To say that Ned Bell is passionate about seafood is like saying Gordon Ramsay has a bit of a temper. It simply doesn’t do justice to the strength of the emotion. This is how passionate the executive chef of Vancouver’s Four Seasons hotel YEW seafood + bar is about seafood: last year Bell got on his bike and rode more than 5,000 miles from coast to coast of Canada to raise awareness for his sustainable fishing initiative, Chefs for Oceans.
“I just wanted to do something out of the box,” he says, “that would make a noise. Along the way I did 24 events with the best chefs in the country. It just kept gaining momentum. The same questions kept being asked: ‘Just what is sustainable seafood?’ Even in Vancouver this movement is only 10 years old. In some places even the chefs had never heard of the concept, had no idea where the fish in the grocery had come from.”
Bell also works closely with the conservation programme Ocean Wise, started 10 years ago by fellow chef Rob Clark and the Vancouver Aquarium. Ocean Wise has since signed up 600 restaurant partners with thousands of outlets across Canada to its labelling system that tells diners and chefs which fish are sustainably caught. “It makes it easy for chefs,” says Bell, “because Ocean Wise does the research for you: you just look for the logo before buying.”
Canadian chefs in general, and Vancouver’s in particular, have become strong supporters of the farm-to-plate – or ocean-to-plate – movement, which shows in the flowering of world-class restaurants. Bell knows the local fishermen he buys from personally, and at the fishing docks, not 10 minutes from his restaurant, he introduces me to one of his suppliers, Shaun Strobel of Skipper Otto’s.
Strobel, too, finds that Ocean Wise makes life simpler. “It’s an easy way to say to a client, sorry but we can’t add China Rockford to the list, as they are not Ocean Wise approved,” he says. “Those fish literally live to be 80 years old.”
Bell, a descendant of four generations of fishermen, who has seen the industry decline because of overfishing, feels a special responsibility to promote sustainability. And he’s not just stopping at Canada, either. The Four Seasons chain has hotels and restaurants all over the world, and Bell discusses best practice with all of them. But he believes that British Columbia is the best possible place to start.
“Here on the west coast there’s more connection with the environment,” Bell says, “partly because of the First Nations tribes here, for whom we have a huge respect. And, of course, the mighty salmon is a jewel. This is the only place in the world where you get five species of salmon, and everything relies on them: the eagles, the bears, the killer whales, even the trees – the eagles pick up the salmon and carry them into the forest, and when they decompose they feed the eco-system.”
Dolf DeJong, vice-president of conservation and education, Vancouver Aquarium, and a friend of Ned Bell, is understandably proud of the way Ocean Wise has grown. “It’s self-funding, now. We have five staff in Vancouver, and two more in Toronto. We have someone to do the deep dive and find out what the stocks are like and how many fish are being caught, and put it through a three-party review system. We host events such as the chowder chowdown and ceviche smackdown, and recently held the first seafood symposium with academics and chefs all coming together for a lecture series.”
And can it really make a difference? DeJong tells a story to illustrate how hearts and minds can be changed – over time. During his work with schools, one of the playrooms was found to have been trashed during the night by teenagers. “Tables had been pushed into ball pools, the soda machine was broken into and money taken – it was a real mess. But then, in the recycling bin, we saw all these beer bottles. So even in the middle of this drunken rampage, these criminal acts, these kids were thinking: ‘Good guys recycle.’
“That’s when I realised that we might just have a shot at changing the world.”
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