More West Coast fish get the Seafood Watch seal of approval as sustainable.

Seafood Watch offers more choices for the mindful cook

A pledge to uphold the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch recommendations is the seafood lover’s equivalent of the Girl Scout promise.

Pull out a smartphone at the seafood counter or sushi bar and you can check the Seafood Watch app to see if the seafood you’re about to order is sustainable. If it’s in the green “best choice” category or the yellow “good alternative” list you’re good to go, but if a type of seafood is marked red, it means that Seafood Watch scientists recommend you avoid it because of overfishing or other environmental factors.

So it was big news when Seafood Watch recently announced it had upgraded the status of a large group of West Coast fish for the first time in the program’s 15-year history. All groundfish — fish that live on or near the ocean floor, including flatfish, skate and rockfish — from California, Oregon and Washington have been moved up to the green or yellow category. Thanks to catch limits and area closures monitored by the government, the groundfish populations have reached a healthy level, say the program’s scientists.

Newly in the green or “best choice” category are Bay Area favorites like sand dabs, English and Dover sole, a half dozen species of rockfish (often called rock cod or, incorrectly, snapper), sablefish (also known as black cod or butterfish) and lingcod. These are the kinds of flaky white fish you want to fry in breadcrumbs and serve with caper butter or stuff into tacos. The thick and meaty sablefish also takes well to smoking and broiling.

To get the green light, says Santi Roberts, science manager for the Seafood Watch program, a fish has to come from an environment where other nearby species that might be caught alongside it are also at a sustainable or near sustainable level.

Yet despite Seafood Watch’s longtime role as a leader in ocean sustainability, some Bay Area seafood purveyors don’t agree with the new recommendations. The controversy around these fish demonstrates how complicated commercial fishing is — and why there’s a need for such a list in the first place.

The majority of groundfish are caught via trawling and bottom trawling, a method that involves dragging a net along the ocean floor. Seafood Watch now gives a “good alternative” or “best choice” recommendation for a dozen species caught via bottom trawling in West Coast waters. Also known as dragging, bottom trawling results in a lot of bycatch and can “cause significant and irreversible harm to fragile benthic (sea floor) ecosystems and species, raising questions about its environmental sustainability,” as the World Wildlife Fund states on its website.

Kenny Belov of Fish restaurant in Sausalito and sustainable seafood distributor TwoXSea buys only groundfish caught via hook and line or purse seine, not bottom trawling. He recently posted a photo on Instagram of a trawl net for halibut that was full of dead Dungeness crab, skate and other bycatch and wrote, “This is why @2byc doesn’t do drag fish. Look at all those Dungeness crabs being wasted. This is a green listed fishery. BS!”

“You can make all the argument that the trawls are not causing any damage, and that they are highly managed,” says Belov. “The reality is dragging that net across the open floor produces what that picture produces.” Though he agrees drag fishing has improved, “we are not at the point where we can start to endorse these fisheries. We have done so much damage to the ecosystem.”

But Roberts of Seafood Watch counters that trawl fisheries are managed well enough — meaning the catch is monitored and limited — to make up for negative side effects.

“Although trawling typically results in more bycatch and more damage to the sea floor than many types of hook and lining, the management basically trumps that. If done well, it can mitigate the effects,” says Roberts.

Roberts also says that Seafood Watch doesn’t recommend bottom trawling for rockfish, which live in rocky areas that can be damaged more by the trawl gear than the sandy habitats of the starry flounder, for example.

Joe Conte of Water 2 Table, which supplies seafood to restaurants and some retail markets, doesn’t purchase trawl-caught fish, mostly because the quality isn’t as good as hook and line — the fish can be damaged in the net. But he sees a potential upside to the new recommendations.

“Most Americans like a flaky white fish, and there’s massive amounts of it — tilapia, basa — coming into the United States from unregulated farms in Asia. I think (the aquarium is) trying to look at the big picture: If we can encourage people to buy this trawl fish that is regulated, and regulated well, it can lessen impact on those other fish.”