The dos and don’ts of buying sustainable seafood have become common knowledge for many Americans, thanks in large part to the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch program and its wallet-sized reference cards, which offer simple guidelines to making smart purchases in the seafood department. Yet even as many consumers do their best to dodge red-listed items, fishmongers still dangle them before our noses.
Concerned about the continued offering of such items in stores, a class of UC Santa Cruz undergrads has developed a rating system of retail seafood markets that could put the pressure on companies that carry some of the biggest no-nos, such as Chilean sea bass and farmed salmon, to clean up their acts. Created as an experimental nonprofit in Prof. Don Croll’s marine conservation biology class, Sea Change Santa Cruz, as the students have named their organization, evaluates stores and supermarkets based on the coldest, hardest data there is: the fish they sell. The system, which works on a scale of one to 10, has been applied to a handful of major Santa Cruz County retail locations. New Leaf Markets attained the greenest score in town—a 7.6—while Costco scraped the bottom with a 1.6. In between are local markets like Shopper’s Corner, Stagnaro’s and Staff of Life and chains like Safeway, Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s.
Sea Change Santa Cruz’s creators hope that lower-scoring markets will strive to match the better scores of their competitors.
“We wanted to create the incentive to change, so that stores might even compete with each other for the best ratings,” said Jonah Mulski, a 33-year-old student in Croll’s class who helped lead and develop the project. He says Sea Change Santa Cruz’s rating system is intended to fill a gap in the sustainable seafood movement.
“Other groups have produced information to educate consumers and allow them to support sustainable seafood industries,” Mulski said. He added that the Seafood Watch cards are helpful but can create confusion if consumers are unsure of how or where certain species were harvested. “So we want retailers to take responsibility. They’re the one link in the seafood chain that hasn’t been pressured yet to change.”
Sea Change Santa Cruz’s sustainability scores of local stores and supermarkets are to be displayed on the organization’s website and on fliers being distributed by the students at farmers markets, in downtown Santa Cruz, in Capitola and on the UC-Santa Cruz campus. But Mulski acknowledged that the evaluation system is not failsafe. Markets that have scored well “still sell red-listed species,” Mulski said, “and it’s important that consumers educate themselves and stay informed as to what’s red-listed and what’s not.”
Activists with Greenpeace assisted Croll’s class in developing the rating system’s criteria and running the first survey of local stores. For their part, the students developed and incorporated a “localness factor” into the scoring scheme, with a critical eye on how many miles away the fish was caught, processed and packaged.
“We think it’s as important to support local economies and keep the carbon footprint down as it is for stores to sell sustainably fished species,” Mulski said.
As the fall quarter nears its end at UCSC, Sea Change Santa Cruz nears an uncertain future. Says Croll, “One of the exercises of this class is to ask the students what they want to do next” in terms of maintaining the system as a viable, active organization.
Sea Change Santa Cruz would not be the first sustainable seafood advocacy group to begin in the classroom. Santa Cruz-based Fishwise originated at UCSC as a project of two graduate students in 2002. Today, Fishwise advises companies nationwide, including New Leaf Markets and some 1,500 locations of Safeway, in developing sustainable fish- and shellfish-buying programs. The organization also works closer to the water, encouraging fishermen to improve their practices rather than simply encouraging retailers to drop the products from their inventories.
Mulski says Sea Change Santa Cruz is likely to continue operating after the school quarter ends in December, and he anticipates follow-up surveys to track any changes or progress in how local businesses manage their seafood inventories.
“In Santa Cruz there are markets that support healthy oceans and those that don’t,” he said, “and we want the public to know who’s who.”
Learn more at www.seachangesantacruz.org.
