For years, Guido Rahr was a regular weekly customer at Sinju Restaurant, a sleek sushi emporium across the street from his office in Portland, OR’s, artsy Pearl District. Taking a seat at the sushi bar earlier this summer, Rahr noticed that bluefin tuna was on the menu.

Rahr, who is president of the Wild Salmon Center, an international conservation group, says that he asked the chef whether it was Pacific or Atlantic bluefin. The chef responded that it was Atlantic—one of the most endangered fish species in the ocean, on the very brink of extinction. In what he insists was a diplomatic manner, Rahr said that he recommended that the restaurant consider not serving Atlantic bluefin. “I said it really politely and more in the sense of, ‘I’m a regular customer and I’m concerned. You really ought to think twice about doing this—especially in Portland where we take sustainability seriously,’” he told me in a telephone interview.

There were two other customers at the bar who overheard the discussion but went back to their meals with no apparent loss of appetite.

On the way out the door, he told the manager that he would gather some information about bluefin, and the following day, he dropped off a packet. And for nearly a month thought nothing more of the incident–until he returned to Sinju, only to be greeted by a hostess who asked Rahr and his party to wait by the door, then vanished into the kitchen. According to Rahr, she came back out holding a cell phone, which she presented to him. Her boss was on the other end and asked Rahr to tell him his concerns. Rahr repeated the bluefin facts, and the manager said that he would prefer that Rahr bring such issues to him directly and not in front of other customers. “I thought, OK, that’s fine,” said Rahr. “It was all very cordial.”

When Rahr put the phone down, the hostess informed him that he was no longer welcome in the restaurant. “She said the staff were afraid to serve me,” said Rahr.

“I was stunned. Shocked. All of my conversations had been very polite and low-key.”

In mid-August, Rahr emailed a letter to Mike Chen, a manager at the restaurant group, which has two other locations in Portland. He has yet to get a reply. I reached Mr. Chen by telephone and asked him to comment on the incident. He requested that I email my questions, which I did, but so far no one at the restaurant has responded.

Rahr hasn’t had sushi since being banned. “Instead of as a loyal customer, they treated me as an adversary. I can’t see how any place can serve bluefin with a clear conscience. I need to find a new sushi restaurant.”

Luckily, living in Portland, he has a clear choice. He said that he plans to check out Bamboo Sushi, which has won high praise for its fish—every morsel of which is sustainable.

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Circular logic.

I have visited two dairy farms in the last couple of weeks. One belongs to Henry, my neighbor here in Vermont. I stopped by his place to pick up a dozen bales of mulch hay to spread on my garden, and he invited me into the barn to meet Ernie, a three-week-old bull calf he seemed particularly proud of. Ernie came trotting up to us with the rambunctious glee of an oversized Labrador pup. It was almost as if the calf knew his privileged destiny was a life of grazing on green, hilly pastures occasionally performing the duties required of a ladies’ man.

With part-time help from his wife and a hired hand, Henry milks about 65 cows, black and white Holsteins and fawn-colored Jerseys, along with mottled crossbreeds of the two. With milk prices low, Henry has been barely scraping by for the last few years. As we say in New England, he survives not so much on how much money he makes, but on how much he doesn’t spend. Henry’s weathered, gray barns are decades past needing a coat of stain, and his rusting collection of tractors, wagons, mowers, and balers is fast approaching antique status, kept functional only because in a previous life, Henry was a farm equipment mechanic. Despite such disadvantages (or maybe because of them), Henry’s milk is consistently rated as top-quality, and he gets a premium price for it.

The other dairy I visited is called Fair Oaks Farms. Owned by nine families, it is located near an interstate highway that bisects flat corn, alfalfa, and soybean fields in Indiana. Fair Oaks is one of the largest dairy farms in the United States. It houses 30,000 cows and produces enough milk to slake the thirst of the entire city of Chicago, which is located 75 miles to the north.

Until the 1970s, America’s milk products were supplied by several hundred thousand Henrys scattered across the country. But if current trends continue, the future of milk production in the country will look a lot like Fair Oaks—huge operations with enough financial clout to deal on equal footing with dairy processing giants like Dean Foods and supermarket chains like Kroger. In 1970, there were 658,000 dairy farms in the U. S. By 2006, according to the United States Department of Agriculture, that number had fallen to 75,000, a drop of an astounding 88 percent. And the plunge continues. But in the same period, the number of mega-farms with more than 2,000 cows rose by 104 percent.

Unlike Henry’s farm, Fair Oaks is “bio-secure,” meaning it’s off-limits to visitors and there’s no scratching behind the ears of calves. But it does offer guided bus tours, so I paid the $10 entry fee, received a hot-pink wrist bracelet, and joined a group of senior citizens aboard a gleaming white bus. “As one of the largest dairy farms in the United States, Fair Oaks wanted to give the public the chance to see 21st-century agriculture up close,” said Tony Wiedman, the company’s marketing manager.

As we cruised at a walking pace, a recorded voice reeled off statistics that were mind boggling. Fair Oaks owns 19,000 acres of land—enough to accommodate 56,000 football fields. Its cows live in 10 barns (imagine airplane hangars), 3,000 per facility. Tended by a workforce of 400, they produce 250,000 gallons of milk per day—even without the stimulation of artificial hormones, which Fair Oaks eschews. Waste from the cows is processed in a state-of-the-art digester, producing enough methane to generate all the electricity the vast farm requires.

Milking time at Fair Oaks never ends. Each cow is milked three times per day (At Henry’s, as at most traditional dairies, cows are milked twice a day.) Live Oak’s 10 milking parlors operate 24/7 and 365 days a year. For one hour out of eight, milking stops just long enough for equipment to be automatically cleaned.

We were allowed to get off our bus to climb a set of steps to a glassed-off viewing area above the room where the cows were being milked 72 at a time in what looked like a large, slow-motion, bovine merry-go-round. Cows are the ultimate creatures of habit, and these beasts dutifully knew the routine, walking on their own into empty stanchions and standing placidly while attendants wiped their teats down with disinfectant and attached the suction cups of the mechanical milking machines. It took a leisurely eight and a half minutes for the device to make a full rotation. The cows stood, disinterestedly chewing their cud, as computers linked to transponders on their collars kept track of their milk output, automatically shutting off the suction when udders were empty. Once the rotation was complete, the cows backed out of the stanchions on their own, and others took their places. It takes about an hour to milk 500 cows.

Like any mammal, in order to produce milk, cows must have offspring, so the birthing barn at Fair Oaks is a busy place. Between 80 and 100 calves are born there each day. While our group stood gaping (again through a glass partition), a worker tied a strap around two little hooves protruding from the hind end of a Holstein. After a couple of mighty heaves, the worker hauled a wet, bloody calf into the world. It lay in the straw, still, and from all appearances lifeless. The mother stayed in place so long that I began to wonder whether the Fair Oaks marketing folks were going to have a little PR issue on their hands. But she suddenly stood, turned around, and began to lick the calf vigorously. It responded by raising its head and moving its hoofs as if contemplating standing.

That calf turned out to be a female, as are about half the calves born at Fair Oaks. Little more than wasteful byproducts, male calves are sold for slaughter. But by next May, Fair Oaks will have overcome that little biological problem by using “sex select” insemination, a process that promises that 80 percent of calves born there will be female. Like the calf that I saw being born, they will travel south to farms in Kentucky, Tennessee, and Missouri—states with land better suited to pasture than the valuable black loam around Fair Oaks. After residing there for two and a half years, they will be artificially inseminated and returned to Fair Oaks when they are seven months pregnant. Two months later, they will have their first calves and then, for the next five to seven years, assume their spots in the constantly rotating milking parlor.

They will never again step outside a barn.

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The one that didn't get away.

Fishermen working the waters of Alaska’s Copper River district claim that their salmon are the best in the world. Fishermen from other parts of the state insist that their fish are equally good and that Copper River’s reputation is founded more on well-executed PR than intrinsic quality. Discretion is the better part of valor, particularly in matters related to regional food loyalties, and I’ve had marvelous salmon from several parts of Alaska.

The experience is made all the more enjoyable by knowing that all Alaskan salmon is sustainably managed and wild, unlike environmentally damaging (and off-tasting) farmed salmon.

But there is a valuable lesson for other fishermen and fish eaters from Copper River. There can be no denying that among seafood lovers, Copper River is all but a brand name, one synonymous with quality. (Have you ever seen salmon promoted as “Bristol Bay” or “Kodiak?”) And fishermen receive nearly twice as much money for Copper River salmon than they do for fish caught in some other regions of Alaska, even though they are catching the same species, born in the same clean, glacial lakes and streams and maturing in the same cold, northern Pacific waters.

I was interested in finding the secret to Copper River’s success late last month when I traveled to Cordova, Alaska, as a guest of the Copper River/Prince William Sound Marketing Association.

Copper River fishermen do have a couple of natural advantages over the competition. Their salmon are the first to spawn in the spring, heading back to the river and the fishermen’s waiting nets in May just when winter-deadened appetites in the lower Forty Eight are most eager for the year’s first fresh salmon.

From a culinary point of view, the geography of the Copper River watershed has given its salmon an evolutionary advantage over others. The river is nearly 300 miles long and flows powerfully from glaciers high in the Chugach and St. Elias Wrangell Mountains. The upstream swim to the salmon’s natal pools requires enormous exertion, and because salmon stop eating once they re-enter fresh water, they have to rely on huge reserves of built-up fat to fuel their efforts. High-fat content means moist and flavorful flesh.

Savvy marketing has definitely played a role in Copper River’s success. In the 1980s virtually all the Copper River catch was being exported to Japan at prices so low that fishermen were pulling their boats out of the water and hanging up their nets. But a group of area fishermen were convinced that their salmon were special. “I don’t think it’s an overstatement to say that we have the best sockeye salmon in the world,” Jim Kallander, one of those fishermen, who is now the mayor of Cordova, told me over a dinner of—I really don’t need to tell you, do I? “We felt that there was more value in our salmon than we were getting by shipping them in bulk to Japan.”

Working with Jon Rowley, a seafood business consultant based in the Seattle area, the fishermen introduced restaurant chefs in the Pacific Northwest to Copper River salmon, often personally walking into the kitchens and coaxing them to try a box or two. The chefs in turn spread the gospel by specifying Copper River on their menu descriptions, in effect giving the fish a brand name.

Because Copper River fishermen thought their salmon were special, they also decided to treat them accordingly by adopting more conscientious handling practices than were the industry norm. Thea Thomas, who has fished Copper River for more than 20 years, was among those who saw the importance of maintaining quality. I hopped a ride with her for a firsthand look at how a Copper River salmon made the journey from ocean to dock. It was a rare sunny day as we motored out of mountain-rimmed Orca Inlet, with its sea otters and seals. Once out in the open Gulf of Alaska, Thomas set out a gill net as long as three football fields, hoping to intercept some inbound salmon. After about 45 minutes, she began to retrieve the net on a tractor-wheel-sized mechanical reel mounted behind the cabin on her boat. Copper River fishermen are encouraged to pull in their nets frequently so the salmon come aboard while still alive.

I’d been on salmon gillnetters before, so I had a few preconceptions of what might happen next—fish violently shaken from the net onto the deck, getting kicked around and stepped on before being tossed like so many chunks of stove wood into a plastic container, piling on top of each other by the hundreds and with no ice to keep them cold. So I was surprised to see Thomas extract her salmon from the net individually, sever their gills so that they bled cleanly and quickly, then immediately place then in a slurry of ice chips and seawater. To be certain that an ample supply of ice was available, even during periods when the fleet was working far from port, the fishermen themselves bought a barge to transport it to the boats rather than risk running out.

Convincing fishermen who are used to treating their catch as a commodity to change their ways took some time, and is still to some extent a work in progress, but as more members of the Cordova fleet saw that there was money to be made by taking good care of salmon, they improved their practices. And the processors and shippers followed the example of the fishermen. Instead of being frozen and shipped to Japan, Copper River salmon were loaded onto planes shortly after arriving at the processors in Cordova and air-freighted to Seattle the same night.

“The fishermen raised the bar for everyone,” said Kallander. “In the end, what it is all about is treating the fish with the respect they deserve.” In a world where wild seafood is increasingly at risk, that strikes me as a philosophy that fishermen and consumers should adopt—no matter where their fish comes from.

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Pop a Cork, Save a Forest

Shrimp on Prozac

There’s Oil in Them There Cereal Boxes

Ahhhhhhhhhhh.

Pop a Cork, Save a Forest

We had a dinner party last night for a group of friends who enjoy their wine. I’m glad to report that we more than did our bit to save the forests of Portugal, Spain, Italy, and northern Africa. The vintages we selected all came in bottles sealed with cork, which is made from the bark of a species of oak.

But with the increasing popularity of screw caps and plastic “corks,” the real cork industry is threatened, and along with it, more than four million acres of forest. In addition to providing some 100,000 jobs, cork forests combat global warming and provide habitat for wildlife. Portugal’s Montada Forest is home to hundreds of species of birds and also habitat for the Iberian lynx, one of the world’s most endangered animals. Apcor, the Portuguese Cork Association says that cork is compostable and produces 24 times less carbon than the aluminum in screw caps—if you need another reason to pop a cork and raise a glass.

Shrimp on Prozac

Those antidepressants we’ve been taken to brighten our moods eventually get excreted by our bodies and are flowing into the planet’s rivers and oceans through sewage treatment systems, which is bad news for aquatic wildlife, according to a study by British biologists.

The researchers exposed shrimp to concentrations of fluoxetine equivalent to what is commonly discharged by municipal wastewater plants. Fluoxetine is a key ingredient in Prosac and other anitdepressants. The shrimp used in the experiment are normally shy creatures, preferring dark crevasses and holes where they can avoid predators. However, the mood-elevated crustaceans headed for bright areas. “This behavior makes them much more likely to be eaten by a predator, such as a fish or bird,” study co-author Alex Ford, a biologist at U.K.’s University of Portsmouth, told reporter Kate Ravilious of National Geographic News .

Ford chose to study shrimp because they are a popular seafood item, but he noted that flouxetine exposure also has been linked to behavioral changes in fish and other aquatic animals.

But then again, given the catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf, wild shrimp might need something to deal with depression.

There’s Oil in Them There Cereal Boxes

In June, Kellogg’s recalled 28 million boxes of Fruit Loops, Corn Pops, Honey Smacks, and Apple Jacks after consumers claimed the cereal smelled bad and, in some cases caused nausea, vomiting, or diarrhea. Despite the recall, the company claimed that the symptoms were not caused by any “harmful material found in the food.”

The company also said that there were slightly elevated levels of a food packaging substance in the cereals, which are marketed primarily to children. But it failed to say what the packaging substance was.

Last week, the culprit was identified by the Environmental Working Group (EWA). It was a compound called methylnaphthalene, a compound manufactured from crude oil or coal tar (and also present in tobacco and wood smoke) and used to make dyes and resins. According to the EWG, there has been insufficient scientific research to determine whether or not consuming the chemical causes harm. Details are lacking, but apparently the chemical leached from the package into the cereal.

Kellogg’s offered sickened customers coupons for free cereal, presumably without methylnaphthalene.

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