More than a decade ago, Barton Seaver was a handsome, young chef with a penchant for fish. At his Georgetown restaurant, Hook, he served close to 80 different species of seafood. Next was Tackle Box, an urban fish shack, and, later, as chef at Blue Ridge restaurant in Glover Park, he was named Esquire’s Chef of the Year in 2009.
Seaver, who turns 39 this month, no longer advocates for eating a diverse sea-based diet from a position behind the stove. Living in Maine, he’s now an activist, the director of the Sustainable Seafood and Health Initiative at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the author of the International Association of Culinary Professionals’ award-winning book American Seafood: Heritage, Culture & Cookery From Sea to Shining Sea.
American Seafood is a working coffee table book, if that’s a category. It’s gorgeous to flip through, with full-color images of a blazing sun setting over the sea and piles and piles of blue crabs, nautical tattoos, vintage ads, action shots of fishers from the 1880s and portraits of fishers from today. And, there’s also the tale of America’s storied history with the sea, from the importance of coastal towns to our narrow view of what fish we deem culturally edible.
Seaver cites a terrifying stat: 90 percent of the seafood we eat comes from 10 species, with 65 percent coming from shrimp, tuna and salmon alone. “In the face of wild abundance, we have preferred familiarity over experience,” he writes. This narrow view does not make for healthy waters.
It’s why about 400 of the 500 pages of this book are dedicated to the stunning diversity of seafood along the Atlantic, Pacific and in between. The catalog, from abalone to wreckfish, tells the history and anecdotes of each fish but contains almost no recipes. (There are his other half-dozen books for that.)
American Seafood is a beautiful, thoughtful and a thought-provoking ode, and most importantly, an open call for being better sea fare-eating citizens: “We need to shift our baseline to ask for only what the ocean can provide,” writes Seaver, “and to accept the diversity it offers as our normal.”
