Serving Sushi With A Conscience

Bamboo Sushi in Portland, Oregon was named the most sustainable fish restaurant in the United States, reports GOOD Magazine.

Our ears pricked up when we heard this, since Turnstyle recently covered the sustainable sushi trend in San Francisco.

Fish2fork – a food review website that ranks restaurants on their environmental policies – gave Bamboo Sushi 4.5 points out of 5, and explained that Bamboo Sushi is taking responsibility for the fish it serves in a very serious way.

Kristofor Lofgren, the owner of Bamboo Sushi, told GOOD that only one percent of the world’s oceans are Marine Protected Areas. His plan is to use a portion of every dollar spent at Bamboo Sushi to buy these protected areas of ocean and use them as breeding grounds for more fish.  Bamboo Sushi is about to buy their first protected area in the Bahamas.

Your dining experience at Bamboo Sushi doesn’t have to end at dessert – if you choose to donate $4,000 at the end of your meal, they will fly you out to Florida to tag a shark with a GPS locater. You can name it, and track it from then on. GOOD writes, “Offering that kind of experiential engagement with conservation is proven to increase donations over time. It doesn’t hurt brand loyalty to the restaurant either.”

Fish restaurant in Sausalito, CA — ranked just below Bamboo Sushi on fish2fork — is leading the campaign to get salmon off restaurant menus.

In fact, the whole world is hopping on board with marine protection. Chile’s congress just unanimously voted to ban shark finning. According to Discovery News, 30 species of sharks swim up and down Chile’s coast, and are often hunted for their fins, which are exported to Asia to be used in soup. The ban makes it illegal to detach the fins from a shark upon being caught. The shark must be brought into the fishery whole so that its species can be identified, and the numbers of sharks caught can be monitored.

NPR reports that in order to be sustainable, we should take a look at Food and Water Watch’s National Smart Seafood Guide 2011, which recommends that restaurants take advantage of using several invasive species  – like blue tilapia, Asian carp, lionfish, and a few kinds of crab. Even though retailers and restaurants in the U.S. aren’t accustomed to selling these types of fish, trying it out could help reduce the amount of imported species that could actually be contaminated. “Over 70 percent of domestic shrimp and about 60 percent of domestic oysters came from the Gulf of Mexico prior to the April 2010 oil spill,” according to the Smart Seafood Guide.