versus just simply sustainable seafood.
Barton: Yes.
Lisa: Talk to me about that.
Barton: Sustainable … God, what an unsexy idea. Just maintain the status quo. Sure, that’s a great place to be. Don’t get me wrong. I’ll take sustainable because often times we’re heading the wrong direction but when it comes to sustainable seafood or sustainable agriculture, sustainable energy, whatever the conversation is, there’s a big ask inherent to that. I’m asking you to change your behaviors, change your lifestyle, make sacrifices, oftentimes, spend more money, move outside of your comfort zone, and what’s the reward for doing all that? Don’t worry, everything will stay the same.
That’s not really inspiring. You think back to the days of Bell Laboratories or the Space Race when every last little invention was this major step forward and there was this reward of pride and nationalism. How come we can’t encourage people with this great carrot of restoration? It’s not just restoring the health of ecosystems. I don’t approach environmentalism in the traditional way, the tragedy of the commons, bad human bad, you’re in Eden and it’s your fault. I look at it as a very positive. Hey, if we have the power to destroy ecosystems and make ourselves sick through the food systems we create, that’s fabulous. That’s great news. Because that means equally we have the power to heal and to restore. Restorative to me means creating resilient economic systems in which a daughter can follow in her daddy’s boot steps onto the lobster boat. It means an economic system in which neighbors are thriving. It means public health outcomes that are consistently improving and all of this is the measure of an enduring, thriving human community which is wholly predicated on a resilient and healthy ecosystem. It’s really looking at taking this idea of reward, taking this idea of growth and of betterment and applying it to ourselves so that the environment might gain as well.
Lisa: One of the things that you brought up as a possibility is that we maybe eat less. That if we’re going to have a lovely piece of fish, that maybe we parcel it out a little bit. We eat a little bit less of that. We don’t need as much protein as everybody says that we need. Let’s have some more fruits and vegetables. That’s fascinating, that idea that maybe just being mindful about our overconsumption of lots of different things including protein, maybe that is contributing in some ways to the overfishing of certain populations.
Barton: I think this applies to a lot of different scenarios that too often, we place the full burden of sustainability on the producer. That you, the farmer, you, the fisherman, it is your responsibility and yours alone to make available to me sustainable products. That shirks and completely abdicates our own responsibility as consumers which I think we have equal burden to bear. Not only must we produce sustainably and hold accountable producers, but when they produce sustainably, we must reward them and support them but then we have a responsibility to use those products sustainably. We can sustainably farm shrimp. I talk about this in that TED talk. We can sustainably farm shrimp but an all you can eat shrimp buffet is inherently and never will be sustainable. It’s simply just more than we need.
I think it also goes beyond this, just in terms of eating less, but also diversifying. For too long, a couple of facts and figures, in America we eat 14.6 pounds of seafood per person year. 95% of that is only 10 species. 65% is only three species, shrimp, tuna, and salmon. If our relationship with the ocean and thereby with fishermen and their economy is predicated on the notion of let me tell you what I’m willing to eat for dinner rather than asking of the oceans and fishermen what they are able and willing to supply, we’ve created this very irrational economy in which we only eat what we want and we discard the rest. Even though everything that comes from the ocean is equally profitable to the body for the purpose of sustaining ourselves, but we are not transferring that value back to the fishermen and allowing them to thrive.
I a lot of times focus on the opportunities we have as consumers to make very simple choices that have positive outcomes with our own health, with our budgets, and honestly with our enjoyment too. A diverse meal full of fruits, greens, grains, nuts, vegetables and small amount of protein, whatever it may be is far more interesting through its diversity. These are all wins. It’s just piecing them together in a narrative that whoever I’m talking to gets it because it’s not about me telling you what to do. It’s about providing a context for your own passions to be ignited, your own interests to find opportunity to act upon.
Lisa: One of the issues that I think sometimes people run across is that the types of species that you are discussing are … That’s what’s there. If you go to a restaurant, they will have shrimp, they will have salmon. Or if you go to the grocery store, your recognizable species are those things. How do we get more of the … What I’ve been told are under loved and sometimes the ugly fish? How do you get those types of things into the restaurants or into the supermarkets or into the fish markets where people can buy them?
Barton: You simply just have to ask for them. A business is not going to bring in a highly perishable item on the hopes that it might sell. You have to ask for it. You have to create the specter of demand by which a company sees opportunity. By which they feel that their risk is somewhat mitigated. Then there are also just incredible programs, think what Jen Levin is doing down at Gulf of Maine Research Institute, what Don Perkins is doing down there, with their Gulf of Maine Species that Hannaford’s and restaurants all over, the under loved species such as dogfish and scup and whiting and mackerel. These are available to us. I think now we’re still in a phase where we need to seek them out a little bit. If you see it at Hannaford’s all we have to do is seek out just a little bit of information and they’ve also done such a great job of educating around that so that there is a dialogue.
It’s not just sitting there waiting for you to come to it. If you look at menu and its got swordfish, scallops, shrimp, tuna and salmon on it, and brotula, guess what’s not selling tonight? What’s brotula? You have to sell it. You have to sell the story. That’s what GMRI does so well. That’s what I think Mainers also understand so well is they understand the impact. They understand that connectivity in the way that farmers’ markets have allowed us to understand the connectivity, see the dirt underneath the farmer’s fingernails and feel the passion of the agrarian hero which we so venerate. It is that sense of connection. It is that storied seafood that really begins to make us interested and comfortable with these new species and begin to ask for them.
Lisa: When we go to the farmers’ market, sometimes the things that are more readily available and maybe they’re the heritage type items, sometimes they’re not the prettiest. Sometimes you’re getting the ugly tomatoes or you’re getting the ugly root vegetables. Isn’t there also a reeducation around what something looks like and how one can create a beautiful plate even with an ugly type of item, and also an education around how long you have to use something because sometimes I think we’re throwing things out before we really need to.
Barton: Certainly food waste is one of the easiest ways to tackle our impact on the environment and gain so much in return in terms of money backs. The facts and figures are just astounding in how much food we waste and just our food waste in this country alone is equal to the greenhouse gas emissions of nations, just the amount of food that we throw out. Yeah. That’s just one thing right there and that encourages us to shop more smartly, is that the best way to say that, but also more often I think. To create a better relationship with food. If food is only something … ‘I have to go do the grocery shopping. It’s Sunday afternoon. I don’t want to do this but I got to fill up the fridge for the week.” Food is then only a convenience that’s only something that you have to do rather than something you’re really relating to. Yes, it is a pain in the butt to go more often. It does take time, but you’re also rewarded with foods, with meals that are fun, are creative, actually spark something in your brain and they bring your family together and actually give you something at the end of the day palpable, tangible that you’ve created and are proud of. There’s a lot of value in that.
When it comes to ugly fruits or ugly vegetables, I have never had a tomato sauce, ever, that I’ve looked at and said, “Ugh. That was made out of ugly tomatoes.” Cut up your parsnips or your turnips or whatever and roast them off and serve them with an anchovy vinaigrette with whole grain mustard and red wine vinegar and slug of olive oil in it. There’s far more on this plate to distract me than to entice me than the notion that this might not have been perfectly cylindrical in a conical form. I’m not sure exactly when we began to believe that perfection was all that we deserved and nothing less in terms of fruits and vegetables and it gets to that same idea of the seafoods, the under loved seafoods. When did we begin to feel as though we deserve to have salmon all the time and shrimp all the time? Even though dogfish might be what we should be eating. Again, this is not bad human bad, this is not judging, but rather this is really just saying we all live under this burden of anxiety, whether we live in a world that’s managed for abundance or one that’s managed for scarcity. Everyone deals with that in their own way and that affects them somehow. What I try and espouse is that we have great opportunities to take control of that narrative, in healthful, tasty, delicious, communal ways.
Lisa: I came to know of you through looking into a Harvard course and there’s a doctor who teaches public health and I have a background in public health so I was thinking, “Oh, maybe I’ll take this.” I’ve been doing public health for a while now. I want to kind of get updated. When you and I were talking, you said, “Yeah. There’s a lot of really great new data that’s out there that’s supporting the things that we have been talking about for a long time.” That’s very exciting because instead of just saying, “You should do this because it’s the right thing to do,” now we can say, “Here are some numbers for you and some scientific backing.” How has that been helpful to you as you’ve been trying to espouse as you say a more thoughtful way of living?
Barton: We care about what we can measure. I think it does matter that there is some empirical fact-based learning behind this. As we evolve our thinking about the environment, we need to understand what those impacts are. We need to understand that climate change is a threat to our health and when we have the papers, when we have the knowledge that says, “Okay, well here are the impacts,” then we can make rational choices and then we can really begin a learning process that is both efficient, that we can incorporate easily into our lives because we’re not seeking out some sort of mystical answer, just public health being this wild idea that you can’t really quite nail down what it is. It’s really opened the door for us to have a more consistent dialogue and to really answer the question of what are the problems that we are trying to solve and what are the outcomes of that.
I think all too often in public health, in environmentalism, the program or the idea is so obvious that it begs us to not ask question of, “Well, what are we using this campaign to accomplish?” A great example of this is recycling. Reduce, reuse, recycle. Legislated into municipalities everywhere. This is the law. This is hardwired into the brains of millennials. This is fabulous. Yet in the 50 or so years since recycling has really become a social and then legislative movement, the amount of recyclable goods flowing into our marketplace has increased exponentially to the point where we are now a disposable goods, recyclable goods economy. We prefer them.
We’ve been so busy reducing, reusing and recycling that we forgot to refuse. In this way, I think oftentimes campaigns, messaging, eat your vegetables, whatever it is, can end up being used as a confirmation bias that allows us to continue on in the very behaviors that have sort of proliferated the problem. Now with the science coming out around the impacts on public health of our environment, we are finally able to think about it in what is really a very simple geometric theorem. Humans can be no healthier than the foods we eat. The foods we eat can be no healthier than the environment they come from. If A equals B and B equals C, we can be no healthier than our environment and just being able to prove that theorem right there is such a powerful step forward that we didn’t have before.
Lisa: For people that have been listening to our conversation, what is one thing that you can say try incorporating this today and it will make an impact?
Barton: I think back to the portion size. Just with our protein, we have such a center of the plate mentality. When we go out to dinner, we order the steak and it’s eight ounces minimum. Their bodies simply don’t need that and literally don’t have the carrying capacity for it and we end up getting rid of most of that. Not only I think as I said earlier do we enjoy greater diversity of textures, tastes, colors, flavors. All the things that make eating fun, but also our impact on ecosystems drops dramatically and one step further than that, simply eat more seafood. Eat more seafood. The 3 S’s of public health. It’s this simple. Wear your seat belt, don’t smoke, and eat seafood.
Lisa: we will be providing links to your information so people can learn more about the work that you’re doing on our show notes page which is lovemaineradio.com. We’ve been speaking with Barton Seaver who is on a mission to restore our relationship with the ocean, the land, and with each other through dinner. I really appreciate your coming in and having this conversation with me today. It’s been fun.
Barton: Thanks. I appreciate the opportunity.