Tidbit: More on sustainable seafood

Being stuck here in town because of the snow, we obviously didn't get to do the reviews that we had planned, which was a real bummer. Instead of a night on the town in DC, Friday was spent on the town in Morgantown. We headed to the Warner to see "Up in the Air." (Short movie review: I did not love it.) After that, we walked across the street to Madeline's.

Now I have never considered Madeline's to be a place with a lot of local food. (Sometimes the specials menu mentions local salad greens or something.) I usually order a vegetarian dish, because I don't know if they are serving meat that was grass fed, treated humanely, not pumped full of hormones, or whatever. But on the heels of the my last post which mentioned sustainable seafood, I was thinking this would be apropos.

I love fish, or any kind of seafood for that matter. But some of the info you can find, especially on Atlantic salmon, will just knock your socks off. No doubt about it, that's some stuff you don't want to eat...

So onward and upward...not Friday, but a few weeks ago, I asked the server at Madeline's where the mussels came from (there are a couple of appetizers with mussels). She said Chile. I wasn't sure if that's a good thing, so I skipped them. Instead, I ordered the Maryland crab soup (more or less local). And then Friday night, I was tempted to order the shrimp, and I asked where they came from. The server said Thailand. And again, I ordered the Maryland crab soup.

I didn't have my iPhone either time, which I would normally use to look this stuff up, to find out if the source of the fish makes it a "thumbs up" or "thumbs down." And, I like to find out whether there's a high risk for contamination with heavy metals or poisons as well.

Here are a couple of good places to find this info. Check them out to see which one works best for you.

Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood WATCH
Easy to use, you can just search for a type of seafood and get an easy-to-read chart indicating Best Choice, Good Alternative, or Avoid based on sustainability, with notes at the bottom about possible contamination. There's an iPhone app, and a downloadable card that you can print to fold up and carry with you. A lot of great info.

Sea Choice
This one also has an iPhone app and printable resources. I haven't used it much, but it looks really good. The info here should be same as Monterey Bay Aquarium. This site seems a little more streamlined.

Sustainable Sushi
There's a blog here, with sushi restaurant reviews as well. This one's nice because you can search for a fish by its sushi name. (Speaking of sustainable sushi, I think this is where I found info for RM Seafood in Las Vegas. Amazing. Best seafood I have ever eaten...more on this later.)

Vital Choices
I swear this isn't a commercial, but I order seafood from Vital Choices and it's fantastic. Good, clean, sustainable seafood. Kind of pricey, but I try to hit up the salmon and halibut specials. And they do free shipping for orders over $99, so I stock up. The spot prawns are more like lobster (which, incidentally I don't eat...the dilemma) than shrimp, beautiful and out of this world. Lots of info on this website as well.

So, as it turns out, I could have ordered the mussels at Madeline's, and felt comfortable that I was eating a sustainably harvested creature with a low risk for contamination. Skipping the shrimp from Thailand was a good idea, and of course the Maryland crab was fine. Next time, I'm all over the Mussels Diablo!!!

ps. A big shout out to Natasha at Madeline's for being so lovely and answering my "where does it come from" questions with a smile!