Our Point of View on COVID19, Seafood and Ocean Health
Thirty years ago, when Changing Tastes’ founder was completing his graduate work in Public Health, we were in the midst of the HIV and AIDS crisis, including the United States placing immigration restrictions on people with the disease, as well as national effort to change social norms in order to reduce tobacco related deaths and limit smoking in public.
The magnitude of change and the potential economic impacts were daunting. The restaurant industry once called these impossible challenges and threats to its existence, as were the economic downturns of 2001 and 2007.
Three decades on, the world’s response to the public health risks from COVID19 is more timely, coordinated, and profound. We have taken a collective pause, creating a quieter time — a Sabbath — across most of our planet and we have also radically altered the business of food.
For the food and hospitality industry, we know this moment is also a bitter one. Our collective response to COVID19 has all but closed most of the world’s restaurants, dining halls, and hotels. While this is a necessity to protect our public health, it is also a hardship for over a billion hard working people who grow, harvest, process, cook, and sell food, as well as millions of small restaurant owners.
For the oceans, it is a pivotal one.
What we choose to do over the next few months can profoundly benefit our oceans for decades to come.
At Changing Tastes, we see this as a unique and opportune moment in time that is unprecedented during our professional lives, where we can make changes now. Why now? Because many of our natural systems have a moment to recover, and that can set a new and better direction for our reemergence and how we treat our oceans.
We also see it as just a moment in time, and one that will pass, before the restaurant and hospitality industry returns to again set the tastes for the public. Then, the industry can choose to offer up something even better than before.
As we look out a short while ahead, we believe the COVID19 response will reshape how we catch and eat fish and seafood over the near term. Some faster reproducing wild fisheries may recover, and others could be substantially and perhaps permanently harmed. Here is some of what we see ahead:
North American and European consumers are panic buying and hoarding canned tuna along with a few other grocery items. Major canned tuna producers are running at maximum volume amidst record sales. But we are not eating a lot more canned tuna. Rather, we’ve essentially transferred most of a year’s harvest from warehouses to pantries and basement storage shelves.
Swiftly rebuilding that inventory will substantially increase pressure on tuna fisheries and workers for some time if the industry looks to squeeze an extra year’s production out of the world’s tuna stocks. It can be even worse if producers misinterpret current conditions and wrongly believe demand has permanently increased. However, we can work to flatten the demand curve for canned tuna and protect or even rebuild wild stocks!
The farmed salmon industry is grinding to a halt. The substantial reduction of air travel and freight and to a lesser extent closure of the European hotel industry have broken both supply lines and their customer base. In South America, workers in salmon farms also have other jobs in anchovy processing and feed production. But concerns about COVID19 contamination in salmon farms have prevented many from working additional jobs to produce salmon feed.
During this brief time while production has slowed, we can more easily introduce new feed sources and shape the demand for farmed salmon before production restarts.
Fast growing species may recover as we temporarily ratchet down demand, harvest, and production for items like octopus, eaten almost exclusively in restaurants, and of pelagic fish used for feed. Before demand resumes, we can right size preferences and demand to match conservation goals. This will make management efforts for these fisheries more effective than ever as they achieve the easier task of maintaining healthy stocks rather than the greater challenge of recovery.
Maintaining the new level of hygiene achieved in hospitality and foodservice and substantially reducing the use of single use plastics and other disposable items. New operating procedures maintain exceptional levels of cleanliness on durable surfaces and reusable items. Resuming operations around a principle ofmaintaining cleanliness at all times rather than discarding items over the course of service can become the new normal.
Domestic food production, including fisheries, farms, and advanced on-land production is becomingmore important to the food industry, governments, and consumers as we become increasingly aware ofthe brittle nature of global supply chains. The time is ripe to advance better management of wild fisheries and cultivate the adoption of advanced cellular and land-based aquaculture technologies.
We see a speedy recovery for the foodservice industry, which doesn’t have to look exactly like it just did. After the 2001 and 2007 economic downturns, as well as those in prior decades, the foodservice sector was one of the first to recover. Each time, the hospitality sector has grown and taken share from grocery retail.
Dining out is a way for people to treat themselves to an entertaining and affordable luxury, one that is more practical, filling, and less frivolous than others. Eating breakfast or lunch out more often also is one of the first things people in more affluent countries will do once they start commuting to work again. Once we are back in the workforce and after our collective time eating in, we think the return to restaurant life — and eating in — may be an even more substantial celebration of our reemergence and recovery.
All told, we have a few months to shape the role of fish and seafood in the decades after the COVID19 response. What we choose to harvest, produce, sell, and eat can look substantially different if we act quickly.
Research we conducted over the past months shows that consumers and consumer facing companies also would prefer a change to a different assortment of fish and seafood, are more concerned with ocean health issues, and more open to new ways of producing fish and seafood through aquaculture, including cellular cultivation. They are also are more familiar than many may realize with eating sea plants and mollusks that can be part of regenerative efforts.
Knowing how both diseases and healthy behaviors are spread has underpinned Changing Tastes’ work and our point of view about influencing how we choose to eat and feed each other, in order to change our effects and relationship to our environment. We are seeing the power of those models right now.
It’s also how we have continued to define new approaches to make necessary and impossible changes happen, and to bring forward innovative and profitable solutions to impossible challenges. An example of this was our creating the Plant-Forward culinary strategy to reduce the amount of meat served by the foodservice industry as a way to address climate change through menu design. Our recent efforts are now shifting what we eat and plant in our landscapes, improving how we harvest the bounty of our oceans, and helping to grow the restaurant industry.
Our response at Changing Tastes, as has been our response in the past when faced with other necessary and impossible challenges, is to offer our point of view and provide a template for a sustainable and successful future. Many of you have asked us for advice and specifics about the best way we can implement new and better practices in ways that our customers, partners, and guests will accept and enjoy them. Our advice is: now is the time to make those changes, and to change tastes before business as usual resumes.
Over the next few months, we can work together to achieve that very near and better future and make a positive impact as the food industry recovers, restarts, and reemerges into a much better one. How different it will look is up to us and the actions that we take now.
This pause gives us the ability to create a new normal that will be better than the one we have all been working so hard to change. We look forward to working together with all of you to make this vision a reality in the coming months. There’s more to come.
In the meantime, on behalf of the Changing Tastes team, Salud! We wish you and yours only the best of health and a bright future.