Celebrity Chefs Serve Up Endangered Salmon With a Side of Michelin-Starred Ignorance

Armed with inflated egos, a cabal of chefs has cooked up a recipe for saving the oceans that keeps endangered wild fish on their menus, boots out responsibly farmed salmon and serves up their pescatarian pretension with sustainably sourced hypocrisy.

By Fabian Dawson
SeaWestNews

Apparently, somewhere between stiffening the soufflé and reducing the balsamic glaze, 120 so-called celebrity chefs have also mastered marine biology and aquaculture science, while perfecting the art of making seafood affordable by pricing ordinary people out of it.

Not content with keeping their newfound expertise confined to their expensive kitchens, the chefs decided to share their culinary claptrap with the rest of the world.

Their sanctimonious smugness was on full display yesterday in newspaper ads across the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia and Iceland as part of an activist campaign called Off The Table.

This campaign calls on restaurants to stop serving ocean-farmed salmon, citing the   much-discredited claims of anti-fish farm activists about its environmental impacts on wild fish and marine ecosystems.

It is a sweeping declaration from people whose professional expertise lies in deciding how much truffle oil to drizzle over the amuse-bouche.

And while their well-heeled customers can afford whatever exotic or endangered seafood appears on the menu, ordinary Canadians struggling with soaring food costs face a rather different reality.

For many families, the question is whether they can afford salmon at all, despite ocean-grown salmon being Canada’s most-consumed seafood.

But affordability, like truth, science and the livelihoods of salmon farming coastal and indigenous communities, appears to be off the table in this collaboration of overcooked culinary egos.

These chefs are certainly entitled to decide what they serve in their restaurants.

They can replace farmed salmon with wild seafood, conveniently ignoring the plight of the very species they claim to be saving, or charge $85 for three asparagus spears arranged like the Eiffel Tower on a plate the size of a satellite dish.

That is their business.

But when they use their “celebrity status” to condemn an entire food production industry, the public is entitled to ask whether they know what they are talking about.

How many of these chefs have visited a working salmon farm?

How many have talked to communities that have chosen salmon farming as part of their economic future?

And how many have actually read the peer-reviewed assessments by government scientists and internationally recognized fisheries experts, which found   ocean salmon farms pose no more than a minimal risk to wild stocks?

A similar 2018 campaign by activist-friendly chefs in British Columbia, where thousands are awaiting a government decision on the future of salmon farming in the province, wilted when confronted with the same questions.

Like that campaign, this Off The Table publicity materials provide an impressive collection of celebrity names and Michelin stars. It offers no information about the participants’ knowledge of ocean aquaculture or if they have ever visited a salmon farm.

Now imagine a food critic writing a scathing review of these chefs’ restaurants without ever setting foot inside their establishments or tasting a single dish.

That critic would be skewered, declared a culinary terrorist, and the resulting meltdown would make Gordon Ramsay look like a Buddhist monk.

Yet when celebrity chefs make similarly sweeping pronouncements about ocean salmon farming, we are expected to overlook their lack of aquaculture knowledge and applaud their virtue signalling.

If the chefs behind Off The Table genuinely want to contribute to responsible seafood production, they should begin by visiting the coastal communities involved, speaking with the people affected and examining the science behind the very food sector they have so confidently condemned.

Until then, the only thing that deserves to be taken Off The Table is their credibility.

(Main image from top left shows David Barzelay, Matthew Taylor and Jon Klip, Norbert Niederkofler and Mauro Colagreco, who are some of the chefs featured by the Off The Table campaign.)